What the Mirewood Sends Back

In the final stretch, the pull became unmistakable. A warmth behind her eyes, a loosening, a gentle invitation to set down the heavy, specific, inconvenient work of being exactly herself. It would be so easy. The wood wasn’t cruel. It only wanted to simplify.
Tanvi pressed the stone into her palm until the edge bit into her skin and she thought: honey. Every morning. Since he was four. She thought it like a chant, like a door she was holding shut with her body.
She came out of the trees at the north edge of the wood, gasping, into cold afternoon light.
She was herself. Entirely, exhaustingly herself.
Yash was sitting on the stone wall at the edge of their mother’s garden, waiting, the way he always waited when he was worried — very still and pretending to look at something else. When he saw her face, something shifted behind his eyes. Not recognition. Remembering.
“I don’t take honey anymore,” he said quietly.
“I know.”
“I didn’t notice until just now.” He looked at his own hands. “What did it take?”
Tanvi thought about the woman on the root, and the stone still in her fist, and the thing she had felt loosening in the wood — that particular, private, untranslatable knowledge of her own self that she had barely held onto. She had come out whole. She had come out with everything she went in with.
But she had left the stone behind. She had not meant to. She had simply found, when she stepped clear of the trees, that her hand was empty.
“Nothing I can name,” she said.
And that was the truth, and it was also not, and she has never been entirely sure which part of her the Mirewood is still quietly holding.