The Nightbough

On the northern edge of the Heartland, east of Three Rivers, the land climbs into a broad belt of old oak and black-barked ash whose upper limbs knit together so thoroughly that dusk arrives beneath them hours ahead of the rest of the day. The woodcutters named it the Nightbough for the boughs that shut out the sky, and travellers who hear the name assume it belongs to a spell. It does not. Nothing glows here, nothing whispers, and no lights drift between the trunks. The trees are trees, the shadows are only shade, and the one piece of magic in the place is what its name does to a nervous stranger.

Narrow trails thread the wood, worn by deer and by woodcutters, and every so often one opens into a round clearing where the canopy lets a little light fall. The clearings are why people go quiet at the tree line. Pale cloth is tied to the branches at the trail mouths, bundles of twigs lean against the trunks, and the leaf mould inside is swept into neat rings of ash. Rumour says rites are kept there, and that the people who keep them never raise their voices. Carters repeat that part first and like it least.

Hunters and woodcutters who once worked the Nightbough now work elsewhere, or work only the verges of the road and do not talk about the camps that burned. Nobody has found anything in the wood that a spell would explain. Every account of the place ends with a person, never a ghost.