26
Wailing Grove
—1892, August 12: 8-Hour 12—
And there are species that I have not seen elsewhere, even apart from the Red Woods. A gray-white flower with four petals grows there upon a creeping vine. The leaves, heart-shaped, end in a curled point. At night, the flowers open, revealing four purple petals within the four white. The scent is strong, like concentrated honeysuckle, and it draws to it what I call the night bee, another creature I have seen nowhere else. Black with white dots along its back, the night bee looks in other respects like an ordinary honeybee. We do not yet know if it also makes honey and, if so, what kind.
—From Sophia Tims’s Reflections on a Journey to the Eerie Sea
THE DAY DAWNED overcast, but the clouds were dark gray, not yellow, and Lichen told them he expected rain to move east in their wake, catching them by midafternoon. Bittersweet replied that, with luck, they would arrive in Oakring before then.
“Turtleback Valley,” Sophia reminded him urgently.
He nodded. “Don’t worry. It’s on our way.”
Lichen gave them apples, walnuts, and sandwiches of dark bread with blackberry jam. After walking them back along the narrow path beside the quarry, he stood by the boulder where he had met them the night before and waved them on their journey.
Nosh traveled quickly, the prospect of either a heavy rain or a dry bed pushing him onward, and Sophia felt a growing nervousness in her stomach. She sensed Bittersweet restraining himself from interrupting her thoughts, and she was grateful; her mind was in turmoil.
To settle herself, she practiced the approach to map-reading that Bittersweet had begun to teach her. Instead of falling entirely into sleep, she tried drifting into a frame of mind that he called “discernment”: a state in which her active senses fell asleep, in a way, so that her sense of perception could fully waken. She hardly understood it, and as yet she’d had no luck finding her way into such a state, but she practiced it nonetheless. Bittersweet said that she had to “stop seeing and begin perceiving,” a suggestion that did not, unfortunately, make things easier.
The air was damp with condensation, and Sophia felt the clouds amassing overhead. Every step Nosh took seemed to add to the suspense. Sophia took a deep breath.
“Use your dream eye, not your outer eyes,” Bittersweet murmured.
“I’m trying,” Sophia replied.
“It’s very hard to do when you’re so tense.”
Sophia shot him a look over her shoulder.
“Sorry.” He looked genuinely sympathetic. “We’re almost there. Please don’t hope for too much,” he said earnestly.
“I know.”
Sophia gave up on using her dream eye and instead looked closely at everything around them. The path was crumbly and dry, stony on the incline. A few wildflowers grew sparsely amid the maples. Nosh had been climbing steadily all morning, and the forest was thinning. Now he stepped off the path, heading right, toward a slow rise.
Suddenly, between the trees, a great valley came into view. The hills below were dark green. The flattened mound that gave the valley its name lay to the north: a hill shaped like a crawling turtle, its arms, legs, and head just visible. At the valley’s base, the ground was rocky. A gray river wound along it, flat and colorless beneath the heavy clouds.
“There’s the grove,” Bittersweet said, pointing. But Sophia had already felt its presence. A tight cluster of dark trees interrupted the stream, surprisingly tall, their trunks dark red. They seemed misplaced, as if they had been dropped there, whole and intact in their incongruity, by a stranger with no knowledge of the valley. Tree-Eater’s red trees, Sophia thought.
Looking at the grove, she felt a storm of feelings that she knew with certainty were not her own. They belonged to the Clime, the old one. And the sense of intention behind them seemed so familiar that she wondered how she had never observed its source before, for surely this was the wellspring of the pressure, reassurance, suggestion, and guidance that she had known all her life. She recognized its influence in a hundred minute decisions that had seemed on the surface to be hers: an unspecified suspicion of another person; a trenchant unwillingness to make the choice that seemed by all other signs obvious; a desire to look farther into a deserted place. She remembered vividly hearing this voice-that-was-not-a-voice only two months ago, when she searched for the Nihilismian ship known as the Verity: it formed as a sense of excitement, urging her onward. The old one had been speaking to her all along.
In that moment, she understood what Bittersweet meant by perceiving rather than seeing: it meant to know something without questioning how one knows; to accept the intuitive sense one has of what is right; to bypass the slow steps of seeing, judging, and deciding. She perceived what lay before her as clearly as if the old one had spoken it in her ear: This grove was secret. It was too dear, too fragile, too dangerous. They were not to come near.
This was why the old one had fallen silent. Everything for miles and miles and miles had gone quiet and still for the sake of this place. The fear was not about the grove; it was for the grove. It had to be protected at all costs.
“Bittersweet,” Sophia whispered. She found that she was standing next to him, and she did not remember having dismounted.
“What is it?”
“The Clime is guarding this place.”
Bittersweet looked out toward the grove, and a sudden flash of lightning shuddered across the valley. Several seconds later, the thunder echoed, low and muted. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. The sense of it is sharper now. Things have changed. I wonder what has happened.”
“It is so palpable here,” Sophia said, still whispering.
Bittersweet glanced at her. “It is. Perhaps because the old one has drawn all its attention here, to this place, its presence is very strong. Had you never sensed it before?”
Sophia shook her head. She continued staring as splinters of lightning cracked the dark sky. Move on, move on, move on, they seemed to say. This is not the time. The grove stood, dark and impenetrable, still untouched by the coming storm. At such a distance, it seemed a slight and frail thing: tiny in the vastness of the valley.
The rain reached them before it reached the valley floor, and it began to fall in cold, hard pellets. The droplets pattered on the leaves overhead, and then they began in earnest, falling with a roar. Almost immediately, the valley was obscured from view, but Sophia still saw it clearly in her mind’s eye: the secret grove of Red Woods; the great valley that drew the wailing Lachrima to its center; the place so vital, so cherished, that the burden of protecting it had awoken fear in the heart of the old one.
“We can go now,” Sophia said loudly, over the crashing rain.
“Really?” Bittersweet asked, surprised.
“The Clime doesn’t want us to go near. Maybe later, but not now.” She turned to him, feeling elated, so clear was her sense of what to do. Then she realized that the falling rain had grown sharp and leaden. Looking up, eyes half-closed, she felt the hail pelting against her skin.
When she turned back to Bittersweet, he was standing motionless, staring at his outstretched hand.
She at first did not understand what she was seeing. Bittersweet’s palm was filled with black pellets. His face was streaked black, as if with paint.
“What is it?” Sophia asked, horrified.
They looked up at the trees around them and saw the green leaves smeared with black. The trail before them was already flooded; the hail made a black path leading into darkness.
“Char. It is raining char upon us.”