I pause, balled fist falling to my side. It’s the ground, not the trees, that’s throbbing beneath our feet, and all of a sudden the wind has gone silent. I open my mouth to reply, but the words shrivel in my throat as a giant hand curls around the trunk nearest me, its fingers the precise color and texture of the bark. The hand twists for a moment to find its purchase, and then it wrenches the tree from its roots, flinging it upward into the oblivious gray sky.
The creature standing before me has no eyes, just two misshapen slits in the corrugated bark of its face. Its grizzled beard is made from garlands of pine needles and dead leaves, held together with sticky yellow sap. Its body is as thick as two trees, dovetailed, and its arms and legs are fat with moss and rot. A single bird circles its head, as if looking for a place to nest among the animate foliage.
I am still staring, openmouthed and dumb, when its fingers wrap around my torso and lift me into the air.
Gáspár shouts my name, those three syllables that shocked me so completely the night before, and then I hear the rasp of metal as he draws his ax. The creature turns me over in its hands, letting me slip from its grasp and then catching me again, like a cat with some curious plaything. Every time the ground comes rushing up at me my stomach roils in nauseated protest, but I am too rattled to even scream, much less try to reach for my inscrutable new magic.
I am overwhelmed only by my own desperate stupidity when the creature picks me up by my cloak, threadlike in its giant fingers, and holds me above its open mouth. Its breath reeks of burning flesh and rotted wood and a few tears prick at the corners of my eyes, futile and doomed. Gáspár’s ax clangs furiously against the creature’s wooden leg, and the immediacy of his action shocks me now: there’s no hesitation, not like the way his blade faltered in the tent with Kajetán.
And then, inexplicably, another voice rings out sharp and clear: “It goes without stopping, bends but never breaks, has branches and knots yet cannot grow leaves.”
The creature pauses, letting me dangle squirming from its fingers. The bark of its face crumples like a furrowed brow. With its free hand it scratches its head, puzzled—looking, for a moment, quite human.
Tuula is a brightly colored speck in the snow. She repeats, “It goes without stopping, bends but never breaks, has branches and knots yet cannot grow leaves.”
The creature’s eye-slits narrow. When I slip from its grasp, I squeeze my own eyes shut, bracing to hit the ground hard. But the impact is muffled, muted. I open my eyes and find myself draped across Bierdna’s back. The bear twists its head around and sniffs at me, and my breath catches on the words thank you. When have I begun to imagine that it can understand me?
Gáspár freezes halfway in his path toward me, ax held tight, face pale. When he looks me up and down I don’t think I am inventing the concern in his eye, but he stops himself before he reaches my side.
I slide off the bear, still gasping. Tuula looks down her nose at me, arms folded, Szabín at her back. Once I can manage to speak, I can only ask, “What is that?”
“Just one of our pesky, awful wood giants,” Tuula says. “They’re very strong, as you can see, but very stupid. If you tell them a riddle, they’ll be stuck for ages trying to solve it, and stand still until finally they forget what you said in the first place.”
I just stare up at her, miserable and cowed. True to her word, the creature is rooted to the ground, still scratching its wooden head.
“It’s a river, by the way,” Tuula goes on.
“A what?”
“The answer to the riddle.” Her voice hitches. “It goes without stopping, bends but never breaks, has branches and knots yet cannot grow leaves. A river. I suppose you ought to know, since you’re planning on braving the woods alone. I won’t relish saving your insipid life again, wolf-girl.”
I swallow the insult, at least half-deserved, and get to my feet without breaking my stare. Reindeer and crows, wood giants and bears. Tuula has knowledge and magic that make the North look like water in a cupped hand, something that can be held fast and close. If she were to draw a map of Kaleva, it would be marked with paths that circumvent the monsters and moving trees, lines that cleave through danger to safety. Even the women of my village could never dream of moving through the forest with such assurance.
I clench my four-fingered hand, still pale with its untested power. Tuula is watching me with her black hawk’s glare, as if she can even see into the animal part of my mind, can see the refrain of seven days, seven days, seven days, or the hunger in my eyes. Szabín was right about one thing—no one would come to such a bitter, brutal place unless they were desperate.