Silver in the Wood

“I’m not sure I can leave the wood,” he said, when the trees were thinning and the Hall was in sight. “Walk in time,” said Tobias. “Think of your map.” He could see it in his head, Silver’s Hallow Wood, the primaeval forest spilling off the edges of the paper. There was a time three thousand years gone you could have walked from one end of the coun

He often intimidated people, being a big and grim-looking sort of fellow; he’d accepted it years ago and had long since stopped trying to be the kind of man who smiled enough to make up for it.

He let Silver come to see him a time or two, took care to have his cottage in the same place every time. Braided his hair when he felt Silver’s tread snapping careless twigs on the forest’s edge.

Bullet lodged in his thigh, and he was no doctor; nor was anything that lived in his wood. Well, there it was. He’d live or not. If he lived, he’d manage, and if he died, he’d die in the shadow of the old oak. Maybe it was time. He’d seen nearly four hundred summers come and go by now.

More than half the night was through by the time she arrived, and she’d missed the midnight hour, when she would have been strongest. “How now,” Tobias murmured when he saw her swell into being on the edge of the clearing. She was twisted and reddish, and her eyes lacked the sunlight-in-the-canopy gleam of a healthy dryad.

He’d found the trail a few days ago up on the hills, among the twisted gorse. It was a sad thing when a dryad went sour. They were sweet ladies for the most part, and Tobias liked them. He had four or five in his wood, not counting the old oak, who was his own manner of thing. This one wasn’t a local; she smelled rootless and angry. Lost her tree,

Tobias stood up when he saw them coming. Bondee looked at him, and for a moment Tobias imagined seeing himself through the lad’s eyes: tall and broad, with heavy shoulders and big hands, long wild hair and bare feet planted in the ground—and here was Bramble curling around him, standing by him, not bothering to conceal herself from human eyes now,

lying in a soft white bed, with his wood too far away, listening to old wives’ tales of himself.

“Silver,” said his guest after a moment. “Henry Silver.”