irminar-vihwl

The grove lay at the far end of the east field, past the stone wall that had fallen down. The grove was full of oaks that held the canopy, Elm and Ash vying for position even in shade, Linden trees filling the rest of the area.

At one time, the family’s pigs rooted here. The great number of Hazel trees at the groves edge made the work of building a fence easy, while providing nuts for the animals. The pen was long gone now, as was the smell. Its bones remained; ditches, wattle fence, and wood uprights grey and rotten, rails fallen away from the deep notches that once held them. Strips of rope, frayed and weathered, still clung in places where they had been bound tight around the joints. Irmina said they’d stopped keeping animals in the grove after the Taking, though she never told what that meant. Oswin only knew it had been before he was born.

Along the grove’s edge, where sunlight still touched the earth, a clump of young trees had sprung up close together; saplings of oak and ash that leaned toward each other as if grown from a single seed. Inside that circle, the air felt still and sheltered. Oswin and Erla had claimed it for their hold.

They had bent and woven long vines between the trunks, lacing them in and out until the gaps were mostly closed. In places, they’d propped stones against the base of the weaving to keep the biting wind from slipping through. Beyond the young trees, the rest of the grove darkened quickly, its older trunks rising in a tangle of moss and shadow.

Erla crouched inside now, tugging a stubborn vine into place and tucking it tight. “It’ll hold through a rain, maybe two.

She sang a babbling song, making the work easy.

“We should stack more stones on the north side,” Oswin said. “That’s where the wind comes down the hill.”

She looked up at him, hair sticking to her forehead. “You’re good at this. Always planning ahead.”

He only shrugged, though a small warmth stirred in his chest at her words.

“I’ll gather more stones for that side,” he said, stepping out of the fort.

The air felt different deeper in the grove; cooler, as if the shadows from the deep were reaching toward him. For a moment, he had the uneasy sense that the trees were aware of him, though nothing moved.

A few paces away, near the shadow-line where the young trees met the older grove, he spotted a flat stone half-buried in last year’s leaves. As he cleared them away, his fingers brushed cloth. He pulled it free; a scrap of faded fabric, frayed at the edges, wrapped around a bundle of twigs. The sticks were smooth and pale, not from any tree he knew, and tied with a thin cord that looked more like woven grass than string. The soot-smudged face was little more than two dark marks and a line, but it seemed to watch him.

A cool, earthy musk rose from it, like the air of a cave or a place far underground.

“Where’d you get that?” Erla called from inside the fort.

“It was stuck here,” he said, glancing toward the deeper grove. The doll felt strangely weightless in his hand, but heavy on his mind, as if it belonged to the place more than to any person.

He gave it a name, or perhaps remembered it: Brim.

“I’m Brim,” he said in a thin, high voice, pretending to make the doll speak. “And who’s this with me?”

“Oswin,” Erla replied at once, laughing.

The name hung in the air a moment too long, as if the trees had caught it.