The Butcher of the Forest

by Premee Mohamed

Best time of the year. Eat everything without guilt. Even this air, cool and fresh, ripe with a year’s work well done, you could enjoy.

The first thing she noted about him was that he was drinking out of a cup made of a skull, and she caught herself just in time to forestall a bray of what she knew would be frankly unwise laughter.

“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 . . . “Alive.” “Yes.” Technically, she almost said; at any rate now that she knew what he was going to ask of her, it would do him no good to know of the child’s fate.

Everyone in the village, everyone in the valley, even those several days’ ride from the north woods, knew not to go into them.

They were innocent of their father’s evil. The old women of the village would say they were tainted with it, but there was no taint in blood alone, truly. Veris knew that well enough from experience.

“The north woods themselves are . . . are probably perfectly safe. Like the south woods. But inside them, they are . . . another woods. Not the same. And when you are inside you cannot tell the difference between the north woods and this other place . . .”

In general, if you knew that your child had gone into the woods, you simply held a funeral: they were gone, they would never come back.

“I have returned. I am one known to you. Please allow me safe passage to bring back those who are lost.”

It was a lovely morning, and that made everything much worse somehow.

At some point, you took a step, and you were simply there, and you would not see the difference between it and the true woods, and you would never take another step that led you back home.

What did not live here was people, and even that was not strictly true, because nothing was. They were people-ish, and they had no name, and sometimes they did not look like people, even though they could speak. This place was their home, though, and whatever it took to keep it that way, they would not shirk to do it.

She could almost see it around her: magic not as words and spells but as poison, a faint smoky mist exhaled from the near-invisible flowers in the grass, from the tiny white mushrooms in the black dirt below her feet.

Nothing in the Elmever was as it seemed; and many things were imitations of what they wished to be. And if she forgot that, she would never leave this place.

There was no moon and she recalled that from last time—the creatures here loved only the stars; they did not trust the moon, which was too bright for them, and for the same reason they had even less regard for the sun.

“Do we know you?” the guardian said softly. Like the creature Veris had shared her food with, its voice was strange—inhuman, but also not animal. Composed of lake-hiss, rock-click, tree-breath. Almost a song.

All three could still see the beast, and it could see them.