Page 191 of Shifting Hearts 1
The forest’s silence might have been unnerving if I hadn’t grown up listening to the tree’s breaths. The intertwined canopy closed up only a handsbreadth above my head, the twisted branches interlaced so tightly that they obscured nearly all light. The whole effect created a shadowy blanket that stretched for miles beneath the crisscrossed wooden fingers letting in scant glimpses of the constantly overcast sky, situated between one small cottage. One in a field of wild flowers at one end of the forest, and the other at a foreboding cliff face, assaulted by sharp winds and often snowed in during the coldest months.
But inside the forest neither sunlight nor snow touches the soft earth floor.
Here, quiet reigned. Only the trees whispered to one another, ignoring the cottages positioned like sentinels at either side of the range.
And me in the middle, traipsing beneath the creaking branches, followed by a trail of children who I barely knew.
I picked my way through the deepest of dark places, counting the steps in my head as we walked. A familiar tune fell from my lips despite that I understood the value of silence in the center of the forest.
Less than a mile to go.
So much could happen in the time between one cottage and the next. My feet didn't ache from the walk. Only the coldness that pervaded my bare soles eked in via the hard packed dirt of the newly carved path through the forest’s heart. A dichotomy of what was real, and what was not.
Out here I was used to that strangeness, too.
Every time I entered the forest, something changed.
Or everything.
Things we couldn’t see flickered between thick trunks that melded in the gloom to create a wall of impassable nothingness. False shadow birds circled above us, as though the canopy itself had an imagination, creating the creatures out of their blackened, skeletal sticks like paper cranes. Silent cries shrieked overhead, picking at the skills of my pitiful train of children, warning us against all the things that waited in the darkness.
Beyond.
A frisson of fear rippled through the children linked by their hands. I turned back to count dirty heads, ensuring I still had the same number as I did when we entered the forest so many miles back. I couldn’t lose any one now, not when we were so close to freedom.
Huge eyes stared back at me, hope simmering beneath the surface. My heart clenched at the simple signature of their so easily given trust.
It has been a long time since I lost a child to these depths, a long time since the eyes that watched let me see, if only for a brief glimpse, before the forest closed out the terror that waited.
Watching.
Something squealed, and my cloak yanked toward the ground. A small, warm body stumbled against my heels when I stopped, looking about us before I pivoted and knelt at ground level.
My heart raced but no scream ripped from my lips. Another fright I’d become accustomed to in my mere nineteen years that seemed so much longer. An eternity of fear living and playing near the forest. When I turned fifteen, I entered the path that opened for me between two trunks for the first time.
As though the forest expected me.
Invited.
Four years of escorting hundreds of children beneath the twisted sticks. Along the paths I swore grew just for my feet to pass between the ancient trunks.
Four years of wondering when the shadows might reach out and steal any one of us away at any time.
When the next breath each of us breathed might be our last.
When the trees might finally touch me.
Since I had been allowed to help out with transporting Gran’s foster children from one cottage to the next like a static heart between beats, a warden through the woods. Haunted woods at that, the stuff of ghost stories. All that was missing was a gothic house in the center of the forest, with turreted towers and a witch bearing spells to unwary travelers.
But that wasn’t our destination, and I’d never made it to the very center. The forest never allowed it. And if it did, then I didn’t expect that anyone lived there. The forest might breathe, but it wasn’t alive, exactly. Not in the sense that we existed, all creatures of hearts and blood and bones and thoughts.
This was a place of earth and shadows, twisted thoughts where nightmares drifted, untethered.
“Brynnie.” The softest whisper and another tug of my clock reminded me that my attention needed to be at ground level, not with the trees, but still my mind drifted to our destination that called to us all.
A siren song in sunlight and sweet, open air.
My mother's cottage waited just outside the thick shadows in a green clearing where wild flowers bloomed year round, and the sun offered a gentle heat of the life giving variety. There, evenings were filled with clear skies, and constellations I named in the shapes of mythical beasts that one roamed the lands but no more. Nights were safe from the eyes that never stopped seeking within the forest’s boundary.
