A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  These thoughts and memories crowded in stormy lines between Heloise’s brows even as she perched on the lowest branches of the obliging oak. But she couldn’t bear to consider them long, so she shook her head and concentrated instead on the task before her.

  One searching hand ran over the trunk, seeking old scars. There were a few, but not many; Heloise was always careful not to take too much bark from any one tree. She climbed higher to a place where the tree had not yet been cut. There, her legs wrapped tightly about a thick branch, she set to work peeling long strips of bark. This was the best time of year for harvesting oak bark, just as the sap began to rise. Using the technique her father had taught her, she gently stripped away long peels, which she dropped to lie in curls among the roots below, waiting to be gathered. She worked efficiently, ignoring the numbness in her fingers and toes, glad for a task to occupy her hands. Usually she brought along Clovis or Clotaire to gather for her, but she was just as happy to be alone today.

  “Heloise Pigman,” she muttered as she worked. “That’s a person I never want to meet.” She wouldn’t either. Not if she could help it.

  Yet this repulsive version of herself danced before her vision like the phantom of a future destiny. Determined to drive it away, Heloise started to hum.

  It was an odd little tune she hummed. Indeed, it might be a stretch to call it a tune, at least by mortal standards. With all of the charming folksongs common to that region, Heloise could have entertained herself with quite a lovely personal concert. But she never thought to hum any of those songs. Only one tune could possibly be hummed at this time of year by the people of Canneberges . . .

  Now, when the snows were melted away . . .

  Now, when the sap began to rise . . .

  Now, when in three days’ time the sun would set upon the last day of winter and rise upon the first of spring, only one song echoed in the heart of any man, woman, or child of Canneberges. The old, old song. The sacred song.

  Heloise hummed Le Sacre.

  But it was not a song meant for humming. It began simply enough, but as it progressed, it changed. And as it changed, it grew. Heloise could hear it in her head even as she’d heard it every year since before she could remember—the soulful moan of a shawm like the sound of a tree’s old spirit come to life, and the higher sighing of pipes offset by beating tabors. Then, rolling in like thunder from the sea, the much deeper boom of the copper timpani, a sound she could never hope to produce in her small throat.

  Once all of these joined together and built to a crisis point, suddenly they ceased, and the solo voice of a young maid rose up in the darkness. She sang alone at first, but soon other voices joined hers and swelled into a great ensemble of sound, voices singing in a language unknown to anyone in Canneberges yet as much a part of their lives and culture as the flax and the cranberries they sowed and harvested each year.

  Heloise hummed the opening melody. In place of the tabors and timpani, she tapped out rhythms on the oak branch and trunk. Then, after a breathless moment of silence, she opened her mouth and sang the strange, strange words:

  “Cianenso

  Nive nur norum.

  Nive noar—garph, gug! Blegh!”

  So her singing ended in a fit of coughing as the melody soared out of her range. She grimaced, adjusted her grip on her peeling knife, and began the song again an octave lower. Nevertheless, when she came to the high-soaring third line she coughed again, unable to get the incomprehensible words out.

  Oh well. She was only fourteen. She had four years to practice before she would be obliged to sing Le Sacre in public and dance with the maidens of the estate.

  Heloise began to sing again, sighing out the first word, “Cianensoooooooo.” It always amazed her how much passion she could put into her voice when no one was listening.

  At least, no one so far as she knew.

  Across from the oak tree in which Heloise worked stood a dark, heavily shrouded pine. This was a solemn tree with no musicality in its limbs, yet at the sound of Heloise’s halting voice a sudden interest seemed to rise up from the shadows beneath it. Branches moved ever so slightly.

  And something secret gazed out.

  After humming the first haunting notes faster the third time around—like a horse speeding up before it leaped the fence—Heloise opened her mouth and tried the strange words again. “Cianenso!” she belted out.

  From within the shadows of the pine, a voice echoed hers: “Cianenso.”

  This voice was so profoundly deep that Heloise could not hear its singing over her own vocalizations. But when she came to that tricky third line and once more broke off in coughing, the second voice continued without her:

  “Nive noar-ciu, lysa-ciu.

  Nivee mher

  Nivien nur jurar

  Nou iran-an!”

  Heloise, one hand clutching her knife, the other gently guiding the newest strip of peeled bark, froze. Her eyes rounded, staring at the trunk before her. In that moment she was aware of every curl of bark, every splotch of lichen, every rough contour. Everything struck her sight with such heightened awareness of being that she would have been overwhelmed . . .

  . . . except that every other sense of her body suddenly fixated on the sound behind her.

  The voice sang on, as strange as the words being sung. So strange, so deep, so wild, and so dangerous that it seemed to somehow belong with the words, as though each were a part of the others: words and voice and melody.

  But worst of all . . . or best . . . or most dreadful . . . Heloise suddenly understood what was being sung. For the words, though they remained the same upon her ear, plunged down inside her head and twisted, taking on new shapes, new sounds, new colors, taking on form and substance that she could suddenly comprehend. She heard the voice in the shadows behind her singing:

  “Night so hopeless and so pure.

  Evening comes to promise

  All my children

  Of a deeper night.”

  The voice faded away slowly, like the gentle fading of darkness into dawn. Then all was still.

  If I think about it too long, I won’t ever move again, Heloise thought. Next she thought: You’re already thinking too much. Stop it at once.

  Then she thought: You’re still doing it.

  With a wrench of her spirit far more abrupt than any movement of her limbs or muscles, she turned around. The branch she sat on swayed, its bare twigs scraping against one another. She stared at the fir tree behind her. The sound had come from that tree. But who had sung? The tree? No. She’d never heard a tree speak, much less sing, though she’d listened often enough just in case. And even if, by some chance, trees did sing, she was quite certain no tree ever sounded that dark. That feral.

  That bloodthirsty.

  Stop it, she told herself. Stop thinking. Do something!

  Few options came to mind, however. She could either stay where she was in the tree, hoping whatever had sung those words—whatever had painted those sensations in her brain—couldn’t climb trees, or . . .

  Evette would never have done what Heloise did next. Evette would have stayed put and possibly tried to cajole the secret lurker out of hiding with the force of her own persuasive sweetness. She would then have reasoned with it until, unable to bear one more word of reasonableness, it either ate her or ran away forever.

  But Heloise was not Evette.

  She turned her knife blade-down and dropped it carefully between the branches. The blade plunged into a mossy patch between roots, the handle vibrating gently on impact. Scarcely taking her eyes from the fir tree, Heloise swung herself down, branch by branch. Her braids caught on bits of twig, but she pulled them free and kept descending. Before dropping to the ground from the last branch she may have hesitated, wiped nervous sweat from her lip, and stared extra hard at the shadows under that tree. But she would never have admitted this to a soul.

  After landing in a crouch on the hard forest floor, Heloise paused only long enough to draw a brea
th before snatching up her knife. Slowly she rose and stepped carefully toward the fir tree, which grew from the bottom of a ditch on the far side of the path, its lowest needle-veiled branches brushing the earth to create a perfect, cave-like hiding place.

  Heloise, her body sideways to make the smallest target possible, her knife upraised and poised to plunge, drew near. As she approached, her movements slowed as though she pressed against some invisible force. But she didn’t stop. One cold step at a time, she progressed.

  Something was under there. Something . . . She could hear it breathing. Something big.

  Something too big to fit in that small space.

  Something impossible.

  She tried to swallow, but her mouth and throat were too dry. Her eyes narrowed beneath her frowning brow, as though she could somehow force them to see the un-seeable.

  If you run away, it will pounce on you from behind, she thought. So it’s a good thing you’re not thinking about running away. Absolutely.

  She no longer breathed. Her lungs were too tight to allow for breath. But it was still breathing. Deep, deep breaths.

  “Who—who is there?” Heloise said.

  Even as the words left her mouth, a sudden gust of wind caught them up, whirled to the top of a tall tree, and plunged back down to the forest floor. Heloise, her braids and skirts billowing in that wind, glanced after it. Realizing her mistake at once, she forced herself to look back at the fir tree. Its branches shivered as though something had just rushed out from under it. But nothing could be seen, no shadow, no form.

  The heavy presence she had sensed only moments ago was gone.

  The wind, meanwhile, was very present, and it burst out laughing, an insane, high laugh. Heloise, furious, brandished her knife, but what could a knife do against a wind? As it gusted in her face, tugging at her braids again, she slashed, but to no avail. The wind only laughed harder.

  Little bits of paper whirled around Heloise like a small tornado. Tiny papercuts nicked her hands and cheeks. Grinding her teeth, she threw up her arms to protect her eyes.

  The wind laughed so loudly that Heloise didn’t hear the sound of approaching hooves. So when young Master Benedict de Cœur rounded a turn in the path, his horse shied, and he shouted, and Heloise’s story almost came to a swift and crushing end.

  But just at the last, the horse was able to pivot, and Heloise herself, despite the force of the wind, fell down the slope and landed in the fir tree’s branches. Benedict, less fortunate in his landing site, sprawled on the path and stared up at bare twigs whirling against the sky as his vision spun. His horse galloped on down the path and disappeared into the trees.

  “Iubdan’s beard,” Benedict cursed. Then he coughed, propped himself up on one elbow, and turned to scowl at the wild-haired maid in the ditch. “Iubdan’s crown and beard, girl, what do you think you’re doing?” he snarled.

  And then he blushed.

  FOUR

  The family of Cœur, longtime masters of Canneberges and other great estates across the kingdom, were red-bearded, red-blooded, red-tempered men. As red as the cranberries in the bogs; as red as the dyes with which the dyers stained their reams of fine flax thread. Their great ancestor Rufus the Red (for whom the Flaxman family’s rooster was named) was a man of such bloody history that all painted depictions of him were done entirely in shades of crimson and scarlet, and the only carvings were rendered in redwood.

  Such was Benedict’s heritage. But he doubted very much that Rufus the Red (his ancestor, not the rooster) had suffered under such a curse of blushes as he battled every day.

  For Benedict’s red blood, much to his chagrin, was severely checked by the delicate, refined blue blood of his mother’s family, the Bellamys: a quiet, thoughtful assortment of aristocrats whose hereditary taste inclined far more toward poetry, introspection, and good-breeding than ruthlessness.

  Thus Benedict, though he boasted a temper as potent as any among the descendants of the famous Rufus, also boasted a quick-rising shame that countered all expressions of fury with immediate expressions of abject apology. Thus in his father’s eyes he was a wet puppy; in his mother’s, a hot-headed hound. He could never win.

  “I mean to say,” he said, still propped on his elbow and watching the peasant girl disentangle herself from the branches of a fir tree, “I do apologize. I shouldn’t have sworn at you like that.”

  “You’re dragon-eaten right!” Heloise snapped, her head emerging from the ditch. Her braids had mostly come undone, and wild curls stood up around her head, giving her the appearance of some strange forest spirit of wicked intent rising up out of the soil itself. Her eyes flashed with what Benedict took to be rage but was more surprise than anything.

  His blush deepened. He had never heard a girl use such a curse. Cursing by the Dragon was something only the most daring of the older boys at university ever tried, and then only behind the headmaster’s back.

  But peasant girls weren’t like normal girls. They were uneducated so possessed no breadth of understanding. One couldn’t expect too much from them, now could one?

  Still blushing but assuming an expression of noble condescension and forbearance, Benedict picked himself up, brushed himself off, and strode to the ditch. There he bent, one hand on his knee, the other extended to Heloise.

  She stared at it. He might have been offering her a spider, so great was the disgust curling her lip. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “Um. I’d like to help you up?” Benedict said. It was more a question than a statement, as though he wasn’t certain this was the right response to give.

  Heloise continued to stare. Then she shrugged, kicked a bare foot free of her tangled skirts, and pulled herself upright. “I don’t need help,” she said, then took a step and almost slipped back down the incline. Out of pure necessity her flailing hand caught his, and she found herself held in a firm grasp which drew her back up onto the path.

  It was then that Heloise caught sight of Benedict’s hat lying in the middle of the road and she knew whose hand she held and at whom she had just so roundly cursed. Now it was her turn to blush.

  Heloise had never before seen Master Benedict close up. He had been away at university for several years now, only home for the occasional visit, and she could not recall having glimpsed him even once during those intervals. She knew the general idea of what he looked like, however: tall, fair, and thin, like his mother. All the farm girls of Canneberges claimed that he was handsome, though now that she saw him up close, Heloise thought his features rather more odd than attractive. In fact, she thought he looked a bit like Rufus the Red (the rooster, not the ancestor).

  But everyone on Canneberges estate knew that the marquis’s son wore a bright blue cap set with trailing peacock feathers. There wasn’t a hat like it to be seen anywhere else on the estate and not a finer one to be had in all the kingdom. Or so the dyer boys claimed, with no little envy. After all, who wouldn’t want a hat adorned with peacock feathers?

  And this was the hat Heloise now saw with one feather bent and broken at a terrible angle.

  “Oh, sweet Lights Above,” Heloise whispered. She shook her hand free of Benedict’s grasp and tried to curtsy so hard she almost sat down. “Master Benedict! Sir! I—”

  I wish I had pinned up my braids like Evette suggested.

  The thought flashed through her brain, and it was enough to make her want to gag. Dragons blast it! Why was Evette always right?

  Benedict waited a polite interval to see if the peasant girl would finish her excuses or explanations. But she had apparently lost all power of speech. “Well,” he said at last, “no harm done.” He turned to fetch his hat and immediately spotted the inaccuracy of that statement. “Oh.” He picked up the hat, and the broken feather dangled forlornly before falling, leaving behind a sorry stub. The bright eye of the peacock feather gleamed in the dust of the path. “My man will have something to say about this,” Benedict muttered, more to himself than to Heloise. He sig
hed and placed the hat on his head.

  The next moment a great wind gusted, and the hat was off his head and caught in Heloise’s hands.

  She stared at it.

  Benedict stared at it.

  “Um,” said Heloise.

  “Um,” said Benedict. He put out his hand. “May I have my hat back, please?”

  Bobbing another curtsy, Heloise all but threw the hat at him. He accepted it with more grace and carefully set it at a jaunty angle over his hair. No sooner had his hands let go of the brim, however, when—

  Heloise gasped as the hat hit her in the face. She caught it and dragged it down, her eyes round and staring into the equally startled gaze of Master Benedict.

  “Excuse me, little girl,” said he, “but would you kindly not . . .”

  At least he had the good grace to stop talking. Heloise would grant him that, even if she couldn’t find it in her heart to forgive him for calling her “little girl.” (He wasn’t that much older than she was! Perhaps closer to Evette’s age than hers, but still!) She narrowed her eyes and watched him as he calculated whether or not there had been enough time for her to leap that distance, snatch the hat, leap back again, and slap it across her own face.

  “Nope,” she said, tossing the hat back to him. “It wasn’t me.”

  Benedict flushed a brighter crimson than ever, if that were possible. “Then how—”

  He didn’t finish. Before he could, the wind caught the hat again and returned it to Heloise’s hands. It giggled. And a strange, mad giggle it was, high-pitched and otherworldly. No human throat could make a sound like that.

  Nevertheless, Benedict’s brow lowered in a scowl which he focused on Heloise. She scowled back, determined he wouldn’t begin to imagine that she had made such a twittering noise. “Here,” she said, stepping closer and holding out the hat. “Take it.”