“Let her?” I shoved my hood back from my forehead, as if the cold air could help me put my words together. “I didn’t have a choice. And how was I to know Lirr was hunting me? Father certainly never told me.”
Anne stared into the distance for a long moment, her breath misting before her. “He didn’t know,” she said finally. “I never told him the ghisting went to you. But I did tell him to never, ever, let you leave the Wold. That should have been enough. How did Kaspin get to you?”
I was still rankled by her implication that I’d willingly left the village, but I pushed past it. I gave a strangled, huffing laugh. “I was mistaken for a notorious highwaywoman, robbed a few travelers, was captured and sentenced to hang, then sang my way off the gallows and was sold off to Kaspin by a dandy called Charles Grant.”
The swirling wind hushed, leaving us in a bubble of stillness.
“You survived all that,” she said, “even though you’d never left that backwater village?”
I nodded, a kernel of pride blossoming in my chest. “I did.”
Abruptly she wrapped one arm around my head and kissed me, half on the forehead, half on the brim of my hat. I froze, startled and blinded by unexpected tears.
She held there for a moment, clasping me to her and simply breathing. Tension trembled through her, as if she fought an internal war, and lost it. She started to pull away.
Before she could let go, I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. I heard a thump as she rested the head of her axe in the snow, one hand still limp at her side. She angled her face away from mine, leaving us temple to temple, and I felt her fight a sob. I felt the conflict in her, the shuddering grimace of emotion that could no longer be ignored.
I closed my eyes, giving her as much privacy as I could without letting her go.
“I survived,” I whispered. As much as I wanted to crumble, as much as the reality of my broken mother terrified me, I managed to keep my own tears at bay. I was not a child anymore. This was her moment of consolation—not mine. “So did you. And we’ll survive this too.”
My mother inhaled shakily and released the breath again in a long, steady gust. Then she pulled back, cupping my cheek in one hand, and looked into my eyes. Hers were red-rimmed, her cheeks streaked with tears, but she smiled. I smiled back, small and sad.
“We will,” she vowed.
*
The next day—or rather, when the Second Sun emerged from the Stormwall in the southeast—an island came into sight. It sat at the heart of the ruined fleet, blurring the edge of the endless grey-gold sky.
I reached into my satchel and pulled out a salvaged spyglass. Then, placing its cold sight to my eye, I held my breath.
The island held a Ghistwold. A sleeping winter forest grew from and between the bodies of beached ships, rooting in their figureheads and erupting from man-made shells into leafless ash and elm, oak and birch and poplar. Some of the ships were little more than piles of snow-caked, bleached wood, while others were more recent, their hulls intact and threadbare sails snapping in the wind. The trees were huge, grown to unnatural size despite the arctic world, the lack of daylight and the impossibility of growing seasons.
As we drew closer, I began to sense the ghistings within those trees. By the time we entered their meager shade I could hear them murmuring in wordless slumber, drawing my attention here and there. But none of them spoke to me, deep in their rest.
Shadows stretched towards us across the snow at unpredictable angles, branches like claws and trunks like pillars of night. I slowed, my heart trammeling against my ribs. I’d the sense of a traveler coming home in the dead of night; a stranger in her own home, her family asleep and unaware of her presence. This ash. That elm. I knew each one distantly, intrinsically, but they were oblivious to me.
I wanted them to wake up. I wanted their leaves to unfurl and their roots to creep across the ground. I wanted to see their spirits flit through the cold light of the Second Sun and hear their voices speak.
The golden larch grew on an outcropping of rock in the center of the sleeping Wold. Thick roots reached from beneath the snow, latticing the rock and plunging into the earth below. High above, her vivid boughs were encased in ice.
“This is her tree,” my mother murmured, setting down her axe. “Tane’s tree.”
I lowered my satchel and looked up into the branches. Golden boughs drooped under a windblown sheath of ice and snow, and I felt the tree’s emptiness. There was no ghisting here.
My fingers began to tingle, my consciousness tugged as if I were falling asleep, and then, I remembered.
The Spirit in Her Bones
They cut her from the heart of her mountainside Wold. They found her unclaimed, unprotected, those ravenous humans, and fashioned her body into the figurehead of their ship. Her mother wept as they bore her away. Her sisters cursed, and her brothers raged. And she herself wept as they changed her, carving and hacking, smoothing and reshaping, until she was no longer Tane, but a human figure of wood and paint. A forgotten saint, a spear in one hand, and a distaff in the other.
She bore them across seas and through storms. But where other ghistings grew complacent to their captivity, she who was once Tane did not. She was other, and she would not rest.
She was a Mother Tree, heiress to the Wold in which she was grown, destined to stretch from the shade of her own Mother into the light of the sun. Her roots would sustain the Wold, when the first Mother fell and returned to the Dark Water. Her energy would bind it. Her rule soothe it.
When she heard her kin lament from beyond the wall of storms, she led her ill-fated crew astray. She whispered of riches beyond the tempest and her captain, blinded by greed, believed. They braved the Stormwall, emerging into an arctic world where so, so many ships had perished.
There, she who had been Tane drove her ship onto the rocks and refused to move again. Her crew cursed and raged, but then they starved and died, and Tane’s world quietened. Over the decades she reached roots into frozen earth and stretched branches to the dusky sky. And where her roots reached her kin, trapped in their own prisons, they, too, began to sprout.
A new Ghistwold grew, with Tane as their Mother. Her roots sustained them. Her energy bound them. Her rule soothed them. The cold and the wind did not bother them—their life and sustenance came from another world altogether, their roots reaching into the Other. They brought summer with them. Ash and elm unfurled leaves that the arctic winds could not tear. Snow melted beneath birches in their paper shrouds, and fiddleheads emerged from blankets of moss.
New ships arrived and wrecked, some which Tane’s forest and their network of roots could not reach. But they would one day, Tane soothed them. Time, after all, meant little to immortal ghistings.
Sleep, she sang to those distant ships. Sleep until the time is right.
Then he came. Tane sensed Hoten’s ship as it passed through the Stormwall. Her roots stretched and her fine leaves rustled, watching, waiting.
The ship wrecked, as they all eventually did. Far from her reach the vessel became a torch in the night, and she sensed the new ghisting’s pain as his prison burned. Then that pain was gone, and there was silence instead.
Soon after, a man wandered into the Wold. She sensed a ghisting with him. Within him.
Horror. Disgust. The feelings overwhelmed her and spread through the forest, but the ghisting in the man exalted.