The Changeling of Fenlen Forest

by Katherine Magyarody

  But Torun pressed on. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You know the tales well for someone who doesn’t believe in them.”

  “You don’t have to believe in a joke to find it funny.”

  Don’t you? I thought. Don’t you have to want to believe, just a little? But to say so would have made him clamp down on what he thought and said. Instead I asked, “How do you know the stories?”

  “When I was little, after my parents died, I lived with Melina’s parents. Her father told me stories when he taught me to herd. That was before your father came.”

  “Do you wish you were back there?”

  He shook his head. “The old man’s dead. He was good to me. The old woman…well, you’ll meet her sometime.” He didn’t seem particularly happy about the idea. “The stories were good for me then. I needed them because I thought the Alvina made life better. Put out a honey cake for them and you have a good lambing season. But there’s no such thing,” he said bluntly. “There is just the world that we live in. Magic might belong to the trees and to the animals, but it does not belong to humans. Otherwise,” he snapped a twig in half and threw it away from him. “Otherwise, things would be different.” He visibly retreated into himself, shoulders pushing inward and up, chin tucking down.

  It was a long, silent night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Visiting

  Melina was not impressed when we arrived home soaked through and shivering the next morning. We had waded across the river to get back. The water went up to our necks in places and fighting the current left us exhausted.

  I was in great disgrace, and not only for having lost my pack and my boots. I could see from the uneasy expression on Melina’s face that our accident confirmed the fears she had expressed in her argument with Torun the day before.

  She sent me behind the curtain with Sarai and Telka so that I could change into a clean shift near the bed. Torun undressed in a nook that held sacks of barley and millet while Melina paced the main room. Under the mutter of Melina’s voice, I could hear the pull of wet fabric over Torun’s skin.

  “What happened?” Sarai asked me. I didn’t even have to think of translating the phrase in my head. I was starting to understand that much of…Verian. Verian, I reminded myself, was the name of their tongue. She hung my wet shirt and trousers over the line. “So?”

  I was tired, cold and couldn’t think of the right words.

  “Uksarv,” I said.

  “Pfft” was Sarai’s typical reaction as she tossed me dry clothes.

  “UKSARV!” Telka’s eyes grew large. She snatched the little carved animal from under her pillow and began to trot it along the bed as I dressed. “Uksarv, uksarv, uksarv…”

  There was a silence on the other half of the curtain.

  “Heirre.” Come here, Melina was commanding us.

  Torun was hunched over his porridge. Today it was savory, with flecks of meat in it. He caught my eye as I sat down across from him and then looked away.

  I decided I would keep my face to my bowl. I ate a spoonful of creamy, salty porridge. Food had never tasted so good. I was being fed, though I had made Torun disappear for a day and night. I looked at Melina, who was moving around the house, reaching behind the loom, under the bed. I wanted to apologize but wasn’t sure how. Or what I should apologize for. Going to the Alvina birlan had been an accident, after all. Perhaps the cave—and Melina’s anger—were connected to Bettina? But that had been a year ago, and according to Torun, the Alvina were just a story. As I chewed, I failed to come up with the proper words.

  Melina walked by the table with her arms full of rolled skirts, belts, pillowcases, plain bolts of cloth. She nudged Torun with her elbow, said “Torun, kesilik,” and walked on without acknowledging me.

  “Melina wants me to tell you that we need to go to the village to sell the cloths,” he explained in Gersan. “They cannot wait for your father.” Torun finally met my eyes. “I started to tell them about finding the Alvina birlan.” He looked sidelong at Melina, who was giving instructions to Sarai. Rather mysteriously, he added, “And now we go sell.”

  “But what about finding Sida?”

  He shook his head. “I will take you girls to the village first. This is family business. Without this, we go nowhere out of Melina’s sight.”

  We?

  “But the sheep?”

  “Maro and Dan can be with them another day.”

  And so we spent a hurried hour laying out what we—by which I mean Melina, Sarai and Telka—had made. Dan came up to watch as they sorted the finer, more intricate productions where the plants had curling tendrils and the animals had sinuous necks, from those with geometric designs and raised puffs and cross loops made of thicker, rougher threads. To my surprise, it was the fine cloths that Torun packed into three bundles.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to sell the nicest ones to the people farther away?”

  “No,” Torun answered, heaving the largest bundle onto his back. “The village people deserve our best. We need their good will. The others…that is your father’s business.”

  Was it defiance against Pa’s willingness to put a price on things, or business sense? Perhaps piled, raised designs were harder to weave than I thought.

  “We save patterns with meaning for those who can read them,” Torun said as he stood. “Come.”

  We set out with Torun a few paces ahead with his bow and arrows, then Melina and Sarai with their cloths in handcarts, and then lastly me, with Telka clinging to my shoulders. After two hours, I was so tired that I did not realize when we had reached the village. We had passed through an odd sort of orchard with blossoming fruit trees mixed with different nut trees, a forest of edible things. Then the hard-beaten track had widened into a road and then a clearing, which suggested that we had come to a sort of meeting place. Somewhere, I heard the cluck of chickens. A voice called, high up above us, and Melina raised her face to answer.

  I looked up and saw the carved and painted undersides of a portico spreading across the thick branches of the oak tree we had been passing under. While our portico was grey, weathered, unseasoned wood, these were patterned in interweaving lines of moss green, new leaf green, the green of a cat’s eyes. From the painted motley flashed flowers and birds of red, yellow, purple. I had assumed that our—Melina’s—house was in the trees because of the river. Now I thought of what Torun had told me.

  “It’s like in the story,” I said, looking up. “People living in the branches.”

  A door opened upwards from the portico floor and a set of wooden stairs was lowered down to us. Melina went up, followed by the girls. I hung back. I had been half hoping for a bustling, anonymous marketplace. I had not expected to enter our customers’ homes, nor to measure how our life compared to those around us.

  “Torun!” Melina called.

  He gestured towards the stairs. “You first.”

  “Why not you?”

  He grinned. “I need to push you if you are too afraid.”

  “I am not,” I said, and I stumbled up the stairs.

  I stopped at the top, knee poised at the portico floor. A family had gathered around Melina and the children and was staring at me. Smiles faded, cheeks paled. A girl my age lifted her hand to her mouth before self-consciously letting it drop and attempting to smile at me. An ancient woman with the face of a prune and a collapsed, toothless mouth was less subtle in her manner. She brought her left forefinger and thumb to her forehead and heart, a sign to ward off evil.

  “That is Melina’s mother,” I hear Torun whisper. “She is our family’s Velni-Ani. The Old-Mother.” I felt Torun’s fingers tentatively push the heel of my poised foot forward.

  Blushing, I scrambled onto the portico and smoothed my skirt. Torun climbed up nimbly, and the stares shot from me to him. He came to the family and kissed them each on
the right cheek and reminded Melina in the lightest of tones that they had a full day ahead of them. He opened his arms and ushered them back inside, unconsciously taking up the motions of a shepherd.

  A question broke free from the mother, concerning me no doubt, and the heads began to turn my way. Torun kept walking them inside, but he looked at me and nodded me towards them.

  Once they had gone in, Torun held out his hand to me. “Come. They are cousins. Rina is our age and kind. The first will be the worst. You will get used to the looks.”

  From my place by the stairs, I didn’t believe him. But banter soothed me, so I asked, “How do you know?”

  “I have had practice.” He bent his fingers to urge me to come.

  I began walking towards him and reached out my hand. “What practice?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wished I could have bit off my tongue. Of course, after Bettina’s…whatever it was…death or disappearance…Torun’s sorrow would have been keenly watched over and gossiped about.

  Torun’s hand dropped, and he stepped away from me. His pale eyebrows rose above his dark eyes. His mouth hardened. “Just ask Melina how you can help. If you can’t, just mind Telka.”

  But Telka scampered off to play with the other children while Melina spoke in hushed tones with the older women. They bustled about through the house, collecting things. Sarai held me gently by the billowed sleeve of my shirt.

  Torun sat in a corner with his shoulders up, clearly disapproving. He once tried to speak up to one of the women, but they cut him off and sent him outside. I looked over my shoulder as he stalked out and saw a group of young men calling to him. One had the clay-smeared sleeves of a potter’s apprentice, and another wore the leather apron of a blacksmith. The door swung shut.

  What lay before me did not seem like any market venture I had ever seen.

  Under the direction of her mother and grandmother, Rina laid out a sheet and poured poppy seeds on it in a narrow line and gestured that I should step over them. I did, and she gathered the poppy seeds together.

  The women held out objects made of iron—cooking pots, knives, a nail. I took each one in turn and handed it back.

  They gave me a spoon and a shallow bowl with a pottage made of meat and barley.

  The old woman—my half-siblings’ grandmother, Velni-Ani—grabbed my wrist and turned my palm upwards. She ran her fingers over the creases, stained with sap and dust from my walk with Telka. She gave a “hmph,” curled my fingers over my palm and returned my hand to me.

  Velni-Ani called Melina and the two muttered amongst themselves. Rina signalled Sarai over and gave her a red cord with a small iron pendant on it, a simple hollow disk. Sarai ran back and tied it around my neck, snagging a few hairs in the knot. “This to sell cloth?” I asked in my childish Verian, rubbing my neck. I was going to have to get Torun to teach me how to speak better. After so many years of Ma insisting that I speak Gersan properly, it was painful to know how bad I sounded in Verian. I looked around to make sure no one else had heard. They hadn’t. The women were happily picking through the rolls of cloth Melina had brought up.

  Sarai shook her head. “This is for you, before we sell to others. This shows you don’t have evil spirits living in you.” Her lip curled.

  My face felt hot as I thought about what Torun had said, about Alvina taking revenge and causing bad luck. But I was Pa’s daughter, there was nothing supernatural about that!

  “I…Pa…” I felt stupid. Why was speaking so much harder than understanding? From the expression on Sarai’s face, I couldn’t tell whether she scorned me or the old woman. I saw Rina watching me, almost apologetically. She seemed too shy to come over. I wondered whether she and Bettina had been friends. It seemed likely.

  “You came at twilight and you say you were lost. You fell in the river and Torun fell with you. You found the cave and slept there. You might be unlucky for us to keep. An Alvinaisik.”

  An Alvina girl? I needed to bring Sarai to reality. “I think…we come to sell?”

  Sarai gave me an edgewise look, as if remembering her craft made her dislike me less. “That too. But now we have to show you around because talk spreads fast.”

  The family visit was not the worst part of the day. Melina’s mother’s and sister’s family had learned to respect Torun’s silence and Melina’s pain; others had not.

  When we climbed down, each household of the village had gathered in the clearing below and had set up a bench of goods. Torun and Telka manned our handcarts, while Melina and Sarai took me around from bench to bench.

  At every successive family that we visited, there were more open exclamations of surprise. Across the little marketplace, Torun became stiffer and more taciturn. Soon, he barely looked at me, and the only way I knew he kept watch over me was because I never saw him looking in my direction. His determination not to chat, not to smile, not to eat what they offered us—in short, to do nothing but business—made our family, him, me, the centre of gossip.

  Melina and Sarai gave shorter and shorter explanations, none of which I could hear because they whispered them to their clients as cloth changed hands in exchange for earthenware, pearls of barley, chestnut flour, honey, a leather satchel, a set of needles. Telka was, blessedly, too young to care and soon ran off to play. I realized that Melina had brought her along as a test of my likeness.

  I was mute with embarrassment. I, who could challenge manor-born Julian in perfect Gersan, now had an infant’s vocabulary. Despite all the writing lessons Ma had put me through, I could not say what I was, who I was.

  All the women and men and children walking by or stopping at our wares had to do was look at Torun and then look at me before making the ward sign. I heard one old woman tell another that I must be an Alvinaisik. The other jerked her chin at my iron amulet. I could feel the suspicion seething in the minds of the housewives who stepped away quickly with tablecloths and wall hangings in their baskets.

  In the mid-afternoon, the trade died down. As we packed up, I heard the muffled outbursts of opinion from the porticos as they watched me retreat. Torun kept packing our purchases more tightly, so they wouldn’t rattle loose on the way home.

  When we were ready to leave, we found Telka in the middle of a circle of children, telling them about the many uksarv who lived around her home and how Torun and I would bring one for her as a pet.

  “Chut!” Sarai waded into the troop of children and scooped Telka up under the arms. Sarai dragged her towards our cart. Telka giggled and waved to her friends. One of the little boys pointed at me and Telka nodded vigorously.

  As we left the clearing, someone called out “Ufoli sheled!” Sarai looked up to glare. Torun did not, but his shoulders were high and tight.

  “Ignore them, Sarai. I’ll take care of it later.”

  “Pfft. Don’t, Torun. It’ll make it worse.”

  “What did they say?” I broke in.

  “They called you a foreign…brat,” he said. I suspected that brat was a rather loose translation for sheled. We walked home in silence. Sarai forged ahead with the bow and arrow, while Melina and Torun, pushing the handcarts, were deep in contemplation of I know not what. Telka rode in Torun’s cart, tired and content to stare at the sky through the early spring leaves.

  I walked in between Sarai and the handcarts, caught between tears of relief and disappointment. Relief that it was over, disappointment in myself because, after all, why would I expect a kinder reception from the village? What had I wanted? I was a fool. My half-siblings had accepted me because of my father. But the village was not beholden to my father and I was no part of their blood. So why should I be anything but an outsider?

  I noticed that Sarai had stopped ahead of me. I ran up to her. Had she seen something?

  Looking down, she hadn’t spotted anything, except her brown, smudgy toes. Her shoulders hunched and the tendons in her neck were strai
ned.

  “Sarai?”

  She burst into tears. I edged away, feeling that I was the cause of her anger. All day, I had done nothing right. At least I could give her space.

  “No,” she said, putting a hand on my arm and withdrawing it as soon as I stopped my retreat. Sarai had never touched me voluntarily and I was surprised to feel how light and narrow her hand was. No wonder she was a nimble weaver.

  “It’s not fair,” she said, slowly so that I could understand. “You didn’t do anything. It’s not your fault you look like Bettina. You aren’t anything like her and you can’t talk better than Telka, but they shouldn’t stare at you for that.”

  “Why I not her?” Although I could understand Verian, my ability to speak it failed me at this crucial moment. I had asked the question the wrong way. Or perhaps mangling the words wasn’t that bad of a thing because Sarai sniffed, rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and shook her tear-damp hair out of her face. “Because you’re a terrible weaver,” she said, her composure regained. Apparently, Sarai had exclusive rights to criticize me and guarded her rights jealously.

  She cleared her throat. “They think you are a little bivin.” I frowned, not understanding the last word. She made her eyes big and growled and made her hands into claws. “Bivin…Like an animal.”

  Wild, I thought. They think I’m wild.

  My language made me a child or an idiot. A domesticated, obedient idiot might not be too bad, but I was a wild one. At least Sarai didn’t seem to mind.

  “I told them you are no use at the loom. I think you will be more useful by being where you are happy. In the woods.”

  Useful. That was the important word for Sarai, not happy.

  I looked over my shoulder, where I saw Melina and Torun stopped a few paces behind us. “What you need?” I asked. I didn’t have the words to be anything but blunt.