Page 9 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire
A brilliant question for which I have no answer.
I turn on my heel and race for the gate, my old coat barely covering my nightgown. When my hands land on the latch, I pause and glance back over my shoulder.
Gran stands in the doorway, her face lit by a lone flickering candle as she watches me. I don’t know what she wants. She can’t truly expect me to accept that my sister has just run away with the fairies and will never come back?
“We’ll be back before supper,” I call to her.
Gran says nothing in reply. I think we both know that a liar’s promise means nothing.
5
y coed
(THE WOODS)
“Ceridwen!” I yell, barreling through the trees.
The torrent of rain hits the canopy of leaves, roaring overhead as I move deeper into the wood. My coat is sodden, the hem of my nightgown damp and muddy. Every step through the thick muck threatens to send me tumbling to the ground. I keep to the bank of the river, even though I keep slipping. It’s my guide and a route to follow home.
I don’t slow down even as trees begin to rise so high above me that the stars disappear. The world becomes pillars of bark and whispering autumn boughs.
My foot catches on a protruding root that clings to the riverbank and I lurch forward, losing my balance, but the floor doesn’t reach up to meet me. There’s a moment of hesitation—from me or the ground, I’m not sure—as the world seems to pause and consider my place in it. Something decides that I’m not going to fall, and I merely stagger a few steps ahead before halting, feeling warmer than before. If I wasn’t in such a rush, maybe I’d find it odd.
As it is, I’ve got places to be.
I run deeper into the woods, a pressure building in my head. It gets harder to breathe. If you’ve ever lain beneath the water and let the air in your lungs become a fire, let your brain start to go quiet, you know how this feels. My steps become heavy, clumsy. I never fall, but I’m fighting the earth as it tries to pull me down. The forest pulses, the very ground beneath my feet shifting like a tide.
Until it stops.
Moonlight breaches the tree canopy. The pounding in my head ceases, and I learn how to breathe again. The chill of autumn lifts, replaced by a gentle warmth that wraps around me like open arms. There are only the trees, the moss beneath my feet and a faint shimmer in the air—like beetle wings ground to a fine dust.
It’s too quiet, and I wonder why it feels like I’ve stepped into a different world. There’s no rain. I shiver, halting in place, my boots sinking into the carpet of moss. It hasn’t rained here, not in some time. The ground is dry. There’s no damp lingering, no threat of a downpour. Even my woolen coat is drier than it ought to be. Everything is in perfect stasis, captured like a watercolor painting. Like magic.
Perhaps that doesn’t sound like magic to you, so I must make sure you understand—italwaysrains in Wales.
The forest goes on forever with no obvious path. I press my hand to a tree trunk, all other thoughts pushed out save for one that’s screaming at me.
It’s all real.
Magic and the teg, and forests that girls enter and never leave. My hair stands on end and the world expands around me, getting so big—so strange and unending—that I become smaller than ever and my knees start to shake.
I cannot afford to be scared of things that were stories a mere hour ago. Panic can come later. I push off from the trunk, looking for signs of Ceridwen. I force myself to breathe, to think. To listen.
There’s a rustle of leaves. There’s a branch cracking underfoot.
I whip around, searching for the source, but see only a flash of black and silver as something disappears around a tree. Maybe it was just an animal, but it was tall and it wanted to be seen as little as I do.
I hurry on. The climate is so perfectly temperate it’s almost disturbing. There’s a perpetual breeze, but it never makes me cold, and the light seems almost shy. Everything is too green, too sharp—the ground too even and the trees too perfectly spaced, stretching on eternally until they bleed into a thin mist and disappear. Even the flowers, which appear in routine bursts, come only in colors that complement each other. There’s no sound except the crack of sticks beneath my boots.
I call Ceridwen’s name and a bird flees the branches overhead. Its shadow creeps through the gaps in the leaves at intervals and then I’m alone once more. I glance down at the river; it must come from somewhere.
I pause and think of the stories Dad told—of travelers led astray in fairy meadows and dragged off course by phantom sounds in the woods. I think of whatever was there at the edge of the forest, watching me, that didn’t want to be seen.
My skin crawls at the prospect, and my breath shakes, but to my own surprise my heart is constant. An unerring beat I am unsettled—I’ll admit that to you if I must—but I am not afraid.
The river is a useful landmark. The last thing I want is to get lost, and I can use it to orient myself.
I keep to the bank. It’s soft as a pillow underfoot, quickly becoming marshy until the brook widens and deepens, its bottom disappearing under silt.
