Beatty - Willa of the Wood

Text copyright 2018 by Robert Beatty

Cover illustration 2018 by Millie Liu

(Minty Fresh Mangos)

Cover design by Maria Elias

All rights reserved. Published by Disney Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group.No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storageand retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For informationaddress Disney Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

ISBN 978-1-368-01060-3

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The Great Smoky Mountains
1900

As Willa overheard the two day-folk men talking about whether the earth was flat or round, she shook her head. They were both wrong. The world was neither flat nor round. It was mountains.

W illa crept through the darkened forest, following the faint scent of chimney smoke on the midnight air. The silver strands of the clouds passing in front of the moon cloaked her movements in shadow, and she made little sound stepping across the cold, wet leaves she felt beneath her bare feet. All during the night shed been moving down the slope of the mountain into the small valley where the homesteaders lived. When she came to the rocky edge of the river, she knew she was getting close to what shed come for.

She didnt know the rivers mood here, so she avoided the dark and dangerous currents by climbing up through the gnarled limbs of the craggy old trees and asking for their help. As the branches reached out over the water to hold her, they rustled in the wind, talking to one another, as if concerned about where she was going. Her tunic of woven green cane flexed with the movements of her body as she climbed, the branches of the trees holding her gently, intertwining wrist and arm, ankle and leg, then letting go in turn, helping her across with the care that they would give a sapling granddaughter. She made her way hand over hand above the misty breath of the tumbling river, then slithered down a trunk on the other side.

Thank you, she whispered to the trees, touching ones bark with the palm of her hand as she left them behind her.

Passing a tranquil pool of starlit water among the stones at the rivers edge, she glimpsed her reflection: a twelve-year-old willow wisp of a forest girl with long, dark hair, a rounded face with streaked and spotted skin, and emerald-green eyes. Unlike most of her clan, who coveted the glittering treasures of their enemies and even wore their deadened clothes, Willa wore no fabric or jewelry of any kind that might flash in the gloom. Wherever she went in the forest, her skin and hair and eyes took on the color and appearance of the green leaves around her. If she paused near the trunk of a tree, she turned so brown and barken that she became nearly invisible. And now, as she looked into the water, she saw her face for just a moment before it took on the color of the water and the nighttime sky above her and she disappeared, her dark blue cheeks dotted with glistening stars.

Continuing toward what shed come for, Willa slunk low and quiet through the mountain laurel, up the gentle riverine slope, her heart beating slow and steady as she approached the homesteaders lair.

She came from a clan of forest people that the Cherokee called the old ones and told stories about around their campfires at night. The white-skinned homesteaders referred to her kind as night-thieves, or sometimes night-spirits, even though she was as flesh and blood as a deer, a fox, or any other creature of the forest. But she seldom heard the true name of her people. In the old languagewhich she only spoke with her grandmother nowher people were called the Faeran.

Willa stopped at the edge of the forest and blended her skin into the surrounding textures of green. Tendrils of leaves wrapped around her. She became all but invisible.

The soft sounds of the nights insects and frogs surrounded her. But she stayed alert, wary of beady-eyed dogs, hidden watchmen, and other dangers.

She gazed toward the lair of the homesteaders. They had built it with the cut-up carcasses of murdered trees nailed one to the other in long slabs. The bodies of the dead trees made flat walls with square corners, unlike anything else in the forest.

Just get what you came for, Willa, she told herself.

The lair had a high, slanted rooftop, a large railed porch that came around the front, and a chimney made of jagged rock the homesteaders had broken from the bones of the river. She saw no oil lamps or candlelight in the windows, but she knew from the thin line of gray smoke drifting from the chimney that the homesteaderswhom she sometimes called the day-folk, because they retreated into their lairs when the sun went downwere probably sleeping inside in their long, flat, pillowed beds.

She knew from experience that the homesteaders in this area locked the doors of their lairs at night, so she had to be clever. Through an open window? Down the chimney? She studied the lair for a long time, looking for a way in. And then she saw it. In the lower part of the front door, the owner of the lair had fashioned a smaller door for his white-fanged companion to come and go.

And that was his mistake.

Her heart began to pound, for her body knew the time had come, and the leaves withdrew from around her. She emerged from the cover of the forest and quickly darted across the open grassy area that surrounded the lair. She hated open areas. Her legs felt strange and uneven as she ran across the unnaturally flat ground. She dashed up the steps to the wooden porch. Then she slipped down onto her hands and knees, pushed through the little door, and crawled into the darkened lair to begin the nights take.

O nce inside the walls of the lair, Willa scurried out of the moonlight filtering in through the window. She hunkered down on the floor in the shadowed corner of the eating place, the small quills on the back of her neck rising up as her eyes scanned the darkness for danger.

Wheres the biting dog? she wondered. Are all the day-folk upstairs in their beds?

Holding her breath, she slithered across the floor and looked out into the main room of the lair for attackers.

She waited, she watched, and she listened.

If they caught her hereactually inside their lairthey would kill her. They had hacked the trees of the forest and hunted the animals. They had murdered her mother, her father, her twin sister, and so many others of the Dead Hollow lair. The day-folk did not think. They did not hesitate. Whether it was the wolves who howled to find their loved ones in the night, or the great trees who raised their limbs to the sun, the day-folk killed whatever they did not understand. And they understood very little of the forest into which they had come.

As she pulled in a slow and steady, tightly controlled breath, she heard the sound of the small metal-wound machine ticking on the fireplace mantel and the slow hiss and crackle of the dying embers that had led her here to the lair.