"Hey. Hey, Wirt."
Wirt's eyes cracked open and he huffed, annoyed. This wasn't the first time Greg had interrupted his sleep for one reason or another, and he was sure it wouldn't be the last. Which would be only mildly annoying if he were sure he could drift back to his dreams right away, but he could feel immediately that he'd be awake for hours.
Wirt gave him the cold shoulder, pinching his eyes shut and pretending to still be asleep. (A cold shoulder wasn't difficult. He was already clinging to his cape, trying to squeeze together some semblance of warmth."
"Okay. You sleep," Greg said from behind him. "I'm sorry I got us lost, Wirt."
Something in Wirt gave way, remembering where exactly they were. He pried an eye open again and sighed, letting go of his cape to push himself up.
There was resistance, like his cape was a solid thing instead of fabric.
Greg kept talking. "Will you take care of Ronald for me?"
Which sounded like Greg was planning on leaving somewhere, and that was not okay. Wirt tried to say something, maybe along the lines of "I'm up, I'm up, don't go anywhere," but all he could make was a small strangled noise as a scratchy cold thing moved to cover his mouth, settling in-between his teeth like a horse's bit.
"Okay," said Greg, and for a second Wirt thought he saw Wirt's struggles. But he continued, "I have to go now. Goodbye, Wirt," and Wirt could hear receding tiny footfalls crunch in the snow.
"Yes, come, Gregory," said something infinitely deeper and darker than Greg. "There is much to be done."
If Wirt was squirming before, he was honestly struggling now, his eyes searching desperately. It was wood. He was covered in wooden branches that squeezed and tightened as though their hold on him was consciously controlled.
"And then you'll show us the way home, right?" Greg sounded far away.
Wirt tried to scream Greg's name but the root in his mouth gagged him.
"Of course. We made a promise, didn't we?"
Beatrice flew onwards, her feathers folding almost backward against the harsh north wind of winter. She called out Greg and Wirt's names now and then, but nothing showed up beneath her but acres and acres of stupid foliage.
It was a hopeless cause. Maybe they were already home by now. That was wishful thinking, but she was too exhausted to care.
And yet… going home to her family wasn't an option. Not until she got those scissors. Wirt and Greg were the last ones to see them; they were her only lead. More than that, after what had happened, those boys were her responsibility almost as much as her family's curse was.
She'd thought getting a bird's-eye view would be an advantage. But there were things she couldn't see from the air-dense undergrowth and dark places. She would have to try harder.
It was late when she finally saw Greg, half-covered in Edelwood and barely able to respond to her. Almost too late.
"I'll get Wirt," she told Greg, hopping from the wood-entwined tea kettle to the boy's shoulder to the ground before him and back onto the kettle nervously. "I'll find him and bring him back here."
Greg coughed up a leaf. "No," he said, shaking his head as much as he could in his confines. "He's not here anymore. I beat the Beast," he added stubbornly. "If I'm still here, he must have already shown Wirt and Ronald the way home."
Beatrice had no way to know if that was true or not. But even if it wasn't, she was unwilling to break the kid's heart on his deathbed. "Okay," Beatrice said softly. "I'll find someone else."
Greg smiled, a sad smile that made him look older.
"I, I'm sorry, Greg," she said before she took wing, and that was the last thing she ever said to him.
She found Wirt not long after that, a ways away across the frozen marsh. He was nestled near the trunk of a tree, which might have looked cozy enough if he weren't clearly panicking.
"Wirt," she squawked, alighting beside him. "Stop messing around and get out of there, Greg needs you now!"
Wirt turned wide red-rimmed eyes to her but didn't answer, excusable only because of the huge root wrapped from around his neck to halfway up his skull. He looked exhausted, like he'd been fighting the edelwood's growth for hours or longer.
Beatrice stayed with him a minute, watching his pointless silent fighting, before taking to the air again.
(So, fine, she might have been responsible for all this, but she was still a little angry at how he'd vanished without giving her a chance to explain. After she'd saved them from Adelaide and nearly sacrificed herself for them, too! Wirt may not have known that, but it didn't make her less frustrated.)
Finding Wirt and Greg turned out to have been easy compared to finding anyone else in the stupid huge forest. Night fell too soon and Beatrice reluctantly stopped searching for the evening, unable to see anything beneath the canopy of trees.
She set off again in the wee hours of the following morning, circling the area around Greg over and over as though someone would appear heaven-sent.
Beatrice finally spied the dim, fading light of a lantern. Earlier, she would have hesitated to approach, but times were more desperate now. She dove down and accosted the Woodsman, flitting about his head and peppering him with accusations.
"This is all your fault, you know. You'd better fix it. You could have helped those boys from day one but you didn't because, what, you wanted this to happen? You needed more edelwood, more oil for your lantern?" she spat out at him from this way and that.
He stopped her wearily. "The youngest is beyond help," he said. His voice was dull and he didn't make a move to shoo her. Guilt at her words leaked out from him palpably.
"You saw him in the wood?" she shrieked. "You didn't cut him out?"
"I didn't-" The Woodsman swung the lantern around, looking for the creature to blame. The Beast wasn't close enough to be seen by the flickering soul-light. "Lead me to him and I will try," the Woodsman said, defeated. "But I fear he's too far gone."
"Worry about that when he's not stuck in a tree," Beatrice retorted, flying a bit higher. "Follow me, I saw him this way."
They went to the clearing and back a couple of times, unable to recognize one tree out of many. But Beatrice eventually got her bearings and choked out a "no...!"
The Woodsman shook his head, shining the lantern over the tree. He was grieving in his own way. "Too far gone," he said again, staring at the tree. It stretched tall and wide like any other in the forest but for the grimace laid out over its bark.
"He's still in there, fool," Beatrice snapped with only a moment's hesitation. "Cut him out of it!"
The Woodsman gave her a look of pity but set down the lantern with a creak. The dirty task had to be done anyway; no point in waiting to harvest the oil.
Slowly, rhythmically, having done it a thousand times even if he never knew the foul sin of the action until today, the Woodsman hauled up his ax and chopped at the wood. Several feet up, at Beatrice's insistence, to avoid cutting any vulnerable body inside.
But it became clear as the Woodsman tirelessly worked that there was no living child inside the trunk yearning for freedom. Whatever process the edelwood's growth worked by, it absorbed its dead much faster than a normal forest would.
The Woodsman topped the hollow trunk in half with a crash and a groan as the tree was felled. Beatrice hung back, watching from a branch, unwilling to get closer and see her failure with her own eyes.
Bending over, the Woodsman reached into the trunk. He pulled out a tarnished tea kettle and, at the base of it, a round whitish thing small enough to be cradled in his palms.
It was difficult for Beatrice to keep her composure when the Woodsman held the thing-which she refused to look at directly-in his arms and sobbed.
As the daylight faded, she finally turned to the man. "There's one more," she said as if she still believed one of the brothers could be saved.
Clutching his prize, a difficult feat with the lantern and ax also in hand, the Woodsman stood and nodded. His expression was stoic, betrayed only by its wetness. "Lead me to him," he said in his gravelly way.
Beatrice watched from the air as the man picked his way across the ice and slush of the marsh. It was easier to spy Wirt than it had been to find Greg's remains, as the teenager was still moving. He writhed upon seeing them, but for all the exertion he seemed to give, his movement was slight. A tree trunk encased him almost totally now, leaning against the larger tree for support.
The Woodsman began his work at the head, taking small cuts that nevertheless made Wirt flinch until the root around his head fell to the snow beneath him.
"Where's Greg?" Wirt croaked as soon as he was able. "And the frog, I'm supposed to be watching the frog."
Neither the Woodsman nor Beatrice thought they were the appropriate person to answer. Wirt searched their eyes and then their persons, finally seeing the kettle and the pale bone held within it.
Wirt cried. It wasn't a dignified weeping like the Woodsman's had been, but a hysterical wailing, interspersed with half-formed sentences and choking noises and thick black oily tears. The Woodsman had to stop cutting as Wirt screamed and thrashed in his wooden encasement.
Beatrice had been expecting the grief, but the sight of the gloppy oil being squeezed out of Wirt's eyes and streaming down his face made her ill. The sight was wrong, just as everything about the scene was wrong.
She fluttered away, telling herself she was giving Wirt privacy even though she knew she was running away from her own nauseating guilt of failure.
Wirt was alive, that much she'd done. But for how much longer?
The Woodsman watched the boy's anguish, at a loss for what to do or whether he should be here. He couldn't leave before he finished his work-not until Wirt was no longer wrapped in an edelwood.
"Woodsman," he heard from the shadows. He snapped his head around, noticing the bluebird's absence. That rumbling, ominous voice belonged to no bird, of course. "Feed the lantern."
That old reprise was overplayed. The Beast said it too often. But he would say it when the Woodsman had already cut down the edelwoods, grinding their oil out bottle by bottle. There was no grinder here, no way to get oil-except the thick black of the boy's tears. Wirt was still beyond reasoning with, clutching at air and staring at the kettle and making apologies that could never be accepted.
And his face was streaked with shining black oil. Bottles worth, pouring down his face and emptying uselessly into the frozen soil.
The woodsman, unnoticed, put a hand below the wood at Wirt's shoulders, collecting a palmful of oil. Then, morbidly curious, he obediently poured the stuff into the lantern.
"It's pure," the Beast's voice came from the shadows, sounding richly satisfied.
"You can hardly tell from so little," the Woodsman said, mindful that they were being overheard. He looked at the flame in the lantern-was it really shining more brightly? Could his daughter truly be kept alive from a substance so awful as this?
"Cut him out, and keep the boy from planting root," the Beast commanded. "He will come with us."
Farming grief. That was what the Beast had been doing all these years. Should the Woodsman be surprised at this new low? And could he argue? There was nowhere else for Wirt to go. Even now, the boy was muttering that he couldn't go home, would never go home without Greg.
The Woodsman watched him, then took his ax in hand again. Chopping at the wood at at long length freeing Wirt, who stumbled forward towards his little brother's remains.
But he tripped and fell as snakelike roots crawled out of the earth and up his ankle. The Woodsman caught him, barely.
"Take them," he said to Wirt. Wirt nodded, face smeared with the oil to the point where his gauntness and exhaustion were almost invisible behind it, and reached out to snatch the kettle and its cargo.
The Woodsman bent, sawing through the thin ankle roots with the blade of his ax, then heaved Wirt up. Wirt exclaimed something, startled out of his sadness, as he was lifted into the boughs of a leafless maple above him.
"Stay there. I'll return with a cart from the mill," the Woodsman said to Wirt. "Don't go near the ground, or I'll have to cut you out again."
Wirt seemed not to hear. A droplet hit the brim of the Woodsman's hat like rain.
"And," the Woodsman added, defeated, as he pulled a small glass bottle from a pocket and held it up to the boy in the tree, "Save your tears in this." There was no way to ensure Wirt's obedience but words, so the Woodsman said the one thing he was sure would make the elder boy obey. "Your brother would have wished it."
A bluebird watched from afar as the Woodsman left Wirt in the clearing, trudging away to her family's old grist mill. Flapping her wings to alight and perch near Wirt, she almost missed the shadow rising from behind the Woodsman.
It settled a hand on his shoulder and hissed words of pride in his ear.