Then, my doe-unicorn nipped at my shoulder and took herself back into the forest. For a human, her pace would have been a boastful saunter; for a horse, it would have been a prance.
I looked at my garden. Ma and Victor would be angry at me, of course. I had been gone several hours, no doubt. Or had I? It had been shadowless noon when Julian had stepped on my plants, but now the shade had barely started peeping over the eastern side of the house. The weeds I picked had only just started to wilt. Sida sniffed at them and lightly vaulted over the garden fence.
Sida followed me as I washed off my wounds in the stream. Most of the dirt and soot ran off her downy fur, but she was still a dull brown-grey. We cautiously approached the house and entered the side door to my mother’s workshop. In the main room, I could hear the murmur of Ma’s and Victor’s voices. If I had been gone long, they would have run out of things to say. If Julian had arrived back, he would have been adding his own sardonic twist on my disappearance. I hated him.
Quietly, I scrounged around my mother’s workshop for the household pot of ointment. I dabbed it on my knees and the palms of my hands. My skin itched a little as scabs formed and dried where shredded flesh had been. In a few minutes, I’d absentmindedly scratch them off when I gave Sida a pat—and find healthy new skin in their place.
I replaced the jar, careful not to disturb my mother’s piles of notes for the syrup she was developing. For internal complaints, alicorn was tricky because it tasted chalky and stuck to the back of your throat. Instead of getting it into your body, you’d cough most of it up. If I reshuffled her papers, I might set us back by months.
“Elizabeth, is that you?” Ma called.
“Yes, Ma,” I said. I went to the inner door of the workshop and entered the main cabin. I breathed in and looked at Victor. “Thank you for offering to take me in, but I can’t.”
“Hmmm,” said Victor, looking me up and down. Now I looked as dirty, as coarse, as my mother. A lost cause.
I turned to Ma. “I do not want to stay where Julian is. He…” I tried to order my thoughts. “I do not like him.”
Ma’s forehead creased. I very seldom disobeyed her. “But, Elizabeth…”
“I don’t feel safe with him.” I crossed my arms and saw that my dishevelled clothes and raw hands did not escape her notice.
“I wouldn’t want to send you where…” Her eyes flicked to Victor. “Would you anticipate him causing trouble?”
“Well, yes.” He looked around, as if to register Julian’s reaction. “Where is that boy?”
I shrugged. “I saw him heading off to the forest,” I said. That was, as far as I knew, true.
“The young fool,” Victor swore. “He said he wanted to go off hunting.”
When he went outside to investigate, Victor of course found Julian’s blood bay stallion gone and no trace of Julian himself. “Julian mentioned there’s good hunting a bit north from here,” Victor said. “He must have gone that way.”
There was nothing I could say, though I felt the ring heavy in my skirt pocket. Victor gave his sister a dry kiss on the cheek and departed. That night, as Ma was in her workshop and Sida slept by my bedside, I took out The Schoole of Good Manners. I compared the embossed leather cover with the ring I had found. The crest of a rose and three feathers, one tooled into calfskin, the other etched into gold. I ran out of the house and flung the ring as far as I could into the trees. I didn’t want any part of Julian near me. My old, scarred doe disappeared after that day. At first, I did not remark upon her absence, because the unicorns came and went according to their own plans. And, after all, I had Sida, who started coming with me into Fenlen Forest. I was happier amongst the trees than at the house.
After Victor left, Ma became bitter. She never forgot to remind me that I had chosen wrong. No effort I made was good enough. I collected plants and began my own herbarium. I made bilberry jam for receding, bleeding gums. I invented a recipe for burdock-root fritters for costive bowels and brewed an elderberry cordial for coughs.
“But why would I sell these housewife’s concoctions,” my mother said when I suggested she bring a few samples on her next trip, “when alicorn heals all these remedies with more lasting effect?” I gathered bright birds’ feathers and strips of shed unicorn velvet and shining unicorn hair from the branches of trees. Ma had laughed at the lumpy rug that I braided out of unicorn velvet.
“What does that protect against?” she had said. “Muddy floors? I think other rugs do that as well.”
I struggled to convince Ma that by choosing her, I had chosen rightly. I tried to show her that our life was good. And I tended Sida. She let me baby her and pretend that she was tame, though she was not tame. I gave her pet names, though she was not my pet at all.
This was my life; these were my ambitions.
I was seventeen when the forest took me.
CHAPTER SIX
Hide and Seek
My hope that Sida was tame, I think, was at the root of my disaster. Over the summer, autumn and winter, I watched her develop from a frail fawn to a robust yearling on the verge of growing her first horn. I did not expect her to be, well, domestic, but I did hope that she might stay. Sida gave me a reasonable excuse to turn down Mrs. Helder’s increasingly insistent offers that I come in for market days and stay for the dances that followed.
“Why spend an evening being ignored by young farmers and shopkeepers?” I said. “I could be testing whether Sida likes eating celandines or asters, now that she’s rejecting oats.”
“Once Sida can find her own fodder, you’ll come with me,” Mrs. Helder said. Silently, I denied that such a day would come. A secret, dark part of me hoped that the goat’s milk that I raised Sida on would cause her to develop more slowly.
But as her muscles grew strong under her loose baby skin, she grew impatient with me. Sida was beginning to bud her first horn and she wanted to roam the forest. And yet she would not simply leave me behind. She would scamper ahead just far enough to know that I was running after her. At first it was just the meadow around our log house, then around the mouth of the path that I took into the forest. Every day the process of singing her name and cajoling her to my side was becoming longer.
At last, in earliest spring, when the first pale shoots emerged from the retreating snow that clung to the bases of the trees and my mother had just set off on her first trip of the year, it happened.
We were on my usual trail in search of horns and my pack was heavy with supplies enough for a day and a night. I paused, stooped to look at something that might be alicorn, when Sida gave a little rear and galloped off. I dropped what had turned out to be a spiralled snail shell and ran after her. But Sida had discovered her strength and was taking joy in the ease with which she leapt over fallen tree trunks and kicked up the half-frozen moss. I could hear her snorts and calls of happiness.
When I found her again, it was dark and I had no choice but to pitch camp for the evening. Sida lay down beside me and put her head in my lap. She looked up at me and blinked repentantly. The advantage of sleeping amongst unicorns is that they are better than a fire for keeping warm on a cold spring night. You can lean into their dense winter coats and let their heat seep through you, if they let you.
“Sida,” I told her in a stern voice that I had learned from Ma, “one day you are going to run off and I won’t be able to follow you. Do you want that? Do you think you are old enough to be alone?” I forgave and fell asleep running my fingers through the fuzz of her cheeks.
In the morning, she had left me again. Unicorns step carefully and are hard to track, but Sida was young and silly. She admired herself too much not to leave her cloven hoofprints in fresh mud and rub her horn bud against the new bark of trees. She was excited with the idea of freedom and had left the paths we used to follow. The snow was deeper here than at home. I was getting cold and my food was running out. But I was mor
e worried for Sida and paid more attention to her trail than to where I was headed.
It was late afternoon when I saw her, and we were farther from home than I had ever been. We had been in a valley the evening before and I had moved uphill all day. The climb had levelled into a plateau, where I could see the sky through the trees.
And suddenly, there I saw her, my fawn, framed by two tall alders. The setting sun made her down glow the colour of a ripe peach. The ground tilted down sharply behind her.
“Sida!” I called. “Come here, darling.”
Sida looked at me and cocked her head to one side.
I reached towards her, hand closed loosely as if I had a treat. “Sida, be a good girl. We’ve been gone long enough already. Mrs. Helder doesn’t like it when I haven’t milked the goats.”
Sida nickered, pawed the ground. I took a step. She held her ground. I took another step, faster now, and a twig snapped underfoot. Sida gave a little neigh, turned and leapt.
I ran. I ran and saw the drop, but Sida was not below. It was steep, I reasoned against my panic, but not impossible to survive such a fall. Perhaps I could not see her in the snow. I called the fawn’s name. Below me the trees grew at sharp angles. I clung to them as I stepped from outcrop to outcrop of tangled, bare roots.
As I fought my way down, I missed that shift in sound I always felt in my ears when I entered the forest at home. The momentary, silent pressure, like ducking your head in a stream and feeling the water against your ears. I was too worried about Sida to notice.
When I reached the bottom, I looked through the bushes. I felt the blood beat against my eardrums as I searched for a white, crumpled body, snapped legs desecrated by mud. But as the light faded from red to purple to an ever-deepening blue, I could not find her. The trees became interspersed with large granite boulders that cast innumerable shadows. As the stars started to emerge from the dark, a cold, cutting wind rose. I realized that not only was Sida lost, but I had no way of finding my way home.
If Mrs. Helder had been beside me, I would have broken into loud, wailing, messy tears. But alone, I only managed one dry, racking sob. Sida had left me and I was alone. I was alone and my unicorns had not come to comfort me. The night would be harsh and cold. And tomorrow it would be a long, weary trek home—even if I could find home. My fingertips were already numb and I tucked my hands under my arms as I stumbled forward, no longer looking around me. I knew I had to find a place to camp, but that meant giving up.
“Bettina!”
Shocked at the sound of a human voice, I turned.
“Bettina, ti vog?”
There was more that I could not understand, but those three words repeated again. In the dimming light, I saw a young man sitting on a large, sloping boulder, looking as scared as I did. His shoulders were tensed, and his fingers gripped into the lichen. His light grey coat and breeches were so close in colour to the dirty spring snow that he almost looked a part of the landscape. He seemed long-limbed, and the fading light emphasized the angularity of his face. He had light hair, a flyaway halo of dandelion fluff. A pale beard whose wispiness across his high cheeks suggested that he was close to my age.
“Bettina, galan ti vog?” His voice was tight with fear and sadness and…something else. He scrutinized my face and then passed briefly over my arms hugging my body, the leaf debris clinging to my knees, my muddy boots.
When his eyes returned to my face, I caught his gaze and realized with a shock that he desired me. Not casually, not greedily; his need for me was part of him. I felt my cheeks grow warm. I had never seen longing so openly written on anyone’s face. It made me feel shy, rather than frightened.
Staring into my eyes, he shifted and knelt forward, extending his hand. “Ni resi, Bettina, Ya vogmi.”
“I…I don’t understand you,” I said slowly.
At the sound of my words, the hand retreated, as if stung. But he kept staring.
“I am sorry,” I added, stepping forward. My throat was dry, and my voice was ragged. “I can’t understand you.”
He broke away from my gaze and looked up into the night sky. The silence stretched out. His sharp chin still lifted, but his eyes slid carefully across my hair, my mouth, my nose and finally, my eyes. He exhaled slowly.
“My apologies.” He pronounced Gersan slowly and in a strange way, as if the sounds formed only at the front of his mouth. “I…” his language failed him. “You look as a girl I know.” He corrected himself clumsily. “Know-ed.” He winced, sensing that he had not expressed his meaning correctly.
“Where is she?”
He tilted his head down to look at me and spoke without answering my question. “It is strange. I do not like to, but it is…I must.” He sat back out of his kneel, slid off the boulder. He picked up a tall staff with a curved top from the base of the boulder and gestured to a narrow path I had not seen, leading through the scattered rocks. “Come.”
I paused. Stay away from strangers, I remembered Mrs. Helder saying, long ago. I remembered her fear when I told her of the girl with the lamb, who had appeared and disappeared so suddenly. Had I been too trusting then? And here I was again in the forest with a person foreign to my understanding. But the night was coming on. It would be too dark to gather firewood and I could easily freeze. There are legends of people wandering into that forest. He knew Gersan, I reasoned. But any clever creature might learn Gersan, I surmised with equal reason. Coming upon an eerie-looking young man at dusk was not auspicious. But he had looked shocked and mournful, rather than crafty. And whether I went with him or not, I might be dead within hours from the cold.
The young man sensed my hesitation. “My…” he thought of the word, “my uncle. He speak…em…he speak-s Gersan.” He flushed at his pronunciation, as though he expected to be chastised.
“You speak Gersan,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not like him. Come, it is late. My…aunt…she has food.” I approached him but kept an arm’s length between us. He seemed to understand that I was nervous. Still, he kept looking at me and considering me, as if to make sure I was real.
We walked together.
“My name, Torun,” he said, placing his long, narrow, outstretched fingers on his chest. He lifted that hand off and gestured at me, his calloused palm forming a question.
“Elizabeth.”
He looked at me sharply.
“Yes?” I said.
“Elizabeth, Bettina. Same name.” Torun had no heart to talk after that. He followed a path evidently so familiar that even though his eyes were open, he was trusting his feet alone. His eyes were in shadow, but the moonlight reflected on them darkly, so that I knew they were opened wide, staring at something beyond me, beyond what I saw.
I did not mind. I was heartened to see him wrapped up in his thoughts, which, though perhaps spurred by my presence, had little to do with me. I examined him more closely. He was compactly built, and his undyed wool clothes cut close to lean and muscular limbs. His skin was pale, almost to transparency, and his ears arched up at the tips. Despite a red scattering of pimples over his cheeks, in the dark he struck me as somewhat like the unicorns in his ability to catch the moonlight.
I thought again of Mrs. Helder’s stories of the Old Folk. It was strange that Torun knew Gersan, but I had never heard such sounds as made his language since…since that mysterious girl with the lamb. And where was he leading me? Having an uncle was an accident of birth, not a guarantee of Torun’s character. But what about Bettina? She sounded irretrievably lost, if not dead. Could the Old Folk die? He caught me watching him, and I quickly turned my face to the path ahead of us. But my eyes kept turning towards him. Yes, he looked weary with life.
“Not far now.” He pointed ahead to a densely wooded area high above and across the wide, flat streambed we had reached. “There.”
I saw nothing.
He jumped down
into the riverbed and held out his hand to me. Perhaps this was part of a creature’s trick, I wondered. No young man had ever performed such a gesture of courtesy for my benefit, and now Torun had done it twice. I stared, feeling blood rush to my cheeks. He dropped his hand and stepped back.
“My apologies. I forget, for a moment.”
Torun had evidently much experience with leaping down from the rocks, but I sat down and slid myself ungracefully down to join him in the riverbed. Large, snow-covered stones were gradually replaced with smaller, flatter ones as we neared the stream.
He waded through and paused, calf deep.
“The river can be…” He raised his staff and hand and waved them about. He was trying to convey some meaning. Had Sida not been lost, I would have laughed to see the absolute break between the comedy of his arms and the solemnity of his face. Instead, I stared, uncomprehending.
“Ah…You need help?” He held out his arms, as if to mean he would carry me.
My face was burning. “No.” My boots were thick and well-greased, and I splashed through to him. The current pressed the leather against my legs. “I’m just tired.”
Within a few minutes it was almost completely dark.
“Not far.” We scrambled up the other side of the bank and across a stretch of tall, dry grass to what seemed to be a thick hedge. We pushed through the bushes, which opened onto a small sloping clearing vaguely dotted with sleeping sheep. The bushes seemed to form a natural fence around their small pasture. In the middle of the pasture was a stout, gnarled, spreading oak tree. Built into the branches, supported by beams six feet high, was a clever little house with a portico that spanned the oak’s largest branches.
Torun leaned his staff against the oak’s trunk and called up in his language. The phrases seemed to begin with a stress and flow on in a monotone before lilting sharply up and down at the end.
The Changeling of Fenlen Forest Page 5