A/N: This was written for the WA All Dialogue/All Narrative challenge. The word count turned out to be too high to be an official entry, but the style stuck.

I hugely appreciate all comments, and constructive criticism is welcome. The title is adapted from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, and the quoted ritual at the beginning comes from the first Thief game.

Thanks to tafferling for betaing.

A Forest Grows in Dayport

Night smother light, black brick lamp, done with bright

Dew and damp, smother tight, dark and hide, foolsie sight

Stay inside, fear the night, call the dark, call the black

Bringsie forth, I call it back

– The Trickster's Ritual

One

i

Back when Garrett was a boy, before the Trickster won, in the long hungry years of his life between his mother's death and the day he fell in with the Keepers, a man told him he'd been born to hang.

That had been Long Thomas, a vicious bastard with nothing but spite in his soul, whose common-law wife was the sister of Scarrow Green. Scarrow was a wannabe-entrepreneur Garrett had fallen in with, who'd seen an opportunity in the hordes of homeless street-rats going begging on the streets. So he'd set up shop, charged a couple of coppers to any boy who wanted to learn how to be a better thief, safe in the warm confines of Scarrow's filthy kitchen. Their coppers bought them food and shelter, and the chance to practice the art of thieving – and it was an art: it was Scarrow who'd first taught Garrett that – without having to worry about the bluecoats or the gallows. It was in that kitchen that he'd learned how to charm purses from pockets, practising on a coat with a pocket as hung about with delicate silver bells as a pampered cat.

It was the sort of set-up Garrett might have instinctively distrusted, except that Scarrow genuinely did have a bit of a soft heart. More to the point, he was selfish, and it it didn't take long for Garrett to figure out exactly what Scarrow had to gain from his altruistic little thieves' den.

Scarrow liked women. He liked how having the kids around made him look like some kind of gentleman philanthropist. No easier method to charm a woman's legs open than dunning her into thinking you a soft-hearted cove who gave a damn about the well-being of children.

Scarrow was a selfish bastard, no doubt, but he wasn't a dangerous one – just a tender idiot who kept an eye out for the main chance and an easy bit of cunt.

It wasn't hard to see which were the kids who got the most attention – the talented ones who could earn their keep, and the pretty little weaklings, who couldn't, but were the sort of blond-haired consumptive brats a woman might melt over. Her heart for them, and her cunt for Scarrow. A fine little scam, and if the other kids, the ones who weren't talented or pretty, sickened and died, well, too bad for them. Not like Scarrow was made of money. Not like he could help them all.

Garrett had benefited from Scarrow's largesse himself. When he was ten, something he'd eaten had made him sicken, leaving him with a pain in his belly so bad he'd thought it was like to burst. His liquified guts poured out of him in a stream of burning watery shit, leaving him so weak he could barely push himself away from the puddle of vomit by his cheek. It was Scarrow who'd paid for the tonic that had saved his life, and afterwards Garrett had been so grateful he'd danced attendance on the man, had done everything he could to show him how grateful he was. Not an emotion he was used to, gratitude, and neither was adoration, but he'd adored Scarrow after that.

It was only years later Garrett counted up the value of all the stolen goods he'd handed over willingly to Scarrow, and realised he must have paid him back for the cost of the tonic a hundredfold. He'd been torn between anger at himself for being duped and grudging respect for Scarrow. Still, Scarrow had saved his life, and not just with the tonic: the skills Garrett had learned and practised in Scarrow's kitchen had probably saved his life several times over too. The bastard had kept him warm and he'd kept him safe.

At least until Long Thomas started turning up. Unlike Scarrow, who was more of a con-artist in those days, Long Thomas was still a thief, and the dangerous sort, his dues fully paid up with the Dockside Wardens. He was also a cunt, free with his fists and with Scarrow's women, and Scarrow was scared shitless of him. Scarrow might play tough, but Garrett could see how he physically shrank on the days when Long Thomas was around, sitting at his table, judging each boy and finding them wanting.

Especially Garrett. He took against Garrett for one reason or other, probably because back then Garrett hadn't learnt when to keep his smart-mouthed comments to himself.

It came to a head one night when Long Thomas had suggested taking their training to the rooftops. He had a job in the works, something that needed a likely sort of lad who was small and quick and had a head for heights. He'd bet them all they couldn't circumvate the spire of the Hammerite chapel before the clock tower chimed out ten o'clock.

Garrett did it. The drop to the cobbles below had made him feel physically sick, but he did it, and the other boys and Scarrow were all cheering him when he dropped back down to the rooftop, grinning, just at the first of the chimes began to sound.

And then as he'd turned to claim his prize, Long Thomas had slammed his blackjack into Garrett's belly. The back of Garrett's skull struck a chimney as he fell, his vision blurring with a sharp spike of pain. And then as he lay flat on his back, winded and crying with the pain, a boot pressed down on his throat, crushing his windpipe, stopping his breath. He never had been strong, especially back then – a skinny little rat of a boy, scrabbling at Long Thomas's ankle with fingernails bitten to the quick. That was when Long Thomas made his pronouncement, and it had the air of a prophecy.

Garrett would hang.

Those words had come back to Garrett three years when the guillotine was installed in Hangman's Square three years later. So much quicker, so much easier, and no more hangings. Long Thomas was dead by then, and he'd gone to the gallows himself, but the memory of his promise was so vivid Garrett could feel the boot at his throat, could smell the reek of stale alcohol and sour unwashed skin. But the City was done with hangings – the guillotine was the modern way to deal with criminals. And if some were disappointed with the loss of the visual spectacle of bodies dangling from gibbets, they'd make do with heads on spikes and the thrill of spurting blood.

Long Thomas had been wrong, and the spectre that had haunted Garrett, the man who he was still terrified of five years on, whom he still saw sometimes, waking from a restless sleep to see looming over his pallet, began to fade. Because he'd been wrong.

Except, of course, he hadn't been.

ii

Strange how easy failure was in the end. A single moment of clumsiness at the very moment he should have been safe. He'd swapped the fake Eye for the real thing, now cradled safely like a baby in his arms. His own stolen eye seemed to wink up at him. A scuff of a boot on stone, and even then he thought he might have gotten away with it, that the Trickster hadn't heard. At least until the first vine came whipping out of the darkness and twined around his throat, choking off his airways.

He'd failed. More vines wrapped around his wrists and ankles, and the Trickster, that monstrous hulking figure with its goaty musk, its reek of seed and spice and honey, came dancing towards him, its delicate hooves click-clacking on the stone. Its thighs were thick with wiry hair, phallus dangling between them, its gleaming black eyes glittering as it plucked the real Eye from his hand. He'd expected to be killed there and then, but instead he'd been forced to watch as the Trickster completed the ritual and set darkness loose upon the world.

He failed. And he'd been hanged for it. Long Thomas had been right after all.

iii

They choked and beat and broke him, stripped him naked. Left him to burn and to freeze, wrapped him in branches and vines and cobwebs, dangled him like an insect caught in a spider's web. They starved him until he wept from hunger, then forced half-rotted food down his gullet, branches twining into his mouth, pushing in more and more, until he could do nothing else but swallow or choke to death. He ate and ate and ate until his stomach was distended, and he vomited it all up.

Vines dripped water into his parched mouth, never quite enough to quench his thirst. Only when it rained, the freezing raindrops pattering down through the leaves, did Garrett get the chance to drink his fill. So long as he was on his back, anyway, or at an angle where he could tilt his head to catch the raindrops in his mouth. Most of the time he was facing downwards, and the icy water would pool uselessly between the vines that held him close, soaking his hair and running down into his remaining eye, mingling with his burning tears.

He had no memory of them moving him from the Maw. They fed him drugs that dragged him into a black unnatural sleep, or conjured up visions, that made him thrash against the vines that held him. He'd scream and beg for mercy, for death, while Long Thomas, the terror of his boyhood, crept along the webbing of vines and branches towards him like a great and terrible spider.

They moved him again when he was sleeping, and more than once.

A great forest. A ruined building. Or the Trickster's court, where Garrett played the part of a fool, his grimy naked body draped in a ragged motley – the tan and gristly red of flayed human skin. The throne room was a miserable place, with gnarled branches snaking in through broken windows. A few raggedy pagans sat scattered around. They looked almost as whipped and cowed and miserable as Garrett must have done.

Vines wrapped around his wrists and ankles forced him to dance and caper for their amusement like a marionette, and afterwards they let him feed himself from the groaning table piled high with rotting food, overripe fruit and meat crawling with maggots. Garrett, leashed like a dog, but used to keeping his hatred and fury hidden, ate what he could, knowing he might not get another chance. He cowered at the sound of those click-clacking little goat's feet prancing closer, the goaty stink of the god-thing as it danced around him. The Trickster gripped the vine around his throat, and Garrett, his mouth full of meat on the turn, which flooded his mouth with nauseating juices with every bite, whimpered and clawed at the table as the Trickster hauled him backwards.

It wasn't the first time he'd starved, and he knew he wasn't really starving now – not really. He still remembered that one bad summer, after a series of failed harvests, when there'd been rioting on the streets at the price of bread. He'd been about seven then, his mother gone only a couple of years, so he hadn't quite forgotten what it meant to be loved and still occasionally dreamed of warm arms around him. There was still a stupid part of him that dreamed she might be coming back, but that summer had been enough to crush that hope right out of him.

He'd never known hunger like it, before or since, but the memory of it had never quite left him, no matter what he ate. He'd scraped himself through somehow, crawling the streets from dawn to dusk, searching for enough pieces of dogshit to earn him a scant handful of pennies from the tannery in the stews. Once they'd tried to cheat him, claiming the bucket hadn't been filled up enough, and as punishment, not only wouldn't he get his coin, but they'd keep the bucket and its filthy stinking contents too. He'd sworn at them, got beaten beaten bloody for his pains, but he hadn't begged them for mercy. Not then.

But he was begging now. He wept and clawed at his leash, pleading with the Trickster to let him have a little more, until the leash tightened to hard around his throat he couldn't breathe.

It was never long before they hanged him again and for the first time in a long while he was thinking about Long Thomas again. Long Thomas with his boot on a boy's throat, crushing the hope from him. Telling him he was born to hang.

And he'd been right all along, the bastard. Garrett had always assumed hanging would kill him. Instead, he'd just wish it had.

iv

There were others sometimes too. Other bodies with him in the trees. Some kicked and fought and struggled and screamed; some tried to call out to Garrett, begging him to help them, begging him to tell them what was happening, what would be done with them. Figures moved through the forest paths beneath them, keeping their heads down, while the men around Garrett screamed at them for help, for mercy, to cut them down. Once, a pagan boy, trailing along behind his father, lifted his head and stared up at Garrett, his eyes wide and frightened, much as Garrett had watched public executions when he'd been young. The boy's father slapped him hard for looking up, for doing anything but keeping his eyes fixed on the path. It was a slap born of terror, and the two hurried on while the man suspended beside Garrett screamed. Thankfully he didn't stay long. The others never did. They weren't special, not like Garrett. He was the Trickster's prize. The stringsy puppet manfool, who'd thought he could play at stealing from a god and win.

One day he slept and when he woke he was alone.

And then he wasn't.

It might have been a dream. Or a hallucination. He kept thinking it couldn't be real, even as the two figures cut through the wines and branches that held him and lowered him gently to the ground. There was a moment when he was clasped in someone's arms, and then they pulled away and he'd left a smear of snot and tears on their woollen robes. He clung to them like a frightened child, begging them not to leave him this time. Not this time. Not again. He couldn't do it again. He begged them to take him with them, and they gently prised his hands away. Something small and hard and cold was pressed into his loosely clenched fist, and then he was crumpled on the bank of mossy earth at the base of a tree and they were gone.

If the Keepers said anything to him before they left, he didn't remember.

What he did remember was cursing them out. Screaming the worst invectives after them, or trying to, same as he'd sworn at the tanner who'd stolen his hard-earned pail of dogshit from him, back before he'd learned the virtues of keeping your mouth tight shut and your rage well hidden. His throat was so ragged and parched the only sound he could make was a soundless croak. The hard little thing they pushed into his hand was a key of solid iron, threaded onto a leather thong. He stared at it, unable in his weakened state to make sense of it. In the end, he gave up, and hung the thong around his neck. The key felt like a shard of ice against his chest.

He slumped back against the roots, ready to give up, ready, at last, to die, but the sound of something crashing through the trees was enough to spur him back to his feet. He stumbled over the roots, unused to walking, and the trees seemed to claw at him, intent on stopping him from escaping. Every inch of him was left scoured and scraped to ribbons, his palms, his face, his thighs, the soles of his feet, by thorn bushes that whipped at him, tried to scratch out his remaining eye.

He'd thought himself lost in a vast forest, but as he scrambled down a mossy bank, he gave a cry of shock as something sharp and jagged ripped a gash in the back of his thigh. At the bottom, he crumpled, breathing hard and fast, his scream a soundless thing howled into the ground. The bank hadn't been earth at all, but a ruined stone wall beneath a thin blanket of earth and moss. The remnants of what had once been a window gaped like a missing tooth in a jaw, jagged shards of broken glass remaining in the frame. Another shape he'd taken to be a crooked tree in the gloom turned out to be a twisted metal lamp-post, its light long since dead. He pressed one hand to the back of his thigh, and drew the other across his cheek, although there were no tears to wipe away.

This was no forest, but a City street, the trees pushing up through brick and stone and concrete, ripping up the foundations of the buildings and growing up through rooftops. Terracotta tiles littered the ground beneath Garrett's bare feet like fallen autumn leaves.

He frowned at the skyline, picked out the familiar shape of a crane and reorientated himself through force of habit. He knew that skyline, altered though it might have been: this was Dayport. How long must he have been out for a forest to have grown up like this?

Shivering, confused and frightened, and with his blood running down into the back of his knee, he felt his grip on consciousness slipping. He leaned against a tree, breathing hard, legs ready to crumple, fighting dizziness.

Something moved in the bushes. His head snapped up. Gripping the tree for support, he swiped up a chunk of rubble, but he was so weak he could barely close his fist around it. His first instinct under normal circumstances would have been to run, but he was bleeding too badly; he wouldn't get far. Even in the darkness the trail would be easy to follow, and they could track him, stalk him, pick him off at their leisure.

But he was angry now, the surging rage he'd carried in his heart since he was a child. He'd learned to keep it in check, first out of fear, then because the Keepers demanded it of him, and finally because he'd recognised how useful that cold steady-eyed fury could be when under control. It didn't cloud the judgement like normal rage, but sharpened it, a tool to focus the mind. And he'd used the tool as any half-decent thief would use a tools at his disposal – turned it like a spying glass on the fat and rich and privileged, making it easier to strip them of their valuables and every scrap of pride.

Now it was turned on a woman, with elaborate scarification markings around her eyes. She was dressed in a roughly fashioned leather jerkin dyed a dull ochre. A Pagan, but she clasped an infant to her chest and her eyes were bright with terror.

The stone tumbled from his grip – probably wishful thinking anyway – and he held his palm up, to show her he meant her no harm. All his clarity of thought fled; he was a fugitive scrambling through a City he didn't recognise any more, and he had no idea whether she might mean him harm.

Well, maybe she didn't, but somebody did.

From behind, a club slammed into his upper back. It drove him to his knees. with a choking cry of pain. And again it slammed down, on the back of his skull. His vision blackened at the edges, tunnelling away. Feet scuffed in the dirt around his head, the woman hissing something, her voice fierce and insistent. And he heard his own voice too, so slurred it sounded like he was drunk. It came from a great distance, begging them for help.

One last thought flashed through his mind before the darkness claimed him: that he'd once sworn he'd never beg again.

So much for that.