Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 34
after Emmy.
Jordan and his father completed their meal in silence.
After dinner Jordan took a walk to the spot where he
planned to build his own house. He was heartsick. He strolled
the rutted, red tracks that joined the houses of the village, but it
only took a few minutes to cover them all. He stopped to talk
to a few people, family and friends who sat in the lazing sun
and talked while their hands busied with spinning and
mending. He was distracted, however, and soon resumed
walking again. The Penners were fixing their roof, along with
a mob of relatives. Jordan avoided them; they would just want
his advice.
This village was his home, always and forever. Jordan
enjoyed hearing tales of the outside world, and often dreamed
of a life as an traveller. But outside the village waited the
forest.
The forest appeared in the fading daylight as a ragged
swath of green-black across the eastern horizon, exhaling its
hostility across the reach of fields and air to Jordan. The forest
was a domain of the Winds, and of the morphs that served
them. Unlike the morphs, the true Winds had no form, but
only a monstrous passion sufficient to animate dead moss and
clay. They drove the wall of trees forward like a tidal wave,
slowed to imperceptibility by some low cunning, but just as
unstoppable. The previous summer, Jacob Walker had gone to
the back of his fields to cull some of the young birch trees that
had invaded his fields. His son had seen the morphs take him,
and the way Jordan heard it, the trees themselves had moved at
the morphs' command. Walker's farm was abandoned now,
saplings spiking up here and there in the field, the crops turned
to woodsage and fireweed, poison ivy and thistle. The Walker