In this tree the faint glows and reflected late-afternoon light that force through the canopy cascade into one another into a sheet of bright color, as lovely as stained glass in the morning, and as she swings onto the lowest branch she stops to hold out her hand and watch the color play across it.
Her hand is shaking, and dirty; the fingernails are broken and black. The journey has not been kind to her and her dog turned back long ago, leaving her to finish the trip in solitude and silence. When the first pale-eyed wolf had reared out of the darkness between the trunks she had shrieked so loudly that she heard an animal start away into the underbrush; the realization that it was only a stone, gleaming, was somehow more unsettling than comforting.
She thinks often and uncontrollably of the story her father tells her to frighten her: the story of Spokelse, the white woman who lingers near the edge of the Wardwood and stares, sliding between the trees and pulling children towards some ambiguous but ghastly fate. The old ghost seems to be waiting beyond every obstacle, and when a white bird flashes its wings in the canopy Petra's knees knock until she must sit down.
She had seen one person since coming. He was a young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty; he was stumbling in the opposite direction with his fist clenched possessively around some small thing, and his eyes when they landed on Petra looked through her, full of grief and exultation. He was unsuited to the environment; his fine velvet coat was torn and his elegant buttoned boots were scuffed and ruined. He had said nothing and neither had she. There was nothing to say. He was a grown man and she was an eight year old girl, but she was clearly more ready for this trial than he.
She thought of him often after that, and thought of him now. It was a comfort to remember his torn scarf, and to pull her own coarse shawl about her shoulders; she thought of his limping and felt proud of her rough bare feet and strong brown legs. She was exhausted and had nothing left to carry but a heel of bread, but she was only a child and the Wardwood had found her worthy and called her forth and she had answered.
At each new branch she pauses to look at the swaying totems and listen to their clinking. Each one is beautiful and strange, and as she ascends higher the terrible thought seizes her throat that she might not know which is hers despite the awful instinct pushing her onwards.
High in the leaves she hesitates, leaning her cheek against the bark. There is a bright totem here, as bright as a gypsy ribbon; its whorls glow as cheery as a flower. Its legs are extended in a bow like a dog wanting to play a game, and she aches to take it. It is very beautiful. Its antlers are dipped in scarlet red. When it is grown, it will be a lovely buck who would dance alongside her through town. The other children would stare and whisper and laugh, and Petra would get all the tossed coins that might otherwise go to the man with the monkey in the square. She would wear bright dresses and sit on its back. They would stand together at the head of the festivals, draped in flowers and laughing.
"It's mine," she whispers, but her own ferocity betrays her. She ignores the dread opening a hole in her belly and she reaches to take the totem.
When her fingers brush its dappled surface she sways, sick; it is a feeling of guilt, as though she were stealing a piece of bread from a dying man. She thinks of the kid with the broken leg, of the lie she told her father, of the drowned dog, and she shakes her hand, swallows.
She turns her head, knowing already what is behind her. She had been ignoring its ephemeral pleas, but succumbs to them now.
The totem swings in a cluster of its fellows. They are brown and grey, but the totem that sings to her is white like new milk and plain, and its whorls are dark. It stands out not by virtue of gaiety, as the antlered totem had; instead it stares like a ghost from its drab herd, risen onto its forelegs as if readying to deliver a kick. A phantom built for vengeance and swiftly-delivered judgment, no dancing, chiming creature, this."Spokelse," she whispers bitterly.
She had known, somehow, this would happen. It is not Petra's place to have a bright deer tripping at her side with ribbons wound in its antlers and bells hanging from its feet. It would be a pale strange thing ready to lash out in defense and prove its strength; it would be a thing to set her apart and mark her as different, to draw gazes of fear, not admiration. A ghost. It is the trajectory of her life, even in its meagre eight years, that she will be bound always to strangeness and isolation.
But she reaches and she takes the totem and it falls into her hand like a ripe fruit, and despite herself, she feels a well of relief. Tears rise and she lets them fall as she stuffs the totem into her belt, barely looking at it, and begins her descent. She does not look at the red-tipped totem. She just scrambles down scraping her knees and her elbows. Later she will hold the totem as she huddles under a tree to wait for the day to come, and she will tell it in hurried whispers the story of Spokelse drifting over the downs. "Just a ghost story," she will whisper, but she feels somehow as though she no longer needs the mantra. Ghosts only come for bad children. Petra is not a child any more. Petra is Chosen.
When Petra arrives home to her worried mother in the doorway, her story will shift and change at the eyes riveted on her as she tells it.
She will hold the totem in the palm of her hand and its whiteness will make her fingers look even blacker and dirtier than they are. It will gleam and glow in the banked firelight.
"Its name is Spokelse," she will tell her mother. "It is my ghost."
