Mother, Maiden, Crone

by Gwen Benaway

  As the next wave of bandits stepped over their fallen friends and ran toward them, Aoyas pressed the tip of her knife deep into the veins of her right wrist. A sharp pain washed over her as blood poured from her exposed arteries. The thread of Spirit magic inside her flickered as her resolve weakened, but then she heard Rais cry out. One of the bandits had scored a deep cut on his right arm and he was bleeding. It would all be over soon.

  Not tonight, she thought, I won’t let him die for me. She pressed the dagger deeper and called the thread of Spirit fully into being. It roared around her, drawing its power from her blood spilling onto the ground. The air shimmered before her eyes for a moment and then the Spirit thread tore out of her toward the bandits. It became a forked bolt of white lightning, blasting into their skin and jumping between them.

  Rais leapt back from the fray as soon as her lightning struck out. He ran toward her, but she was already falling. Spirit magic was stronger than Elemental. When the Empire had invaded her homeland, they’d discovered just how powerful it was when their high wards failed and lightning fell on their armies. But like all great powers, it had a terrible price paid in blood.

  Her life for a spell felt like a fair trade when it meant that Rais would live. She wondered what he would do without her as she felt her head slam into the ground. Just before the infinite dark took her, she saw the remaining bandits turn back and flee from the village. Their leader, the scarred man, lay dead beside his horse in a pool of blood and scorched flesh.

  The last thing she heard was Rais’s voice saying her name and then, from some distant place she barely remembered, the sound of her grandmother’s laugh echoing around her like a soft summer rain.

  Light came back slowly. She tried to stay hidden in the dark as long as she could, chasing the remnants of her grandmother’s presence, but the light kept growing around her. Soon she could feel her body again, the roughness of the bedding against her skin and the coarseness of the straw mattress. Voices came next. She heard people talking in the distance and could feel their heaviness of their spirits. Finally, the dark abandoned her completely and Aoyas had no choice but to wake up.

  She opened her eyes. Sunlight streamed from the small window in their inn room. She was alone. The room was stuffy and smelled of sickness. She tried to rise up in bed, but it hurt too much. Looking down, she could see a large white linen bandage wrapped around her wrist. It was blood stained but looked fresh. Someone was taking care of her.

  “Rais?” Her voice cracked as she spoke, momentarily dropping down into a deep pitch that she hadn’t used since childhood. “Is someone there?”

  He might be dead. I could have survived but maybe they killed him. Fear raced through her body, sweeping away whatever comfort she felt at finding herself still alive. Tears rushed to the corners of her eyes, but she stifled the panicked sob that swelled in her throat. Before she could think of what to do next, she heard steps outside her door. She reached for her magic but found nothing. It was gone, completely dried up from her last spell.

  “Aoyas?” Rais opened the door gingerly, almost as if he didn’t believe that she had really called out for him. “Are you awake?”

  “Hey.” Her voice cracked again. She coughed, trying to clear the dryness out of her throat. Rais stepped into their room and came to sit beside her on the bed.

  “Hey.” His voice was gentle as he reached out and brushed a strand of her hair behind her ears. “You’re alive, I guess.”

  “I think so.” She looked into his eyes, the same brown eyes that caught her attention so many years ago. “And so are you.”

  “Yeah.” Rais shrugged as he took her hand into his. “We’re both alive.”

  “What about the bandits?”

  “Either dead or run off. The villagers think we’re heroes. They want us to stay for the season in case the bandits return, but they can’t pay us.” He squeezed her hand softly before smiling at her. “I know it doesn’t make good business sense, but would you be okay if we said yes to that?”

  “You want to stay in an isolated mountain village with me for no pay?” Aoyas raised her left eyebrow at him. “Did the bandits hit your head a lot or something?”

  Rais laughed before replying, “No. It just sounds nice.”

  Aoyas stayed quiet for a moment, savouring the familiar warmth of his hand in hers. She noticed that the breeze from the open window smelled of wild roses and mountains. “You must really love me, huh?”

  Rais squeezed her hand again, much tighter than the first time. He cleared his throat and wiped his eyes with his sleeve before answering her.

  “Yeah. I really do.”

  Forest’s Edge

  Audrey Vest

  It is a small village, in a valley at the base of a range of jagged mountains at the edge of a dark forest far far far away in the north. Cold houses built on cold earth beneath a thin grey sky. Wolves that howl in the darkness. A wind that whispers ceaselessly in numb ears. It talks of old things in dead tongues—buried lords, whose rotting corpses lie forgotten in damp tombs; mounds of ash gone to flower; and castles ripped apart by time, their bones ground to dust and blown away.

  The villagers say the woods there are a gateway to Fairy; they say that to walk beneath the forest’s laden boughs is to embrace death (or worse); they say that at night if you peer between the wide trunks you might catch a glimpse of the strange lights of the fey kin’s midnight banquets and hear the distant music of their laughter, and that if you do not run then and douse your head in cold water and burn sage and lavender and breathe the smoke deep into your lungs, that you shall fall under their spell and be drawn back to them and eat their food and spend forevermore in a daze at their grand tables.

  Dark falls early in this country, and from the little windows of the village houses seeps the glow of oil lamps and candles and hearth fires over which hang pots of fragrant soups made rich by the blood of that month’s slaughtered cow.

  One building smoulders hotter than the rest, and inside it a woman with dark hair pounds a length of metal until its glow has faded all to naught. She picks it up with tongs and nestles it among the coals of the furnace. Sweat runs down her back. When the metal is bright again, she takes it and hammers it here and bends it there, and when it’s finished, she dips it in a vat of oil and wipes her brow with a soft rag while the metal hisses in its bath. The woman sighs then, strong as a bellows. Her name is Denya. She has spent her life here, thirty years of long winters and pale springs that never bloom to summer but instead die unripe and wither beneath early snow.

  There comes a whimpering from the corner of the forge, a frail sound like a dog too sick or tired or old to bark. Denya ladles broth from a pot hung by the furnace into a wooden bowl which she takes to the corner, to her daughter, Eliya, who lies curled in a nest of blankets atop an old straw mattress.

  Denya sits by her daughter’s side and brushes a lock of hair from her pale cheek. Eliya’s skin is cold, despite the heat of the forge. She shivers at her mother’s touch and Denya draws her hand back.

  “My darling,” she says, “my dearest,” and her daughter’s eyes flutter open, her irises as pale and grey as the late sky.

  “Will you drink some now?” Denya asks and Eliya nods weakly.

  Denya lifts her daughter’s head and brings spoonfuls of thin broth to her lips, which the girl drinks slowly, as though the labour of swallowing is almost more than she can bare. When the small bowl has been emptied, Eliya’s eyes close again and Denya lays her back against her pillow and pulls the blankets close around her once more.

  It has been three weeks like this. Three weeks of Eliya shivering in the forge while her mother sweats, of Denya watching her daughter grow thin and weak, eating nothing and drinking only broth and murmuring fitfully in her sleep at strange dreams whose contents Denya can only guess at. Denya is afraid. The village hangs now at the end of autumn—any day now t
he first snows will begin in earnest, and the air will come alive with the biting malice of deep frost, and the sun will shine less and less through the haze as the black jaws of winter close around them. Denya fears that she will watch her daughter wither to nothing. That she will be left alone to bury her behind the forge in the frozen earth beside her wife’s empty grave.

  Such is the truth of life here, the hardness of it. Death is a fox lurking in the garden, waiting for the weak or wounded, for the old, the young, the tired or sick. Most die in ordinary ways and are buried in the little cemetery by the old church where the villagers all gather on Thursdays to pray and make offerings to the spirits of their dead.

  Some few, though, die unseen. They vanish from their homes in the night, and in the morning some trace of them is found by the forest’s edge—a slipper, a scarf, a tuft of cloth caught on a bramble. They are the dead who must be forgotten, for they are cursed. They have no headstones in the churchyard, no offerings and prayers. To speak of them is sinful. To remember them, dangerous. Better to forget them outright, lest you yourself fall prey to their folly and wander where no human ought.

  Denya smooths her daughter’s hair and frets. She looks at the empty ground beside her, where Bren should be kneeling with her. When she closes her eyes, Denya can almost see her wife’s face turned toward their daughter, her mouth drawn in a frown, her brow knit with fear. Bren would catch her staring and turn, and their eyes would meet and grow cloudy, and they would force wan smiles they didn’t feel and clasp their hands together and squeeze tightly.

  Eliya moans faintly. Denya stands. She unties her apron and pulls her jacket on and wraps Eliya’s blankets around her and takes her up into her arms. Eliya is small for a girl of seven, and made feather-light from her wasting. She stirs, and Denya whispers softly to soothe her, and she carries her daughter from the forge out into the cold evening. They walk through the village, past Falstom’s beer house, the sound of laughter rich in the air. At the far edge of the village Denya takes a path along the base of a wide hill, and they come eventually to Maro’s cottage.

  It is an old, round building of grey stones. The door is rough against Denya’s knuckles when she knocks. Maro opens the door and peers out at them from beneath her wrinkles, and she frowns and draws them in and latches the door behind her.

  “Lay her there,” Maro says and Denya settles her daughter into Maro’s bed.

  The cottage is a single room whose walls are lined with shelves full of jars and bottles and wicker baskets. Dried herbs and flowers hang in neat bunches from the rafters, and the air is almost as hot as the forge. Denya shrugs off her jacket and holds it nervously before her.

  “She still isn’t better,” Denya says.

  Maro harrumphs and shuffles to the hearth, where she pours two mugs of pungent tea from a kettle.

  “Warmth and soup, I told you,” Maro says and hands a mug to Denya. “Nothing else for it but that.”

  Denya puts her mug down on the table. “There must be something.”

  Maro shakes her head and takes a long sip of tea.

  “She’s skin and bone,” Denya pleads. “She can barely move, she sleeps all day and talks in her sleep, and even in the forge she still shivers!”

  A pot over the hearth begins to bubble over, and Maro shuffles over to stir it and move it to the edge of the fire.

  “Nothing I can do for her,” she says.

  Denya says, “Please,” and takes a step toward the old woman.

  Maro sighs and runs a hand through her short, wild hair, her back still turned to Denya.

  “You can work magic,” Denya begs. “How is there nothing?”

  “Not magic!” Maro snaps. “I brew potions, that’s all. I fix flesh. Always something to be done for flesh. Her sickness is in her spirit.”

  There are tears in Denya’s eyes now, and they spill free and run down her cheeks and drip onto the worn floorboards beneath her. Maro watches and twists her thin hands together, and she looks away from Denya when the woman begins to sob.

  “What can I do?” Denya asks between her ragged breaths. “How do I save her?”

  Maro refills her mug and stares into it. “Broth.”

  Denya makes an anguished sound and sinks to the floor.

  Maro sits in a chair at her table. She says “Broth,” softly, and then louder, “fey broth.”

  Denya’s breath catches. She straightens.

  “From the forest?”

  Maro nods, her eyes fixed intently upon a beetle slowly ambling along the edge of her table. “Only that will warm her. She has been in the woods, I think, and has caught a chill there. I am sorry.”

  Denya stands then, and looks to Maro’s window. Outside it is full dark, the sky black and moonless.

  “Take these,” Maro says and offers Denya a lamp and an iron dagger.

  Denya takes both and dons her jacket, and she kisses Eliya on her forehead. Maro comes over to them and cuts a lock of Eliya’s hair, which she fastens to a length of cord that she ties around Denya’s neck.

  “To remind you,” Maro says.

  Denya wipes the tears from her eyes. She takes a last look at her daughter and then she steps out into the night. Her jacket is heavy, but as she walks east toward the forest the cold begins to worm its way inside her. She has forgotten her scarf, and her gloves, and the air is heavy with the weight of coming snow.

  At the wood’s edge she stops. The trees are dark and thick and gnarled. She has been here before, once as a child on a dare with her friends, and then again three years ago when she found Bren’s necklace hanging from a low branch the morning after she vanished. There had been a bird higher up in the tree, crying out it’s lilting, tuneless song. She stood by the forest’s edge and stared into its gloom, her mind a wheel spinning madly, every muscle in her tensed and aching. She might have screamed, then. Might have clutched the necklace tight and rushed in after her wife, if the neighbors who’d come to help her search hadn’t laid their hands upon her shoulders and pulled her away. As they half-dragged, half-carried her back to the village, the bird followed, and every morning for three months Denya woke to the sound of it singing outside her window. Her sobs were never loud enough to drown it from her ears.

  Eliya had been too young then to understand what had happened. She had not wept for her mother, not like Denya had. Only later did Bren’s absence become real to her and then Eliya grew quiet and took to writing Bren’s name in the dirt when she practised her letters.

  Denya’s breath comes in white puffs before her. She grips the knife tight in her shivering hand and walks forward to the edge of the trees and past it, and the stillness of the forest wraps around her like a quilt of lead.

  The lamplight is pale and weak. She treads carefully over roots and fallen branches. In deeper, deeper, every step a transgression. The air grows warmer. There is a smell of old rot; musty leaves and dead wood gnawed by worms and old moss hang like tattered banners from high boughs. She walks and looks and strains her ears, but all she can hear are her own footsteps, and there are no lights in the distance to guide her way.

  Now she comes to an oddity, a place where the trees give way to a little clearing, though the canopy is still thick above so that the place has the feeling of a large room. The ground within is flat, hard earth, and it is warm here, and the lantern seems almost to glow brighter when Denya steps inside. The air smells sweeter. There is a sort of bed made of clean moss near the edge of the clearing, next to a tree stump upon which sits a golden cup and a glass pitcher of water with rose petals. The scene is wrong somehow, though. Too large. The cup is as big as her head, she can see that now, and the pitcher larger than her chest, and the bed is long enough again by half for even the tallest men of her village, and there are footprints in the dirt, long and bare, with four toes.

  Denya hurries from the clearing. She stumbles once or twice, glances bac
k and sees nothing, though she cannot shake the feeling that there are eyes watching her from the darkness just beyond her light.

  More trees, more than can be counted, old and nameless and wild. And now there is a light ahead, a glow that draws her like a moth, and Denya hurries forward and staggers out into a glen of grass and stone. There is a stream, and flowers, and the colours of it all are brighter than she has ever seen. Behind her the canopy is alight with the fiery glow of sunset, and she can feel the heat of it against her skin.

  It begins to rain warm, sweet water. Denya looks up. There is blue above her, dusky and soft as periwinkle. She tastes the drops with her tongue, and she spreads her arms wide and laughs.

  There is a path from the glen, wide and straight and lined with silver lanterns whose flames are warm and inviting. Denya starts down the path. Her steps are eager; before her there is a blueish glow, and behind her the sun has set, and there are stars above her, and there is music in the air pulling her forward, a lilting song whose notes excite her even as they raise the hairs upon her neck. She comes eventually to a place where the trees grow thinner, and there are lights among the branches and in the air around them, and the ground is soft with moss and creeping thyme, and there are long, low tables laden with platters and bowls of food and pitchers of drink, and the air is warm as summer and fresh as morning dew.

  And the people—the people! Tall and slender, with silver hair and sharp, pretty features and clothes that look spun from spider silk, so fine and shimmering and strange are they. Some sit at the tables on cushions and talk and laugh high, thin laughs, while others dance in circles with each other as the music rushes on from some unseen place.

  A woman comes before Denya and smiles with a flash of white teeth. Her hair is short and looks soft as down, and she wears silver piercings in her nose and ears and lips the like of which Denya has never seen.

  “Welcome, Beauty,” the woman sings in a gossamer voice.