Content note: child abuse

 

They said the grove was there before the city. Before people. They said, before the first houses that would, eventually, grow into the city of Ilmar, everything at the foot of the mountains had been forest. But, even when it had all been forest, the grove had been there, just trees amongst trees but different, separate. They said that the grove had been there before the forest, before there were even trees at all.

Ilmar was there now, though, with the grove at the edge of the Gutter Districts where the poorer folk lived, on the wrong side of the river. And you had to be poor among the poor to live right up against the  Grove. Bad luck, to look out of your door and see the trees waving there, sometimes with the wind, sometimes not. Bad luck, to see what came out of them.

Leskia and her father were very poor, as though her dead mother had taken all the luck, graft, and good sense to her grave. When Leskia looked out of the back window of their little shack, the trees were right there. Else they’d never have had a roof over their heads at all. Nobody else would live so close.

The Anchorwood, they called it. The name gave her the shivers. As though, absent that little stand of trees, the whole world would be dragged away by unseen tides, wrecked on strange rocks. That was how the grove got you thinking of it, like the fixed point of things.

Her father didn’t have much useful advice to give in life, except, “Stay away from the wood.” No place to go play in, he said. Clipped her about the head if he caught her looking at it, the limit of his parental duties. Then he’d go to the Anchorage, the leaning old taverna that stood beside the grove. They said the woman who ran it was a witch and had dealings with those who lived inside the wood. What she mostly had dealings with were crooks, because the city authorities feared to come down hard on the place because of its uncanny reputation. Criminals, fugitives, thieves, and gamblers. The routes to easy money, as far as Leskia’s father was concerned, every time he crossed the fifty yards between his door and the door of the Anchorage. A haunt of rooks, swindlers, and villains, as he’d swear every time he came back, pockets lighter and maybe a bruise across his face. One night he was particularly excited, saying that the proprietor had invited him to some special secret high-stakes game, and he was finally in and being taken seriously, and their fortunes were on the turn. That was the night that he lost every last thing they had left of Leskia’s mother, including her ring and her ashes.

None of which meant he spent less time there. More and more, as Leskia grew up. And losing money to grifters at the Anchorage didn’t put food on the table, so that was her job. Begging, mostly, except beggars were wicked jealous of their spots, and the Lodges—the family concerns who organised and directed those exact crooks who were cheating her father at cards—leant on every street panhandler for contributions to ensure the streets remained safe for beggars. Leskia was more than familiar with the Lodges, the braggart toughs who called themselves “soldiers” and swaggered through every street on the wrong side of the river in stolen finery. Hand to sword-hilt and a quick boot ready for some scrawny kid.

Leskia was thirteen when her father’s forbiddances finally wore thin. Begging had earned her nothing that day, and when she got home, the little that had been there when she left was gone, and so was her father. He was in the Anchorage again, and Leskia even crept to the place’s back door in case some uncharacteristic charity was in the air. The old witch proprietor had been there, though: smoking, her eyes like death. So Leskia had slunk away from the door, and there was the wood. Standing at the back of the Anchorage, just as it stood at the back of their shack, a stand of dark trees under the moon. No more than twenty, surely. She could walk around it in a few minutes. That was what the little island of rational thought in her mind said. The rest of her, the ocean around it, said No. No she could not. The Grove went on and on. The Anchorwood was a forest. Was the forest, the first one, all forests. It went to many places. There were other lands, other worlds through it; that was what people said. Eerie folk came out of it, from places where things were different. And that wasn’t even counting the folk who lived in the wood itself…

She crept closer. It was a wood. Things lived in a wood, yes, but some of those things might be birds she could catch, berry bushes with lustrous red fruit, mushrooms…She’d heard stories, from travellers who went through more mundane forests on their way to Ilmar. Her shrunken belly clenched like a fist.

She went into the wood. Just into its shallows, that first time. Just creeping past the first sentinel trees. She went in, just that far, and looked out towards the far side, out into the farmland past the bounds of Ilmar, out towards the foothills, splashed pale with the light of the full moon. And saw none of that. Only the trees and the darkness beneath them, stretching on forever.

She took another step. She hadn’t meant to. She looked back and there were only the trees. No shack, no Anchorage with a lantern over the door to guide in gulls like her father. Just the wood.

And if there were birds, they would eat carrion; and if there were berries, they would be poisonous; and if there were mushrooms, then you wouldn’t want the dreams they’d bring if you ate them. The berries would be kinder.

Something moved, between the trees. Somethings. Pale somethings. Leskia crouched, fear pincering every joint of her, and watched the Indwellers approach. That was what people called them, the folk of the wood. Somehow, even living right at the Anchorwood’s edge, she’d never properly seen them. Her father had always turned her head, dragged her away, shut the door. But here they were in their own place, and here she was, watching them.

Some half a dozen, though she found it hard to count them somehow, so that there might have been five or seven or even eleven. Genderless figures in baggy robes, strung with cords of little bones and jars, of twisted little toys made from teeth and feathers. Poling their way through the gloom of the wood with plain staves, wearing masks. Oblong masks of bark or wood, painted in jagged patterns that had nothing of faces to them. At first she thought the clashing lines and shapes obscured eye and mouth, but as they drew closer she saw there was no hole or break in the masks at all, just slightly curved canvases of wood, each one with its own chaotic design.

They passed so close to her she could have tugged at the hem of their robes. Their staves landed within inches of her knees as she knelt there. They smelled of leafmould and incense and made almost no sound as they passed.

The last one looked at her. Or its mask tilted towards her and she felt an eyeless regard. It even paused, just one step when the others—the four or five or seven others—were moving and that final Indweller was still. She felt…

Not under threat. Not flinching in case that staff came down across her shoulders or upraised arm like some Lodge soldier’s cudgel or merchant’s stick. Yet, at the same time, at the very brink of a truly existential doom. As though the shadows of the wood all about her were pits, and a step in any direction could see her swallowed up by the earth.

But hunger was a tyrant that wielded the lash, and so she looked into that blank mask and raised a hand, palm cupped. Please. No hard luck story or pleading, like she might try on the streets. Just that hand.

The Indweller dropped to its haunches. Leskia whimpered. A hand reached out, the fingers thin as twigs, as though, of the two of them, she’d had a good meal far more recently. She felt something drop into her palm. A clutch of hard, round stones. Then the Indweller was standing again, no obvious transition. Then it was in step with its fellows again, somehow exactly in place despite its delay. Then they were almost out of sight, and she remembered she was lost in the wood, even though she was just one step in past the trees. She ran. Ran after them, despite understanding that one must never follow the Indwellers where they led. Understanding, because of what her father had taught her. Understanding, in the same innate way she understood that, if she opened her hand, the stones would fall down and not up.

They left the wood.

She stumbled, fell flat on her face. There were no trees around her, only behind her. She was out. Out where? For a moment she feared to lift her head in case she saw…what? What would be worse, honestly, than just the shabby old shack and the Anchorage and her drunken father weaving home with fewer pennies in his pocket? And indeed, because life had few good things in store for Leskia, that was what she saw when she looked. That and the line of Indwellers weaving their way into the streets of Ilmar, about some incomprehensible errand of their own.

In her cupped hand were a dozen hard-shelled nuts, of no kind she’d ever seen. She used a stone to crack them open. The flesh was delicious, the best thing she’d ever tasted, even without the extra savour that being so very hungry brought. She looked out for those nuts, the rest of her life, and never saw one again, so that the taste would haunt her dreams with impossible longing.

Ilmar was not a free city. A few years before, the Palleseen army had put their uniforms at every street corner. Brought their taxes and their weights and measures, their days of the week and their language, and called it liberation. Leskia hadn’t really noticed at first, because she hadn’t thought that—meagre as her life was—things could get worse. But with the Pals taking up all the space at the top, everyone else was forced downwards, which meant less for everyone else. The class of people above the truly impoverished found themselves poorer, and took it out on those below, because those above them might fight back. In Leskia’s case this was primarily Severne, who was three years older than her and spent her time dancing attendance on the Lodge soldiers, running their errands and selling them what she stole or extorted from lesser kids like Leskia. Severne, who threw Leskia’s father’s failings in her face, as if Leskia didn’t know the truth of the man. Severne, who strutted up when Leskia had found a good corner to beg alms at, and demanded protection, because the streets of Ilmar were hard. And who would absolutely follow through on every threat if Leskia was slow to make a donation to the cause.

Severne had always been there in Leskia’s life. Her own family lived two streets from the Anchorage, and Severne’s mother spent half her nights there, just like Leskia’s father. Except Severne’s mother was Lodge, which meant she came out of that place with work and friends and money, rather than just a black eye and empty pockets. In the gutters and alleys of their mean district, Severne was aristocracy and Leskia was her rightful prey. And when it wasn’t Severne or her peers, then the Pals were always on the lookout to move a beggar on. The Palleseen believed in bringing perfection to those places they conquered, and nobody needed to beg in a perfect society. Possibly at some point they would introduce a way for people like Leskia to put food in their bellies some honest way, but right now it just meant that if the uniforms caught you begging then they’d put those standard-issue boots to good use.

And somehow, despite all of this, Leskia lived. And somehow, even her useless father lived, through no particular virtue of his own. There was always just enough that they were hungry, not starved.

She saw the Indwellers, now and then. Now she had shaken off her father’s hand and his stories, and kept an eye on the wood. From their comings and goings she learned how the air felt, when the wood was open. When it wasn’t just a handful of leftover trees, but stretched off forever, and led to many places. Then the masked people would go on their unknown errands. Visiting the Anchorage to consult with the witch; walking into the city; standing at the edge of the trees with infinity at their backs, staring facelessly back at Leskia. She never dared beg from them again but stared right back. Bad luck, anyone would tell you. Curses would monkey-walk along the line of that connection and blight your life with all the wickedness of the Indwellers. Except Leskia knew her life was as blighted as it could possibly get and so she stared until she felt that strange tug. Like an invitation. That was when she knew to look away.

Nothing calls to misfortune more than to imagine things can’t get worse. An Ilmari maxim, from a city that had known its share of bad things. Three years into the Pal occupation, the people of Ilmar also decided that everything was as bad as it could possibly be and tried to throw off the yoke. The students at the Gownhall, the Lodges, the old displaced rich families, the factory workers, all of them taking to the streets, and none of them together, so that the uniforms and discipline of the Pals beat down on each of them, and none of it came to anything.

Leskia was out in the city when the fighting started. Not a part of it, not claimed by any faction, no flame of rebellion in her heart. Just skulking at a corner with her hand out, hoping someone would let a coin slip between their fingers. And then the soldiers had come, down every street at once, it almost seemed. Come with batons and truncheons proclaiming a curfew, immediate effect. And she’d run, and because she’d run they’d chased. Running was like a drug to men like that. It meant you’d done something wrong and you weren’t strong enough to fight back, so they could chase you without fear of retribution. And Leskia was sixteen and hungry and stick-limbed, and they were all well-fed and hearty and strong. They caught her and they beat her, for no other reason than she was there on the street and she’d run, and the city had tried to turn against them. They were strong bullying lads who’d had a taste of resistance, so they put the boot in with a will to remind themselves how strong they were. One of those boots went into her knee, and Leskia felt the joint twist in a way that made her feel sick to the very core of her, and it was never right afterwards.

What she remembered most—apart from the pain—was how half the faces louring down at her, half the voices spitting insults and accusations, were Ilmari. Locals who’d taken up the occupiers’ writ and their uniform, because it was better to wear the boots than get kicked, and because of that they kicked twice as hard.

She limped home that night, stop and start, ducking away whenever she saw another uniform, eyes blurring with tears because every step was agony, and there were so many uniforms between her and home. And at last she saw the Indweller. Just the one, as though even they hadn’t come through that night of blood unscathed. Just a solitary robed figure on its way back to the wood. Didn’t even turn its masked face to look, when she crept into its footsteps and followed it back. And the uniforms looked at the Indweller, just the way you weren’t supposed to, and nothing bad seemed to happen to them. But those uniform boots kept their distance nonetheless and, because of that, Leskia got home.

Her father never did. She never found out what befell him on that one desperate day and night of uprising. Perhaps he found the man he was supposed to be and died under the batons of the occupiers at a barricade, waving a flag. Perhaps he finally had his throat slit over one more debt he couldn’t pay. She never knew, but she knew the man well enough that she didn’t try to mythologise his end. He was just gone and it was just her, living in the shack at the edge of the Anchorwood.

After the uprising, the Pals turned the screws on Ilmar everywhere they could. Which didn’t mean up on the hill where the rich folk lived, and didn’t mean in the corridors of the Gownhall. And only meant a little in the factories, because the Pals still needed the factories. But in the Gutter Districts things got harder, and there was less to go round. Meaning, for Leskia at very bottom of the pile, almost nothing. The Pals were fervent about clearing beggars from any street where a beggar might panhandle a coin, the price of food was higher than ever because so much was being sent off to the new war overseas, and thieves were being hung in public every few days. Then it was winter in the bargain, and firewood was at a premium despite all the good wooden doors the Pals had kicked in after the uprising. Ilmari winters were savage. Leskia was freezing. And there was the wood.

People froze to death on the streets rather than go to the Anchorwood for firewood. The Indwellers and the monsters would do such things to you, if you even dared think of such a thing. But Leskia had walked in the shadow of the Indwellers, and she’d never seen a monster, and she was cold.

The first time she just skulked through the very edge of the Grove, which was almost all of the Grove, for beyond the trees was just the land, and the mountain. The second time, three nights later, the dark within the Anchorwood was profound and hollow and she knew that it was there, the rest of the wood, all the paths and places it led to. But the cold and her earlier boldness spurred her, and she found an armful of sticks and found her way home. The third time, the Indwellers were there.

She was just straightening up with a snarl of twigs thrust all-anyhow in the crook of her arm, and there they were, five or six or eleven of them, silent, robed, still. Masks without eyes that stared right into her. She should have apologised. She should have prostrated herself. She should have fled, but she did none of that. Just stared back, frozen like the cold had got to her all at once. And they turned their grave look away from her and moved on, and she gathered enough firewood to live, and there still hadn’t been any monsters, and she swore she’d never go into the wood ever again.

When she got home with her bounty, Severne was there. Right there, in the shack with a door that had never really latched properly. Severne, and a couple of youths plainly junior to her. The Lodges had taken a battering after the uprising. Some Big Names had been killed. Severne had her own cadre of toughs now. She was Street-important, but she’d never forgotten her childhood punching bag.

“I told you she brings home the goods,” Severne told her lackeys. And, at their look, “It’s just wood. Now she’s brought it out. It’s just wood.” And then they took most of it off Leskia, for protection. In recompense for their protecting her from unspecified things, such as maybe getting her teeth knocked out for not handing over the wood. And Leskia was one, and rake thin with a knee that had never healed straight, and so they just took and what could she do, save go into the wood again?

The moon was mostly behind cloud by then. She’d been hoping that would mean no more than the little copse of trees, but the profound depths of the Anchorwood stretched away from her like the abyss of the sea. She set to fumbling in the gloom for sticks, finding her meagre bounty by touch, until her adjusting eyes made out something long, pale. A whole big branch, perhaps, bark-stripped, dry, a night’s warmth. Either that or set fire to the shack tonight and freeze tomorrow. What was there to lose?

It was a corpse. Her fingers found rough fabric, bones beneath taut skin. Cold enough that it could have been tonight’s or three days old. Exploring further she found a tangle of string, pendants, and talismans about the dead neck. Still pretending this was some foolish explorer who’d gone into the trees, like nobody ever should without the sort of protections a magician would charge you a fortune for. Until her questing fingertips found the face, the lack of face, the mask.

Whoever knew that the Indwellers died? And she had no idea of cause, being half-blind in the dark and no doctor, but the body her fingers found was as famished as her own, and perhaps it was no more than that.

The mask came away at the lightest tug, no suggestion of how it had been held on. She explored the feel of it, the unbroken curve of its face. Beneath, the dead flesh face of the Indweller just felt dead, fleshy. Stiff with cold, but eyes, nose, mouth. No more eldritch than the truncheon that had wrecked her knee.

The moon came out and Leskia saw the monster.

It was very close, slipped between the trees like a paper between books on a shelf. Like a fish, really. A fish with a mouthful of wedge-shaped teeth and huge, goggling eyes, but with an armoured lizard’s tail and lizard’s legs jutting from its sides. A jagged maw she’d fit into without it having to stretch itself. A gaze so impersonally hostile that she almost felt apologetic for taking up its time.

It took one step towards her, body flexing sinuously. Lugubrious, able to take its time. It must be a good life, to be a monster of the wood. She grabbed a fistful of the dead Indweller’s talismans and thrust them at it, snapping some of the strings. The disinterested gaze passed over her trinkets and found nothing there to prevent the creature taking another step.

She held out the mask. The moon waxed so she could see the blank, patterned curve of wood reflected in the monster’s dinnerplate eye. It snorted, a spray of white crystals like salt. Its eyes tilted, trying to focus, a myopic clerk reading her papers.

It was that easy. Faced with that relic of the dead, the monster turned and moved off, one jerky limb at a time, lizard-languorous as though it had entirely forgotten her.

She fled back with her new scatter of wood. And the mask. Somehow, when she ducked into her shack again, the mask was still in her hand.

Once the fire was laid, she lifted it towards her own face, wondering what she might see, through the places the eyeholes weren’t. Outside, in the still clear crystal of a freezing night, the world seemed to hold its breath.

She didn’t, in the end. Didn’t dare. That was Leskia, after all. Taught by life to be a coward because every chance she’d taken had bitten her. Not Severne, who’d grown up on these same streets but learned to be bold.

Next day, she was panhandling on Sterriks Street where the Pals didn’t go much, when the Indweller found her. She looked up and there it was, just that mask looking down on her. Not the mask she’d taken from the wood. Another jagged, meaningless pattern of colours, and no eyes. It planted its staff beside her knee and she flinched. The mask she’d stolen—stolen now seemed inarguably the word—was within her thin tunic. She fumbled for it, held it out. Pushed it at the creature with increasing mimed urgency, but nothing of the Indweller would accept it. And even the meagre prospects of Sterriks Street wouldn’t come near her while the Indweller stood there.

“They were already dead,” Leskia hissed at the facelessness. But that wasn’t why it was here. It was waiting. It could wait forever, and nobody would move it on or trouble it. A Pal patrol passed by, even, as the Indweller stood over her. They didn’t take her up for begging, and they didn’t intervene to save her. They took one look at the masked, robed figure and crossed to the far side of the street. Even the might of the occupiers wasn’t going to interfere with the denizens of the Wood.

She fled, at last. Limped all the way home. Sat on her floor beside the cold grate, staring at the painted wood, seeing landscapes and nightmares and teeth in its jarring designs. She went out back, to where the trees were. She threw it, hard as she could, so that it was lost in the darkness there. Knowing it might just sit and rot. Knowing she had possessed something of numinous wonder and terror, and cast it away because she was a coward, like the world had taught her to be.

When she was back at the shack, the door slanting off its hinges, the mask was in the centre of the floor, turned upwards, watching her. For the form of it, she repeated the charade twice more. Another long throw, and then actually carrying the thing into the trees and setting it down on the root-warped ground with a burlesque of reverence. Always it was back on her floor when she returned home. And by then it was night and freezing so she couldn’t feel her toes.

She destroyed the door, then. Pitifully easy to do. The shards of it gave her fire for another night, and it wasn’t as though the ragged thing had kept the cold out or the privacy in. The next night she’d do the same with the window shutters, maybe, then possibly the roof, devouring her shack piece by piece, one half-warm night at a time. Everything wooden in the place except the mask.

In the morning there was an Indweller outside. Just staring at her shack as though reminded of something. Perhaps the same one as in Sterriks Street, perhaps not, because every mask was different but you could never remember the details of them. Except the one she’d stolen, which was branded on her mind.

She shouted at it to go away. It didn’t. She demanded to know what it wanted. It waited. Then, at some point, when she’d turned to pick up her stick, it wasn’t there anymore, nor anywhere she could see, though it couldn’t possibly have gone far enough in that second of time to be out of sight.

All through that day, and the next days, the mask felt like it was burning her beneath her tunic. As though she’d find its sharp patterns branded onto the skin of her shrunken stomach. And no less shrunken in the evening, because wherever she set up with an open palm, the Pals were marching through with swinging truncheons, making sure no indigents marred the perfection of their streets. It seemed that nobody was going to panhandle a penny on the good side of the river without a boot in the teeth, and on the other side of the river there wasn’t a penny to panhandle.

She was seeing the Indwellers everywhere, by then. Probably seeing them where they weren’t, as hunger and cold gnawed at the edges of her attention. Their presence bristled against her mind like pins. On street corners, gathered in little convocations in vacant lots, passing through alleyways she knew weren’t there in the regular city. As though her Ilmar was just a skin stretched over the Indwellers’ world, that could be entered via the Wood.

The idea came to her then, and she spent the back end of the day trying to steal a knife. Except knives weren’t things anyone let a filthy beggar loiter near, so she ended up at the back door of the Anchorage, desperate, hand out, asking the hard-faced witch for the loan of one. For old time’s sake. For charity, which the tavernkeeper had none of, surely. For her father, who’d pissed away there all the time and money he might have spared for his daughter. Unlikely it was that last which moved the woman, but she passed over a knife nonetheless, and even a needle when asked. And all that night, Leskia whittled away at the last worm-eaten piece of shutter, and stitched at the rags of her clothes, and didn’t look up in case there was a faceless face at the empty frame of the window, peering in.

When she set out into the city the next day, it was as a very different Leskia. Robed, or at least all those rags had come together to make something like a robe. Her stick traded for a branch from the Wood, that was more like a staff. And over her face, the mask. Not the mask. Not the actual mask that she’d stolen from the wood and that wouldn’t leave her alone. Just a chunk of her shutter carved with ragged, jagged designs. Painted with mud and blood and white dust. Tiny slits cut into the grain, so she could see little slivers of the world through it. And she walked across the bridge and onto the wealthy side of the river, and the Pals didn’t stop her, or even seem to see her. And she sat where she liked, and the other beggars—the stronger ones who paid their dues to the Lodges—they made room for her. And when she put out her hand, it was like magic. Nobody looked at her, yet coins found their way to her palm. Ilmari, from fur-clad merchants to shop-boys with toes poking out the sprung seams of their shoes, they all sidled close. Dropped pennies into her waiting hands. Murmured prayers. The Wood had been there before the city, and the city had grown around the Wood. People remembered its infinite possibilities. In good times it was a childhood terror. In hard times, like now with the Palleseen occupation and the grip of winter, it was hope.

Leskia understood that she was receiving a bounty under false pretences, but she also understood that you could starve eating only your just deserts, so she took it. She took it for food and firewood that didn’t come from a haunted grove. For a shirt to go under her makeshift robe. For the joy of actually having money.

And when the patrols came round—the Pals, and the Ilmari who dressed like them and were twice as brutal—they kicked and cursed and moved on every other panhandler, but they left Leskia alone. If the Ilmari regarded the Indwellers with a superstitious awe, that was nothing compared to the wide berth the Pals gave them. They were the one part of the city the occupiers could neither control nor perfect.

For a brief span, most of a month, Leskia’s life became almost good. Each day she’d don her disguise and go out into the city, and people would give her money. Each night she’d eat and get a fire going. She had a new door to the shack and some felt to stretch over the empty windows. She felt as though she was living in a different city to the one she’d known and everyone else inhabited. In the darkness behind the mask was a world of calm and plenty she’d never even suspected existed. The only problem was the Indwellers themselves, because they never went away. They were on the same streets she was, and she felt their faceless regard on her, not offended, not hostile, but noticing her the way you never wanted to be noticed by the Indwellers. They were at the fringes of the wood when she stepped out of her shack. They were at her window at night—she couldn’t even see past the felt, but she knew they were there. If they could stare at her through their eyeless masks, why not her screens? Why not her walls? Why not look into her straight through the flesh on her bones? Of course they could. But there was more flesh on those bones now, and it wasn’t shuddering from cold like it had been, and she discovered, to her surprise, that she would take the creeping existential horror as the price of warmth and a full belly.

It was Severne who ruined things, of course. Severne always did. From their youngest days growing up together, Severne had been there to trip her up, to push her down, to tell her unkind truths about her father. Now it was Severne who worked out Leskia’s dodge. Came up to her, one day in the city. Stood before her, looking down at the mask, at the robe, and said her name.

Leskia looked up, startled. The best part of a month, since anyone had used her name. It sounded strange to her, as though it had become detached, cut away by that borrowed knife. Only now, in Severne’s hard tones, did it come back to her.

Severne had a couple of her people in tow, and they bundled Leskia into an alley and slapped her about, punched her in the gut. Waved the mask in her face.

“Don’t think we don’t see you,” Severne said. “Don’t think this hides you from us. Ilmar’s mystery, that you’re not fit to soil.”

Leskia tried to apologise, as she always did, mouth full of her own blood. Better to burble her sorries and let her self-respect drool red down her chin, than have them think she needed another round of fists and feet to be properly respectful.

“We’ve watched you, walking the streets, crossing the river, holding out your hand. Not like the Indwellers even beg. What a stupid idea! No wonder it was yours. But it works, doesn’t it? You think we don’t see how well you’re doing, out of this lie of yours?

Leskia understood that her due punishment had come round at last. They’d stamp on her makeshift mask. They’d stamp on her. Because she was there. Because they could. The invulnerability she’d revelled in, this last month, had finally been torn from her. By Severne. Of course, by Severne.

“I’ll pay,” she mumbled around thick lips. “Protection. To the Lodges. To you.” Of course she would. She would retain the sin, the unthinkable hubris of impersonating the numinous, and Severne would get the bounty. That was the way of the world. But better that than another beating.

Severne hoisted her up by her collar. “Oh you’ll pay,” she agreed. “Always and forever until you’re dead, Leskia. That’s how life works. But right now you’ve shown us something, as we’ve watched you.” And she pulled and tugged until Leskia’s mess of a robe was hauled off her, leaving her shivering in the new shirt, the darned leggings.

“We’ve seen you just go anywhere, in this get up of yours,” Severne said. “Nobody looks. Nobody wants to get caught staring at them from the Wood. The Pals won’t stop you. You could walk into the richest house up on the hill and nobody would stand in your way, if they thought you were one of them.” And she seized Leskia’s staff, tore it from her hand.

“I went to the Aunts,” Severne said, meaning the women who ran the Lodges, the women Severne was desperate to come to the notice of. “I told them about your dodge. They wanted you dead, at first. For pissing on Ilmar’s sacred mystery. But then we started to think. About how useful it would be, to walk anywhere in the city, and everyone just look the other way.” And she waved the mask in Leskia’s face. “But you’ve shown us they’re not so sacred after all. You’ve shown us even Ilmar’s worst beggar can thumb a nose at their mystery. All those years and we thought they were dangerous somehow, when you can just wear the mask and pretend.” Severne’s grin was like the sort of crescent knife priests used to cut throats. “So yes, you’ll pay, Leskia, every day and forever, but today you pay with this.” And she put the mask on.

The mask. The mask. And what she’d taken from Leskia was the worm-eaten piece of tat she’d carved and smeared. And what she’d waved in Leskia’s face was no more than that. But what she put over her face was the one stolen from the wood, the real one, the mask.

Severne stepped back. She stood quite still as her cohorts dressed her in the robe. The same ragged robe Leskia had stitched, the same branch of a staff Leskia had taken from the Wood. Because they weren’t important. They weren’t the mask.

And, when they’d clad her, her people stood back and waited, and Severne remained quite still. Until one of them reached out to take her arm. “Come on, Severne’, let’s—” and stopped. Drew back, as though what she’d touched, through those layers of ragged cloth, wasn’t Severne.

“Let’s,” the tough said again, but it was just a sound, not attached to any meaning.

The mask, the mask that was on Severne’s head, turned to look down the alley, taking Severne’s head with it. There were two Indwellers there. Just those shabby robed figures with the nonsensically patterned wood plates over their faces, strung with tat and trinkets, staves in their hands, waiting. Severne moved towards them, and her first step was jerky, awkward, as though the joints and leverage of it were strange to her, but the second was smooth, as though she’d learned.

“Severne…?” the other tough said, their voice trembling just a little.

Severne joined the two Indwellers and then the three Indwellers stared at them all, and Leskia realised she didn’t know which one was Severne. It could have been any of them. The masks, so individual, were simultaneously indistinguishable.

She had found a dead Indweller in the Wood, that once. So she’d thought. But she hadn’t, not really. She’d just found a body, and a mask.

One of the toughs tried it—lurched forwards, reached for his best guess at which mask hid his boss. Stopped, fingers inches from it. Understanding the sacrilege he was about to perform. And the Indweller wouldn’t have stopped him. Not batted his hand away with its staff, nor even reacted, but…terrible things. A great chasm of terrible things stretching away from them, like the wood did. An infinity of appalling consequences in that one touch. The man withdrew his fingers. Moments later he and his confederate were fleeing.

“I…” Leskia said, and the Indwellers turned to go, as though she didn’t even exist for them anymore. Which she didn’t, and surely she should be so very profoundly grateful for that forbearance, she who had stolen from them. She who had stolen one of them. She who had walked uninvited in their places and their shoes. She understood, then, that she was quits. Her debt had been repaid and forgiven. No longer would the Indwellers lurk at her window or stare at her from between the trees. She had transgressed, and she had paid her dues with Severne’s flesh, and she had been let go. It was one of those stories her father told her, about why you never went into the wood. And she was the penitent child who had learned, and never would again.

Tomorrow would be chill, but not freezing. There were yet streets of Ilmar she could beg on. She could even carve another mask and run the same scam, although perhaps it wouldn’t work, now she didn’t have the real mask close to her heart. But life, life would go on in Ilmar, even for her. If you could call it living. Or.

The three—five? seven?—Indwellers had reached the end of the alley, and who knew what direction they would walk away in. Some way that regular feet could never find, perhaps, in that dreadful, uncanny, free way of theirs. Places nobody was meant to see, places a body and a mind couldn’t endure. But then that was their world, and was it really any worse than the one Leskia knew?

Her heart in her mouth, she ran after them, falling into step at their heels, donning her false mask and waiting for the reality.

 

(Editors’ Note: “Woodmask” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 61A.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© 2024 Adrian Tchaikovsky