I looked up at him curiously. “Don’t you want to dance with Gwen?”
“If I wanted to dance with Gwen, I would have asked her,” Gilbert said, pulling me to my feet. “I want to dance with you.”
“Very well,” I said graciously, grandly laying my hand in the crook of his arm. “But don’t blame me if you lose your toes.”
It had been a long time since I had danced, and my threat was no empty one. There was a master to call the dances but I lost my way merrily through all of them regardless. Gilbert didn’t seem to care about having his toes stood on thoroughly through every other figure in the dance, so we were well matched.
“I’ll remember to wear my working boots next time!” he yelled at me over the loud merriment of the music. Gwendolen, passing in the dance, looked much affronted.
When I repeated my apologies after the dance he said dismissively: “You’re light, like a butterfly. When the cow steps on my toes, it’s another matter.”
I laughed aloud at that, and Gwendolen, who was passing by on her way to join the new set forming, immediately demanded to know what I found so amusing in Gilbert’s conversation.
“My dancing is being compared to the cow’s,” I told her, laughing all the more at Gilbert’s protests.
Gwendolen looked both disapproving and disappointed, as if she had expected to find Gilbert flirting with me. I raised my brows at her with mischief in my heart, and she scowled and turned on her heel. A moment later I saw her vigorously bossing one of the group of young men surrounding her. The others were evidently laughing at him, but though he looked wretched he also had a mulish jaw very like my own. I wasn’t really surprised when, at Gilbert’s brief absence to refill the punch bowl, the same boy approached me and asked me nervously to dance.
His name was Harry, and he was one of Gwendolen’s regular boys– Liz Gantry’s window-friend, too, if I wasn’t mistaken. He was too young to be settling down any time soon with Gwendolen or anyone else, so I said to him: “You don’t have to do everything she says, you know.”
He pushed up his glasses and looked at me properly for the first time, startled.
“Sorry, Rose. Only do dance with me, please. She said she’d only dance the next with me if I danced this one with you.”
“Oh, all right,” I agreed, distantly amused to realise that although every boy present probably knew my name, not a one of them actually knew me. I was Gwen’s sister: part of the furniture. “But I’m a dreadful dancer and I’ll probably trample your toes.”
“Oh, just go clockwise no matter what, and you’ll be fine,” he assured me. “You’re trying to go the men’s way, I saw you before.”
I grinned, because he was right: I had been trying to lead. I was so used to dancing the boy’s part with Gwen for practise that I could never remember to go the right way.
Fortunately, the next dance only consisted of a few simple polka steps and hops accomplished in a waltz hold, which made it difficult for me to go wrong. Once I got used to the constriction of having an arm about my waist, and being forced to remember to put my own hand on my partner’s shoulder, the rest of the steps weren’t so difficult. I surprised myself by enjoying it all. Harry, like Gilbert, was informal and boyish, and didn’t spend the entire dance turning his head to see where Gwendolen was, much to my approval. Gwen could certainly do worse. He treated me like an agreeable sister, discussing fishing and hunting with a gleeful abandon that I guessed he wasn’t permitted to show with Gwendolen. He was an energetic dancer, spinning me for twice the amount of turns the dance demanded and routinely losing his glasses with each hop. I couldn’t picture Gwendolen, all polite curtsies and delicate whirls, appreciating his style of dance.
When the dance ended we parted agreeably. I retreated with Gilbert to the edges of the forest before Gwendolen could send any more boys to dance with me, out of sight but not out of sound of the party. We walked between hedge and forest, being careful to keep just far enough away from deep forest to avoid falling in. I kept Gilbert to my left and the forest to my right, and we shared a half-pie that Gilbert had snatched from the buffet in passing.
“Mother always told us not to go into the forest,” Gilbert said through a mouthful. “There were stories about a monstrous wolf who ate the hearts of any young girls who were stupid enough to come in after dark. I thought that if he was after young girls he wouldn’t want me and so I used to come in anyway, to find strawberries.”
“Liz Gantry said something like that,” I said, my interest piqued. Evidently Liz was not the only child to have been terrorized with the story. Bastian really must have been wolf for a long time, to have stories told about him to frighten young children. “Why hearts?”
“I suppose because that’s what it always is,” Gilbert said. “There was supposed to be a spell on the wolf. My mother said it was nonsense, but she still wouldn’t let Betsy and Nan and Grace into the woods after dark.”
“Suppose there really is a monster in the forest,” I countered, testing how much the curse would let me say before it prevented me from speaking. It was a favourite past-time of mine ever since I had found that if I were sneaky enough, I could tiptoe around the matter. “Maybe under enchantment?”
“We could free it from the spell!” Gilbert was grinning, the light of adventure in his eyes. “What should our monster be, Rose?”
I tossed the question back to him. “What do you think?”
“Oh no, this is your monster! You tell me.”
“A wolf,” I said, watching the dancers between the foliage and hoping that my voice was just casual enough.
“Just like the legend,” Gilbert said approvingly. “Good. Now, what spell is it under?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. The words were there, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make myself say them. I scowled into the forest. Bother! I mustn’t have been tiptoeing carefully enough.
At last I said: “I don’t know. It’s your turn to tell me.”
“He’s a prince under a spell,” Gilbert said frivolously. “He fell in love with a princess and the evil stepmother put a curse on him because she doesn’t want her stepdaughter to marry and take over the kingdom.”
It was close enough to the truth to make me think there would be some point in asking Gilbert what he thought would disenchant such a person. When I opened my mouth to ask him it was too late. Other couples were making their way out to the forest’s edge and we soon formed a noisy, cheerful group. I left not long after, sneaking away while Gilbert was engaged in resupplying the table with food and punch. Gwendolen was horrified, but since the Gantry girls undertook to walk her home and she wasn’t forced to leave with me, she soon came around. Cecelia Gantry was a silly little goose as blonde as Gwendolen, but Liz was sensible and not likely to let Gwendolen stay out too long. I wondered, briefly, if Elizabeth remembered sharing a packet of sprinkles with me while we kicked our heels outside Mistress Pennypurse’s shopfront those two years ago. Getting my own back for all the times that Gwendolen had adjured me to make my bed and do the washing, and willing to make Liz laugh, I said to my sister: “Now, Gwen; you’re to mind Liz and do just what she says.”
I slipped away while Gwen was still opening and closing her mouth in outrage, and Liz laughing, and made good my escape to the forest.
It was peaceful under the trees. Dew had wet the grass and soon my feet were drenched in it, pleasantly cool and clean after the exercise of dancing. I didn’t hurry back, wandering among the trees dreamily; though I kept to the path, still cautious of what was to be found in deep forest after dark. The fairies had frightened me more than I liked to admit, even to myself.
But the night was quiet and peaceful around me: friendly, even, and I found myself skipping along the path, light and free, singing under my breath. There was a kind of exuberance in the air, a tickling of excitement in my stomach that made my toes lighter. It felt as though the forest were preparing for something. Before long I was dancing
, spinning perilously close to the edges of the path and unusually nimble. There was a definite pull from the forest now, a heady, gleeful tug that might have set alarm bells ringing in my head if it hadn’t been so absolutely clean and joyful. Shadows and lights glittered and danced in the forest beside me, resolving into human-like shapes and then sinking back into the dark green twilight of the forest. The strange excitement grew in me, along with the sense of invitation emanating from the forest, and in one uncharacteristically graceful leap, I left the path for the forest. Strong hands reached out to welcome me and I was tossed headlong into a wild, laughing dance, where my hands were seized and I was pulled effortlessly into the moving circle.
The faces of the dancers were beautiful but hard to see, shifting and becoming part of this tree or that hedge, never entirely human yet not disturbingly inhuman. They laughed and danced with quick, wild unfamiliar steps, circling continuously around a couple dressed – or was that their skin? – in vibrant, spring green. At first, tossed about in the circle, I wondered why: then I gave a short crack of laughter at my own stupidity. It was a wedding, with the bride and groom whirling in the very centre.
We circled and laughed, and in the centre of the circle, the bride and groom whirled together as the music became indefinably faster. The ladies, myself included, swayed first to the right, then the left. We were swooped up into the air by our waists and swung in a breathless, graceful arc; only to be let go lightly the next moment in a continuous movement and pirouetted onto the next partner. I was passed from partner to partner, dancing with tall, beautiful men who tossed me into the air without effort and laughed down into my flushed, exhilarated face. I felt like the youngest sister in a family of older brothers, there to be cosseted and teased, but by no means taken seriously. One of them, younger than the others, even said: “Here we go, little sister!” and whirled me wildly through the dancers in a mad promenade with barely enough time to swing me into the air before it was time for me to go on to the next partner.
Once, I saw Cassandra in the dance almost opposite me, and for a nasty, cold moment, the world seemed to stand still. But she only nodded at me; a slow, considering incline of the head, and it struck me that she was greeting me as an equal. It occurred to me that the wedding dance was shifting through all the wardships, and that in this dance there were no wardships, only forest. My eyes glittered, because that meant I was in a different kind of deep forest altogether. It should have frightened me, but I was too euphoric to allow the feeling to grow.
I forgot about Cassandra after that, caught up in the dance and the wonder. I knew she wouldn’t harm me here, where we were both guests; and I knew instinctively that if she tried, these people were entirely capable of stopping her.
The dance grew faster and more complicated, and all my energies were devoted to keeping up with it as it came to the last few rotations. Within the rings of dancers the bride and groom spun in a tight circle, flicking their bare feet in and out more quickly than my eyes could follow. We did likewise with our partners, feet flashing so high and fast that more than one lady fleetingly displayed a shapely pair of knees. I knew in this gleeful moment that once I left deep forest I wouldn’t be able to dance like this again. It was as much a part of the forest as the trees were.
As we slipped into the final revolution the circle of dancers around me shouted: a high, joyful whoop. The groom lifted his bride into the air in an exuberant, graceful sweep, his hands around her slender waist, and her skirts swirled in a pine-scented whiff of air. There was another shout and then the bride was whirled back down and folded into the arms of her groom, his arm tight about her waist and her arm about his neck. It was graceful and beautiful, and wholly intimate. I looked away, losing myself in the general milling and murmur of voices as everyone else did the same, and the dance broke apart into confusion.
It was hard to remember exactly what happened after that. Perhaps I was falling asleep, or perhaps it was just the way things worked in that kind of deep forest, and one wasn’t meant to remember. The last coherent thought that I remembered, before finding myself alone on the path before Akiva’s cottage, was a wistful desire to dance again. To my confusion, it was broad daylight on the path. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, bewildered, because surely I had only been in deep forest for half an hour! It should by rights still be night. But the triad stretching across the sky proclaimed the day to be some way past mid-morning, prompting the foreboding thought that I might have lost more than just a few hours of night in the dance.
Horned hedgepigs! I thought indignantly. Not again!
“I believe I’m too old for this dance you lead me,” sighed Akiva’s voice. She was standing just inside the garden gate.
I sucked my cheeks in and said: “Sorry, Akiva.”
She raised her brows. “So I imagine. It must have been quite a gathering, to have held you there three days.”
“Three days!” I numbly combed my little wreath of blue flowers from my hair, and found that they had unaccountably become faded and shrivelled.
Akiva directed her gaze at them with grim meaning. “You’ve been properly pixie-led, my child.”
“There was a wedding,” I began, but lapsed into silence at her raised eyebrows. I seemed, I thought mournfully, to fall into scrapes with alarming regularity. There didn’t really seem to be any way of defending myself sensibly, and so I sensibly kept quiet.
“Hm,” Akiva said, watching me. “Since you can’t seem to help your natural stupidity, perhaps it would be just as well to broaden your education.”
As reproofs from Akiva went it was a mild one, and I was grateful to escape a boxed ear as I followed her back into the cottage. Despite the three days Akiva told me I had been gone, I felt bright and refreshed. I seemed to remember being given a small cup of something clear and sparkling; something that tasted like water and yet somehow more than water. I wondered quietly about it to myself but didn’t mention it to Akiva, since I had a good idea that disclosing such a fact to her would lead to my ears being boxed for the stupidity of drinking anything in such a place and such company.
When I mentioned cautiously that Cassandra had also been at the dance, Akiva only retorted: “No doubt. Cassandra is not bothered by such trivialities as being pixie-led for days or weeks on end.”
I frowned, because my own guess been rather different. “They were pixies?”
“Of course not, ignorant child! They were dryads of the deepest forest and you were fortunate to have lost mere days. Come with me.”
She opened a door beside my bedroom door and disappeared through it, much to my astonishment. I gave it a hard look: there had never been door beside my bedroom door. Interesting.
When I followed Akiva I found myself in a small library. The walls were lined with books and even the dusty old window was surrounded by shelves stacked perilously with books.
Akiva said shortly: “That section is dryads, and that section is Forest. Now for pity’s sake learn something!” and left me there.
When she returned with a tray of lunch I was curled up in the fitful light from the window, immersed in a book about dryads. I looked up warily and Akiva set the tray down with a sigh.
“Oh, don’t look so woebegone, child. I’m sorry I snapped your head off.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I said, surprised. I wasn’t used to Akiva apologising to me. “It was silly of me. Only it was so much fun, Akiva!”
She sat herself down on a pile of books with a groan, and said: “The truth is I was never taught, myself. And I’m blessed if I could keep up with you enough to tell you the things not to do before you do ‘em! Maybe I started too old.”
“What about Gwydion?” I asked. I had never quite dared to ask about him before, but then, neither had Akiva ever seemed so approachable. “Didn’t he do anything wrong?”
She laughed. “Oh, I suppose he did. I had him when he was a child of four, and he was a real devil on legs. I don’t recall that he was in the habit of meeting with
gryphons and dryads, however.”
“I’ll try harder not to be stupid,” I said, with a sinking heart. Akiva’s gentleness was more terrifying to me than her frequent, crabbed moods. “Please don’t send me away.”
Akiva looked startled, and then cackled with laughter. “I doubt the forest would let you go, child, even if I wanted to send you away. Which I don’t, so let’s hear no more fears about being sent home. Unless, of course, you are tired of living with such a grumpy old tartar.”
I hastened to assure her I was by no means eager to leave, glowing with relief and a small, warm joy. It was a nice feeling to know that the forest had accepted me, and no less pleasant to know that Akiva had, too.
“That’s enough of that!” Akiva told me, with a gruffness that I realised, in some surprise, hid her own pleasure. So I wasn’t taken in, and meekly followed her as she briskly walked around the library shelves, choosing volumes for me to read with decisive quickness and passing them back to me. My armful of books grew quickly, and following behind Akiva, I was at leisure to skim the spines of the books. In my wandering, I came across a book entitled: ‘The Art Of Curse: Theory and Practise’, which I hooked from the shelf and quickly hid in my pile. It had occurred to me that Bastian was bound to turn up again at some point, and although Akiva had told him in no uncertain terms that this was not to be before my sixteenth birthday, I felt that I would like to be prepared. I didn’t know why she’d done such a thing– any more, I thought crossly, than I knew why my birthday had been singled out as the end of the embargo. When asked, Akiva had said roundly that she didn’t propose to consult me as to every decision that she made, and to mind my own business. I felt aggrieved, since I considered that it was my business, but I hadn’t asked again. Bastian was a touchy subject with Akiva, though she seemed to like him well enough when he was with us. It struck me that her manner was that of a protective mother, and I recalled Bastian warning me that he was dangerous. Since I didn’t see exactly how Bastian was dangerous, I tucked the little red book close in the front of my pinafore and instead turned my mind to things I could understand.
Wolfskin Page 17
