to break. She felt petite, so alone on such an oversized platform, especially once she made it to the middle of the river and the pole was barely long enough to reach the lowering depth. Benjamin had told her of the falls to the south and she imagined going over in the great misty roar, being buried underwater, floating onward to the sea.
Panic swirled inside her but she forced herself to move again, remembering the courage she had summoned back in Umber when she stood before the harbor, reassured by her brother, and climbed aboard the skiff and into the Cleaver off to Floria. But where did courage lead me? Molly wondered as she floated and the ferry, and the current, and the world moved beneath her.
Soon the water flowed more gently and the anchor line rose. She smelled the great, green pines and the moisture of the forest. Once the ferry bumped the dock and Molly tied it to the post, she stared across the clearing that would lead her to the woods, where the road disappeared into a chasm in the trees.
A universe of trees in a universe of night, a million dark spires, an infinity of leaves—even eagles in the day would fail to see the limit of the forest, with the town, like a dimple, in the center. That the cities lay beyond it seemed an element of faith. All a traveler could do was trust in one direction.
Silver-blue lights hovered in the clearing. They were wisps of flame, smaller than her hands, and Molly felt compelled to see one up close. She stepped toward the nearest wisp and watched it bob away; she tried again, and then again, until it led her into the reeds and both her feet were in the water. Molly blinked her eyes. The wisp glimmered beautifully, as if to lead her on—as if to draw her into the current where the flow would drag her down.
She saw the house lights a quarter mile off beyond the river, much fainter than the phantom lights hovering around her. She regretted leaving Benjamin behind without a word. A passing whiff of candlefruit she’d spilled upon her sleeve made even Abigail a person she was hesitant to leave. She wondered what would happen when they found she’d taken the ferry. Nothing, she decided. Nobody would care.
She left the river and the wisps and crossed the clearing, walking briskly to outpace her fear of entering the woods, which rose above her in a great dark wall as she approached. The way had not been cleared so much as woven through the trees. Creeping vines snared her feet. Thorns caught her skirts. The farther in she went, the more the forest closed around her till the road veered left and she was thoroughly surrounded, feeling as far away from Root as anywhere on earth.
Long, twisted branches seemed to grapple overhead. There were nuts the size of apples, pine needles stiff enough to penetrate cloth. She passed an evergreen with sap oozing audibly out of the trunk. Stones and lumpy roots protruded from the ground, and there were holes and ferns and mounds of grass, moss, and tangling weeds. She listened tensely as she walked, hearing snaps and rustling swishes. Several times she turned, sensing movement at her back, and lost her sense of direction when the road seemed to vanish in the dark.
The smell of skunk grew alarming, strong enough to gag her. She trampled a prodigious heap of scat, maybe a bear’s. There was eye-shine, there behind a dense mass of bracken, but from what breed of creature, and from what source of light?
“Man is the dominant animal,” she told herself aloud, recalling a thing that Nicholas used to say upon his horse.
She heard an echo overhead and stumbled backward in surprise. A scruffy black bird shifted on a branch, peering down at her intensely with its unblinking eyes.
“Man is the dominant animal,” it said to her again, croaking in a crude imitation of her voice.
She hurried on, and walked and walked, and jogged until she panted. It was two days to Liberty by horse. Maybe three. Benjamin had told her there were inns along the way but it was possible she wouldn’t reach the first till after dawn. She needed money, needed food. She would need another name. But then in Liberty she might begin again and get it right. Another full city for another new life, unless her secret sprang a leak or