When my nose broke, the metallic tang of my blood ran down over my top lip.
I let go of her other arm in surprise. She stood up shakily, clothing askew, and turned back to the mouth of the cave.
“Stop!” I cried out in Gersan. I was so flustered I lost my other language. “I don’t want to fight you!”
The sound of my true voice made Bettina pause. She turned.
We stared at each other and a small smile twisted on her lips. My lips. Pa’s lips.
“You strange creature,” she said. As I remembered, her Gersan was good, much better than my Verian.
I wiped my bloody nose with the back of my hand. The throbbing pain made it hard to think. “Bettina, don’t go into the cave.”
She laughed, but it was not the joyful sound I remembered from my childhood. “Why not? At first, I thought I was being haunted by myself. But last winter, when you came to me in Telka’s shape…”
“No! That was years ago for me!” How could her memory be so different from mine? “I was scared, and you were kind to me.”
“But that was a mistake. I should have known when you threatened to follow me home.”
“I wasn’t…Bettina, I was lonely.”
“I do not blame you,” she said. “After all, how could you know how humans feel?”
“I am human. You know I didn’t follow you home. Like I told you then, I went back to my own mother. I lived with her for years and years!”
“But then why did I keep seeing you? And why did you grow to match my size so quickly?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t pretend to be innocent. You’ve been haunting me.”
“What?” I remembered what Melina had accused me of, but I had no such memories.
“I heard you singing in the forest some days when I went foraging.” She laughed through her tears. “But I’ve heard you warn me. Your voice in the woods.” And she sang: Blow away the dust, good wind, blow away the dust. With my heart’s old sorrow, take it to the dusk.
“How?” I had not seen her, though I had been close to the unicorn herd while I sang. She had been gone. I had come after. Unless…
“And I saw you with Torun. The first time I tried to run away, I saw you with him, standing in the river, naked.”
“We…that wasn’t…” Sida’s grasp on time must have been shaky after the stress of the fawn’s birth, but I could not explain that to Bettina. I remembered hearing what I thought was a night bird’s cry. It must have been Bettina’s shocked exclamation.
She waved me off. “No, the pathetic thing was how happy you looked that night. For me to be happy like that, I would have to be another person altogether. So, I might as well let the Alvinaisik have my place. And if you come from out here, then there must be a better place for me wherever you come from.” She gestured at the cave and gave a little, skeptical wheeze of a chuckle. “But why would you leave? Why come here?”
I took a deep breath. “I came here to save you.” If I couldn’t convince her I was human, I might as well use her belief that I was Alvinaisik.
She laughed again, a real laugh this time. “Don’t lie. Not to me.”
“Don’t walk into the cave. You’ll die there. And if you cross the forest, if you survive, you won’t find some better world, just another world with other problems.” I racked my mind for ideas. “Torun said that you had a plan, that the two of you…”
“Torun won’t leave,” she said with disgust. “He’s a shepherd. He takes care of sheep and people and that’s all.”
It sounded like a great deal to me, but I kept quiet. I thought of Ma, of her bitterness. Ma felt, somehow, like she had always chosen wrong, like she was living the wrong life. Although she couldn’t live under Victor’s thumb, she still thought she had been wrong to run away. Then, after Victor visited us the first time, she had been determined to set us apart. Even though we lived near the Helders’ village, we would never be part of the community.
“This is not enough for me,” Bettina said vehemently, spreading her arms. “The village is so…so small. Pa won’t take me anywhere because I’m more valuable at home. And stupid Torun doesn’t see a chance when it’s right in front of his nose. I told him to run off and send for me. Instead, he bought me a lamb. He told me we could grow a flock. It was sweet, and I hate him for it.” She kicked at the ground.
I thought of Pa’s need to wander. When he felt trapped, he had abandoned us and now he arranged his life to make himself the most free. But he never extended that liberty to anyone else. Bettina was as much his daughter as Sarai and Telka and I were. “So, you want to walk into that cave? You’d rather end your life than try to survive the one you have?”
“I don’t have a choice. I am losing the person I once was and the person they want me to be. Either I walk away or I hate everything and everyone around me.” The anger drained from her. “I don’t want to do that. They don’t deserve it. They’re not bad. I am. At least this way they’ll get to keep their idea of me.”
She had judged correctly, and I had suffered for it. “That’s not fair, either,” I said.
“Life isn’t fair.”
I almost smiled because I now knew where Sarai had gotten her toughness from.
I thought of what Torun had once said to me. “What if you just walked away?” I swallowed. “What if they didn’t own you? Everyone thinks you’re dead. You…you just disappeared. Just,” I couldn’t believe what I was saying. “Just walk away. Go to the cities. Sell your trade.”
“Walk away with what?” Standing there in her shift and skirt, with her woven belt and white shawl, she was just a peasant girl, barefoot in the wild and the cold. “I have nothing. Anyone who knows Pa will send me home. Don’t think I haven’t tried before.”
“You have to get past the village and then buy a horse.” I fumbled at my belt, where I had tied the small purse of money Pa gave me. “Take this.” I shrugged off my pack and tossed it at her feet, then pulled off my boots and threw them to her, one by one. “And these.”
Bettina picked through my things. “The money won’t disappear?”
I shook my head. “It’s enough to set up shop.” She might as well have the money.
“Hmph.” She tugged on my boots. I gave her my coat as well and she dropped the shawl on the ground, where the red ochre seeped into the white fabric. They would find it the next day, I realized, and draw their own conclusions.
As she dressed, she looked more like me and less like Bettina. In my boots and coat, her suspiciousness made her look hardened and ready to walk for days.
She caught my eye and stared at me uneasily for a moment. I was wearing her skirt and shift and belt. “It’s so uncanny. Like my own idea of myself.” She stepped close to consider me. “And you’ve been haunting them?”
I nodded, succumbing to the story she would understand best. “But not anymore. A haunting is only useful when the wound is fresh and deep. I’ll be gone in a year,” I said. “It’ll be safe for you to come home then.”
“What if I don’t want to come home in a year?” Bettina said, suspiciously.
“Then don’t.”
“Then maybe I will.”
“Do as you please.”
Bettina laughed at that and I saw an echo of her in happier days. She turned and set off, shoulders squared. It would snow sometime in the night and cover her tracks.
She was going to seek her fortune.
Now I would have to find mine.
I turned and slowly made my way to the portal. My nose ached and I almost regretted giving Torun the alicorn ointment. I fumbled my way through to early autumn, walking to spite my sadness. Though I moved slowly, time raced through the dawn, through the forest-green day and into the evening.
I stopped when the path was too dark to see and I lay down on the moss. I looked into the
canopy and the sky beyond it as the stars began to emerge from the darkness. The cool night’s air began to chill my sweat-soaked clothing. I could catch a cold, I mused. Perhaps I would die out here in the forest and no one would ever find me, like Julian. Ma wouldn’t know that I hadn’t abandoned her, not on purpose. I had probably broken little Telka’s heart again. And Torun? I didn’t know what I felt. Something snorted in the dark, as if to mock my self-pity. I didn’t bother to look over until I saw Sida’s face staring down at me.
“Hello, baby.” She had become so big, I realized. Her face had elongated, her chest was well muscled and her mane was longer. She had not been a baby for a long time. “What have you been up to, you rogue?” I said.
Sida snorted again and touched my nose with her horn. As the pain eased and the swelling decreased, I looked at her. The burn on her shoulder was fully healed now, a rippled strip of dark grey scar tissue partially covered by her thicker winter coat.
I hadn’t even gotten out at the right time, I realized. It had been late summer when I left and I was in autumn. A day had passed for me, but Torun and Telka and Sarai and the boys wouldn’t have seen me for a month, at least. I had not left any tracks or traces to follow.
I touched my nose. Under the crust of dried blood, I knew my face would always look a little off balance. My nose would be a mark of my experiences and this certainty gave me strange comfort. I rolled over and stood up slowly. My muscles ached from exertion and cold.
Sida stamped her hooves.
“I know,” I told her. “I’m the rogue.” I reached out to run my hand along her body. The ache faded from the chilled joints in my fingers. Sida stepped forward, slowly enough that I could move with her. I stepped, and then she went forward again.
“Where’s your herd, Sida?” I asked.
She gave a grunt.
Perhaps she had moved on, perhaps she had chosen me over them. Or perhaps I wasn’t watching properly.
From the corner of my eye, I could see little flickers of gold, like moonlight falling through the gaps of leaves. A hoof here, a snatch of mane there. A curved horn. They were taking me home. She had grown up and moved on.
“You want to walk now?”
She did, and I followed until I began stumbling. Every once in a while, I snuffled a little into her coat and she suffered my occasional self-deprecating moans in patient silence. Had I chosen correctly? There was no right choice. But what if…I was mired in the circularity of these thoughts except when Sida gave me irritated nudges.
We came to my old home, the old familiar clearing, where an old, pale sliver of moon barely illuminated the shallow creek and the long meadow grass. Sida walked me to the edge of the forest. There was the pony cart, but there was no vegetable patch, no small house, no mule or dogs. Just the sound of a small child trying to be brave.
We had arrived at the beginning of things.
Sida stepped forward into the past, where in a few moments I would run out and see her. I stayed in the undergrowth, unsure whether I wanted to watch.
When the door to the pony cart opened, I looked away and found the old matriarch of Sida’s herd watching me. I reached forward and she put her velvet nose into my palm. I closed my eyes and felt the fluttering of moments rush by me. Branches and leaves flickered in and out of life around my body, licking my hand and arms and legs before dying away again. When I opened my eyes, the matriarch was gone and I saw my mother’s house and garden patch in the clearing.
I tramped heavily to my mother’s door. But the house was locked and there was no fire on the hearth to cast a cheery light through the cracks in the shutters. There were dead leaves on the doorstep. The pony cart was gone as well. Had she left for good? I threw my weight against the door. The wooden latch broke and in the fading light I saw bare shelves, an empty floor.
Where was she?
The Helders were the only people I could think of asking, so I began my trek to the village. It was dark when I arrived and the houses all looked strange and squat on the earth and bare without so many trees to shield them. I went right to Mrs. Helder’s back door. I needed someone to cry with, someone large, old and jolly, who would give me bread with butter.
I knocked once, twice, three times.
And Ma opened the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Until a Few Days Ago
I live alone now and the seasons have changed twice. Poor Mrs. Helder died soon after I was lost and Ma dropped by to make Nicholas some consolatory stew and mingle her grief with his. Part of me believes that my disappearance helped her let go of her nobility and her isolation. A smaller, meaner part thinks she was waiting to be the only woman of the house, but she and Nicholas are happy together so I hold my tongue and watch. I see my mother with different eyes, how age and hard weather have made her majestic.
Once a week, Ma and Nicholas Helder come and fetch me to the village, where I give them what alicorn I have found for books and ink and strings of sausage. It is like we are ever repeating my return, with me falling into her arms and her stroking my hair with her muscular hands. The scene gives us both comfort. She does not mind that I find less alicorn because she says that rarity is good for business. She has invited me to come live in the village, but I am tired of fending off the proposals of the innkeeper’s son and the master potter. I have become, it seems, a businesswoman and an heiress to a modest fortune of herbal ointments.
When I came home, I started taking over the family trade. I told Ma that I needed to know more of the world and that I could tell a better story about our products anyway. I say they’re plant based and I’ve added things like rosehip jellies and raspberry teas to our selection.
I have the unicorns, but they do not come often. I begin to wonder whether I see fewer unicorns now because I am somehow tainted by the world. Or perhaps it’s that, what with visiting Ma and our trips, my walks have been short and I have stayed too close to the edge of the forest. In the fall, Sida brought me her twin fawns. She let me run my hands along the curves of their necks, the dip of their backs. I fed them sugar and cinnamon, but they didn’t stay for long.
A few weeks ago, during my spring trip, I was selling alicorn ointment at a fair in a city to the south when I saw a fine woman ride by in a gown of indigo. The hem had a thick border of white peacocks in a geometric style. The threads were of silk, not wool, but I squinted at her and recognized the curl of her dark hair under her fashionable hat and veil.
I slid out of the booth that Ma and I had set up.
“Bettina!” I cried, pushing through the crowds to get to her. “Bettina, ti vog?” She reined in her horse and looked down, startled.
I saw that she was far older than she should be, in her thirties at least.
“Alvinaisik,” she said. “Time has played tricks on us both, I see.”
“You are well?”
Her smile was controlled. “As well as any master weaver. Apprentices are not what they used to be. I don’t live here, you know,” she added, wrinkling her nose as if she was used to something much finer. “But there’s a dye merchant who has some stock I’m interested in.”
“Did you ever go back?”
She was evasive. “Sarai and Telka work with me, but the boys are in the village with my parents.” It was a way of telling me that I was not invited into her home or her private life. She paused, as if unsure whether to say more. “The homestead’s been abandoned these past ten years. They say it’s haunted. People still tell stories about you, you know.”
“About me? I was only there for a few months.”
Her smile became firm, hostile. “Don’t play innocent, Alvinaisik. You haunted the family and stole a young man away. He walked away into the forest and was never seen again.”
“Why would Torun do that?”
“To have you of all creatures ask such a question!” Bettina pressed her spurs to
her horse and rode away quickly, without a backwards glance. I was left in the busy fairground with my heart like a clenched fist.
When I came home, I looked around at my quiet house, at my orderly garden. I have let my world become too contained. I have forgotten how truly strange life can be, and to remind myself, I have set to writing down my thoughts.
When I have finished this page, I will set it aside in my drawer, alongside my best recipes. I will pack up my things, with enough food for a few days. I will pull on my new boots, shoulder my bag and lock the door behind me.
The forest has many secrets, and I hope there is at least one more waiting for me.
Glossary of Verian Words
In writing of my experiences, I have translated some of the Verian into Gersan—as I understood more of the language, it become more transparent to my understanding. But there are some words which I did not translate, for they seemed to hold a certain pungent flavour of their own.
Birlancave
Bivinwild
Gorongosfrog
Heirre come here
Hekunaisikwooden girl
Hin-ye we’re here
Kesilik get ready
Ki-yen who’s there
Kurre out
Naisik girl
Ni no/not
Sheledbrat? (I never figured this word out entirely.)
Ufoliforeign
Uksarv unicorn
Utta ewe
Voon lamb
Vog/vogmiare/am
Yimmagood
Zaforrain
Zastobad
Zastolaterrible
I do also have a phrasebook, which I began a few months after coming home. I realized that certain words were slipping from my memory, so I wrote them down. It should be somewhere in the drawer, in the book whose first few pages are filled with recipes. Though now that I think on it, I’d best take it with me.
The Changeling of Fenlen Forest Page 20