Willa Hext's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Willa Hext planted ivy the way other women planted roses. She wanted a wall of black thorns around Treetomb, so thick no child she lured in could ever crawl back out. For three springs her vines had crept wider along the forest edge. Then the woodcutter came. She heard his axe before she saw him. Chop. Chop. Each stroke bit the young ivy at the treeline, where her newest shoots had just taken root. Green juice stained the blade. He kicked the cut vines into a pile and reached for more. By nightfall he would clear a month of her work. Willa did not rush him. She crouched behind a leaning picket fence, its boards cracked and soft with rot, and watched. A pale moth with bone-colored wings landed on her stained knuckle. She let it rest. Then she looked past the woodcutter, toward the muddy yard behind the fence. A boy stood there in striped pajamas. Barefoot, filthy, wide-eyed. He stared at a spot of empty air and whispered a name. Nobody answered. Nobody ever did. The woodcutter's son, Gideon. The one the father watched from the corner of his eye while he worked. Willa smiled her black-toothed smile. She lifted her basket of woven bones and shook it. Candy rattled inside. The boy's head turned. He did not fear her. He pointed past her shoulder at nothing and said a name she did not know. "Come closer, lamb," Willa said. "I have sweets." Gideon stepped over the rotting fence. His bare feet sank in the mud. He took a candy from her hand and did not eat it. He only stared at the empty air beside her and whispered. The axe stopped. The woodcutter turned. He saw his son's hand inside the basket of bones. He saw the old woman crouched at the treeline. His face went white. The axe hung loose in his grip. "Keep cutting," Willa said, soft and sweet, "and the forest keeps your boy." She closed her green fingers around Gideon's wrist. The boy did not pull away. The woodcutter dropped the axe. It thudded in the dirt beside his pile of dead vines. "Please," he said. "He's all I have." "Then leave my woods alone." The man nodded fast. He backed away, hands open, eyes on his son. He left the axe where it fell. He left the cut ivy in a heap. Willa let go of Gideon's wrist. The boy walked back over the fence to his father, slow, still whispering to the air. The woodcutter grabbed him and ran. Willa picked up the fallen axe. Good steel. She would bury it deep in her roots where no blade could trouble them again. But the boy had seen her now. And the boy spoke to things she could not see.