Willa of the Wood

Willa touches the boy’s body and realizes he is dead, but quickly realizes he isn’t Iska. She moves on through the cells, horrified by what she sees, and realizes that the children aren’t being randomly abused or cared for—they are being initiated as jaetters, since the Faeran have stopped having children. She forces herself onwards to find Iska.

Willa eventually finds Iska in a different cage, and they greet each other enthusiastically. Willa recognizes Nathaniel in him, and he is overjoyed that she came back, overwhelming her. Willa explains that Nathaniel is still alive but also tells him that Ahyoka is dead and the night-spirits want him to join them, horrifying him. 

Willa animates the door into a pile of wriggling, undead sticks to destroy it, horrifying Iska further. Iska convinces her to go hunt for his siblings. Willa looks down the hall and realizes she would never abandon Alliw if she were alive. As they run down the hall, however, three guards emerge with spears ready.

Willa pins Iska to the wall and blends, hiding him with her body. They hold still as the guards pass, talking about how to best cull the weak children. Willa brings Iska to the hole and forces him to go through, explaining that she will use her blending ability to find his siblings, but he must go home if she doesn’t return. Willa returns to the prison, suddenly aware she is going to die in the home she was born in, even though she doesn’t even recognize it as home anymore.

As Willa moves and blends, she realizes she needs help—and she has help, in the form of the many humans in the cells. She moves to the closest cell and introduces herself to the trapped boy, who is named Cassius. She frees him and then frees the tiny girl, Beatrice, in the cell across the hall. She asks Cassius to take Beatrice to safety and gives him directions to her entry point. She tells him to tell Iska to wait for more survivors.

Willa frees 23 children with the same instructions before she finds the other two Steadman children in the worst part of the cave. Hialeah is wrapped protectively around Inali, and they are filthy and starving, but alive. Hialeah, traumatized, doesn’t trust Willa at first, but eventually comes around and follows Willa out of the cell, Inali clinging to her. 

As they run to the exit, the guards spot Willa and sprint after her. Willa gets Hialeah and Inali to safety just as Lorcan, the guard, stabs her with his spear, which she realizes in horror is made of metal now. She is stabbed and hit twice before she collapses.

Willa, determined to protect the children, uses dark woodcraft to animate the dead walls and floor of the Hollow, using her own lifeforce. The plants absorb one of the guards, sustaining Willa, and the others flee in terror. Nathaniel’s children wait for her as she stumbles through; Hialeah tries to tend to Willa’s neck wound, but Willa insists they keep moving before Lorcan finds another way to catch them. She gives them instructions on how to escape and how to avoid the Faeran. Iska is furious at the idea of leaving Willa behind, but Willa insists it is the only way to protect them. Willa begs Iska to go home. Willa asks, before they go, for Hialeah to spell “Cillian” for her. Willa, understanding what her grandmother meant, promises Iska that she isn’t alone.

After the children leave, Willa closes the hole with her lifeforce. She prays that they run and don’t stop running until they are safe. Willa lies on the floor and waits for the guards to return, remembering what she has seen and what she knows of the corrupted Faeran. She wills her bleeding to stop, slows her heart, and stops breathing. The guards find her body and announce that she is dead.

The guards drag Willa’s body to the hall of the padaran, with Willa timing her breaths perfectly so they do not notice. Some of the crueler jaetters beat at her body, but most of the Faeran look horrified. 

The padaran looks delighted by her “death.” Willa realizes she will die there but knows she needs to give the children as much time as she can to escape, so she decides to die on her own terms. She releases her body and comes back to life in front of the entire hall.

Willa stands, alive, to the alarm of everyone else. Her friend Gillen rushes to help her, but Ciderg forces her back. The padaran’s lack of alarm makes Willa surer than ever that everything about him is a trick. Willa refuses to kneel to the padaran, and the mob of Faeran swarm her; she remembers the River of Souls on the wall and chooses to believe in her people rather than fear them. 

Willa screams at them to stop in the old language, shocking them, and she catches Lorcan’s spear as he rushes her and transforms it into a writhing living branch. Gillen tries to voice her support as Willa stands up in front of the Faeran and addresses them. Willa speaks the word of death—Naillic—to the alarm of many in the crowd, but most do not know what it means. She tells them that it is a name, and the padaran begins to scream for her death. She points at the padaran and names him Naillic, and demands to know what happened to Cillian, her father and his twin, whom he was supposed to be bound to for his entire life.

The padaran demands that his guards kill her, but the Faeran continue to swarm around Willa, protecting her like a bee protects a queen. Willa accuses the padaran of killing her father and all those who valued the old ways. Those in the crowd start to demand to know what happened to her mother, Nea, and Alliw, as well as their own loved ones who were killed. She tells Naillic that he killed her family for valuing the old ways and for knowing the truth. 

The crowd begins to grow furious with the padaran for breaking the old ways and committing the ultimate taboo of murdering his own twin. Willa tells the crowd to look at Naillic, pointing out that he is blending to make himself look more impressive. As the illusion fades, Willa summons the Faeran to walk through the padaran’s private halls and look at his stored wealth. 

The padaran kills Faeran who pass with his spear, and Lorcan supports him, but the rioters quickly kill Lorcan. The padaran grabs a torch and brandishes it; Ciderg tries to protect the padaran, but the mob pushes him to the ground and kills him, horrifying Gredic. In the chaos, the torches of the padaran set the floor and walls of the Hollow on fire, terrifying everyone.

Willa struggles to survive in the crowd of people fleeing and is separated from Gillen. Gredic grabs her and forces her down a hallway, telling her that they must stop fighting to survive. Willa realizes that Gredic is now completely alone and is terrified of letting go of her, but she knows she must escape if she ever wants to be free. She tries to escape as they walk, but Gredic catches her, and tells her that he’s going to hunt down her favorite humans and kill them to make sure she has nothing but him to turn to. 

Willa sprints away, and Gredic pursues her all the way to the abyss. Realizing she must kill Gredic to make sure the children are safe, she leans back, grabs Gredic, and falls into the abyss with him, promising him that they are together now.

Willa and Gredic separate during the long fall, and Willa hits cold water and is spun away through an underground river. She uses what the otters taught her and lets the river take her, trying to move as fast as she can so she can breathe. She eventually reaches air and then lets the river carry her out into the wilderness, where she soon finds Gredic’s drowned body, saddening her. She remembers being a child in brutal jaetter training with Gredic, and how much he had encouraged her before his cruelty became possessive. She gives him a stick as a makeshift spear and sends his body down the creek. 

Willa looks behind her and sees all Dead Hollow burning, so much flame it looks like the mountain itself is on fire.

As Willa leaves the water, she realizes she is wounded in multiple places and is in agonizing pain. Knowing only one thing can save her, she returns to the lair, which is now almost destroyed by the fire except for the stone passageways riddling the mountain. She goes back to her grandmother’s den, touching Alliw’s handprint as she goes, and finds her grandmother’s little tree miraculously unharmed by the flame. She uses the tree’s leaves to heal her wounds and then takes the tree outside, realizing her grandmother had known all along that the Faeran had to burn to survive, because they had become something unrecognizable. Willa is the Faeran’s last hope. 

She wanders through the wreckage of the Great Hall, seeing her uncle’s burned corpse, and then plants the tree in the middle of the destruction. She almost leaves, but returns to the tree and uses her magic to help the tree absorb nutrients and grow, singing it to life. It grows a hundred feet tall before she is content, and then she leaves it to resettle the land.

As Willa walks away, the enormity of what she has done overwhelms her. She finds a Faeran boy, Sacram, wandering in the woods, stunned and injured, and takes him to find the rest of the people. She realizes that the Faeran people will need help to survive, with so many of their old skills lost to the padaran’s corruption. 

When she finds the Faeran survivors, however, they harshly reject her, blaming her for starting the fire. Gillen tries to defend her, pointing out that she defeated the padaran, but the adults, who are hungry, scared, and irritated at the loss of their relatively safe life, chase her away, calling her a traitor. Willa flees the survivors as they pelt her with stones and sticks until she can hide in a stream, where she curls into a ball and sobs.

Willa eventually emerges, unsure where to go. She knows she can live in the forest but also knows she needs community. She sees the panther and a mountain lion traveling together in the distance and bids them a quiet farewell, knowing she must find someone to give her a home. The panther turns and stares at her, and they hold each other’s gaze for a long time, before Willa whispers, “Willa of the Wood,” again, naming herself as part of the forest.

As the sun rises, Willa wonders what happened to the human children, and returns to the spot she told Hialeah to go to. To her relief, Hialeah is there, and Hialeah is delighted to see her, embracing her. Iska explains that they decided to wait by the creek until Willa returned, surprising her, since she had said they would never see each other again. She decides she cannot take them home personally, since the realization that Nathaniel won’t love her anymore because he won’t need her makes her sad, but relents when they beg her to protect them. She agrees, but tells them firmly that it is only so she can say goodbye.

Willa escorts the children through the forest, carrying Inali when he grows too heavy for Hialeah. She does not appreciate how loudly they move, but enjoys how much they help each other, moving like a pack. They hide from jaetters and loggers as they travel but eventually reach the homestead.

As they approach, Willa reflects on how different the house looks now than when she was a jaetter trying to rob it. She then realizes that Nathaniel has left the house for good, taking his belongings. The children grow alarmed, but Willa realizes that she can still smell him.

Willa calms the distressed children and tells them to follow her, since she knows she can track Nathaniel to the one place he wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. They find Nathaniel by the graves, burdened by overwhelming loss, and Iska runs to him, shouting. Nathaniel turns, barely believing what he sees, and drops to his knees to embrace and kiss his children. Willa watches from the meadow’s edge, then walks back to the river, quietly bidding farewell to everything she has ever known and loved. 

Suddenly, Nathaniel grabs her and stops her, asking her where she is going. He asks how she did it, and she says she “just wanted to do one kind thing” (376). Nathaniel realizes what is happening and gets down on his knees, telling her that he only left because she was the only thing he had left that he cared about, and she had disappeared. He begs her to stay, and the children echo him, with all of them telling her they love her. 

Willa is overwhelmed by the realization that love is not limited, and realizes staying with Nathaniel will expand her life, not weaken it, since she needs a family to support her. She hugs Nathaniel, crying, and tells them that they have stolen her heart.