The stag brushes past me. I turn to watch him go, and see Phil standing with her arms wrapped tight around her waist, the only unhappy thing in this lovely, verdant wood. But when the stag approaches she straightens, pushes her shoulders back, raises her chin.

  “Whoever and whatever you are, you’ve got to send us back,” Philippa shakily demands. “We have family and a war going on. We can’t be spared.”

  Guilt lodges in the pit of my stomach because I love our parents but they’re nearly strangers, I’ve seen them so little the last four years. All I want is to stay in this place, away from the sound of falling bombs.

  The stag tilts his head to one side. “I called you because you called to me first. Was there some mistake?”

  Philippa and Jamie look questioningly at each other. I twine my hands together, wishing to sink into the ground. When they turn to me, I flush, hot and embarrassed.

  “Evie, what—” Jamie begins.

  “It was me.” The words come out all at once. “When we were in the shelter I wished to be somewhere else and I thought of a peaceful place and I wanted it more than anything. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s not possible,” Philippa insists again. She stares off into the trees with her lips pressed tight together.

  The stag still stands, watching us curiously.

  “What do your eyes tell you?” he asks. “Your ears? Your nose? Your skin? The Woodlands are real enough, and though I’ve never called between the worlds before, it’s within my gift.”

  “This is all a mistake. You’ll have to send us back,” Philippa says, and Jamie nods reluctantly.

  Ice pours through my veins. I can’t. I can’t. Whatever troubles this world may hold, at least for now they’re further off than the ones we left behind.

  “Please, Phil,” I whisper. “Couldn’t we stay? Just for a little while?”

  “Evie!” Philippa sounds scandalized, and it makes me feel so small. “What about Mum and Dad?”

  It’s the stag who saves me. He moves to my side once more and I twist my fingers into the thick fur around his shoulders.

  “You may stay as long as you like, and when you are ready to return, I will send you back to the very moment you were called,” he offers, lowering his head. “It will be as if you never left. But don’t look to escape trouble in the Woodlands—your world may have a war already being fought, but here we live under the shadow of a war that’s sure to come.”

  For a moment, Philippa is silent. Then she speaks. “Swear it. Swear that Mum and Dad will be alright—that they won’t miss us, and that all of us will find our way home.”

  The stag bows his head. “On my name and my honor. I, Cervus, Guardian of the Great Wood, born at midnight to Afara the milk-white hind, keeper of the Woodlands’ sacred heart, possessed of the power to call between worlds, swear this to you.”

  “Swear what?” Philippa presses.

  “That your family will be safe. That you won’t be missed.”

  “And that we will find our way home.”

  Cervus lowers his head further in assent. “And that you will find your way home.”

  “All of us,” Philippa says sharply. “That we will all find our way home.”

  The stag paws at the forest floor, and I’m not sure if it’s a gesture of annoyance or amusement or perhaps both. “I swear by my power and pride that you will all find your way home.”

  But Philippa still looks uncertain, until I cross the clearing and slip my hand into hers.

  “Phil, everything’s going to be alright. I believe him.”

  When she turns to me I smile, more brightly than I have in years. My sister pulls me close and I can feel her nod to the stag, though her hand on my shoulders trembles.

  Cervus turns to Jamie, who stands watching us.

  “What about you? Will you stay in the Woodlands for now? Or should I send you back?”

  Jamie’s wearing his serious, ever-so-responsible-eldest-brother look, but excitement lurks behind his eyes. “Well, I think Phil’s covered any objections I’d have. So if you’ve got a war effort and you’re on the right side, point me at it. I’ve been waiting to help out with ours long enough.”

  “And you, little one?” the stag asks me. “Will you stay in the Great Wood now you’ve seen it? Now you know what we wait for?”

  I hesitate. “Can I speak to you, sir? Alone?”

  In answer, Cervus leaves the clearing, slipping between the overarching trees.

  “Not too far, Ev,” Philippa warns, and I raise a hand in acknowledgment as I follow after the stag. He waits patiently, just far enough from my brother and sister that if I pitch my voice low, we won’t be heard.

  Biting my lip, I stare down at my bare feet, still grimed with mud from our back garden in London. “How did this happen? How could I possibly have called to you when we’ve never met? When I never knew there was such a place as this wood?”

  Cervus watches me unblinkingly, and I look up to meet his gaze.

  “Child, in the Great Wood we have a saying—a Woodlands heart always finds its way home. We speak it over our newborn. We speak it over our dead. We speak it to one another as we live. I may be the forest’s Guardian, but it’s not for me to question into which bodies Woodlands hearts are placed, or when they call out for home.

  “And I wish I could offer you a world without war, but here are the Woodlands, such as they are. We are not at peace in the Great Wood, but there is still a measure of it to be found under these trees for those who are willing to look. Will you search for it with me?”

  “I was afraid of our war,” I confess. “And I expect I’ll be afraid of another, but being here—it’s like everything’s turned right-side up when I never knew I’d been living upside down. I think—I know—I’d follow you anywhere, and into anything.”

  “Then step lightly, and tread where I tread,” Cervus says, loud enough so Philippa and Jamie will hear. “I have an appointment to keep, and we have far to go.”

  3

  A BOY JOINS ME AT THE MAGAZINE STAND ON THE railway platform. It’s a relief to have someone to take my mind off things—off the fact that not only am I out of place, in the absence of Jamie and Philippa, I’m also alone. The boy is ginger-haired and freckled, with big hands and too-long, awkward limbs. I like him before he even speaks. I like his honest smile and his ears that stick out a bit. Despite his height, he reminds me of a Woodlands people called stonewardens. When he speaks, it’s in a Yorkshire accent, and my toes curl in my school shoes. He even sounds like a stonewarden.

  “I’m Tom.” The boy holds out one of his preposterous hands and I shake it, my own swallowed up in his grip. “Tom Harper. I’ve seen you on the train before, I think, and when St. Agatha’s takes day trips. I go to St. Joseph’s. I know your brother, Jamie—good lad, he is. He asked me to have a chat with you if I saw you on the way up to school, so I’m glad we ran into each other.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “He needn’t have worried. I’m not a child.”

  Tom smiles broadly. “’Course you’re not, but nobody’s ever had too many friends, have they?”

  I could take offense over the fact that after all our years, Jamie still thinks I need looking after, but instead I laugh, because Tom Harper can have no idea of the depth of meaning behind the words I’m not a child, and of how many years I’ve lived.

  To his credit, Tom grins, then pulls a bag of toffees out of one pocket and offers them to me. I take one, because you should never turn down a toffee, and quite suddenly we appear to be friends, just as he promised.

  Tom makes for an excellent traveling companion, who doesn’t try to talk when I want to look out the window at the passing view. If I squint, I can imagine the trees are waving as the train rushes past. The beeches are going gold early this year, and that’s just how their spirits looked, back home—they were restless golden things, who carried themselves like queens.

  “Sandwich?” Tom asks when the meal cart goes by.

  “Please.”

  They’re ham and cheese, the bread ever so slightly stale already, and I watch as Tom tears through three in quick succession. He catches me at it and goes red to the roots of his ginger hair.

  “Mum always says I cost as much as a horse to feed,” he says around a mouthful of crumbs. “I’ve only got a pair of sisters at home, little things like you.”

  I smile. I can’t help it. This boy on this journey is a gift. I’d expected to spend the trip staving off loneliness through sheer force of will, but instead I’m sitting across from Tom Harper with his Yorkshire accent and his big hands as he unwraps a fourth sandwich. Here is why I never lose hope—because this boy is a breath of fresh air and a reminder of home.

  Which is rather remarkable, given that home is worlds away.

  Tom grins back at me. “So, St. Agatha’s. You glad to be getting back, or would you rather have the hols stretch on a bit?”

  “I’m glad to be getting away from London.” I brush stray bread crumbs from my school skirt and smooth out the pleats. “Not glad to leave my family, though. But happy I’ll be seeing friends. In answer to your question, both, I suppose.”

  Tom’s grin has softened, and one of his big hands sits on his lap, holding the last bit of his final sandwich. “Torn between two places, eh?”

  I trace a finger across the window as a green valley slides by us. A silver pool lies at its heart, surrounded by birch trees. What a lovely place that would be for water spirits.

  “Yes,” I say, trying not to put too much weight behind the words. “I certainly am.”

  Tom scoots forward and presses something into my hand. I don’t have to look away from the view to know what it is. The feel of rumpled brown paper and the smell of sugar tell me all I need to know.

  “Have a toffee,” Tom says. “And buck up. Everything gets better after the first week back. You just need to settle in again.”

  He takes out a book and lets me be. I pop a toffee into my mouth.

  Outside, the beeches shiver and wave.

  Tom nods off on the seat opposite mine. He snores a little, but not enough to bother. I smile and take out a book of poetry, losing myself in words and memory.

  The meal cart comes round one last time, to clear away our rubbish. Tom stirs and yawns and hands over his sandwich wrappers with a thank-you. We’re nearly to the station now, nearly to the end of this journey and on to the next.

  I peer out the window, taking one more look at the beeches to steady my nerves and strengthen my resolve. This year will be different. This year, I will try to put down roots in the world I was born to.

  Wherever I am, wherever my feet are planted, that is where I will make my life. I won’t withdraw or put up walls. Every day is a treasure, every chance meeting a gift, and I will treat them as such until at last, my Woodlands heart finds its way home.

  Tom is looking at me, red-faced. “I know you’re allowed visitors on weekends. Do you think on Saturday I could bike over? Or not, you can say if you’d rather I didn’t.”

  A gift. A journey. And it’s true—one can never have too many friends.

  “Yes.” I smile. “I’d like it if you came.”

  4

  WE’RE BOUND FOR THE HEART OF THE GREAT WOOD to meet a tyrant, or so Cervus says. But he’ll tell us no more, and Jamie and Philippa look worried as we go deeper into the forest.

  For two weeks, we travel through the Woodlands in Cervus’s company, and despite the meeting that lies ahead I feel myself falling in love, perhaps a little with the stag himself, but mostly with the Wood. Only eleven and desperate for a sense of peace and belonging, I can’t imagine a more beautiful place. The forest itself is a cathedral; the little rivers and songbirds are its choristers; the filtered and shifting sunshine, candlelight; the smell of earth and moss, incense. Each day as we walk, I lose myself in numinous calm.

  We catch glimpses of the Woodlands people: a short, stocky form vanishing around a boulder, leaves swirling through the air in a windless clearing, dappled faces peering from the boughs overhead. We pass by houses built around the bases of trees, too, and clearings laid to crops or fenced in to keep grazing sheep from straying. Cervus never slows his pace, just hurries us along toward an unknown destination. We stop only at night, or to gather berries and fish in the streams.

  Philippa’s still anxious, her nails bitten to the bloody quick. She hardly speaks except to fuss over me before we sleep or when we eat. Jamie does his best to cheer her up.

  “Come on then,” he says each morning when we wake cold and stiff from sleeping on the ground. “It’s still better than school, isn’t it? You can’t possibly want to go back until we’ve seen a bit more of this place.”

  But we never talk about the air raid. We never bring up the fact that we left without knowing what had happened to Mum and Dad. I know it’s eating at my elder sister, yet I can’t help being secretly relieved. I am happy to be here, and happy to trust Cervus, believing that somehow, someday, in spite of everything, all shall be well.

  On our second week in the forest, we come to a place that feels different from the others. Everything has been lovely since the moment we were torn from the darkness and clamor of the bunker. But Cervus leads us into a ring of white birches and I know this place must be the very heart of the Great Wood.

  A hush hangs on the air. Golden sun filters through the shifting leaves overhead, which move with barely a whisper. Motes of dust and the little wishes from full-blown dandelions dance in the shifting light. The grass beneath our bare feet is the color of spring itself.

  Cervus steps into a pool of sunshine at the center of the clearing. His rust-red hide flames and he raises his head, scenting the air before sounding his clarion call.

  The stag lowers himself onto the grass, legs folding gracefully beneath him, and waits.

  Philippa and Jamie wander about the clearing, speaking in low voices and stopping occasionally to look at one of the ancient stone figures ringing the open space. The statues are so old their shapes are impossible to determine—only a carved line here and there, peering out between patches of moss, indicates that they were once more than plain standing stones.

  I trail after my brother and sister for a while, but am drawn back toward Cervus. He might be a stone figure himself, he’s so motionless, but when I crouch down to sit at his side, his ears flick back. Tentatively, I let one hand drop onto his shoulders. For a long while we just sit, but at last he lowers his great head and rests it in my lap.

  I think this is where I was born to be—in the center of a clearing in another world, with this strange, wild creature at my side.

  Philippa looks over one shoulder and something crosses her face at the sight of us. Fear, I think, or maybe grief. I can’t bear to see her unhappy in this glad, bright place. I smile, not just with my eyes and my mouth but with everything in me, until I feel incandescent. Phil smiles wistfully back.

  At the edge of the clearing, the undergrowth stirs. Cervus stands in a single, fluid motion.

  “Come, children,” he says, and we cluster about him. I keep my hand on his shoulder, fingers buried in thick, coarse fur.

  The Woodlanders have arrived. They step out of the trees silently, all of them barefooted or barehooved, like my brother and sister and me. There are half a dozen bay and dun centaurs, a group of short, stocky folk I’ll come to know as stonewardens, and tree spirits who swirl into the clearing as a drift of leaves before taking human shape. Water spirits and winged girls come, too, and other creatures who have no names besides the ones each individual bears. When they’ve all assembled, I marvel at how silent the clearing remains.

  But muffled hoofbeats sound in the distance, and armor flashes through the trees. A white flag gleams in the sun and suddenly armed soldiers are dismounting just outside the clearing. They leave their horses and push past the gathered Woodlanders, trampling the green grass of the clearing beneath their booted feet.

  At the head of the procession is a pale and haughty young man, who must be four or five years older than Jamie’s fifteen. A thin circlet of steel rests on his golden hair, and when he reaches the place where Cervus waits, he stands proudly before the stag. His eyes flicker, red then orange, as if a fire burns inside him.

  A rustle breaks the calm. I glance up and see that all the Woodlanders have taken a knee. A muscle works in the armored young man’s jaw and anger sparks in his uncanny eyes. It’s not him the Woodlanders bow to, then, but the stag. Cervus, in turn, bows back.

  “Venndarien Tarsin, heir to the Empire’s throne,” Cervus says as he straightens. “Welcome to the heart of the Great Wood. None of your line has ever set foot here before.”

  Venndarien casts about him, taking in the gathered Woodlanders and the ring of birch trees. “Your rustic shrines hold no interest for those of my country. Tell me you’ve called on me to offer up your surrender, Cervus, and that you’re not wasting the Empire’s time yet again.”

  “There will be no surrender,” Cervus answers. “And I will use as little of your time as I can. I’ve brought you here to ask for a stay of battle once more.”

  “Unless you’re ready with the timber we demand and every last one of you takes a knee before the Imperial crest, you’ll find us impossible to sway,” the pale young man says.

  A low rumble of discontent rises from the people gathered.

  “We will never bow to Tarsa,” one of the Woodlanders calls. “Much less fell trees to fuel your wars.”

  Venndarien raises an eyebrow, as if the protests coming from the Woodlanders are nothing more than the buzzing of gnats.

  “The Empire does not hear you,” he says.

  Cervus throws back his head and bellows. By the time the echoes of his call have stopped resounding from the trees, the Woodlanders are silent again, regarding the Tarsin delegates with barely subdued anger.

  Venndarien turns his attention to us, and Philippa meets his gaze stonily as his eyes linger on her.

  “Who are these ragged upstarts?” the Tarsin heir asks Cervus. It’s true we hardly look our best, still in our nightclothes after two weeks of walking through the Woodlands. “They’re not forest dwellers. What hovel in a back corner of the Empire did you steal them from?”

 

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