Kindred fought the urge to flee back up the stairs. Did they know? She could still run: she might somehow avoid Barque, might make it back to Cruel House. She could plead ignorance, take whatever punishment the man drummed up.
She stayed, feet firm.
“Who are you here to see?” the first guard asked, putting her body and blades between Kindred and the entrance to the Forest.
“Ragged Sarah, Captain Jane Caraway, and Little Wing,” Kindred said, keeping her eyes ahead but listening for the sound of feet stepping off the stairs behind her, for the sound of panting breath and Barque’s cudgel whistling through the air.
The taller woman consulted a list written out on a curling length of Sea grass while the first continued to eye Kindred.
Moments passed, and Kindred tried to keep breathing, to not look as though she had run there, to remember herself as a person who belonged in this place. That ghost wind rattled the leaves of the trees again, the sound dry and old, like sickly breathing.
Did she hear something behind her? The sound of a humiliated man cursing under his breath? Kindred couldn’t tell if it was the wind speaking in little voices, playing to her imaginings and fears. She longed to look, and it must have shown in her face, because the first guard stepped nearer still, one hand going to her blade, as if she knew something was wrong and was prepared to cut her way to the solution.
“Yep,” the second woman said, breaking the tension with the mundanity of her response, the mundanity of her job taking over again. “Here it is. All three cleared for guests.”
Cleared for guests. Barque must have known and still kept Kindred and the others away out of spite.
“And what’s your name?”
“Kindred.”
Writing this down, the woman said, “Yllstra will take you.”
Yllstra, the first sentry who had called out, looked Kindred over once more, squinting, before saying, “Follow me and do exactly as I say. If you don’t, you will likely die.”
She offered this statement without bluster, and the other guard gave no sign of mockery or humor.
Yllstra set off along the discreet path burrowing its way through the thick press of trees. As she rounded a curve into the Forest, Kindred looked back down the path, but there was no sign of her pursuer. She followed Yllstra.
The ambient light from the central column was soon crowded out by more and more trees, and, as the path grew narrower, Kindred and Yllstra had to walk in single file in almost-total dark. Yllstra stopped beside a small wooden sign sticking up from the side of the path at a slight angle. The sign read only, Pursuant.
“The Forest does not allow fire along the paths,” Yllstra said. “You will have enough light to see by, if only just, so let that be enough. It is some distance to reach the Healing Glade and once we begin moving, it is unsafe to stop. Follow me no matter what you see in the woods around you.
“And most importantly, do not stray from the path. Many things live in this Forest, all of them hungry.”
As they continued along the path, Kindred had the discomfiting realization that Yllstra had taken her blades out, one in each hand. She followed.
Darkness pressed close, and Kindred was wondering what Yllstra considered “enough light” when the guard’s form began to mingle with the shadows. The path was an afterimage before and below her, and the trees around her were barely visible.
It was some time into the walk—the only sounds Kindred’s breathing, Yllstra’s breathing, and the sound of the path beneath their feet—when lights like stars began appearing deep in the forest.
“What are those?” Kindred asked, the trees suffocating her words with their density, their depth.
“Lantern bearers,” Yllstra said.
“How come they can have lights?” Kindred felt cheated. “I thought you didn’t allow fire on the paths.”
Yllstra slowed but did not stop. “I didn’t say I don’t allow fire on the path. I said the Forest doesn’t allow it. Those are not people on other paths. Do not look at them. Pay no attention if they approach.”
She picked up her pace again, and Kindred struggled to follow.
But despite Yllstra’s warning, Kindred couldn’t help but look off into the darkness. She was entranced by the strange lights floating and bobbing about in the black. And after a time, they did seem to be approaching, though Kindred couldn’t tell if their path brought her nearer the lights or if the lantern bearers moved through the trees somehow.
As the lights neared, they resolved into the shape of lanterns: old, boxy things dangling, she thought, from short chains. The bearers themselves remained subsumed in darkness; their forms described the absence of light. Nearest was a tall bearer carrying a lantern floating higher than the rest, a lantern swinging in long, measured arcs articulating the slow, rhythmic steps of its bearer.
Myriad lantern bearers swam through the darkness toward Kindred, approaching from both sides now.
“Eyes on me,” Yllstra said, her voice percussive and jarring amid the lights’ hypnotic approach.
But Kindred had seen something behind one of the lanterns, something that couldn’t be, and though she continued to follow behind Yllstra, her attention lay with the darkness and the mysteries moving through it.
“Ouch. Fuck!” came Yllstra’s exasperated shout as Kindred stepped on her heel.
“Sorry,” Kindred muttered. “Sorry, I’m not trying to . . .” But she trailed off. She’d seen it again.
“Ignore them and keep moving,” Yllstra said, casting a quick glance to the lantern bearers before striding forward.
The lantern bearers were close now, very close, close enough for even the meager light of the lanterns to do their work and reveal some of the bearers. Though, Kindred realized, looking at the nearest one, the lantern itself—this one and all the rest—gave off very little light, and the illumination it did provide was soft and cold, a ghost light for a ghost wood and a ghost wind. Even this close—close enough that a leap would have brought her to the being behind the lantern—Kindred caught only shifting glimpses, a short person, a man, no, a woman, dark robes falling around her, ratty hair nesting around her shoulders, her face still in shadow until—there.
Kindred stopped walking, and though Yllstra might have continued ahead, Kindred didn’t care, couldn’t.
The lantern bearer smiled in the ghost light.
It was Kindred. She stared at herself holding a lantern and smiling from the darkness.
A song, one of the creation stories she’d heard first from her grandmother aboard Revenger, whispered out from the darkness, and though the lantern bearer did nothing other than smile—her teeth lit from behind as though she held a fire deep inside, her own hearthfire—Kindred was sure the song came from the bearer.