The Changeling of Fenlen Forest

by Katherine Magyarody

  A strange ripple passed over Sarai’s face, something like surprise or pleasure.

  “I want colour,” she said, pointing to the threads in her skirt. “Red. Blue. Green. Yellow. And…and more. Colours no one else has. And flowers,” she said running her fingers over the shapes on her belt.

  “I bring flowers,” I said, in my best efforts at Verian. “I bring red. Blue. Green.”

  Sarai’s pale face flushed slightly, as if in some private triumph, and she strode down the path ahead.

  That night, I stood in the field by the river under the full moon.

  “Sida,” I whispered, hoping that she was nearby. “Sida!”

  I saw nothing. Sida did not return; she had gone elsewhere and I would have to find her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Herd

  I walked, watched, waited. Sida would reveal herself, but I could not know when.

  I settled into a pattern of wandering through the forest trails in the day and coming home with some berries or plants I had found for Sarai. Woad and larkspur for blue, dyer’s rocket for yellow, crottle lichen for orange. As darkness fell, I helped card wool, or chop wood, or cook.

  I followed Torun’s tracks, venturing a little farther here or there, until I found the ledge where the buck had scared Torun into pulling us into the river. My boots and pack were lying there, scattered over with dirt and dried pine needles, like the souvenirs of a suicide. My feet had grown tough with barefooted ramblings, so I tied my boots together with a bit of twine and slung them over my neck. They would be useful when the weather turned cool. I was very happy to find my pack, with its emergency supplies. If I ever had the chance to go home, the pack would help me leave.

  I hadn’t crossed the river since my fall with Torun and the night by the cave. I wondered whether this forest, too, belonged to Fenlen. It was wild and nobody except Torun and the sheep seemed to come here. I did not cross the river because I knew Sida was on the east bank.

  One day, I was hiking up to the high pasture where Torun stayed overnight with the herd after the lambs had dropped. I tried to go there every other afternoon or so for a few hours, and he taught me words and phrases. I muttered yesterday’s lesson to myself as I climbed over logs and picked my way through saplings that had recently grown thick with leaves.

  “This mutton tastes good,” I said to myself in Verian. “Please give me more mutton. How old is that sheep?” I was conscious of being shadowed through the forest, but I pretended I hadn’t noticed a thing. I was almost at the pasture.

  I named the things around me, refusing to turn at the sound of a mushroom being crushed. “Tree. Tree. Tree. Leaf. Bird. Pine tree. Rock. Big rock. Little rock. Many rocks.”

  I hoped it would be Sida, but I was curious about the other creatures I had seen. I stopped where I was.

  There was a scurry of movement. In front of me, as if from nowhere—I swear I had been watching the path—the barrel-chested buck charged past me on the right.

  “Uksarv.”

  Ahead, I saw Sida leap into sight as she galloped by me on the left, far up the hill. The buck gained ground and suddenly Sida stopped, looked over her shoulder and kicked, nailing him in the cheek with a hoof. He stumbled to the side and…disappeared.

  Instead of wondering how a large animal had vanished, seemingly into thin air, I lost my self-control and shouted after Sida.

  “Sida! Sida, come back here!” I chased her, but she was much swifter, especially uphill.

  I paused at the edge of the pasture.

  Sida stood in front of Torun, who was kneeling in front of her with his hands outstretched and upturned. He had observed me closely that day on the cliffside, I realized. Sida smelled him, rested her cheek to his. Carefully, slowly, with his hands still out, Torun stood up. Sida rubbed her nose on his right hand and he gently stroked the side of her face.

  Sida loved attention and had recently had none. She tilted her head up so he could get at the angle between her head and neck.

  Torun stepped backwards and Sida stepped forward, so as not to lose any scratching. He sang to her softly as he went.

  I felt a surge of jealousy. Why hadn’t I thought of singing?

  I jogged up towards them, panting and very confused. She had been avoiding me, so why…but my thoughts of myself faded as I came closer.

  Besides the big gash I had noticed, Sida now bore a myriad of small cuts and lesions, as if she had been running through sharp boulders and raspberry thickets.

  “Chuuu,” Torun murmured, as he stroked her sides. “Chuuu.”

  “The buck was running after her.”

  He looked over to me. “It happens sometimes with the sheep, with rams and ewes,” Torun said in Gersan. “Is the buck near?”

  I shook my hand. “She kicked him and he…he went off.” I couldn’t understand quite where, though.

  “Good. Fetch some water, please,” he said, checking her hooves. “And my bag.”

  When I handed his bag and flask to him, I saw that Sida’s gash was mostly healed, but there were a few places where the skin still stretched a reddish pink and where the scabs oozed and cracked. Torun kept stroking her with one hand, rooting through his bag with the other. He took out some dried herbs and put them into his mouth.

  “Yimma naisik,” Torun murmured. Good girl. To me, he said, “There should be some vinegar there.”

  As he chewed, Torun washed her cut, first with water and then with vinegar. To my amazement, Sida’s ears flicked back and forth, but she didn’t shy away from him. With one hand, he scooped the herbs out of his mouth and spread them into the cut.

  “That could infect her!” I said.

  “Do you have a better idea?” he said in his calm voice. “I do this with my sheep. And myself.”

  “I have some alicorn ointment,” I said. I upended the bag and everything tumbled out, including balled-up lint, apple seeds and stems, a small jar of alicorn ointment my mother insisted I carry everywhere and a chipped-off old bit of horn.

  Torun paused in his ministrations. “What…”

  I tossed the horn back in and began packing with great speed and precision.

  “Was that…?”

  “Yes,” I said as calmly as I could. “It’s nothing. I sometimes find them in the forest.”

  “Don’t let anyone see it,” Torun said.

  “I’m not stupid.” Huffily, I grabbed the jar of ointment.

  Sida would not let me come near her with it. I stepped forward, she stepped back. I stepped to the right, she stepped left. I set it down. “I suppose it would be odd to be healed with a part of your own body,” I conceded.

  “Do you have any rope?” Torun asked. “She might be safer if she stays here.”

  I found a length in my pack, but when Sida saw me tie a loop on the end of it, she reared up a little and then bucked.

  “Sida, this is for your safety,” I said.

  She lowered her head, and if she had grown a horn of any size, she might have been dangerous.

  I dropped the rope. “Or not. I’m not sure we would be any help against a buck.”

  “True. If we give her something she wants, perhaps she will stay. What does she eat?” Torun asked.

  “At first it was milk from our goats. Then she used to eat oats and barley cooked in milk, she was just starting on new flowers and grass…” I trailed off. Sida wasn’t a baby anymore. She had been feeding herself for some time now.

  “Well, what do other uksarv eat?”

  “They’re picky. Wild plums, new leaves, bark off certain trees. But it’s not predictable.”

  Torun stroked Sida’s neck. “Then we should leave her to make her own choices.”

  “But she might run off and never come back!” My voice was tight with fear.

  Torun turned towards me and put a hand very ligh
tly on my shoulder, near my neck. “She came back to you,” he said. “Trust her.”

  I found myself biting back strange fears.

  Torun moved his hand to pat me on the back. Pat-pat. Pause. Pat-pat. He paused again and put his arm around my shoulders in an uncertain attempt at comfort.

  “What if she doesn’t need me anymore?” I mumbled. “What if she disappears?”

  I felt Torun swallow. “Then she has chosen for herself. But I do not think she will do so.”

  We stood like that until my breathing stilled. When I opened my eyes, Sida was watching us curiously.

  Sida leaned over and licked the tears from my face. She snuffled at the taste and I laughed at the slobber of it.

  Then she took three steps backwards and trotted a circle around us. I reached out for her. “Come here, Sida…” She tore off through the meadow. The flock scattered and re-formed in small clusters.

  “You are too afraid,” Torun said. I would have run after her, but his arm dropped to my hand and he slowed my pace to a smooth walk.

  We followed her and she went further down, running and then pausing at the edge of the forest. She watched us expectantly.

  “She wants us to chase her,” I said. “It’s her old game.”

  “I’m going to have to bring the flock with me if we go farther,” Torun said. We both thought about the mess of getting a herd of sheep through unknown terrain.

  “You stay,” I said. “She’ll keep me safe.”

  “Come back after,” he said. “Promise?”

  “I promise,” I said over my shoulder.

  I followed Sida down through the forest.

  She had grown wiser, leaving fewer tracks, but I could still see the scuff of overturned leaves here, a broken stick there. No Sida, just trees and trees and more trees. A rock. I sat down, breathed in. What had she wanted me to see?

  I head a whicker to my right. I turned slowly, my heart beating hard.

  It wasn’t her.

  I found myself facing a doe. Her dappling was darker than the others I had seen and a spray of gold-brown spots marked her cheeks and muzzle. The curve of her belly showed that she was heavily pregnant; a few more weeks and she would lose her horn before she gave birth. She seemed to belong to the group Torun and I had seen. In fact, though I dared not take my eyes off her, I thought I could see the rest of the does somewhere beyond me in the forest. Was Sida there? I could see, beyond the herd, a shifting patch of shadow. She was not quite amongst them, but they weren’t chasing her away, either. I crouched slowly.

  Here was the matriarch as well, slight and scarred. I noticed that one of her eyes had the slight milky sheen of a forming cataract. The freckled doe was her second-in-command in leading the herd.

  The two circled me, their horns touching my face, my neck, drawing a line down my torso. They were testing me.

  Then the matriarch stepped closer with her head up and I felt the velvety soft skin of her chin and lips and the prickle of her chin hairs as she considered my taste.

  She turned her head to the side to feel the fast beat of my pulse. She stepped away.

  I remembered my wad of Sida’s hair in my pocket and carefully took it out.

  “Please…” I held it out in my hand so they could look at it and smell it. Sida had been angry at me when I had grabbed this scrap of her, but it showed the matriarch that I had been close to her, not just today, but another time. Many times. I wanted to show them I was trustworthy.

  The old matriarch seemed thoughtful. The younger, speckled doe stepped from side to side—as close to a prance as her belly allowed. Her ears pricked back and forth. I could not tell if she thought Sida was the threat, or me, who held the traces of a wounded unicorn. The matriarch shook her head and led the young doe off to the rest of the group. I did not try to follow them now and they pushed into the green of the forest. They stepped more carefully than Sida and left no tracks behind them. I felt alone and confused.

  Would Sida be served better if I protected her from these uksarv, or was the idea of separating her from them somehow wrong? She had fled the buck, but these does clung together and protected one another.

  If Sida joined these beasts who seemed to belong to this part of the forest, how could I get home? Perhaps I didn’t need her at all. But then, if I got home and a hundred years had passed, Sida would be the only one I knew. Then what?

  I walked back to Torun and the flock.

  When I got there, up the field north of me, I saw Torun checking the tiny hooves of one of the lambs. He bent the animal’s small legs in a perfunctory manner, lifting here, pressing there. But when he was done, he kissed the top of its head and made the ward sign between its ears. Unconscious of the favour, the lamb grunted and trotted away to its mother. Torun remained crouched where he was, squinting, thinking. In the afternoon sun, his shadow was long and cool in the grass. I sat down next to him with a thump and lay down in the grass with my knees up. I hugged myself.

  “Any luck?”

  I shook my head. The sky was so bright and blue that I had to close my eyes. I told him what I had seen.

  “No sign of the buck?” he asked.

  “Just the does…”

  “That sounds like luck to me. She has found her herd. She will be safe with them.”

  But I was supposed to be her herd, I wanted to tell him. If she went, where did that leave me? Torun sat next to me in silence, letting me muddle through my thoughts. I heard him kick up a stick with his toes. A few seconds later, he took out his knife to carve.

  I opened my eyes a slit. He sat blocking the sun. His back curved as he whittled.

  “Are there any stories about uksarv?” At home, the story was that a young girl could lure a unicorn—pure of body and all that. I suspected the story wasn’t exactly true, but it wasn’t untrue either. Like the story of the Alvina, perhaps there was a kernel of knowledge, something to chew on.

  “I’ll warn you, it’s not a very good one.”

  I closed my eyes again. “The story? I’ll judge for myself.”

  “Yes,” Torun said. He cleared his throat. “In the early days, Sun Father looked down on Earth Mother. She grew warm and in her belly a seed stirred. This was the Life Tree, which grew strong under the gaze of Sun Father. Sun Father and Earth Mother created many children between them. They grew on the branches of the Life Tree if they were animals and pushed upwards from the roots if they were plants. From the Tree grew a branch that drooped to the ground and from the branch grew a great flower and when the flower blossomed, in it was a Milk-White Mare.”

  “When are we getting to the uksarv?”

  “Be patient! You’re as bad as Telka. So. Earth Mother’s dearest child was her Milk-White Mare. But Lightning watched the Milk-White and wanted her for its own. Though Lightning can touch what is on Earth, it cannot stay long. The Milk-White Mare was struck by a tongue of Lightning. Burned and hurting, she hid under the Life Tree, where the roots grew around her. Milk-White was the first creature to return to her mother, and now all creatures who tire of life come back to her.”

  “That’s a story about death, not uksarv.”

  “Chut. I am not done. After many months, a new creature emerged alone from the hollow under the Life Tree. The Mare’s Son was strange, like his mother in most ways, but bearing fire on his forehead. He chased the animals and women and men away from the Life Tree. The people forgot about the Life Tree and wandered away to other lands. Now the Life Tree creates in silence and secrecy and we cannot know it.”

  He was quiet again and all I could hear was the maaah-maaaah of the sheep and the breeze rustling through the tall grass. I sat up. “That’s all?”

  He shrugged.

  “But that story’s not anything like the uksarv we saw.”

  “Stories don’t have anything to do with anything real. They’re ways of s
aying things you can’t say.”

  “What do you mean?” The part about the mare hiding under the Life Tree…it seemed to fit somehow with the story he told me about the Alvina and the cave. “What can’t you say?”

  He must have found my question unnerving because he grunted, flicking a slice of white wood away from himself. “They’re mostly nonsense.” As he shifted, I got a good look at Torun’s belt. It had a repeating pattern of paired black birds facing each other against an undyed, grey-white background. But in the dull cream of the wool, my eyes sometimes caught a glint of a brighter hair.

  “Torun, when you think a story is a good one, I’ll weave you a belt with peacocks dancing across it.”

  I closed my eyes, but the heat on my face told me he had shifted to look at me better. The sunlight made me see the lacework of veins on my eyelids.

  “Do you know what that means?” he said.

  “It’s a joke,” I said. “If I weave you a belt, it will be all one colour. Probably brown.”

  “Hmm.” He whittled in silence after that.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rina’s Wedding

  I hadn’t been paying attention when we went to sell cloth at the village. Or else I hadn’t been able to read the signs. I couldn’t understand that the stitching of red ribbon from the shoulder to cuff of new shirts for Sarai and for me meant something more than new shirts. I didn’t catch on to the significance of baking nut rolls in the small clay-and-brick oven in the summer kitchen. Sarai slapping my hand away from them didn’t mean a thing beyond her usual bad temper. But two days after the stories of the Milk-White Mare and her son, Torun came down with the herd in the midmorning.

  “I’m down for the wedding,” he said by way of explanation.

  “What? Who?”

  “Rina, of course. Didn’t you know?” he asked with a wry smile as he sat down to a late breakfast. “It’s all the girls could talk about before I left.”

  Torun added that Maro and Dan would take care of the flock in the little pasture underneath the house. They were not of marriageable age and so they did not have to come. Uninterested in dancing or ceremony, the boys accepted the task of watching the sheep for two days with glee.