Where the Woods End Page 12

  “You attacked a plant,” he said.

  “Well, yes,” said Kestrel. “I thought it was a snake. But that’s not the point.”

  “What is it, then?” he said.

  “You taught me how to beat the forest,” she said. “And I’m not stopping now for anything.”

  Her dad held her hand, his huge fingers wrapped around Kestrel’s.

  “That’s not what I was trying to teach you,” he said. “The real moral of that story is that I’m your father, and it’s my job to look after you. You have no idea how scared I was that day.”

  Kestrel shook her head. “I know I said you weren’t brave,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “When did you get so old?” he asked.

  “When you weren’t looking,” she said, the answer catching in her throat.

  The grabber snarled and hurled itself against the tree, which shuddered with a horrible splintering sound. They both tightened their grip on each other, and Kestrel felt another white-hot bolt of fear. The grabber was drawing its attack out. She had no doubt that it could have leaped up and caught them both in its jaws by now, but for some reason it was trying to shake them out the tree. Almost as though it was having fun.

  “Kestrel,” her dad said, a new urgency in his voice. “I need you to promise you’ll do something for me.”

  He said her name in the serious tone he only used when something very bad was happening. Kestrel, your grandmother is dead. Kestrel, your mother and I are going our separate ways. Kestrel, I have to leave now.

  “What?” she said, dreading what would come next.

  “I think I found a way to get rid of the black dog,” he said. “You need to make your mother eat some bloodberries.”

  “What?” Kestrel said, stiffening in surprise. The grabber ripped another piece of the tree off, and the sharp crack of the splintering trunk sent a cold shiver through her.

  “They grow in a place called the Marrow Orchard,” her dad said. His voice was low and fast. “I wanted to get them for you, but it’s too late. You’ll have to do it, but you can’t go alone. It’s heavily guarded. You need a distraction so that you can sneak in unseen.”

  Kestrel’s stomach churned. Not the Marrow Orchard. Not that place right at the back of her grandma’s notebook, on the page covered in purple fruit stains. Not the page with all those horrible drawings of teeth and bones and birds . . .

  “I need to feed her some fruit?” Kestrel protested. “I don’t see how that’s going to help.”

  “Listen to me,” he said. “If I remember what your grandma taught me, it’s that the bloodberries weaken spells. The dog’s one of your mother’s spells, isn’t it? It’s got a body and sharp teeth, but it’s not a real animal.”

  “Dad—”

  “Kestrel, there are plenty of things I don’t know about your mother,” he said. “But I think she’s hiding things. It’s not just the dog you need to worry about.” Sweat was beading on his forehead, and his eyes kept flicking to the grabber below them. He touched the brim of his hat with his hand.

  “Like what?” Kestrel said urgently.

  “I don’t know what. I just . . .”

  The tree creaked. He shuddered.

  “Climb higher,” said Kestrel. “Follow me. We can get away through the trees.”

  She glanced down at the grabber again and her heart stumbled. Its obvious hunger was making it fast and desperate. For the first time, a tiny part of her doubted she’d ever be able to kill a grabber before it struck. She was sure that this one would continue to hound her dad even if she were hacking it apart piece by piece.

  “We can’t run forever,” her dad said gently, as though he’d read her mind.

  The grabber drew back and licked its lips. It craned its neck toward them, a hundred tiny bones cracking and snapping under its stolen skin. It took a deep breath, as though it was breathing in the smell of their fear, and its nostrils flared.

  “Remember the Marrow Orchard. Promise me you’ll get out,” her dad said. “I don’t know what’s outside this forest, but I’m choosing to believe it’s good.”

  The grabber was swelling, its makeshift body creaking and snapping. It was ready. It stretched its jaws toward them, its mouth open, revealing its jumbled and rotting insides.

  “I’ve had nightmares about this for years,” her dad said, his voice strangely calm. “You always know what your grabber’s going to be, deep down.”

  The grabber hit the tree with all its weight, making it shake so hard Kestrel had to cling to the branch. The grabber jumped again, snapping its jaws a couple of inches below them, and Kestrel cried out.

  All at once she knew what she would write in the notebook, if she still had it. The words scurried over her eyelids like frantic spiders.

  The forest is alive, and the grabbers are its terrible appetite.

  The grabber took a deep, rasping breath that rattled its gory ribs.

  “Get away from here, Kestrel,” her dad said. “Run away and don’t look back.”

  “No,” she said.

  She gripped her sharpened spoon in one fist and leaned over the branch. She drew in a deep breath and aimed for where she thought the grabber’s heart would be. She was going to jump and land on it with all her weight. For the first time ever she would kill a grabber before it struck. Even if it killed her, too. She tensed her muscles, ready to leap.

  And then it was like the world had folded in the middle. Her dad was bending over, offering himself to the grabber with his arms outstretched as though embracing it, and the grabber, in turn, was reaching for him. It was slow, too slow, and Kestrel could see every individual hair on the grabber’s back in terrible detail, could see the breath rising from its throat. Her mouth opened, and she yelled as the grabber took her father’s hands in its jaws and pulled him down.

  He was gone in a second. Time became right again. Kestrel screamed as the grabber crunched something, then it was leaping away, taking her father with it; and he was silent, unmoving. His life had been snatched away with less effort than it takes to blow out a candle.

  Kestrel’s body turned white-hot with a cry of pain. It came from the bottom of her stomach and forced its way out of her mouth, so hard she thought her jaw might break apart. Pippit bit her on the hand so she could feel his teeth on the fine bones running up to her knuckles, and that broke the spell. She pitched forward, flinging herself from the tree and landing hard in the dead leaves. She crawled after the grabber like an animal.

  “Go!” Pippit hissed in her ear.

  “Yes,” said Kestrel, and climbed up with her hand on the spoon, toward the grabber’s bloody trail. Pippit hissed in her ear.

  “Wrong way! Go! Now!”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not going back.”

  “Village! Now!”

  “You can go if you want,” she said. Her horror was slowly solidifying into a long spike of icy rage. “I’m going to kill a grabber.”

  * * *

  She raced after the grabber’s deep footprints. It had gone around the side of the hill, not wasting any time now, leaping over twisted roots and through jutting rocks. She quickly decapitated the creepers and branches that got in her way with one clean swipe of her spoon. The grabber was just ahead, and now that it had neatly dispatched and almost completely swallowed its meal, it moved with a sense of triumph.

  It was scattering things behind it, its own fine white bones and claws and teeth, as though it was falling apart. Kestrel couldn’t see her dad anywhere. It seemed impossible that the grabber had swallowed him whole, but it was even more impossible that he had escaped its jaws. The grabber lowered its head, then slowed to a trot. It was bloated and triumphant. It didn’t seem to know that Kestrel was almost on top of it.

  The grabber stopped. It was standing right on the edge of a cliff. The ground dropped away as t
hough the hill had been chopped in half. Far below it was a pit of green needle-covered trees coated in a thin layer of snow. Small white flakes swirled around the grabber’s head. The snow had been falling all this time, and Kestrel hadn’t even noticed.

  The grabber’s back was turned to her. It dropped something heavy on the ground and lowered its head to sniff it, its jaws damp. There was a metal trap around its leg, which it wore like nothing more than a bracelet. Kestrel gripped her spoon in her fist, shaking as she looked for a weak spot.

  “Belly,” whispered Pippit.

  The grabber twitched at the sound of Pippit’s voice. Kestrel threw herself toward the grabber, and before it had time to realize what was happening, she had driven her spoon through its ribs.

  The grabber howled and thrashed. Kestrel pulled the spoon out of its body and gave it a blow to the side of the head just as it swung its jaws open to bite her, and then she shoved it toward the edge.

  The grabber was heavy, but it hadn’t expected her to throw her whole weight into it. It scrabbled for a hold on the ground, but rocks were already sliding away under its feet. At the last moment Kestrel grabbed hold of one of the grabber’s ears, trying to stop it from falling, horrified that her father was in there somewhere. She was sick at the thought of him smashing to pieces with the grabber.

  The grabber’s ear tore off as the monster slipped over the edge of the cliff. Its fur, which was attached to the ear, pulled away from the grabber as it plunged over the cliff. The fur dangled from Kestrel’s hand. It was Mardy’s missing wolf-skin rug.

  The grabber’s howl was cut short as it crashed through the trees. It landed on the ground below with a sharp, final-sounding snap. Kestrel’s legs folded and she hit the ground, clutching the rug. It took her a while to realize that she was shuddering with tears, and that Pippit was licking her cheeks. She jumped at the sight of his face so close, his brown weasel-teeth and his eyes slightly crossed from focusing on her nose.

  “Blood,” he said urgently. “Move. Go.”

  She knew at once what he meant. The smell of blood was in the air, and now that the grabber was dead other creatures would come to see if there were any scraps left behind—first the wolves, then everything from the rust-colored dogs to the poisonous rabbits, even the fat white slugs, the ones that sucked up blood. They’d find her there, helpless and weak, and if one of them was brave enough to snap its teeth at her, they’d all have a go.

  Bloodmoss squirmed quietly under Kestrel’s knees, trying to worm its way over her skin and into her boots.

  Kestrel pushed herself to her feet, holding on to a rotten trunk for support. She felt very sick, as though the mold had finally worked its way into her body. She wanted to sink into the earth, let the bloodmoss take her. The more the seconds crawled by, the more difficult it became to pretend that she hadn’t just watched her father die.

  There was a howl in the distance, followed by another, and another, until a chorus was all around her.

  “The wolves,” said Kestrel, her voice strangely high. “They’re celebrating, aren’t they?”

  Pippit growled, the hairs on his back standing up.

  “Move,” he said. “Blood. Now.”

  Kestrel had very little strength left, but she knew she needed every ounce of it to make it back to the village before they found her, too. Her dad would shake her if he saw her sitting here, staring at the ground, letting herself freeze in the snow. With a huge effort she stood up, the wolf skin clasped in her hand, and sank back into the forest.

  THE DRESS

  Kestrel was as clean and raw as the inside of an acorn. She’d been scrubbed with soap and polished with a flannel, and her hair had been painstakingly unknotted. The rubbish she’d collected in the forest, all the twigs and tree needles, had been picked out of her hair and tossed through the window by her mother. With every part of her that was cleaned or thrown away, Kestrel felt that part of herself had gone as well. The only thing her mother couldn’t strip away was the queasy feeling in her stomach.

  Kestrel stared straight ahead as her mother laced her into a dress with frightening speed. Instead of the wall, all she could see was Dad slipping out of the tree, his arms outstretched for his grabber, and the grabber extending its teeth toward him.

  Kestrel’s mother didn’t notice how quiet she was. She was in a fantastic mood. She hummed as she pulled the last pins out of the dress and tied Kestrel’s hair up, her fingers dancing over her scalp like spiders.

  “Perfect,” she said, taking Kestrel by the shoulders and turning her around to look in a broken piece of mirror. Kestrel jumped, the image of her dad’s grabber scattering.

  The dress her mother had made her was long and black, with a pinched-looking bodice and a high neck. It was covered in shiny green-and-black beads, and the sleeves were done up with hard black buttons like fish eyes.

  She was a raven, a cockroach, a monster.

  “How does it feel?” her mother asked, her hands still on Kestrel’s shoulders.

  “I can’t breathe,” said Kestrel truthfully.

  “That means it fits,” said her mother, and Kestrel saw her smile in the reflection.

  It was a present for being good. Her mother had pulled her into the house last night and put her in a pile of blankets, and Kestrel had let her. She had been too tired to kick and scream, to climb up to the gutter. She tossed all night, dreaming about her dad being eaten. Whenever she surfaced from sleep, it felt like the blankets were suffocating her. Then, when she’d woken up this morning, the dress was ready for her.

  Kestrel gasped as her mother yanked the laces on the dress to make it even tighter. The black dog sat in the corner of the room, watching Kestrel as though it knew exactly what she was thinking.

  She fixed her gaze on it and tried to look impassive. But she couldn’t stop her dad’s words running through her head, again and again, just like his death had run through her sleep.

  Remember the Marrow Orchard. Promise me you’ll get out.

  Her mother made the finishing touches to the dress, tweaking the sleeves and the collar. Kestrel stared at the battered front door, wishing she could get out. For the first time in years, she could see the faces that the knots made, the ones that Granmos had terrified her with on her tenth birthday. They grinned at her nastily through the splinters, as though they knew that she was weak.

  Splinters. Kestrel blinked. When did the door become so damaged, anyway? She thought back, but she couldn’t remember it looking like that when Granmos first conjured up the faces. Did something happen to it?

  “You look pale, sweetie,” Kestrel’s mother said, interrupting her. She handed her a cup of water.

  Kestrel slowly raised it to her lips, then she saw the bobbing, milky-blind eyes of the Briny Witch rotating in the bottom of the cup. She gasped and dropped it, splattering water all over the floor and soaking the bottom of her dress.

  “What’s wrong?” her mother asked, snatching the cup and looking inside. The Briny Witch had gone.

  “Nothing,” Kestrel said quickly.

  Her mother watched Kestrel beadily for another few moments.

  “You look good in that dress,” she said finally. “You should wear nice things while you’re young, while you can still get away with it.”

  “It’s special,” Kestrel said, hoping her mother couldn’t detect the hint of sarcasm. “What gave you the idea?”

  “I thought you’d like to look less like an animal, and more like a real girl. More like your mother.”

  “I do look like you,” Kestrel said, turning around slowly, wanting to rip every single piece of the vile dress apart.

  “I’m fully aware that certain people don’t treat you with the respect that you deserve,” her mother said, except she said the word people like most would say scum. “And I’m not saying it’s your fault, sweetest, but you don’t help yourself by c
harging around with dirt on your face and holes in your sweater, and certainly not by playing in the trees. But if you look more like me, who’s going to bother you?”

  No one, Kestrel thought. She looked terrifying. They wouldn’t dare mutter about her now.

  “You can even hunt in it,” her mother said. “There’s a place inside it for your spoon.”

  Kestrel wondered what her dad would think of the dress if he could see her.

  “Mum,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “I know,” her mother said, and then her arms were around Kestrel and she was being pulled to the floor. She landed in her mother’s lap, dust balls scudding away from their feet. “I heard the howls from here. The whole village did.”

  Kestrel felt a huge sob wrack her body, then she pressed her hands over her eyes and forced it all back in.

  “Let me tell you something, sweetie,” said her mother, running her fingers over Kestrel’s newly shiny hair. “When you’re my age you learn that grieving is a waste of time. You should concentrate on the people you have left. You have me, don’t you? You could move back into the house, sleep in a real bed. It’s all here for you.”

  Kestrel buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. For a moment, she imagined eating hot food by her mother’s side and sleeping in the warm bed every night. It was almost comforting.

  Her mother ran a finger down Kestrel’s nose, then tapped it playfully. “In fact,” she said, “I think this might be a new beginning for us. I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but things will change. You’re growing up.”

  “I guess,” Kestrel said. She felt a million years old. Her mother smoothed her hair, and despite herself, Kestrel felt her shoulders relax.

  For a moment she considered letting it all out. She could tell her mother that her grabber was coming. Maybe she’d even call the black dog off and let Kestrel go, and she could escape the forest before the grabber caught her. She wouldn’t have to steal any berries. For a second, telling her mother everything was the perfect answer.