by Rebecca Hahn
If it weren’t for my Gramps, I reckon my uncle would have killed me, too. But the shock of seeing him cut down his own sister, and near to lame his own father—and the sight of me looking on at it all wide-eyed, a baby girl scarce able to toddle about—I think they wondered, then, the king’s soldiers, whether they’d done right after all to follow this prince. It’s one thing to think on doing something, one thing to plan, to dream of it. It’s another to see it in front of you. It’s another to have the world change all about you and be unable to put it back the way it was. I reckon even my uncle may have had a shock when he saw his sister’s blood draining away.
So when my Gramps pleaded to be allowed to take me away, when he offered his son the kingdom, even, if he’d just let me live—my uncle gave in. My Gramps pulled me up onto his horse, and we rode and rode until the pain in his legs near made him fall, and we stopped then at the very next village. The villagers there took care of us until Gramps’s legs had healed as much as they ever would. And then he built us a hut—far enough away from anyone else not to bring the new king’s wrath down on them, if he came for us again, and within a few years I was growing my flowers out back, so we’d no need to depend on the villagers’ generosity for food, neither. And he’s left us alone all these years, though he still comes down to ask my Gramps’s advice now and again. And my Gramps has never said a word about wishing he was still king.
I think on it sometimes, how it must have been to be my mother, waiting in her hiding place, dreading the moment she’d hear the soldiers coming, and hoping every morning it wouldn’t be that day, that she’d have one more day to see the sun and feel the grass and watch me grow. I like to think she wanted that, to watch me grow. My Gramps says she loved me, but how would he know? He never saw me until that day, until he rode up with his army to her door and tried to save her, and fell, and never quite got up again. He wouldn’t know if she used to kiss my hair. He wouldn’t know if she sang me to sleep or if she sat there staring out her window, wishing for her monster to come and get her, wishing anything but that she had a baby girl who was like to kill her just by living.
He wouldn’t know, and she’s not here to say.
It’s as I’m thinking these things that the green-clad lady on her log looks up with her bright, shining eyes and tells me I ought to come with her.
I don’t know how I got here. I haven’t come this far out since I was a child. I haven’t heard the voice of this lady in at least ten years, but there she is now, talking to me, holding out her hand as if we sat together only yesterday.
She’s glowing in the dim forest light. The tips of her fingers set off sparks in the air.
“Child,” she says in a sweet, airy lilt.
“I’m not a child anymore,” I say, firm. I should be stepping away at once, but I’d forgotten how beautiful this lady is, in the way that nightshade is beautiful. I can’t bring myself to turn away.
Her misty head tilts. “You are our child, still,” she says. “Won’t you come and walk with me?”
In all my years of avoiding her, she’s never come this close before. I’d see her looking up from her log, a ways into the woods, and I’d turn and walk fast in the other direction. Or I’d hear her knitting needles going click-click-clack just around the next batch of trees or over a rise in the ground, and I’d hum to myself and back away until she had faded out again.
She was never in the same place twice.
I reach out—I can’t help it—to touch her fingers, to see what they might feel like. The woods’ shadows fold down upon us, and it is only our fingertips, inching closer and closer and then, just barely, brushing at the seams. We stop like that. It’s like the moment between now and then. It’s like the last note of a sunset before it drains away. It’s like the almost-there tip of a new flower stem, or the instant before a petal falls to the earth.
She looks, too, at our fingers there together. If she had breath, it would be as caught as mine.
I pull back. She lowers her hand.
Before she can say another thing, I turn and walk away, all the way back to our hut.
That night, I can’t get myself to sleep, and I know my Gramps is just as wakeful, though he lies still in the moonlight. He thinks he has it figured out, how to act so I think he’s fast asleep and not mulling over his own thoughts, as I am over mine.
But I know the sound of my Gramps’s waking breaths. Times are, in the dark of night, I’ve heard him crying softly. My eyes will be turned toward the wall, to where I can see the moonlight slipping in under the shutters. He lies still, too, not moving a bit, but I can hear his sobs, dry, muffled by his pillow.
I don’t think he cries just for me, all cut off from the world, not one thing or another. I don’t think he cries just for my mother, neither. I think he cries too for what he used to be—a king, a someone, power in his smallest gesture, his slightest smile. And now he can’t even walk right, and his smiles do no good, or at best hold off the king’s wrath from me, one almost-grown girl, and him, one crippled old man.
He’d never let me hear him talk of it. He’d never say what it was like—life—before I came. Doesn’t matter, though. You don’t live with one person that long and not understand the things he never says. Comes a time when not saying them speaks more than if he did. Comes a time I can read the sadness in his eyes better than the smile on his lips.
I don’t think he wishes me dead and gone. I don’t think he wishes that he’d never saved me, that he’d never tried to save her, that he hadn’t given them a reason to break his legs and take his throne from him.
Life’s not as simple as all that. More like, you’ll be wishing for things that couldn’t be. That the cold of winter be turned all of a sudden to springtime joy. That a baby was born even without the mother’s carrying it and giving birth. That you could go far away and stay forever, all at the same time. Those are the things we’re like to wish. Things not possible. Things not even those in the woods could make true, no matter what they might promise.
Midnight has come and gone before I slip into a dream at last, and as far as I know, my Gramps stays wakeful long after that.
Four
GRAMPS NEVER does say what the king wanted that day, and I never tell him about the lady in the woods, neither. But in the weeks that follow, as we’re getting a new rumor every day about the woods moving in, or about another phoenix appearing in the sky, terrifying our livestock, giving our children new, monstrous dreams—all through those days I never stop going to the woods.
I know I ought to keep out. But if Gramps can have his secrets, so can I, and anyway I don’t face the lady like that again. I do begin to let her walk behind me on my rambles. I let her sing her melodies, and at times I hum along as well. But that’s all. I don’t talk to her. I don’t turn to see her face. She’s a hidden thought, scarce brushing against my mind.
It’s normal, almost, those last weeks of summer. Out in our hut, we’re not touched by the movement of the woods. It’s funny, when I think on it, how our trees never budge. A row of sunflowers lines the garden beds just before the wall, and outside the wall of our garden a dirt path runs all around, and beyond that are the trees. We don’t lose one sunflower or one stone off the wall or one inch off that path.
It makes it easy to dismiss the rumors. For a time, we can pretend that everything’s as it always has been. For a time, nothing bothers us but the everlasting parade of village lads and the unwelcome looks from the lords.
It’s not until the leaves are beginning to drop that a lord I don’t recognize walks down to our hut late in the day, and he doesn’t buy a flower, and he doesn’t look at me where I’m standing against the hut; he just sits and chats with Gramps until I’m about to scream from the boredom of it.
After a while, he isn’t even talking anymore or making a show of it. We’re all silent together on the porch, Gramps sitting straight in his chair, eyeing this lord calmly; the lord looking out up the path over the hill, toward the da
rkening sky; me twisting my hands in my skirt and counting to a million. I figure if I get that far, I’ll forget all my Gramps ever taught me about being polite, and I’ll turn and leave this lord to sit to his heart’s content. And Gramps can do what he wants to me, because really, enough is enough.
But as I reach one thousand three hundred and twenty-one, and as the darkness is thickening, spreading through the porch like fog or like cold, the lord speaks.
He’s young, a black-haired, handsome man. Tall, and sure of himself. He’s been deferential to my Gramps to this point, and he speaks with an ease, a camaraderie the lords rarely manage.
“Things will change soon,” he says. He waits a moment, letting us settle into this unannounced conversation. He’s talked about the impending harvest and crop prices. He’s talked of the woods approaching and of the road through the northern mountains closing down in parts, overrun by trees. There’s something different in the way he starts this new topic, and when he continues, it’s different too, as though before he was only mouthing the lines of a character in a play and now he’s stepped offstage and has begun to speak as himself. “The king grows older every day, without an heir. There are some who think he never will have one. There are some who wonder what will happen when the king is no longer here.”
“My son is young,” Gramps says. He speaks hesitantly; he rarely refers to his relationship to the king. “It will be a long time before he is no longer here.”
“That could be true.” The lord leans forward over the table toward Gramps. “Still, there will be changes soon. Already there is talk of things no one would have mentioned just months ago, hidden-away things, forgotten things.” His voice slides through total darkness now. The stars are concealed by a bank of low clouds, and this lord isn’t even a shadow, but a blank spot in the night.
“Does the king speak of such things?” my Gramps says.
“No.” Quietly. “Not yet. But he hears it, and it shows in his face that he knows what they are saying. What we are saying.”
“Talk does not mean action.”
“Maybe not. And yet . . .” His chair creaks as he settles back again. “As we were discussing, the woods are on the move, and the king has no real solution. Some blame the hidden-away things for this—attack—on our fields. Some blame the ones who forced those things into hiding, and feel an uncovering is well overdue. I will say it again: there will be changes soon.”
All is quiet again. I wrap my arms about myself as a breeze whips by with the first scent of autumn. Changes. There’ve been no changes since Gramps and I ran off to this hut. Only year after year, and lord after lady, and short visits from the king, and trading with the villagers. Only recently attention from those village lads, and looks from the nobles come to buy flowers and turned gawkers at the flower girl. Those aren’t the changes this lord means.
“My lord,” the man says—the lord!—speaking to my Gramps, the flower man. If it was quiet before, it’s as dead as dead now. His words take up all the space and all the sound on our porch. “My lord, there will be dangerous times ahead. It would be wise to take alliances with those who offer them.”
“And are you offering?” It’s almost sharp, my Gramps’s voice.
“I am. I am offering, my lord, for your granddaughter’s hand in marriage.”
It has always amazed me how the village boys could stop by and pay me court without once talking to me. But even they glanced in my direction. Even they showed in a thousand ways that they knew I stood only three feet away, listening to their every word. I could tell by the red that crept up their necks. I could tell by the stammer in their voices.
This man’s voice is as smooth and as pale as cream. If he’s blushing, I wouldn’t know it in the dark, but I haven’t seen his eyes on me the whole of the evening, and the sound of his words just now wasn’t directed toward me. He’s shown in no way that he knows I exist.
“Have you the blessing of your family’s head in this?” That’s my Gramps, sharper still.
“I am my house’s head, the last of the House of Ontrei. And I am not without friends at court. There are those who know what it is I came to ask tonight.”
Now I start to wonder, as I didn’t think to wonder before, whether Gramps might actually jump at this offer. It’s seemed so like a dream, the nameless man in the dark, his cryptic words. But now he’s given us his name, and he has friends, and others know of this conversation. I could be riding back with this lord this very night to stand before a court official and sign a document and leave my Gramps behind.
And I don’t want it to happen.
When I shut my eyes, I can see the glowing hand of the lady in the woods once more, reaching, beckoning, telling me to follow far and away to where possibilities never disappear. And I see my friend, my Annel, running after that hand and laughing, and letting her hair free from her braid, and never looking back.
This wouldn’t be like that.
This would be putting one foot in front of the other, slow and steady, day after day, wherever this lord might care to lead.
I know every inch of this porch, just as I know every flower in our garden. I move along the wall until I’m behind the table where the lord and my Gramps sit, and I place my hands on it.
The men grow still at my presence; I can hear their breathing. “My Lord of Ontrei,” I say, trying to speak somewhat like the ladies I hear day after day, “you honor us with your proposal, and we are appreciating your warning of the changes of things.”
I take a breath to figure my way from here, and my Gramps says, “Marni, let me deal with this.”
“It’s all right, Gramps,” I say. “I’ve got the words.” And I do. I go on. “We’re appreciating the proposal and the warning, my lord, but we find ourselves unable to accept your offer, generous though it is. We’ll be staying as we are, as we’ve always been.”
There’s a pause. “Our thanks, though,” I say, to show I’m finished.
“My lord, this is your reply as well?” the Lord of Ontrei asks. There’s something—disbelief—that I don’t like in that tone.
“Marni is young,” says my Gramps. “But if she’s unwilling, I’m afraid that’s the end of it.”
“I see.”
Another silence. “It’s getting dark,” Gramps says, maybe a bit late in the evening to be commenting on that, but that’s not what he’s saying, really.
After a moment more, the Lord of Ontrei shifts his chair back and gets to his feet. He has to pass Gramps to reach the steps, and he pauses there, no doubt figuring his way around. Then he’s across the porch, down the steps. At the bottom, he stops. He says, “I meant no disrespect to you, my lord, nor to you, lady.”
We neither of us answer.
“When the changes come,” he says, “remember that I have a more open mind than some. I can point you to others like me. There are plenty who would make the same offers of friendship I have—and maybe in time my alliance will prove more welcome to you both.” The night swallows him then, sound, shape, and presence, and it’s only Gramps and me on the porch again.
Gramps sighs. “You won’t take a villager; you won’t take a lord. Who will you take, Marni?”
“No one,” I answer at once. “I’ve no need for anyone. Just you and me, Gramps, and the flowers.”
“It used to be that simple,” he says. “But nothing lasts forever.”
“Well,” I say, taking his arm to help him up, “we’ve no need to worry about forever. Just today, and tomorrow, and the next.”
He’s quiet as we get him to his feet, and I leave him leaning against the door frame while I light a candle from the embers of our fire. As I’m standing, cupping the flame with my hand, he says, “That’s what I thought about her.”
I catch his eyes. He’s all still in the candlelight. “What did you think?” I say, soft, so as not to scare him from the topic.
“I thought worrying about one day and the next would be enough. I thought when it came down to it,
something would change—your uncle’s heart, my soldiers’ loyalty. I thought I’d never have to worry about forever.”
I go over to him and take his arm again. Close to him, fierce, I say, “They’ll never take me from you, Gramps.”
He switches his cane to his other hand and puts his free one over mine where it rests on his arm. “You’re a good girl, Marni. None of this is your fault, you remember that.”
I laugh a bit; I can’t help it. “Oh, Gramps,” I say. “It’s all of it my fault. Now come along, it’s high time you were in bed.”
But he holds me back a moment more. I say, “What is it?”
He doesn’t say a thing, just looks long at me, as though he’s readying himself to draw my portrait or some such. Then he shakes his head and turns away. “Nothing,” he says. He squeezes my hand again and switches his cane. The firelight glints on his cheeks.
He lets me lead him away at last, and this night I’m asleep as soon as I’ve pulled the covers up.
I wake up early the next day and go out while Gramps is still abed. I stand on the back step, breathing in the crisp air, pushing last night’s lord out of my mind.
The birds are singing in the lilac bushes in our garden and all through the woods. The flowers are turning brown; some have already dropped. Soon I’ll be picking the last crop, hanging it to dry in the rafters of our hut, and our job will be done for the year. I’ve bought vegetables and stored them in the space underneath the floorboards in the kitchen. I’ve dried meat and put it out in the shed, where we can tear ourselves a hunk whenever we’re craving some soup or a fried piece in the morning. I’ve packed the chicken house with dead leaves and stems. I’ve packed our cow in too, singing to her as she chewed her grass with mournful eyes. I never have met a cow with joyful eyes. Could be they don’t appreciate being crammed into wooden stalls. Could be there’s a great cow knowledge of what it is we do to them when they’ve outlived their usefulness and we’re hankering for that hunk of meat to go with our eggs.
