The Root Arch Shortcut
Ada walked home with a warm stone in her pocket. The path curved the long way around the hill, and her breath came out in small clouds. Stars hung in the branch gaps like lanterns someone had forgotten to take down. She counted the turns still ahead. Six, maybe seven, all of them cold. Then she came to the root arch. Two old trees had grown together over a gap, and under the gap a tunnel of roots ran down into the hill. She had passed it a hundred times. It pointed the way her hollow was. Dark air drifted out of it, and the air was not cold.
She stood at the mouth and said it plainly. "I'm scared of the dark bit." The words went in and came back to her softer than she sent them. She put one boot on the first root. Warm. She put the other boot beside it. Still warm. The hill seemed to breathe out around her ankles. Ada took four steps and stopped, then four more, counting them the way she counted turns in the path. "It gets warmer the further in I go," she said. Moss brushed her hand like a sleeve. Ahead of her, a small green light switched itself on.
The tunnel did not go straight. It leaned left, then right, then down a soft slope of old leaves. Ada went slowly, one hand on the root wall, which was dry and faintly rough. Pale mushrooms stood in rows along the floor, each one warm as a cup of milk. She passed a beetle asleep on a thread. She passed a hollow where rain had dripped so long it had worn a bowl in the stone. Above her the roots opened in places, and through the gaps she saw stars, small and patient. Her shoulders had stopped being tight. "This is taking ages," Ada said, and found she did not mind.
A moth met her at a bend, grey and slow, its wings held like two halves of a leaf. It wanted the warm spot where three roots crossed. Ada stepped aside so it could land, and stood very still while it settled and stopped shivering. Then she went on, four steps at a time. She passed a stone that was still holding the heat of the afternoon. She passed a root shaped like a shoulder and patted it. "It gets warmer the further in I go," she said, and her voice ran ahead down the tunnel and waited for her there.
After a while the floor began to climb, and Ada climbed with it. The roots grew thinner. Cool air came down to meet the warm air, and the two mixed around her face. She saw a round opening above, full of stars. She put her hands on the last root and pulled herself up and out, into grass stiff with frost. She was standing on the top of the ridge. Below her, far down through the trees, she could see the small steady glow of her own lantern in the hollow tree. It was further away than when she had started.
Ada laughed, one short laugh that made a cloud. The shortcut had gone right under the hill and come out on the wrong side of it, which was the long way home by any counting. She did not mind that either. The hill had kept her warm the whole way through, and now the walk down was all downhill, with the frost shining on every fern. An owl said one low word and did not say another. Ada went down slowly, hands in her pockets, holding the stone that was still faintly warm, taking the turns she had meant to avoid.
At the bottom, where the path met the stream, a badger was sitting on her heels with a bundle of dry moss in her arms. Her hands were pink with cold. She had come a long way for good bedding, she said, and had stopped to let her fingers remember how to bend. Ada took the warm stone out of her pocket and put it in the badger's palm and closed her fingers over it. They walked the last bend together, slowly, because the moss kept slipping and had to be caught.
Ada's hollow tree smelled of lamp oil and leaves. She turned the lantern down until the flame was the size of a seed. The badger laid her moss out and sat with her back against the warm inside wall of the tree. Outside, the frost went on quietly making its patterns, and under the hill the tunnel went on being warm without anybody in it. "It gets warmer the further in I go," Ada said, almost asleep. The badger's hand was warm now, around the stone and around Ada's fingers too. Ada let her eyes close and kept hold.
