by Rebecca Hahn
We’re ready for the cold and the snow and the winds. We’re ready for another winter inside our hut, sitting by the fireplace, me sewing and Gramps sketching pictures with the bits of paper and charcoal we get from traveling sales folk. Gramps has a gift for drawing; if you didn’t know better, you’d think he’d lived his whole life as an artist. A few strokes of his charcoal and the flowers draping the porch are transferred, alive and elegant, to the paper. Or he’ll do a portrait of a child from a nearby farm, and the quirk of the boy’s mouth and the glint in his eyes and the pixie ears will all be there in the drawing, just as they are in life. Come the winter, he’ll be sketching away, tucking drawings into every corner and shelf in our hut, handing them out to everyone who stops by. Our visitors will dwindle to almost no one in the darkest, coldest weeks. It’ll be as though the world out there doesn’t exist anymore. It’ll be as though we’ve found a place to disappear in truth. As the food runs low, we’ll find ourselves wishing for the spring, but in the beginning, and for a stretch in the middle, we’ll be perfectly happy to bundle up and forget it all.
Today, though, the cold and the snow are still holding off. Animals run, hurry-scurry, through the flower beds and under the cracks in the wall, piling up their hoard before the winter. Won’t be many more days like this one. Won’t be many more chances to slip out through the garden while Gramps is sleeping in the soft dawn light and to hop over the wall and into the trees.
At once, the scent of crumbling leaves fills my nose. I breathe in deep. It twitches my fingers. It lifts my lips in a smile without me quite knowing why. It makes me laugh. My hair flips back in the breeze. I walk on, and for once, I don’t blink away the spirits dancing round. They’re as much a part of the season as the wind is, as the nuts ripe on the branches and the early setting of the sun. I see it in their dances: the way the world is turning out of summer, out of languid, heavy heat into quick motions and shivering flights through frozen hills. There will be months of staying indoors, yes, but also urgent strikings of flint and keen-eyed hunters stringing their bows for rabbits the color of the snow.
The spirits dance like that now, quick, nothing excessive, with joy in the danger and the running.
I don’t want to look away from them. I’m as caught up in the world today as they are, maybe more so. Despite what I said to my Gramps, I know that lord was right about the coming changes; I know that tomorrow or the next day we could lose the meager safety we’ve hoarded so long. My uncle might ride down this instant, demanding that I come with him, that I pay the price my mother did for her dallying with the woods, the price I’ve avoided for sixteen years only by his grace and by the foolish love of an old king.
I know it’s coming, but I scarce can think of it just now, not when the woods are sparkling and dancing like this. The world has always moved from one extreme to the other, year after year, from scorching, dripping heat to blazing, breathtaking cold. The movements of a court, the fear of an uncle—what do they count compared with this?
And besides, something has been happening here in the last few weeks. I’ve sensed it growing, the little magics gathering, the voices multiplying in a way they shouldn’t be at this time of the year. The floating lights should be dwindling, the speaking owls should be gathering fluff for their winter nests. But the creatures of the woods have only been running more, flitting here and there more, talking to each other incessantly as the air has cooled.
It makes me want to run forever, this thing the forest is doing. It makes me want to jump up high, to scream out loud, to become something I’ve never been, a beast, a voice—magic. I let this feeling run over me. I glory in it and don’t think on all my fretting about forever.
I know it when she walks up from behind and joins me. We continue side by side, up over needle-laden hills, on into the woods. She sings, eerie and thin, a lullaby from long ago. She has a pair of needles in one hand, like the needles on the ground beneath our feet but fifty times bigger, and a skein of light trails from her arm.
She wouldn’t have come at all if I hadn’t been paying more attention than is sensible out here these past few weeks. If I’d been ignoring the creatures of the woods, if I’d been ignoring her as has been my wont for ten years now, she wouldn’t have come up to me like this, all smooth and pleasing. There are things beings like her can do, and there are things they can’t think of without your giving them leave. It’s something to do with the difference between us. It’s something to do with us being human and them being something not quite, yet not quite not, either, if you see what I am saying.
But I’m not feeling quite human now either, am I? So I let her walk beside me, and when I stop at last, when the forest is all about me so there’s nothing else in any direction, only the mossy dirt and rough bark and silvery, whispering leaves, I turn to her, and she turns to me.
I know better than to talk to her, but though the changes seem far off in this place, they’re never so far that I can forget them completely, and this might be the last chance I have for speaking. So I say to her, “What would happen, then? If we just kept walking and I never did go back?”
“Anything might,” she says, and keeps on with her humming.
“No,” I say. “I won’t take that for my answer. I’m not seven anymore. I’m a girl of near seventeen, and I’m just the sort you want to spirit away. Maybe I’d think on it, but first I’d want to know what would happen next. What do you give those girls in truth? Quick death? Slow torture? What?”
“Anything,” she says again. “We give them anything they want.”
I shake my head. “Not anything. Not a true love. Not a pile of money to spend back home.”
She takes a step closer to me, and I steel myself not to back away. Though I’ve no wish to brush against her, I’m not about to let her see my fear, neither. “We don’t promise things we cannot give,” she says. “Come with us, little Tulip, and you’ll get exactly what you want.”
It’s not only the lords and ladies who call me that. I don’t know who started it first, in fact—the people who don’t want to remember who I am or the creatures who don’t care. I haven’t heard that name from this lady, though, in many years. “Not so little anymore,” I mutter.
“No, and not so free.”
“I never was free.”
She breathes in and out through that mouth I can’t ever see, and she’s reaching out her hand again and saying, “Then leave it all. Come with me, follow me.” And she’s promising me, she’s promising more than I can bear with that hand, that voice; the whole woods shudders with this, the possibility of what I might find if I give in. “You think you’re just another one,” she says now, excited, urging me. “You think you’re another of those girls, that we don’t see any difference.”
I frown. “You say that to everyone?”
“No, Tulip. Only to you. For the others, it is an exit, an exodus.” She’s inches from me, but she’s still not touching me. She could, with one swoop of her hand, one brush of her misty hair toward mine. “For you, it will be an entrance. Come with me, my flower, and you will be coming home.”
There’s something flashing behind my eyes, some dark laughter, some impossible thing. I’m not backing away from her now, because I can’t. I can’t stop looking at her. I can’t stop seeing the way her dress falls like needles and her hair floats like fog. She is so familiar. She’s a dream I used to have.
“Remember,” she says, and she’s so close it’s as though her voice is in my head. “Remember what you are, Tulip. Remember what you could be.”
And it’s then, with her dress all lit in her hand’s light and her hair drifting about and her face as hidden as the dark spaces between tree roots, and I’m not feared of her, I’m not thinking on how strange she looks, because I’m somehow as used to her as I am to my own Gramps, my own flowers—it’s then that I remember the things I had forgotten about these woods, and what they were to me as a child.
I have said, haven’t I, that long
ago I would near lose myself in the woods, wandering, singing, forgetting. I wasn’t the king’s unwanted niece, and I wasn’t the flower girl; I was someone else. I was anyone I wanted to be, maybe, but it was different from that, too.
Remember how I said I used to knit with the lady on the log when I was a little girl? Well, I didn’t knit plain old human things. I didn’t bring out my wool and horse-bone needles and sit there next to her knitting my Gramps’s socks.
I knit what she knit.
I knit with pine needles I’d picked from the ground and held in my hand as they drew out long and strong. I spun my thread from the beams of light slicing through the trees, dappling the forest floor. I sang the song the lady on the log sang, the one with words I never could remember the moment I went home again, and we knit warm nests for the birds and secret crannies for the squirrels to hide their nuts in, and when we had been wronged by some inhabitant of the woods, we knit a revenge and sent it soaring away on its glowing wings to take our price.
And when I ran with the little ones, I shrank myself down to their size, and I grew myself a pair of wings as delicate and pale as theirs, and I screeched in their language as we went marauding against the other tribes of the forest or danced the afternoons away or sat in council, determining laws and punishments.
And when I met up with the bigger of the woods’ peoples, when a phoenix or a griffin came down south near my Gramps’s hut, I spoke to them in song, and when I was lucky, they took me up on their backs and flew me so high that I could see over almost the whole of the country: the king’s castle gleaming by the river, the many-colored fields to the east, the mountains to the north, and the trees rolling on and on forever to the south. No one saw us, the great beautiful birds and me. Now there’s a new sighting of a phoenix every week, but then it was as though we were hidden from the human realm.
Seems like all those memories had gone clean out of my head somehow. Oh, I knew I had talked with the creatures in the woods, the ones that weren’t human, the ones that breathed magic for air and were as like to sing you to your death as to your sleep.
But I had forgotten how close I was to becoming one of them before I stopped letting myself see them, before I cut myself off from their dangerous voices. I thought the song these woods sang for me was no different from the one that tempts so many girls. I thought that’s why they wanted me, because I’m a girl, not—not because I’m the dragon’s daughter.
I can’t help it; I stumble away from the lady. I reach out a hand and hold myself up by a tree. “I had forgotten,” I say.
“It has been a long time,” says the lady. “And you weren’t ready to come with us yet.”
“And now you think I am.”
“Yes.”
“What do you want me for?”
“Tulip,” she says, “we want you to come home.”
Home. There’s that word again, and this time it rings all through me, and I’ve an urge, like a hunger, to do those things I’m only just remembering. To sprout some wings. To run on all fours. To dance through the trees alongside the spirits.
When I can, I look up at the lady again, and she’s standing still where I left her, waiting for me to speak.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Why not?” She sounds so unbearably bereft, as if it breaks her heart to hear me tell her no.
But I shake my head. “He never left me.”
She doesn’t ask who I mean. “That’s enough to stop you from being what you’re meant to be?”
I say, “It’s enough for anything. It’s enough to tell me what I should be.”
He’ll be awake now back at the hut, and I know it. I imagine him peering out our back door, looking here and there for me. I’m not sure, this far away, if I would hear it when he called. If I went with this lady, I would never know how long he searched for me. I would never know how many weeks it was before he grew sick with fretting and lay down in his bed. I wouldn’t know if the king would take pity on him, the flower man without a flower, and would take him back to the castle finally, or if he would let him lie, stay silent, and with his turning away do what he hadn’t dared to do all those years with an axe or a knife or a drop of poison.
The lady’s looking at me now with her head half turned, a wary look, her eyes sharp pricks of light. Her arms are at her sides. “You used to sit with me happily,” she says, still in that eerie voice, whining now. “You know you did. You were perfection, my dark flower. No questions, just laughter, just dance.”
“I grew up.”
She shakes her head at me. The knitting hanging from her left hand is a comet flash through the woods. “You don’t have to,” she says, quiet and quieter. She’s sidling away, slipping back through the trunks. “You can have what the others have, what the others want, and more, because you are more. You can have your freedom.”
And then, between one thought and the next, she’s gone. She’s taken the spirits and the other magic folk with her. Only an ordinary wren tilts her head at me from a nearby branch before taking wing out into the depths, into that place where anything might happen. She’s gone, leaving me behind, and the gray is filling in the corners of the woods like the shading in a drawing, and I go back from the farthest I have ever been, and when I get home, the sun is setting behind me, and I know as soon as I set foot in our garden that something is horribly wrong.
Five
THE FLOWERS are restless. I sense them, swiveling their heads toward me, quivering all along their stems. Only the faintest light still brushes the garden. I thought my Gramps would be at the door, frantic, calling my name. I thought he’d have gathered a search party, and all the meadows round about would be speckled with torches.
But it’s dark, and it’s silent, and there’s a dread growing in me as I climb the back step into the hut. The flowers turn to watch me go. I’ve never felt them so upset. I’ve never felt them so uneasy with the world. Something has happened.
My Gramps isn’t in his bed. He isn’t sitting before the fire, and when I pass through to the front porch, he’s not at his table there, neither.
Someone else is.
The Lord of Ontrei’s eyes flash at me through the dusk. He stands. He’s holding something in his hand, a piece of paper, looks like. I don’t say nothing. I can’t think. My Gramps’s cane is lying on the porch, just before the steps, as though he threw it down there and never came back to pick it up. But he wouldn’t do that, would he? There’s no way my Gramps could go traipsing over the countryside without his cane. He couldn’t go ten feet without it.
“Lady,” the lord says. “I’ve some terrible news.”
“Was it the king?” I can scarce hear my own voice, there’s such a ringing in my ears. How could I leave him for this long? How could I go so far away that I don’t even know now if he screamed? “Did he take my Gramps?”
But the lord is shaking his head. “No, lady. No one took him away.”
“What, then? Where did he go?”
“Please,” says the lord, “take a seat.”
I do, without thinking, without realizing that I’m crossing the porch, pulling out the chair, sitting in it. The lord sits across from me.
He says, “I came to see if you’d change your mind.”
It takes me a bit to think on what he means. “If I’d marry you after all,” I say.
“Yes. You’ve no idea, lady, what the king’s been saying, what he’s been talking of doing.”
“I reckon he’d like to kill us both.”
There, that’s surprised him. “Not in so many words,” he says. “But that’s the general idea. It’s the woods. It’s that they’re moving in, and he thinks that you have something to do with it.”
There’s a rustle of leaves in the bushes lining our path, and I shiver, not with cold, though. It’s a tingle, a rushing in my blood as the memories of running with the woods folk flash through me again. For a moment I scarce can blame my uncle for being afraid. For a moment I think I’m the sor
t of thing that could kill him with my gnashing teeth or take his kingdom with only a whispered word.
But I shake my head. “They’ll take themselves back again. They always do.” It’s what my Gramps says, and I recall the strangeness in the flowers, the cane abandoned at my feet. “Where is he?” I say. “If he’s not been taken, where did he go?”
The Lord of Ontrei takes a deep breath, and the dread comes back a thousandfold, and I know before he says it, the worst words in the world: “He’s dead.”
“No.” We talked of this only last night, of time running out, of not escaping from forever. Just one night ago. It can’t have happened already. The world can’t—mustn’t work that way. We ought to have today, still, and tomorrow, and the next. Today, tomorrow, and the next day—and then the day after that.
“I came by this morning to see if you’d changed your mind. He was here, where I’m sitting now. He was already gone.”
“No.”
“I think it must have been his heart giving out. There was no sign of a struggle. He sat with his head upon the table, with this paper under his arm.” He pushes it toward me.
I don’t look at it. “What did you do with him, if he was gone?”
“I buried him out back.”
And there, those words. Those are the ones that make it real, that make him not just not here, but somewhere horrible, buried, like a crocus bulb that never comes up in the spring. I say, “Without me?”
“I waited hours, lady.” His voice is soft. “I didn’t know when you’d be back. I didn’t want to leave him here, to risk someone from the castle finding him. They’d have told the king, and I didn’t think he would want that. I didn’t think you would.”
And I wouldn’t, I guess. The king would take the body. He’d bury it himself, where kings are buried, I suppose. He might talk over it, make some big fuss. I wouldn’t want the king touching my Gramps.
