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

by Emily Tesh

“The people I spoke to in Hallerton village. They say there’s a wild man out here—a priest of the old gods, or a desperate criminal, or just an ordinary lunatic. He eats nothing but meat, raw, and it has made him grow to a giant’s stature; or so I was given to understand at the Fox and Feathers. They informed me I would know him by his height and his hair.” “His hair, hmm,” said Tobias. “Waist-length and unwashed,” said Silver, looking at Tobias. “Now that’s a slander,” said Tobias. “It’s not past my elbows, and I wash all over every week.” “I’m glad to hear it, Mr Finch,” said Silver. “The rest’s all true,” said Tobias. “Old gods and banditry and lunacy?” “And the one where I eat people,” said Tobias, unsmiling. Silver laughed abruptly, a splendid peal of sound.

How long had it been, if Tobias couldn’t even recognise a handsome lad suggesting a bit of mutual entertainment anymore? A long, long time, that was what. A long time, whispered the low rustle of the breeze in the leaves outside. A long time, sang the drip-drip-drip of rainwater, softly, while Tobias sat clear-eyed and sleepless in the dark, listening to the wood.

It was a sad thing when a dryad went sour. They were sweet ladies for the most part, and Tobias liked them. He had four or five in his wood, not counting the old oak, who was his own manner of thing. This one wasn’t a local; she smelled rootless and angry. Lost her tree, most likely, and no one had asked her mercy or planted her a sapling. She’d go for the woodsmen, who slept in a long cabin just outside the village. Damn thing was wooden, which wouldn’t make Tobias’s task any easier.

“Why don’t you come along with me,” said Tobias, “and we’ll plant you a sweet willow, down by the river, with water to sing to you and sun on your leaves?”

Time went slow around him, heavy and green after the way of the trees,

The slow green time carried on pooling around Tobias’s feet, and the pain of the wound felt distant through it.

Tobias lurched into his cottage and time abruptly poured itself back into its proper shape. He saw the shadows settle over the floor as Bramble took up a guard all around the place, calling up blackthorn and dark holly on every side, planting herself by the door in a menacing tangle. Well, there went Tobias’s vegetable garden.

Bullet lodged in his thigh, and he was no doctor; nor was anything that lived in his wood. Well, there it was. He’d live or not. If he lived, he’d manage, and if he died, he’d die in the shadow of the old oak. Maybe it was time. He’d seen nearly four hundred summers come and go by now. He kept his eyes closed and tried to go to sleep.

“I’m here, my dear,” said Tobias, and crossed into the shadow of the trees. At once slow deep green rolled over him. He took a breath, and another, smelling old rotting leaves and healthy growth and autumn light. He felt almost as though he could have planted his feet and become a tree himself, a strong oak reaching up to the sky, brother of the old oak who ruled the wood. Ah, he thought, and nothing else. Silver

“Out you come, now,” he murmured. He planted his feet a shoulders width apart in the ground. After a moment he closed his eyes. Here was the wood. 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.

The stump and its coils of broken roots lay uprooted among the wreckage of the oak in the clearing. The moon-silvered mist was thicker than ever all around them. And where the oak had stood there was a great dark hollow in the ground, gaping open like a mouth. Tobias could still taste foulness in the air, bubbling up from below.

“Not I,” said Fabian. “I am the Lord of Summer, the Master of the Hallow, the prince-by-corpselight. I was here before your darling Henry bought my house; in fact,” he laughed, “I was here before Fabian Rafela’s grandfather built my house.”

Bramble’s eyes were glowing like a cat’s in the shadows. She was summoning thorn bushes and nettles by the score to tear at the ghoulish thing that was Fabian’s mind and Silver’s body and the soul of something that Tobias could tell was older by far than both, near as old as the wood: a parasite that had bored in deep long ago.

He had thought himself a thing uprooted, like the great oak, ready to begin his death. “Mr Finch,” said Mrs Silver, the one time he said anything about it, “you are not, in point of fact, a tree.”