Chapter Text
A last check of her backpack (water bottle, sunscreen, lip balm, toilet roll, a couple of loose plasters she had found in her medicine cabinet) done, Jeyne got out of the car and blinked into the bright summer sky. Sure, the website she skimmed for about five minutes had recommended more things to take on a hike, but this had really been a spur of the moment decision, so she grabbed what she had on hand. She had just felt the sudden, overwhelming urge to get out of the city and walk. It wasn’t like she planned to stay out the entire day. And she wouldn’t leave the trail, so surely it would be just fine. It’s not like she would starve or get eaten by wolves. Were there wolves around here? She didn’t think there were.
Quickly grabbing her sunglasses and leaving the mask dangling off her rear-view mirror, she surveyed the edge of the forest. The trail seemed more overgrown than it had seemed online, but surely a bit of grass and a few roots wouldn’t make much difference. The website had recommended a route to a clearing that had looked fairly easy—the trail branched at a few points, but all Jeyne had to remember was to keep turning right at the forks. Regardless, anything was better than being cooped up in her one-bedroom apartment for another whole day and she could use a bit of a workout.
It took about half an hour of quiet walking, no headphones, until she finally stopped hearing the motorway and started hearing the birdsong. Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply, savouring the smells in the forest. Jeyne had grown up by the seaside, but still, there was something uniquely beautiful about forests. Ferns curled around moss-covered stones. Wildflowers peeked around gnarled tree roots. A small grey shape darted by, too fast to make out any details. She crossed a mossy footbridge over a babbling brook, crouching on the bank to look for fish. There weren’t any, but she wasn’t too disappointed. Maybe they wanted some privacy, too.
She stretched and stood up, wandering further down the path. These woods were nice—not overgrown and choked with plants so thickly that getting through was a struggle, but more than just a bunch of trees and nothing else.
Jeyne was so engrossed in marveling at nature that she jumped at the sound of footfalls behind her. But it was only a jogger, nodding as he passed her, keeping a respectful distance, turning left at the forked path before her. Watching him until he passed out of sight, she then turned right, just ast the site had recommended. This was easy! No getting lost for Jeyne! She had only looked away for a minute, but when she looked back, she came face to face with a deer on the path. Its ears were twitching, like it was listening to the leaves rustle. Or maybe it was listening to Jeyne’s breathing. She was the one who didn’t belong here, after all. The leaves had every right to be here.
Even though she knew that you weren’t supposed to touch wild animals, she reached out a hand, just out of curiosity what would happen. How tame were deer? She’d never been so close to one, and likely never would be again. Its nostrils were widening and closing again as it took a furtive step closer, looking at her out of deep brown eyes before it startled and ran off along the path and disappeared into the trees. Disappointed, Jeyne dropped her hand and followed. She clambered over a branch that lay across the path, looking suspiciously like it had just been knocked over.
Walking further into the woods, she started hearing water again, just ahead of her. Odd. The brook hadn’t looked like it would loop this way, but she felt secure in the knowledge that she hadn’t left the route she picked out before. She must have not looked at the map well enough. Stopping to take a sip of her water, she looked around, to see if maybe the forest was just throwing the sound of the brook weirdly, but it didn’t seem like it. And yes, just there, ahead of her, at another fork, water trickled between a couple of rocks. Remembering to stick to the right, she went on and past the rock formation.
Jeyne didn’t think that she had left the trail but she couldn’t deny the fact that the underbrush was now well past her ankles as she pressed on. But at least she hadn’t worn shorts. Turning around, she tried to find her way back to the path, but there seemed to be nothing but dead and dying trees and the nettles itching at her lower arms. There was no possible way for her to have gotten lost.
Was there?
It seemed like it had been ages since the jogger went past her. The path was nowhere in sight anymore and the once-green forest had turned brown and grey, cold and barren. The bare branches of the trees scratched at the sky. Dry, crackling leaves crunched underfoot. Even the birds quietened, their songs growing more distant. A crow cawed overhead just as it took flight but otherwise, everything seemed muffled. The forest definitely shouldn’t look like this, not at this time of year. Not when everything had been lush and green when she started her hike.
Did the trees loom larger? Or did they just seem that way because she could see every single one of their spindly, naked branches? At the very least, she would have noticed the nettles before walking straight into them, especially at this height.
Picking her way through the underbrush, carefully trying and failing miserably to avoid the nettles, to where she hoped the path would be, she instead found herself facing the crumbling façade of an old manor, half-covered with vines. She climbed over a long, mossy stone and approached the ruins. The roof had long since fallen in. A tree, twisted and crooked, grew into the walls and back out again, branches reaching out from what had once been windows. It almost seemed like someone was standing there, watching her from above.
Jeyne hadn’t seen anything like this on the map. Shouldn’t it have been marked? She traced a finger along the outline of a stone in the wall. The doors were nothing but scraps of rotting wood fixed to rusty hinges, and she wandered into the ruins. Whatever this place was before, it had been grand—a staircase beckoned her upwards to nothing, and she could almost imagine it new and clean, with a long carpet down the steps, a woman in a poofy skirt descending into a crowd of admirers. Instead, a long centipede crawled across a step.
She shuddered and turned away, across an overgrown stone into another room. The walls were still mostly standing in here; even remains of shelves stood against the wall, terribly overgrown and broken in the middle, boasting a bird’s nest and a layer of leaves an inch thick. There was a book lying on the ground, the cover rotting and the pages torn out. Birds, likely, taking fragments to their nests. The woods had started to encroach on the building here, too; a tree branch was just growing into and through one of the burst windows. Was it the same tree she had seen outside? The angle seemed wrong.
A shiver ran down Jeyne’s spine. The longer she spent inside the building, the colder it seemed to become. The stone would keep some heat out, but definitely not to this extent, and especially not with the way the walls were crumbling. She looked out the window, and while the forest was still autumnal and unwelcoming, the sun was still bathing everything into a warm afternoon glow. Perhaps an explanation could be found upstairs? Jeyne turned back and climbed the grand staircase, carefully avoiding the centipede, running her hand along the railing. The wood felt surprisingly sturdy under her fingertips. As she ascended, she could almost hear the music that must have played here, a long time ago. And if she strained her ears, she could almost hear laughter, too.
She paused at the top to take in the view. She knew that the roof had caved in. She had seen the branches growing from broken windows. The upper story had rotted away and caved in long ago.
And yet, the floor was whole. Not entirely; there were pieces missing, holes where she could see down into the leaf litter, but she walked down the passage without hearing a creak or a groan from the structure. The windows were grimy and one was cracked, but no branches grew through them.
Something scratched against the glass. Jeyne startled, heart pounding, but there was nothing outside but a bare branch, blown into the window by the wind. She didn’t think there had been glass in the windows when she looked from the outside, but that could have just as well have been a trick of the light.
Lights flickered out of the corner of her eye. She could hear music, very faintly, sounding as though it was coming from outside, from the back of the house. But that was impossible. There was nobody here, except for her. Following the flicker, with her eyes on the floor, she followed the corridor, where a couple of doorways branched off into different rooms. Why had the doors downstairs been in a worse state than up here? It didn’t make sense. All doors except for the one to her left were whole, if a little warped from their exposure to the elements. The door she pushed open with her elbow swung open with a loud creak, followed by a loud caw. A flurry of feathers went past her, through the door. It was the crow from before, squawking loudly at her, as though she had disturbed it.
“Sorry,” she called after it, entirely out of reflex.
The floor in this room seemed to have held up better than the corridor’s. There weren’t any holes here, just the usual signs of daily use. There even was a large darker square on the floor where a bed must have stood once while the rest of the floor was sun-bleached. But how was that even possible? The house must have stood empty for a long time, surely the sun would have bleached the rest of the floor as well by now.
It looked safe enough, so Jeyne made another few daring steps into the room, to inspect the windows. Clutching her water bottle, she closed the distance to the window and looked outside. If she hadn’t gotten turned around, this must be the room that the tree had grown into. The look outside confirmed her suspicion. It was the courtyard that she’d crossed to get into the house, looking much the same. So where was the tree? The house only seemed to have this storey and an attic, so why didn’t the exterior and the interior match up?
And if there were windows—whole windows, no cracked glass at all—that posed another question: how had the crow got in here? The door had been closed, hadn’t it? Maybe it had swung closed with the crow inside, but there was no wind up here to push the door. And anyway, she had seen the branch growing through the windows from the outside with her own two eyes!
While she was ruminating, she took another sip of her water. Why was the house here, in the middle of the woods? Why wasn’t it on the map? Why was there not even a plaque in sight anywhere? This must have been the home of a rich, important family, perhaps even old nobility. They couldn’t have just vanished without a trace. They must have descendants down in the village. As she set her bottle down on the window sill, she saw something move down in the courtyard.
The deer was back and looking at her. No, that was silly, surely it couldn’t see her up here. And even if it could, why would it care? No, it wasn’t looking at her, it was just looking up. To think anything else would be silly. And yet, everything about this made her skin crawl. Nothing about this felt right, and yet, not entirely wrong. Just… off.
And then, she heard another sound, a loud bang, almost like someone had slammed a door. And true, as soon as she turned around and made a couple of steps back towards the door, it sounded like someone was yelling, coming from the other end of the corridor. But that must have been the wind, finding its way through the cracks.
Remembering her water bottle, Jeyne returned to the window and gasped as she looked outside. The deer was gone. But it had been replaced by a different afternoon sun shining through a sparse cloud cover. Instead of the roots and plants pushing stones up and aside, the courtyard was filled with neat rows of stone. The woods seemed further away, kept at bay by flower beds that looked just neat enough that it was certain they weren’t wildflowers. They almost looked like a protective ring against the forest around the property. Purple and red pompoms bobbed in the breeze next to a bush of colorful zinnias, their petals rustling as they moved. A redheaded woman in a fine, old-fashioned dress seemed to be deep in conversation with a man dressed in more plain, but still immaculately kept clothing. A trio of small dogs were chasing each other around, watched over by three equally redheaded people, and a man in a cap, all just as finely dressed as the other woman. One of them was a younger woman who leaned slightly into the be-capped man while the other man was keeping an eye on a younger boy who moved steadily towards the flowerbeds. Suddenly, all of them turned around towards the door, as if called.
Were there reenactors here? It didn’t explain how the house had changed, or where the garden had come from, but nothing else made any kind of sense at all. But why would they be here, in the middle of nowhere? And, more importantly, why would they be here now? And how did it explain the forest changing like this? She couldn’t have imagined that. It was the height of summer and yet it had looked like the last days of autumn the closer she had gotten to the house. And now the courtyard was looking like a picturesque late summer scene.
She set her backpack down and pulled her phone out to snap a picture. Just to convince herself that she wasn’t going mad. That was sensible, right? Then, Jeyne took a long, deep drink of water, hoping that it was… what? A hallucination from the heat? Some weird dream? Right. There was nothing for it. She’d just have to go and see. She set the water bottle down and braced herself. Just then, as she turned back to the room, something was moving at the corner of her vision. It had looked like a man, but that was impossible. She was alone up here and she hadn’t heard anyone entering either. Nobody could have snuck up on her, could they?
“Hello?” she called, but not at full volume. “Is anyone there?”
No answer.
“This isn’t funny!” she called, louder this time.
A laugh.
That was definitely a laugh, and, there, red, just out of the corner of her eye again. But as she turned, the room was still empty. Just as it had been when she first entered it. Right. Enough. She’d go downstairs and just ask these people what they were thinking.
When she went to close the door behind herself, there it was again. A bed where the dark rectangle on the floor had been, but when she chanced another look back inside, the room was empty. But at least it was still as clean as it had been when she entered it. She didn’t know what she would have done if the tree branch had suddenly appeared inside the window frame.
When she descended the staircase, her vision kept flickering. One minute, the stairs looked sturdy, but worn, then worm-bitten and cracked, just where she wasn’t stepping, and then, as she stepped off, it looked as if it was installed just yesterday and polished to a shine. The front door was ajar. Was that her doing? She couldn’t remember whether she had left the door open.
The sun stood just right for it to blind her as she pulled the door open and stepped outside.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” a young woman’s voice said, surprise evident in her tone.
As Jeyne looked at her, she could see many more people in the background, women in fine, big, old-fashioned dresses, and the men dressed just as nicely. They were laughing and dancing, seemingly without a care in the world. All of this was too weird.
Wait, was the woman in front of her the one she had seen before, from upstairs? But she couldn’t have changed that quickly. Her hair was styled differently, in a neat bun covered in flowers. She was wearing a more elaborate dress than she had just a minute before, and a pair of elegant, white gloves.
“I …”
“And that’s quite odd, you see, because this is my engagement party,” she continued, talking right over Jeyne’s fumbling attempt at an explanation. “Are you a friend of Mr. Greyjoy?”
“No,” Jeyne said, uncertainly. Who was Mr. Greyjoy?
“Then who are you?”