When, growing up, I had asked about my mother, Peter told me small things: she drank too much coffee, she loved to garden, she had been an only child. They gave me pieces of a life, but not enough to really know her. He’d never talked about himself, his youth, his tastes. I’d never asked, childishly assuming that his life had only truly begun once I was born.
“Do you think,” I said slowly, “that perhaps we cannot really know our parents until they have gone?”
Matthew said nothing.
“Do you think we will find Peter in the city?”
“If he’s there, he’s done a very good job hiding it.”
“Do you think he’s safe?” I bit down on my lip, “Could he be hurt?”
“I don’t know. I looked for him. I was mad at you when I left the hotel—for pushing me away, for ignoring me. But then it seemed so off. Rafe had seemed off the whole time, and you just wouldn’t see it. I got halfway home before deciding that I couldn’t leave you until I was sure you’d met up with your father, but by then I couldn’t remember what route I had taken. I drove around for almost an hour, but I couldn’t find the building. Couldn’t find any trace of you. I was worried. I asked around the universities for Peter, showed his picture at all the libraries I could think of, even the museums. Right up until you called the other day I was canvassing the places that the two of you might be. No one had any information.”
“But I would know if he were in danger, wouldn’t I?” I pressed. “I’d sense it somehow . . .” My cheeks reddened as I mumbled, “Just like you knew with me.”
Matthew shrugged. “I know it’s the last thing you’d want, the last thing either of us do, but still our best bet could be going back for Rafe. He had all of those notes, all Peter’s letters . . .”
At this mention of Rafe’s name, I froze. There was no way to tell the story of his death without revealing myself as the monster Mrs. Blott had deemed too dangerous to show to her family. Matthew was all I had left; I didn’t know where I would be if he abandoned me, too.
“No,” I whispered, staring deliberately above Matthew’s head.
“If we send someone else, my brother, maybe, to go find him . . . It wouldn’t have to be you. I don’t think I could even see him without . . .” His mouth puckered, cruel in a way I’d never known him to be. That cruelty was my fault.
“No.” The sheer curtains fluttered in the breeze. I heard Matthew take a long, slow breath.
I opened my mouth to say more, but stopped as Matthew’s hand reached for mine. He let it rest awkwardly against the comforter atop my knee for just a moment before pulling back and lacing it into his other.
“You don’t have to explain,” he said. “I saw how you were.” He extended his hand again, this time with purpose, squeezing my leg through the bed sheets. I shivered. “We can talk about it later,” he said, “when you’re ready. For now let’s keep our focus on your father.”
I nodded, locking my memories away, forcing myself back to the matter at hand. I hadn’t thought, in killing Rafe, that I was losing any final trace of Peter. Was Rafe truly our last clue? I thought of the dreams I’d had, Peter as fodder for the forest, his body wrapped in vines, weeds shooting through. I thought of Peter’s refusal to cross the line of trees. Matthew’s mother frightened of our village. The warnings. The stories. All those women, disappearing. Men forever changed by strange encounters in the wood. The map, the spirals, the quests.
“I think Peter’s at home,” I said aloud, “or somewhere near it.”
Matthew considered this, leaned back in his armchair, reached up as if to tug a lock of hair, clearly forgetting he had cut it. I ached at the emptiness, the awkward dance of his fingers searching for a curl and finding nothing. He scratched at the fuzz above his ear instead.
“School starts again in three days,” he said slowly. “I could bring you back with me. But I don’t know that our best course of action would be—”
“Yes,” I said. “Take me with you. Take me home.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to make a full recovery here? My mother is happy to have you as long as you—”
“I’m ready to go now.” I pushed off my bed sheet to reveal his sister’s nightgown and my own spindly shin. “Please.”
“We wouldn’t leave immediately. First, I’d want to—”
“As soon as we can, then. Please.” I had the strong urge to see Marlowe, to fall asleep in my own bed, to give the house a good cleaning. Urizon called to me, needed my care. Now that I realized, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t felt it before. I could see the house when I closed my eyes, the ivy climbing the trellises, the grass overgrown at the edge of the wood. Every joint and sinew in my body pushed me toward the forest, my stomach twirling as if lengthening with tendrils of its own. To stay at the Harevens’ any longer seemed like infidelity, a denial of the Blakely inheritance I’d only just begun to understand. An insult to Peter, who I felt sure was waiting for me at Urizon.
My insistence was enough to persuade Matthew.
“If you think that you’re strong enough, we can set out tomorrow morning,” he said. “And you do think that you’re strong enough?”
I nodded. I wiggled my toes, then slid my legs over the side of the bed, stepping onto soft woven carpet. My head spun a bit when I stood, but cleared quickly. I stretched.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Then it’s settled,” said Matthew. “I trust you. I’ll go tell my mother the news. Just be careful not to touch the . . .” His voice faded as he caught himself. “Never mind. I know that you will.”
A Flood
The forest spools and gathers, holds its breath until evening. In the dark it protracts to take a fuller span of William Blakely’s masterpiece, Urizon, Helen’s home. Mary’s home. Emma’s and Lucy’s. The ivy moves quickest, sneaking in through the cracks in the stone, under the doors, forcing them wider. The roots of the yard oaks crack like cramped legs and extend themselves, sighing as they stretch against floorboards, popping them loose. Tree branches tap windows. Wild roses, sharp-edged and hideously sweet, thorn through and scent the parlors. The outside comes in. Centuries of stagnation have exploded into action; eternal life, an eternal inertia, releasing all the force it’s held at bay.
And in the center of the shadow wood, the black-eyed girl’s clearing transfigures, the tide pulling the undergrowth back to make way for her cathedral. The bones of centuries of buried Blakelys past rise from their graves to build a yellow-white palace, displacing the trees and the dirt, forming turrets and battlements, a dark, echoing castle, the black-eyed girl’s old bed pallet her throne. To walk here now, you would not know this once was forest, this smooth ground soil, these chandeliers trees.
Lucy, watching, is afraid of her own fear.
“It is well to be afraid,” says Mary, patting Lucy’s elbow.
“Nonsense,” she hisses.
Lucy does not understand the shifting. Fails to grasp the black-eyed girl is now far outside her control, was never hers to begin with. She shakes her head, disbelieving. She thinks to punish the black-eyed girl with a spanking, as she saw the nurses do when her brother misbehaved as a child. To tie the girl up, as she might a naughty dog. This violence, this manifestation of the black-eyed girl’s anger—it must be misdirected, intended for the forces that have hurt the women out in the wider world. There must be a way to teach the girl, to help her realize her mistake.
“She is here to protect us,” Lucy swears, her voice faltering as she moves with Mary and Imogen around the girl’s clearing. The women stand over the jumbled bloodless body that was Emma, contorted and curled, her cracked, empty bones hidden under a thin cobweb shroud.
“We can leave, follow the traveling trees. Hide from the demon at Urizon,” Mary says, poking Emma’s wrist with a curious finger. She jumps back when the patchy web that covered it reveals splintered bone where the girl’s hands should rest. “We must leave,” Mary presses. “At once.”
Imogen agrees. “Now is our chance, before she finds us. The house’s walls will protect us until we can make a better plan.”