Free Tree Girl by T. A. Barron

Where had that shadow gone? This was all too strange. And strangest of all…the shadow reminded her somehow of Old Burl.
    “Come on!” Sash waved at her from up ahead. He was standing by a sunlit walnut tree, whose branches smelled like nuts roasting on a hearth. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
    She ran to him. Right away, they set off again. And they continued, never slowing, across groundmuddy and dry, steep and flat, sunlit and shadowed.
    Before long, Anna noticed something new. As the day went on, the trees grew quieter. Much quieter. A hush came over the forest, filling it like a mist.
    Fewer branches clacked or groaned, fewer leaves whispered. Even the squirrels stopped their chatter. Before long, there was almost no sound at all, but for two pairs of padding feet.
    Rotting ravens
, she thought.
What’s going on?
    At last they paused for a drink at a rushing rill. Anna cupped her hands and filled them, while Eagle hopped over to the edge of the bank. For his part, Sash plunged his whole head into the water. Then he shook himself, splattering the others. Eagle squawked and slapped the air with his good wing.
    Anna leaned back against a young beech, whose smooth bark shone like a sea-washed shell. “Sash, why does it feel like the trees are, well…
waiting
for something?”
    “You feel it?” He gave a small grin, but said no more.
    Onward they trekked, over a hill blackened byfire years before, and around the edge of a mist-shrouded marsh. For lunch, they ate the tops of some stalks of golden grass that Sash called
nutashala
, along with some of Anna’s radishes. Then they continued on their way, rounding a lake nearly covered with lily pads. Fat green frogs sat on the leaves, strangely silent.
    All the while, the quiet grew heavier. Like a storm cloud ready to burst.
    As the late afternoon light shafted through the branches, the land started to rise steadily. Up they climbed, over rocks and tumbled trunks, as if they were mounting a stairway to the sky. Anna’s thighs stiffened, and her calves ached. But even more, she felt the weight of all that stillness. That growing tension in the air.
    And she felt something more—a subtle thrill swelling in her chest. For she knew, without asking, that they had started to climb the great ridge. Not far now! She craned her neck and peered up into the mesh of boughs. She couldn’t see the top of the ridge, or the willow that stood there. Not yet, anyway.
    But she was close. Really close.
    The slope grew steeper. Her knees and calvesthrobbed. She knew that she’d need to rest sometime soon. But how could she stop now?
    Just then Sash pointed to a carpet of thick moss under a towering rowan tree. “There,” he said in a whisper. “That’s as far as we go today.”
    Despite her wobbly legs, she objected. “Can’t we go a little higher? We must be halfway up the ridge by now.”
    “More than that.” He lay down on the moss and stretched out his legs. “But this is where we stop.”
    Anna could tell it was pointless to argue. She sighed and lay down on the soft, thick carpet. Her body sank, it seemed, into the ground itself. Eagle hopped off, finding a bed of his own in the tufts.
    Then, like the forest around them, they waited in silence.

Chapter 14
    F OR SOME TIME A NNA AND S ASH lay on their backs in the moss, quiet as the trees themselves. Just watching. One by one, every leaf and needle and twig sparkled with the day’s last light, gleamed for a while, then faded into darkness. In the rowan branches above them, the eyes of a nesting thrush glowed an eerie orange.
    Anna turned from the deepening shadows to the boy beside her. “Are your, ah…people…somewhere near?”
    “The drumalos are here, all right. But they’re waiting. For what comes next.” He chortled. “It happens only once a year, on High Hallow Eve. And it’s something, I’m sure, no human has ever witnessed.”
    Until now
, thought Anna.
    The tension in the air increased. The hair on