Wildwood Dancing

by Juliet Marillier

  They had left the hall before I reached the spot where I had seen them—close to the steps up to the terrace from which Tati and I had made our terrifying passage to the Other Kingdom at Dark of the Moon. The door stood slightly open. Through the gap, the freezing air of the winter night seeped into the crowded chamber.

  I went halfway up the steps before I called. “Tati?” I glanced back over my shoulder. Beyond the half-open door, the music played on—nobody had followed me. I went higher. “Tati, where are you?”

  At one end of the parapet, a long black coat lay neatly folded on the wall. At the other end stood my sister and her lover. Tati’s arms were wound around Sorrow’s neck, her body pressed close to his, as if she would melt into him. His hands were enlaced in my sister’s long hair as he strained her slight form against him, white on black. Their eyes were closed; their lips clung; they were lost in each other. It was beautiful and powerful. It was impossible. I cleared my throat, and they opened their eyes and turned to look at me.

  “If Cezar sees you, he’ll kill you,” I said bluntly, picking up the black coat. “You must leave now, right away. How could you risk yourself like this? Tati, come inside.”

  Sorrow took the coat. He did not put it on.

  “Jena, just a moment longer,” pleaded Tati.

  “Now!” I hissed. “Do you want to see him run through with a pitchfork? Sorrow, go, please! Just go!” As I spoke, I heard someone coming through the door at the foot of the steps, and a voice.

  “Jena?” It was Cezar.

  Sorrow slung the coat over his shoulder. He reached out, and Tati threw her arms around him, burying her face against his chest. He stroked her hair, murmuring something.

  “Jena, are you up there?” Cezar sounded anxious rather than suspicious.

  “I’m just coming down!” I called in what I hoped was a casual tone. I jerked my head violently toward the other end of the terrace as Sorrow disengaged himself from my sister once more. Anastasia had used some kind of portal to reach the Other Kingdom from here—I hoped he could do the same. “Go!” I mouthed. “Now!”

  “It’s freezing cold out here, Jena, and you don’t even have a shawl. You’ll catch your death!” I could hear my cousin’s heavy tread as he climbed the steps.

  Tati was standing frozen, her eyes on her lover as he swung up onto the parapet. “Goodbye,” she whispered.

  “Goodbye,” Sorrow said, and, slipping his arms into the black coat, he stepped off the wall and into space. I sucked in my breath, then let it out as Cezar appeared at the top of the steps.

  “Come inside, girls,” he said. “Get warm by the fire. Jena? Are you all right?”

  Tati walked past him, unseeing, and vanished down the stairs. I wanted to go to the parapet: to look over, to see whether Sorrow lay among the trees far below like a broken doll.

  “I’m sorry to have worried you, Cezar,” I said shakily. “I needed some fresh air.”

  “Maybe we can find a quiet corner, just the two of us, eh?” He put his arm around me. Under the circumstances, I let him. Anything to distract him from the oddity of the situation. “Come, my dear, let’s go in.”

  As we made our way down, it came to me that a sudden descent from a castle wall might present no difficulties at all for Sorrow. He had been in the Other Kingdom a long time. Perhaps he had indeed changed: become less like a human and more like one of them. Maybe he’d gone through a portal; when Anastasia had taken us across, it had felt like falling. But maybe he could spread out his black coat and fly like a bat. I shivered. That had been too close, by far.

  “It’s all right, Jena,” said Cezar. “I’m here.”

  My heart, still thumping from Sorrow’s narrow escape, slowed with relief when Cezar left me to go off and find the quiet corner he had mentioned. I kept myself very busy: first chatting to Aunt Bogdana, then dancing with Rǎzvan and Daniel and some other young men, whose names I instantly forgot. Gogu’s comments were predictable:

  Too tall, you’d get a sore neck just talking to him.

  This one smells.

  Lavender silk. What more need I say?

  I imagined a different face on my partner: a tangle of dark hair, a sweet mouth, wary green eyes. Beside the man in Drǎguţa’s mirror, tonight’s collection of suitors seemed entirely without character. Then, in my imagination, I heard my sisters’ screams as the green-eyed man turned to something monstrous, and I knew how foolish it was to let myself think of him. Dark of the Moon had opened up a realm of peril—dream about it too much and I might be drawn into forgetting my sense of right and wrong. This world, I told myself sternly. These suitors, this life. If you want your family to be safe, if you want to protect Piscul Dracului, this is the way.

  I kept watch over my sisters, something that was second nature from our visits to Dancing Glade. I spotted Tati and Stela retreating upstairs together—Stela stifling a yawn, Tati drifting along at her side. Iulia was talking to Rǎzvan. Whatever he was saying to her, it had coaxed a smile to her face.

  The supply of pastries began to run short, and people still seemed to be hungry. I headed for the kitchen to check with Florica. As I entered the passageway, my cousin stepped out of the shadows and grabbed me by the arm, making me gasp in fright. There was nobody else around.

  “Don’t do that!” I snapped as my heartbeat slowly returned to its normal pace.

  “Are you trying to avoid me, Jena?” Cezar asked, not letting go. “I need to talk to you alone. I said so when we came inside, but you’re always somewhere else. Come and share some ţuicǎ. Rest for a little.” When I opened my mouth to tell him that Aunt Bogdana had asked me to come straight back, he added, “I have something to say to you. You must know what it is. Jena, this needs to be in private.”

  I glanced around frantically. The sound of laughter and clinking platters filtered up from the party. From the other end, behind the closed kitchen doors, came the sound of scrubbing: Florica and her assistants, starting to clean up. In the middle, Cezar and I stood in our own little patch of awkward silence.

  “If you’ve got something to say, better just go ahead,” I told him.

  He had held on to my arm all this time. Now he grabbed the other arm as well. I had my back to the wall, and his face was unpleasantly close to mine. I could smell ţuicǎ on his breath. I gritted my teeth.

  Get on with it, wretch.

  “You know what it is. You know how much I want you, Jena. You look wonderful in that red gown. I can’t keep my eyes off you. Jena, you will marry me, won’t you?” The words came out in a rush. Before I could draw breath—let alone start to say I wouldn’t marry him if he were the last man in all Transylvania—Cezar bent forward and kissed me.

  I had often dreamed of my first proper kiss, though the dreams had not contained a particular man, just a vague idea of one. The kiss itself, I knew all about. It would be tender and sweet and exciting all at once. It would make my knees go weak, and at the same time it would make me feel safe, and loved, and beautiful.

  The touch of Cezar’s mouth on mine destroyed every trace of that dream. His kiss was not about love or tenderness. It was a kiss of possession, and it bruised my lips and wounded my heart. When he was done, I wrenched my arms from his grip and stood there shaking, using all the strength I had to stop myself from hitting him.

  Tell him.

  I drew a deep breath. There were words bursting to get out of me—furious, hurtful words. Though I was shaking with humiliation, I kept them back. Cezar held power in our household. If Father died, that power would become absolute. My refusal would offend my cousin, there was no avoiding that. But I must do it as tactfully as I could. He had the capacity to cause terrible damage to all the people I loved.

  “Thank you for your proposal,” I said in a tight voice. “Cezar, this just wouldn’t work, you and I. We’re too different. We don’t think alike. We don’t enjoy the same things. We’d argue all the time, and be desperately unhappy—”

  “Jena, Jena, Jena,�
� he muttered, moving in close again. He pressed his body up against mine and put his lips against my ear. “You don’t mean that. Haven’t we been friends since we were small children? All lovers quarrel, that’s the way things are. Besides, this solves the problem of your father’s estate. I’m family already. I’m sure this is what Uncle Teodor would want. Come on, Jena, you’re just teasing me.…”

  His hand went down the front of the red gown, and my rage finally got the better of me. In the pocket, squashed between Cezar and me, Gogu was quivering with fury. “Stop it!” I shouted, and hit Cezar across the cheek, hard. “Don’t you dare touch me like that! What do you think I am, some girl who lets every drunken oaf pinch and fondle her in dark corners? I’m not going to marry you, Cezar, and if I have anything to do with it, nor are any of my sisters. Don’t ever put your hands on me again. I’m saving that privilege for my future husband. And there’s one thing plain as a pikestaff: that won’t be you!” I turned on my heel and marched off to the kitchen, and I didn’t look back.

  * * *

  After the guests had retired for the night, I retreated to our bedchamber, exhausted and distressed. My mind hardly had room to hold the double shock of Sorrow’s foolhardy appearance in our midst and Cezar’s crude behavior.

  I took off the red gown, knowing that I would never wear it again, and slipped into my night robe. I put Gogu on the side table. Stela was asleep. Tati lay in bed with her eyes open. The others were sitting on Iulia’s bed, conversing in whispers. Nobody looked happy. On some level, perhaps, our party had been a success, but the possibility of finding suitors we genuinely liked seemed farther away than ever. I remembered Tati saying once that the Other Kingdom might spoil us for life in our own world, because nothing could ever match up to it. Tonight I was beginning to wonder whether that was true.

  “Jena!” exclaimed Paula as I turned and she caught sight of my face. “You look terrible! It wasn’t as bad as that, was it?”

  I cleared my throat. “Cezar just proposed to me,” I said. “I turned him down.” I had not planned to tell them just yet—the hurt of his abusive kiss was still raw. The words had spilled out despite myself.

  There was a stunned silence. Even Tati stared at me, getting up on her elbow to do so.

  “True,” I said. “He kissed me, and groped me, and it was disgusting. I tried to be nice about refusing, but I lost my temper. I’ve made him angry. Even angrier than he was before.” I poured water into Gogu’s bowl. There was comfort in the small daily routine.

  “I bet he thinks you’re a challenge,” said Paula.

  “Yes, like wild boar to be hunted,” I said. “If I married him, he wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d crushed the last spark of spirit in me. I can’t think how he ever believed I’d say yes.” But, I thought, perhaps underneath the man who seemed hungry for power and dominance—the one who feared the Other Kingdom so much he felt bound to destroy it—a little boy still existed: the solemn child who had idolized his big brother, and had felt responsible for an even smaller cousin since the day tragedy struck the three of them. Perhaps he had always believed that one day he and I would be together. If so, it was sad. I would never marry him—his touch disgusted me, and his anger frightened me.

  I snuffed out the last candle and got into bed beside Tati. I could not even begin to talk to her. Curiously, as the image of my sister and her lover wrapped in each other’s arms came to my mind, what I felt most strongly seemed to be envy. To love like that, to be so lost in it that you forgot everything else in the world, must be a wonderful feeling—powerful and joyous. I wished the green-eyed man in the mirror could be what he had seemed at first. I wanted him to be real, and to love me, and not to be a monster from the Other Kingdom. Why did things have to keep twisting around and going dark when all I was trying to do was keep my family safe and live my life the way Father would expect? Tears began to trickle down my cheeks.

  A little later, Gogu hopped across and settled damply on the pillow.

  “Jena?”

  I had not expected Tati to say anything. “Mmm?”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “You saved Sorrow tonight. If you hadn’t warned us, Cezar would have seen him. Caught him. I didn’t think you would do that.”

  “You can’t have thought I’d stand by and let Cezar run him through with whatever was handy.”

  “No, of course not,” Tati said in a murmur. “But you still want the problem to be gone, don’t you? You’re still hoping Ileana will send them away and that I’ll never see him again. You were angry with us.”

  “Of course I was angry,” I said. “He must never come here again, Tati. Did you plan this? How?”

  “I see him sometimes in the woods.” Her whisper was barely audible. “I told him about the party. I didn’t think he would come, Jena, truly.”

  “He shouldn’t have. It’s not just Cezar he has to fear, or the other men of the valley. Coming here to see you might get him in trouble with Tadeusz as well.” I thought of the terrible things I had seen at Dark of the Moon—the imaginative ways the Night People had devised for tormenting those human folk unlucky enough to become their slaves. I remembered Anastasia telling me that Tadeusz wanted Sorrow to see him with Tati. That would be a very particular kind of torture. “Sorrow must love you very much,” I said, “to take such a risk for you. Please don’t do this again, and please don’t go out into the forest looking for him. Promise me.”

  “All right. As long as we go across at next Full Moon.”

  “I think,” I said grimly, “that’s going to depend on Cezar. Good night, Tati. Sweet dreams, Gogu.” I did not tell my sister how much Sorrow’s leap from the wall had troubled me; how it seemed to me that if he could do that, he was no longer so different from the folk who had captured him as a child. I wondered what they ate in the realm of the Night People, he and his poor sister. I fell asleep with dark images in my mind. My dreams were a chaotic jumble of angry voices and violent hands.

  Cezar didn’t say a word about what had happened. In fact, he seemed to be on his best behavior with all of us. Still, I was suspicious. It wasn’t like Cezar to forgive and forget.

  The conduct of the business had been taken right out of my hands. Cezar claimed Father’s desk and told me, politely enough, that for the rest of winter there would be no figures for me to reconcile since his own people at Vǎrful cu Negurǎ would deal with everything. In short, there was nothing for me to do, and no reason for me to be in the workroom. He didn’t actually say this last part, perhaps knowing the explosion it would generate, but he made the message clear.

  I protested, but not for long. To tell the truth, after the night of our party, I could hardly bear to talk to my cousin. I was finding it hard to sleep. When I did, my dreams were tangled and distressing. I’d be dancing with a young man: not Cezar, or the odious Vlad of the frog experiments, or any of the folk from Ileana’s glade, but a man with green eyes and unkempt dark hair, who held me firmly but gently and smiled his funny smile as he looked at me. I’d feel radiant with happiness, full of a contentment I had never known before, not even on the most thrilling of all our nights of Full Moon dancing. Then the man would bend his head to say something—perhaps Trust me, Jena—and his face would change to the grotesquely ugly thing I had seen in Drǎguţa’s mirror. Around me, the bright chamber would fade away. The light would become livid, green and purple, and sounds of screaming would fill my ears. My partner’s sweet smile would become a grimace—all long, sharp teeth and pale, flicking tongue. I would wake up covered in cold sweat, my heart racing in terror. Sometimes I shouted and woke my sisters. Sometimes my dream was different: in this one, I was chasing Tati through the forest as someone led her away. Whether it was Sorrow or Tadeusz I could not see. I ran and ran, and the harder I tried the farther ahead they moved, until they reached a cliff top looking out over a great ravine filled with mist. Jump, said the man, and as I tried to reach her, my sister leaped out to be swallo
wed up by the vapor.

  I kept these dreams to myself, but the memory of them was with me even in waking hours. To keep the nightmares at bay, I tried to make plans. I must get a letter to Father somehow, without Cezar knowing. A truthful letter, perhaps addressed to Gabriel, in which I set out what I could about our problems and let them know how badly we needed help. Who would take it? The snow still lay in heavy drifts, piled up against walls, blanketing roofs, burdening trees. Winters were long in the Carpathians. A possible solution presented itself—but I did not write the letter, not yet. Cezar had a habit of reading anything left lying around.

  The days passed. The young men helped Petru with the farm chores, which was a good thing. They also accompanied us girls anywhere we went outside the castle, which was not so good. Cezar had tightened his watchfulness, and it became near-impossible for any of us to slip away for a solitary walk. I spent a lot of time in the tower room, a favorite haunt for me and Gogu. Piscul Dracului was full of nooks and crannies. I liked the notion that however long we lived here, there would always be new ones to discover. This particular tower had seven arched windows with views out over snowy woodland, and the ceiling was blue, with stars on it. A long time ago I had brought an old fur rug up here and a pile of threadbare cushions.

  I was lying on my back on the rug, looking up at the painted stars and doing my best not to think of our problems. Gogu was perched on my midriff, unusually still.

  “We’re not going to talk about anything bad today, Gogu,” I told him. “We’re going to discuss only things we like. You start.”

  It was your idea. You start.

  “Paddling in the stream in springtime,” I said. “Making pancakes. The smell of a wood fire. The sound of a waterfall.”

  Gogu made no response.