Page 6 of The Light Between Worlds

For two weeks, we travel through the Woodlands in Cervus’s company, and despite the meeting that lies ahead I feel myself falling in love, perhaps a little with the stag himself, but mostly with the Wood. Only eleven and desperate for a sense of peace and belonging, I can’t imagine a more beautiful place. The forest itself is a cathedral; the little rivers and songbirds are its choristers; the filtered and shifting sunshine, candlelight; the smell of earth and moss, incense. Each day as we walk, I lose myself in numinous calm.

We catch glimpses of the Woodlands people: a short, stocky form vanishing around a boulder, leaves swirling through the air in a windless clearing, dappled faces peering from the boughs overhead. We pass by houses built around the bases of trees, too, and clearings laid to crops or fenced in to keep grazing sheep from straying. Cervus never slows his pace, just hurries us along toward an unknown destination. We stop only at night, or to gather berries and fish in the streams.

Philippa’s still anxious, her nails bitten to the bloody quick. She hardly speaks except to fuss over me before we sleep or when we eat. Jamie does his best to cheer her up.

“Come on then,” he says each morning when we wake cold and stiff from sleeping on the ground. “It’s still better than school, isn’t it? You can’t possibly want to go back until we’ve seen a bit more of this place.”

But we never talk about the air raid. We never bring up the fact that we left without knowing what had happened to Mum and Dad. I know it’s eating at my elder sister, yet I can’t help being secretly relieved. I am happy to be here, and happy to trust Cervus, believing that somehow, someday, in spite of everything, all shall be well.

On our second week in the forest, we come to a place that feels different from the others. Everything has been lovely since the moment we were torn from the darkness and clamor of the bunker. But Cervus leads us into a ring of white birches and I know this place must be the very heart of the Great Wood.

A hush hangs on the air. Golden sun filters through the shifting leaves overhead, which move with barely a whisper. Motes of dust and the little wishes from full-blown dandelions dance in the shifting light. The grass beneath our bare feet is the color of spring itself.

Cervus steps into a pool of sunshine at the center of the clearing. His rust-red hide flames and he raises his head, scenting the air before sounding his clarion call.

The stag lowers himself onto the grass, legs folding gracefully beneath him, and waits.

Philippa and Jamie wander about the clearing, speaking in low voices and stopping occasionally to look at one of the ancient stonefigures ringing the open space. The statues are so old their shapes are impossible to determine—only a carved line here and there, peering out between patches of moss, indicates that they were once more than plain standing stones.

I trail after my brother and sister for a while, but am drawn back toward Cervus. He might be a stone figure himself, he’s so motionless, but when I crouch down to sit at his side, his ears flick back. Tentatively, I let one hand drop onto his shoulders. For a long while we just sit, but at last he lowers his great head and rests it in my lap.

I think this is where I was born to be—in the center of a clearing in another world, with this strange, wild creature at my side.

Philippa looks over one shoulder and something crosses her face at the sight of us. Fear, I think, or maybe grief. I can’t bear to see her unhappy in this glad, bright place. I smile, not just with my eyes and my mouth but with everything in me, until I feel incandescent. Phil smiles wistfully back.

At the edge of the clearing, the undergrowth stirs. Cervus stands in a single, fluid motion.

“Come, children,” he says, and we cluster about him. I keep my hand on his shoulder, fingers buried in thick, coarse fur.

The Woodlanders have arrived. They step out of the trees silently, all of them barefooted or barehooved, like my brother and sister and me. There are half a dozen bay and dun centaurs, a group of short, stocky folk I’ll come to know as stonewardens, and tree spirits who swirl into the clearing as a drift of leaves before taking human shape. Water spirits and winged girls come, too, and other creatures who have no names besides the ones each individual bears. When they’ve all assembled, I marvel at how silent the clearing remains.

But muffled hoofbeats sound in the distance, and armor flashes through the trees. A white flag gleams in the sun and suddenly armed soldiers are dismounting just outside the clearing. They leave their horses and push past the gathered Woodlanders, trampling the green grass of the clearing beneath their booted feet.

At the head of the procession is a pale and haughty young man, who must be four or five years older than Jamie’s fifteen. A thin circlet of steel rests on his golden hair, and when he reaches the place where Cervus waits, he stands proudly before the stag. His eyes flicker, red then orange, as if a fire burns inside him.

A rustle breaks the calm. I glance up and see that all the Woodlanders have taken a knee. A muscle works in the armored young man’s jaw and anger sparks in his uncanny eyes. It’s not him the Woodlanders bow to, then, but the stag. Cervus, in turn, bows back.

“Venndarien Tarsin, heir to the Empire’s throne,” Cervus says as he straightens. “Welcome to the heart of the Great Wood. None of your line has ever set foot here before.”

Venndarien casts about him, taking in the gathered Woodlanders and the ring of birch trees. “Your rustic shrines hold no interest for those of my country. Tell me you’ve called on me to offer up your surrender, Cervus, and that you’re not wasting the Empire’s time yet again.”

“There will be no surrender,” Cervus answers. “And I will use as little of your time as I can. I’ve brought you here to ask for a stay of battle once more.”

“Unless you’re ready with the timber we demand and every last one of you takes a knee before the Imperial crest, you’ll find us impossible to sway,” the pale young man says.

A low rumble of discontent rises from the people gathered.

“We will never bow to Tarsa,” one of the Woodlanders calls. “Much less fell trees to fuel your wars.”

Venndarien raises an eyebrow, as if the protests coming from the Woodlanders are nothing more than the buzzing of gnats.

“The Empire does not hear you,” he says.

Cervus throws back his head and bellows. By the time the echoes of his call have stopped resounding from the trees, the Woodlanders are silent again, regarding the Tarsin delegates with barely subdued anger.

Venndarien turns his attention to us, and Philippa meets his gaze stonily as his eyes linger on her.

“Who are these ragged upstarts?” the Tarsin heir asks Cervus. It’s true we hardly look our best, still in our nightclothes after two weeks of walking through the Woodlands. “They’re not forest dwellers. What hovel in a back corner of the Empire did you steal them from?”