My father looked uneasy for a moment. “No. That’s not a good idea.” He did not have to say Torun’s name.
“I don’t have to be with the flock,” I insisted. “I’m very good at foraging.”
He cleared his throat and spoke over me. “In this house, women have other work.” He jerked his chin at the boys. “Maro. Dan.” He stood, and the boys jumped and swung from Pa’s arms. They squealed as he took striding steps out to the portico. I followed them to the door and looked out. Through the rain, I noticed a few bedraggled outbuildings in the tree- and shrub-lined enclosure, and in the north-east corner, another, much smaller treehouse. It was under this small outbuilding that the boys went with our father to split wood and who knows what else adoring boys do with their fathers on rainy days.
As for me, Telka’s sticky fingers tugging on my wrist told me that I was going to have to plot my escape while I learned about the girls’ industry. After we washed up using water from the overflowing rain barrels on the portico, Sarai directed me to the loom.
I stared at the wooden machine with utter incomprehension, at its broad, horizontal panel, the thick, wooden legs, the vertical contraptions, the infinity of threads.
“Lizbet!” Sarai patted the loom and then her skirt of stiff, dark blue. She took a step to the side and patted a small handloom that could easily fit between Telka’s arms. Then she ran her long fingers along her waist. I understood that the large loom was for weaving the lengths of fabric that they wrapped around themselves as skirts and the small, narrow loom mounted on a board the length of my forearm was for creating the intricately patterned belts that they used to cinch women’s skirts together or to break the grey-white of the men’s clothes. Sarai’s belt was red with white pinwheels and Telka’s was white with a simple yellow stripe and a little red bird on each end. Last night, Melina’s belt had been indigo blue with geometric red and white peacocks. I, for the moment, was beltless, though I suppose if I had to have one, I would have wished it to be dark green with Sida dancing across it. I understood that if my father had his way, I would soon be working their trade as well as wearing their clothing.
I shook my head and pointed to the doorway.
“Pffft.” Sarai said, a sound that clearly translated to “keep dreaming.”
“Please?” I said, hoping that my tone would be as transparent as hers.
“Pa,” she said, in addition to some other words I could not catch. She disgustedly directed me to the spinning wheel.
Outside of braiding small and ugly carpets out of fraying unicorn velvet, I had no experience with handicrafts. I looked over to where Telka was busy carding wool. Obviously, she and Sarai and Bettina had been trained to this work. I had been trained to be outside with my heels sinking into the soft earth. After watching me poking around the wheel and hesitantly pushing on the pedal, Sarai heaved a world-weary groan and sent me to card wool with Telka. If Sarai had anything to do with it, I would be outside in the rain in an instant. But while my father was outside, I was staying inside.
Sarai took her place at the loom and began weaving the shuttle back and forth with great skill and precision, every so often sharing knowing looks with Telka, who kept changing my grip on the toothed paddles.
As I worked, I thought through my options. The rain would wash away Sida’s tracks, but when the rain ended, the mud would catch the impress of her cloven hooves. Hopefully, Sida would have found high ground. High ground. I remembered that Torun and the sheep were in the high pasture. At home, Sida had treated our goats with curious disdain—what would she think of sheep? I wondered whether I should tell Torun about her. I wondered what his face would look like if I told him. Would his sadness lift or his eyes open with wonder, like Mrs. Helder’s did when I told her of does and bucks and fawns? I tried to picture his face, an absurd thought; it had been so dark when I met him that I wasn’t even sure of the colour of his eyes.
My hand slipped, and I dropped one of the carding brushes. Telka and Sarai sighed in unison.
By the time Melina returned, Telka had graduated from correcting my grip to smacking my hands and saying, “Zasto! Zasto, Lizbet!”
Melina removed her thick felt coat slowly and hung it by the furnace to dry. When she approached me, the woman’s eyes were rimmed with pink as though she had been crying. Whereas Ma chased me out of her workshop whenever I interrupted her experiments, Melina simply watched. Then she sat by my side and wordlessly showed me how to brush the clumps of the wool until the fibres all pointed in the same direction and then how to tease this wool rolag from the hooked teeth. She then sat me down by the large loom. Perhaps if she and Sarai had been working on a solid colour, I might have understood, but the pattern of large and small arrowheads in crimson, black and white required a system of counting that I could not follow. Within two passes of the shuttle over the warp, I had spoiled the pattern and tangled the shuttles. My incompetence seemed to calm her, because I was not her daughter reformed, just a part of my father’s inferior past.
That night, I could not sleep, and I did not want to. Yesterday, I had been bone-tired and distraught. I was still distraught, and after a day cooped inside, I was itching for fresh air. Beside me, Telka graduated to only clinging to my arm. The smell of seven bodies, of food, of wet woolen clothing, was overwhelming.
I waited for the children to fall asleep, for Melina’s and my father’s voices to fade away. I waited until I sure that they had turned in for the evening. My boots were under the bed, and I carried them in one arm. There was the patter of water on the roof, but trees always scattered water after the sky had closed. If the rain had stopped, the ground might dry overnight and I could start looking for Sida. If she had crossed the river, I hoped she hadn’t gone far. I slipped out of the alcove and found my father with his face to the fire burning low in the clay furnace and his feet on the earthenware ledge. An unlit pipe lay in his right hand. He was asleep, most likely. I walked to the door quickly and quietly. But as I opened it, the wood creaked.
“Where do you think you’re going?” my father asked in a low, measured voice. The very controlled quality marked him as either nervous or angry.
“Outside.” My voice was louder than I had expected.
He jerked his head to the door. Outside, we could speak louder. Fine. That’s where I wanted to be, anyway. The delicious, wet smell of spring air cut through the thick warmth of the house. We stepped out onto the portico. It was now spitting rain. The air was damp and cool. Poor Sida. Poor Torun, wherever he was. I pulled on my boots.
He didn’t stop me, but said, “You can’t run off in the night. Not you, especially.”
At home, I obeyed Ma because I trusted her. With Pa, I hesitated. I didn’t trust him, but I had no one else. I couldn’t rebel if I did not understand.
“Please,” he said. “Not before morning…”
I sat down with my back against the side of the house and my elbows on my knees. I thought I had an idea that something had happened to Bettina in the nighttime. But whatever it was, it wasn’t something I could ask about. Not yet. Not if I wanted the truth.
“I’m not running off,” I said. “It’s too…I’m not used to so many people.” I was surprised by my own honesty. “I can’t sleep with all the…the breathing on me.”
He nodded. “There are rather a lot of them. That’s why I keep on trading.”
“To leave them?”
“No, so I keep coming back to them.”
I made an involuntary “chuh” of disgust, but he talked over me.
“You see, Elizabeth, I’m a simple man. I like to be admired by my family and I don’t like to get involved in their petty sorrows. So, I stay home just enough so they don’t find out how shallow I am.”
I thought over this a little. Such a strategy would work very well for a charming tinker travelling from place to place, but it wouldn’t have fooled Ma in our cramped po
ny cart. “Then, why are you being so honest with me?”
He winked at me. “Well, you’re not very real to me yet, are you?”
I shook my head. Unbelievable. And, therefore, probably true. Part of me wished that Ma had taken Victor’s offer. Pa wasn’t worth mourning. I’d tell her so. But for now, I had to learn enough about Pa’s life here to survive until the spring flood died down.
“Why hasn’t Torun come home?” Torun’s presence lingered in the house, although he stayed away. All through the day, his name flashed through my dark, muddled attempts to understand. I wanted to talk to Torun, but the thought of his return made me want to run, fast and hard. It also made my mind rush to form questions that I wanted to ask of him, questions I could never ask Pa.
My father shrugged. “The water’s high and driving a wet, unhappy flock of sheep is no man’s idea of a game. But he could come back, if he wanted.” He did not seem too concerned.
I was relieved by his answer, irritated by his nonchalance. “Why did you teach him Gersan?”
He laughed “I taught Torun so I would have someone to talk to. I also taught Bett…my eldest girl, so Torun would have someone to talk to and practise with when I was gone. I thought he would help me trade when he reached manhood. Speaking Gersan would let us talk about the wares without the customers hearing. A steady partner is worth his weight in gold. Torun’s not born to buy and sell, but he liked seeing and hearing more of the world. We did a few trips together from the time he was Sarai’s age, until last winter.”
“Who took care of the flock?”
“My eldest girl, when he was away.”
My mind went to the ghost elf-girl I had met as a child. She had had a lamb. She had spoken Gersan. But she had been almost grown when I was still very small. Perhaps the creature I had met had also haunted Bettina? My line of thought was broken by Pa briskly continuing.
“The sheep would stay around the house, though. She’s…she was…too good a weaver to waste.” He avoided saying her name, which would have attracted his family’s attention if they happened to drift in and out of sleep. “He was going to marry my…her, see? A year or two from now. The two of them made some pact before she had lost her milk teeth. He took her rather seriously.”
“He would marry his cousin? Isn’t Melina his aunt?” It happened sometimes at the Helders’ village, but I still thought it strange.
“No, not quite so close. She’s his second cousin, I think, but she raised him. Old enough to be his aunt. So.”
“How old was Bettina?” My skin prickled. Torun, somewhere around my age, would be too old for a daughter of Pa’s. “She was almost sixteen last year, when it happened.”
Impossible.
She would have been seventeen now. But I was seventeen. I stared at him.
If he seemed uneasy about something, his was an everyday, natural unease.
“How…” I started, trying to understand what was absolutely unnatural. How could he have two seventeen-year-old daughters? Instead, I stuttered, “How long after you left us did…did…Where did you go after you left us?”
He shrugged and tapped his pipe on the railing. “The pony threw me and ran off. Hit my head and woke up with a fever. I wandered about in the forest. Somehow, I ended up here, with Melina leaning over me and nursing me.”
“How long before Bettina was born?”
He took his time answering. His manner was easy, but I hoped his blood had the decency to rise a little in his cheeks. “Bettina came about a year in.”
I felt heartsick. By any logical system of counting, Bettina should be just entering maidenhood.
He laughed at my expression. “You’re such an innocent.”
He made it sound like an insult, but I barely felt the sting. He was too foolish or too forgetful to notice that I should not be so close in age and appearance to Bettina. What has happened? I thought, looking at him. To you, to me, to Bettina? I longed to ask, but he continued before I could say another word.
“It was a waste to train Torun,” he said, steering us back into safe territory. “Now when I’m in town, I have that scoundrel Heino,” he said. He scratched his beard. “Elizabeth, I’m going to show you what a trusting old Pa you have and leave you out here by yourself.” He nodded towards the house, where the others slept. “But you have to come back inside before the others wake up in the morning. Especially Telka. You don’t know what it would look like to them.”
He went inside, and I lay down on the portico and stretched myself out across the worn boards.
Unreal, I thought with the beat of my heart. Unreal. Impossible.
And yet, Mrs. Helder had told me stories of young people wandering out of the forest for a night and coming out to find their grandchildren were grown. And now, somehow, I—like my father before me—had found myself on the other side of something, something that was in the Fenlen Forest or was the Fenlen Forest.
How could I ever find my way home now? Ma would find herself utterly alone. If I went back, would I find her and the Helders long dead?
And yet, the Fenlen Forest had been my home for many years. The forest had never hurt me or cut me away from myself in the way it did now. I grasped onto that fact. If I had somehow wandered out of sync from my life, had Sida come with me? She must be with me. I had to see if she was here. And then I would return to Ma through Fenlen Forest. Somehow.
The rain came harder now. Raindrops smacked hard against the wood and shattered into a fine mist. I shivered. I would have to wait until the rain stopped and simply be my father’s daughter for a while. Simply! With what I knew, how could anything be simple?
Could I have seen Bettina, so many years before? How? Why? I couldn’t believe it. Or else…
When I was small, Mrs. Helder had been concerned about the girl with the lamb stealing my shape. On winter nights, she had told me about children who were lured away by the Old Folk and the strange creatures who took their place. Changelings.
I wondered if I had accidentally become one.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A Change in the Weather
It’s easier to deny that something strange has happened when you can’t say anything about it. I was silent, and during the incessant rain of the next six days, the disturbing fact that time had somehow slipped its chain in the Fenlen Forest fell into the back of my mind. It didn’t change anything, really. I still had to do the same things—find Sida, get home. I just didn’t know what would be waiting for me there.
I made my escape from the house a week later, when the bad weather broke. Every morning I had looked out from the portico with less and less hope of finding my way back. The rain had grown stronger and then weakened in turns without stopping. The river swelled above its banks, and I understood why we lived in a treehouse and why Torun had led the sheep away. His absence meant a week of Melina’s tortured attempt to explain the loom in words I did not understand. I lived in a lonely silence. After finding me still in the treehouse the next morning, Pa decided that honesty was not, after all, the best policy. He was playful, slick and evasive. Without anyone but Pa to speak with in my native Gersan, the sounds of their tongue and the shape of their lilting words began to flicker through my dreams. I became uneasily aware that, but for my father, I might start to forget my mother’s language.
And then, the clouds finally scudded west across the river and towards the forest. The tepid sun revealed a sludgy landscape. The watery morning light cast itself over the puddles and raindrops that trembled on each leaf and beaded each strand of grass. Dressed in my breeches, I hauled up the trapdoor and let it fall to the wooden boards of the portico floor with a damp thud. I was feeding the ladder through the floor when I heard the pat-pat-pat of Telka’s bare feet. She threw open the door, panting a little. I did not want her to be scared or cry at the sight of me running off—there was no guarantee I would find Sida, and if I didn’t
, I would still need to come back to my father’s house to sleep and eat.
“Ni zafor!” I whispered gleefully as the ladder hit the ground with a squelch. “No” and “rain” were two of my recently acquired words. Telka was my main source of vocabulary. She was proud of teaching me, since I spoke like a child a few years younger than her. I gave a small whoop of happiness that Telka echoed back to me. As I pulled on my boots, Telka ran back to look inside and put a finger to her lips. They were still sleeping. Excellent. I waved at her and started climbing down.
The earth was saturated, and when I stepped down, muddy water came up almost to my booted ankles. Telka, barefoot in her nightgown, was already halfway down the ladder. When I was her age, Ma’s worst fits of exasperation came when she was frustrated and tired after a day of work only to see me come home filthy. I imagined that a morning scrub would not please Melina. I turned and patted my shoulders and waist.
Telka, being the youngest of a large family, instinctively climbed onto my back. I anchored her legs with my arms and I stepped out into the early morning sunlight. I had not set my boots to the ground in over a week and before this morning, my eyes had always been trained on what lay beyond the yard—the river, the hills. Although I had only seen the hedged meadow on the night of my arrival, I now saw that within this meadow were two three-walled shelters—a summer kitchen with its own clay furnace in the southeast corner and a larger shed for the sheep inside a pen in the northwest corner. Beside the pen was a henhouse, from which the disgruntled clucking of damp, cooped birds came. Now I understood what Dan and Maro and Pa had been doing throughout the week. The poultry had needed feeding, and the sheep shelter had been re-shingled and filled with clean hay. From the ground, I saw that there were cisterns to catch rainwater above each building. Along the northeast side of the yard was a fenced off, muddy vegetable garden within which stood a shed on stilts that I supposed held extra supplies.
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