A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  She was too busy thinking: I must be going mad.

  Before her eyes swam the image of her own face, fat forehead and all, gazing up at her from the mirror glass. She took another bite and a third, chewing the bread slowly and saying nothing even when Clovis pinched her arm and Clotaire tugged at a curl.

  Oblivious to her sister’s uncharacteristically taciturn mood, Evette bustled. She often bustled, for it was the right, farm-maidenly thing to do, and she always did the right thing. Evette bustled while Heloise galumphed; so it was no wonder that half the boys on Canneberges estate were bringing Evette clusters of posies tied up with string while Heloise had yet to receive even one wilted blossom from a single daring admirer. Evette was the perfect example of everything a young man looked for in a future farm-wife. Heloise was just . . . Heloise.

  Evette fetched the broom and smoothed out the ruffled floor rushes—which she had only just finished smoothing in the wake of her brothers’ morning fracas. But that was Evette for you: The more fruitless the task, the more sweetly she pursued it.

  “Meme let you sleep long since it’s your birthday, Heloise,” she said, touching Clovis’s bare feet with the broom bristles. He obliged by lifting them, and she swept beneath. “But she asked me to tell you that the south-end dye house sent a request for more—”

  “I heard!” Heloise snapped even as she pushed more pottage into her mouth.

  Evette paused, broom upraised mid-swish. Her eyes took on that expression of, not anger, not irritation . . . but compelling disappointment.

  There was never any satisfaction to be had in snapping at Evette.

  “There’s no call to be short,” she said in her kindest, most long-suffering voice, the voice usually reserved for the rowdiest of the five brothers. “You are a young woman now, Heloise, not a child. It’s time you started behaving with some decorum.”

  Clotaire and Clovis glanced up at Heloise’s face. They saw the dark clouds gathering. As one, they hunched over their bowls, battening down against a storm.

  Evette, unmindful, resumed her sweeping. “And you know, you really must learn to tame that hair of yours. It’s not seemly to leave it loose like that. You look like a dandelion about to burst. And long braids are unbecoming on a girl of fourteen. I started pinning up my braids on my twelfth birthday. You don’t want to look like a child, do you?”

  Really, it wasn’t the things she said. It was the way she said them.

  No, honestly, it wasn’t even the way she said them. It was the way Heloise knew she meant them. Always just shy of truly belittling, but in a tone so well-meaning that, no matter what, Evette would come across as the sweet, kind, endearing sister and Heloise as the unpardonable beast for not appreciating her. Sometimes it was just too much to be borne.

  Heloise dug her fold of bread into her pottage. She tested the balance.

  The next moment, Evette screamed, dropped her broom, and put both hands up to her face from which a great glob of pottage dripped.

  To a chorus of yells and laughter from her brothers—and an immediate outbreak of pottage-flinging that would keep Evette busy cleaning up for ages—Heloise dropped her bowl, leapt to her feet, grabbed her basket, snatched her peeling knife down from its hook, and fled out into the cottage yard. Even as Evette called futile protests after her, she vaulted over the gate and darted on beyond to the flax fields above the bogs.

  Others have heard me in the past. Many others, most long dead. I think of them often as I sit in my window. I think of them as I never used to think of mortals when I lived in these worlds. They are each dear to me in their way, and I am sorry for what became of them. Such brave young hearts attempting the impossible!

  The impossible to which I call them.

  But what choice have I? Or they, for that matter?

  Sometimes I wonder if it would be kinder to never call to them at all. To let them mourn. To let them forget . . .

  THREE

  Grandmem Flaxman was an old, old woman who lived according to old, old ways. This meant that she rose several hours before dawn every morning, even though it was many years since there’d been any need for her to do so. She had long since moved herself and her belongings out of her dead husband’s cottage—making way for her son, Cerf, his wife, and their ever-growing brood—and into a humble, shack-like dwelling up above the south-end bogs. She didn’t even keep a goat anymore. Cerf always made certain she had food and milk enough brought to her every few days by one of her grandsons or by young Heloise.

  So Grandmem had settled into an existence of . . . well, much though she hated to admit it, of uselessness.

  But then, she thought, you’ve been useless all your life. Especially when it counted most.

  Nevertheless, she always rose before dawn and sat, as she did this particular morning, watching the sunrise from her doorstep. It was a passable sunrise as far as sunrises went. A clear sky, a pale sheen of color fanning rosy-pink and then warm gold across all the world to wash away the frost that gathered here on the verge of spring. A thin film of ice on the edges of the cranberry bogs sparkled then melted away into nothing, like a Faerie’s jewel when glimpsed by mortal eyes. Painters sitting where Grandmem now sat would be inspired to mix new pigments; poets would feel the need to sharpen their penknives and pare their goose quills down to delicate points. Oh yes, it was a very nice sunrise, truly.

  “It don’t compare though, do it, Cateline?” Grandmem muttered. In one hand she held a carrot, which she gummed occasionally, too tired just now to fetch her grinding stone and mash it into edible mush. She took it from her mouth and heaved a great sigh. “It don’t compare to the sights you’re seeing. But I think you’d be happy to trade. I know I would if I was you.”

  It had become so much more difficult in the last few years to drive away these melancholy thoughts, accompanied as they always were by lashings of self-reproach.

  The sun continued to rise. Dawn lengthened into morning. And still Grandmem could not bring herself to get up from her doorstep and hobble inside. So she watched the morning, watched the flocks of songbirds singing their many choruses (which, she knew in her unromantic soul, were really nothing more than territorial battle cries but no less lovely for that), and continued to mutter to herself as she often did these days. “Are you eating finer things than last year’s carrots, Cateline? Or do you even need food where you are?”

  Then she saw a shadow that should not be there.

  Long and low, it passed along the edge of the nearest cranberry bog. It had no source to cast it—at least, none that Grandmem could see. But Grandmem knew she did not have to see something for it to be there. She knew this better than anyone.

  She slid the carrot back into her mouth, rolled it around thoughtfully, and watched the shadow lurk its way along. It was the lurkingest shadow that ever existed. “So,” she said around the carrot. “He’s back. He’s come for her now.”

  Then she frowned, the many wrinkles of her face piling into a single point between her hairless brows. Thoughts came much more slowly than they once had. But they could be sorted through and arranged in coherent order if she was careful about them. The shadow . . . the melting ice . . . the vanishing frost . . .

  Cateline . . .

  “I wonder,” Grandmem said even as the shadow slipped away up the hill and vanished into the still-deeper shadows of the Oakwood, the largest plot of forest on the estate grounds. She removed the carrot again and spun it slowly between her quivering fingers. “I wonder if young Heloise has met herself yet?”

  So saying, she got to her feet. This in itself took some doing, but she was fired with a determination unlike anything she had felt in years. She dropped the munched-on carrot in the dust and, clutching her rough-spun shawl about her shoulders, set off toward the little track that wound its way over the flax fields and on to Cerf’s cottage.

  Before she’d taken more than a few tottering steps toward the path, she saw her granddaughter, Heloise, fly past in such a rush that one ha
lf expected to glimpse the Black Dogs themselves snapping at her heels. Heloise hadn’t even seen her old grandmother. On she sprang like a barefoot rabbit over the fields, around the bogs, and up the same way the lurking shadow had gone.

  “Hmmmm,” said Grandmem.

  She dismissed the ridiculous notion of following after the girl, of giving her some warning. What was the use? Besides, she’d never catch her. No, best continue to the cottage. Wait for her there. She’d be back, after all.

  It wasn’t quite time. Soon, but not yet.

  Tightening her grip on her shawl, Grandmem continued on her way. Moments later a breeze blew past, trailing bits of paper in its wake. Grandmem’s ears were not as sharp as they’d once been, but she distinctly heard a mad little laugh. She watched the paper trail until it too vanished up into the forest.

  “Hmmmm,” Grandmem said.

  Disembodied laughs are enough to disrupt the balance of most minds. Not hers. Her old memory was too stuffed with strange sights, sounds, smells, and sensations to have room for disruption. She continued on her way.

  The beat of a horse’s hooves approached. Grandmem peered ahead, squinting against the morning sun. A tall horse—an elegant horse. That could only mean gentry. With a muttered curse, Grandmem tottered off the path and nearly fell into a ditch. She was only an old serf-woman, hardly worth the four walls of the shack in which she lived. She couldn’t share even a humble farm path with a great lord or lady. It wouldn’t be decent.

  She kept her head bowed, wondering if her knees still had it in them to curtsy. The horseman drew near and cast a long shadow across her.

  “My good old mother,” said a voice that, despite its trembling excitement, remained completely steeped in courtly courtesy. “Tell me, have you seen . . .”

  The voice trailed off. Grandmem, who disliked being called “my good old mother” even by her own son, glared up at the horseman. He boasted a head of straw-colored hair all tumbled about in fashionable curls. His face was young and too oddly angular to be considered quite handsome, though he was eye-catching in his way.

  Most noteworthy was the manner in which he sat there on his tall horse, frowning, his mouth still open.

  Grandmem recognized him at once: the Honorable Benedict de Cœur of Canneberges, only son of the Marquis and Marquise de Canneberges. Come home from university for the winter due to illness, if she recalled the farmer gossips correctly. She regarded the young fellow through one eye, the other squinted shut. She had been around long enough to learn a thing or two about reading faces and expressions. And she could see that, young lordling though he was, Benedict was deeply embarrassed.

  “Um,” he said, trying to find words that would not come.

  “If you’re wondering,” said Grandmem, “if I saw an invisible breeze blow by, carrying paper-bits behind it, I did. I did, yes. Not two minutes ago. And it was laughing, yes, like a very fiend.”

  “You did?” The young scholar brightened considerably. Which is to say, his pale face flushed an impressive crimson. “Which way did it go?”

  “Up yonder, toward the Oakwood,” said Grandmem, indicating with a nod of her head. “You’ll be knowing, being the great big lord-man you are, that it is bad luck to chase after laughing breezes?”

  But Benedict had no time for luck, be it good or bad. He fumbled in his pocket for a coin, found none, and blushed again with still greater embarrassment. Grandmem could have rolled her eyes, but no one would have seen them behind all her wrinkles, so she didn’t bother.

  “Away with you now,” she said, as though she were the lady and he the serf dismissed at her word. “Away, and may you find a luck to your liking.”

  The young lord tipped his hat and urged his tall horse onward up the trail after the wind and, though he did not know it, after Heloise as well.

  Grandmem watched him go. Then she said, “Hmmm.”

  And continued on her way.

  It is amazing what a good rage and a good run can do to return a sense of order and reasonableness to a mind disturbed. By the time Heloise, panting and gasping at the painful stitch in her side, reached the outermost fringes of the Oakwood, she had nearly convinced herself that what she had thought she’d seen in the mirror was nothing at all. Purely dreamed up. Imagined. Fancied. Nonsense, really.

  Besides, even if by some strange twist of madness she truly had seen her reflection wink while she herself was wide-eyed and staring—which, pfffsh, was ridiculous—did it really matter? Evette was still the most obnoxious and bothersome person ever to walk the fields of Canneberges; and it was surely far more worthwhile to spend a morning contemplating the various grievances inflicted by a perfect sister than worrying about reflections, winking or otherwise.

  So Heloise paused a moment just within the shadows of the forest, bent over with her hands (one clutching the long handle of her peeling knife) on her knees, waiting until the stitch in her side eased. Despite the pain, she couldn’t repress the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth even as her brow continued to frown. The sight of Evette with pottage on her face, her jaw dropped, her eyes tightly squeezed shut, her scream filling the cottage—that was a memory to treasure indeed! It was a rare day that saw Evette even remotely discomfited.

  Heloise’s smile soon vanished, however, as she straightened up and entered the Oakwood. The first faint notes of what would soon swell into a full chorus of shame already played in the back of her mind. After all, Evette hadn’t done anything so terribly wrong. She was just . . . perfect, sweet, well-meaning, and kind-hearted. She was just herself.

  “And you, Heloise, are a beast,” Heloise muttered. By now her frown was quite severe and, though she did not know it, she looked like a wrinkle-free reflection of her stern-faced grandmother in that moment.

  As she proceeded into the forest, she caught her wild hair in both hands, parted it down the middle, and tied it in braids. It was so thick that each braid was fatter than her own wrist. Considering Evette’s kindly suggestions over breakfast, she almost wound them up on top of her head like a young woman should. But no. She may be a beast; but she was her own beast, and let no one try to tell her otherwise! She had no hairpins on her anyway.

  With this decision firmly in mind, she chose the left-hand trail into deeper Oakwood and set off at a leisurely stride, her basket bouncing on her hip. Oakwood was not so called because it was made up entirely of oaks, nor indeed were oaks the most prominent tree to be found there. But they were the most important tree, and few people ventured into the wood above the south-end except to gather oak bark. The prosperity of Canneberges depended on oak bark, which could be boiled down for its strong tannins, the best and least-smelly fixative known for dying cloth. Canneberges estate was famous throughout the kingdom—and kingdoms beyond—for its bolts of rich red linen.

  Heloise, as one of the primary bark-gatherers of the south-end, was an essential part of that fame.

  “Heloise Oakwoman,” she whispered to herself as she approached the first tall oak in her path. Oakwoman would be an excellent name for her, a name with standing completely distinct from her father’s. But it was unlikely at best, and she knew it. No one was called Oakwoman. It wasn’t how things were done.

  Heloise dropped her basket among the roots, tucked her long skirts into her belt, and, knife gripped between her teeth, climbed into the lower branches of the oak. As she went she growled a different name around the knife: “Heloise Pigman.”

  Because, truth be told, that name was much more likely. In another few years—very few now, though she rarely allowed herself to think about it—she, like Evette, would be pushed, prodded, and eventually matched up with some farmer or dyer or pig-keeper lad. Then she would take on his name. His standing.

  “Wouldn’t you just hate to be a Pigman?” Heloise had asked her sister not many weeks ago while the two of them, bundled warmly against the last of the winter snows, made their way across the yard to feed Gutrund the sow.

  Evette, reaching into the pen to
scratch Gutrund behind the ear just where she liked it, had smiled sweetly. “Pigs are important,” she’d said. “And the pig-keepers up at the Great House are respectable men of good standing.”

  Heloise made a face. “Respectable or not, they stink worse than Gutrund here. Whenever Gy Pigman comes calling, it’s all I can do not to pinch my nose before he’s stepped over the threshold!”

  Evette, still smiling, dropped her eyes demurely. Gy Pigman was one of her many and most ardent suitors. “You know, Heloise,” she said then, “we don’t have the right to be as choosy as all that.”

  Heloise had frowned at this statement. Hers was a temperament prone to scowls, and the oncoming advent of adulthood combined with her sister’s never-ending practicality only dampened the little good humor with which nature had deemed fit to grace her. “Then you marry Gy if you must,” she’d declared, dumping the table scraps and root vegetables so quickly that they slopped over the edge of Gutrund’s trough. “You marry him, because if you don’t, he might come calling on me next. And I wouldn’t have him for all Madame de Cœur’s silks and jewels!”

  “Oh, Heloise,” said Evette, “I wouldn’t worry. I doubt very much Gy will ever want to come calling on you.”

  Anyone else delivering such a line would have deserved—and likely received—a smack in the face. Not Evette. She spoke it with the utmost sincerity, truly intending to comfort her sister.

  It was unbearable.

  So Heloise had whirled about, empty slop-bucket swinging, and stomped back to the cottage. Evette, her smile never wavering, had followed in silence behind. After all, if you were a respectable young woman, you must marry a respectable young man, take his name, assume his standing, and raise his children. It was how things were done. Especially by the daughters of flax farmers.