Excerpt: The Witch, the Weaver, and the Wood

After a little while, I came to another little path that led off from the King’s Highway, and I went down it. It didn’t go very far at all, just a few minutes’ walk away from the road the path ended in a little clear space around the base of the largest tree I had ever seen. If the normal trees in the Wood would have taken three grown men to reach around them, this would have taken at least ten. Its branches reached up, and out, and covered the space around it that looked clear on the ground.

Somewhere beyond the trees the sun went down, then, and I went up to the base of the tree and found a space where I could lie down between two tree roots and fall asleep.

I woke up because the tree above me was creaking in the wind and in the dim light I looked up and saw dark shapes hanging from the branches. The air smelled like rotting meat, and one of the shapes above me turned and I saw it was the body of a wolf, hanging by a rope. Its throat had been cut, and its dead eyes glinted a little as it swung. Near it, I saw a large black bird, probably a raven or a crow, with its feathers plucked ragged in the wind. Above me, quite near the trunk, there was a horse hanging from a large limb. Its head hung to the side, severed to the spine, and the throat gaped open where the edges of the muscle had dried and shriveled. Someone had looped a rope harness around its forelegs and that creaked and groaned as the wind shifted the dead horse’s weight. The ends of its mane fluttered gently against its torn neck.

The whole tree was covered in them, as if someone had decorated it for a holiday festival, only with corpses instead of dried flowers and little paper stars. But the worst part was that among the birds and dogs and horses, there were humans hanged on the tree as well. They all hung from nooses about their snapped necks, with matted hair and ragged clothing. Their faces were dried and sunken, grinning where the skin of their lips had pulled back and their jaws sank.

I was too much afraid to move, so I lay there against the trunk of the giant tree and stared upwards as the branches creaked and bowed under the weight of all those dead things. The body of a woman hung from one of the lower branches in front of me, her ragged skirts fluttering around her. She spun gently in the wind, as if she were turning to face me, and she stared at me as if here eyes could still see.

How do you like my tree, little girl? she asked me. I shook my head and stared at her, with my eyes wide.

There was a dry laughing sound that could have been the wind in the leaves, except that the tree was as bare as winter except for the corpses hanging on it, and the branches were all black lines against the gray sky. Is it too gruesome for you, little granddaughter of the Greatwood? You know little of power. This is the greatest power of all.