The Forest Without a Moon

Chapter 3

Nella rose from her crouch on stiff, protesting knees, her cloak rustling against the dead nettles. She kept low, trailing him through the lane as he drifted past the shuttered cottages, his bare feet leaving no sound on the cobblestones. By the time he reached the low stone wall encircling his family’s cottage, the first pale, tallow-colored light of morning was catching the frost on the thatch. Nella surged forward, cutting across the frozen rime of the front yard, and caught the boy by the shoulder just as his fingers closed around the cold iron latch of his back door.

The wool of his nightshirt was wet and stiff beneath her fingers, rimed with a brittle crust of ice that did not melt against her grip. When her thumb brushed his skin, the cold that radiated off him shocked her; it was not the ordinary, biting chill of winter mud, but an absolute, metallic vacancy that bit into the pulp of her fingers. Even more startling was the smell that rolled off his damp clothes—a sharp, electric reek of ozone and dry, bitter lichen, an arid, sunless scent that had no business existing in the sodden, moss-choked basin of Somber Hollow. His knuckles were raw, crusted with a fine, chalky frost that clung to the crevices of his skin like fine bone-flour.

"Finnian," Nella whispered, her voice cracking against the dead air as she dropped to her knees, grasping his thin arms to turn him toward her. "Finnian, look at me. Where have you been? Who took you past the stones?"

The boy did not flinch, nor did he pull away from her grip. His face was entirely devoid of color, his skin holding a faint, waxy translucence in the dawn twilight, and when he turned his gaze upon her, Nella felt a sharp lurch behind her ribs. His pupils were blown so wide that the muddy brown of his irises was reduced to a hairline ring, absorbing the gray morning light without reflection. He looked through her cheekbones, his focus drifting somewhere beyond the ridge of her shoulder, as though she were nothing more than a pane of dirty glass standing between him and the warmth of his bed. For several agonizing seconds, his chest did not rise or fall, until a shuddering gasp broke from his lips, his small shoulders caving inward as if air were an unwelcome intrusion into his lungs.

"Finnian," she pressed, her fingers tightening around his icy sleeves, desperate to anchor his wandering stare. "Tell me what happened out there. I saw you walk into the grove. Who was waiting for you?"

A sluggish flicker passed behind his dilated eyes, the pupil contracting by a fraction as his brow pinched in vague, sleepy confusion. His lips, chapped and dusted with that strange, powdery white frost, parted with a faint, sticking sound. He looked down at her hands on his arms, then back up to her face, his voice drifting out in a dry, threadbare rasp that sounded far too small for the heavy silence of the lane. "They're so cold, Nella," he murmured, his breath carrying no mist into the freezing air, only that sharp, copper-and-ozone tang. "The playmates. They get so cold when the bell stops ringing." Before she could demand an answer, before she could ask who had given him leave to wander into the dark, Finnian slipped his arm from her grasp with a smooth, uncanny fluidity, depressed the latch, and stepped over the threshold. The heavy oak door swung shut with a muffled thud, the bolt dropping into place from within with an iron finality that left Nella kneeling alone in the frost.

She remained on the frozen mud for a long time, her own pulse knocking against the hollow space beneath her sternum with an irregular, leaden beat. The valley was beginning to stir, but it was a grotesque, mechanical waking. In the distance, the bell tower of the central square cleared its iron throat, tolling six heavy, mundane strokes that echoed against the sheer granite cliffs encircling Somber Hollow. As the final chime dissolved into the gray canopy of weeping ash, the village began to pretend it was alive. Chimneys started to belch pale trails of birch smoke, shutters rattled open on rusty hinges, and the dull clatter of buckets sounded from the communal well. The missing hour, the impossible thirteenth chime that had vibrated through the marrow of her jawbone, had vanished from the world, leaving behind only the cold grease of collective silence.

Nella stood, dusting the brittle rime from the knees of her skirts, her limbs aching with a deep, persistent hollow that no movement could shake. She needed the comfort of familiar things, needed to test the fabric of the village's reality against the sharp edges of what she had witnessed in the dark. She turned down the lane toward the square, heading toward the warm, buttery glow spilling from the casements of Delilah Ross’s bakery. If anyone could provide an anchor, if anyone could look her in the eye and dispel the mounting terror that was coiling in her gut, it had to be Delilah—the woman who had wiped the sweat from her brow when she had woken from her forgotten childhood fever, the only mother Nella’s memory had ever known.

The bell above the bakery door gave a cheerful, brassy jingle as Nella pushed inside, but the sound failed to cut through the heavy, cloying fog that hung within the shop. The air was thick with the scent of warm rye crusts, caramelized honey, and melting suet, yet layered beneath that domestic sweetness was another, darker aroma—a sticky, narcotic fragrance that caught in the back of Nella’s throat like burned sugar and bitter almond. It was the unmistakable smell of ghost-poppy sap, thick and heavy enough to coat the tongue.

Delilah was standing behind the broad flour-dusted counter, using a wooden paddle to shift golden loaves from a wicker cooling tray onto the pine shelves. When she looked up, her smile was wide, bright, and utterly vacant, stretching across her plump, weathered face like a strip of linen pulled too taut over an embroidery hoop. Her eyes were glassy, swimming behind a sheen of unspilled tears that had nothing to do with sorrow and everything to do with the heavy, purple-tinged draught steaming in an earthen mug beside her flour bin.

"Nella, sweetling," Delilah said, her voice smooth, lilting, and coated in a syrup of absolute calm that sent a cold prickle down Nella’s spine. "You’re out before the soot has cleared the chimney. Rowan Lancaster was by the lane just a half-hour ago, looking for you. Said he left your cottage before midnight and worried you’d take a chill from the draft in your eaves. Such a good, sturdy boy. A girl could do far worse for winter timber."

Nella did not answer right away. She walked to the counter, her gaze dropping to the scrubbed pine floorboards that divided the shop’s entryway from the display case. There, imprinted clearly in the damp tracking of morning mist, were three distinct footprints. They were small, bare, and pressed into the wood with unnatural sharpness, the edges of each toe bordered by a faint, chalky dust that smelled of frozen stone and dead lichen. They led directly toward the flour bin, then pivoted toward the back pantry, fading into nothingness as if the feet that made them had dissolved into the boards.

"Delilah," Nella said, keeping her voice low, her finger pointing directly down at the wet markings between them. "Who was in here before the sixth bell? Whose child tracked the boundary frost onto your floor?"

Delilah lifted another loaf with the wooden paddle, her movement graceful, practiced, and fluid. As she carried the bread across the counter, her eyes remained fixed squarely on the high shelf, entirely bypassing the floor. When she reached the wet, chalky impressions, she did not look down; she simply lengthened her stride by an inch, stepping cleanly over the footprints with an effortless, blind precision that looked almost like a rehearsed dance step.

"The roof-rime always weeps when the oven comes up to heat, Nella," Delilah murmured, setting the loaf in place with a gentle tap. Her smile never wavered, remained etched into her skin with terrifying permanence, though the skin around her mouth twitched with a tiny, involuntary tremor. "The eaves sweat when the cold turns hard. You worry too much over damp wood, child. It’s bad for the humors. You have that look your father had before the winter took him—looking into dark corners where the broom hasn't reached yet."

"This isn't roof-rime," Nella said, her hand reaching out to clasp Delilah’s forearm, desperate to pierce the narcotic glaze that shielded the older woman’s eyes. Through the coarse wool of Delilah’s sleeve, Nella felt the woman's pulse—steady, slow, and horribly tranquilized, beating with the sluggish cadence of water moving through frozen reeds. "Delilah, look at it. Finnian Hart was barefoot in the street last night. He was out past the thirteenth chime, out beyond the boundary stones. His hands were covered in this same white dust. You step over it because you don't want to see it, but it’s here. It’s on your boards."

For a fraction of a heartbeat, the baker’s smile cracked. A spasm of pure, animal dread flickered behind her clouded irises, her pupils expanding and contracting in a violent, jagged dance as if her mind were frantically trying to focus on an image that her instincts forbade her from seeing. Her breath hitched, catching in her throat with a small, strangled squeak, and for one brief moment, Nella thought the veil had torn—thought the woman would drop the paddle, seize her hands, and weep for the horror that was walking their children into the woods.

Then, Delilah’s hand reached out for the earthen mug on the counter. She lifted the vessel with steady, mechanical slowness, bringing the dark, purple-tinged liquid to her lips. She took a long, deep swallow, her throat working rhythmically against the swallow, the bitter almond steam rising into her nostrils. When she lowered the mug, the terror was gone, washed away like charcoal dust beneath a bucket of lye. Her eyes smoothed over once more, settling into that pleasant, glazed indifference that Nella had seen in every adult in Somber Hollow since the moment she could remember.