And they cast it into the fire.
I felt the gaze of the villagers on me as the flames leapt up. It would be bad if I wasn’t there, Sarai had said. This was a sort of test, it had to be. The women began to sing.
Burn hekunaisik, rise into the wind.
Twigs and sticks, take out the sick.
Flames be bold, chase out the cold.
Heat of the fireplace, rise into the wind.
The flames ate through the sacking face and shrivelled the hair of the hekunaisik. I kept my face as still as I could as the song continued. I would not be afraid.
Bring them health and bring them wealth
Burn the mist, bring back what’s missed
Ashes of a wooden girl, rise into the wind.
The effigy cracked, and a stream of sparks flew up. Someone gave a cheer and the others laughed. The mood returned to that of celebration, but Sarai’s hand tightened over mine. “We usually do this at midwinter,” she said. “When we need to get rid of our fears.”
“So, are you rid of them?” I asked.
Sarai shrugged. “I’m not afraid of anything, so I wouldn’t know.”
The next morning, the charred remains of the hekunaisik had broken down amongst the other burned logs and twigs. Only a shrivelled curl of hay from the hekunaisik’s head remained, stuck between two stones that ringed the fireplace. If I hadn’t seen the effigy, I would not have known it had ever existed.
On the walk home, everyone was silent and withdrawn. I wanted to tell Torun about the hekunaisik, but there was no way of doing so without attracting Melina’s attention. She was talking to Pa, conversing about household matters.
Torun looked over his shoulder at me and then he turned back to face the path. And then he stepped more quickly. Why would he not walk next to me? Was it Pa’s presence? Or was the hekunaisik? Or had the kiss accidentally ruined our friendship? I would have no one else to talk to and then I would need to find a way home. I would ford the river and walk west. I would knock on Ma’s door and fling myself into her waiting arms. I would tend the unicorns with single-minded devotion.
My exaggeration was soon put to the test.
When we arrived at the house, there was a familiar, four-footed, grey-white form nibbling raspberries from the spiky growth that emerged from the eastern wall of the family hedge. I could hear the nervous maaaah-maaaaaah of the sheep on the other side of the hedge. They knew Sida as a force of energetic disruption. Her stillness did not comfort them.
Torun glanced at me despite himself, but, for the moment, I only had eyes for my fawn.
“Sida!”
I felt my father watching me as I ran over. This time, Sida stood patiently as I fussed over her. I stretched my arms around her narrow neck and kissed her elegant face. Torun’s herb-poultice seemed to have helped the cuts and scratches. I ran my hands over her pointed ears, checking for mites. She was healthy and she was safe. For now. But she blew her breath uneasily and stamped her hooves. What had happened? Why wasn’t she with the herd?
There was a rustle through the hedge. Maro, followed by Dan, lurched into view and then retreated a little. Sida gave a nervous side-step.
“Who is this?” Pa asked in Gersan. As if I would give a more honest answer if Melina did not understand. His voice was plummy, but I saw a flicker of greed in his eyes.
“This is one of my…” I almost said fawns. “This is one of my foals. She’s a yearling now. I raised her by bottle when her dam died.” I brushed Sida’s forelock over her forehead to cover the bud. It was as high as my thumb now, but unbruised and sound. I leaned down, running my hands over Sida’s body to make sure her legs were strong and her hooves were healthy.
What was she doing here?
“Strange-looking yearling,” my father said, rubbing his eyes. “I could use a horse.”
Whatever had happened out there, Sida wasn’t safe here, either.
With my right hand, I found an old dried, broken strand of raspberry bramble and picked it up as I stood. Ignoring the million palm-pricks of the bramble’s thorns, I ran my left hand along her flank. “Good girl, clever girl,” I sang. “This girl is not for riding, is she?”
“Perhaps I could find a horse to breed her with.” He stepped towards Sida and me.
I swiftly pressed the bramble into her belly. Surprised at the sting, she reared up with a scream and charged away. I took a few steps to see her round the hedge and head towards Fenlen Forest. She leapt down into the streambed and splashed across the river. The water was only knee high now. I threw away the strand as my family turned to watch Sida disappear.
I clenched my bleeding hand as they turned to stare at me.
“Pa, you scared her!” I felt like crying, far more than I had yesterday when he denied the possibility of sending word to Ma. Sida had come to me for help and I had scared her off. I shuddered. I had been like the unicorn mothers who scare off their yearlings, but I had done it too soon. Too soon and for unnatural reasons. But my relation to Pa was natural, was it not? I swallowed my guilt. “She’ll stay away now.”
“A yearling? She’ll come back.” He did not look convinced at my lie, bleary as he was from the night’s celebration.
We stared at each other until Melina suggested that we go inside to eat.
My father grunted and pushed through the hedge towards the house.
I stayed where I was, looking down to the river. The water had ebbed; I could see the flat top of the larger rocks in places. It was no longer impossible, I felt with a pang, to go across, to find my way home. After all, Sida could.
“Heirre.” Torun was the last one outside.
“Torun…” The questions and worries piled up. What did Sida’s appearance mean? What about the hekunaisik? “Yesterday, the hekunaisik…why did they make me hold it? Why are they scared of me?”
He looked at me askance. “People think that by making a hekunaisik, they are protecting the bride or the village. But they are also making it alive, in a way. It takes on their fears.” He turned my face carefully toward his and I met his eyes. Before, Torun had said that there was no human magic. I was beginning to understand why he stuck so firmly to that belief. “But you are strong. You are not a hekunaisik. And Sida understands you. She came back.”
For a moment, I thought he would kiss me. His eyelashes were tipped with gold.
“I just wished she hadn’t today.”
“Like you, she wanders on her own time.”
“Torun! LIZBET! COME!” Sarai’s sharp voice sounded no softer from far away.
We made our way slowly to the hedge. Torun lifted a bough to let us through. As I walked into the green shadows, he swiftly ducked and kissed me. He might have aimed for my mouth, but I was so surprised by his movement that I stumbled and he kissed me instead under my left ear as I tripped into the yard.
“There you are!” Sarai lectured from the portico. “If this is what being a mother is like, I never want children. Now get inside so I don’t have to deal with everything myself!”
If Torun was red in the face and I was bashful, we were fortunate that the family was distracted. Unfortunately, they were distracted by Sida’s appearance and what it might mean. Telka was telling Melina that Sida was like her unicorn toy.
“I want to see the uksarv again,” she said
“Not uksarv,” I explained in Verian. What was the word I wanted? “It’s an ufoli horse.”
“But it had fluffy hair like the toy Torun carved me. You said my toy was an uksarv,” Telka said. “And you told Sarai you saw uksarv when you and Torun went exploring. Sarai, don’t kick me!”
My father cleared his throat. Telka stopped whining and Sarai, it seemed, stopped kicking.
“Telka. Clever girl. Why don’t you show everyone what you told me about?”
Telka’s expression changed from the open
-mouthed dismay of betrayal to narrow-eyed judgment of me, Torun and Sarai. She bounced up from her seat and went to our sleeping nook.
“She’s going to show you that toy Torun carved her,” Sarai said. “She’s always making things up.”
But Sarai was wrong. Telka trotted back to us with her treasure behind her back. With her chin in the air, she presented to us the alicorn I had stowed away in my bag.
“Where did you get that?” Sarai said, her eyes going from Telka to me.
“She snooped,” Torun added. “Telka!”
“So, you knew as well,” Pa said with a smile.
Torun fell silent.
“I need to find her, my uksarv, so I can go home,” I said. “There’s something…off…about the forest and I can’t go into it without her.”
“You’re not going to share your treasure with us, you mean?”
“What treasure? You…you think that’s worth anything?” It had value, but I wasn’t sure what he expected from it. Ma had managed to build a life not much better than the one he had.
“I’ll find out,” Pa said smoothly. “I’ll go into the city and figure out exactly how much it’s worth. And in the meantime, you’ll find your little pet and bring her here.”
“Yes,” Telka said. “Please!”
“I’ll…I’ll stay here. I’ll stay indoors. I’ll learn to weave.”
“Pfft.” That was from Sarai. She knew me better.
“Then your pet will come to you.” Pa tossed the alicorn from hand to hand. “I can wait.”
“I suppose you’ll have to,” I shot back.
He smiled.
Sarai rolled her eyes.
That night, the gap between me, Telka and Sarai in the big bed seemed to have mysteriously disappeared.
That made it more difficult to sneak out once everyone had fallen asleep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Forest Society
I awoke at dawn and packed my things—this time, I took my boots and my oilskin. I nabbed a few links of sausage from the beams and a small bag of oats. The alicorn was still with Pa.
“Lizbet?” Telka watched me from behind the curtain.
“I’m going to find the uksarv,” I whispered. She could explain to Pa how she saw fit. Sida had come for me and I needed to know why.
Torun was dozing in the lambing shed. He sat up when he heard me leap down from the trap door. He combed the hay out of his hair with his fingers and lit a small lantern. He shaded its light with his other hand. As he climbed over the fence, I wondered whether we should kiss again and we lurched towards each other indecisively. Our heads smacked together.
“Agh!” I said, and then while I giggled, he kissed me. Holding hands, we snuck out of the family enclosure and made our way down to the riverbank where we could talk. The grass was cold and wet with dew and made slithering sounds as we went.
“It is a mess,” he said.
True. But which mess was he talking about?
“We do not know the uksarv and now he wants us to control them.”
Ah, that mess. “As long as he thinks there’s only one.”
Torun nodded. “What are you going to do?”
“Stay home?”
“Learn to weave?”
We laughed at the thought. I’d find Sida, but I would not tell Pa. I did not like the idea of Pa getting mixed up with the uksarv. It bothered me in a way that Ma’s business never had.
Torun broke my thoughts with another kiss. “You could stay up at the high pasture. With me. I’ll be up until it’s time to shear them. Don’t go into Fenlen Forest. Please.”
“Why not? If I find a way home, I should probably go.”
“You should?”
The question caught me off guard. Of course, I should. I couldn’t abandon Ma. I needed to at least try to find my way home. What was keeping me here? At first it had been Sida. And the fear of getting lost in a forest I thought I knew. But now…
“Don’t go, please.” He cleared his throat. “You know I don’t believe in nonsense stories. But the forest is dangerous.”
The sun was coming up, warm on our backs. The shadows were fleeing west towards the forest. I rebelled against Torun’s words and against my own fears. It was a strange place, perhaps, but it had never threatened me.
“The forest’s not dangerous!” Torun himself didn’t believe the stories. I kissed the corner of his right eye. “Why don’t you come with me and you’ll find out? Maybe we’ll run away together.”
The corners of his mouth tugged down for a moment. “I am not funny.” He huffed at his ungrammatical Gersan. “I am not being funny. This is not funny. People are lost there.”
Ah. That was what had happened. “Did she…did she go missing looking for a lamb? A hawk had snatched it?” But even as I said it, I knew it didn’t make sense. If Bettina was lost that night, how could she have woven my unicorn hairs into Torun’s belt?
His eyes narrowed, surprised and just a bit suspicious. “No,” he said. “If Telka told you, she’s making up stories. That was a year before it happened.” I waited for more, but he fell silent.
Torun made it sound like her disappearance wasn’t caused by the forest and he didn’t believe in fairy folk such as the Alvina. Then why was he scared?
He was staring across the river at the dim shapes of the boulders.
I wanted him to look at me. “But the forest isn’t so bad. Look at my father…he made it across! And if you’re with me, you’ll be safe. I’ve been there lots of times. There isn’t a border that you cross and poof! you’re lost.”
His pale skin flushed to match the rash of pimples across his right cheek. His chin pushed out slightly. “Maybe the border is in myself.”
“But you’d be with me!” Didn’t that make a difference? Torun pulled his spine straight, reaching his full height. As if he needed to show physical strength to oppose me. “Maybe I am weak to stay, maybe strong. But I cannot go there. I won’t.”
“Fine.” Suddenly, we were too serious. It was as if he were no longer having an argument with me, but with someone else.
“Yes. Fine. Do not go to the cave.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
I shouldered my bag and stalked away across the uneven stones of the riverbank, sloshing through the water. I should have wished him a pleasant time with the herd, but I was rankled by the ghost that had turned my proposed adventure into a tussle of wills.
On the far bank, I looked over my shoulder. Torun was walking away with his shoulders hunched. I could see the path of flattened grass ahead of him, the river, the cluster of trees I now knew as Melina’s home. The landscape now held meaning for me. Yet, ahead of me, the incline of the escarpment beckoned. The striations of rock were shot through by veins of plant life. Somewhere, there was a trail.
I turned west and made my way through the scattered boulders and the scrub of bilberry bushes. Torun’s boulder was still there, with the moss growing stealthily across the carved face. Moss didn’t usually grow so fast, I thought with a twinge of unease. To the left and south of Torun’s boulder, a faint path, a thin, hard-packed dirt line among the grass, led along the base of the ravine before forking off. One line led further south, where the wind brought a faint, sulphuric stink. To the cave, I knew. The other path was marked more by an absence of trees and bushes than any indent in the grass and weeds. It was a path visible only to someone looking for a way and it led me up a gradual incline that switched back and forth to the top of the ravine. How long the trail had existed, I could not know.
I pulled myself up the steep path, singing the song from Rina’s wedding to calm my nerves. Blow away the dust, good wind, blow away the dust. With my heart’s old sorrow, take it to the dusk… Whereas it had once been slippery with ice and slush, the incline was now tufted with new growth, with bushy trees.
And as I scrambled up, among the old, thick-trunked trees, I felt pressure building on my ears, like they had filled with water. The aspens and larches were fringed with shadows. The forest’s not dangerous. If you’re with me, you’ll be safe. That was what I told Torun. And now I suspected—no, I knew—that I had been wrong.
Before, I had lived in Fenlen Forest. It had been my home. The only habitat I had known. But now I had been in another forest. On the other side of the river, the shadows matched the overlapping pattern of the leaves above. In Torun’s forest, the silence was cut through with the baaing of sheep or the chitter of squirrels fighting in the canopy.
Now I had returned to the forest, going west instead of east, and everything seemed strange. I could see that the shadows clung to each stipple in the trees’ bark, each dimple of the leaves, each sap-filled vein that strained out from the skin of the plant stalks. In the silence, the pipit’s cheep seemed higher and sweeter and the woodlark’s song carried an echo. But the tension in my ears built, like I was diving deeper and deeper into a lake.
“Sida?” Unlike the birds’ calls, my voice did not soar; it curled into the soft, thick moss and lay still there. I opened my mouth to call again, and then closed it.
The pressure on my ears began to hurt; I had been gone too long.
I knelt into the loam and ran my hands under fallen leaves. The leaves were warm and dry, but the earth underneath was cool and damp.
What right did I have to be here? What had given me the right, for so many years? The forest had been mine, I had believed, but perhaps I had equally belonged to it. I had given something in return. My Pa. And Pa had sacrificed us for the right to walk through the forest without harm.
For years, I had taken things from the forest. Alicorn, yes, but also flowers, wood for the fire, pebbles that felt nice in the palm of my hand and that made satisfying plonking noises when tossed in a creek. And what had I given, since the hurt of Pa’s absence had waned?
What was I willing to give for Sida? For the forest?
I swallowed, uncomfortable with the thought. Pa had been my blood and now I had nothing, I thought as I took my hand out from under the leaves. I looked through my bag, knowing there was little in it that the forest would value. My waterskin. A small bag of oats. Flint and tinder. My hand passed over my knife. That was something, I thought. I unsheathed it.
The Changeling of Fenlen Forest Page 14
