CHAPTER 4
The Spiral in the Trees;
A Finger on a Windowpane
They’d traveled for days, over mountain passes still stuck with snow, through craggy valleys where trees grew in the most unreachable places. They traversed hillsides and crossed grand plantations, where the farmers’ children ran from their work in the fields to meet the small, yet immediately recognizable procession. There were four travelers: two humans, a fox, and a coyote. One of the humans was a middle-aged woman, the other a boy of perhaps ten. They were all Mystics, of the North Wood. They wore identical sackcloth robes. They were on a journey that would bring them into the very heart of Wildwood.
The youngest, the boy, carried a small, bright flag in his hands.
They didn’t speak as they walked, choosing instead to pass the long spans of time in meditation, absorbing the spectrum of languages they received from the plants and trees that surrounded them on their journey. It was their gift: the ability to commune with the mute flora of the forest. They wore this incredible ability with solemnity, using it not so much as one might flourish some crass magic trick, but in a reserved and mindful way, so that their relationship with the plants and trees would be a model to the rest of the citizens of the Wood, that they might live in more perfect harmony with the organic world around them. For this reason, the people of North Wood revered them.
As they came down from the mountains, their surroundings began to change; gone were the little hovels by the road and the farmhouses and inns. Instead, the vegetation by the side of the single, curving road they followed grew heavy and cluttered with thick, wild greenery, fighting for supremacy on the uneven ground. Even the language of the plants and trees shifted; it became uneven and scattered, a white noise of garbled shouting, barraging the quiet minds of the Mystics as they traveled. They found they needed to stop and rest more often; carrying the weight of the forest’s belligerent voices was burden enough.
They broke camp early and traveled all day. As the final morning of their journey dawned, the young boy sat on the cracked stump of a storm-fallen hemlock and stared into space. The older woman came over to him and put her hand consolingly on his shoulder.
“Not long now,” she said. “We’re not far off.”
He acknowledged her with a wan smile. “I can feel it,” he said. “But there’s something else. . . .”
The woman looked at him curiously. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said. His finger, lazing at his side, began drawing a looping spiral on the grain of the tree trunk. “I’ve been having dreams.”
“About the tree?”
The boy cleared his throat; his finger continued to trace the pattern. “No,” he said. “I can’t say. I can’t quite see it.”
The other two Mystics had risen and were busily pulling down their canvas tents. The early morning sun was breaking through the tangle of trees; a mist had settled on the lower branches. The boy’s finger had finally traced to the center of the spiral he’d been creating, and it stopped there. He looked down at his fingertip and watched it, like someone monitoring an unmoving spider in the center of an elaborate web.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The other three Mystics followed him wordlessly. They knew not to question his leadership, even though his selection as the Elder Mystic, a role once reserved, as its name would suggest, for the eldest of the sect, was wholly unprecedented. After the death of the prior Elder Mystic, Iphigenia, the tree surprised everyone by selecting the young boy—a Yearling—as the old woman’s successor. As long as anyone remembered, as long as the histories had been written, there was no record of anyone but the eldest being selected for this highest responsibility; the change was enough to cause confusion among even the most sage and learned of the robed sect. But, as was clear in the teachings of the tree, all was flux; nothing was determined or permanent. Change was the only certainty of life. Perhaps, they decided, the descriptor Elder did not so much refer to the individual’s physical age as their spiritual age. And so the boy was raised from Yearling to Elder Mystic; the boy himself seemed neither surprised nor flattered by the election. He seemed suited to the calling.
And this was their first task: to make the pilgrimage to the Ossuary Tree, in deepest Wildwood, where vicious animals lived freely and bandits made easy prey of the unwary traveler. There to hang a flag on a bough in remembrance of the departed Elder Mystic, Iphigenia. Because the journey was only made on the occasion of an Elder Mystic’s death, each generation of acolytes and Mystics were forced to relearn the journey from the writings of the Ancients and their guidance from the trees. They could follow the road for only so long; eventually they would need to break away and traverse Wildwood itself.
Here there were no roads, no paths. Occasionally a game trail would open up to them, but often they chose instead to follow the guidance of the trees and the plants, ferreting what information they could from the jumble of voices they produced, snaking carefully through the maze of branches and brambles made by the forest.
Now, on the eighth day of the pilgrimage, they arrived at their goal, having broken through a ring of blackberry bushes into a wide, sweeping glade. In the center of the clearing stood the Ossuary Tree.
The Ossuary Tree, one of the three Trees of the Wood, was neither living nor dead. It seemed to hover in some in-between place; it had no leaves, though its bark was a deep, lively brown and its boughs strived skyward and it stood taller by several lengths than any of the other trees in its proximity. Fastened to the ends of its long, gnarled limbs were little colorful flags; each one had been tied there in remembrance of Elder Mystics past. Some of the fluttering scraps of fabric were centuries old, and while they all endured the ravages of the seasons, they remained as perfectly intact as when they first were tied. They became, essentially, the leaves of the Ossuary Tree and were imbued with its life.
Wordlessly, the four Mystics sloughed off their bags. They sat for a moment at the base of the tree, wondering at its height and sharing a few good-natured handshakes in celebration of a successful journey. The sun was shining now; it was clear the season was ebbing into the next, and the May day felt fresh and alive. The young boy, the Elder Mystic, had elected to do the tying himself, though this was unprecedented as well; typically the Elder Mystic, often infirm from age, deferred such a challenging duty to the young and agile. The boy, without saying a word, his face still etched with a strange, contemplative stillness, took the little red flag, the flag that would hang for Iphigenia, in his teeth and began scaling the trunk of the great tree.
The others stood at the base of the wide trunk and watched him climb. Like most of the citizens of North Wood, he had a deep connection with his natural su
rroundings, his nonhuman neighbors, and he scaled the tree’s rough bark with the agility of an ocelot. Before long, he’d disappeared from the sight of the spectators on the ground.
In the higher boughs, bedecked with snapping pendants, the view was breathtaking. The world splayed out before the boy like a dappled carpet of green and brown and blue. A tussock of clouds migrated slowly eastward, across the distant horizon. The Cathedral Mountains, which they’d crossed only days prior, presented themselves like magnificent knuckles of earth, all snowcapped and tall. The boy found a bare branch and, pulling the flag from his teeth, tied the memorial to the deceased Elder Mystic Iphigenia on the stalk of one of the branch’s thin fingers. It joined its fellow pieces of fabric on the tree, rippling unanimously in the wind.
Watching his footing as he prepared to make his way down the tree, the boy noticed a change in the forest; it was something he couldn’t have seen from ground level. It was as if the texture of the wood changed very slightly in a distinct block of the greenery. Looking closer, he noticed that the pattern repeated itself in a slow, lazy curve away from the base of the Ossuary Tree. As he followed the pattern outward, it began to take the form of a very familiar shape.
The boy was greeted with uncertain smiles when he arrived back at the ground. They still found him unknowable. He barely spoke, and when he did, his speech patterns were stilted and strange and he never made eye contact. It was unnerving to the personable Mystics; they waited for the boy to speak now and he did not.
“How was the climb?” the woman ventured finally.
The boy was staring somewhere, just beyond her shoulder.
“Was it comfortable? Did you get very high?” The woman was keen on making a connection.