Chapter One: With the Gathering Blight ONEWITH THE GATHERING BLIGHT How foolish we have been, to claim we comprehend the breadth of this great labyrinth. Only those who have seen the darkest heart of the Weird Wood know the truth--that we have not even begun to glimpse it! -- Into the Weird Wood , Captain Thomis Threshwell THE BABIES RIPENED on the nurse-vine until their pods split and their first squalls pierced the night. The volunteers came, gathering the children they would raise. They wrapped them in silkleaf blankets and carried them through the trees to their new homes, built into the valley wall. All were claimed except one. By now, rain tapped upon the leaves and stirred up the smell of warm clay. Firebugs, with their little smoldering bellies, wove patterns in the dusk. The last baby didn't cry. He lay silently in his sticky, broken pod, gummy mouth opening and closing, a brightness to his eyes that suggested an unnaturally keen regard for a world that should make no sense to him. Bird Song knelt. "We must have miscounted," she said. Spring Run, who held a flaming torch and seemed agitated, said, "We didn't." "And yet," said Bird Song, as she drew the newborn against her tunic, "it would seem we did." "I know how many were on the vine," said Spring Run. The flame she held quivered as the rain hurried and the wind picked up. "We had parents arranged." "Then how do you explain him?" said Bird Song. Spring Run shook her head, chewed on her lip. The baby still made no sound. Perhaps he had not the strings in his throat to make music. Either way, he was the most silent thing in the rustling, sighing vastness. When Bird Song offered a stubby finger, the baby gripped it. There was a snatch in that moment--a snatching sound in Bird Song's throat, of the like Spring Run had never heard her make, and a snatching of the heart. "He will be mine," breathed Bird Song. "That cannot be," Spring Run said. "How can that be? You have never claimed a child, in hundreds of years. You told me of the risk...." But Bird Song was lost in the baby's peculiar eyes, the grip of his hand, the moving but soundless mouth. The baby went home with Bird Song and became hers. The child never made a sound, not a cry nor laugh. When he walked, the leaves and needles seemed not to crackle. Other children refused to play with him. He frightened them, and anyway, he found no joy or intrigue in their games. Bullies tried to shake loose some semblance of life, whether an angry cry or a sob--but he gave them nothing. From the beginning there was a nub of anger deep within him, though he had no name for it yet. Only the wilderness soothed him. He walked through ravines and felt the lush moss between his toes. He pressed his ear to the trunks of trees. He laced vines around his hands, and smelled and tasted stalks and stems, and raked his fingers through the soil. Gradually he brought the vast wilderness to order within his mind, fixing the distinctions between different plants and flowers and trees. He knew demon-lace from grimcreepers, bugwort from fool's root, tricksy, poisonous kingwitch from smiling, deadly grinlock. The boy was more wild than the wild itself, covered in dirt, long hair matted with mulch, hands stained green or black or red from climbing, scampering, examining. Bird Song scolded him, kept him busy with chores and studies. Though she loved him, she rarely showed it. He felt the way she held it back, her fear of loving him wholly. It was something he couldn't understand. He spent his time out in the shadowy, fragrant hollows of the woods, where few ever trod. Only there did the world make sense, and only there did the anger within him wane. The boy was strange but tolerable to the village, until he began to root. Though it was the natural course of their lives to root and eventually rejoin the wilderness, no child of eight summers old had ever done so. It started with white strands forming beneath the skin of his shoulders, streaking down his arms like pale veins. Crying Drake, the village healer, examined him with thinned lips and stern mutters. When he took Bird Song aside to deliver the news, the boy heard every word. "No question at all," whispered Crying Drake. "Soon they will break through the skin." "You're wrong," said Bird Song, massaging her jaw. "Must be." "Afraid not," replied the healer. Crying Drake was correct. Over the following year, the boy's arms broke out into strands of roots, the skin replaced by plaits of coiling, hairlike roots that spiraled from his shoulders to the tips of his fingers. Roots replaced his hair. Most troubling of all was the fate of the child's mouth. Before he was ten summers old, roots--like those of a great oak tree, only tiny--grew between his lips, fastening his mouth shut forever. By now there were murmurings throughout the village. A boy rooting so young was seen as a dreadful omen. The boy was no longer bullied or scolded--now only avoided. Some broached the subject with Bird Song, saying he was a danger to them all. They called him jjul-ga-- demon-grown. Despite all protestations, Bird Song was unmoved. The boy was just a boy. There was no surer way of making a monster, she told them, than convincing somebody they were one. The wilderness was his only comfort. He breathed in the wetness of the earth and the bark after rain, and caressed mildew and clay, and studied toadstools and moths and bramble. He knew the birds by their songs--not only their breed but their souls, whether they were joyous or sorrowful. He crawled into the Snake's Tongue and let the river clatter over his feet and hands, and he heard ancient things, secrets and memories and magic hoarded by the water. Sometimes Bird Song accompanied him, studying him. He would kneel and place his hands upon the soil, and the roots coating his fingers would worm into the earth and meet with the buried roots of shrubs or trees. Bird Song watched his eyes swim as he communed with the flora--as he compelled flowers to bloom or trees to blossom, right before her eyes. Bird Song said, "You have a rare affinity with the wild. How will you use it?" The boy couldn't speak, but all Bird Song's questions were rhetorical anyway. "There is something coiled at the center of all things," she said. "Even you. How it is fed will determine its uncoiling. If it is fed on goodness, it will flourish into something beautiful. Like a rose. A rose eats of the sweet earth, drinks of the cool rainwater. But the coiled thing can feed on darker substances and become something else. It has no inherent nature, do you see? There is, in all things, a second path--one toward poison, and evil, and ruin." The child, looking down upon a series of foaming, copper-colored waterfalls, said nothing. What did this mean for him? The thing coiled at his center was only a hot, sleepless rage. "Have you chosen a name yet?" asked Bird Song. Sweat lay upon her brow. She held a hatchet in one hand, in the other a half-eaten mothfruit. The boy shook his head. "See that you do," she said. "A thing is chaotic until it is named. Chaos endangers us all." Two summers later the boy fell into a terrible fever. He was cold and yet he burned, and he was miserable and afraid, and he craved desperately the care of Bird Song. But Bird Song was forever distracted by more important duties. Instead he was nursed by Spring Run. She cooled his brow and applied clawed-mint ointment to his bony chest and tried to feed him. The boy was already so thin--he could eat little but broth through the roots--and grew thinner now. His dreams were strange and terrible. He dreamed beneath the soil, of unspeakable monsters writhing for freedom. Devils hatched from eggs of shadow and stalked forward to claim him. He dreamed of pearl-eyed raptors perched above him. Sometimes he woke, terrified, bewildered. All the while, his body seethed and roiled like the waters of a hot spring. Questions tormented him. Where was Bird Song? Was everything else more important than him? Did she secretly fear and loathe him as the rest of the village did? Was he jjul-ga after all? Or was it some other flaw he was yet to understand? When the fever passed, the boy ran away. He left with no provisions. The wilderness would provide everything. The first night, a storm rose from the Giant's Cleft. A hot, dark swell of cloud. It ruptured into violent rain that half blinded the boy and drove him into a cavern for shelter. The forest floor bubbled, and trees bent beneath the torrent, and soon water poured down the hills, lit by the flash of lightning. The boy knew he was in trouble. Water began to fill the cavern. He left, battered by rain, hunting for high ground. Then the earth came unseamed and mud began to slide, pouring in a ruinous murk, dooming the boy. Soon his legs were lost to the sticky depths. It rose to his waist, mud plugging his eyes, everything a swirl of debris and darkness. He grasped a tree stump, but it was hopeless. He let go. The flood dragged his legs and filled his nose and mouth and snuffed out all light. Only then did a pair of hands hook beneath his shoulders. There was Bird Song above him, bordered by lashing rain and the cut of lightning in the sky. She had her teeth clamped around the haft of her hatchet, boots wedged behind the roots of an unbent bonewood tree. With all her might, she dragged the boy from the torrent. She helped him clear the mud from his sinuses and his eyes. When there was nothing left there but tears, she held his face and told him that she loved him, that he must never leave again--that he had her heart and always would. They waited out the storm, then went home together. Little changed in their relationship despite this betrayal of affection. Bird Song remained busy, and distant, and wary of him. Soon after, she claimed another baby from the nurse-vine, when the parent who'd volunteered fell foul of demon-lace. Now what scraps of love Bird Song had to offer were divided between the boy and a new baby girl. But the baby became the only bright spot in his strange and shadowy childhood. Her toothless, small-eyed smile, her squeaks of laughter, the way she'd try to put any small object into her mouth, drew from the boy an ache that he had no name for. He watched over her, tried to make her laugh, made her toys as she grew a little older--including a ragwitch, a floppy doll resembling the poppets of the dollcasters, made from root, branch, leaf, and clay. The girl, who called herself Morning Song when she was five summers old, adored the ragwitch. And the boy, still nameless, adored her. Except for the wilderness, she was the only thing that had ever softened his heart. However, Morning Song was forever unwell. Crying Drake diagnosed it as weary-fever. "She was born with it," the doctor said, "and she will die with it. It cannot be cured, only managed." Bird Song received this in typical muted fashion. If the boy could have screamed, then he would have. How could she do nothing? There was formidable magic in the Weird Wood, and he refused to believe there was no cure. So the boy hunted the deep for the rarest of herbs and plants and seeds. He scoured ancient runescrit texts in search of forgotten remedies. Morning Song grew older, happy but unwell, often unable to leave her bed. She clutched her ragwitch wherever she went, and while she slept. The boy was often close by, watching over her, hurting at his core. Morning Song had made him a necklace, a frayed string loaded with shells and quartz and smooth pebbles, that he never removed. He clutched it often, drawing strength from it. Everywhere he searched for a means to cure her: in books and in the wild, where he listened to the deep, broken voices of old trees, or the trickling whispers traveling the streams, or in the darkness where stranger, older things muttered--sometimes in tongues he couldn't comprehend. All the while, Morning Song clung to life. And the boy's heart, amid the tireless anger he felt toward almost everything else, clung to her. Time passed. The boy, nearly a man, grew darker and angrier and stranger. Finding a cure for Morning Song remained his only focus. Finally he met a voice that offered wisdom. In a tangle of black passageways, beneath the ruins of a castle, flowed a stream. With his hands in that stream, the boy heard a voice. "Her sickness is a punishment," it said. A punishment? For what? Morning Song had done nothing wrong. She was only a child. "Not her," said the voice, a drawn-out, faint, trickling sound, barely distinguishable from the stream. "For what is being done to the wilderness. Go see for yourself. Beyond the fathomstones." Out he went beyond the fathomstones. What he discovered near the stony, smoky streets of the dollcasters filled him with hot, intense rage. Loggers hacked at ancient trees and sent them crashing to the forest floor--the boy heard them die with mournful moans, bleeding sap. Loops of bracken, loaded with succulent berries, were burned to black scrub. Poisons were poured into rivers, choking the gills of ancient fish. Tears clustered in his eyes, blinding. They carved and maimed and murdered, these others . How could Bird Song allow this? And was this really the root of Morning Song's sickness? Though he had no reason to trust the voice in the stream, why would it lie? And he--more than most others--knew how the wild was deeply interconnected, exchanging minerals and wisdom and love. If one part suffered, so did the rest. Furious, he showed Bird Song what the dollcasters were doing. "I will deal with it," she said sternly. But nothing changed, despite Bird Song's promise. He made new ragwitches then, drawing upon his encyclopedic knowledge of the Weird Wood. He twisted fool's root into heads and torsos and limbs, infused them with grinlock, used shards of bone from the lost dead that he pulled from the soil. He nailed the flopping, sinister dolls to trees, or dangled them from branches. From their dark souls a blight spread--trees withered into husks, sprouted thorns, dripped toxins. And when the boy pulled upon strings in his mind, the ragwitches burst into monsters of bone and branch and clay. Terrible, malformed, rageful creatures that showed the dollcasters the wilderness could bite back. By his seventeenth summer, the boy was still nameless. The roots covering his arms had grown thorns. Nobody dared talk to him. Anger rose from his skin, like heat from a white-hot coal. Rumors spread of his ragwitches, strung around the forest beyond the fathomstones. Often he heard the voice that had told him the reason for Morning Song's sickness. It tormented him, telling him that more needed doing, that time was running out. A visitor came from the city, a mushroom-nosed inspector in a dark blue tunic. Flanking him were two tall men with sackcloth hoods covering their faces, wearing capes. Their poppets were cast as gray tigers. They convened with Bird Song in her house. The boy listened from outside. "... getting out of hand," said the inspector. "Eight loggers were attacked last week. These dolls became monsters. A factory supervisor was found drowned in an oil spill. You must find who is responsible!" "The Weird Wood is a dangerous place," said Bird Song. "Not least to those who treat it unkindly." "So you admit, then, that there is some malignant actor at work?" "There is more at work here than I will ever know," replied Bird Song. "You command the Root Folk," said the inspector. "Nothing of the sort," said Bird Song. "I am looked to for guidance, nothing more. And if any should come to me with ideas of making these dolls , as you say, I would guide them toward a different path. You have made your point, Inspector. I'll look into it. Do you have enough food for your return journey? Good. See they make it safely, Spring Run." When they were gone, Bird Song found the boy sitting cross-legged at the foot of a serpent tree. She crouched. "Have you been crossing the fathomstones?" she said. Bird Song's eyes burrowed into his own. The boy turned away. "Look at me," she said dangerously. The smoldering thing at his center was fanned, flaring up. What right did she have to be angry? It was he--and the ragwitches--protecting the natural world, to cure Morning Song. It was then that he made the first sound of his life, though his mouth was fastened shut and the noise came from elsewhere, from the wild itself. Giggling rang out, from the trees and the ground and the sky, an overlapping, frantic web of laughing voices, as the boy's eyes ran with tears. Bird Song was stunned, and other Root Folk gasped, stepping back, appalled. "You walk a dark path," said Bird Song, composing herself. "Much farther and there'll be no turning back. Name yourself, for a start. It will soothe your temper. Be a good part of this world. Something that gives more than it takes. If we all do that, there will be harmony." From across the clearing, Morning Song watched him--hugging her doll, the first he'd made. Her eyes were large and frightened. The thing inside him ached. More needed to be done. Time was running out. The boy made more ragwitches. They spread their blight, inside the Weird Wood and out. More dollcasters died. Bird Song tried to reason with the boy, but nothing she said reached him. Villagers fled, afraid of the boy. Others joined him--sympathizers with his campaign of violence. One day, he met the magus Manfred Tarr. He was a long, thin man with slicked-back hair and eyes like inkwells. With his cane he examined the fathomstones, which even a magus could not cross. On spotting him, Manfred bowed. The skin was drawn tight around his cheekbones. "It is a great wonder, this stone," said Manfred. The boy stared. The voice was the one he had been hearing for many moons now--the one goading him to take action. "More needs to be done," continued the magus, "to save the girl. To save us all. Ancient trees are torn down. Irreplaceable color stolen to decorate vanities. Animals poached for their fur and flesh. The problem runs deeper. It lies with Bird Song. Respectfully, I wonder what kind of leader she is, who would allow all this to happen unchecked. You cannot do what needs to be done. But I can, if I could meet her." Tears clumped in the boy's eyes. "Alas, I cannot cross this marvelous stone," said the magus, tapping it with his cane and smiling liplessly. "So you must bring her to me before time runs out...." There was a wildfire in him as he left Manfred behind. Even outsiders came to preach action, and Bird Song did nothing. He was blind, crazed, deadly. He would do more, then. The wilderness laughed on his behalf, wild giggling slipping from hollows and cracks and shadows. He would drag Bird Song to Manfred Tarr if need be. He would make the dollcasters suffer for everything they'd done. He'd bring monsters, and poison, and violence. Finally he chose a name. He would be called Blight--and would be a blight upon all of Wreathenwold. Excerpted from The Heart of the Weird Wood by Jordan Lees All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
