Silver in the Wood (The Greenhollow Duology, #1)

by Emily Tesh

how are you feeling?” Tobias thought about it. He could not say to Silver: like a thing uprooted, though he was.

Wildflowers began to spring up in the woods around the same time Silver came back. Tobias let Bramble tuck some into his hair one morning, and then forgot they were there until after Silver had already visited him and gone again. He hadn’t said a word.

He went back to his cottage and sat down with his back against the old oak. Sometimes he wondered if the tree felt sorry for him. A kind of nonsense. The tree was a tree; he felt tree-things, sunlight and earth and so on, and Tobias was only another kind of thing that dwelt upon him, no different if you thought about it from the squirrel’s nest in the nook of the trunk.

but to feel as mortals felt—to laugh as mortals laughed, and look up under the eyelashes, and sing old songs to the plucked strings of a whatever-it-was— Tobias was a fool and always had been. He groaned and stood up. When he looked up he found it was pitchy dark. Time had softened around him the way it so often did. Maybe that was the wood’s version of pity.

Slow and green he felt the life of it, the life that had been his life as well these four centuries past. It poured around him thick and steady, binding all together: the long patient strength of the trees that anchored, the deep bright power of the handful of dryads—Tobias felt Bramble clear as day among them, young and strong—and then the small and necessary, the bracken and ferns, the mosses and mushrooms. Here were the songbirds and ravens and solemn wide-winged owls, shy deer and burrowing rabbits, fox and badger and snake, beetles and moths and midges, all the things that were the wood, that lived each in their own way under the shelter of the old oak.

“You were a good thing also,” said Bramble. “Go now and do people things. Then come back and do people things. Build and hunt. Set snares, cut paths. Plant more trees.” “And you, my dear?” Tobias said after a moment. “You should choose yourself a tree, you know. Plant yourself. Else you’ll get peculiar.” “I am peculiar,” said Bramble. “I chose already.” “Tell me where to visit you, then,” said Tobias. “Everywhere,” she said simply. “Every tree. They’re all mine.”

“Good,” said Bramble. “He’ll need you.” “You won’t, though.” “No,” she said patiently, “because I’m not a people. But I will still love you.” “You as well, my dear,” Tobias said, after a moment when his throat felt too thick to speak. “You as well.”