The next morning, Brand bats my good shoulder with the back of his hand and says, “You’re sittin’ with me today. Front of the line. Let’s go.”

  “Oh,” I say. “All right.”

  I glance at Finch, who has overheard this and looks a little crestfallen before playing it off as no big deal. We’re all just keepin’ it fresh around here.

  I’ve been trying to act like an adult and not a kid who was just chewed out for poor situational awareness, even if that is a lot closer to what happened. I’m also limping again and trying not to let it show. I tweaked my ankle during the fight, probably when trees shot up out of nowhere and I fell over, and I didn’t notice until climbing down from the wagon to get ready for dinner and bed. It’s not unbearable. The ankle had already been kind of achy, so it was only a little worse off than before. I am so tired of pain dictating how I live, though, and anyway, it’s just another day of riding a wagon through the woods.

  We’ve been moving for only a few minutes when Brand begins, “Ma wanted me to talk to you today. Tell you more about the forest. Cryptids. Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Well, not the birds and the bees. Gotta keep it polite, she said.”

  “Magic?”

  He hesitates. “We can talk about that, too.”

  We rumble forward in silence a little while before he tries again.

  “It’s hard to tell what you know and what you don’t. Like. You don’t remember who you were, you don’t know shit about the Sunken Forest, but you aren’t dumb. You know fire is hot. You know all kinds of ordinary stuff. But then you wander off in the forest, no backup, no wards, and no one does that — that’s ordinary stuff, too. So, right, you came from up top, of course you don’t know. But people up top don’t come into the forest at all, they’re too scared, and you’re not scared. So you don’t think like them, and you don’t think like us, either. That fall really knocked the sense out of you, huh?” He chuckles, elbowing me lightly in the ribs. “You do all right, mostly, so we all forget you lost more than just your name when you fell. We forget there are things that are obvious to us that you need explained. Even the folks up top know you gotta watch out for cryptids around the forest, but when I tell you stories it’s like you think I’m making it up.”

  “I did,” I admit.

  “Really? Even when I told you about the river beauty? Sheesh! This woman…”

  “So what is a cryptid?” I ask. “I thought… Doesn’t cryptid mean it’s not real? There’s —” I stop, realizing I don’t know how to explain that grainy photos and bad camera footage is hotly debated but not considered incontrovertible evidence. I am not sure this is a place with photography. “There are just stories told by grifters or people who want to impress their drinking buddies. Or scare kids.”

  Brand takes a minute to collect his words. “The things in the forest are only here in the forest. I don’t know about other places, maybe they’ve got their own, but when I talk about cryptids I mean things only here that aren’t quite animals and aren’t quite people. Sometimes they’re what’s left of something dead. Sometimes they weren’t alive like you and me to begin with. They’re more like dreams that got away.”

  I stop myself from impulsively saying that means they aren’t real, because I saw it for myself and already know that’s not true. “And… you use magic to fight them? Is that it?”

  “Well I’m not gonna use my hands,” says Brand. When he sees I’ve missed the joke, he adds, “Ghosts don’t care if you punch ‘em, and you’ll just get your fingers frostbit.”

  “But fire works? And making trees grow?”

  “Smoke works. If you use the right kind, anyway. And the trees work because it’s river trees. You can’t just throw any old wood shavings and expect a result.”

  “Ma definitely threw a fireball, though.”

  Brand suppresses a sigh. “Yeah. She did.”

  We ride in silence for some minutes. I think, Maybe I should just tell them. It would be easier, wouldn’t it? If I just said I got body-swapped with someone across realities or universes, maybe everyone would be more willing to talk openly. I could explain why some things are familiar and some things aren’t. If they can handle magic and monsters, they can handle this, right?

  Only for them, magic and monsters is normal, isn’t it? Just like the hibbovins, which I still find alarming even though they have been nothing but docile and politely disinterested in me. I’m not sure I could say “horse” and expect anyone to know what I’m talking about. If I haven’t seen it in front of me, if no one has mentioned it in my hearing, I have no idea if it exists here.

  So maybe certain kinds of magic are a normal part of life, but cell phones and satellite transmissions and traveling two thousand miles in a single day are incomprehensible — and sounds more like a world which would have body-swapping technology than this one. If you can arrive on the distant end of a country in a matter of hours, why not? Besides, if I tried to describe television or the internet — or, possibly, horses — I’d probably sound insane before I sounded otherworldly.

  I’d rather be the amnesiac than the madwoman or impossible thing living among them.

  “Hey,” Brand says, interrupting my rumination. “We’re about to turn. Guess which way?”

  I look at the way ahead of us. “Right.”

  “Ooh, good guess.”

  “I didn’t guess.” I point to a raised patch. “That’s a marker, isn’t it?”

  Brand looks at me, genuinely impressed. “How’d you figure that out?”

  I blush, pleased at his approval. “It’s why I wandered off yesterday. I wanted to know why you’d gone right instead of straight. There was a tree root in the path. When I was standing in the wagon tracks, I noticed the hidden guides.”

  He pats my head like a proud uncle trying not to make a fuss even though he’s thrilled. “Look at you — you’re quick, you’re real quick! See, you’ll get this. You learned a lot yesterday, huh? Not just about ghosties.” He laughs. “You’ll get there.”

  I ask, “Can I learn magic, too?”

  From the look he gives me, I wonder if this is too ambitious a question. But instead of telling me Ma and Finch are some kind of special breed of human, he says, “This is hard to talk about. We don’t talk to outsiders about this kind of thing. But a lot of us down here started out up there, so you aren’t an outsider forever, just until... until you aren’t. I don’t know, I was born down here, but I’m the only one of us —“ he jerks a thumb over his shoulder “ — who was. Thirsan was nine, he’s basically grown up with it, but Finch was sixteen and Ma was seventeen and Puck was… about the same age as you, come to think of it. You’re learning to read the ways even without someone telling you, you’re already becoming a forest woman. So you’ll keep learning, and one day, you’ll know. Maybe you’ll do magic, too.”

  This is not a satisfying answer, more like a very complicatedly worded dodge, but Brand looks at me like he is hoping this helped. I nod.

  “Right. So. You noticed the way markers. Good start. You notice anything else?”

  “Um… Some are logs, some are dirt?”

  “Wow, you really got in there, huh?”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Not that deep. I just noticed the difference.”

  Brand pointed to a mound we were passing. “So there’s one, right, and if you look up a ways, there’s another. They don’t look like much, aren’t really anything but a suggestion: don’t go this way with a wagon. The logs, though, those are different. The way they lie tells you something. Can you tell what?”

  I look. There aren’t that many of them around, and from what I can see they were arranged to look as accidental as possible. Just dead, overgrown wood in a forest. “Nope.”

  Brand is almost as pleased to teach me as he is when I figure things out on my own. “Those are why we don’t see cryptids on the road.”

  He tells me all about how there are a variety of wards used by the people who dwell in the forest to create safe channels of passage. There are places with gaps, the way an overpass or underpass is built into a roadway to allow pedestrians to cross through areas with heavy traffic. The gaps protect the wards from taking damage from something trying to force its way across. If something does damage a ward, these built in breaks also stop that one damaged ward from leaving an entire channel unprotected. The wards use the network of river tree roots to connect to each other and shape the barriers.

  “Between one ward and the next, it makes a boundary that feels like solid tree to any cryptids trying to cross it,” Brand says. “Even the ghosts can’t go through river trees.”

  “Why not mark it clearly?” I ask. “Why all the cloak and dagger? It’s just roads.”

  “For one: even all cloak and dagger-y, there are things that know where the gaps are and like to skulk around. No one travels alone in the forest, and shit like that is why. Something’s always gonna think you look tasty, and it’ll do the work to find out. We hide the gaps, and fewer things can hide around them. For another… It’s spooky down here, right? Everyone knows that. People like our happy little band, we’re fine with it, we know it, we have the skills to come and go. Up there?” He waves a hand at what I assume is the direction of the nearest wall. “All they know is that the scariest shit in the kingdom hangs out here. They call it the Ghost River. Making our roads hard to find is just one more way to keep outsiders out, keep ‘em from getting brave and thinking what the forest needs is taming. And yeah, we like to spread rumors when we go up, make sure nobody gets ideas, but we don’t need to. You can see the ghosts from the cliffs, once in a while. No one comes down here unless they know a guy or they’re desperate.”

  Brand stops, then glances at me.

  “Or, you know. They fall in.”

  *

  Brand spends the rest of the day telling me about cryptids. I will almost definitely not remember any of what he says; it’s all just a stream of information, way more than I can internalize in one sitting, and I’ve always been more of a visual learner. The point, however, is made: if I see something in the forest, I should assume it wants to eat me and make cute accessories out of my vertebrae.

  He also informs me that the running water and that little stone beach wasn’t even the river — not exactly.

  “There are a bunch of places where the river splits around land and makes islands. Sometimes they’ve got bridges connecting one side of the river to the other, but spots like that one? Nah. Wrong place for it. We’ll be arriving at one of the crossings tomorrow. You’ll get a look at just how big the river really is.”

  So it is on our sixth day of travel that I finally get to see the river at the heart of the Sunken Forest, and I learn we are crossing not one, but three islands to get to the far side.

  The entrance to the first bridge is within the trees, and as we begin crossing we rise up over a long stretch of rocky riverside beneath us before we start crossing the water. I barely give this a thought as I stare out over just how much river there is to cross. I can’t actually see the other side. The island anchoring the other end of the bridge hosts a cluster of river trees that, despite being immense, are sparser and younger than the ones we’ve just passed through. There are still enough of them that they could hide a small village in their midst.

  The bridge reminds me of the Roman constructions we learned about in Western Civ classes, which makes me wonder at who the hell constructed these, and how long ago. Who had the time? The ability? What’s keeping them stable? If someone once lived here with the ability to do that, why wasn’t this a densely populated area now?

  There’s a wind over the river that blows cool enough to chill my skin, even in the sunshine. Brand is practically glowing with excitement at how nice a day it is, how lucky we are to make this crossing in such perfect weather — “I’ve done this in a storm, and let me tell you, worst decision of my life” — and how great it feels to be out here in the fresh air.

  “Do cryptids come up here?” I ask, my head full of warnings.

  “On the bridge, nah. Wards on the ends keep them out. Probably some old ones in the supports, too. Over the bridge? Maybe. They usually go under. Ma and Puck are ready, though, so don’t worry.”

  “What is it they do?”

  “Puck makes smoke bombs. She knows all that apothecary shit, so she makes little packets of dried plants and fire powder. If she drops one on a fire pit, it clears anything out of the area and creates a safe zone. She throws one in the air, Ma lights it up, pow! — smoke screen.”

  I remember how fast the ghost fish backed away and fled when it hit the smoke. It’s comforting.

  After the weaving path we have been traveling through the forest, the island crossing is almost direct. Wagon tracks are visible on the ground, and they curve to meet the next bridge in an easygoing arc through the trees.

  The second bridge is shorter, but scarier. It appears to have been constructed mostly out of live river trees that have twisted together to fill in where the stones of the original bridge washed away untold generations ago. Before we begin to cross, Brand stops the wagons.

  “Hey, Finch,” he calls. “Come check the bridge.”

  Finch hops down and runs up ahead of the hibbovins, touching the roots that grow around the right side of the bridge. After a couple minutes, he stands up. “Feels stable. I think Chazey came through here a little while ago and did some reinforcing, it feels like her work.”

  “Ah, Chazey,” says Brand dreamily. “You think she’s ahead of us? Going to Star Point?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t tell how long ago she did it. Recently, but that could mean six months ago.”

  “I hope she’s there, I haven’t seen her in a while… Chazey…”

  Finch catches my eye, then he grins and says, “Didn’t she join up with Angor?”

  Brand clutches his heart. “Don’t you joke!”

  “I thought she wasn’t at the quarter meet at the Hollow because she was upriver with him and his crew.”

  “You think you’re teasing, but you’re breaking my heart, Finch, why would you do that?”

  Finch trots back to his wagon, Brand muttering about some things being sacred. He’s almost definitely hamming it up. As he goads the hibbovins forward, however, he gets that dreamy face again. Chazey must be someone he has a longstanding and well known crush on.

  We stop for a break on the second island. This island is wider than the first, and there is something of a swimming hole carved into it by the river and a natural incline leading down to the water. The massive trunk of a fallen tree is jammed into the opening between the river and the pool, blocking out the current. Puck takes the incline down and sticks her feet in, content to sit and watch as Thirsan and Finch strip to their underwear and jump into the water from thirty feet up, howling as they launch themselves into empty space. When they bob to the surface, both of them gasp for air against the chill and whoop loudly.

  Then they swim over to the incline, push themselves out, and race back up to the top to do it again.

  I walk down the incline and stick my feet in the water, too.

  “You going in?” Puck asks me.

  Finch swims over to us and plants his hands on the stone. His shoulders work to heave the rest of him out of the water, stomach muscles flexing to raise his knees high enough to rest on the pool’s edge. He grins, panting against the chill, water running down his chest, his waist, his thighs as he steps to his feet then returns to the ledge for another jump.

  “I’m just fine watching,” I say.

  I sit with Puck for a little while, but I’m still too cold from the wind over the bridge to soak my feet for very long and so ascend back to the wagons and sit in the sun. Brand cannonballs down once, as if on principle, then comes back up and has his lunch with an air of wet satisfaction.

  “Gotta do it once,” he says. “I don’t have energy like those kids anymore, but one time? I can do it one time.”

  Ma ducks into the wagon she shares with Puck, then comes out again wearing undershorts and something like a relaxed fit halter top. She dives gracefully off the edge of the swimming hole, surfacing in front of Puck and resting her arms on the edge of the pool, long legs swaying in the water behind her. Puck crosses her ankles and titters at whatever Ma is saying.

  I eat my lunch, watching all of this in good humor but feeling a little left out. I’d love to jump in. I have nothing I could wear to protect my modesty, though, and even if I did, I can’t swim. Not with my injuries. Jumping from this height might even make them worse.

  “Hey,” says Thirsan.

  I look over to where he and Finch are, near the edge of the swimming hole. As we watch, Thirsan turns his back to the edge with his heels together, and folds his arms across his chest like a mummy. He closes both his fists, pinkies extended, smirks, then tips backwards into the water. He drops like a stone, plunging head first beneath the surface.

  Finch and Brand exchange a tense look.

  “Does that mean something?” I ask.

  Finch responds, “What?”

  I fold my arms over my chest, pinkies extended.

  “Ah. Um. It’s an impolite gesture.” He holds up his own extended pinky. “Doing this to someone is a way of saying they’ve uh. Got a small penis.”

  I laugh. Rude, yeah, but every culture seems to have at least one crass form of sign language.

  Finch relaxes when I am not immediately offended. Then he grabs the nearest river tree cone off the ground, peers over the edge of the swimming hole, and flings it.

  The faint “Ow!” from below confirms a direct hit.