Willa of the Wood

Willa moves through the house silently and on high alert, knowing the dog and the homesteader will kill her if they find her, since they destroy everything in their paths. She finds some cookies in a tin and eats them hungrily, stealing the rest. She looks at a picture of the homesteader and his family, but forces herself to move on. 

As she steals money and other goods, she thinks about how much love she, a jaetter (or young thief) will earn from the padaran for stealing such valuable goods. Just the night before, he hit her hard on the face for not stealing enough, shocking her, and she is determined to improve. The jaetters are supposed to move together and not steal from inside homes, but Willa believes she is better than the rest and wants to prove it. 

She creeps upstairs and sees the man sleeping with the dog in the bed, but the other rooms in the home are oddly empty. She sees the gun beside the man’s bed and grows nervous.

Willa nervously takes half of the man’s jewelry and valuables, knowing that if she does not bring back enough, she will not get fed—and since this would be her second infraction, the punishment would be “worse.” Although the padaran has instructed them to steal everything, convinced the day-folk have more than what they need, Willa only ever takes half of what they have. Her grandmother told her that, a long time ago, the Faeran people did not steal and lived only off the wild land. While Willa believes this, she now has no choice but to pursue the belongings of the humans.

Willa finds a wedding ring matching the one on the man’s hand, but can’t bring herself to take it, realizing that “Sometimes half was whole” (15). She looks through the children’s rooms but is confused by their absence. As she finishes, she hears the man wake up and call to the dog; she runs, but the man catches up to her and shoots blindly. The shot hits her in the shoulder, and she tries to muster the strength to stand up and run.

Willa can’t move, and the dog bites her leg badly. She wrestles free and runs out of the house, with the man screaming in fury behind her; she believes she has made it to the forest but smells goat and realizes she has only made it to the man’s barn. She hunkers down, realizing she will probably die as her parents did. 

The man approaches slowly, with a lantern in hand, while she shakes in the corner. To her surprise, he looks shocked when he sees her, and he asks what she is, looking suddenly kind. He tries to reach for her to help her, soothing her, but Willa does not trust him and runs away again, escaping into the forest. She hears the man call for the dog to go after her.

In the forest, Willa does her best to disperse her own scent so the dog cannot track her. She tries to use a deer trail through the river to cross safely, but she is too weak, and the river sweeps her away. She struggles to crawl up onto some rocks and howls for help in desperation, hoping a wolf mother she saved a year ago will help her. She hears a howl in return, and a silvery wolf leading a pack of 30 other wolves runs to her aid. She begs for help as the man’s lantern light appears in the distance.

Although under any other circumstances the wolf would have killed Willa, in this specific instance, Luthien owes Willa her life, so she crouches down and allows Willa to climb onto her back. Willa is puzzled by the human’s sudden kindness after shooting her, but reminds herself that she cannot trust humans. 

She tells Luthien that the human has a dog to track them with, and Luthien commands the other wolves in her pack to separate through the underbrush to create many trails. Luthien runs up Clingman’s Dome, or Kuwa’hi, with Willa falling asleep on her back from lack of blood.

Willa wakes up a significant amount of time later and finds that all the wolves are with Luthien now, looking out over a ridge where a wounded bear is lumbering along. To her surprise, the wolves do not attack but follow the bear; the youngest wolves follow Luthien closely, seemingly scared. Willa doesn’t know what this means, but feels Luthien tense, ready to fight.

Willa watches the wolves track the bear and remembers doing the same with her mamaw (grandmother) and her twin sister Alliw. They eventually arrive at a gigantic, perfectly still lake, filled with bears and birds and a strange mist. The bear they have been tracking eases into the water, appearing to feel relief soon after. 

A giant white bear appears and threatens Luthien, who holds her ground and growls back; Willa puts together that this is the bear’s lake, and he is threatened by her, not by the wolves. She speaks to the bear in the old language, and he reluctantly lets her and Luthien pass. She knows that the bear is far older than any living thing she has ever seen before.

Luthien lowers her into the warm water and Willa immediately feels her wounds close, healing her. She remembers a story about a lake with healing powers called Atagahi that only the bears could find, protected by an ancient white bear. Suddenly, as Willa rests, she hears the bears and wolves begin to growl in alarm and looks up to see the man standing on the ridge with his gun and his dog. She fervently begs that he look away so none of the wolves and bears will die and the healing lake will not be found.

The man does go away, and the animals quickly relax again. When she feels better, Willa asks Luthien to take her back to the Faeran people, even though she knows she and the old bear share a kinship of knowing what is wrong with the world. Luthien escorts her up the Great Mountain towards a large fallen tree lying over a gorge called the Watcher, which guards the entrance to Dead Hollow, her people’s lair. 

Willa embraces Luthien as she leaves, knowing Luthien has honored her immensely, and swears loyalty to the wolf. She feels overwhelmed by loneliness as the wolves leave, but turns and goes to her people, growing increasingly afraid.

Willa knows the other jaetters will be waiting for her return and will try to steal her take, so she climbs the upside-down Watcher and nests her satchel in with some baby pileated woodpeckers. The injured mother comes to visit, and Willa helps her remove the net from around her wings and body, shocked that someone would be hunting in such a manner. 

After Willa heads to the lair, however, she is quickly confronted by Gredic and three other jaetters, who threaten her and try to force her to change colors, something they cannot do. Gredic is joined by his twin, Ciderg, as well as twins Kearnin and Ninraek, who are the cruelest of all, even if they aren’t the leaders. Gredic controls Willa’s every move, or tries to, and gets abusive if he realizes Willa has slipped away. Gredic notices that Willa is hurt and demands to know what she has done and found, but she refuses to tell. He grows angry, pinning her against a wall and screaming at her.

Gredic chokes Willa, who knows she has no chance of fighting back; she swears she will not run away, and he releases her, allowing her to shift her colors and vanish. She doesn’t run, however, but drops to the ground and crawls away from the flailing jaetters. The boys eventually leave to find her satchel so they can claim her take for themselves. As she fetches her satchel again and rethinks her path, she notices a group of Faeran guards going into the forest with strange equipment, which is odd since Faeran people do not hunt.

Willa takes an alternate route through the forest to Dead Hollow, which resembles a huge hornet’s nest but is woven out of dead sticks. The hollow was once alive but has long died with the death of almost all the woodwitches—magicians like her grandmother, who are now forbidden by the padaran. Willa crawls through a crack in a wall to get to a forbidden area of the Hollow, which smells of rot and decay. She roams through the abandoned tunnels and caves of the Hollow for a while, trying to get back home, but eventually grows dizzy from blood loss as her wounds reopen. 

Willa stops at branching paths and senses a whimpering creature down a path leading away from the central hub of the Hollow. She follows the path and finds, to her shock, a prison cell housing a 10-year-old Cherokee boy, begging for help.

Willa is overwhelmed with the sense that both the Faeran people have done something wrong by capturing the boy, and that she has done something wrong in finding out. She tries to harden herself to the boy’s suffering, reminding herself that she must hate humans, but struggles when the boy tells her he is starving. 

Against her own judgment, she gives the boy pieces of the cookies she had found; he asks why she has taken him, and she insists that she didn’t do anything, shocking her, since the clan is one entity and she has just verbally separated herself from them. However, she knows she is right and reiterates that she did nothing. The boy tells her that his name is Iska and tries to ask her more questions, but she hears the guards and leaps to her feet.

The guards spot Willa, who takes off; when she is out of sight, she blends into the wall and they walk past her, running to tell the padaran that a jaetters has seen the prison. 

As Willa leaves, she realizes there are many other children in woven prisons down there, shocking her. She rushes through the tunnels until she reaches the main areas of the Hollow. She runs to her mamaw, knowing that she cannot recover from what she has seen, and the punishment will be severe.

Willa feels relief as she reaches the cave system that she and her grandmother shelter in. One of the tunnels has a pit that the Faeran believe has no bottom, while another has walls painted with images of the people before, including a wall of handprints of their entire clan, called the River of Souls. 

Willa stops and places her handprint onto the most recent handprint, which is her twin sister’s, before moving on. She remembers the night of the deaths of the rest of her family—her mother, father, and sister, killed by humans, with only her grandmother surviving to take care of Willa and claim her as her “twin.” Willa doesn’t have distinct memories of them but feels agonizing loss all the same. She believes all she can rely on is her mamaw, who has taught her everything.

Willa runs to her mamaw, who is 137 years old, cannot walk, and is streaked with all the colors of the world from years of blending into it. She and her mamaw speak the old Faeran language in secret, which the padaran forbid so that the lair could “survive.” 

Mamaw cares for Willa’s wounds, but Willa refuses to tell her how she got wounded, knowing it would disappoint her, since her mamaw has always insisted she preserve her own safety over pleasing the padaran. Mamaw plucks a leaf from a small, delicate tree, a tree she has been caring for her entire life. She uses it to tend to Willa. As Willa dwells on how safe she feels in their cave, Mamaw removes a piece of lead shot from Willa’s shoulder and demands to know what happened.

Willa explains the events of the night to her grandmother, who is astonished that the wolves and the bear helped her. Her grandmother is horrified that she went into a human house and reminds her that her powers don’t work inside them; Willa insists she had to please the padaran, and her grandmother tells her not to let the padaran control her identity. 

Her grandmother alludes to dangers being inside the hollow as well as outside it, and Willa tells her about the hunting party and the trapped children. Mamaw tells Willa to be careful, as the padaran has grown desperate and is killing anyone who resists him. Willa and her grandmother discuss how there is not enough food because none of the Faeran know how to forage for themselves anymore, and Willa eventually presses to know how her parents and sister died.

Mamaw explains that she had taken Willa away to learn the song of the little tree, separating her from her sister and parents, who died in an attack after a meeting in the great hall of the Hollow. She was initiated as a jaetter the day after, because her father was not around to stop it; she was the last of the jaetters to be initiated—a cruel and abusive process—because no more children have been born and survived since. 

Willa asks if the padaran can save them, and her mamaw insists he cannot, but tells Willa to not even think of the truth. Willa hears a disturbance in the distance and switches the contents of her satchel with her grandmother’s medicine bag. Guards come, with Gredic leading the way, and haul Willa off, with her grandmother begging them to be kind to her.