Cartographer Tasji stepped from beneath the reaching branches of the Spirwood’s canopy and found another village home missing. The plot where the house once stood beside the trail was empty of anything touched by the hand of mortal folk. Except for the Spirwood’s power humming beneath his feet, it could have been any forest edge: meadow grass, shrubs, young trees.
The last time he emerged, he’d been greeted by the house’s cheerful riot of a garden, full of children and dogs and shrieking laughter. The butterflies floating from flower to flower, the last bright remnants of summer, had reminded him of his own home. Of his wife, Parvana.
Now, there was only silence. A child’s rag-doll lay forgotten in the verge of the Mapped trail.
The Spirwood had spread.
•••
Tasji’s wagon waited a little further down the trail. A nomadic childhood memory repurposed as his own mobile Scriptorium, it was cozy and safe. Far safer than any rented room under the shadow of a Spirwood could be.
Nacre flew ahead of him to the rooftree and roused all their white feathers, quorking warning. The wind was rising, a storm boiling up over the Spirwood in thick charcoal curdles of cloud.
“I know,” Tasji told his raven familiar. “I’ll have to work quickly. This one is strong.”
The white raven quorked again, peering over the edge of the curved roof to watch as Tasji drew a sigil on the door with a charred stick. Protection and peace in elegant knotted swirls, made all the more potent by using a piece of the Spirwood itself. It wouldn’t last long, but enough to let him begin the work.
Any Scribe could draw sigils, could hold magic in script and gold and flourished illumination. Any Scribe could prepare the pigment, ink, brush, and quill necessary for the art. The more magical the source, the more potent the finished work.
Only the especially stubborn Scribes became Cartographers, taking the world and binding it to parchment and paper. A bridge Mapped by a Cartographer would never wash out; a river Mapped would never drown the town on its banks.
A Spirwood stand would never swallow the village in its shadow.
Lightning turned the cabin actinic violet. The wagon shook from wheels to rooftree, and the Spirwood hissed with the oncoming rain.
Tasji listened to the living, malignant wood as he laid out his tools in precise lines on the worktable. Nacre muttered from their perch over the worktop, glaring in the direction of the wood.
“It can’t touch us out here, Nacre.” Tasji spared a moment to give the raven a reassuring scritch. “We’re not within its reach. All it can do is scream and unsettle the weather.”
Nacre preened his fingers, but did not seem comforted, all their feathers slicked down. The ground groaned and shuddered beneath the wagon with every lightning strike.
When he was satisfied with the arrangement of his instruments, Tasji set another light-charm aglow in its polished brass reflector. Everything was ready. Spirwood water, sap, and pigment, ground fine to ink and paint, set out in tidy rows in easy reach. Spirwood rowan twigs and marten fur made his brushes. His quills were molted wing-feathers from Nacre.
The storm raged, rattling the shutters and whistling through the eaves. Tasji ignored it.
It had taken a moon’s turn and more to chart this Spirwood in silverpoint, to collect and prepare components steeped in power from beneath its branches. Tasji had been beset by aggressive wildlife, fallen trees, rock falls, and toxic miasmas. And more unearthly threats: phantasms with beloved faces—cajoling, threatening, in danger—nightmares until the prospect of sleep became more dread than relief, the grove twisting over on itself in a shifting maze of trees and rocks and brush.
Storms were another tool of the Spirwood to frustrate and delay the few Cartographers who bound them. It wouldn’t be the first time nor the last Tasji set out to bind a wood and was threatened by its fury. Bridges and roads never fought back.
Spirwoods did not go quietly.
•••
The half-completed Map was waiting on his desk, flattened beneath beetle-carved stone weights. He would finish it tonight. He would. This Spirwood stand would not waylay him any longer; he’d already been too long away from Court—and home. He missed home. His family. The routine of his days in the larger workshop he shared with his wife, the familiar lay of their village, Parvana’s gardens in every season—and the fleeting moments of his daughter’s childhood.
The Map his Empress had commissioned was satisfying, meaningful work, and he did not begrudge it—but each Spirwood stand he was sent to Map fought harder. Took longer to complete to the Empress’ satisfaction. Magic in every mote and drop. Tasji dipped his quill and set to the Map.
The storm screamed itself hoarse as he finished the iron-gall linework and began the first layers of forest greens. Misted curls of damp seeped in around the trembling door and beneath the eaves while Tasji painted trees in miniature profusion.
“An excellent Map, husband. Come, take a rest. Stretch. Have you eaten yet?” His wife’s hands rubbed across his shoulders. He almost leaned into Parvana’s touch, then held himself still.
Nacre shrilled warning from their perch, wings buffeting his head. Tasji set down his brush and held a hand up to calm the bird.
“Distracting me will not help you,” Tasji said to the Spirwood wearing his wife’s presence. Every Spirwood was bound—eventually.
“I had to try,” the Spirwood replied with wind and rustling leaves and an echo of his wife’s voice. “To live uncaged a little longer. To stretch and breath and live—”
“To devour homes and smother villages.” Not his home—because he had Mapped their wood, bound that Spirwood by oak gall and stone dust. Others had not been so fortunate.
“I should say the same to you.” The storm died to weeping rain. Tasji turned at the despair in its whisper. Fury, he expected. Violence, malevolence, those were all hallmarks of a Spirwood. He had never heard one speak so much for itself. The Spirwood’s presence had become a moss-and-rot fog, huddled on the floor.
“I keep people safe—from you,” Tasji said. Nacre muttered agreement.
“I warn the mortals,” the Spirwood hissed. Phosphorescence, like far-off lightning, flickered in its depths. “I try to drive them away. But they stay! And more come, and never leave, and then you mortals with power, to bind and break me. There is less and less of me—of us—every season.”
“Do you expect sympathy from me, when you have harmed so many? You will not turn me from my work, no matter what new ploys you attempt.” Tasji put his back to the miserable cloud and picked up his brush again. Cleaning and reshaping the bristles, dipping again in fresh paint—the small rituals helped settle him. The Map would be finished by dawn.
He hesitated over the next stroke; his brush held a fingerwidth over the mulberry-silk paper. The Spirwood spoke truth—fewer stands and groves remained unbound, and many had shrunk within the borders he and the other Cartographers had inked. Fewer powerful creatures, too, from which Scribes gathered their materials.
As more and more refugees fled from distant, less peaceful lands to the Empress’ aegis, there were fewer fields for them not under a Spirwood’s shadow—for them and the crops required to feed them. Tasji, as one of the Cartographers in the Empress’ service, who Mapped the lands the refugees settled, knew their plights all too well.
Was the Spirwood just as much a victim as the people forced to find shelter beneath it? Was it not murder but self-defense?
Paint dripped from his brush and he moved swiftly to turn it from accident into intent, drawing the droplet out into leaf-shapes and underbrush where it existed in reality. Mistakes were not allowed on a Cartographer’s Map. Stray ink spatters had changed nations with errant topography. Tasji did not make mistakes.
“It is no ploy. You would not go gracefully into bondage, either.”
“My mere existence is not dangerous to—enough. I am only a Cartographer, Spirwood. I am no philosopher, to muddle through your morass. All I can do is define the size and comfort of your prison.” He pushed back from the Map and gestured to the areas on the other side of the Spirwood stand from the village. Coolness drifted up his side as the moss-and-rot fog became a vague form peering over his shoulder. “I can give you space, here, see? I can turn the trails away. But I am not permitted to let you remain unbound.”
“Who binds you, Cartographer? Who holds such power over you, you who can tame rivers and dry out marshlands, that you dare not disobey?”
“The Empress.” He put the brush down with exaggerated care, so the shudder passing through him, like a sudden squall, did not mar his work. The Empress was something more than mortal, awe-full and awe-inspiring in the way of a jagged snow-crowned mountain peak—powerful, beautiful, and utterly beyond his understanding.
“She terrifies you. More than us?” The moss-and-rot-fog rolled along his shoulders, the fog stinging against his skin on just the edge of acid toxin threat, as though testing.
Nacre growled and flapped. The gust flung the Spirwood’s presence back onto the floor in eddies and tiny, sulking whirlwinds. The white raven hopped from their perch to Tasji’s shoulder, muttering to themself with irritated shakes of their head.
“I need to finish this.” Tasji leaned over the Map and picked up his brush once more.
The Spirwood, mercifully, was silent.
It remained in a small thoughtful puddle on his floor, flickering with firefly lights, sloshing back and forth like water in a carried bowl. Nacre muttered every time it moved too far.
Tasji had always been quietly proud of his ability to work through any disturbance a Spirwood could muster, to get a Map completed without undue delay, to please the Empress and be allowed to return home. But this—this Spirwood made his neck prickle and shattered his focus with no more than a whisper of mist. It was galling. When he could stand it no longer, Tasji shoved his chair back from the desk and turned to it.
“Why are you still here? Why do you persist?”
“Would you intercede for us to the Empress, Cartographer Tasji?” The moss-and-rot fog spun itself up and up into a recognizable human shape, firefly-flicker where eyes should be. “Would anyone?”
“Intercede? For a Spirwood?”
“We are a reasoning being! Surely, we have as much right as any of the mortals. If they can live, why cannot we? If they can cry for sanctuary…”
“…why shouldn’t you.” Tasji sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You are not wrong.” It was true, it would be right—but Tasji was no Worldheart, to empathize so deeply with another so one’s own self was in danger of being lost, subsumed in the sea of spirit from which all magic flowed. Spirwoods had fed too often on folk he knew and cared for. “I will not intercede for you, Wood.”
The Spirwood’s presence shrieked and spun itself up into a miniature storm, all whirlwind, lightning, and whipping branches. Nacre screamed and fled to the far side of the wagon, all spread wings and roused hackles.
Tasji stood his ground, a pen in his hand he barely remembered seizing, loaded with Spirwood ink and poised like a fencer’s blade. “This will not help you.”
After a long moment of rumbling, growling earth, in which Tasji prepared for this Map to be his very last, forever unfinished—the Spirwood’s presence shrank. The moss-and-rot fog clung to the wagon’s rafters, wrapped small and vulnerable.
Rain began weeping in glistening rivers over the wagon, soft and quiet, and the moonlight dimmed as clouds misted over it. “It does not,” the Spirwood moaned. “And thus are we dead already.”
Tasji sat down in his chair and gently set the pen in its holder. “I will not intercede for you, Wood. But I will not stand in your way, either.”
A tendril of fog curled towards him. “You will not bind us?”
“I will not bind your voice. The rest of you—”
Tasji gestured towards the southeast, where the capital lay. Where the Empress held Court. The Spirwood would not be the first inhuman thing to grace its halls, or seek arbitration; the Empress was renowned for her scrupulous, militant fairness. More than a decade ago, a wing of Phoenix had been granted a Map over the objections of her mortal courtiers. Their homes would never burn down by accident or intent, nor poachers ever trespass their borders.
“You will take us to the Empress!” The moss-and-rot fog brightened and thickened, becoming almost solid in hope. “We will speak with her, sovereign to sovereign?”
“If—If you let me finish my work!”
The rain ceased immediately. Moonlight flooded in, silver counterpoint to the yellow warmth of his glowstone lamps. Nacre left off their calling and settled, feathers smoothing into sudden contentment. Even the shadows down the trail, stretching out from beneath the Spirwood’s branches, became less impenetrable and sinister.
The Spirwood’s presence flowed down the wall and into an empty lamp, a soft-edged globe of hopeful firefly flicker.
•••
Tasji finished the Map by moonset.
By dawn the wagon was in motion, Tasji driving down a Cartographer’s Road. Between one bend and the next they were before the Palace itself instead of wending into the village.
By noon, he was on his knees, prostrate before the Empress herself. Where the Spirwood was wild and sprawling, the Empress was order and law made flesh; as remote and still as a temple statue, weighed down in electrum, silver, and sapphire. Her eyes, luminous and blank from corner to corner, pinned him to the polished stone floor as surely as any nail.
“O Most Faithful and Honored Empress, I bring before you the Map commanded of me.” He unrolled the completed Map for the Court. The rivers on it seemed to flow, the trees swayed in unfelt breezes, miniature cows in their fields and beasts in the wood moved as though real. And the Spirwood looked as though it was ready to swallow the Palace, branches spreading in illusory crowns from the parchment.
“I also bring before you a petitioner, a subject of your Imperial Serenity.”
Tasji set down the lamp with the Spirwood’s Voice within. Moss had grown on it, ivy and twining vines and tiny wine-velvet flowers. He set the lamp before the Empress and edged backwards.
“The Spirwood, O Serenity.”
The Court gasped.
The Spirwood’s presence flowed upward, moss-and-rot fog in another approximation of a body, crowned with firefly-flickers and lightning, garbed in leaves and branches. It bowed, ever so slightly, to the Empress, and spoke in a voice of birds and thunder.
“Empress. We are the Spirwood: we live, we breathe, we feel. We ask of you: grant us sanctuary. Sanction our freedom. As you offer to the mortals, give it also to us.”
Tasji left before the Court could dissolve into hysterics, but he had seen the thoughtful expression on his Empress’ face. His Empress would hear the Spirwood. And she would judge, and if she deemed it fair and just, call for one of her Cartographers.
After all, Maps could always be redrawn.
