Chapter 8: What It Was Before
The fox moved to her side when she sat down, pressed its warm weight against her thigh and stayed there, which she accepted as the gift it was.
She opened the book.
The compact had been working on it since the cellar, slow and patient, the way it worked on everything it did not yet understand, and by the time she opened to the first page inside the Thornring the translation was further along than she expected. Not complete. Not clean. But present the way a voice is present through static, there and comprehensible if she listened at the right angle.
She listened.
The first pages were witness, as she had understood in the cellar, a record of observation laid down over time, the script running its patient loops through event after event without comment or judgment, the way very old things record without editorializing. She moved through them carefully, the compact rendering each page into something adjacent to language, meaning without quite words, and she began to understand the shape of what the book was.
It was a history of the network.
Not the forest's history. Not the fae lords' history or the history of the compact or the long record of guardians and their keeping. The network's own history, as the network had experienced it, which was a strange thing to hold in her mind, the idea of a network having experience, and then she thought about what it felt like when the compact opened and the forest poured through her and she thought: of course it does. Of course it does.
The early pages were very old and the translation was thinner there, impressions rather than events. She understood that the network had once been vast. Not just the Vennwood, not just this forest, but connected outward and outward to other networks, other forests, other deep places where root-weight accumulated over centuries and became something that had no human name but that the compact recognized with a kind of reverence she felt as warmth in her sternum.
It had been whole, once. The world had been threaded through with it.
And then something had changed.
She turned pages. The compact worked harder here, the script becoming denser, the record more urgent, and she felt the shift in it, the quality of witnessing changing from observation to alarm. Something had entered the network from outside. Not from another forest, not from another root-system. From outside the network entirely. From a place the network did not have language for because it had never needed language for it.
She thought about what the King had said. Not a creature. Not a force. A direction.
The book was more specific than that.
She read slowly, the compact translating in pieces, and what she assembled from those pieces was this: the hunger had not always been hungry. Before it entered the network it had been something else, something the book's script described in terms she felt rather than understood, a concept that lived in the space between words. The closest the compact could render it was: a thinning. The place where something ends. The edge.
It had been an edge.
Not evil. Not purposeful. Simply the boundary condition of a thing, the way all things have edges where they stop being themselves and become something else. It had existed at the margins of the network the way cold exists at the margins of warmth, not aggressive, not consuming, simply present as the edge must be present where the center is.
And then something had pushed it inward.
She stopped on that page and read it again.
Something had pushed the edge into the center. Had taken the boundary condition of the network and forced it through the network's oldest root, and what had been a thinning at the margins had become a consuming at the core, because that was what edges did when they were forced into centers, they ate, because eating was the only thing an edge could do when it was where a center should be.
She sat with that for a long time.
The fox shifted against her leg. Somewhere outside the ring the circling continued, slow and patient, and she felt through the compact that the ward was holding, the ember-warmth of the old stones steady if not strong. She looked up.
The Hollow King was still where he had been when she sat down. Outside the ring, to the north of it, seated on the ground with his back against one of the outer stone depressions, the place where a standing stone had been and was no longer. He had not moved in hours. He was not sleeping, she did not think something like him slept, but he was still in a way that was different from his usual stillness, less the stillness of a predator and more the stillness of something that had put down a weight it had been carrying for a very long time and was simply resting in the absence of it.
His crown of twisted branches caught the moonlight in pieces.
She had been afraid of him, was still afraid of him in the way you are afraid of things that could hollow you without effort. But she had been looking at him for hours now, across the space of the ward, and she had noticed something she had not let herself notice before.
He was tired.
Not physically. Not the tired of a body that needed sleep. The tired of something that had been doing a single thing for a very long time and had not been able to stop and had kept going anyway because stopping was not an option, and now the thing was, if not finished, at least paused, and the exhaustion that had nowhere to go while it was moving had somewhere to go now.
Three hundred years, she thought. Three hundred years of imprisonment and the thing you were trying to warn everyone about still out there and getting worse and no one listening because no one knew to listen.
She looked back at the book.
The page after the pushing had happened was different from all the others. The script changed, the loops tightening, and the compact rendered it not as meaning but as feeling, a single sustained feeling that lasted the length of the page, and the feeling was grief.
The network grieving its own center. The oldest root in the moment of its severing, the record of what it had been and what it was becoming, laid down in the only language a root has, which is the language of what it is connected to and what it has lost connection to, and it was, she pressed her hand flat against the page without meaning to, it was the most complete grief she had ever been in the presence of, the grief of something that had been whole and was becoming hollow, and she felt it in the compact and through the compact in the forest around her, the Vennwood's sleeping weight aware of what she was reading the way a dreamer is aware of sound without waking.
She turned the page.
The amber warmth of the ward changed.
Not suddenly. Not dramatically. A shift in the quality of it, a flicker, the way a candle flickers when a door opens somewhere in the house. She felt it through her palm still pressed against the stone behind her and looked up immediately.
The circling had stopped.
The compact told her this before her other senses did, the slow rotation she had been tracking at the edges of awareness simply absent, the way you notice a sound has stopped because the silence it leaves has a shape. She stood, the book still open in her hand, the fox on its feet beside her, every tail raised.
The bark-and-moss woman was awake, had been awake, was standing at the south stone looking outward. Morrigan's talons were tight on Kit's shoulder.
'It stopped circling,' Kit said.
'Yes,' the King said. He was on his feet, his exhaustion gone or put away, the predator stillness back. He was looking south, the same direction as the bark-and-moss woman. 'That is not an improvement.'
The ward flickered again. Stronger this time. The ember-warmth stuttered, recovered, stuttered again, and Kit felt in the stone under her palm the effort of it, three hundred years of diminishment and now this, the old wards doing what they had been built to do with what they had left to do it with.
'It's not circling because it found a way in,' Morrigan said.
The southernmost stone went cold.
Not the cold of the Hollow King, not the cold of absence, but the cold of something pressing against a surface from the other side, the cold of a hand on glass. Kit felt it travel up her spine through the compact before she felt it in the air, and the compact did something she had not felt it do before, not in all the months it had been learning her and she had been learning it.
It braced.
The way you brace before impact. The way a tree braces in a storm, roots deepening, the whole structure of it committing to the ground beneath it.
The southernmost stone cracked.
A single clean fracture, top to bottom, the sound of it sharp and final in the night air, and through the fracture something came that was not cold and not dark and not any of the things she had been taught to expect from things that meant harm. It was simply, for one terrible moment, an absence in the shape of an entrance, and the compact screamed against her ribs, and Kit grabbed the book and held it against her chest and looked at the gap in the ward where the stone had been whole a moment ago and was not anymore.
'Kit,' Morrigan said, very quietly, and it was not a warning. It was her name, said the way you say someone's name when you want them to know you are there.
She knew he was there.
She looked at the cracked stone and the absence beyond it and the book against her chest and the compact braced inside her like a tree in a storm.
'Tell me,' she said to the King, to the bark-and-moss woman, to whoever had an answer, 'that there is another ward somewhere. Another place like this. Tell me we have somewhere to go.'
The silence that followed was not the silence of the wrong places.
It was the silence of people deciding how much of the truth to give her all at once.