Then Vetch paused. His voice echoed oddly. “We’ve reached the bottom branches, Rob. There’s quite a jump.”
Leaf-rustle.
Then a thud.
Rob let himself down, gripping the trunk with his filthy hands, ducked under the final oak leaves. Vetch was standing knee deep in leaf mold, looking up at him, barely visible in the murk.
“This time I’ll catch you, Prince.”
“Don’t worry. I’m fine.” He let go and landed painfully in the soft springy mass, picking himself up.
For a moment they looked at each other. Then Rob stared around.
The trees were dense and silent. A stifling, smothering gloom enclosed him. He had a sense of thousands of square miles of forest, and himself and Vetch tiny things in the heart of it, lost forever. All the green canopy above him was a mesh of branches, of many species of tree, some thick trunked, some spindly, some in bud, some dark with coniferous needles. In the darkness they rustled, as if in a slight breeze, but no draft of wind touched his face. The forest of Annwn was airless and strangely calm. It stank of rot and mildew and lichen and moss.
Vetch sat wearily in the leaves, his back against the trunk. He took out the crane-skin bag, slid a small plastic bottle of mineral water from it and drank. Then he held it up to Rob.
Rob didn’t move. “Are we dead?”
“No.”
“In a coma? Like Chloe?”
“Not yet. Up there not even a second will have passed.” Vetch gestured with the bottle; Rob took it and drank. The water was cold and he was surprisingly thirsty.
The poet smiled, wry. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“You wouldn’t have made it down without me.”
“True. I was near death. But that was a second and an eternity ago and far away; we’ve descended into a world that is mine now, and already it’s begun to make me whole again.” He stood. In the dimness his hair seemed darker. Rob gave him back the water and Vetch tossed it into the bag. “Besides,” he said quietly, “there’s no way back. The tree has become one of a million trees, no different. The only way for you now is on, through the caers.”
He ducked under a branch and pushed his way through. Rob followed. None of this is real, he thought carefully. None of it exists. It doesn’t matter where we go, because in a few hours I’ll wake up at home and find none of it ever happened. Maybe not even Chloe’s accident.
Vetch was watching. “Stay close to me. The forest holds a million dangers.” He turned and struggled on.
Reluctant, the trees let them through. They came down a slope to a stand of birch, then pushed through it to a patch of scrub, where the cover thinned to bushes gleaming with white flowers. Their smell was sickly sweet.
Vetch looked up and smiled. “The summer stars.”
Rob recognized them. Very faint, in the purple twilight. Constellations Mac pointed out with the butt of his cigarette on summer nights in the garden with the old telescope. Eridanus, the meandering river. Taurus the Bull, rising late. The Swan. The Girl, Virgo. Brighter than he had ever seen them. Frost-bright, though the wood was warm and mothy.
Vetch turned, listening and breathing. He seemed to be orienting himself; he smelled the air and put a hand on several of the nearest trees. Finally he said, “This way, I think. I don’t know how far in we are. Look for signs that people have moved through here. Any traces of a path.”
Rob scratched a dried leaf from his hair. “People? Do you mean Chloe?”
“Maybe.” Vetch seemed distracted. He was listening; he stopped and looked back, the way they had come. “Did you hear something then?”
Far above, the wind raged. Down here the forest breathed and creaked and rustled around them.
“All sorts of things.”
Uneasy, Vetch waited. Then he turned. “Stay close.”
They made slow progress. Climbing through the tangled wood was like moving through a world that existed only to hinder them; vines caught at their hands, twigs tripped them. In places the ground sank into vast morasses, the surface virulent with algae, the stumps of drowned trees leaning out like the ruined columns of a palace. Sudden gusts of wind would spring up, plucking at Vetch’s coat and Rob’s hair; a cascade of golden leaves would spin and spiral and patter, thick as snowfall. Fooled by the dimness, Rob twice put his foot down into bog; the second time he staggered and yelled, almost overbalancing. Only Vetch’s grip held him; he dragged himself out and crouched, soaked and scared.
Vetch stood over him. “Some power that’s here doesn’t want us to get through. I think Chloe is his prisoner.”
“His?” Rob looked up, alarmed.
“There have always been kings in the Unworld, Rob. Their names echo in tales. Manawydan, Hades, Arawn, Melwas. The King has many names, but always he cannot live alone. He is darkness and death and winter. He comes up to the world and captures a girl. A girl who is young, alive, beautiful. Like your sister.”
“My sister is in a coma in a nursing home,” Rob said stubbornly.
Vetch laughed his soft laugh. “This is that coma. This wood.” Walking on, his voice came back, echoing from the trees. “When you draw, you copy the world, don’t you? You remake it on paper, but it isn’t the same. It’s yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone’s creation. We stumble through its tendrils, as if we’re crawling through the synapses of his mind.”
“And you think this King’s got Chloe?”
Vetch glanced back. “That’s what we have to find out.”
They walked for what seemed like an hour, maybe longer. Rob had no way of measuring except by his weariness. Then, on the other side of an alder grove, Vetch walked straight into nothing, and slammed back into the mossy turf in astonishment.
Rob helped him up. “Are you all right?”
The poet rubbed the star mark on his bruised forehead. “I think so.” He stepped forward carefully, hands out. Rob saw how his delicate fingers probed the air, found an invisible surface, flattened along it, felt its cracks and blocks.
Stepping back, he looked at an angle. There was a shimmer there, a greenish glint in the gloom. “A wall?” Rob said.
“Caer Wydyr. Glass Castle. The second circle.”
“Second? So how many are there?”
“Seven.” Vetch looked up. Three shadows hung over him. “She’s passed through Royal Caer and this is Glass. The others are Turning Castle, Spiral Castle, Gloomy Castle, the Woven Caer, and the last one, Caer Siddi itself, the Circle of Ice and Fire. Each a fortress, each a level of descent into the mind. At the heart of the seventh is the Chair, the throne of Annwn. Whoever sits in it rules the Unworld.” He stepped back. “We need to find the entrance.”
They groped around the wall, barely able to see where it was. The trees grew close around and were reflected in it, so the forest seemed unbroken. Rob found he was facing himself, dirty and lichen smeared. His face was small and pale and seemed to have grown younger; it scared him, so he tried to think only about Chloe, about her running to him and hugging him.
Between two ash trees Vetch stopped. “Here. This is it.”
They stepped through.
Inside, the castle was cold. The walls were thick and bubbled seams of glass, twisted and fused with palest color, aquamarine and emerald; columns of twisted glass held up shards of the shattered roof.
Vetch scratched the corner of his mouth. “We’re too late. They’re not here.”
The trees had long broken through. They grew in the empty halls, in the vast chambers. Great blocks of glass lay in smashed heaps on the floor; already bramble and bracken were smothering everything. In each room, window shutters had been forced; ragged curtains of foliage hung there now, and a stand of tiny oak saplings had cracked the iridescent paving into tilted slabs and grown a foot high, each with tiny green leaves newly unfurled.