Secrets Beneath the Forest Skin

In the hush between heartbeats and wingbeats, Kit and Morrigan find the kind of bond that remakes the forest itself.

[secretsofnature]

“Writer of forests that breathe and characters who don’t listen.”

I write stories where the forest has opinions and the fae have zero respect for personal boundaries. My first novella, Shadow of the Forest, is finished — mostly because the woods wouldn’t let me leave until it was. The second one, The Hollow Crown, is growing on its own now. I’m just trying to keep up before something with wings and bad intentions gets there first. If you wander into this blog, expect:

roots that move when you’re not looking

crows who know too much and say too little

girls who touch cursed things anyway

magic that pretends to be gentle

and the forest, watching, always watching Morrigan says this place is “a mistake waiting to happen.” Kit says she’s “trying her best.” I say welcome to the chaos.

[secretsofnature]

Chapter 3: What the Land Remembers

The property began where the tree line thinned.

Kit knew it before she saw the fence posts, the old ones her grandfather had sunk so deep they'd never heaved in a frost, before she saw the gap in the wire where her mother had always ducked through rather than walk to the gate. She knew it the way she knew the compact, not by reasoning but by something older than reasoning, a recognition that lived in the body before the mind caught up.

The Vennwood knew it too. The trees here were different. Not wrong, not like the silent places, but older and more considered, the way a room feels when someone who loved it has been gone for a long time and the room has been quietly holding its shape in their absence.

She had pulled ahead without deciding to. The full group was behind her somewhere, the bark-and-moss woman and the stag moving at the pace of things that did not hurry, the Hollow King moving at the pace of something that had nowhere else to be. She was aware of them back there the way she was aware of weather, present, relevant, not immediate.

Morrigan shifted on her shoulder.

'You've slowed down,' he said.

'I know.'

'We don't have to—'

'I know that too.'

He was quiet for a moment, which was its own kind of language between them. Then he said, 'When did you last come here?'

Kit looked at the fence line. At the way the light fell through the canopy here, different from the Vennwood's deep places, more ordinary, more like the light she remembered from being small and not yet knowing what she was.

'I was nine,' she said. 'Maybe ten. My mother brought me once, just once, after he died. She walked the whole property line and didn't say anything, and when we got back to the car she told me we wouldn't be coming back.' She paused. 'I used to think she was grieving. I think now she was afraid.'

'Of the land?'

'Of what she'd feel standing on it.' Kit reached out and touched one of the old fence posts. The wood was gray and soft with years, but it held. 'She knew something was here. She'd grown up here. She just never had a name for it, so she kept her distance and hoped distance was enough.'

Morrigan made the low sound that meant he was thinking, the one she'd learned to wait out.

'The journal,' he said finally.

'Yes.'

'She knew your grandfather had written things down. She could have read it.'

'She could have.' Kit let her hand fall from the post. 'She didn't. My mother was very good at deciding not to know things. I used to think that was a flaw.' She found she could not finish the sentence the way she'd intended. 'I think now it was just fear with better manners.'

She ducked through the gap in the wire, the same gap, the same angle her body remembered without her instructing it, and stood on the other side on her grandfather's land.

The compact opened, just slightly, the way a door opens when air pressure changes, not a choice, just a response. The forest here was inside the wards, or had been, or remembered being. It was quieter than the Vennwood but not empty. It was the quiet of held breath rather than absence, and Kit felt the difference in her sternum, the place where the compact lived.

Then she saw the stones.

Not the Standing Stones, not the great worked pillars of the old ward circle, but smaller ones, hand-placed, set in a line from the gap in the fence toward the tree's interior. Each one was roughly the size of a child's fist. Each one had been placed with care, not randomly, with the flat face up and a small depression worn into the center of each, as if something had been set there and removed.

She had played on these stones.

The memory arrived without warning, the way the worst ones do, full and sudden and lit from inside. She had been very small. Her grandfather had been alive and enormous the way grandfathers are when you are small, not tall exactly but substantial, a weight in the world. She had walked this line of stones and he had walked beside her and she had asked him what they were for and he had said, they're for listening, little one, and she had accepted that the way children accept things, completely and without follow-up.

She had forgotten.

She had forgotten entirely, for twenty years, and she was standing on his land with the compact humming in her chest and an eyeless king somewhere behind her and a hunger moving through the world like a direction, and she had forgotten that she had stood here before, that she had known this place before she knew what knowing meant.

'Morrigan,' she said.

'I see them,' he said quietly.

'Did you know? When I was here before, were you—'

'No. I wasn't with you then.' A pause. 'I came later.'

She walked the line of stones slowly. There were eleven of them. She counted without meaning to, the way you count things when you need your hands to be doing something. Eleven stones in a line, running from the fence toward a cluster of old oaks, and at the end of the line, where the oaks grew close together and the light went dark and cathedral, the ground dipped.

The root cellar.

It was older than she'd expected, or she had mis-remembered it as newer. The door was set almost flat to the ground, wood and iron, the iron gone to deep rust that held its shape against the grain. Her grandfather had laid flat stones around the frame, the same hand-placed care as the line behind her, and in the gap between the stones and the door frame something had been packed, she crouched to look, dried herbs, packed tight and deliberate, still faintly present after however many years.

He had sealed it with everything he had.

Not to keep something in, she realized. The herbs weren't a barrier. They were a, she searched for the word the compact offered her and found it, a marker. A signal. The kind of thing you leave not to repel but to say: I was here. I knew. Remember that I knew.

Her grandfather had stood on this ground and understood something she was only now beginning to reach the edges of, and he had sealed this cellar and left her mother instructions not to open it, and then he had died, and the journal he left behind had been incomplete because her grandfather, like her mother, had decided there were things she was better off not knowing until she was ready.

The difference was that her grandfather had also decided she would eventually be ready.

She heard the others moving through the trees behind her, the stag's slow weight, the bark-and-moss woman's step that barely disturbed the leaves. She heard the Hollow King's particular silence, the way his presence registered not as sound but as the absence of the small sounds that should have been there.

She did not turn around.

'He left it for me,' she said, to Morrigan, to the sealed door, to the land itself. 'He didn't seal it to hide it. He sealed it so it would still be here when I came.'

'Yes,' Morrigan said. 'I think so.'

'He knew I'd come.' She sat back on her heels. The dread was still there, hadn't gone anywhere, sat in her chest alongside the compact like a second heartbeat. But underneath it something else had shifted, something she didn't have a clean name for, not comfort, not certainty, more like the feeling of finding a handhold in the dark. 'He knew what I was before I did.'

'Guardians tend to run in blood,' the bark-and-moss woman said from behind her, and Kit did not startle, had felt her approach. 'Your grandfather was not the compact's guardian. But he understood the land. Some people do, without the binding. They simply, ' she paused, choosing, 'pay attention.'

Kit looked at the sealed door for a long moment.

The iron was the color of old blood. The herbs in the frame had held their shape for years past when they should have crumbled. The flat stones around it were the same hand as the line behind her, patient and deliberate, a man who had worked slowly and meant every placement.

She put her hand on the iron handle.

The dread did not leave. She had not expected it to. But her grandfather had stood here too, had felt whatever he'd felt, and had sealed this door anyway and trusted that she would come and open it.

She owed him the opening.

'Everyone stand back,' she said, and pulled.

[secretsofnature]

The Hollow Crown: Sequel to Shadow of the Forest

Chapter 2: The Shape of What Was Feared

No one moved.

The clearing held its breath, the way clearings do after something impossible has been said aloud, as if the air itself needs a moment to decide whether to carry the words or let them fall.

Kit became aware, slowly, that she was still holding the compact open. The fae lords were still lit. She was still feeding them from whatever she had left, which was not much, which was not the point. She closed her hands around the current and held it there, not releasing, not pulling more. A kind of standoff with herself.

She had read every page of that journal.

She had read it the way a person reads something they love and are afraid of, carefully, more than once, in different lights, hoping the meaning would shift. Her grandfather's handwriting in the margins. Her grandfather's corrections, the places where he'd pressed too hard and torn the paper slightly, the places where the ink went thin because he was tired or because whatever he was writing cost him something.

She had assumed the last year wasn't there because it hadn't been written. She had not considered that it had been written and removed. She had not considered that someone who loved her might have looked at a truth and decided, deliberately, that she was better off without it.

Something moved at the tree line.

The bark-and-moss woman came forward first, the many-tailed fox close at her side. Behind them, the great stag lowered its impossible antlers and stepped into the clearing with the careful gravity of something that had not chosen to move and had moved anyway. It stopped at the woman's shoulder. Its eyes were very dark and very still.

'Guardian,' the bark-and-moss woman said.

Her voice was the sound of green things growing over stone. Kit had heard it before, or something like it, in the deep places of the Vennwood where the forest spoke through root and water rather than wind. It was not comforting, exactly. It was old.

'You know,' Kit said. It wasn't a question.

'I know what I was told.' The woman moved to stand at the edge of the gray, the place where the Hollow King's cold began, and stopped there. She looked at him with something that was not fear and not recognition and not quite anything Kit had a name for. 'I know what the fae lords believed when they made the compact. I know what they did not ask.'

The Hollow King had not moved. He stood in the center of the ruined stone with his crown of twisted branches and his eyeless face, and he was patient the way winter is patient, not gentle, not cruel, simply enduring.

'What didn't they ask?' Kit said.

'Why,' the woman said simply. 'They did not ask why the oldest root was severed. They found the wound and they found something standing near it, and they made a judgment.' She paused. 'Judgments made from wounds are rarely accurate.'

'I did not sever the root,' the Hollow King said. His voice had not changed. It never seemed to change, that sound of empty rooms, of aftermath. 'I was present when it was severed. I had been present for some time, trying to understand what had done it. When the fae lords arrived, they saw what they expected to see.'

'A monster,' Morrigan said from Kit's shoulder.

'Something large and strange in a place that had been damaged.' The King tilted his crowned head. 'The distinction matters.'

Kit's hands were still closed around the compact. She was aware of the fae lords through the bond, diminished and fraying, holding the light she was feeding them with something that was effort now where it had once been reflex. They were listening. She could feel that, the quality of their attention, the way it had shifted from braced readiness to something more careful.

'Three hundred years,' she said. 'You were imprisoned for three hundred years, and your argument is that it was a misunderstanding.'

'My argument,' the Hollow King said, 'is that the misunderstanding is going to get you killed.'

The stag made a sound, low and resonant, more vibration than noise. The fox pressed closer to the bark-and-moss woman's leg.

'What is it?' Kit said. 'The thing that severed the root. What is it.'

The Hollow King was quiet for a moment that lasted slightly too long.

'I don't have a name for it,' he said. 'In three hundred years of considering the question, I have found no name that fits. It is not a creature. It is not a force, exactly. It is more like a, ' he paused, and for the first time Kit had the sense that he was searching, 'a direction. A hunger that moves through the world the way a cold front moves through weather, except that what it leaves behind is not just cold. What it leaves behind is absence. Things that were there and then simply are not.'

The gray of the clearing seemed deeper, suddenly. Kit did not look at it directly.

'The sickness in the forest,' she said. 'The wrong silences. The places in the Vennwood where nothing grows.'

'Yes,' the bark-and-moss woman said quietly. 'Those places have grown, over the years. We did not know what was making them. We thought, some of us, that it was the imprisonment, that the Hollow King's containment was bleeding something into the soil.' She did not look at him when she said it. 'We may have been wrong about that also.'

'You were,' the King said. There was no heat in it.

'How long has it been in the forest?' Kit asked.

'It was here before I was.' The Hollow King turned his eyeless face toward the Vennwood's dark edge. 'It was here before the Standing Stones were raised. The fae lords built their compact and their wards to keep me contained, and in doing so they built something that functioned, for a while, as a kind of barrier to it also. Not intentionally. Not well. But the old wards had weight, and weight slows things that feed on absence.' A pause. 'The wards are gone now.'

The ruined stone was very quiet.

'You said it knows I'm here,' Kit said.

'It has known since you first opened the compact,' the King said. 'Possibly before. You carry a great deal of the forest in you now, guardian, and the forest is one of the last places with enough root-weight to be worth feeding on. You are, from its perspective, a door.'

Kit thought about the moment in the deep Vennwood, months ago now, when she had first felt the forest pour itself through her, had first understood what the compact meant, what it asked. She had thought, at the time, that the most frightening thing about it was the scale, that she was becoming something she didn't have language for.

She was beginning to think she had not been frightened of the right things.

'What do we do,' she said.

She hadn't meant it to come out the way it did, plural, inclusive, directed at the clearing as a whole rather than at any one of them. But it came out that way, and no one corrected it.

The bark-and-moss woman looked at the Hollow King. The stag raised its head. The many-tailed fox sat down in the grass at the edge of the gray, which was either trust or pragmatism, and Kit found she didn't care which.

Morrigan was very still on her shoulder, and she felt him through the old bond, the one that had existed long before the compact, and what she felt from him was not comfort exactly.

It was something more like: we are not alone in this, and that is not yet the same as safe, but it is something.

'First,' the Hollow King said, 'you stop feeding the fae lords enough to keep the compact at full tension. You are burning through yourself, and we will need you intact.' He paused. 'Second, you tell me what your grandfather built on his land before he died, because I believe he knew more than he put in that journal. And whatever he built, I believe it is the closest thing to a ward we have left.'

Kit looked at him for a long moment.

'You've been watching my family,' she said.

'I have been watching this forest for three hundred years,' the Hollow King said. 'Your family is part of this forest. The distinction, again, matters.'

The clearing was still gray where he stood. The cold was still the cold of absence, of rooms that had forgotten warmth. But Kit was standing at the edge of it, and she had not stepped back, and neither had anyone else.

She let the compact ease, just slightly, enough to stop the pulling, enough to let the fae lords rest in what they were rather than what she'd been forcing them to hold.

'There's a root cellar,' she said. 'On the property. He sealed it a year before he died, and he told my mother not to open it. She never did.'

The Hollow King's crowned head tilted.

'Then that,' he said, 'is where we begin.'

[secretsofnature]

The Hollow Crown: Squeal to Shadow of the Forest

Chapter 1: What Remains

The cold hit her first.

Not the cold of winter or of deep shade, but the cold that lives in the space where warmth used to be, the kind that comes after a fire goes out and the room remembers what it was before anyone ever lit it.

The Hollow King stood at the center of the ruined stone, and everything within twenty feet of him was already gray.

Kit felt the fae lords before she saw them move. They were still there, what was left of them, their forms shredded and scattered by the backlash of the King's broken barrier. She could feel them through the compact, the binding that ran through her like a second nervous system, frayed now at the edges, each lord a flickering presence where there had been solid, ancient weight.

They were not gone. But they were barely here.

She reached for them anyway.

It wasn't a decision exactly, not the way breathing wasn't a decision. The compact didn't ask. It simply opened, and Kit became something she had no name for, a hollow place through which the forest poured itself, drawing up through the soles of her boots, through the marrow of her bones, through every nerve the Vennwood had spent months learning to trust.

She felt the fae lords catch it.

Whatever shape they had left, they used to hold the current she gave them. It came out as light, pale and cold as winter starlight, and it struck the Hollow King in the chest and drove him back one step.

One step. That was all.

But he stepped.

'Again,' Morrigan said from her shoulder, his voice stripped of everything but the word itself.

Kit pulled deeper. The forest gave. It always gave, even now, even with its Standing Stones in rubble and its oldest wards burning to nothing, even with the thing it had spent three centuries containing now standing in the open air with a crown of twisted branches and no eyes.

The fae lords shaped the second strike tighter, a concentrated lance instead of a wave. It hit the King at the throat, and this time he made a sound, something that had no equivalent in human hearing, a frequency that Kit felt in her back teeth and the hollow of her sternum.

He did not step back.

'Guardian,' the fae lords said through the bond, their voices layered and fraying, 'we cannot sustain this. We are too diminished. You are feeding us, but there is not enough of us left to hold the shape.'

'Then hold it as long as you can,' Kit said, and pulled more.

The forest screamed somewhere deep in its roots. She felt it, that edge where drawing power stopped being a gift and started being a wound, and she pulled past it anyway, because there was nothing else to pull from and nowhere else to be.

The Hollow King watched her with his eyeless face, and she had the terrible sense that he was not trying. That he was standing in the clearing the way a stone stands in a river, simply present, simply patient, while everything she threw at him broke around him like water.

'He's not fighting back,' she said.

'No,' Morrigan agreed.

'Why isn't he fighting back?'

Morrigan's talons tightened on her shoulder, a small pain, grounding.

Then the King moved.

Not toward her. He turned his crowned head slowly, deliberately, toward the tree line where the bark-and-moss woman stood frozen at the edge of the clearing, the many-tailed fox pressed to her side, the great stag behind them both with its impossible antlers lowered and trembling.

He looked at them for a long moment. Then he looked back at Kit.

'I have been patient,' the Hollow King said, his voice the sound of rooms after everyone has left them. 'Three hundred years is a long patience, even for something like me. I have had a great deal of time to think.'

Kit kept the current running through the compact, kept the fae lords lit with whatever she had left to give, but her hands had stopped shaking. Some part of her had gone very still.

'Then talk,' she said.

'I intend to.' He tilted his crowned head. 'I want you to understand something, guardian, before this continues. I could hollow this clearing. I could hollow you. I could hollow the bird on your shoulder and every creature standing at the tree line and the fae lords you are burning yourself hollow to sustain.' A pause. 'I have not done this.'

'Because you're gathering strength,' Kit said.

'Because,' the Hollow King said, 'I am trying to show you something. I am trying to show you that I am choosing not to.'

The silence that followed was absolute.

Even the forest stopped its screaming.

Morrigan went very still against Kit's neck, and she felt him shift, not fleeing, something else entirely, a bracing, a preparation. He made a sound below the threshold of speech and she understood it the way she understood the forest, not in words, not yet, just in intent.

Wait.

'I don't make deals with things that hollow the world,' Kit said.

'No,' the King agreed. 'You make deals with things that imprison them. Tell me, guardian, do you know why the compact was made? Not what your grandfather wrote. Not what the fae lords have told you.' He paused. 'What your grandmother learned, in the last year of her life, that she could not bring herself to write down.'

Kit's blood stopped.

She had read every page of that journal. Every page, a hundred times. She knew the handwriting by heart, the way her grandfather's letters changed when he was tired, the ink going thinner, the words crowding each other.

She had never found the last year.

She had assumed it simply wasn't there.

'She burned it,' the Hollow King said, with something that was not quite gentleness and not quite cruelty, but occupied the same territory. 'Because what she learned would have required you to make a choice that no one should have to make. And she loved you. In her way. And so she burned it, and she left you in the dark, and she hoped it would be enough.'

Kit was aware, distantly, that she had stopped breathing.

'What did she learn?' Kit said.

The Hollow King looked at her with his eyeless face, and in the space where his eyes should have been, she saw something that might have been pity.

'That I am not what they imprisoned me for,' he said. 'And that the thing they were actually afraid of, the thing that severed the oldest root, the thing that has been making this forest sick for longer than your bloodline has existed, is still out there.'

He paused.

'And it knows you're here.'

[secretsofnature]

Chapter 4: The Vigil

I dreamed in green.

Not the green of living things, not leaf-filtered light or new grass, but something deeper and older, the green that exists below soil, in the dark where roots remember. I dreamed of the oldest root, the severed one, and in the dream I could see where it had been cut, a clean wound still pale at the edges, a thing that had bled slowly for generations and not stopped.

I woke with my cheek against bark and the forest breathing underneath me.

Morrigan was already awake, or perhaps he had never slept. He was perched above me in the dark, his shadow angling wrong in the early light, his green eyes steady on the Hollowreach.

'The first weeks are the hardest,' he said, when he saw me move. Not a comfort. A statement of fact, the way you might warn someone about weather.

I sat up and pressed my palm flat against the root beside me. The warmth was still there, patient and unremarkable, the warmth of a living thing that had simply waited long enough.

'What do I do first,' I said.

'You listen,' he said. 'That is always first.'

Learning to listen turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done.

It was like having a thousand new senses all screaming for attention at once. The forest did not communicate the way I had expected, not in words or images but in sensation, pressure and temperature and wrongness, the way you feel before you hear a sound that is too low to name. I spent the first days with a headache that settled behind my eyes and did not leave, the kind of pain that comes from concentrating on something that has no edges.

Morrigan guided me through it with the patience of something that has done this before and knows the shape of the struggle.

'Your grandfather was better at this by now,' he said one morning, as I stood in the Vennwood trying to isolate the signal from a distressed oak whose roots were being strangled by erosion.

'My grandfather had seventy years of practice,' I said. 'Give me a break.'

He did not give me a break. But he did not leave, either, and I was beginning to understand those were the same thing.

I learned to quiet my mind and let the forest speak without it becoming noise. I learned to identify threats, a patch of blight spreading through a stand of beech, a corrupted spring, the particular quality of wrongness that meant something was moving at the boundaries where it should not be. I learned to work with the forest's creatures, who were sometimes helpful and sometimes cryptic in the particular way of things that have been around long enough to find directness tedious.

And I learned about the Hollow King.

My grandfather's journals had only scratched the surface. The Hollow King had been imprisoned for three hundred years, but he was not inactive. He spent every moment of his captivity pressing at the edges of his prison, sending whispers through the cracks, trying to corrupt the forest from within. What I had not understood from the journals, what I could not have understood until I felt it myself, was the quality of that presence.

I could feel him sometimes, especially late at night when the Vennwood went still. A cold thing at the edge of my awareness, patient in the way that only something without a body can be patient. He did not think like a person. He did not think like the fae. He thought like an ending, like the silence after the last note of a song fades and does not come back.

He was waiting. He had always been waiting. He had three hundred years of practice at it.

One month into my guardianship, I learned what a real threat felt like.

I woke in the middle of the night to a sensation of wrongness so complete it had no bottom to it, just depth and depth and more depth, the feeling of something wrong all the way down. I grabbed the iron rifle my grandfather had left, one of the few weapons that could harm fae creatures, and ran into the forest. Morrigan flew ahead, cawing directions.

We found the breach at one of the Standing Stones. A thing was trying to claw through the barrier, a creature made of shadow and a hunger that was not quite hunger because it had forgotten what satisfaction felt like. Its form shifted and reformed constantly, unable to hold a shape. Where its claws touched the earth, the grass died.

'Hollow-touched,' Morrigan said. His voice was flat, careful. 'A victim of the King's corruption. It's trying to break the wards.'

The creature was faster than I expected. It lunged and I barely rolled aside, its claws leaving furrows in the ground where I had been standing, the earth going grey and dead in long parallel lines.

I did not think about what I did next. The forest answered before I had finished reaching for it, the power coming through me like a current, something that had been waiting at the edge of my hands since the moment I pressed my palm to that first root in the Hollowreach. Vines erupted from the earth and wrapped the creature tight.

The thing shrieked and thrashed. Its touch withered the vines even as they held. I fired, and the iron tore through its shadow-form, and it screamed again, a sound like glass forgetting how to be glass, and then it was nothing.

I stood in the clearing with the rifle still raised and the Standing Stone behind me and Morrigan on a branch above, looking down.

'Not bad,' he said, after a moment. 'For your first real threat. Though you used too much power. You'll be exhausted for days.'

He was right. I barely made it back to the cabin before my legs gave out. I slept for eighteen hours, and when I woke, he was on my windowsill, watching the forest with those old, steady eyes.

'That won't be the last,' he said. 'The King is testing you. Testing the new binding. He wants to know how strong you are, how quickly you tire, how well you can hold the compact.'

'Can he break free?' I asked.

Morrigan was quiet for a moment.

'If you fail enough times, yes,' he said. 'The prison is only as strong as its guardian. Your grandfather was powerful, but he was also old. The binding weakened in his final years. Now it's your strength that holds the King in place, and he knows you're untested.'

'So what do I do?'

'You get stronger. You learn. You survive.' He hopped closer along the sill. 'And you accept that this is your life now. There's no going back, Kit. You're the guardian. The only one standing between the world and what he would do to it if he got out.'

I looked out at the forest. I could feel it like a second heartbeat in my chest, steady and patient and ancient, the rhythm I had first felt in the Hollowreach pressed up through the soles of my feet.

I thought about my grandmother, who had stood in the oldest part of these woods and felt this same warmth and chosen her daughter over it.

I thought about my mother, who had stood in the Thornring and turned around.

I thought about the eight-year-old version of me, who had promised to stay on the trail and felt something come untied inside her chest when she said it.

Three generations of women standing at the edge of this. And then me.

'Then I'd better get to work,' I said.

So began what I came to think of as my real education.

The attacks continued. Sometimes hollow-touched creatures, sometimes corrupted spirits, occasionally something stranger and more dangerous that I did not have a name for and Morrigan would not supply one. I fought them all, and I got better, not gracefully but incrementally, the way you get better at anything you have to do or die.

I learned to channel the forest's power without burning through myself. I learned the rhythms of the compact, the ebb and flow of old magic through the Standing Stones. I learned which creatures could be trusted and which were already compromised, working at angles I could not always see.

The fae lords visited periodically, their shadow-forms coalescing in the Heart Wood to assess me. They were not warm and they were not cold. They were simply ancient and pragmatic, and I was a function to them, a necessary component of something that had been running longer than any human institution. As long as I performed the function, they were satisfied.

Morrigan, for all his complaints, became something like a companion. He had served three generations of guardians, he told me, and each had been different. My grandmother had been fierce and uncompromising. My grandfather had been patient and scholarly.

'And me?' I asked.

'Stubborn,' he said.

'Is that a compliment?'

'It is an observation,' he said. Then, after a pause: 'In this work, it will probably serve you.'

I decided to take it as a compliment anyway.

The seasons turned. I marked time by the forest's changes rather than any calendar, the budding of spring, the heaviness of summer, the long slow surrender of autumn, the quiet of winter when the Vennwood went still and I could feel the Hollow King most clearly, cold and patient at the edges of everything.

Each cycle made me feel more deeply rooted. More aware of the ancient rhythms beneath the surface, the ones that had been running before my family existed, before anyone had thought to name them.

And beneath all of it, steady as a pulse, I could feel the oldest root. The severed one. The wound that had been bleeding for generations.

I didn't know yet what came next. But the Hollowreach had told me, in the way it told me things, slowly and through the soles of my feet, that next was coming.

The Hollow King was waiting.

So was I.

[secretsofnature]

[secretsofnature]

Chapter Three: What the Roots Remember

After the Reclaimer left, we sat.

There wasn't a discussion about it. My legs simply stopped working in any useful direction, and Morrigan, perhaps recognizing this as a reasonable response to the last several hours of my life, settled beside me against the base of one of the enormous trunks. The bark was warm. Not the intentional warmth of the cedar, not a pulse or a signal, just warmth, the way a living thing is warm when it has been alive long enough.

I leaned into it without deciding to.

The Hollowreach breathed around us, slow and deep, that low resonance moving through the roots under my boots and up through the back of my jacket and into my spine. I was starting to be able to separate it from my own heartbeat. They had different rhythms. The forest's was slower. More patient. The kind of rhythm that has outlasted everything that has ever tried to interrupt it.

"My mother," I said, when I had enough breath to say anything at all.

Morrigan was looking at the dark between the trees, his green eyes steady, his hands resting loose on his knees. He had shifted back into the human shape fully, or as fully as he ever did, which I was realizing meant that the feathers were gone from the edges of his shadow but the shadow still behaved slightly wrong, angling away from the ambient light rather than toward it.

"What about her," he said. It wasn't quite a question.

"You said the Vennwood remembered her."

"It did."

"She's lived next to these woods her whole life," I said. "She's never once gone off the trail. She thinks the forest is something you look at from a safe distance and appreciate from behind glass." I paused. "She made me promise, when I was eight, that I wouldn't go past the ridge alone."

Morrigan was quiet for a moment. "And how many times have you broken that promise?"

"That's not the point."

"How many times," he said again, patient as geology.

I looked at the roots under my feet, wide and pale in the dark, smooth as old bone. "Hundreds," I admitted. "Maybe more."

He nodded slowly, as though this confirmed something.

"Your mother was called," he said. "When she was young. Not much older than you are now." He paused, and the pause had the quality of something being chosen carefully, the right words from a language with too many options. "She came as far as the Thornring. She stood in it for a long time. And then she walked back to the trail and kept walking, and she did not come back."

Something cold moved through me that had nothing to do with the temperature.

"She chose to leave," I said.

"She chose not to stay," Morrigan said, which sounded like the same thing but wasn't. "The Vennwood does not hold that against her. It does not deal in judgment. It only records."

"But it grieved," I said, remembering what he had told me, slowly, in the dark, through roots.

"Yes," he said. Simply, without cushioning it.

I sat with that for a while. The forest breathed. Somewhere far above us, something moved through the canopy, not the Greywalkers, something lighter, something that belonged here, a sound like water over stone repeated at a great height.

"What about her mother?" I asked. "My grandmother."

Morrigan turned to look at me then. There was something in his face I hadn't seen before, not reluctance exactly, more like the expression of someone who is about to hand you something heavier than it looks.

"Your grandmother came," he said. "She came all the way to the Hollowreach."

I stared at him. "She was here."

"She stood where you are standing." He glanced at the root beneath my hand. "That trunk you are leaning against, she leaned against it too. She was here for three days."

"Three days." The number sat strangely in my mouth. "What happened?"

"She learned what the Vennwood wanted," he said. "She understood it. And then something in the world outside pulled her back, something she could not leave behind, and she went."

"What pulled her back?"

Morrigan looked at me steadily. "Your mother," he said. "Who was very young at the time, and sick, and needed her."

The breath went out of me slowly.

I thought about my mother, who hated the woods, who had made me promise at eight years old, who kept the curtains on the forest side of the house closed in winter when the trees went bare and the dark came early. I thought about all the years I had assumed her wariness was just fear, just the ordinary human impulse to stay on the path, stay on the side of things that had names and edges and rules.

I thought about what it might feel like to be a child whose mother had gone into the forest and come back different. Quieter. Turned slightly away from everything, the way a compass needle turns.

"She never told me," I said.

"No," Morrigan agreed. "I don't think she knew how." He was quiet for a moment. "Or perhaps she knew that telling you would not keep you out of the woods. And she had already learned that nothing else would either."

I laughed, short and a little painful. "She tried. Every summer. Every year."

"The Vennwood is patient," he said, and there was something almost fond in it, or the closest thing to fond that a voice like his produced. "It knew you would come. It has been knowing for a long time."

"Is that supposed to be comforting?"

"It is supposed to be true," he said. "Comfort is a different matter."

I pulled my knees up and rested my arms on them, looking out into the Hollowreach. The dark here was extraordinary, not oppressive, just complete, the kind of dark that doesn't apologize for being dark. The massive trunks rose into it and disappeared. The roots spread out from them in every direction, and here and there, faintly, they glowed, a pale blue that was less like light and more like the idea of light, something the wood was remembering rather than producing.

"What did my grandmother learn?" I asked. "About what the Vennwood wanted."

Morrigan considered this for a long moment. Long enough that I understood this was not evasion. It was a real consideration, the process of translating something vast into something I could hold.

"The Vennwood is not well," he said at last. "You know this. You have felt it, the Greywalkers, the imbalance, the way the old patterns are fraying at the edges." He paused. "It has been unwell for a long time. Longer than your grandmother's life. Longer than several of your grandmother's lives."

"What made it sick?"

"The same thing that makes most old things sick," he said. "It was separated from what it needed. There is a root, the oldest root, the one that connects the Vennwood to the larger network of living things beneath this land, that was severed. Not by accident. Deliberately. By someone who understood exactly what they were cutting." His jaw tightened, fractionally. "It was a very long time ago. The who of it matters less now than the what."

"And the what is that the forest has been sick ever since."

"Slowly, progressively, yes." He looked at the glowing roots around us. "The Hollowreach holds. But the outer wood, the part you know, the part your mother knows, it has been changing for generations. The Greywalkers are a symptom of that. So is the Reclaimer coming closer to the surface than it should."

"What did my grandmother understand about fixing it?"

"That it cannot be fixed from inside," he said. "The Vennwood can sustain itself, but it cannot repair that root alone. It needs something from the outside. Something that belongs to both worlds." He stopped.

I waited.

"Something like a person," I said, "who has been walking these woods her whole life and felt them like a second heartbeat, and whose grandmother and mother before her were called and almost answered."

Morrigan did not say yes. He didn't need to. The Hollowreach said it for him, that slow resonant breath moving through the roots and up into the base of my spine, the forest's patient rhythm syncing briefly, just briefly, with mine.

I pressed my palm flat against the root beside me.

It was warm.

Not the cedar's warmth, not a signal or a welcome. Older than that. The warmth of something that has been waiting a very long time and has just, quietly, recognized that the waiting might be over.

"I still don't know how," I said.

"No," Morrigan agreed. "That is what comes next."

He rose to his feet, and his shadow moved with him, angling wrong, feathers ghosting briefly at its edges before settling.

"Rest," he said. "The Hollowreach will hold tonight. Nothing that means you harm can reach you here." He looked down at me, those green eyes steady and old and something else now, something with a longer name than I had yet. "You are not a lost thing, Kit Lapierre. You are not a stolen thing. But you are not yet what the Vennwood needs you to be." A pause, measured and deliberate. "That is what tomorrow is for."

He moved away into the dark, not far, just far enough to give me the silence.

I sat with my palm on the root and the forest breathing around me and thought about my grandmother, who had stood in this exact place and pressed her hand against this exact trunk and felt this exact warmth, and had chosen her daughter over it.

I thought about my mother, who had stood in the Thornring and turned around.

I thought about the eight-year-old version of myself, who had promised to stay on the trail and felt something pull loose inside her chest when she said it, like a knot coming untied.

Three generations of women standing at the edge of this.

And then me, sitting in the middle of it, in the oldest part of a forest that had been waiting longer than my family had existed, with a crow who was not a crow asleep somewhere in the dark above me and the slow certain pulse of something ancient moving through the soles of my feet.

I did not sleep for a long time.

But when I finally did, I dreamed in green.

[secretsofnature]

CHAPTER TWO — THE RECLAIMER

The Hollowreach did not feel like a place.

It felt like the memory of one. Like stepping into a room where something enormous had stood for so long that its shape had pressed itself into the air, permanent as a scar.

The dark here was not empty. It had texture, weight, a low resonance that moved against my skin the way deep water moves, not threatening, just present. Unhurried. The roots beneath my feet were as wide as roads, and the trees, if they were still trees, had grown so far past the shape of trees that I had no word for what they were instead. Columns, maybe. Pillars holding up something I couldn't see.

Morrigan had not let go of my hand.

He stood very still beside me, which I was learning meant he was paying attention to something I couldn't hear. His eyes had gone fully green in the dark, no white, no pupil, just that deep ember color that made him look less like a person and more like a signal.

"Is it always like this in here?" I whispered.

"No," he said. "Usually it is quieter."

I did not find that comforting.

Something shifted at the far edge of my vision, not movement exactly, more like the space between two of the massive trunks had rearranged itself, become deeper than it should be. I turned to look at it directly and it stopped. The way a sound stops when you hold your breath to listen.

"Morrigan."

"I see it."

"What is it?"

He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that meant he was deciding how much truth to give me.

"Its name is the Reclaimer," he said finally. The words came out careful, the way you carry something fragile. "It is not a Greywalker. It is something older than that. Something the Hollowreach keeps."

"Keeps," I repeated. "Like a guard?"

"Like a process," he said. "The Vennwood does not lose things. When something that belongs to it wanders too far, or is taken, or forgets what it is, the Reclaimer finds it. Brings it back."

The shape between the trunks deepened again. I felt it before I saw it, a low pulling in my chest, like the cedar's warmth but inverted. Not welcoming. Assessing.

"Brings back what, exactly?" My voice came out steadier than I felt.

Morrigan turned to look at me then, and his expression was the one I was beginning to recognize, the one that meant the answer was complicated in a way that my having less context made worse.

"Things that were once part of the forest," he said. "And things that carry something of the forest inside them without knowing it."

The pulling in my chest tightened.

"Which one am I?" I asked.

"That," he said, "is what it is deciding."

The Reclaimer stepped out of the dark.

It was tall. Not unnaturally so, not the way a nightmare is tall, but the way very old things are tall, as if it had simply been growing longer than everything around it. Its edges were not sharp. They dissolved slightly at the margins, the way a tree dissolves into fog, present and then less present and then absent, no clear line between the two. It did not walk so much as arrive, each step was less of a movement and more a decision to be somewhere slightly different than before.

It had no face I could name. But it had attention. I felt that attention land on me the way you feel sunlight land, a specific warmth, a specific weight, directed.

"Don't look away from it," Morrigan said quietly. "And don't run."

"I thought running was our whole strategy."

"That was the Greywalkers. Running tells them you resonate. Running tells the Reclaimer you know what you are."

"I don't know what I am!"

"Then don't run," he said, very simply.

The Reclaimer stopped. It was close enough now that I could feel the temperature drop around it, not cold like winter, cold like depth, like water that has never been touched by sun. It tilted its head slowly, that same birdlike angle that Morrigan used, and I wondered distantly whether Morrigan had learned it from something like this, or whether something like this had learned it from Morrigan, or whether both of them had simply learned it from the forest.

It reached toward me.

Not with a hand. With intention. I felt it brush the edge of something inside my chest, not my heartbeat, something deeper than that, something I didn't have a name for. It felt like being recognized.

Not kindly. Not unkindly. Just accurately.

My breath came out shaky. "What is it doing?"

"Reading you," Morrigan said. He had gone very still, the stillness of someone who knows better than to interrupt.

"Reading me for what?"

"For what you owe," he said. "And what is owed to you."

The Reclaimer's attention deepened. I felt it move through me the way roots move through soil, slow and certain, finding every hollow, every pocket of resistance, every place where something had been buried and forgotten. I had the sudden, vertiginous sense that it was finding things inside me I hadn't known were there. Old things. Things that had arrived long before I had.

The cedar, I thought. All those mornings with my palm against the scar. All those years of the forest knowing my footstep, my attention, the direction I turned when something moved in the leaves.

It hadn't just been noting me.

It had been storing me.

"Morrigan," I said, and my voice came out very quiet, "how long has the Vennwood been doing this?"

A pause. The honest kind.

"Since before you were born," he said. "It remembered your mother. And hers before that."

The Reclaimer withdrew its attention slowly, the way a tide withdraws, leaving everything rearranged.

It stood for a long moment, looking at me with whatever it used instead of eyes.

Then it stepped back.

One step. Then another. The dark between the trunks absorbed it, not violently, not in retreat, the way a door closes when it has finished being a door.

I let out a breath I had been holding for what felt like several years.

"That's it?" I said. "It just left?"

"It made its assessment," Morrigan said. Something in his voice had loosened slightly. Not relief, exactly. More like a calculation that had resolved in the expected direction. "You are not something lost. You are not something stolen. You are something that came when it was called." He paused. "That is a different category entirely."

"And what does that category get?"

He looked at me for a moment, those green eyes steady in the dark, old and strange and something else now, something that might have been, if I was reading it right, a very restrained version of glad.

"It gets to stay," he said.

Above us, the Hollowreach settled. The columns of ancient wood seemed to breathe, once slowly, the way the forest had breathed that morning when I left the trail.

The way it breathes when it is paying attention.

The way it breathes, I was beginning to understand when it is satisfied.

[secretsofnature]

“The Clearing Doesn’t Like Straight Lines”

“Kit tried walking straight through the clearing once. Morrigan watched her drift sideways like the forest was nudging her, then said, ‘Told you. Certainty makes it nervous.’”

[secretsofnature]

[secretsofnature]

“Forest Rule #11”

“Never touch the birch bark after dusk. It remembers too much.”

[secretsofnature]

“What the Birch Remember”

“The birch don’t speak of what they’ve seen, but their bark still scars where the truth tried to escape.”

[secretsofnature]

[secretsofnature]

“When the Forest Notices”

“The pendant hasn’t warmed in days, but tonight, when Kit walked past the old birch, it burned hot enough to leave a mark.”

[secretsofnature]

[secretsofnature]

“Secret of the Heartwood Pendant”

“The pendant was carved from the last Heartwood Tree, a species the forest erased after it broke a pact. Anything made from its wood still remembers the truth.”

[secretsofnature]