The Forest's Son

by Aleo, Cyndy

  He unfastens his seatbelt and begins to stand. By force of his will alone, he can feel his mother making way for him, like he's commanding her to shrink back into her seat and make her six-feet-plus as small as she can so he can pass by her more easily.

  And then Donovan curls her fingers into his shirt.

  The movement is so subtle he almost misses it, but he feels the first knuckle of her third finger rub into his rib right near his heart. Not quite brushing his sternum, it brings a moment of discomfort that isn't quite pain, but is enough to ground him. If he didn't think she would be safe back in her own apartment, in her own life, how does he think she’ll be safe here where she knew no one? She doesn't know the language or the city, and she’ll have no idea where to go if she’s in trouble.

  And he can’t rely on his mother to keep watch over her. She has enough worries of her own. And begged him not to bring Donovan with them.

  He takes one deep breath, then another, and watches the passengers on the plane as they start to move, returning to their normal routines of deplaning. His mother stretches, freeing herself from the compact ball she'd contorted into, seemingly unaware of her prior actions.

  How much power does he have over those around him? How much power will he have over his mother's sisters when they reach the forest?

  Donovan tips her face up to his, her bleary, sleep-encrusted eyes blinking open. They focus on him, the unseeing blankness he'd seen before they left JFK vanished.

  “Where are we?” she asks.

  “We are home.”

  23: Acclimation

  She surfaces all at once. Her ears pop as the plane depressurizes, and her eyes clear and her mind begins to sort itself back into things that make sense again. The flight crew is making announcements to the passengers in Polish, French, and English. At least she assumes the first language is Polish. She recognizes some of the sounds from Jakub's conversations with his mother.

  It sounds a bit like Russian, she thinks, only with softer, more muted sounds. The name of the city is beautiful to her ears: krahk-ooph. It sounds romantic, and it might be if things weren't so unreal.

  Grace is convinced she’ll die here, and probably Donovan as well. Jakub, however, is sure things will be fine, and she'd felt for herself what he was capable of when the plane touched down. Everything that had been clouding up her insides cleared out with whatever that was, and she knew other passengers had felt it as well.

  Yet Grace continues to be wary as they make their way down the jetway and into the airport, her eyes shifting constantly, like she's watching for trouble around every corner, even at the baggage claim.

  Donovan thinks Grace is being overly cautious; after all, she assumes most, if not all, of Grace's “sisters” must be as tall as she is, and Grace certainly stands out from the crowd here with her height. Still, Donovan decides she should be thankful that neither Grace nor Jakub are taking chances with their safety.

  Their baggage gathered, Jakub goes out to hail a cab.

  “Where are we going?” she asks Grace.

  “Zamek Królewski w Niepołomicach.”

  “That tells me nothing. You know I don’t understand Polish, if that’s what that was.”

  “It's a hotel right near the Puszcza Niepołomicka.”

  “That's … that's your forest, isn't it? The one you come from?”

  Grace nods and lifts several bags, seeing that Jakub has been successful in flagging down a cab.

  “Is he insane?”

  Grace turns to face Donovan just before the door opens.

  “Possibly. But at least you won't have to sleep in the forest. It's cold this time of year.”

  Donovan has no choice but to follow her to the cab. Suitcases are tossed into the trunk while Jakub rattles off instructions in a stream of Polish so quickly Donovan can't even attempt to pick out sounds that might be individual words. There's no hesitation in his voice, and the driver follows along readily. She realizes it's as if Jakub has been speaking his mother tongue all along, instead of the colloquial English she's been hearing in the time she's known him.

  She scoots across the backseat of the cab until she can press her face against the window. Until today, Kraków hadn't even been a blip on her radar, nor Poland, for that matter. She supposes she'd thought of it in general, in history and geography classes, but she hadn't even thought to ask Vance — Jakub — what his ancestry was.

  Even with Grace's accent, it had never been a subject that came up. In her head, she guesses she'd imagined it being very cold and possibly Soviet-looking, with strange-looking Orthodox churches. What she sees, however, is a city awash in stone buildings in light colors, old mixed with new.

  She should be feeling guilty; being the smallest of them, the polite thing to do would be to take the middle seat, but Jakub has done so once again, leaving his mother the side with the other window. Donovan can hear Grace’s quiet sobs and wonders how much Grace can recognize from her life here before. Trying to remember her history, Donovan realizes at least two world wars have passed through here, as well as countless changes in ruling government. Grace must be almost as much of a stranger here as she is.

  Rummaging through her purse, she finds a small, unopened, plastic pack of tissues, and nudges Jakub's arm with it. He looks confused, but she nudges him again, then points the package toward his mother. Without a sound, he offers them to Grace, and she accepts them without thanks, blowing her nose with a loud honk before returning to her quiet sobs.

  Jakub appears helpless, so Donovan reaches over his long legs and puts her hand on Grace's knee, giving her a small squeeze. Grace lays her hand upon Donovan's, patting it gently.

  Jakub sighs loudly, possibly frustrated with these emotional women tagging along with him, but he pulls Donovan close and kisses the top of her head.

  “Thank you,” he whispers. “For doing what I can’t. I have little memory of this place, only senses. Home is home. Matka is matka.

  “But for my mother, she remembers the sights and the sounds and the smells, and it’s not the same. I fear it will be worse when we get to the forest; much of the old growth was destroyed in the last World War.”

  “It doesn't bother you?” she asks.

  “No. My connection is to the earth itself. The surroundings make no difference. I think they could probably burn the planet to ash and I could still find it. Just as I could still find you.”

  Donovan's heart thrums loudly in her ears. This isn't the time or the place to be mooning over him, she knows, but she does all the same. Still, the way he talks of “his” forest and “his” place makes her wonder if it comes down to a choice, which he will choose. Will she even stand a chance when he has the opportunity to reclaim his birthright? Does a country hold more of his heart than she does?

  24: Scattered

  “He dares,” Edyta's voice rises above the others.

  “It seems he does,” Bożena replies.

  “I thought we were preparing to go there,” Janina says.

  “There appears to be no point, now, does there?” Bożena asks. “He's here, and odds are his mother has come with him. I highly doubt she would leave him to his own devices. Now we change our plans. This is our home. Our forest. None know it better than we.”

  Grażyna — she is thinking of herself as Grażyna now that she is back — can almost hear the voices of her sisters the closer the cab gets to the forest. She cannot help but think this is a huge mistake, coming here.

  Back at their house, they would be in their own forest. Jakub knows those woods like the back of his hand and her sisters would be at a disadvantage. Here, she is blind, and so is Jakub. And the sisters have hundreds — if not thousands — of years of knowledge. They know every tree and root and rock here. She knows nothing but memories of a forest that has been mostly destroyed. Jakub knows less than that.

  In addition, he is hobbled by the human girl, whose panic flares so palpably she nearly kept them from boarding the plane in the first plac
e. They'd dragged her around like a giant marionette, pushing her this way and that way. She'd been unresponsive, and Grażyna had wondered if they'd even be able to drag the girl past security without someone thinking she was some kind of hostage.

  The strangest thing yet, though, has been the moment the plane touched down. Whatever happened with Jakub the moment he reconnected with his true home had gone through the entire plane. Everyone had felt it, even Donovan. Yet Donovan had been the only one not under his control.

  Grażyna feels no small amount of shame that she'd bowed to the unspoken whim of her son, but one lone human girl had managed to keep hold of her own free will, even panicked half out of her mind.

  They will wait, she knows. Her sisters will wait until they enter the forest itself. As close as Jakub will be in the hotel, the sisters are unlikely to breach the building, or even the grounds; Jakub is correct in that regard. With them so close, the sisters will wait until the advantage is completely theirs, with no humans in sight, no unfamiliar boxes to navigate, no need to pretend to be anything they are not, before they strike.

  She leans her head against the window of the cab and rubs her temples. She can feel her sisters: an incessant buzzing in her head. She feels alien in the cab, in her clothing. Every cell in her body cries out to flee the cab, strip to her bare skin, and return to the forest and her sisters. Even if they allow her no more than a few seconds before ending her, she thinks it will be worth it to feel whole again.

  “Can I do anything for you?”

  It is Jakub's low voice in her ear. She shakes her head, because what can he do? He cannot turn back time. He cannot make himself female. He cannot change all of her history, alter every decision she made that has brought them to this point.

  She knows in her heart that she would make the same decision every time: to run with him, to save him. But to be so close to home and know she will see her sisters for minutes, at most, and only as enemy, breaks her heart.

  ~

  Bożena is tempted to kill Edyta herself, long before there will be any confrontation with Grażyna and her son. Edyta — and now Zuzanna — are an incessant buzzing in her ears. Like pestering bees, they refuse to stop their recriminations. They should have moved faster. They should have gone to find him long ago. They should have continued their search even when he seemed to disappear.

  Really, Bożena should have cut Edyta’s tongue out and that would also solve all her problems at the moment.

  She can’t spare so much as a moment to think of anything but the strife being sown among the sisters by Edyta’s ranting. Why hadn’t they managed to take the child from Grażyna at his birth? Why hadn’t Bożena known Grażyna would try such a thing if he were a boy child? Why haven’t the sisters kept more current with all the things of the outside world that would have let them keep better track of things, find them more easily?

  Not for the first time, Bożena thinks of Edyta as a small child, full of curiosity and overly emotional when she doesn't get her way. She wishes she could step over Edyta and leave her to her tantrum as she does the little ones. Unfortunately, Edyta can cause a great deal more damage than a three-year-old if left to her fit.

  Bożena tries her best to calm the rest of the sisters, to reassure them that all will be well, that this will be better for them, that charging in too quickly would have been disastrous.

  But she doesn’t like how Edyta and Zuzanna are talking. How a few other sisters linger near them and nod when Edyta starts another one of her rants.

  Bożena continues with her preparations and tries her best to ignore the grumbling. So long as it doesn’t rise in volume — either noise-wise or numbers-wise — she still thinks there’s a chance everything will work out in the end.

  What she doesn’t know, however, is how much Edyta is willing to risk in order to gain control of the sisters. Or if she’s willing to divide them in order to amass power.

  25: Accommodation

  By the time the cab pulls up to the hotel, Jakub can sort out individual voices among the sisters, and he wonders if they’re aware that he can hear their thoughts — or at least, some of their thoughts. He’s thankful Donovan and his mother have been so quiet during the cab ride, because it’s given him time to concentrate.

  There’s one voice, Edyta’s, which seems most focused on their destruction, but she’s not much of a leader. Desiring power, perhaps, but Bożena would be the one called leader if they had one, and she seems torn. It’s possible that when his mother first fled she was the first one to call for death, but now, the years have weakened her somewhat. He needs more information. He needs to find the sister who still feels closest to his mother. Maybe it’s Bożena.

  The others he can sense — Janina, Agnieszka, Adela, Helena, Beata, Zuzanna — he can't get enough of a reading to know where their sympathies may lie. Edyta and Bożena, however, may be key to any strategy he can come up with. He’ll have to pay closer attention, if he isn't distracted by things going on at the hotel.

  Edyta is all anger; it bleeds off her and follows her on her path through their forest area like a long train on a wedding gown. How the sisters haven't noticed that much anger in their midst over the years, he's unsure, but she’ll be easiest to identify; her anger pulsing red all around her.

  Bożena, on the other hand, should be the one with Edyta's anger. From his mother's accounts over the years, he knows Bożena was her closest ally and confidant before his birth. They’d been born around the same time — certainly within a few years of each other — and his mother's ultimate decision and defection had to have both hurt and angered Bożena.

  Yet he feels none of the anger in her that’s so prominent in Edyta’s thoughts. The greatest emotion he senses from Bożena is sadness: that she must ask her sisters to move against another; that her reunion with her former best friend and true sister may be far too short; that she may be the one to bear the most responsibility for Grażyna's death when — if — it comes to pass.

  She may be helpful.

  As for the rest, their emotions cross lines and bleed into each other until they’re indistinguishable. Some feel the lines being drawn within the tribe, and have some dim awareness that there are two sides, and sisters may be asked to choose. For a tribe used to everything being unanimous, it's unsettling for them: another undercurrent.

  His mother goes through the motions of checking them all into the hotel, even though the staff keeps looking to him to give direction. The temptation is there to smirk at them every time his mother draws their attention back to her; how anyone can look at her and think she'd let anyone else speak for her is beyond his understanding, but perhaps the hotel staff is a bit slower than most to adjust to his mother’s presence.

  One older woman in the lobby makes the sign of the cross when she sees his mother, and he hears her mutter under her breath, “Dziwozona.” Idly, he wonders what the woman would do if he turned to her and confirmed her superstitious fears.

  Instead, he bends his head toward Donovan to ask for perhaps the hundredth time if he can do anything for her. Each time she tells him no, but she's still not settled, still not back to being “his” Donovan. The trip has sent them all off their normal axes, and nothing will be right again until whatever confrontation is to come is over.

  His mother refuses the staff’s offer of help with their bags, and between the two of them, they manage most of the luggage, with Donovan pulling a single suitcase behind her. The suite they reserved has two bedrooms, and his mother lifts one brow in silent question. The small part of him that’s still Vance wants to chuckle at her unspoken question, but the time for their joking camaraderie is gone.

  “She'll stay with me,” he says, and his mother heads toward the bed in the main living area to start unpacking.

  Taking Donovan's hand, he leads her into the other room, where the two single beds have been pushed together. It takes only one look at the crisp, white sheets on the beds for him to know Donovan will kill him if he even sugges
ts she get into bed without washing off the grime of travel, so he finds the bag his mother had hastily thrown Donovan's toiletries into when they'd packed at her apartment.

  “Do you need any help showering?” he asks.

  She jumps, then stares at him with a smirk and a single raised eyebrow.

  “Oh, I don’t mean me. I mean, my mother. Unless you want —”

  He's useless at this. It was stupid, stupid, stupid to let things change from just friends to something more right before heading into who knows what, and he's simultaneously crushed and relieved when she shakes her head and trudges to find the bathroom with her arms full of shampoo and soap.

  He slides to the floor, not wanting to go back out into the main living space, where he’d have to deal with his mother, and he waits for Donovan to be done in the shower. For the first time, he wonders if bringing her was the right thing to do — if he'd made the decision with his head instead of his heart. He wants her near him all the time, but this promises to lead to insanity.

  26: Displaced

  Considering the hotel is really a castle, Donovan is pleasantly surprised at the warm tones of the bathroom tile and the modern glass and chrome fixtures. Convinced everything will feel better once she has clean hair, she fiddles with the shower taps until she gets warm, if not hot, water, and steps in.

  Should she have locked the bathroom door? The glass shower enclosure leaves no privacy at all if Grace — or, god forbid, Jakub — should walk in.

  Before she's even halfway through washing her hair, she's already replaying their conversation in her mind. When everything has become surreal, having Jakub offer to help her in the shower makes it ten times more so.

  Was he serious? Did he expect —?

  Even thinking about possibly having sex with him makes her move faster, nicking herself twice when shaving. She curses knowing she'll leave blood stains on the hotel’s immaculate white towels. It's crystal clear she doesn't belong here, but he wants her with him for whatever reason, and she promised she'd see this through.