The Forest of Vanishing Stars(11)
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For two months, Yona wandered the forest alone, setting up camp in a different spot every few months, just as Jerusza had taught her, but gradually coming closer to the forest’s edge, too, flirting with danger in a way that made her heart race. What if she ventured into a village, a town? Could she choose a different life than the one Jerusza had given her? After all, who was Jerusza to choose Yona’s fate, her future? But fear held her back—fear and a memory of the explosions that had shaken the forest the summer before. Jerusza’s words still rang in her ears. The horror has just begun.
By late April, the spring sun burned the afternoons, and Yona, accustomed now to the predictable silence of her own company, had moved into the northern depths of the forest, leaving both the mysterious swamp and her dreams of civilization behind. In the summer and autumn, one was never really alone among the trees, for that was when the creatures of the forest were most active. Each day she walked deeper into the woods, and at the coming of each twilight, she made a simple camp beneath the stars. When the nights were mild, there was no need to build a shelter; the sky was her roof, the world her walls. In the mornings, she talked in a gentle whisper to the long-billed snipes that came to drink from the clear brooks, and sometimes, if she stayed still enough, she could lock eyes with a sleek spotted lynx for a long moment before each of them went their separate ways in silent understanding.
At night, when she closed her eyes, she reached for long-lost images of her parents in her mind until she could just make them out through the fog of time, their familiar faces hovering above a cradle. Siegfried and Alwine Jüttner. Who were they? What did they believe had become of their lost daughter? Did they still think of her, wonder about her fate?
On a crisp morning after a heavy rain late in the month, Yona was just about to emerge from the hollowed-out oak trunk where she’d sought shelter from the storm the night before, when she heard a rustling in the trees. She had seen a flock of cranes the previous afternoon and thought they might be returning, so she held her breath and listened for their distinctive bugle calls. But the flash of color behind the trees wasn’t the muddy white of a crane, and immediately, Yona’s chest seized with fear. It was too small to be an elk or a bear. It was too small even for a fox. It took Yona a few startled seconds to recognize that the creature moving into the clearing was a slight, dark-haired child, a little girl in a threadbare dress, her hair matted, her arms and legs mud-caked, her face white as a cumulus cloud.
Yona ducked quickly behind a tree and watched as the girl staggered closer. Yona hadn’t seen a child in years; the glimpses she caught of other humans in the forest were always of older boys or men who had ventured beyond their villages to hunt, or of the bad men Jerusza had warned her about, the ones who wore tattered uniforms, fur caps, and scowls. Yona couldn’t guess how old the child was—old enough to speak, perhaps, though certainly not old enough to be roaming the woods alone—but she could tell instantly that something was wrong. The girl’s eyes were wide as full moons, unfocused, and her legs seemed ill-suited to carrying her tiny frame as she wobbled to and fro.
Yona took a step forward, then froze. Surely there would be a protective mother nearby. But Yona waited a minute, and then two, and no parent arrived. The girl wobbled a bit more, and then her eyes rolled back into her head, and she collapsed with a noise that sounded like both a sigh and a gasp, pitching headfirst into a jagged tree stump.
Yona was running toward the child before she could stop herself, driven by an instinct she couldn’t name, which overrode her caution. Before she knew it, she was on her knees beside the child, lifting her up, feeling for a pulse in her tiny, limp wrist, sighing in relief at the strong tap-tap-tap from the child’s radial artery. She put a hand on the girl’s forehead and withdrew it quickly with a sharp intake of breath. The girl was burning up. Yona picked her up gently and then hesitated. What to do next? The child needed something to bring her fever down, but where were her people? Parents didn’t let children this young wander into the wilderness, for they would disappear forever there. She waited only a second more before calling out, “Hello? Anybody?”
Two white-backed woodpeckers lifted off from a tree nearby, their startled kuik-kuiks piercing the quiet of the forest, but nothing else moved. Yona looked down once more at the little girl in her arms. Her hair was tied with a bow; her little blue sweater, though shredded to rags, had a yellow fabric star carefully stitched on. There was someone out there who cared about her. “Please!” Yona called out once more. “The child is hurt!” But her only reply was the shuffle of the branches and the faint echo of her own voice.
There was no one out there. Finally, with the child in her arms, Yona turned and hurried toward the tree where she’d found shelter the night before, a massive oak, hundreds of years old, with a hollow in its trunk large enough to lie down in and to stand without ducking. After reassuring herself that the girl’s heart was still beating strong, Yona laid her down on a bed of leaves and dashed out to skin a long strip of bark from a willow tree. She raced to the stream a kilometer from her camp, soaked the bark in the cool water, and ran back to the shelter, where she knelt beside the girl and applied the compress to her head. “There,” she murmured, “you’ll feel better soon.” She sat back on her heels, studying the girl’s still, colorless face. “Please hold on,” she added in a whisper.