Puck says things like, “Could I have you mind the stove for a moment, Akasha?” and “Akasha, love, bring this over to Finch, would you?” just often enough that my name spreads without a formal announcement. This is a relief. I can’t imagine going around telling everyone individually any better than I can imagine requesting everyone’s attention around the fire and declaring myself.

  I still feel my ears go hot when Finch says, “Morning, Akasha,” the next day, but he blushes, too, so at least it’s not just me.

  As if my name is the sign she has been waiting for, Ma announces after breakfast, “We’re moving camp today. Brand is getting the —“

  She says a word absolutely no one else is fazed by, and I am immediately certain I will look stupid if I ask.

  “ — so make sure your wagons are locked down. Secure or protect anything you don’t want breaking. As soon as the —“ the word again; hih-buh-vins? “ — are hitched up, we’re going. Akasha, I know you don’t have much, but it’s important you learn the process; I’ll show you what to look out for in the storage wagon.”

  Ma exchanges a few words with Puck, then we go into the storage wagon where she directs me in the way the trunks are fastened to the wall and the floor by rope to keep them from sliding. She opens them up to demonstrate how things are stacked together, how soft items are used to reduce impact to delicate things, how the trunks are filled to the lids in such a way that the contents can still move but not bounce.

  “You won’t have to worry about this right now,” she says, “But for future reference, I recommend never packing things onto your bed. You can fill the floor or line the walls, but if we’ve been traveling all day then the last thing you want to deal with at the end is moving a heavy trunk out of the way so you can sleep.”

  In my former life, I had damned myself while cleaning my room by using the bed as an extra shelf, and more than once had to make a judgment call on whether or not the laundry was getting folded or if I was just sleeping next to it. I understood this recommendation intimately.

  I am helping Puck condense the kitchen furniture onto the back of her wagon, impressed at the way even the prep counter fits into place around the stove, when Brand returns from the woods with the hibbovins. I stare. They look like burly, hunch-backed horses with horns that swoop around their ears and along their jawlines. Their hooves are cloven. Their tails are tufted, lashing whips. They are soot-dark and yellow-eyed, but follow Brand docilely, and stand two to a wagon while he hitches them in place.

  “They’re just hibbovins, love,” Puck says, touching my left shoulder.

  I nod, quick and silent, because they aren’t ‘just’ anything. Hibbovins look like fresh exports from Hell, disturbingly graceful for their size, and with that grace comes a quiet that makes them seem less real. No matter how hard I try to pay attention to what Puck is showing me about locking up the kitchen, I can’t tear my eyes away from the enormous demons Brand leads around like sheep.

  Once the monsters are hitched, Brand directs the wagons one at a time away from the circle around the fire pit and into a line, starting with Finch and Thirsan’s, then mine, then Brand’s own, then Ma and Puck’s. As he does this, everyone else checks around the area for items left behind. Finch uses the soup pot to pour creek water over the fire pit.

  “Are we ready?” asks Puck.

  Ma nods. “Looks like. Brand, take the lead. Thirsan, you’re on storage. Akasha, sit with Finch. Puck and I will take the rear.”

  It is only now I realize that I will be sitting directly behind a pair of the creatures, not walking at a safe and respectable distance to the side or perhaps several yards behind. My heart starts to pound.

  “Do… do we sit inside?” I ask Finch.

  He laughs. “Nah — up here.”

  Then he pulls a hidden ladder from just beneath the roof and starts climbing.

  The roof of the wagon is carved out in such a way that there is a sort of wide trough down its center, and a guard rail at the back. I imagine it could be used as extra storage space, if someone had more than would easily fit in the wagon, but most immediately, it is space where Finch and I can sit with a view that lets us see the way ahead of the hibbovins. I could probably lie down in the open space and feel quite safe.

  Ahead of us, Thirsan is already seated on top of the storage wagon, reins in hand, looking a little bored. Behind us, Ma helps Puck into a seated position beside her, laughing as she sways into Ma’s shoulder.

  “You all right?” Finch asks. “Not afraid of heights, are you?”

  “I think I’m fine.”

  “Do you want to steer?”

  “No!”

  He laughs, and I realize he’s yanking my chain — I am obviously terrified of the hibbovins, so of course handing me the reins is a bad idea.

  If I were in perfect health, I probably could have walked briskly alongside the wagons and kept pace with them. Brand guides the way through the trees, winding along a path which looks more like a coincidence of space than a proper road. The ride is not smooth, the wheels bumping and juddering over roots and rocks and whatever else hides below the leaves of small growing things, but there has to be something absorbing the worst of the impact because it doesn’t feel like my teeth will rattle out of my head. The rocking has a hypnotic effect. The hibbovins are unnerving to watch, muscles rippling beneath their fur with each step, but I keep my eyes on the forest and it passes like a dream.

  *

  We arrive at a small meadow in the middle of the afternoon and stop to stretch our legs and eat. The hibbovins wander into the meadow, wading through the weeds that grow much more densely where the sun can reach the soil, and they set out chewing on anything their mouths can reach. My fellow humans and I stay near the meadow’s edge and lunch on dried meat and foraged greens.

  “Makin’ good time,” Brand remarks. “The way’s been clear, got here earlier’n I thought.”

  “Where are we going?” I ask, mostly to make conversation. My entire world has been the size of our campsite and its immediate surroundings for days unnumbered. Nothing he says will mean anything to me.

  He takes a stick and starts marking the ground, one wavy line to the left, one to the right, then a dot closer to the right side. “We started here,” he says. “That’s where we were camping the last little while.” He makes another dot a couple inches lower and a bit to the left. “Here’s about where we are now. And here…” he moves the point in an undulating line through the air several more inches down, as though roughly indicating the path ahead, then finally stabs it into the dirt about a foot and a half away. “…is where we’re headed next.”

  “Oh. We’ll be doing this several days?”

  “Yuh. ‘Bout a week and a half, conditions permitting.”

  I look at his rough map. “What’s the boundary? Here and here.” I point to the wavy lines on either side.

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  “It’s the edge of the forest — the outer walls.”

  “…walls? The forest has walls?”

  He looks at me strangely, then remembers I am supposedly an amnesiac. “We’re in the Sunken Forest.”

  “Sunken… Forest.” I frown down at the edges of the crude map as though I might understand a few lines in the dirt better than his words. Brand takes pity and elaborates.

  “So this is one side, right, and this is the other, and in the middle…” he makes a series of wavy lines running between them. “There’s this river. Once, this river filled the whole forest — you can see the bones of fish in the forest walls, some places. But the river got smaller and smaller over time, and then this forest grew up in the old river bed. The trees are special, they only grow here, and they grow as high as the wall and no taller. They’re river trees. Looks incredible from up top.”

  I look up, up, up, at the branches overhead. I look at the gap that is the meadow, and the hole between the branches that lets the sunlight in. The trees tower over us, and I try to imagine what he has described — a canyon, isn’t it? A canyon full of enormous trees.

  Brand is watching me with growing amusement. “It’s haunted down here, too,” he adds. “Spooky shit lives in the Sunken Forest.”

  “Brand,” says Ma, a warning bite in her tone.

  “She oughta know,” he replies defensively.

  “She doesn’t need to hear cryptid horror stories.”

  “She wants to know about them — Akasha, you want to know what’s out here, right?”

  I nod encouragingly, because yes I absolutely want to know what this place’s next best thing to Bigfoot is.

  Ma sighs. “Don’t give her nightmares.”

  *

  Brand tells me about the Sobilah, whose name I recognize from before — a floating hand with an eye on each finger and one on its palm, which drifts between the trees looking for prey. Then he describes a coravik, which sounds more like an ordinary bird of prey than a cryptid, small and gray with a curved beak and sharp talons and an unnerving ability to go for the eyes, sometimes out of spite. What makes it stand out as something other than a very rare raptor is that it usually appears like a divine punishment after witnessing something you shouldn’t; someone bathing in the river, or clandestine meetings among the trees. It’s unclear from Brand’s stories if the coravik is a protector of nude bathers and private gatherings, or if it’s a vengeful shapeshifter.

  The nude bathers are either a ghost or a cryptid, too, depending on the story, luring people to their doom or just seducing the unsuspecting. He calls them “river beauties” and gets a little too far into a story about the time he met one before Ma and Puck simultaneously realize what he’s saying and shout, “Brand!”

  He cuts off, remembering himself and that he is telling a cute young lady about one of his youthful misadventures, and he laughs and blushes and laughs some more. “You don’t need to hear all that,” he says. “Point is, I lived to tell the tale.”

  “And you kept your eyes, too,” I add, and he laughs once again in agreement.

  I don’t need to hear the details, of course. But I’m not delicate, either, and I kind of want to know if the whole story was as funny as he made it sound.

  Finch and Thirsan reappear from wherever they have ventured to, collecting fresh drinking water from one of the streams criss-crossing the Sunken Forest. In light of what Brand has told me, I am reconsidering these streams; they must branch off from the river, or run down to join it. They are the thin remnants of what was once something vast and deep.

  The world I live in has become incrementally bigger.

  When we resume traveling, I ask Finch, “Do you know any cryptid stories?”

  “Cryptids?”

  “Brand was telling me about them. We covered the Sobilah, and coraviks, and river beauties. Actually, that’s where we got sidetracked; Brand was telling me about how he met one, and then Ma and Puck interrupted before it got… um. Too detailed.”

  Finch laughs the awkward laugh of someone who knows the rest of the story and is distressed to think I almost had my poor, naive mind afflicted by that knowledge, too. “That was quick of them. Just stay away from the river and you won’t have to worry about it.”

  “Do you have a river beauty story?”

  I am only asking to tease him, which proves rewarding. He turns crimson.

  “No!”

  “Really? A healthy young man like you never went looking to tempt fate while fishing?”

  “Too risky. I have more sense than that.”

  “Are they all girls? Maybe I should go test my luck, see if there’s a handsome man waiting in the water to seduce me.”

  Finch actually responds, “You’re thinking of woodsmen,” which is so much more informative than I expect that I forget my teasing.

  “Woodsmen? Are they ghosts or cryptids?”

  “They’re…” he thinks. “More cryptid than ghost. River beauties are like that, too, though, where it could be either. Or both. Sometimes it’s one, and sometimes it’s the other.”

  “How do you tell?”

  He shrugs. “Ask? I don’t know, it hasn’t really come up.”

  “So river beauties are women, and woodsmen are men.”

  “Usually.”

  “And woodsmen, what, run around the forest with no clothes on, daring women to chase them? Do they have coraviks, too?”

  “Ha! No. Woodsmen are just handsome.” He thinks. “They usually have a dog. Or they’re looking for a dog. You have to watch out, though, because if you start talking to him and you aren’t seduced by his charms, he might go at you with an ax.”

  I puzzle over the idea of a lumberjack who doesn’t take ‘no’ very well as a cryptid. “How is he not just some guy trying to meet girls in the forest? I mean —“ I stop myself before saying weird flex, but the feeling is there. “It sounds like a spook made up to discourage girls from wandering around the woods alone. Or from talking to strangers.”

  “It’s not a spook,” Finch says, then pauses while he thinks of an explanation. “The river beauties and the woodsmen are both half in, half out. Here, but not all here.”

  He looks at me to see if this vague explanation is working at all. It is, sort of. I used to read a lot as a kid, and this sounds like exactly the kind of thing you’d read about in myths or folklore — you turn around, and the person you were just talking to is gone. The cozy cottage that kept you safe from the storm overnight is a broken down hovel when you come back a week later. That kind of thing.

  “So how do you tell the difference? How do you know if it’s a person or a cryptid or ghost or whatever?”

  “You’re not supposed to tell,” says Finch. “You’re supposed to walk away.”

  “That’s it? What if it’s just a person?”

  “If you’re alone in the woods, don’t talk to strangers. Simple as.”

  I bite back the petulant impulse to press, to find out what one was legitimately supposed to do if some guy is looking for his dog and there’s no one else around. Maybe all of it is made up stories so guys like Brand can brag about hooking up with ghost ladies at the river, or to mythologize wariness of strangers; the point wasn’t to make people anxious, but to assert it’s better to be safe than sorry. Don’t go in the woods alone, and if you absolutely must then be aware of stranger danger.

  “So what should I have done?” I ask, because I can’t just let it rest. “I wake up in a strange bed in a wagon in the woods, surrounded by strangers. Some woodsman walks in on me while I’m checking my injuries. What then?”

  Finch looks surprised, then a little embarrassed. “That was different.”

  “I dunno, Mister Woodsman. Trusting strangers just because there was no one else around doesn’t sound like I had a lot of choice. Maybe there needs to be a signal so you know who’s human and who’s only half there.”

  “Woodsmen and river beauties wouldn’t help an injured person. They’re more like predators.”

  “So you’re definitely not a predator.”

  It is very interesting that Finch stops himself before agreeing with this sentence and gives it some real thought. “I definitely didn’t want to hurt you,” he says. “I don’t think that’s so for a woodsman.”

  “So you might be a predator?”

  He does not immediately agree with this either. “I’m a hunter,” he says, finally. “I take advantage of weaknesses to eat. ‘Hunter’ is just ‘predator’ with more tools, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve given this some thought.”

  “Some.”

  He doesn’t elaborate.