Wren had been lost in the Lantern Wood only once before, and that time the trees had let her go before dark. This time the path behind her had closed like a held breath, and the only light left was hanging in a single tree ahead — hundreds of small gold lamps caught in its branches like fruit that had decided, once, to become stars.
She was still deciding whether to run when the horse stepped out from beneath it. It was black as the space between the lights, and utterly silent, and there was a rider on its back with a bow drawn to her cheek and an arrow already pointed — not at Wren, but past her, into the dark the girl had just come from.
“Don’t turn around,” the archer said. Her voice had the same quality as the lights: warm, small, entirely too calm for the moment. “It followed you in. It won’t follow you out.”
Something in the black behind Wren made a sound like wet leather dragging over stone. The arrow flew. The sound stopped.
The archer lowered the bow and looked at her properly for the first time — an assessing look, not unkind. “You shouldn’t be able to see this tree,” she said. “It only lights for the ones the wood hasn’t decided about yet.”
“Decided what?”
“Whether to let you leave a little wiser, or not at all.” The horse turned, unbidden, toward a gap in the trees that Wren was certain hadn’t been there a moment before. “Go on. It’s decided. Just don’t come back looking for the lights on purpose — they only ever find the lost.”
Wren walked out into moonlight and ordinary trees, and never told a soul what she’d seen, in case telling made it stop being true.