The Butcher of the Forest

by Premee Mohamed

Still he has this power over us. And it has not waned one whit since the day he came. Why me and why?

maybe she too would want a cup of wine at sunrise when he told her why she had been brought here.

“You are the one who went into these curst woods and brought back a child,” he said. “Yes,” she said, and her stomach sank. Oh. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no . . .

Never, never, never. It had been drilled into them their entire lives; they had taken in the fear of the place with their mothers’ milk. One more step and you risked falling into the Elmever. Where the other people of the woods lived. And they would not give you up.

In the Elmever you always had something seeming to confuse your eyes;

(unwise to shed blood, even a drop, of anything that lived in those woods),

everyone around here did in some way, they were not arranged in neat spiderweb strings like the families in the big city, but tangled together close like wool, with roots that ran into each other’s histories like the trees in the forest.

But it was beautiful in a way the south woods were not beautiful; it held this quality of age, weight, of mass and depth like a mountain.

The rules were vague but should not be broken: don’t cut living wood; don’t shed any animal’s blood; trade if you must, but do not negotiate. And certainly never accept any “gifts.”

Were these already creatures from the other realm? Or were they ordinary wolves, and exempt from the rules?

this was proof that she had indeed, all unsuspecting, strayed into the Elmever. No fanfare, no thunder, no shower of magical light. She had taken a step, somewhere, and here she was.

“And I know you lied,” said the Lord of the Elmever, the great immortal god with no name, who had ruled this land before anyone had devised such a thing as names, and the voice went through her like an arrow and left her pierced and empty. “You lied . . . you did not pay your way here.”

“Innocence is no refuge,” the god said, and reached out, scoring with his claw a line in the air that burned brightly for a moment, then tore like wet cloth,

Three deaths: that was right in some way, but she could not bear it. She must break the three.

“I have failed,” Veris murmured, looking down at her scratched and bleeding hands, covered now with mud to the wrists. “I have . . . I brought out only one . . . of the Tyrant’s children. I am already dead. Forfeited my life but also my family’s . . . the entire village.”

Side by side, unspeaking, they wandered and wove their way back up the grass, and the guards cried out in astonishment at their coming, and in moments the gray stone burst into gladness with torches and lanterns, and the stained glass danced to greet them like a fallen rainbow.

“It’s my fault. I lied. The price of the forest was my worst memory; I told them the death of my father. It was not. It was only the worst until my own child died. The child I recovered from the woods fifteen years ago.”