Holding the knife in my right hand, I pricked the fingertips of my left hand and placed my hand to the earth once more. I pressed down and felt the soil give up its moisture, felt the water cling to the grooves of my fingerprints as my blood oozed out. The earth felt warm now, I thought, warm as flesh. I took my hand away and licked my fingers. The tang of blood mixed with the rich taste of the soil.
“Sida?” I called and the pressure on my ears gave way. My voice carried through the trees, high and hopeful as the birdsong. But I shivered, because now I knew that I was only a guest. With my right hand, I unscrewed the jar of alicorn and dabbed a finger into the white ointment. I touched each of the five cuts. They stung, itched, scabbed over. A few seconds later, I knew, the scabs would flake away.
That first day I did not dare to lose sight of the ridge. I did not believe that I would find Sida. Unicorns take their dignity very seriously, and I had insulted her. I had welcomed her presence with a thorny raspberry bramble. I should not have done it, part of me said. But with Pa standing there, it had been the only thing to do. I followed the ridge in a straight line north, pretending that I did not feel lonely.
But in the evening, as I was looking down from the ridge, I spotted the herd of uksarv. In the honey-light of the afternoon, their edges seemed to fade into the rising mist. They were standing in the riverbed, ambling through and dipping their heads to drink as they crossed over to my side. Towards me! My pulse throbbed. Where was Sida?
There. At the edge of the herd. She was back with them, now that I had chased her away. But not quite. She lagged behind. I was so focused on her, on the proud toss of her head that told of her secret dejection, that I didn’t realize that part of the herd had disappeared. But there were fewer of them now. Only the does heavy in their pregnancy remained, picking their way up towards the escarpment by a path I had not seen before. Where had the others gone?
A nicker answered my thoughts. I turned, and there was the scarred matriarch with her milky eye. Behind her, a group of does cropped at the low-hanging leaves. None of them had the low-slung bellies of pregnancy. Those does were rejoining the group one by one on the path. And then came Sida. The speckled second-in-command was nowhere to be seen.
Sida circled the perimeter of the group, but the does turned away from her, forming a circle with the pregnant ones in the middle. Only the matriarch remained outside the circle, watching me.
Sida frisked in the matriarch’s direction, followed the gaze of her good eye and spotted me watching from behind an ash. She came to me.
I put out my hand and she snuffled at it. I fumbled with my pack and offered her my oats, but she did not want them. Instead, Sida knelt down and looked at me. She turned her neck to look at the matriarch and then at her back. She wanted me to get up onto her back.
The matriarch looked on impassively.
“You’re too young,” I said to Sida, but I was secretly pleased. If she wanted me to climb up on her back, she wanted me to stay with her. Gently, I swung my leg over her, and she rose up, struggling a little at first, because of the odd sensation of having weight on her.
I clutched at her mane as she stood, rump first and then lifting her forelegs. Well, it was as new to her as it was to me. I gripped tight as she started off at a brisk walk. We went south, a direction I had not been in, where the ground sloped gently. We must be going over the Alvina birlan, I thought.
The escarpment began to lower, but Sida stopped at an overhang that dipped gently down on the left.
Below us, I saw a small group of uksarv.
I recognized the barrel-chested buck. He was standing watch: ears alert, tail switching back and forth. Behind him was the heavily pregnant doe with the speckled face I had encountered earlier. The matriarch’s second-in-command. She had lost her horn and was lying on the forest floor with her legs tucked under her. She looked tired, resigned. She was very close to giving birth. Around her were three other does, some visibly expecting, but none so far along as this one. They seemed to be trying to comfort her, but to no avail.
“He must be building a herd,” I said to myself. “Stealing does away from another group.” I looked at Sida, at the fixed set of her ears. That must have been what was happening. He must have found her and has been trying to add her to his…whatever it was.
But now what, I thought to myself. Evidently, I didn’t think fast enough for her because Sida backed up and ducked her neck down. I tumbled over her shoulders and found myself sitting hard in the undergrowth.
The old buck raised his head and looked left and right, trying to see what might dare encroach on his territory.
And Sida was nowhere I could see her. No, I did see her. She was moving quietly to the south and west from me.
I took one step and a stick cracked underfoot.
A snort and the shuffle of leaves underfoot told me the buck had heard me and was coming to investigate. Somehow, he had missed Sida’s progress.
Now I knew what Sida wanted to do. She was going to rescue the pregnant doe by instigating a raiding party. I was the bait, she was the escape artist.
I had succeeded in distracting the old buck. He saw me and stopped, turning his head to consider me with rolling eyes. I didn’t kneel. My plan was to climb a tree if I needed to.
I needed to keep my eyes on him. If my eyes went to Sida, he would look.
He lowered his horn.
I backed up into the pricking branches of a pine. He began slinking forward, snaking his neck to the left and right.
When I hit the trunk of the pine, I pivoted on my heel and scaled the first three branches. Now that the buck was focused on me, I could spare a glance at Sida.
She nudged the doe to get up. The doe was tired and gave a shake of her head.
I threw a pinecone at the buck and instantly regretted it when the buck charged at the tree. He reared up and stretched out his neck to bite me. I scaled the next branch, and regret aside, threw another pinecone. He squealed in anger.
Below, Sida stretched out her neck and nipped at the doe’s haunches. The doe gave an irritated whinny as she stood up quickly. Sida gave a bugling cry. Perhaps it was triumphant. I thought it was a bad idea.
The buck turned to protect his does. He and Sida circled each other, pranced forward, darted back.
But each was intent on getting the other away from the does, which meant the fight was near the speckled one. Whenever Sida tried something to urge the doe up the hill, the barrel-chested buck circled around and blocked their way.
Sida reared in aggravation and cried out again, as if she was calling someone. Me?
I scrambled down the tree.
The old buck turned, looked over his shoulders and aimed a kick at Sida. She leapt away, but his hoof landed close to the doe’s round belly, on her haunch. She fell over and then heavily got to her feet.
I gasped and threw another pinecone at the buck, then searched for a rock.
And then the matriarch arrived, distracting the buck with a stern call of challenge. Sida, head down, stubby horn pointed, pushed the buck farther south, rearing and bucking.
With the buck fighting off the matriarch, I clambered down the incline and ran to the little group.
Sida and I stood on either side of the specked doe and quickly led her away towards the rest of her herd. The others could choose to stay or follow as they wished. The sounds of the uksarv duel escalated and then faded as we made our way north.
The speckled doe walked slowly. The kick to her side had been a hard one, and there was a curve of broken skin. Her tightly stretched belly rippled as the fawn inside shifted its position. I saw something—a knee? a hoof?—pushing at the doe’s skin from within. I ran my hand over the doe’s stomach, feeling uneasy. The fall could not have been safe for either mother or fawn.
When we reached the matriarch’s herd, the does surrounded the speckled one
and Sida and me, nosing us curiously. They began moving away as a group.
Somewhere behind us, the buck bellowed. The does burst into flight. They first ran forward, leaving the three of us behind. Then they circled back and roiled around Sida and the speckled doe. This time, they stayed tightly around the doe, but Sida slid out of the group.
She trotted up to me and butted me in the shoulder with the ridge of her nose. I stumbled back, and she nibbled at my hair to apologize. And then she butted me again. It was time to go home, she was telling me, because I had no business here.
She turned and galloped after the herd.
I climbed down the face of the ravine before the buck saw me.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
New Arrival
The forest’s not dangerous! Ha. Now I knew it might welcome me, or not.
And then there were the uksarv. I had once thought that unicorns were solitary creatures, wise and withdrawn. That they were beyond the flaws of humans and the appetites of animals. Maybe they still were, closer to home. Here they weren’t.
I wasn’t going to go after them or look for my path in the dark. Not when the buck was roaming around in a temper. At the base of the escarpment, I tripped over an uksarv horn. I almost tucked it into my bag and, thinking better of it, threw it into the scrubby bushes. I wasn’t risking Pa picking through my things.
I went back to the house in the gloaming.
Pa was on the portico, packing up. I didn’t understand. He had just come back—Melina and Sarai had not woven enough for him to go out yet.
“Any luck?” he said.
“Pa,” I said. “Give me my horn.”
“No. I’m going to meet Heino and we’re going to sell it.”
“It’s not yours.”
“I don’t believe you understand how a family business works.” He smoothed his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. “You see, you make things or find things and I sell them. I’ll give you a percentage of the profit. Like I give Sarai for her weaving.”
During the clamour of supper, I tried to steal it back from him, so he resorted to tucking it under his shirt.
When he left the next morning, he said, “I wonder, do you have to saw the horn off? Does it regrow or do you have to kill the beast first?”
“That’s horrible!” I exclaimed.
“Thank you,” he said, with a wink that I did not like at all.
That day, I stayed and weeded the vegetable patch with Dan. I chopped wood with Maro. I went inside and started the process of learning to spin on a drop spindle with Telka.
“Go away,” Sarai said after our midday meal. “You are trying, but I can’t work with you sighing over your yarn all the time.”
“Do you need vegetables? Wood?” I said.
“Go to the forest, you bivin naisik,” Sarai said, folding her arms. “I don’t care what you do, but don’t stay in here, getting in the way. You make my fingers itch.” That was what she always said two seconds before she pinched people. There was nothing spiteful in her words, but there was only so much space for near-grown girls in the house. Sarai knew she belonged inside. I belonged outside.
I went to Maro and Dan. “Vegetables? Wood?”
But they had their own confederacy of two and they didn’t want me either.
And, in truth, Sarai was right. I had been sighing and getting in the way. I went back to Fenlen Forest, but cautiously. Each day I had walked a little further, learning to recognize the shape of certain trunks, the awkward slump of a broken branch. When I lived with Ma, I had grown familiar with the paths near our house over years, not months. I had once trusted the unicorns with my safety, but now I was alone.
The first day, I was relieved not to see unicorns. But it was a selfish sort of relief. If I did not see them, I could not disobey my inclinations or my father’s wishes. But by the second day, I worried about Sida and the speckled doe. Had Sida been accepted? Had the fawn been born? But I could not find them and could not know. And so, I looked for distraction.
On the third day, I ranged north along the ravine face. I slid down the slope, forded the river and found the sheep path.
When I reached the high pasture, I saw Torun sitting with his face lifted to the sun and his eyes closed, thinking. The setting sun cast his shadow long on the grass.
I decided to play a small trick that would shake him from his reverie. I snuck up behind him and placed my cold fingertip against the nape of his neck where the fine, blond hair thickened. I thought he would jump. Instead, he leaned back and caught my arms. He kissed my hands, dirty as they were, and then my wrists.
I laughed and he pulled me down beside him into the grass.
“You were bored?”
I kissed the tip of his nose. He considered my aim to be off. What is learning to kiss like? A little sloppy, a little animal, but hugely exciting. And yet. And yet, while we kissed, the thoughts crept in. I kept thinking about secrets, about who shared them, who told them, who benefited from them.
“We can’t tell anyone,” I said sometime later, as I caught my breath. “About this.”
“Your father would be… zastola.” Most terrible.
If they knew, Pa would have a way to make me do what he wanted. I wasn’t quite sure how he’d use the knowledge, but he would. Melina would be…I had no idea, but she would not be happy. I did not see how Torun and I could kiss except in secret. Unless we weren’t here at all. When we kissed, it was like we were disappearing from the world around us. Like the uksarv vanishing in the mist. But it was too fast and, like watching the vanishing uksarv, kissing Torun was something I hadn’t had time to understand.
I sat up and told Torun what I had seen: the herd’s strange migration up the escarpment, the buck, Sida’s rescue. “There’s something strange about how they move,” I said. “Like they disappear or something. I don’t understand it.”
“Some animals move very quietly. But tell me about the does.” What seemed to interest him most was not the disappearing act, but the idea that the uksarv went to the forest to give birth, though they seemed to graze on both sides of the river. “I have heard that some kinds of fish go back to the place where they were hatched when they spawn. I wonder if this is the same.”
His curiosity was pushing against his sense of duty and rootedness and his fear of the forest. The forest might be dangerous, but its risks seemed more logical to me than the village, with the villagers’ fear of the Alvina and the hekunaisik.
“Come with me and maybe we’ll find out.”
He lifted his eyebrows and grinned. “You? You did not like sheep giving birth. What about bleeuch?”
“The doe that Sida saved…I’m worried about her,” I admitted.
The teasing expression subsided from Torun’s face. “Why?”
“The buck kicked her hard and she’s close to giving birth.”
“Do…do you know where she is?” He knew enough to be worried and that made my heart knot.
But I didn’t.
For the next three days, I went looking for the herd, though my desire for Torun made returning to the forest difficult. When I came to the ravine, I felt a pull away from Fenlen Forest, towards him. And the air would weigh heavily on my ears until I cut my fingers and bled into the earth. I felt that I was cheating, that I was giving my blood too lightly.
I worried that my thoughts, which haunted me as I ran along the deer paths, kept the unicorns away. In the afternoons, I went up to Torun.
And on the fourth day, Sida was there, pacing back and forth in front of him in the high pasture. I was struck by the force with which she raked the ground with her hooves, by the muscles strong under her coat. She had grown stronger and faster than I wanted to believe.
“What does she want?” he asked.
“She wants us to go with her.” I remembered the does in the forest. �
��They need help.”
We gathered up his kit, his water cauldron, a lantern. Sida circled around us as we made our preparations.
“How are we going to get this to the forest? What about the sheep?”
Sida gave a little rear and pawed the ground. Then she knelt.
I swung my leg over her back and twined my fingers in her mane.
“Come on, Sida,” I said. But Sida arched her neck back to give me a scolding look. She waited for Torun to climb behind me with his arms around my waist.
Sida stood, and as she stepped forward, I felt none of the hesitation I had sensed in my earlier ride.
The ride down the valley, across the river and up the escarpment was a dark, nervous blur. We had little idea of where we were, only that time seemed to race with us. We soon saw the gold haze of the uksarv in the forest around us, coalescing around the doe in labour.
The doe made hoarse, wounded sounds. She lay down and rolled back and forth and then rested on her side. Her lungs heaved and heaved with pain. And the fawn would not come.
Sida halted and we slid down. Torun ran over and knelt at the speckled doe’s side. After a brief, assessing glance under her tail, he ran his hands over her, put his ear to her side.
“There is still a heartbeat,” he said, beckoning me. He put his arm around my shoulders and guided me to the doe’s swollen side. At first, I could only hear her steady beat, strong and fast because of her travail. And then, running above it was a flickering pit-pit-pit-pit.
“She’ll be safe?” I asked, relieved.
He ran his hands along her side. “As safe as she could be. Build a fire.” Torun’s voice was not happy. “I’ll get water,” he said.
It was only after I coaxed a flame into being that I realized that “as safe as she could be” did not really promise safety at all.
The Changeling of Fenlen Forest Page 15
