Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children, #6)(10)

Bit by bit, her breath evened out and her lungs stopped burning, and her tears tapered off, leaving her feeling damp and oddly sticky. Frustrated, Regan swiped a hand across her mouth to wipe the wet away, tasting salt. She straightened, looking around. She knew this creek. It ran all the way through the woods; if she followed it long enough, she’d come out behind her own house. It would take hours.

She couldn’t go back to school. Going back to school would mean facing Laurel and her army of giggling girls, all of whom would already have heard and accepted Laurel’s version of the truth. It would also mean facing the adults responsible for her care, who wouldn’t be happy about her unauthorized departure from school grounds. The damage was done. Why not go home?

Regan sniffled, smelling salt, and started along the bank of the creek, heading for the woods, heading for safety, heading for home.





PART II



HOOF AND HORN





5



THE DOOR IN THE WOOD


THE NAMELESS CREEK CHUCKLED softly as it ran along its bed of mud and waterweed and small, polished stones. The water looked cool and inviting, but Regan knew better than to take off her shoes and wade. Stepping into the water would kick up clouds of silt and make it impossible to see the bottom, and the last time she’d done that, she’d stepped on a chunk of glass big enough to go all the way through her foot. She’d limped home, bleeding, and barely made it to the back porch before the pain overwhelmed her. Well, she was miles from home now. Better not to risk it. So she stayed on the bank, watching the water tumble by, and enjoyed the shade of the trees and the sweet morning air.

If only she could stay out here forever, she thought, she could be happy. If she never had to return to school and confront Laurel’s brutally triumphant, endlessly cruel eyes. If she could be absolved of the consequences of her own actions. If only, if only, if, if, if.

The world dwindled to the act of walking and the patterns of shadow on the ground. With the creek to guide her, Regan didn’t need to think about where she was going; she only had to walk, and so she walked, following the water into the wood.

We should take a moment here, to talk about the wood. It was a small, tamed thing by the standards humans set for forests, long since boxed in on all sides by residential construction, homes and shopping malls and highways. But it remembered what it was to have been wild. It contained the seeds of its own restoration, birds and beasts and stinging insects, fish and frogs and small, burrowing things. If the boundaries were ever removed, the wood would be ready to spring back into its old wildness, for it had never been domesticated, merely winnowed down and contained.

Because it was tame, Regan could walk safely, without fear of meeting anything larger than a raccoon or a deer. Because it had been wild, she still caught her breath when she heard something passing in the brush, when a branch snapped for no apparent reason. Such is the dichotomy of forests. Even the smallest remembers what it was to cover nations, and the shadows they contain will whisper that knowledge to anyone who listens.

Regan shivered as something passed on the other side of a wall of trees, feeling suddenly less like the trees and the creek belonged to her, and more like an uninvited, potentially unwelcome guest. She began to walk a little faster, trying to figure out how far she was from her house. Not too far—this stretch of trees was far more familiar than the trees closer to the school had been. She’d wandered this far from her own backyard dozens of times before. She’d be home soon.

Her heart sank at the thought. She’d have to tell her parents what she’d done—that she’d told Laurel everything and then run away rather than face the consequences of her choices. And then she’d have to start convincing them not to make her go back to school, which was going to be hard, since she was pretty sure “told a secret to the wrong person” wasn’t grounds for a transfer in the district’s eyes. She didn’t know for sure what was, but she knew Heather’s mom had tried to get Heather transferred once it became clear that she was never going to regain the approval of her former friends. It hadn’t worked. Heather was still there, on the fringes of the schoolyard, and only graduation was going to change things.

Regan slowed again, suddenly eager for her journey to take as long as possible. Maybe that was why the shape in the nearby growth caught her eye, and she stopped abruptly, sending a pebble clattering into the creek as she cocked her head and blinked at what was surely a trick of the light.

Two trees had grown around each other, branches tangling and twisting like the wicker of a basket. They looped in and out of one another’s embrace, until they formed what looked almost like a doorway. That was interesting, but not unique; branches often grew together, and the shapes they made in the process could be remarkably architectural. She’d seen castles in the trees when she was little, castles and dragons and all manner of fabulous things.

But she’d never seen a doorway before.

Transfixed, Regan moved closer, eyes fixed on the shape. Unlike most of the optical illusions formed by the tangling of branches, it became more doorlike as she approached, not less. The twigs above it almost seemed to form words; she realized, with a start, that she could read them. “Be Sure,” they said, in spindly, organic lettering.

Be sure? Be sure of what? Be sure she wasn’t really looking at a door in the middle of the woods, since that would be ridiculous? Be sure that trees couldn’t spell words in English, especially not words that were so clearly and obviously written? Well, she was sure of those things, as sure as she’d ever been of anything.