by Cat Hellisen
“Sometimes we need to cry,” her father said. The moon shone around his shoulders, draping his hunched silhouette in a silver cloak that fell to his feet. He looked like a broken king, his hair a wild crown. Then he crouched down to hold out his hand, and the moment was gone. He was just her father, old and grizzly and tired. “Come on, let’s go home. After you’ve slept we can talk about this properly. I didn’t mean to upset you. All I want is what’s right for you. And this”—he waved at the cold, open land—“none of this is right. You should be somewhere that makes you happy, somewhere safe.”
Sarah didn’t want to talk about any of this properly. All that meant was that her father would explain again how things had changed, how he couldn’t cope. How he was going to send her away. Talking wasn’t going to change his mind, she knew.
She let him dust the leaves from her sweater and pretended to herself that she was still just a little child. When he set off down the curly, twisty track of the Not-a-Forest, Sarah followed him home, sniffling a little every now and again. It wasn’t as if she actually had anywhere else to run to, and it was cold outside. Around them the small trees leaned in and whispered the tops of their branches together. They sounded excited, passing the news between themselves like feathery trails of gossip. Sarah turned to look behind her at the little track. It was black as a child’s charcoal scribble. There was no dancing flicker of fire between the slim trunks. Just empty dark, older than men and beasts.
It remembers, Alan had said. Sarah wondered if at night the trees dreamed of a time when they covered the world and the true kings were wild and wore crowns of horns and antlers.
Even if they did, she supposed it didn’t matter. She was leaving her little woods behind and being sent away to people she’d never met—had believed were dead—and there was nothing left in her to feel anger or happiness or sorrow. The crying had cleaned her out like rainwater unclogging the choked-up summer leaves from a drainpipe.
The truth of it was that she didn’t feel much of anything at all.
5
TO THE CASTLE
ONCE AGAIN, they were packing up the house. It wasn’t as if this was a new thing, but before, there had been two people parceling their home into the sturdy plastic containers, wrapping the crockery and few ornaments in layers and layers of newspaper, like a backward game of pass-the-parcel, while her mother had kept a checklist on a clipboard and had marked their life away with little pencil check marks.
Sarah filled her suitcase with clothes, dog-eared paperbacks, and last of all, a thing she hadn’t bothered with in years—a gift her mother had given her for her ninth birthday. She had soon stopped wearing it, because it had seemed silly. It was a small silver teddy bear on a thin necklace chain. For my Sarahbear, her mother had said. That was their name for her. Even though she’d never been the kind of child who liked bears. Her two favorite stuffed toys had been a large yellow stegosaurus with purple spots and a tiny, feathery gray hedgehog that her father had brought her from a trip overseas.
Steg and Hedge were in the suitcase too, but only as somewhat grubby afterthoughts.
She picked up the necklace again. The chain swung between her fingers, the little silver bear flashing in the dim light.
Another reminder. Sarah remembered holding the bear up to her mother’s necklace, one that Sarah’s dad had given her, with a tiny bird on the end. It hadn’t been bright and silver like the bear, but rather it looked like it had been dug out of someone’s attic. Sarah had put the bear and bird together so they could talk, because it seemed rather sad that the two had to be lonely and separate all the time.
And that night her mother had brought her a small box. Inside it was her bird necklace. “At night,” she said, as she unclipped Sarah’s catch and lifted the necklace away in a neat shimmer of fine chain, “the two of them can be together, and talk about all the different things they’ve seen through the day.” Her mother had closed the lid and set the little box on Sarah’s night table, under the pool of light from the lamp. “And I think it’s best if they stay here in the evenings, in case they have anything they need to tell you. My ears are too old to hear their voices—high-pitched, you know.” And that had made perfect sense to Sarah. For years after, the box had held the two necklaces and sat on her bedside table through each night, even after she’d stopped wearing the bear.
Sarah didn’t remember when the ritual had stopped, or what had happened to the little bird. It had just been one of those things she’d grown out of and forgotten.
The bear spun gently from her fingers, alone, with no bird left to whisper to in the dark. Sarah didn’t want to wear it, but she also didn’t want to pack it away in one of the plastic boxes, possibly to never be seen again. So she tucked it into an envelope, dropped it on top of the neatly folded clothes, and zipped her suitcase shut.
* * *
Her father drove Sarah to her grandparents’ house. He drove through the night, speeding down the empty highways, his headlights pooling cold yellow beams across the dead black tar.
They didn’t talk, although her father tried a few times. Sarah just turned her face to the window and ignored him. It was to punish him, a little, but it was also because she didn’t think she’d be able to say anything and not have her whole chest break open and spatter the inside of the car with all the things she was trying not to feel.
Sarah leaned her temple against the cold pane of the window. Her father wound his window down to stay awake, and night air streamed in. Sarah curled herself tighter in her blanket in the back seat, covering her face from the bite of the icy wind. She’d never liked the cold. No one in her family did.
Three times something broke the monotony of the gray-shrouded highway, as Sarah stared out her window.
First an owl swept across the road, wings silent-spread as it hunted. That was before the fog. It seemed to Sarah that the fog streamed from the owl’s soft wings like downy ribbons.
Second, a hare flashed out of nowhere and died with a rattle-thump against the front grille of her father’s car. It left Sarah with a sick small feeling low in her stomach, though she was too cried-out to shed any tears. After that, the fog rolled thicker across the fields to stop abruptly by the road, as if the tarmac was some kind of uncrossable river. On either side of the black strip of highway, the fog gathered like ghosts.
The third moment came just before Sarah drifted into sleep, so it could have been the beginnings of a dream. A buck with lyre-shaped horns sailed out of the bank of fog, dashed across the road, and plunged into the opposite gray mass. It was smoky under the moon, half made of mist itself.
In the dark she dreamed of her mother growing wings and darting away, out the bedroom window before Sarah could stop her. She leapt after the flying woman, but instead of growing wings herself, she fell and fell and fell.
She woke when the car came to a stop. It was still biting cold, and her cheeks were numb. Sarah uncurled from her warm cocoon of blankets and jackets and sat up blinking. The light was golden, new, and through the dust on the car window the sky was pale and pearly as the inside of a seashell.
Sometime during the night, the tarred road had given way to a smooth track of packed red sand, like a lane of beaten copper. The edges of the path were rutted by water and filled with stones, but the center line was clear. No tire tracks, no pebbles, not even the faint green wisp of a weed marred the road. On either side the grass grew pale and thin, a waist-high sea of feathery white-gold.
Sarah rubbed the sleep grit from her eyes and yawned. The car was still, parked along the side of the road. “Where are we?” she asked as she wound down the window and leaned her head out. Sleep had made her give up on the silent treatment. After all, she wasn’t sure when she’d see her father again. It was so quiet here that her ears ached.
Her father was leaning against the car, drinking coffee from a thermos and smoking a cigarette. He had smoked when Sarah was a small girl; she couldn’t remember exactly when he’d stopped. He seem
ed suddenly very young. His hair was brighter, thicker, and his skin less lined. Maybe it was the early-morning light. His eyes glinted, deep golden brown, reminding Sarah of the tigereyes in her box of semiprecious stones. “Nearer than we were,” he said.
“How much farther?”
“Get out, stretch your legs a bit.” He flicked ash onto the dirt road, but the wind caught the soft fluff before it hit the ground and tossed it playfully upward.
“There’s no bathroom.” Sarah’s bladder felt full and round as a balloon filled with water. She wriggled free from the layers of blankets.
“That’s what the great outdoors is for.” Her father sounded almost like he was laughing, but his face was smooth and dreamy, as if he wasn’t even really talking to her. Maybe he had changed his mind about this whole grandparent thing.
“Ugh. That’s so gross.” Nonetheless, Sarah stumbled off to find a hidden spot out in the white-gold meadow. There were no trees here, but every now and again a clump of dark-leaved shrubs huddled together in little green islands in the pale sea. The wind chased ripples and waves through the grass tufts, and massed flocks of small birds dived in and out of the vast empty grassland.
When she came back to the car, her father had finished his coffee and cigarette, and was using the front of the car as a kitchen table, slapping pieces of ham onto white bread. He held out an uncut sandwich for her. “Breakfast,” he growled.
Sarah stared at it, and then at her father’s. He’d made himself a sandwich too, but instead of ham and mayonnaise, he’d added a fat layer of raw meat. It was revolting, staining the thin pieces of white bread pink. “You’re not really going to eat that, are you?”
“Why?” he said. “What’s wrong with it?” And he swallowed it down in two huge bites.
Sarah nibbled on the edge of her sandwich. “Okay, no more kidding around—where are we, anyway?”
“Middle of nowhere.” Her father wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then stretched so that the bones in his back popped. He turned to her and grinned. “With miles to go before we sleep.”
There were tiny shreds of pink meat caught between his teeth.
* * *
Sarah had left her nest in the back seat and changed into a pair of comfy tracksuit pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and was now sitting in the passenger seat, watching the world speed past.
Every now and again her father would roll down the window for a blast of fresh cold air, and the wind would careen through the car, nipping exposed skin and tangling hair. Her father’s hair seemed to have become longer and more knotted, sculpted by the wind into a wild, mussed-up mess.
Ever so slowly, the clumps of bushes grew larger, forming little knots of thorny woods. The meadows gave way to fire-blackened thickets, the thin trunks of the shrubs bedded deep in a mattress of new bracken. Here and there a lone high tree broke out above the others, like a sentinel tower. Her father’s grip tightened on the steering wheel as the trees grew taller and thicker, and when Sarah glanced at his face, his mouth was clenched in a silent snarl, lips pulled back.
“Dad?” Sarah dropped her feet off the dash and sat up straighter. The trees had crowded up on either side of the road, making it harder and harder to see, but she’d caught a glimpse of something ahead. “What’s that?” She pointed. There it was again, a flash of something gray.
“Ah,” he said. “We’re almost there.” He flexed his fingers on the wheel, then raised one hand to chew absently at his thumbnail. It looked overly long and ragged, like he’d forgotten to cut his nails for months.
“Almost where?” There was no way he was taking her to her grandparents. She’d been expecting some old-age community, or even a dilapidated house in a not-so-great area. But this—they were deep in the wilds. Fear and guilt filled her. Sarah was certain that her mother had left because of her, and now she was being punished. Where was her father taking her? And why? She wasn’t quite afraid of him. At least, she kept telling herself that. He was her dad, after all. He wasn’t exactly lying to her, just not telling her everything. Adults were like that sometimes.
The car rounded a curve in the forest road, bumping over a thatch of dried bracken in the center, and stopped.
Ahead of them was a clearing, and in the middle of the clearing stood a castle tower.
It was a single squat turret, like a jabbing finger or a lone tooth, made of mottled stone, dribbled and spattered with lichen in yellows and reds. Furry clumps of moss clung velvety and green at the base. Ivy grew wild, so thick in some places it distorted the shape of the tower, and sprays of leaves crowned with little blue-black berries rose over the low walls around the outskirts. Tumbled boulders marked the faint outlines of rooms that had long since fallen.
Tall slitted windows cut the tower sides. Someone had hacked the ivy back from the windows, and the broken stems stuck out in ragged spikes.
“Your grandparents’ house,” her father said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and pushed open his car door.
Sarah sat frozen in place. There weren’t even power lines or phone lines or anything. He was going to leave her here, out in the middle of nowhere in a ruin with people she’d never met. She clutched her seat belt, holding on to it desperately. Perhaps if she just never left the car, he’d be forced to drive back with her—
“Out,” he said. “They’re expecting you.”
She swallowed, and made her fingers push the release button. There was no one waiting for them at all. Perhaps her father really had gone mad. She couldn’t help but look at his hands, half expecting to see him holding an ax or something. No one would ever find her body out here.
Nothing. Of course nothing. She let herself breathe. The air tasted sweet and green, full of damp flavor. “A castle—really?” Sarah’s voice sounded high and scared, though she was trying for a joke. “You never told me we were part of a royal family.”
“It never seemed important,” he answered. “And it’s not much of a castle, either,” he added. “Come on. Your grandmother will be waiting. She’s old, and she likes things to happen in a timely manner.”
Thoughts of a round and rosy-cheeked grandma with wispy-wool hair in a sensible bun went hurtling off into the distance. Sarah stepped out of the car and dragged her suitcase from the trunk.
It seemed heavier than ever, and Sarah wondered what would happen if she dropped her case and started crying and stamping her feet like a child, demanding they both go back to the modern and nonmagical house they’d left behind, with its empty spaces and dirty dishes. Arguing that this time they would both be better at dealing with life without Mom. She was pretty sure it would make no difference whatsoever.
Instead, with her suitcase in one hand and her day bag slung over her shoulder, Sarah turned to face her new home. On the ragged battlements a white shape hopped, sending a handful of tiny stones spattering down like hail. She squinted, shading her face with one hand, trying to get a better glimpse. It was a bird.
But not a bird so big. Sarah’s heart gave an unexpected lurch, and the suitcase fell a few inches to slam one pointy corner into the top of her foot. She yelped and bit at her tongue, feeling her mouth spark with pain. A metal and salt taste spilled over her teeth.
“Are you all right?”
Sarah nodded. “Fine.” She swallowed the taste down. The pain in her mouth and foot had turned to throbbing aches. “What kind of bird is that?”
“A raven,” her father said.
“I thought they were black.”
“They are.”
The snowy raven stared down at her. It tilted its head, cawed once, then flew through one of the narrow windows and into the castle. It felt like an invitation.
“Do we just go in?” Sarah looked at her father uncertainly, but he was already loping past her, down a stone path. Mint and chamomile grew from the cracks in wild profusion, and her father’s boots ground the flowers and leaves into perfume. Sarah took a deep breath and set off after him.
&
nbsp; The doorway to the castle was arched, and the door itself was made of a wood so old and black and worn it looked like it had been made by giants and dwarves in some impossible faraway time. The two halves swung open as they approached, groaning on their ancient hinges.
A shadowy figure was waiting for them. A shaft of sun pierced the dark entranceway to illuminate the tall, regal woman standing in the interior gloom. For a moment, with her back to the castle mouth and her face caught in the last rays of the pollen-dusted afternoon sun, the woman looked golden, her hair streaming behind her in thick cloud, her face stern and handsome, like in sepia photographs from long ago.
Sarah drew closer and saw the deep lines that pulled at her beauty, twisting it. Her hair was silver, not gold, and her brow was cut with a thousand frowns. Sarah’s heart, which was already hanging out around the bottom of her stomach, plummeted further. Surely this angry old witch couldn’t be her grandmother?
“So you’ve come,” the woman said, looking past Sarah and at her father instead. “This is the girl?” But she still didn’t look at Sarah.
Her father placed his warm hand on Sarah’s back and pushed her a little closer to the woman who was supposed to be her grandmother. “This is Sarah,” he said. “I said I’d bring her, and I did. Where’s Father?”
“He’s not well,” the woman snapped.
Sarah’s father didn’t seem to care terribly much, but he asked, “What kind of not well?”
“You know what kind.”
“Is he worse?”
Her grandmother didn’t answer, just pressed her lips thinly together as if she was trying to stop a secret from inching its way out like a tiny worm.
Sarah shifted back a little, closer to her father. She didn’t like this woman or the conversation. It reminded her too much of her mother’s words before she left. All twisted and tangled and full of half things. Perhaps her grandmother had poisoned her grandfather. She looked like the kind of woman who would put arsenic in the soup and tenderly nurse someone to death, spoonful by spoonful. A prickling started up in the corners of Sarah’s eyes. She wanted to scream at her father not to leave her here, but her words were all caught up in her throat and her tongue felt swollen to twice its size.
