We stop for the night on the edge of a different meadow. Brand unhitches the hibbovins so they can graze freely and rest. Puck gets the stove going from coals which have stayed hot all day in the oven, despite how far we have traveled; the kitchen rig is designed with consideration for days like these, and she turns the coals into a fire to cook over in short order.

  “Shan’t be making soup tonight,” she muses, as I help her feed sticks and dry wood into the flames. “But I think Thirsan and Finch will be back with a fish or two soon enough, and if I move fast I can get to some nice greens ahead of the hibbovins and we’ll have some of those, too.”

  We eat. We go to bed. In the morning, breakfast is jerky and foraged plants and fresh water. We resume traveling within an hour of waking up.

  As we cross another narrow creek, I ask Finch, “Will we be coming close to the river?”

  “Not today. Why?”

  “Just curious. Brand was telling me yesterday about how this whole area used to be riverbed. I was wondering what it looks like now.”

  “We’ll be coming up to it sooner or later. Depends on which route Brand takes us on.”

  “There are routes?” I look around. I can’t even see a road. “How can you tell?”

  “Mostly just experience. You learn what to look for.”

  I try to pay attention, looking for clues that there is a road or that it diverges one way or another. Whatever Brand reads in the trees at the head of our procession, I can’t see it from the roof of the third wagon. There are just trees, big enough that the space they need between them for their roots to spread is also wide enough for the wagons to pass through with no trouble.

  That there are covertly marked routes implies there are more people.

  “Are there a lot of people in the Sunken Forest?”

  Finch thinks. “Maybe? We’re definitely not the only ones.”

  “How big is the Sunken Forest?” I ask, and when he looks puzzled by the effort of trying to contextualize this, I add, “Could a hundred wagons be in the forest at once and not bump into each other for days?”

  “Yes.”

  “A thousand?”

  “Probably not a thousand. Maybe a few hundred.”

  “Huh.”

  I’m starting to sound like a little kid again, which is humbling. I have only slightly more comprehension of my surroundings than the average child, and I already don’t love the feeling that I am the most annoying person in my extremely limited world, but these aren’t really circumstances where I can fake my way through what I don’t know until I figure it out. Much like a child, there is a very real chance I could kill myself with how much I don’t know.

  I probably shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Most of the adults I knew were also city dwellers who wouldn’t be much better off. Still, I miss my cell phone. I miss search bars. I miss being able to ask whatever questions I need answered without having to rely on the good nature of another person.

  But that’s not an option. I go back to interrogating Finch.

  “So there’s at least a few hundred other wagons?”

  Finch weighs this doubtfully. “I don’t know. Maybe around that number.”

  “But there’s easily five hundred people living in the forest?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they all know how to find a way through the trees?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have they made villages? A village. Is there a town?”

  “Not in the forest, no.”

  I fall silent again. At least five hundred people, but no village?

  Finch adds, “There are villages on the outside. Towns, cities. We go up to Holyhill once in a while, which is pretty big. It’s about half a day’s walk from the forest. Down here though, I think I’ve seen… maybe sixty wagons together at once. There’s definitely more of us, but we don’t hang out in large groups for too long. We’re on our way to a quarter meet now, though.”

  “What’s a quarter meet?”

  This question kicks off an explanation about seasonal gatherings that take place up and down the Sunken Forest, three week windows where bands of people — like ours — come together, trade news or goods, and generally hang out and party. There are designated locations, but who meets where is a matter of proximity and the state of the river, whose course shifts and swells and dwindles according to the weather and the season.

  “We’re closest to Star Point,” says Finch, “Which is a Spring and Autumn meeting ground — high enough it won’t flood, gets warm sun during the day but isn’t too cold at night.”

  “So that’s where we’re going? Star Point?”

  “Yes.”

  I am immediately pulled in opposite directions by excitement and anxiety. A quarter meet sounds fun. It also sounds like I will be soon be oblivious and peculiar in front of a much wider audience, and I only have two outfits, both of which have been modified from Ma’s wardrobe. They are fine — they are practical and comfortable — but I am suddenly, keenly aware of my vanity. I am so pretty. I want to dress myself up like a doll for a party. I never again want to experience being under-dressed in a room full of my peers, trying to project that I am unconcerned in clothes that beg to be overlooked and ignored.

  I take a breath. I unclench my feet in my soft pelt shoes.

  Okay, I think. Probably need to work through some things.

  These are, after all, Ma’s old clothes. She and everyone else I know here dress very similarly, a lot of earth tones, wool, plant fibers. Puck wears swishy skirts, green and blue and brown and unbleached cotton or something very like it. She did a good job of hemming what I am wearing into something that looks like it was always mine. My cardigan is a little long, but my breasts are bigger than Ma’s and she’s leaner than I am, so I probably don’t look like I’m swimming in it. I will not be out of place. I will be a stranger, but I will still look like I belong.

  Finch cannot possibly know my thoughts, but he intuits something of them and says, “You don’t need to be nervous. Everyone’s really friendly. If you need help, I’ll be there.”

  I look up at him, grateful even if he hasn’t quite understood the flashbacks I am having to middle school. Or high school. Or college. “Thanks, Finch.”

  “I mean, it won’t be just me. We’ll all be around, you know, helping you meet people or…getting acquainted. It’ll be fine.” He is trying so hard not to sound like a hero, bashfully overcompensating for something that almost sounded like intimacy.

  I want very badly to start teasing him, but he’s trying to be a gentleman by offering help as much as he is by not making it about himself. So I don’t say anything, and I think about leaning over to bump a shoulder affectionately into his arm, but my shoulder is still a little bruised and achy. Anyway, maybe a gentleman is all he’s trying to be. Maybe he can’t help being a little bashful when I look up at him like he’s my very own knight in shining armor.

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  *

  Our way through the forest weaves and wends, even when it looks like there might be more direct courses between the trees. I have to wonder at this, at what it is that Brand sees that makes him choose the most winding way. I am also irritated by asking all the time, so during our midday break on the fourth day, I wander back the way we came to look for whatever it was Brand saw that had us bending to the right, past the trunks of three vast trees, then curving back to the left and to the place where we finally stopped. He could have led us in a straight line to the same place with no trouble.

  What I notice first is that, in the tracks through the low-growing greenery made by the wagon wheels, there is a mesh of roots across the surface of the forest floor. This is softened by fallen needles and woodland detritus, but I can feel with each step where the narrow roots of trees break through the surface of the earth. All the other plants with their green stems and soft leaves have found space between these roots, and grow only just past my knee at the tallest.

  There are places where the plants appear taller, but as I investigate I see they are growing from rises in the ground itself — and with a little prodding, I discover these rises are fallen tree limbs deteriorating under the effects of weather, water, time, and the work of new growing things, if they aren’t just mounds of earth. There is a subtle pattern to their placement, too. If we hadn’t just ridden through, if the wagon wheels hadn’t left their track through the foliage, I might not have noticed. These overgrown rises are placed to surreptitiously guide the eye. From the top of a wagon, at the head of a line, this might be more obvious.

  It doesn’t take long to figure out why Brand had turned instead of going straight, either. There is no rotting log blocking the way, but beneath all the live plants is a thick root growing into the path which would be a bear to go over in a wagon. If the root isn’t enough to tip a wagon over, it would definitely be hard on the wheels and everything above them. The shape of the tree trunk where it meets the root bulges visibly, even though the root itself is hidden — this, I imagine, is the kind of thing Brand knows to watch for. He can read the trees and the secret roads of the Sunken Forest.

  I walk back to the wagons with new attention to my surroundings, arriving at the hump of a buried log that signals to steer left. I step onto and over it, dismissing the twinge in my ankle as a minor complaint. I haven’t exercised much in the last few days, and it is getting tight from disuse.

  I hear water. Not just the contented murmuring of a creek, but a rushing, rhythmic chant.

  That, I’m almost certain, is the river.

  I look around me, taking note of the place I have just come from. There isn’t a lot to see here, nothing that looks like the marks of a wagon road, but this only means that the buried log I just stepped over is easy to pick out against the rest of the forest. Straight ahead, there is more light through the trees where sun reaches down into the empty space the river has carved.

  It is a straight line from the log to the river. It isn’t even daring, wandering off by myself for a few minutes. It’s fifty yards, tops.

  I can do this.

  I look back a few times, checking and re-checking and re-re-checking that I still recognize where I started from, and I decide I won’t go far. I just want to see what it looks like.

  The trees open onto a small beach of pale, round stones. Most of it is still shadowed, but the sun cuts across the treetops to reflect off of the river, so bright my eyes water. A long, pale limb of driftwood lays crookedly against the bank, and I use it as a guide rail down the slope to where forest floor becomes riverside.

  The river is entrancing. From where I stand, it flows from around a bend to my right and sweeps past to my left. This stony little beach probably floods when it rains. I walk up to the water’s edge, stopping before I risk getting my shoes wet, and stand in a patch of glorious sunlight. The rocks warm the soles of my feet. I stay there a few minutes, basking in the sun until my skin starts to prickle with sweat.

  I check the way back into the woods, up the length of driftwood marking where I came from, just to reassure myself that I can’t possibly get lost that easily. I walk a little ways upriver — barely upriver; twenty feet upriver — and enjoy the thrill at how fast the water moves, how clear it is, how quickly it drops off into darkness. Not a spot for casual bathing, then.

  Movement catches my eye and I look up. Through the air, above the river’s surface, a shape floats toward me. It takes me a moment to make sense of what I am seeing. It looks like an angelfish, triangular and flat and several hundred times larger than anything I’ve seen in an aquarium. From its top to bottom fins, it is at least three of my body lengths. Maybe almost four. It moves with slow, ethereal grace, peacefully unconcerned.

  It has all the substance of a bubble full of smoke. It fades away to nothing at its edges, the faint impression of a thin membrane the only indication that its fins don’t blur into nonexistence. It makes me think of a glass ornament come to life.

  It notices me with the attention of an afterthought, idly flicking its tail fin to adjust its course for a closer examination. Its eyes tilt forward, pale pink pupils shining against bright white irises.

  From behind me, I hear Finch’s voice.

  “Akasha?”

  I turn towards him, awed. “Are you seeing this? Are there seriously ghost fish here?”

  Finch does not look impressed. He looks alarmed. He whistles sharply through the fingers of his left hand and makes a sweeping circular motion with his right. It looks like he’s bowling without the ball, and I have just enough time to think, Huh, that’s weird, before wooden staves burst out of the ground in a circle around me, half a second before the fish lunges forward. It smacks forcefully into the staves, mouth snapping like it’s hoping to suck me in.

  I yelp and drop to the ground. The fish reverses, then darts forward for a second attempt before drifting to the side, assessing. I am surrounded by staves — no, saplings, live trees as thick as my wrist, sprouting out from between the rocks and twisting to meet over my head. The ghost fish tries again, more for the sake of trying than a focused effort, then turns toward Finch.

  Finch, yelling and waving his arms to attract attention, starts to throw rocks to control the fish’s movement, slowly making his way across the beach and closer to me with the forest at his back. The ghost fish is not deterred so much as intrigued by the fight Finch puts up and it watches with interest, dipping closer, darting back. Finch whistles again.

  “Here!” shouts Ma, and then there she is, storming out of the trees with Puck and Thirsan. Puck throws an object into the air above all our heads, and Ma —

  Ma throws a goddamned fireball.

  The object pops into violet smoke. The ghost fish, unfazed, swims forward. Then it flinches back, and back, and back, the smoke clinging and trailing as it tries to escape. It turns away and swims through the air above the river at a speed which, after everything else I’ve just seen, is upsetting to contemplate.

  “Everyone all right?” Ma asks.

  “Fine,” says Finch, a little breathlessly.

  I am too preoccupied to answer, shakily squeezing myself out from between the trunks of the saplings. “What the fuck was that?”

  “One of many reasons you never go off by yourself.” Ma’s tone is just sharp enough to sting. “What were you thinking?”

  “I didn’t know,” I say, cringing at how whiny and defensive I sound. “I just wanted to see the river. It was sunny, I heard water.”

  Ma looks about ready to start lecturing, but she closes her eyes instead, jaw clenching. She takes a breath and exhales slowly, almost definitely praying for serenity. When she responds, her voice is the careful calm of someone mindfully containing their temper. “I need you to stay in view of one of us at all times. Until I say otherwise, don’t wander off on your own. Please. The forest is not safe. Especially for someone with no experience.”

  Her eyes meet mine, expectant. I nod. She nods. Then she turns back toward the woods. “Come on. Brand’s probably getting worried.”

  We all follow her back toward the trees. All the good feeling from the warm sunshine has gone, and I feel irrationally ashamed of myself for nearly getting eaten by a… a what? A ghost fish? Is this one of the ghosts Brand and Finch were telling me about?

  Does that mean all those other stories weren’t just folklore?

  And was that a literal fireball Ma threw? And the saplings — that was Finch, right?

  The boundaries of the known world collapse under the weight of new information. I knew, basically, what to expect with a life lived in wagons. There was a lot to learn, but that was inevitable. I could believe there was a place for me and I could work hard to find it.

  But monsters?

  Magic?

  Did I get rebooted as a video game character?

  The sense of being overwhelmed and underpowered that I left behind in my previous life sends a delicate tendril vining up the back of my neck. I roll my shoulders, shaking my arms out, so desperate to not let that feeling back in that I don’t even care how badly my shoulder reacts. I’ll take the pain over quiet despair any day.

  It’s fine, I insist. I’ll adjust to this, too.

  As I get into position on top of the wagon for the next leg of the day’s journey, I try to focus on the peace of those few minutes in the sunlight and forget everything that happened after.