Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods

Catherynne M. Valente

• Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781481477000
• eBook ISBN: 9781481477017

"I loved every speck of it." —Kelly Barnhill, Newbery Medal–winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon From New York Tim e s bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente comes an inventive middle grade fantasy that follows a boy journeying away from the only home he's ever known and into the magical realm of the dead to fulfill a bargain for his people. Osmo Unknown hungers for the world beyond his small town. With the life that Littlebridge society has planned for him, the only taste Osmo will ever get are his visits to the edge of the Fourpenny Woods where his mother hunts. Until the unthinkable happens: his mother accidentally kills a Quidnunk, a fearsome and intelligent creature that lives deep in the forest.None of this should have anything to do with poor Osmo, except that a strange treaty was once formed between the Quidnunx and the people of Littlebridge to ensure that neither group would harm the other. Now that a Quidnunk is dead, as the firstborn child of the hunter who killed her, Osmo must embark on a quest to find the Eightpenny Woods—the mysterious kingdom where all wild forest creatures go when they die—and make amends.Accompanied by a very rude half-badger, half-wombat named Bonk and an antisocial pangolin girl called Never, it will take all of Osmo's bravery and cleverness to survive the magic of the Eightpenny Woods to save his town…and make it out alive.

Chapter One THE WILD AND THE MILD

Osmo Unknown had always lived in Littlebridge, and nothing interesting had ever happened to him there.

He was born, neither rich nor poor, in a little white four-room cottage on the north side of the Catch-a-Crown River, almost at the furthest edge of town. He thought he would most likely die an old man with a white beard, neither rich nor poor, in a little white four-room cottage on the north side of the Catch-a-Crown River.

He was quite, quite wrong about that.

Osmo Unknown was not precisely the sort of person you think of when someone says the word hero. He wasn’t impressively big or strong. He didn’t have a famous sword or a glorious destiny foretold through the ages. He had thick curly black hair and friendly hazel eyes, the color of old pages and old leaves. He was a bit short and thin for his age, with long clever fingers. The boys in school thought him strange and the girls didn’t think about him at all.

On the other hand, Littlebridge was precisely the kind of place you think of when someone says the word village. The bell tower in the center of town. The painted houses with straw-and-clover roofs and crisscrossed windows. The schoolhouse and the green-and-brown river full of trout and eels and the tavern with golden, welcoming light in the windows even at eight in the morning. The bits of roof gargoyle and marble rose leaves from an age when folk took a bit more care with architecture. All nestled in a pretty valley with good, steady rain and strong, reliable sun, sandwiched between the steep blue mountains on one side and a deep, thorny forest on the other.

And of course, there was no shortage of mysterious legends no one believed in anymore and stern rules everyone broke when they were young and insisted on when they got old.

What sorts of rules? Oh, just the usual kind. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Don’t go out alone after sundown and never eat anything that talks and stay out of the woods no matter what, this means you.

In fact, there was only one single, solitary strange and unusual thing in the whole town. Only one thing you wouldn’t find in any other town of the same size and age and climate.

Where the crossroads met in the center of town rose a great red granite pillar. On the very tip-top of the pillar, a silver skull had looked down on everyone for a number of centuries now.

The skull was huge.

The skull was not human.

The skull was almost like an elephant’s head, and a little like a great stag’s, and something unsettlingly like a tyrannosaurus’s. But it was not an elephant, either. It was not a deer. And it was most certainly not a Tyrannosaurus rex.

No one paid it any more attention than they gave to the bell tower or the shoe shop.

Except Osmo Unknown.

Osmo paid attention to everything. He knew every street and side road of his home. Every wishing well, every stony building and sturdy roof. Good old Dapplegrim Square with Soothfaste Church on one side and the Cruste and Cheddar Tavern on the other. The Afyngred Agricultural Hall and Bonefire Park. The Katja Kvass Memorial Fountain bubbling away pleasantly on the long grass, clear water weeping from a pretty young woman’s pale stone eyes and spilling from the wound in her marble heart into a great wide pool. The crumbling Brownbread Mill still grinding wheat into wealth just south of the main part of town. St. Whylom’s School in its industrial shadow, looking out over the river. The little Kalevala Opera House that hadn’t put on a single opera in Osmo’s thirteen years of life. All the fine shops with real glass windows lining Yclept Closeway. The big wide half-burnt steps of Bodeworde’s Armory, which had gone up in a blaze a hundred and fifty years before. They’d kept the stairs as a reminder never to get careless with gunpowder again.

Osmo knew them all.

The boy with the hazel eyes had never gotten lost, not once, not in his whole life. He couldn’t get lost in Littlebridge any more than you can get lost in your own body.

Osmo hated it.

He hated knowing every street and side road. He hated knowing that the sugar maples in front of Mittu Grumm’s Toy and Shoe Shoppe would always go bright scarlet by the third of October. He hated the ravens that stayed and the sparrows that had somewhere better to be—somewhere he could never go. He hated his dumb ancestor who couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a good fake name for the family. On days when he felt particularly angry at the shape of everything, he even hated the Whaleskin Mountains for keeping him penned in with their useless, dopey sheer glittering jagged cliffs.

But most of all, deep down in his bones, he hated that he’d never been lost, not one minute in his life, that he never would be lost, not in Littlebridge, not in his little white four-room cottage, not anywhere. Of course there were stories of a much more interesting Littlebridge, long ago when magic and monsters and princesses and curses were as common as tea in the afternoon. But they seemed to have run right out of that sort of thing.

Except the silver skull. Except that one single, solitary, fantastic, wonderful strange and unusual thing. Every time he passed it on his way from one dull, familiar place to the next, Osmo swore he could feel its huge, empty eye sockets watching him. Its long, curved fangs reaching out for him. It made the hairs on the back of his neck rise up and his stomach flip over. But that was little enough strangeness for a heart to live on.

Everything in Osmo’s world was already mapped out to the very edges of the page. The village ran like a perfect brass watch. All he wanted was to wake up one day and find the hands snapped off and the bell ringing out twenty-five o’clock.

The very worst of it all was this: Osmo Unknown absolutely, thoroughly loathed the entire idea of becoming a hunter when he grew up. Everyone assumed he’d do just that, as surely as the moon changed in the sky. Osmo would follow his mother, Tilly, into the family business, make a good marriage, and keep the little house of Unknown industry chugging along neatly. But he wanted nothing to do with it. Osmo didn’t want to kill anything. He didn’t want to be good at using his mother’s big beautiful gun. He didn’t want to know how to cut up pelts and gut a deer and portion out the meat so that it could be made into pies and kebabs and stews and roasts.

He didn’t want his job to be hurting things.

But he couldn’t tell anyone how he felt, and Osmo hated that, too. Hunting was a noble profession. Any family would be proud to have a hunter at the holiday table. He knew everyone had to eat to live, and killing a single deer could mean safety and health for a whole winter. But he just didn’t see why it had to be him.

The only good thing about hunters was that they were allowed to go into the Fourpenny Woods whenever they wanted.

Everyone else was forbidden to cross the tree line. When he was little, Osmo’s mother let him wait for her every day, just inside the first clusters of maples and junipers. He used to stare into the shadows, and his soul filled up with the rich, new smell of sap.

But it was off-limits.

To everyone. Forever.

And it was all because of them. Everyone knew what would happen if you went too deep into the woods. Something lived in the deep trees. Something no one had seen in living memory, but everyone dreamed of on their worst nights, tossing and turning in their beds as though it were possible to escape. Something with terrible teeth that lived in the dark.

Something called the Quidnunx.

The Quidnunx stayed in the woods. Humans stayed in the village. Meddling with that was beyond foolish. It was pure, screaming madness.

No, each to their own was best for all, agreed the old folk from the mansions to the marshes. Monsters and men do not mix. The woods were very wild and the town was very mild. The wild and the mild of this world do not get along so well, and nobody ever born in Littlebridge was the sort of person to go testing the rules.

Except one boy with very bright, very wide hazel eyes and long shaggy dark hair and no friends to speak of.

Every inch of the Forest the law let Osmo explore was as precious as a whole emerald to his heart. He loved the woods like he loved his mother. And he feared the great tangle of trees, as he feared his father. But he didn’t love the Forest for the usual reasons. He didn’t love it because it was forbidden. Well, not just because it was forbidden. He didn’t love it because it was dangerous, and therefore exciting. He loved it because it was secret and quiet and lonely, like him. He loved it because it was never the same twice. You couldn’t know a forest like you could know a village. As soon as you thought you did, it would change on you. The trees that went orange before the harvest last year hung on to their green almost till Christmas this year, and the sound you heard might be a hedgehog or a squirrel, but it might just as easily be something… else.

Osmo Unknown lived and breathed and thirsted for the Else.

But until he turned thirteen, all he ever found in the shadows were hedgehogs and squirrels and the occasional bright red October leaf, swirling down from a grey, cold sky.

Chapter Two A LOT OF RUBBISH

Osmo Unknown raised his hand impatiently.

“Yes?” sighed Headmaster Gudgeon. “What seems to be the problem, young Master Unknown?”

“Well,” Osmo said, scratching behind his ear, “it’s just that it’s such a lot of rubbish.”

Gasps went up around the classroom. Osmo sat at a big, four-person desk under a trio of tall, thin windows. The heavy, lazy autumn sun slanted in sideways. The big, blocky shape of the old Brownbread Mill down the way sliced the light into thick planks before it hit their desks. Someone long ago had the bright idea to build the school next to the mill so that the fancified, bubble-scrubbed, book-reading children of Littlebridge would have to look out on a decent day’s labor and think about where the bread in their lunches came from.

And so the waterwheel turned and turned through the years. Since the founding of the school, every student had fought a brave but unwinnable battle not to fall asleep to that lulling, pleasant sound.

Just then, Osmo Unknown had never felt more awake.

He’d spoken out of turn, which always set his blood to simmering on its own. But more than that—today, Ivy Aptrick sat next to him. This hardly ever happened, because their names did not sit next to one another in the alphabet any more than their parents sat together at church. Ivy’s family was somebody in Littlebridge. Osmo’s was… well. Unknown.

But it had happened today. It was happening. Ivy wore a grey dress with grey gloves to match her grey eyes. Her red hair fell over her shoulders like water falling from a wheel. She didn’t gasp like the others, but she did frown, which was worse, somehow.

It was Translation Tuesday. They were working together on The Ballad of the Forest and the Valley, a beloved piece of antique Littlebridge literature. When they could translate it perfectly, they never had to take another Old Bridgish class again. Every child in Littlebridge had to learn rudimentary Old Bridgish, even though they’d never use it at all unless they went into the church for a living. Every child in Littlebridge hated Old Bridgish. They worked very hard for the right to one day forget all about it.

The Ballad of the Forest and the Valley was all about the founding of Littlebridge. It began: Once upon a time, in the beginning of the world, a certain peculiar Forest fell in love with a deep, craggy Valley. And that was the most normal-sounding bit of the whole thing.

“It’s rubbish,” Osmo said firmly. “Whoever wrote this was having a laugh on us. A forest can’t really fall in love with a valley, you know. It’s only a fable. A metaphor. Land hasn’t got a heart. Dirt and rocks and trees can’t fall in love, not like a boy can fall in love with a girl. This is just a silly old story.”

Ivy blushed, and then he blushed. They both looked back at their papers.

“It’s old,” Ivy snapped back, “but it’s not silly or a story.”

The Headmaster shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Adults needed to do that a lot when Osmo was around. “Nobody likes a know-it-all, Master Unknown,” he sighed eventually.

Osmo didn’t think that was true. How could knowing it all ever be a bad thing? Only not knowing things could ever hurt anyone. He didn’t know it all, of course. Not even close. He very much hoped that one day he might. It was his great ambition.

One of the students at another of the huge four-person desks raised their hand to change the subject.

“What’s a pangolin?” one of the older boys said nervously. Gregory Grumm, whose father owned the Toy and Shoe Shoppe. He jabbed his meaty finger at a drawing of one, right after the passage that listed them among the many interesting creatures that could be found in the Fourpenny Woods. That passage was downright child cruelty, Osmo thought. What use was it to read about all the amazing things in the woods when they weren’t allowed within winking dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• First Things First
• Second Things Second
• Chapter One: The Wild and the Mild
• Chapter Two: A Lot of Rubbish
• Chapter Three: A Black-Ribbon Boy
• Chapter Four: Girls and Knights and Needles
• Chapter Five: An Awful Word, an Impossible House
• Chapter Six: Subclause Four A
• Chapter Seven: The Male of the Species
• Chapter Eight: Agatha Underground
• Chapter Nine: This Chapter Is Silver
• Chapter Ten: Nevermore
• Chapter Eleven: The Octoberpole
• Chapter Twelve: The Land of What Does It Matter Now
• Chapter Thirteen: Down the Road to the River After
• Chapter Fourteen: Were You Kind?
• Chapter Fifteen: On Proserpina and the Dark
• Chapter Sixteen: New Puppy Day
• Chapter Seventeen: Widows’ Weeds
• Chapter Eighteen: Button, Button
• Chapter Nineteen: At the Bottom of the Unfinished Ocean
• Chapter Twenty: The Hinderlands
• Chapter Twenty-One: Heads, Bellies, and Hearts
• Chapter Twenty-Two: A Beastly Fight
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The Party Never Stops
• Chapter Twenty-Four: The Whispering Place
• Chapter Twenty-Five: The Blue Whale’s Gambit
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Two Stories
• The Explosion at the End of This Book
• A Brief and Late Intermission
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Wildest Thing There Is
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: A Fish Goes Home
• Last Things Last
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright