********
A fire burned brightly in the cave, but no one’s eyes save hers saw the flames. No one watched as she danced a wide circle around it widdershins. There was only her voice that sang and bounced back from the cavern walls. In the old days, there would have been many voices to help her. Long ago, when she was so much more than one.
“Dark hair with curls,” she asked the fire and threw the sage into its hungry mouth.
“Strong like a fish swimming upstream,” a second offering of sage.
“A smile like the sunrise glow,” a handful of lemon verbena went in.
“Skin soft as rabbit’s fur,” some mint to make it so.
The Girl made her wants specific; it was always best to be clear as to what you wanted. Her eyes she could not camouflage, there was no use in trying. But the rest she made out of the picture in her mind and her offerings of sweet woodruff, wild ginger, and wild rose. When it was done, she wrapped her body in the oak leaves she had netted together with maple sap and spider’s webbing and nestled down in front of the fire. A small hand reached up to pull the last section across her head and face.
She had done as much as she could. The matter of her voice could not be remedied. The herbs she needed did not grow here.
“It will have to be enough,” she thought, and she closed her eyes to sleep. An image of the Ash Trees filled her mind, and she dreamed about the bargain she had made with them.
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Chapter: The Ash Trees
They were old, but they remembered everything that had occurred in their long, slow lives. They even remembered when they were born. The first among them was blown by the wind. It seeded itself where it landed. When it was young, it sent out new shoots, and these grew into its children. The children stood side by side now, and together they were a family content to watch the seasons go by.
They remembered the day the Old One came. With the appearance of a young girl, she had greeted them in their own language. The original people of the land used to pay them tribute, but even they had not known how to speak to the trees.
How surprised they had been. They had heard about beings such as these. Through their roots in the ground, they were connected to others all over the earth. They could hear the thoughts of other trees. There were trees that looked like them, and others that looked so alien the Ash would not have known they were trees at all.
The Girl had called them “Uinnseann.” From this word, they knew the long way she had traveled. The brethren they knew that went by this name lived across a vast water. There was one grove in that land that was especially powerful. The Ash were flattered to be called by their name.
Perhaps the soft heart they had developed for the Girl stemmed from that day. Perhaps that was the reason they considered her proposal now. The pact that the Girl had offered interested them. They had looked in their collective memory, and they found experiences from that far away land that were similar. Not quite like the one for which she had asked, but the Ash felt her request was possible. The Girl wanted an agreement that would span generations.
They had told her it could be done. What the trees would gain was more than what the Girl would. They warned her about the cost. They told her what was required. They knew that there was a flaw in the plan. When they told the Girl, she accepted the possibility.
Their reservations assuaged, they felt they had done their duty. The Girl was even older than they. She had come from a place where she had known that what she asked was more than possible. Who were they to deny her? As much as she desired her goal, they wanted their chance to be something more than they were.
They agreed.
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Chapter: Young Winifred
Janie and Thomas had always allowed their children to roam the forest as they pleased, and their youngest was granted the same freedom. Freddy passed by the four Ash by the meadow, and the sudden breeze that flowed out of the dark green of the forest stilled her on the path. There were tiny prickles on the nape of her neck that then ran down her shoulders to her arms. She did not want to look up into the trees, but she knew something watched her from above. The slow, forced tilt of her head made the skin prickle again, and she shivered. What would she find?
A bird. A relieved laugh escaped her. Nothing but a crow, she reassured herself, and began to smile at the creature perched several feet above her. Then it smiled back at her.
Freddy was running before she even realized what her legs were doing. A caw sounded behind her followed by a noise that sounded like a word. She looked back for a moment, and when her gaze turned forward again, there was a sight even more startling than a talking crow.
She slowed to a stop, and her eyes moved over the woman and the beast that stood in front of her. “Beautiful,” her mind said to her, but the thudding of her heart against her chest felt like a warning.
The woman stood beside the largest buck she had ever seen. The animal’s rack stretched toward the forest canopy, taller than it seemed possible for the animal to withstand its weight. Freddy’s eyes darted back to the woman and found green eyes returning her stare. A woman with long, dark hair; clothing made from leather and furs; a necklace of dead animal bones where other women would wear pretty baubles. Her eyes were the same color as Freddy’s.
A dark shape flew passed her cheek, close enough that she felt the whisper of a wing on her skin. The crow joined the others in front of Freddy, and it nestled into a perch it found in the antlers of the buck.
The woman raised her hand and gestured for Freddy to come closer. Her long fingers stretched outward toward Freddy and then slowly curled to her chest.
“Come here,” she said to her, and without knowing how she got there, she found herself standing directly in front of her. Close enough to touch the woman if she dared.
Freddy would always remember this day, the first day she met the Woman of the Woods. She knew it was impossible, but when she thought back on this memory, she would even be able to smell the rich, dark loam of the forest floor as it was that day. She would hear the caw of the crow as sharp as if the creature was beside her at her ear.
When Freddy had children of her own, she told this story to her eldest; her child who had the touch. Her child who would take her place as protector when she moved on. She said to her, as she sat wide eyed and cross legged before Freddy, “There are things in the woods that you should know.”
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Chapter: The Girl
A ruse of a hunt, it never failed to give her the time away she needed. Of course, she would always bring back a snare of rabbits or a travois that bore the carcass of a deer, so in a way she never truly lied to her wife and children.
The babe was old enough to walk, and the older children were already roaming the hill as if they owned it. She hated to leave Janie, but there were only so many days she could spend in this form. Her responsibilities to the forest required her to be in her own skin.
She kissed her wife goodbye again, and then whistled sweetly down at Lise who clung to Janie’s skirts. Her daughter tried to whistle back, and the Girl wished she could laugh out loud when she wore the glamour of Thomas Stranger.
********
She walked along the trail until the first of her little friends found her. They eyed this form of a man with trepidation. They did not care for it. She glanced around to ensure no one had followed her. She slipped behind a tree of exceptional girth, and while she entered one side with the long stride of a man, she emerged on the other side with a leap as the Girl.
She took a deep breath of the air and smelled the sunlight. She saw the pulsating orange glow that surrounded every living thing of her woods. She did not have these sensations when she was disguised.
Her friends began to join her, one by one - and sometimes in packs of three - as she wound her way past familiar landmarks towards the cave that was sometimes her home. Home; the word sounded funny to her now. Now that she had a true home again and a companion and childr
en. The cold cave with her bits of forest trinkets was not the comfort it had once been for her.
Stooping to fit through the entrance, she used her hands against the walls of stone to find her way. A small beam of light appeared ahead through a narrow fissure from the outside world, and she knew she was almost to her nest.
A warm fire was lit in moments, and then she bundled herself down into blankets of lichen. Her eyes drooped quickly, and she fell asleep thinking of the soft blankets she slept in with Janie.
********
The morning light woke her the next day. She felt recharged, but she moved lazily against the mats beneath her. There was a warm mound by her side as she shifted, and she peeked under the blanket to find a furry creature had found her in the night for warmth. She smiled her pointed tooth smile at its sleepy head and stroked its fur without causing it to wake. Only when she stirred in earnest did the fox uncurl itself with a yawn full of sharp teeth. It licked the air and then bounded out into the morning. The Girl followed not far behind.
There were tasks to be accomplished, and she would only have a week of human time at most. She set herself to the most important and made her way to the stand of Ash along the wildflower meadow.
The trees swayed when they sensed her coming close. To anyone observing, they would have thought that it was merely the wind that caused the limbs to move and created the sound of leaves rubbing against leaves. The Girl knew it was not so.
Her people called this Leaf Speak, and they had learned the language of the trees eons ago. She heard their greeting and answered them in kind, her throat tightening to make sounds they would understand. She needed them to help set the boundaries of protection when she was away as Thomas. She did not have the traditional gifts to give them here in this place. She could not make them on her own - not without more of her kind to aid her. So she had promised the trees a different kind of gift, and they had accepted.
“A gift that will come later,” she reminded herself. She did not like to think on what she had promised them. It was another reminder of what she was giving up to be with Janie.
The Girl knew that Janie sometimes came into the forest to set her own boundaries. She had followed her wife one day as a bright eyed hare and had watched while Janie read from a book as she moved her hands in the air. Janie had said words that reminded the Girl of Leaf Speak, although she could hear that it was not precisely the same. Watching Janie at that moment, she had remembered the first time she had seen her as a little girl trundling up the steep climb of the hill. That first time when she had known that Janie was special. A heritage from Janie’s mother, of course, but the Girl had not been able to ask Mother Swavely when they had first met. Not in the guise of Thomas. Still, the Girl recalled the slow smile that Janie’s mother had beamed at her from across the room the night they had met. The room had gone suddenly still as Thomas Stranger and Mother Swavely regarded each other: the Swavely just inside the cabin door, Thomas steadfastly by Janie’s side at the fireplace.
A warning from the trees snapped her focus back to them. Someone was coming their way. They told the Girl they would tell the rest of the forest that the pact of protection would be renewed again.
“Our gift?” they swayed and asked.
“Soon,” the Girl demurred. Knowing that trees measured time differently. Even more slowly than she did. She would have to pay eventually, but for now they were placated. She darted away to her next task, to search for Freddy in the woods, and found the buck waiting for her beyond the treeline.
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Chapter: Mother Swavely
If Janie’s Mother had been like other mothers in the region, Janie never would have had the life she had been allowed to live.
Mother Swavely’s family had been roamers since time began. They had always been as nomadic as gypsies, although they were fair and freckled where the gypsies were leather and lace. They had arrived in the New World from Scotland, an entire tribe of them, and had wandered their way down from the North. Always keeping to the woods as much as possible. Always making their campfires far from any others.
Only a chance meeting in a field at the edge of a stretch of forest changed the direction of Mother Swavely’s fate. A young man with his dog, caught in the act of singing a song to the trees. He had felt the spying eyes before he saw them, but once he found the greenness amid the freckles, he was hopelessly lost. He had no idea what he would have done had she turned and run instead of stepping past the edge of the trees towards him.
Her family didn’t stand between them. Mother Swavely had been old enough to choose her own direction. While some of the younger men had grumbled that the union shouldn’t be allowed, the women were the ones who had the say.
They charmed the young man’s family with their smiles. The jewels and richly embroidered blankets they gifted to their tribeswoman as dowry didn’t hurt the swaying of opinions either. After they had seen to the handfasting, the tribe left their daughter with a kiss, a book, a ring and a promise. Mother Swavely turned to face her new husband and never looked back.
If she had ever wished she had chosen differently that day long ago when the sun had shone down through the trees to light on the field below, she kept the thought to herself. For her husband, she was beauty and light and grace. Even during the years when the crops tested his patience or when their first born was taken from them so young. Mother Swavely continuously emanated her strength and her love.
There were aspects of her that would always seem a mystery to her husband. The book from her family was filled with words from a language he couldn’t understand, though from time to time he saw her take it down from the high shelf to read to their daughter. Some days, he would come in from the fields and find she had gone into the woods. Later, she would return with her basket full of herbs and her bright yellow hair in braids woven through with wild honeysuckle. Other nights, he would find her at the window with a candle she had dyed a certain color, the moon’s rays bathing her in a strange light.
As the years passed, she would run her fingers along the creases around his eyes, his forehead and the skin along his neck. He could only look at her and wonder how she stayed so young. He told himself the freckles masked her own fine lines. He convinced his mind that her hair was skewing gray. He pretended her body was slowing as his own was.
Only in the year when he became so ill, his last year on this earth, did he open his eyes one day to see her as she truly was. Older, yes, but not so old as she should have been. The gray hairs of which he had convinced himself caught in the sunlight as she passed a window only to show that they had simply grown a whiter blonde.
His last day, he had meant to ask her so many questions. Questions on which he had wondered their whole life together but had always been too afraid to ask. Afraid that he would say something to make her leave him as suddenly as she had appeared all those years ago. On his final day, he only managed to ask her about their Jaana - his little Janie. Why had she insisted on letting her grow up so wild? Why had she let her live on the hill all on her own? Why had she smiled at Stranger the night Janie had revealed him when the rest of them had frowned?
“Hush, husband,” she had soothed him. “None of that matters now, my love.”
But the questions did matter to him. The ones he had been able to ask and all the others he had not managed to voice before the blackness at the corners of his eyes crept closer. His wife’s face filled what remained of his vision. He let himself see all of her without the filter through which he had fooled himself for their entire union. Unbidden, his mind flashed through the image of mother and daughter sitting close to one another, heads bent over a book that none else could read. Mother and daughter stirring herbs stewed in a heavy pot to make the colors for cloth and candle. Mother and daughter walking in the moonlight, their arms full of finds from the woods.
He saw Mother Swavely’s green eyes amid her freckled face that one last time and knew the truth.
She had kept secre
ts from him.
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Chapter: Blood on the Moon
The Scovells had always had ill luck. As far back as anyone living could recall, the sons and daughters alike spent their lives haunted by misfortunes. It wasn't always so, of course. A very long time ago, they were said to have been affluent. Old Money from Europe that had travelled to these shores. Whispers of an ancestor who had sought adventure and brought his lady love across the ocean with him.
The last of their long line still resides in the house someone had built in town when they still had their money. The current resident is the last of his line. Crippled and twisted, he is as broken as the house that falls down around him a bit more each day. The shrubs creep closer year by year. They curl in around the front porch eaves and darken the entry more thickly as each season passes. Every small town has a haunted house, and this one is Eversburg’s.
With no children to follow him, the last Scovell will take the misfortunes of centuries to the grave with him. For that, he is thankful. He’ll not need to explain their family shame to his children on his deathbed, as his own father had had to do with him. He won’t need to watch their eyes change from confusion to understanding to anger when they are finally told that none of the maladies that have fallen in their path their whole life were any fault of theirs.
“We’re cursed,” his father had said to him when Bryan was 20. The cancer that had run down through the family for generations had taken over his father. Bryan learned that day by his father’s sickbed the story of their family’s rumored wrongdoing. The ailments, the slow financial collapse, and the family’s general ill-fortune was the fault of one ancestor. A woman who took something from the wrong person. When his father was finished, all Bryan could think was that it didn’t seem fair for them to be punished for so long for something so small. No doubt, the Swavely women had their own version of the tale.
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