The Forest Without a Moon

Chapter 5

There was nothing.

She pushed harder, squeezing her eyes shut, clawing at the void behind her temples. She tried to summon the sound of her mother’s voice, the shape of the cottage where she was born, the feeling of losing her first tooth, the smell of her childhood blankets. She tried to reach back to six years old, to five, to four. The void was absolute. Her memory did not fade gradually into the soft blur of early youth; it terminated abruptly, cut off as cleanly and decisively as a thread sheared with tailor’s iron.

Her life did not begin with childhood; it began twelve years ago, on an autumn morning, lying fully grown in a narrow bed in the back of Delilah Ross’s bakery. She remembered the smell of pine smoke and burned rye, remembered looking down at her hands—hands that were already long, calloused, and capable—and finding an iron needle already threaded with black wool resting between her fingers. Delilah had been sitting beside the bed, weeping with that same glassy, tranquil smile, stroking Nella’s hair and telling her that the fever had broken, that she was safe now, that the past didn't matter because the village took care of its own.

Nella opened her eyes and stared back into the brass mirror, a creeping horror seizing her throat. She had accepted that explanation for over a decade because the alternative was too monstrous to contemplate. She had believed she was an orphan of the fever because everyone in Somber Hollow nodded pleasantly when she said it, because Sebastian Whitlock handed her soothing tinctures when the draft in her chest kept her awake, because Rowan Lancaster looked at her with simple, uncomplicated desire that anchored her to the solid, unyielding earth.

Slowly, with fingers that felt thick and clumsy as horn, Nella brought her hand to the side of her throat, pressing her fingertips against the soft hollow beneath her jawbone to find the pulse that marked her as a living woman.

For several agonizing seconds, she felt nothing at all—only the cold, smooth texture of her own skin against her fingertips. She pressed harder, digging into the flesh until it bruised, waiting in breathless panic. Finally, beneath the pressure, a rhythm answered. But it was not the swift, fluttering warmth of Finnian’s terrified chest, nor the heavy, furnace-like thrum she had felt in Rowan’s wrist. It was a slow, dragging sensation, a heavy, mechanical knock that occurred once, paused for an impossible stretch of silence, and then knocked again, like a waterwheel grinding against thick ice in a frozen millpond.

She was cold. She was always cold.

Nella dropped her hands to the edge of the washstand, gripping the wet wood so tightly that her knuckles turned white. Ophelia was right; the village was sleeping beneath a heavy blanket of poppy syrup, drinking away their terrors while their children walked barefoot into the teeth of the mountain night. But she was not asleep. She had never been asleep. The draft beneath her ribs was not an illness; it was an open door, a missing piece of a pattern that had been hidden beneath generations of silence and deliberate forgetting.

Tonight, she would not hide in the brambles. Tonight, when the twelfth bell died and the impossible shockwave of the thirteenth struck her teeth, she would not lose Finnian Hart at the edge of the trees. She would take her shears, she would take her cloak, and she would follow the column of white smocks past the boundary stones, past the petrified boughs, and into whatever cold, silent kingdom was waiting to drink their light.

The cold crept up through the pine floorboards, seeping into the soles of Nella’s thick knitted stockings until her toes felt as blunt and unfeeling as river stones. She sat in the darkest corner of her cottage, wedged between the cold iron stove and the heavy worktable, wrapped in her boiled-wool cloak with the hood pulled low over her brow. On the timber bench beside her lay an unlit tallow dip, its wick dry and trimmed, and a bowl of turnip broth she had allowed to congeal into a greasy, gray paste. When Delilah had dropped by at dusk with a covered basket and the broth jug, murmuring about keeping Nella’s strength up through the frost, Nella had smelled the telltale undercurrent of toasted almonds and copper drifting off the steam. She had tipped every drop of the broth into the ash pit behind the stove the moment Delilah’s footsteps faded into the street. Now, her stomach gnawed at itself with a clean, sharp hunger, but her mind remained clear, free from the heavy, sweet fog that had already claimed the rest of the village.

Yet an unnatural heaviness still sought to pull her under as the dead of night deepened. It was not the ordinary weariness that followed a long day of cutting patterns and drawing hemp thread through stiff hide; it was a rhythmic, ambient pressure that seemed to settle directly out of the roofbeams, thickening the air until drawing breath felt like inhaling wet wool. Her eyelids grew leaden, dragging downward against her will, and the draft behind her sternum began to whistle with an icy intensity that made her teeth ache. Her hands, resting in her lap, were turning the dead, chalky white of tallow candles, the blood refusing to warm them no matter how tightly she clenched her fists. To keep the encroaching gray stupor at bay, Nella reached into her apron pocket and drew out her iron bodkin. She turned the long, tapered needle in her fingers, feeling the cruel bite of its square-ground point, and pressed the steel deep into the soft heel of her left palm.

She did not flinch, because the anticipated flare of pain did not come. Instead, there was only a dull, remote thud deep within the meat of her hand, like a nail driven into dry cork. When she pulled the needle free, a single droplet of dark, sluggish fluid welled up in the puncture, clinging to her skin without spreading or running down her wrist. She stared at it in the gloom, watching the thick, syrup-like bead catch the faint gray light filtering through the small front casement. It took an agonizingly long three seconds before a faint, phantom prickle registered in her nerves, so faint it hardly matched the depth of the wound. She pressed her thumb hard against the puncture, forcing the slow sensation of pressure to anchor her wandering focus. Outside, the village bell tower began its measured, metallic groan.

The iron clapper struck twelve times. Nella counted each blow, feeling the reverberations rattle the crockery on her dresser and shudder through the pine timbers under her boots. Each chime was heavy, mourning, and definitive, marking the curfew that every soul in Somber Hollow obeyed without question. As the twelfth chime slowly dissolved into the frozen air, an uncanny, absolute silence descended over the valley. It was not merely the absence of sound, but an active, suffocating hush that seemed to freeze the draft slipping beneath the doorjamb. Nella held her breath, her fingers tightening around the cold haft of the shears tucked beneath her waistband.

Then came the shockwave.

There was no sound to precede it, no iron bell swinging in the high louvers of the watchtower, but the thirteenth chime hit Nella with the physical violence of a falling timber. The vibration struck through the soles of her feet, leaped up the marrow of her shins, and detonated inside her jawbone, setting her molars humming like struck iron tuning forks. The hollow ache behind her ribs flared with a sudden, freezing expansion, as if an icy hand had reached inside her bodice and clenched the empty space where her heart should have beat. The glass of the small casement shivered violently in its lead caming, sending a shower of fine, powdery frost drifting down onto the sill. Nella squeezed her eyes shut against the dizzying vertigo that threatened to drop her to her knees, clutching the edge of the worktable until the violent hum in her skull settled into a steady, vibrating pitch.

She pushed herself upright on trembling legs and crossed the dark room, lifting the edge of the coarse burlap curtain with two numb fingers. The street outside was bathed in the dim, sunless twilight that always hung beneath the dense canopy of the weeping ash trees, the snow-dusted mud gray and dead in the gloom. Across the lane, the latch of the Hart cottage lifted with a dry, mechanical click.

Finnian stepped out onto the frozen ground.

He wore only his coarse linen nightshirt, his bare feet sinking into the crust of frost without the slightest hesitation. Nella watched his pale, slight silhouette through the glass, her throat constricting as she noted his uncanny carriage. There was no grogginess in his posture, no shivering against the bitter draft that swirled down from the sheer cliff walls. His arms hung loose at his sides, his head tilted slightly toward the western cliffs, and his strides were long, even, and unnervingly purposeful. Before Nella could move to unbolt her own door, another latch clattered farther down the lane.

From the gate of the cooperage slipped Brielle Foster. The six-year-old child was clad in the same mud-stained smock she had worn the night before, her tangled yellow hair falling in loose hanks over her shoulders. She did not stumble on the uneven cobbles; she stepped into the street with a light, rhythmic bounce, falling into step precisely ten paces behind Finnian. From the cross-alleys and the dark shadows beneath the thatched eaves, more figures emerged. Nella pressed her brow against the cold pane, counting them in mounting horror. There were twelve, then sixteen, then nearly twenty children, every soul in Somber Hollow under the age of thirteen slipping out of their dark homes like water draining from a punctured tub. They did not speak, they did not look at one another, and not a single whisper or whimper broke the frozen stillness. Their movements were perfectly synchronized, their footsteps falling in an eerie, unified cadence that seemed to match the silent, humming frequency vibrating in Nella’s teeth.