Gillie Blue's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Gillie Blue stopped at the edge of the third wrong clearing and knew the grove had moved again. She had been walking for two hours. She had passed this same split birch twice. Somewhere past it, her friend was still trapped, the one who had followed her in a week ago and not come out. She tightened her grip on the hiking stick her father had cut for her. A good stick keeps you honest on uneven ground, he'd said. She needed honest ground now more than she ever had. Small eyes watched her from the moss. A beetle the size of her thumb. Two mice on a root. A thrush with its head tipped sideways. She had felt them the whole morning, tracking her from branch to stone to branch. The groves hurt people who lingered. She could already feel it in her teeth, a low ache like cold water. She crouched and set down her purple backpack. "He came through here," she said to the beetle. "Tall. Loud laugh. Red jacket. Which way did they take him?" The beetle turned in a slow circle. The mice sat up. The thrush hopped one branch closer and made a sound that was not quite a word. Gillie waited. She tried the few forest words her father had taught her for luck. She tried pointing. She tried drawing a jacket in the dirt with the tip of her stick. The thrush cocked its head the other way. The mice went back to grooming. Whatever they knew, she could not reach it. The language was a wall. She sat down hard in the leaves. For the first time since she'd entered the grove she let herself say it out loud. "I can't do this alone." The light changed. It came between two pines, slow and white, and at first she thought it was only sun breaking through. Then the sun stepped forward on four hooves. A unicorn, small as a young horse, its mane streaked with pale blue, a single horn catching the light like wet glass. It stopped ten feet from her and lowered its head until its eye was level with hers. Gillie did not move. The ache in her teeth eased. The unicorn looked at the beetle. The beetle lifted one leg and pointed, clean and certain, toward the dark line of trees behind the split birch. The mice turned the same way. The thrush called once and flew in that direction. The unicorn took two steps after the thrush and stopped. It looked back at her. Gillie stood. She shouldered the purple pack and picked up her stick. "Okay," she said. "Show me." She followed the unicorn past the split birch, into trees she had not been able to enter alone.