The Withering Wood
She stumbles over a root buried in the snow. The permafrost beneath the soft powder is hard and uneven underfoot. The many brambles of the undergrowth stretch out gnarled claws to pluck at her cloak. Her knees and skins ache with fresh bruises from her many falls. Now, she sets down her charge and allows herself a moment to catch her breath. She looks back the way she has come and grimaces at the fresh prints in the snow. There is little she can do about them now. She listens for the sound of pursuers, then takes a mittened hand, and walks on through the night.
The cold bites at their faces. It eats into the child’s thin boots and gnaws on her toes until they are numb. Frost lays claim to her eyelashes, her hair, the shoulders of her cloak, and she shivers with it.
All around, the skeletal trees are clothed in white. They stand in a brooding silence, ghostly sentries shielding the mortal world from the taint of the Withering Wood beyond. The stars observe the passage of the woman and her child from above the reaching fingers of the trees. Their light is pale, and deep indigo clouds drift across their view. But the stars are not the woman’s only guide. She knows these woods. She has lived in their shadow her whole life. She knows the way.
So do the others of her village, and they will be coming for her. By now her husband will have returned home to find his wife and child fled into the night. She tries not to imagine the heat of his rage when he kicked in the door, cast aside his catch for the day, and turned about in anger when she did not rush to pick it up. How long would it have taken him to rally the men? They would still be dressed and booted from the hunt, their weapons still warm with the blood of their kills and perhaps hungry to taste more.
The girl makes a pitiful sound, as though she shares these fears. Her mother drops into a crouch beside her. She cups her daughter’s flushed cheeks, brushes tendrils of hair from her forehead, and begs her in a whisper to be quiet. The child’s eyes are dull with exhaustion, but she listens, places a hand almost playfully over her own mouth.
The woman's gaze ascends to the mark between her brows. The faint outline of a rose flanked by two crescent moons mars the otherwise smooth skin. The ink has grown darker since it first appeared at sunset. It is the twin to her mother’s mark, but where the woman’s is the bright yellow of a mortal woman, the child’s is turning black. She presses a tender kiss to that cursed outline.
They walk on, and the night draws in close.
The Withering senses the approach of a kindred spirit and so stirs from its age-long vigil. Snow coats its dark, bark-like flesh. When he shakes the lethargy and ice from his limbs, his form is as intangible as black smoke contained within the confines of a humanlike shape. In one stride he moves from the heart of the wood to its fringes, where the trees more familiar to mortals grow. Blue fire behind his eyes alights on the woman and witchling child struggling in the snow, the yowling hounds not far behind, and the wrathful faces of the mortal men following after.
She will die tonight. She knew this before she donned her cloak and stepped over the threshold of their home. Her life is no longer her own, her surrendered fate tied between two possible ends. Either she will perish at the hands of her husband and his dogs, or she will meet her demise in the hostile snows of the Withering Wood.
Ahead, the first of its trees gleam in the moonlight between the silver birches, urging her on. Their bark is an unnatural, opalescent white, their needle-like leaves the deepest blue of midnight. Death will be welcome so long as she reaches those trees. She is close; so close she can sense the gaze of the Withering upon her.
She scoops up the child once more and runs.
The men are not so far behind. They raise bows, spears, anything to stop her reaching the wood. An arrow flashes past her ear and buries itself in a tree. The hounds nip at her heels.
There are tears in her eyes. Desperation grips her lungs and chokes the air from her throat. Something sharp pierces her leg but it is too late. She staggers over the unseen divide between the natural and unnatural. The dogs try to follow, only to shy away from the border, whining with their tails between their legs.
The Withering steadies her with a gnarled hand. She presses the child into his arms even as the taint of his magic mottles her flesh and turns her bones to ice. The woman dies with a smile on her blue lips and the roaring of her husband in her ears.
Her child, at least, is safe.