In the village of Rödmyr, no one spoke the names of the dead after the first snow.
You could speak of them in summer, when the birches trembled in the wind and the sun all but refused to set. You could tell their stories in autumn while gathering lingonberries among the black roots.
But once snow covered the graves, their names had to remain locked behind your teeth.
The elders said the forest listened.
They also said that a stag sometimes climbed down from the branches of the great tree that held up the world. He was so old that moss grew between the tines of his antlers. His name was Dvalinn, the Sleeping One, though he never truly slept.
All winter, he wandered among the trees.
And whenever he heard the name of someone dead, he came to collect it.
Astrid had never believed the story.
She was seventeen, and no longer believed in anything that could not leave a mark: cold splitting the skin of her hands, splinters buried beneath her fingers, smoke stinging her eyes, and the grief that had settled inside the house after her little brother Nils drowned.
It had happened at the end of autumn.
The ice on the lake had looked solid.
It was not.
Astrid had heard the crack, then Nils’s cry. She had run to the shore and thrown herself flat upon the ice, reaching out to him with a branch. For a few seconds, she had watched his pale fingers close around the wood.
Then the branch broke.
Nils vanished beneath the ice without a second scream.
Their mother had not sung while baking bread since. Their father spent his evenings in the stable, even when the animals needed nothing. At supper, they all stared at the empty chair without ever quite turning their heads towards it.
When the first snow fell, Astrid’s grandmother took Nils’s little portrait down from the wall.
“Why are you doing that?” Astrid asked.
“Winter has come.”
The old woman wrapped the portrait in a piece of cloth and locked it at the bottom of a chest.
“His face isn’t going to attract wolves.”
“It isn’t the wolves I fear.”
Astrid gave a joyless laugh.
“You’re frightened of your dead-eating stag?”
Her grandmother slowly closed the chest.
“Dvalinn does not eat the dead. He eats what still binds them to us.”
That night, Astrid dreamed of Nils beneath the ice.
He was beating both hands against its frozen surface. She stood above him, unable to move. Behind his face floated an immense crown of antlers, branching like the bare limbs of a tree.
When she awoke, moonlight filled her room.
Three knocks sounded against the window.
Astrid sat up.
Something moved beyond the glass.
She pulled on her boots and coat, then went downstairs without lighting a lamp. The house was silent. Before stepping outside, she took the lantern from beside the door.
Tracks crossed the yard.
They belonged neither to a man nor to a wolf.
The prints of a great stag sank deep into the snow and led towards the forest.
Astrid thought of waking her father. She thought of her grandmother’s warning.
Then a voice called from among the fir trees.
“Astrid!”
She froze.
It was Nils’s voice.
“Astrid, wait for me!”
She nearly dropped the lantern.
The voice was already moving away.
Astrid followed the tracks.
Beneath the trees, snow did not fall as it did elsewhere. It hung motionless between the branches, every flake suspended in the air and glimmering faintly like a star.
Astrid walked for a long time. Yet whenever she looked back, she could still see the lights of the village between the trunks. The forest seemed to stretch around her without ever allowing her to leave home entirely.
Then she found the first memory.
It hung from the branch of a fir tree.
A small green leaf, impossible in the middle of winter, beat softly like a heart. Through its veins, Astrid saw Nils running across a field with a hoop in his hand. She saw herself chasing him, pretending to be a hungry troll woman. He was laughing so hard that he tripped over the grass.
Astrid touched the leaf.
Her brother’s laughter rang through the trees.
She plucked it from the branch and slipped it into her pocket.
More leaves grew farther along the path.
In one, Nils slept against her shoulder during a cart ride. In another, he wept because a fox had taken his favourite hen. A third held the memory of an argument: Astrid shouting that she wished she had been an only child.
She looked away.
“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered.
The forest did not answer.
Astrid gathered every leaf she found. She was holding them tightly against her chest when the trees finally opened.
A stag stood in the middle of the clearing.
He was far larger than she had imagined. His coat was the colour of rain-darkened bark, and his hooves seemed to have been carved from black stone. His antlers disappeared into the night. Roots, lichens and tiny luminous mushrooms grew along them as they might upon the branches of some ancient forest.
Hundreds of leaves hung within his antlers.
A memory lived inside each one.
Astrid saw a woman cradling an infant. An old man mending a fishing net. Two sisters dancing beside a fire. A boy shyly kissing another boy behind a barn.
Faces forgotten for generations still smiled among the branches of the stag.
Dvalinn lowered his head.
His eyes were black, but not empty. Something moved slowly inside them, like water beneath ice.
“Give me back my brother,” Astrid said.
The stag tore a leaf from his own antlers.
He chewed it slowly.
At once, one of the memories Astrid held against her chest turned white.
She stared at it in horror. A moment before, the leaf had contained an afternoon she had spent with Nils. Now she could no longer remember where that afternoon had taken place.
“Stop!”
Dvalinn stepped towards her.
A voice rose inside Astrid’s mind. It sounded like thousands of dead leaves stirring at once.
You call for me when your grief grows too heavy. Then you hate me for carrying it away.
“I didn’t call you.”
You speak his name every night.
Astrid tried to answer, but no sound left her mouth.
The stag came closer. With each step, roots briefly appeared beneath the snow.
The living were not made to carry all their dead. Memories become stones. You bind them to your hearts, then wonder why you can no longer move.
“I want to keep those stones.”
Even the one beneath the ice?
The clearing vanished.
Astrid stood beside the lake.
Nils was in the water. His hands clung to the branch she held out to him. Once again, she felt the wood break between her fingers. She heard the crack and watched her brother’s face disappear.
But this time, the memory continued.
Beneath the ice, Nils had stopped struggling. His body drifted down into the darkness.
His eyes remained open.
Astrid screamed.
The clearing returned.
She was kneeling in the snow. Dvalinn stood before her, his breath clouding white around his muzzle.
A new leaf had grown at the tip of his antlers.
The lake waited inside it.
The stag lowered his head and offered it to her.
Give it to me.
Astrid understood.
He did not want all her memories.
Not yet.
He wanted this one: Nils’s fingers slipping from the broken branch, his eyes beneath the ice, and the certainty that she might have run faster, chosen stronger wood or stopped him from going onto the lake that day.
She reached for the leaf.
If she gave it to Dvalinn, perhaps she would sleep again. Perhaps she could look at her parents without wondering which of them secretly blamed her. Perhaps she could hear Nils’s name without seeing black water close above him.
Her fingertips brushed the leaf.
Then Astrid remembered something else.
A few hours before his death, Nils had stolen two warm bread rolls. He had hidden one beneath his coat and brought it to her. They had eaten them behind the stable, laughing over their crime.
She searched through the leaves in her arms.
That memory was not among them.
“You already took it.”
Dvalinn did not move.
“The bread. His laughter. You ate it before you even came here.”
Memories do not grow separately. Their roots entwine. When I eat the sorrow, sometimes the joy comes with it.
Astrid closed her hand.
“Then you don’t heal anyone.”
For the first time, the stag raised his head sharply.
The branches of his antlers struck the sky.
Heavy snow fell around them.
I do not heal. I preserve.
The leaves trembled within his antlers.
Astrid glimpsed the faces of countless dead.
What humans forget does not vanish. I carry it to the highest branches. When the world ends and the old tree trembles, every memory will fall like a leaf. Then the dead will know that they were loved.
“And the living?”
The stag was silent.
Astrid understood that Dvalinn did not truly care about the living. He was too ancient to be cruel and too strange to be kind.
He merely performed the task the world had given him.
Astrid tore away the leaf containing the lake.
Pain passed through her at once. She felt the cold, the snapping branch and the emptiness beneath her ribs.
Then she folded the leaf and placed it with the others against her heart.
“This one stays with me.”
The stag slowly lowered his antlers.
It will devour you.
“Maybe.”
You will grow old, and his face will fade despite you. His voice will leave first. Then the colour of his eyes. One day, all you will have left is a name and the certainty that you lost someone.
Astrid was crying now.
“Then I’ll speak his name for as long as I can.”
Dvalinn watched her.
Then he turned away.
As he reached the trees, Astrid cried out.
“Nils!”
The stag stopped.
The entire forest seemed to hold its breath.
“His name was Nils Eriksson! He was nine years old! He hated turnips, he was terrible at lying, and he always started laughing before he reached the end of his own jokes!”
Something stirred among Dvalinn’s antlers.
A leaf broke free and floated down towards Astrid.
She caught it between her hands.
Nils stood behind the stable with a stolen bread roll hidden beneath his coat.
He was laughing.
When Astrid looked up, the stag was gone.
She found her way home just before dawn.
Her grandmother was waiting at the door. She did not ask where Astrid had been. She only looked at the green leaves protruding from her pockets.
“He gave one back,” the old woman said.
Astrid nodded.
“Why are we forbidden to speak the names of the dead if Dvalinn preserves their memories?”
Her grandmother brushed the snow from her granddaughter’s hair.
“Because preserving is not the same as returning. And because some people would rather lose their dead a second time than continue to grieve for them.”
Astrid went inside.
She took Nils’s portrait from the chest and hung it on the wall again. At breakfast, she told the story of the stolen bread rolls.
Her mother wept.
Her father left the table.
But the following evening, he returned with a story of his own. Then their grandmother told them how Nils had once tried to milk a billy goat.
Eventually, even their mother began to speak.
As winter deepened, the house filled with memories.
Some made them laugh.
Others hurt as much as breaking ice.
Outside, at the edge of the forest, a great stag sometimes came to listen.
Whenever someone spoke Nils’s name, a new leaf grew among his antlers.
But Dvalinn no longer ate them.
Not yet.