The White Forest Read Online Free PDF

handle, and a rotted psalter with pages open and undulating. Soon, in my mind, the objects became fabled things lost beneath the waters: whole sunken Saxon villages, forests lying flat, a phalanx of dead Roman soldiers still in armor. There were even the bones of a monster. Nathan floated gently through its rib cage, and shadows of bone caressed him.
    The next image was sun-washed and showed Nathan limp and soaking on a wooded shore. He was nowhere near London. The Thames had carried him to some outer environ, but this was not Dartford or even Gravesend. This was a place of fernlike trees and massive erect stones.
    Faces hovered among the tree trunks—not precisely human, as their eyes were too large and their mouths were lipless and cruel. The creatures regarded him with desire. It was clear he could not escape them. There was nowhere to go. And so Nathan crouched on the beach, waiting as the creatures disgorged themselves from their hiding places.
    I closed the newspaper but could not force the image from my mind—beautiful Nathan in his French-cut suit, set upon by beasts. What they wanted from him, I didn’t know. But certainly they would take him.
    I touched my own face, felt the coolness of my cheek. I’d shed no tears, standing there at the entrance to the Queen’s Host. Instead, my expression had hardened with worry. The fantasy in the Penny was not beyond my imagining. I was concerned, in fact, that such a scene might be closer to the truth than the illustrators could possibly know.
    Only Nathan and Maddy knew my secret. I was familiar with realms of the unnatural, for I myself was an unnatural. Not a monster in appearance; I looked like other young women, though perhaps not as primped and manicured. But I wasn’t the same as other girls. My friends believed I was sick or gifted. Either way, I was unfortunate. Something entirely new upon the earth.

CHAPTER 3

    I should take a moment to explain myself and the beginnings of what Nathan called my “talent” and others, my “disease.” I must start with my mother, as her death was the measure of my loss and the origin of my strangeness. I was only six when the earth took her on the Heath near Parliament Hill. On that day, she’d been walking along an outcropping of shale that had deep fissures in the stone. Her dogs had wandered there to hunt for voles and snakes, and she followed, pulling her cloak against the chill of the morning, careful to avoid stepping in the black fissures. The sky was a pall of white, and beyond the shale, grass shifted, as if moved by some unseen body. Mother told me she’d attempted to distract herself from the eerie scene by making lists of flowers she’d seen on the Heath: maiden pink and feverfew, harebell and yarrow. She’d made a list of guests she wanted to invite to the festival of St. Dunstan’s Day and imagined ink drawings of their likenesses decorating the invitations. Soon each guest had a flower for a face. Her cousin was a marigold; her aunt, a death lily; and my father was the red bloom of the pomegranate tree.
    She was pulled from these reveries by a sound rising from the fissures in the earth, an old voice trying to sing, and there was a smell that she later described as the cloyingly sweet scent of anotherworld. The sweetness made her feel heavy, as if she were sinking into the stone, and when the dogs grew weak, Mother knew she had to gather herself. She carried the vizsla back to Stoke Morrow with the spitz lagging behind, and eventually she fell to her knees in the foyer, putting her face on the cool flagstone, calling for Father.
    I stood in the entryway and watched as he took her into his arms, as if her body had no weight. He brought her to the sofa in the Clock Parlor, where his collection of some twenty clocks kept time. I followed, hovering near Father’s side as he covered Mother with a quilt, watching as her skin turned a terrible shade of cornflower. When she began raving, she told us the fissures