Seven Trees of Stone

  (old year’s day)

  (the storm)

  (firelight)

  (dunbarrow)

  (wormwood drive)

  (the manchett host)

  (a horsehide tent)

  (the barrenwhite tree)

  (speaker of secrets)

  (new year’s day)

  The end begins on a cold December morning. We’re walking through Dunbarrow Park, hands buried in our coat pockets, our breath billowing in clouds. Elza has her scarf over her face like a bank robber. The sky is a delicate unbroken blue, the sun harsh and white and low. The newscasters said this was the coldest winter in fifty years, a crisp, breathless cold, where stepping out of your front door feels like jumping into a frozen bath. The grass and path and park benches are ice coated, crystallized; the bare branches of the trees glitter with frost like someone sprinkled them with sugar. The Brackrun River has been frozen for weeks. We’re in the post-Christmas days, when everyone’s house is full of leftovers and presents. Cake for lunch, shimmering ornaments still hanging from every hook. The lazy limbo as the year winds itself down.

  Given the temperature out here, I’d have taken the bus up to my house, but Elza liked the light for photos, so here we are. I have to admit, now that we’ve worked up some body heat from walking, it is really beautiful. The frosted earth shimmers where the new sun hits it, like the light is turning solid. There’s no wind and nobody else around, no sound but our footsteps and breath. We could be the last two living souls. We stroll down toward the river, past the bandstand, and as we round the corner, Elza catches my arm.

  “Look,” she says softly.

  There’s a swan standing on the path: elegant white neck and head, tipped with a flaring orange bill; rubbery black feet that look like something you’d buy in a joke shop, a mismatch with its regal body. It’s almost dazzling white in the morning sun. Without fear the swan watches us approaching and lets us get close enough that I could reach out and touch it.

  Elza kneels down and unscrews the lens cap from her camera, raises the viewfinder to her right eye. The bird obliges her with a pose, neck curving like a ship’s prow, and once Elza has taken a few shots, it ruffles its wings and stalks off toward the river.

  “Let’s follow it,” Elza says, taking my left hand. The empty finger of my glove bends back at a weird angle. I’m starting not to notice so much, but it can look pretty odd sometimes. The swan doesn’t move that fast and we amble after it, and I’m thinking maybe we’ll walk over the bridge and get up to my house through town, take the long route since the day’s turning out so beautiful, but when we get to the bank of the river, we both stop dead.

  For a moment my thought is that it has snowed but the snow only fell on the river, except of course that makes no sense. Then again, what’s actually happened to the river makes no sense either, because it’s covered in swans.

  The frozen river is heaving with the birds. They don’t squabble or squawk; they just move slowly, aimlessly, pushing against one another, a crowd that has forgotten what they’re supposed to be crowding around. They’re so densely packed, we can’t see the river’s surface. There must be hundreds, thousands of them. It looks like an art exhibit.

  “What on earth?” Elza whispers.

  “I have no idea,” I say. “It’s like a flash mob or something.”

  The first swan, our swan, is looking back at us from the side of the river. Slowly, the bird makes it way down the muddy bank and joins the rest of them, walking on the ice.

  “This is so weird,” Elza says, and she takes her camera out again and starts snapping. The birds don’t pay us any attention. I walk slowly alongside the river, toward the footbridge. They’re totally silent, sticking only to the ice, never venturing back up onto the banks. They don’t seem to be walking in any specific direction, and if there’s a purpose to their movements, it’s too subtle for me to see it. I reach the bridge and wait there for Elza, who’s moving even slower than I am, viewfinder glued to her eye.

  “These are going to come out amazing,” she says when she catches up to me. “You couldn’t ask for a better scene than this. People will think I faked it.”

  “How many swans do you usually see in one place?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Two? Three?”

  As we watch, another pair of big white birds comes flying in low, from the direction of the town. They land on the opposite side of the river, fold their wings, and make their way down to mingle with their fellows.

  “They must be coming from all over,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Elza says, “but why? Have you ever heard of anything like this before? I mean, I know some birds migrate en masse, but swans . . . I don’t think so. And why would they all come here? I’ll have to ask my dad.”

  Elza’s father is an avid bird-watcher and will know all there is to know about the migration habits of swans.

  “This is nuts,” I say. “There have to be, like . . . I don’t know how many. How far does it go on for? Have they covered the whole river?”

  “They can’t have. The Brackrun goes for miles and miles.”

  We decide to find the limits of the swan crowd, and cross the bridge and set out again along the river, this time on the side nearer the town square. We walk for about ten minutes, and the frozen river is still thick with white birds. We can see more arriving every minute, groups of swans flying in from all directions to join the horde. After we walk under the traffic bridge to Wormwood Drive, the birds start to thin out; a ten-minute walk past that and the swans have dwindled down to just a few outliers. They seem to be concentrated within the town limits of Dunbarrow.

  We walk back to the traffic bridge in silence and head for the stairs that lead from the low-lying riverside path to the sidewalk. There are some people standing on the bridge, also looking at the swans. They’re taking photos with their phones. It occurs to me that this will probably make the news. We climb the stairs to the traffic bridge and find ourselves face-to-face with my old friends.

  I didn’t recognize them from the riverbank because they’ve got their hoods up, but I should’ve known it was them. Before my life changed, I used to be on the rugby team at Dunbarrow High, go to all the right parties, have the right friends. I haven’t seen much of them since me and Elza left Dunbarrow High and decided to do our A Levels in Brackford, where nobody knew us. But here they are: Kirk Danknott, Mark Ellsmith, and Mark’s girlfriend, Holiday Simmon, who I used to have the biggest crush on. All of that seems like another life to me now, before Elza and the Host, before my dad and the Book of Eight, before the Shepherd and Ash and Mr. Berkley. Kirk and Mark are wearing tracksuits, bright neon sneakers. They notice us and smile with amused contempt. Kirk looks about the same; Mark’s hair is longer, and he seems to be growing a beard. His nose has reset from when the Shepherd broke it. Holiday is wearing pale jeans and a tan parka, glasses with heavy frames. She at least gives us a genuine smile.

  “Luke, Elza,” Holiday says, “good to see you.”

  “Yeah.” I shrug. The last time I spoke to Holiday was . . . I can’t remember when. Was it when I gave her back the Best of Hannah Montana DVD we stole from her room in the spring? (Long story.) I think it must’ve been then. The last time I saw her was after our final exam, in the summer. Everyone signing one another’s school shirts. I think me and Elza just snuck off somewhere by ourselves.

  “Hey, bird-watchers,” Elza says.

  Kirk snorts.

  “It’s so weird,” Holiday says, gesturing to the river crammed with swans. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  Obviously nobody has. Mark has his arm curled protectively around Holiday’s waist.

  “They probably did it,” Kirk says. “The spooky
kids.”

  “We did what, Kirk?” Elza asks him. “Invited a bunch of swans to Dunbarrow? How do you think we did that? Some kind of swan mailing list?”

  Kirk scowls at this.

  Kirk stumbled across us summoning a demon last Easter, which didn’t end too well for him. Ash, a teenage necromancer with a unique fashion sense and a sideline in altering people’s memories, erased his recollections of the event, but I think something from that evening stuck all the same.

  “Why would we have anything to do with this?” Elza presses.

  “Because you’re messed up in the head,” Kirk says. He spits on the ground by her boots. “Voodoo child.”

  “Elza —” I begin, but Holiday’s already pulling Mark away from us.

  “Nice to see you again,” she says brightly. “Come on, Kirk.”

  Holiday’s defusing techniques aren’t subtle, but they seem to work well enough.

  “Yeah, leave it, man,” Mark says. “She’s not worth it.”

  Kirk glares at us, and then he leans in toward me and says in a low voice, “You wanna go? You know where to find me.”

  “OK,” I say. “If I want a fight, I’ll head right over. Thanks. Good to know.”

  Kirk spits on the ground in front of my shoes as well. After this, he turns away and follows Holiday and Mark. We’re left on the cold bridge, swans milling aimlessly below. My old friends’ backs recede away into the distance. I squeeze Elza’s hand. She’s shaking with anger.

  “How can he just — You let him —”

  “He didn’t spit on us,” I say. “That’s a start, right?”

  “That idiot drives me insane,” she says. “I don’t know how you were ever friends.”

  “I don’t know, Elza. He’s not always like that. He can be a good guy . . .”

  Elza snorts. “God, that got me so wound up! I really want to smoke.”

  She unwraps a stick of spearmint gum and starts chewing it ferociously.

  “How long’s it been now?”

  “One month, two weeks, five days, nine hours. Not sure how many minutes — I’m trying not to count them.”

  “You’re doing well,” I tell her.

  She winds her hair around her finger. “I feel good,” she says. “When I walked from the bus station to my house, I barely felt out of breath. That’s new to me.”

  My ex-friends have vanished around the corner. We’re alone again. Another swan swoops down and lands in the mud by the side of the frozen river.

  “How are you doing with the book I lent you?” Elza asks, looping her arm with mine. We start to walk again, leaving the river behind.

  “All right. They shouldn’t trust those pigs, if you ask me. Especially Napoleon.”

  She laughs. “You have no idea.”

  The winter sunlight is just as beautiful on the frosted plants as it was before, but as we walk up the hill toward my house, I’m struck with a strange dread. Something about the swans has gotten to me, even as we joke and talk about other things. I feel like we’re slipping between the cracks again, moving from the world that makes sense into the other world that lies just beneath it. The sun shines on us, but I can’t feel its warmth.

  At the top of the hill, where my road starts, I see something white lying in the path, and I know what it is before we’re even close enough to make out its shape.

  The swan is curled on the frosted ground, graceful even in death. I stop to look more closely at the body. I can’t see any clear injuries, but there’s a small flush of crimson next to the swan’s head.

  “Do you think something’s happening?” Elza asks me.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, even though I know what she means.

  “Something . . . I don’t know. Magic, I suppose,” Elza says. “I can feel something. Like a sound you can’t really hear, but you can feel it shaking your bones. You know?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I can feel it too.”

  There’s a fragility to the day, a sense that the ground we’re walking on is ice that’s starting to break. There’s something bad in the air you can taste, like smoke. The frost crystals that appeared so beautiful earlier now seem gaudy and brittle.

  “Maybe it’s nothing,” Elza says. “It got hit by a car, probably. They’re just birds.”

  I look at the dead swan’s head, the glassy open eye, black and bottomless.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  My name is Luke Manchett, and I’m seventeen years old. I have nine fingers, nine magic rings, and one ancient book of unspeakable secrets, and eleven GCSE exams that I passed at grade C or higher. I’ve been going to Brackford College since September, taking math, psychology, physics, and sociology. In my spare time I’ve been trying to find ways to escape the debt that I owe to one of the most powerful and evil spirits in the afterlife. My girlfriend, Elza Moss, goes to Brackford as well and is descended from Lilith (first witch, semi-mythic). I used to have a pretty normal life, not that you’d believe that now.

  I unlock the front door of my house and brace myself for a giant dog to fling himself at me. Nothing happens. He’s been dead for months now, and I still can’t stop imagining that Ham’s going to show up again. The hallway feels empty without him. I pull off my shoes and wait for Elza to untie her army boots. I’m still thinking about the swans, wondering what they mean. It could just be that we’re freaking out over something that has nothing to do with us. That’s one of the problems with magic — it makes you think like a lunatic, trying to see patterns in things that might not contain any. Sometimes I’ll think I saw a sigil mark in the clouds, a magic circle forming in the ripples on a pond. Sometimes I know I’m imagining it, and other times I know that I’m seeing what’s really there.

  Bea rushes full tilt in from the laundry room and starts barking.

  “Hey, it’s just us,” I say. “Bea, c’mon.”

  Bea barks louder, retreating backward into the living room. It’s not that Bea and me don’t get along, exactly. But she’s only lived here a couple of months, and I don’t think we’re that sure about each other yet. We got her from a rescue group, and she’s an angry dog.

  “How are you, love?” Mum asks from the living room, above Bea’s racket.

  “All right! Elza’s here,” I reply.

  “Oh, wonderful. Darren was about to start cooking.”

  Great.

  “I thought we were going to his place later?” I ask, coming into the living room.

  “Just dropped by,” Darren says. “How’s things, mate?”

  “Yeah, great. Mate,” I say.

  “Cool, cool,” Darren says. He’s spread-eagled on our sofa, with Mum’s head resting on his shoulder. “We’re just having a mellow morning. Gonna get some lentils going in a bit.”

  “Can’t wait,” I reply.

  Mum met Darren Hart in the summer at some kind of conference on meditation. He literally lives in the woods, in what I can only describe as a compound of wooden huts and tents. He has a single dreadlock that goes halfway down his back, and he makes his money from selling large-scale sculptures that he carves with a chain saw. He’s really into circus tricks.

  “Hi, Persephone. Hi, Darren,” Elza says, resting her hand against my back.

  “All right, Elza,” Darren says. Mum smiles sleepily. Bea is standing on the sofa beside Mum, hackles still raised, ready to start barking at a moment’s notice if I make any sudden moves. She’s like Mum’s bodyguard, I swear. I think Bea is at least half border collie, but it’s difficult to be sure. She’s small and sleek, black furred except for some white specks around her nose, and one white foot, like she’s wearing a single athletic sock. Mum gently strokes Bea’s shoulders with her free hand. I know it’s unfair, but I can’t help missing how calm Ham was by comparison, how easy to get along with.

  “All ready for tonight?” Darren asks when neither of us says anything.

  “Absolutely,” I reply.

  “It’s gonna be great,” he says. “Fi
re pit, veggie burgers, got the slackline set up.”

  “Luke can’t stop talking about it,” Elza says.

  This is true, in much the same way condemned men can’t stop talking about their upcoming executions. Darren’s eyes light up.

  “Wow, amazing, man,” he says. “I’m stoked on you dudes coming up to my place.”

  As often happens, me and Elza have now run out of things to say to Darren. We’ve been in the same room maybe two minutes. He and Mum smile at us.

  “We’re going, uh, upstairs,” I say, gesturing toward my bedroom, as if they might be confused about where it was.

  “All right, love,” Mum says. “We’ll call you when lunch is ready.”

  Me and Elza make our way to my room, which, unlike me, hasn’t changed much over the past few years. There are still clothes on the floor, a beanbag chair, my TV, schoolwork on the desk. There’s the same photos Elza took taped to my closet door, the same cereal bowls with dried milk in the bottom of them. I sit down on the beanbag.

  “I’m stoked on you dudes coming up to my place,” I say in my Darren voice.

  “You’re really mean to him,” Elza says with a smile.

  “I can see you’re trying not to laugh.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t funny. But you are mean. He tries.”

  “He tries extremely hard.”

  “He’s just nervous around you,” Elza says. “He really likes Persephone. He wants it to work out.”

  “I know, Elza. I just . . . like, how would you feel if your dad left and then Darren moved in? Like, you come downstairs one day, and Darren’s sitting there instead, going like, Oh, dudes, can’t wait to get some lentils going? Looking at his weird little dreadlock rattail thing every day?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be thrilled,” Elza says, sitting down next to me. “I can’t deny that. But your dad didn’t just disappear yesterday, Luke. He’s been gone more than ten years.”

  “Yeah,” I say. It’s hardly like they were a happy ten years for Mum either. She was a mess. I know I should be glad she’s met someone again. It’s just when I see her sitting there watching TV with Darren, and Bea curled up next to both of them, I feel like there’s less room on the sofa for me. And I’m glad she met someone, but Darren . . .