The Forest Without a Moon

Chapter 4

"Finnian is a sweet lad," Delilah said pleasantly, her voice entirely leveled, smooth as pond ice. "His mother brought him in yesterday for a twist of honey bread. A healthy, growing boy, though a bit pale around the ears. You should let Delia worry about her own boy, Nella. You spend too much time sewing by dead rushlight. Rowan was saying your cheeks were pale as winter tallow last night. A girl needs tallow on her bones, not smoke in her head. Take a loaf home. Rowan will be back by noon to check your woodpile."

Nella pulled her hand back from Delilah’s arm as though the wool had burned her. The cloying sweetness of the bakery, mingled with the oily reek of the poppy tea, suddenly felt thick enough to suffocate her. The denial was not a wall; it was a bog, deep and bottomless, and the harder she pressed against it, the more effortlessly it absorbed her panic without offering a single solid surface to strike. Without taking the bread, without uttering another word, Nella turned on her heel and shoved her way out into the cold morning air, the little brass bell mocking her retreat with its hollow, cheerful chime.

She could not return to her cottage, could not bear the thought of Rowan Lancaster arriving with an armload of birch logs and that earnest, heavy-lidded affection that belonged to a world where children slept peacefully in their beds. Instead, she took the narrow goat track that wound upward along the northern rim of the hollow, climbing toward the high granite scree where the weeping ash canopy met the sheer cliff face. Under the pretense of gathering wild mountain sage for her stitchery bundles, she climbed until the chimney smoke of Somber Hollow became a pale, dirty smudge below her boots, trapped beneath the ceiling of gray branches that never permitted the sky to show its blue.

Near the boundary hedge—a tangled, briar-choked barrier of hawthorn and petrified root that the village elders had marked with carved ward-stones generations ago—sat a hovel constructed of woven hemlock boughs and slates pried from the shale slides. This was the dwelling of Ophelia Beaumont, the only soul in Somber Hollow who did not buy flour from Delilah Ross, who did not attend the bell tollings in the square, and whose threshold bore no marks of the apothecary’s purifying lime.

As Nella approached the lean-to, the sharp, pungent smell of burning hemlock needles stung her nose, cutting through the damp mountain chill. Ophelia was kneeling in the brambles, her back bent like an archer’s bow, violently plucking bitter roots from the frozen scree. Her gray hair hung in greasy, tangled hanks around a face that was scored with deep, furious crevices, her skin gray and papery as dried wasps’ nests. Unlike Delilah, unlike Rowan, unlike every other person who walked the neat lanes below, Ophelia’s body was in constant, agonizing motion. Her fingers twitched with continuous, rhythmic tremors—the violent, unending shakes of a woman whose blood had rejected the ghost-poppy tincture decades ago, leaving her nerves raw, screaming, and awake to the world’s rot.

Nella stopped several paces back, her breath hanging in a thin, hesitant plume. "Mistress Beaumont," she called softly, keeping her hands visible.

The old woman did not startle; she had clearly heard Nella’s boots on the shale long before she arrived. She slowly rocked back on her heels, turning her bloodshot, razor-sharp gaze upon Nella. There was no glaze in Ophelia’s eyes, no pleasant, chemically induced tranquility. Her gaze was terrifying in its absolute clarity, burning with an exhausted, feverish hostility that made Nella feel stripped to the bone.

"The seamstress," Ophelia spat, her voice like two slate shingles grinding together in a landslide. Her tremors caused the hemlock twigs in her lap to rattle continuously. "The little needle-worker from the boundary lane. Did Sebastian Whitlock send you up the scree to see if the old madwoman has finally frozen in her dung? Tell him my bile is still too sour to burn, girl. Tell him the poppy doesn't grow in the dirt that will bury him."

"Nobody sent me," Nella said, stepping closer, braving the stench of smoke and bitter herbs that clung to the recluse. "I came because I saw Finnian Hart walk past the boundary stones last night. I saw him cross into the weeping ash grove after the thirteenth bell, and this morning he came back smelling of ozone and dead lichen. Nobody in the village will look at his tracks. Delilah steps over them as if they don't exist. Rowan falls into a dead stupor the moment the iron strikes twelve. Why won't anyone see it, Ophelia? What happens to the children when the bell turns silent?"

At the mention of the thirteenth bell, Ophelia’s tremors ceased for a single, shocking second, frozen by a sudden, rigid terror that turned her jaw to iron. She stared at Nella, her bloodshot eyes widening until the yellowed whites showed all around, searching Nella’s face not with anger, but with an intense, horrifying pity that made Nella’s stomach drop.

With a suddenness that defied her twisted spine, Ophelia lunged forward, her bird-like hand shooting out from her tattered wool rags to seize Nella’s wrist. The old woman’s grip was surprisingly vicious, her fingers like dry, knotty vine digging into the tendons of Nella’s forearm. She pulled Nella down until their faces were inches apart, her breath carrying the bitter, acrid tang of wild hemlock and bile.

"You look for tracks in the snow, little echo," Ophelia hissed, her voice dropping into a harsh, vibrating whisper that seemed to rattle the dead leaves around them. "You look for muddy prints and you ask why the mothers drink their bitter tea. You think you’re so brave, staying awake while the village sleeps. But you don't even check to see if your own feet leave a shadow on the wall, do you?"

Nella tried to pull back, but the old woman’s grip was unyielding, her fingernails biting deep into Nella’s flesh. "Let go of me," Nella gasped, her heart hammering against that hollow ache in her breast. "I’m asking what lies past the rocks! The children are dying on their feet—Brielle Foster can barely draw breath, and Finnian’s hands are white as bone! What is in the grove?"

"The grove is a door that was never meant to stay open, girl," Ophelia snarled, her face twitching as the tremors seized her cheeks once more, pulling her mouth into a grotesque sneer. "And you want to go prying at the latch with your little sewing shears? A mirror cannot bleed, girl, and an echo cannot grow old. Remember that before you follow the little ones into the bleached dark. Leave the sleeping bells alone, or the floorboards will give way beneath us all, and you’ll find out what you’re made of when the draft blows through you!"

"What does that mean?" Nella demanded, her voice rising in panic against the oppressive silence of the cliff. "What am I made of?"

Ophelia released her grip with a violent shove, sending Nella stumbling backward onto the sharp slate fragments of the path. The old woman did not look at her again; she hunched back over her pile of bitter roots, her tremors shaking her shoulders so hard that the hem of her skirts rustled against the frozen ground like dry corn husks. "Go back to your cottage, echo," Ophelia muttered into the dirt, her voice fading into a rhythmic, monotonous chant. "Stitch your coats. Warm your cold fingers by Rowan’s fire while you still have a hearth to sit by. You can’t sew a thread through water, and you can’t wake the dead with a bell."

No matter how loudly Nella questioned her, no matter how desperately she pleaded for plain words, the old woman refused to speak another syllable, humming a jagged, tune-less drone that rose and fell with the rhythmic twitching of her hands. Defeated, trembling from the cold and the suffocating weight of Ophelia’s riddles, Nella turned and fled down the mountain track, the scree clattering down the slope behind her boots like skeletal knuckles.

By the time she reached her own cottage at the edge of the lower lane, the afternoon light was already beginning to wane, dying into that dull, pewter gloom that preceded curfew in Somber Hollow. She slipped inside, threw the heavy iron bolt into place, and dropped the thick burlap curtains over the small glass casements, shutting out the village, the creeping ash trees, and the leaden silence of the street.

The hearth had burned down to gray ash, leaving the room frigid and smelling faintly of Rowan’s damp woolen coat from the night before. Nella did not light a rush or rekindle the fir logs. She walked with slow, heavy steps across the floorboards to the washstand in the corner of her bedchamber, where a small, oval mirror of beaten brass hung from a rusted nail.

She poured cold water from the clay pitcher into the pewter basin, the splash sounding unnaturally loud in the confined space of the room. She dipped her fingers into the water, washing the soot and the clinging chalk dust from her hands, then lifted her gaze to the brass plate before her.

The reflection looking back at her was distorted by the beaten metal, but its outlines were painfully clear. She saw her dark hair, plaited tightly against her head, her pale skin stretched taut across sharp, prominent cheekbones, and her wide, dark eyes staring out from dark rings of sleepless exhaustion. It was a face she had looked at every morning for twelve years, yet as she stared into the dull brass, Ophelia’s words rang in the empty chamber of her mind with terrifying resonance.

An echo cannot grow old.

Nella pressed her palm flat against her sternum, right over the chronic, drafty hollow that had tormented her for as long as she could remember. She tried to reach backward into the dark of her own mind, tried to force her thoughts past the barrier that had always felt like a natural edge to her life. She tried to remember Delilah Ross holding her as an infant, tried to remember the mother and father who had supposedly perished in the mountain fever that had swept the valley when she was small.