Warden of the Wild

By the second week of November, seven wards had gone dark, and the forest was becoming itself again with a speed that frightened Cara more than anything she had encountered in four years of solitary wardenship. The paths she had walked a hundred times rerouted overnight, trees stepping aside to create new corridors that led deeper into the wood than any path had gone before. The animals changed too — the deer grew bolder, standing in the clearings at dusk with their heads raised not in alarm but in attention, as though listening to an instruction. The birds stopped singing at dawn and began singing at midnight. She consulted the volumes in the lodge and found, in the oldest of them, written in a hand so ancient the ink had turned green, a passage about the founding of the wards. They had not been built to protect the surrounding villages from the forest, as Cara had always believed. They had been built to protect the forest from itself — from the thing that grew at its centre, the original wildness, a consciousness that was not malevolent but was vast and ancient and could not distinguish between nurturing growth and consuming everything around it. The wardens had not been guards. They had been gardeners, pruning a power that would otherwise bloom without limit. Cara packed her bag on a morning when the frost lay thick on the ground and the forest was quiet in the way that a