The house was empty.
Really—Sage had checked it thoroughly. There was nobody in the root cellar where he slept, or in the kitchen and sitting room and halls of the ground level, or the second floor where most of the bedrooms were. At first he thought some monster had attacked and eaten everyone. He had heard the grown ups talking these last few weeks about a nearby infestation—every so often the decrepit ancient building several miles away in the woods regrew dangerous creatures. They were supposed to explode outward any day now.
But the longer he looked, the more he was drawn to a different conclusion. The bags normally kept in the closet were missing, the horses gone from the stables, the picnic lunches he had helped prepare had disappeared. The whole household must have evacuated, gone to some vacation home in the mountains until a task force could be sent from the capital to come and clear out the monsters in the area. That was normal, that was the plan he had heard. He was supposed to have left with the rest of them.
He had not heard the moving while he slept.
There was still bread on the kitchen table, half sliced, remaining from the night before. Sage took a piece and went searching for the butter.
The floorboards creaked as he walked over them. The butter was sitting in the icebox, enclosed in a blue glass container with a fitting lid. Grabbing it, Sage went back to the table and set it down. Using his fingers, he broke off pieces to place on the bread. It was a delicious breakfast.
It was strange to hear the house silent. The Sleubek family was fairly well to do, employing several young people as live-in staff. They had a large house in a secluded forest glade, and all their goods were delivered from the nearest town. Several years ago, when their only son was sick and dying, they had found the funds to hire a changeling wrangler. What they could not pay to save, they could at least pay to replace.
Sometimes, in the space between tasks, Sage would sit and wonder what his life would be like if their child had not recovered, if there had actually been an empty place for him to fill when he arrived. Maybe he would still be doing chores—but he probably would not have been left alone beside the poisoned woods.
Something screamed in the distance.
Sage dropped the bread. He could not see anything out the window—there was a young tree there in the side lawn, blocking the view of the forest. Oh well. He turned back to his breakfast, carefully peeling his bread off of the table. It had landed butter side down, so now it was all crumby, and the table was sticky. At least there was no one left to reprimand him. When he had finished, he stepped farther across the kitchen towards the counter by the window, folding the bread in half to keep the buttery part safe. There were cookies in the tall corner cabinet, placed just near enough to the counter that he could probably stand there and reach them. But he had better finish eating the bread first.
The scream came again—it was that same sort of not quite human noise that coyotes and mountain lions made sometimes, but Sage had never heard this particular kind of almost. Mrs. Sleubek had mentioned a similar noise—some fifty years ago, when she had been a young girl and those same old monsters returned. Sage did not remember the rest of the conversation. He knew enough about the world to find the information pretty mundane. Monsters were just like that, coming back a long and regular time after you killed them. That was why it was so important for people to stay in one place, to learn the lay of the land, to watch and prepare for the beasts quietly reforming in each vale.
Licking the last of the butter from his fingers, Sage dragged a chair across the floor and used it to step up onto the counter. He tugged on the cabinet door, but it would not open completely with him standing in the way. Scooting back until his heels had no purchase on the counter, he reached up towards the cookie jar on the top shelf. His fingers brushed it, but he could not quite get a grip through the narrow opening, and the whole jar would not fit through like this. Sighing, Sage let the cabinet swing closed, stepped back down onto the chair, and then tugged on the cabinet handle.
It did not budge.
Squinting, Sage leaned forwards towards the cabinet, trying to see what had gotten stuck in the last couple of seconds. There did not seem to be anything along the near end, so he got back up onto the counter, stepped over toward the side with the hinges to look for obstructions. Glancing up, his eye caught the window. The tree which had blocked his view of the forest now stood much closer, completely blocking his view of the sky.
Just as he realized that this was not a normal thing for trees to do, the cabinet door sprung open at an unnatural speed, knocking him backwards off the counter. His elbow caught the backrest of the chair and the two of them went tumbling to the floor. There was something happening—there were a lot of things happening—but all that his brain could hold at the moment was the sensation of having fallen, of aching on the ground.
When his balance steadied and his vision cleared, he rolled over on his back, propping himself up with his elbows to stare up at the offending cabinet. It stood open—pushed by a stick. There were branches inside.
The tree at the window was too close. Leaves pressed up against the window, like children looking out at a snowy day.
Sage scrambled back, but his palms skidded against the floor. Something was wrapped around his ankle, holding him tight. He looked down, and there, winding up his leg, was a thin tendril of wood.
His breath caught in his throat. There was no knife—he had used his hands to eat. There was nothing to cut it off with. He shook his leg again, trying to jerk it out of the monster's grip. There was no effect, except that the root kept on winding up, around his shin and over his knee. It was coming thick from a crack in the floorboards, widening the hole as it grew. There were other cracks too—sprouts curled up along the edges of the wooden floor panels and through breaks in the plaster walls.
Sage sat frozen as the tendril grew thicker, pushing his leg forward as it went. The tip came towards him, floating forward until it rested on his stomach, feather light. Then it turned sideways, curling around his ribs to the small of his back, up along his spine and around again, over his chest.
The house was creaking, but there was no wind.
His leg hurt—the root was growing thicker, but it did not move so the space between strands was too small now. It pinched. The corner touching his stomach grew a branching strand that reached around the other way, down to connect to the floor. His breaths were already coming short and shallow and panicked, but this made it harder. The strands were too tight around his waist. He reached down and grabbed them, tried to pull them at least a little looser, but they didn't budge. A third root sprung out to wrap around his right wrist.
There were leaves on the branches through the walls now, small and bright green, the same color the forest turned in the first week of springtime. Scattered among the boughs were small white flowers. Dogwood.
Something tickled along the edge of his neck. The first root, the tip had grown over his shoulder and behind his neck. It was sprouting over his other shoulder now, up under his ear and along his chin. Reflexively, he reached with his one free hand to grab it before it could cover his face, but it came up between his fingers, tightening around them to lock them in place. Then it dove forward and shot into his mouth.
His lungs were empty, his throat blocked up, but even if he had screamed nobody would have heard him.