by Julia Fine
Still, I was looking for a prophesy—I saw my curse as proof that there was more to Peter’s maps than met the eye. I had been flailing about, seeking a guide, afraid to be the sole check on my body and its powers, afraid of my new feelings toward the forest. Afraid that some terrible harm had befallen my father, that he was gone forever, that I’d always be alone. Rafe’s theory suited my own desperation, and as so many do, I found it easier to believe, to cling to its inherently flawed structure, than to admit I was adrift in an indifferent world, alone.
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t be set on it,” I said. “What else am I to do? Sit home and wait?”
Matthew gave me another long look. I was about to leave, go and get Rafe to begin planning, when he finally spoke.
“You’re being swayed because he’s handsome.” His voice was very matter-of-fact. “And because you’re angry with me. I wish you’d reconsider.”
In this moment there was nothing patronizing about Matthew, just a sort of weariness. He closed his eyes and lifted his face to the ceiling, then opened them and looked at me again.
“All right.” He sighed. “I’m coming with you.”
“Ha,” I said. “I don’t need you to come with me.”
“I know you don’t. But humor me.”
“No thanks, I’d rather not.”
“I don’t care what you’d rather,” said Matthew. “I’m coming.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Fine.” Matthew used the heels of his palms to push the hair from his face. “Just promise me this: that you’ll be careful. That you’ll try hard not to give yourself away.”
“I don’t see why it’s me you’re frightened for,” I said. “I’ve got an excellent defense.”
The Brooch of Hammered Iron
Alys, 605
Alys was nine when she first saw the soldiers. The year was 600 AD.
She’d followed her little cousin Madenn to the stream, ostensibly racing, but letting the younger girl gain ground. Spring had fully displaced winter, which meant the ice that crusted the water had finally melted, the rains restored their favorite swimming spot, which in the weak afternoon light would be frigid, but flowing. Madenn’s flaxen hair streamed loose behind her, a beacon leading Alys through the trees. Every so often Madenn looked back and laughed, the sound waxing and waning with the turn of her head.
Alys fell farther behind Madenn, but she knew what lay ahead: Madenn would untie her belt and slip out of her smock while still running, would leave the garments on the ground and make her way into the water, singing, splashing, spitting fountains through her teeth. Celebration done, Madenn would lie on her back, yellow hair spread like sea reeds, dancing while the rest of her was still, and wait for Alys’s approach, hoping to frighten her. As it had been the year before, as it would be the year after, and on and on until the time came to be wed.
But rather than immersed and naked, Alys found her cousin clothed, and pressed against the wide trunk of an oak tree. Madenn held a finger to her mouth, and cocked her chin to signal to Alys what had stopped her.
Two creatures knelt before the water, armored like locusts, protected by hard metal shells that they peeled slowly from their bodies, the pieces clanging together, the creatures voicing sounds that Alys did not understand. Once stripped, they revealed themselves to be men, broad-shouldered and bulging, with hair cropped close across their foreheads, pronouncing their ears. They entered the stream, yelping when struck by the cold, sitting to cover themselves fully.
Two metal shields the size of Madenn sat abandoned on the rocky plane beside them, as did a longsword, a thick dagger, and a spear.
Alys crouched down, retrieved a dart from her boot. As she did, Madenn placed a small hand over her cousin’s and shook her head. “Fire,” Madenn whispered, seeing, as her own mother could, beyond the present to a future that had, in the brief measure of a moment, shifted into something dangerous and uncharted. “Bloody death.” Alys laced her fingers through Madenn’s and squeezed. The two slipped quietly away, back to their home, to warn the others.
IT WOULD BE three years before those soldiers returned, three years of Madenn campaigning for a rally, whispering warnings, insisting they must strike first or be struck. She had seen fire, she pressed those of her clan, had seen destruction.
Madenn’s brother Fionn echoed her concerns. He’d followed the rumors of southern invaders more closely than Madenn or Alys, greeting those who’d seen the conquerors with questions, voicing his own thoughts on strategy to anyone who’d listen, itching for the glory of war. He offered himself as envoy, asked his father to petition neighboring clans to join together, but each peaceful day that passed convinced the rest that the cousins were wrong. The empire’s hand had already exceeded its grasp; there was talk of revolt among its armies. There was no need—in truth no way—for them to act. Where would the clan even stage an attack, if threat was imminent? The seat of the alien empire, a several months’ journey away? The men tousled Fionn’s hair and called him child. The women told Madenn and Alys not to be frightened.
Then, at the height of the summer when Alys was twelve, the cousins saw crushed meadows that proved enemy movement. By autumn, most of those who’d laughed at their warnings were dead. Together, the survivors retreated to the forest, using their knowledge of the wood to taunt the soldiers who now camped atop the place that had once been their home. The insurgents ruined food stores, rerouted rivers, captured boys meant to relay news from one foreign camp to the next.
“We will rout you,” the conquerors hissed in a mangled version of Alys’s tongue, “we will civilize you. You will be ours.” They burned whatever land they could, hoping to smoke out the natives. They uprooted the old burial mounds, laughed at the old gods.
“The people practice savage rituals,” read one letter that Fionn intercepted, the translation forced out of the errand boy before his early death. “Their women run wild, their men are unclean. They are lucky to have come under our influence.”
HIDDEN IN THEIR sacred groves, shielded in the deepest tract of wood, the cousins plotted. While Fionn and Alys, fierce in firelight, mapped strategy, Madenn dove deep as she could into their history, her visions mining the remains of the old ways, building quiet communion with the trees. “Here before us,” Madenn swore, “and here long after.” Alys watched as her cousin mixed berries and blood, scratching pictures onto dry hide, disregarding her mother, who claimed that to capture a word was to empty it of power, to tame what should be wild.
Fionn refused to hide forever in the forest, despite his sister’s faith that the trees would protect them. His father gone, Fionn knew that he must take revenge, must stand against invaders to uphold the family name. Madenn eventually agreed. There would be a final barrage, led by the hundred of their kind still remaining, however unlikely its success: if they failed, they must fail gloriously, martyred to freedom, avenging their dead. And if they failed, Madenn promised, she’d preserve them. They would be remembered not in the eyes of the conquerors, savage and stubborn, but forever in the sheets of hide she’d bound into a book.
In swirling symbols drawn with blood and berries, Madenn wrote the story of the world that she wanted, the wisdom she’d learned from her mother, the promise of rebirth and a return to what was true. She drew a tree scarred with a spiral, a small human figure half hidden in its heart. A crested bird at the edge of a vast forest. An open palm held to a knife’s blade. It was a prayer, Madenn said, for the forest, for the meadows that burned, the crushed stems of the lilies, the uprooted trees. To tell the story, Madenn reasoned, was to harness its power. A prophetess, Fionn called his sister, handing her a sharpened spear.
MADENN DIED IN the first rush, a longsword to her throat. Alys stabbed the soldier that defiled her cousin’s body. In her shock, she had no time to invoke the land’s power, forgot to make the symbols Madenn thought might bring them aid. She knelt next to her cousin and stared into those vacant eyes, pressing a dirty finger to the w
ound. It was too much, in the crux of the combat, on the fields that stank of sweat and blood and piss, to remember the world as it had been, the quiet of a meadow, the babble of a stream. Those fireside tales of trees that defended men, tales told in whispers, a last leaf of hope as the clan was cut down, proved themselves only stories. Amid the corpses of their comrades, Alys and Fionn were taken alive, symbols of their crushed rebellion.
AT THE EDGE of the wood, in a cage recently vacated by some larger animal, the gristle of its meal mixed with its still fragrant waste, Alys saw Madenn’s blood crumbling quick under her fingernails, the remains of Madenn’s promise drying black upon her hands. She felt a trickle of wet between her legs. Alys took the angry red from where, inside and out, she had been broken, made an ink of her own blood and her cousin’s, reaching through her prison bars and smearing Madenn’s symbols—the spiral, the hand clutching a knife, the crested bird—onto a splintered piece of wood. Alys whispered a word to her family, the forest. She pressed her forehead to the iron bars of her prison, and felt them dissolve.
ONCE FREED, ALYS cursed the thieves, the lives and land they’d taken. She called on the forest, itself under ambush, for aid. She’d doubted Madenn’s claims that the forest would listen, wondered why the trees would help if there was nothing that they wanted she could give. But now her clan’s sacrifice was scattered all around her, bone and blood blossoming from the ground. Alys felt herself clutching at the forest in desperation. Preserve us, she prayed.
The trees shivered, listening, afraid of the changes that had come upon them suddenly: these men with steel and fire, the destruction of their ancestors a day’s journey away. The trees foresaw charred, chalky stumps, molten skeletons, fleeing woodland creatures spitted and skinned. There would be fields where once was forest, steel structures where once their kin rose tall. Preserve us all.
Alys’s eyes were shut, her flooded heart heavy. The trees knelt down to her, acknowledging her pain. She was so young. She was afraid. She did not bargain with the fact that preservation has its own meaning to trees, whose lives span centuries, whose reach is slow, who experience years as humans do moments. Eternity, for Alys, would last longer. Preservation meant stasis, not fulfillment. Preservation was more sister to suppression than release. This she would learn once it was already too late.
Sore from the soldiers who’d used her, the shackles they had locked around her wrists, Alys hid her heart inside an old oak tree. She took Madenn’s book from where it was concealed in the undergrowth and buried it deeper. She took the blood she’d used to paint her way to freedom to call to the forest, scarring the wood deep with Madenn’s symbols. Alys placed a splintered branch at the edge of the trees in memorial, a challenge and a curse.
She stood alone that evening at the top of Urthon Hill, wind gusting, slapping her dark hair against her cheek. Far below her, men sang bawdy songs of conquest, sparks hissed and popped in campfires, horses snorted nervous whinnies. The sky reeled with shifting galaxies of stars.
Alys shut her eyes and disappeared into the wood.
Part
III
12
We returned to Urizon that evening, our plan to collect Rafe from his rented room in Coeurs Crossing the next day. Matthew was to drive us, as Rafe did not have any vehicle but his motorbike, the existence of which was, to Matthew, another blot on Rafe’s general character. My first view of that bike standing sleek against the graveyard fence explained the feeling of familiarity I’d had outside Holzmeier’s—it had been Rafe parked by Urizon on those first days after Peter’s disappearance. When I asked why he’d left so quickly, Rafe explained he hadn’t wanted to intrude. Matthew rolled his eyes, and on our return home stomped up the stairs muttering something about the idiocy of those who forgo helmets. I could hear him still pacing the length of the hallway while Marlowe and I prepared for bed.
That night I dreamed of Rafe. I imagined he was with me on Urizon’s lawn, watching me. Together we rose out of our bodies, ghostly figures floating out over the yew trees, drifting far out past the house, past alders and hazels, hawthorns and pines, past the road, past the barley, into the heart of the old forest, where Rafe undressed me, tenderly unfastening each button of my blouse. He pressed his mouth to my neck and I ached for him, held him, my fingers tearing through his shirt and grasping his shoulders, twisting at his skin. His mouth was soft and warm against mine, his torso pressed so close I thought us caught up in some ritual, some ancient exchange: he’d entered me so fully that parts of him flowed through my veins, now he was me, now the me and he and we were interchangeable, were one. I awoke gasping, my fingers sticky with a transparent sap, stiff from exploring my body.
AFTER A QUICK, early breakfast, I bustled through the house, checking to see nothing was forgotten, peering into Peter’s study, tearing through the kitchen, digging through my dresser drawers a sixth, then seventh time.
“That’s the last of it?” Matthew asked when I’d finished my search, nodding toward the carpetbag I’d stuffed with any book that seemed relevant and now struggled to carry down two sets of stairs. I nodded and he took the heavy bag without acknowledging its weight, hefting it easily over a shoulder. “Make sure you have the key to lock the house behind you.”
I blinked at him, confused.
“Maisie?”
“It’s just we never lock it. I don’t know who you think will come by.”
Matthew gave me a strange look.
“I’m sure I have a key somewhere,” I said, “but it does seem rather silly if we haven’t ever—”
“Fine,” said Matthew, “don’t lock the door.”
“Besides,” I continued, starting with him to the car, “Marlowe will see no one disturbs things.”
“What, you aren’t going to bring him?” Matthew stopped suddenly, turning himself to face me. I could not tell if his expression was one of condescension or concern.
“Of course not,” I scoffed. “He’ll be much happier here. Clearly I’d like to have him with me, but we all know that wouldn’t be practical.”
I had not yet put words to the emotions that I felt regarding Marlowe, but I knew as soon as I’d spoken them this plan was for the best. I was leaving, and Marlowe must stay at Urizon. I could not picture him without Urizon’s garden to reign over, could not imagine him confined for hours to the back of a car, tied up as he’d been outside the café. He belonged here, and to take him from his home would be not only cruel but impossible. Marlowe was the grounds, the forest. My decision was simple as that.
Matthew squeezed his eyes shut, wincing, crinkling his nose. “Not practical,” he repeated. “Well, if we’re gone awhile, then who is going to feed him? Who’ll make sure he gets outside?”
It was my turn to look quizzically at Matthew. “Marlowe’s not a cat,” I said.
“Not a cat.” He was falling into that tic of repeating me, the one I so despised. After a moment, he shrugged and walked toward the car.
I crouched and called to Marlowe, who came over at once, his tail wagging, his claws clipping the drive.
“You’re a good boy,” I told him. “And I’ll come back to you soon.”
Marlowe nuzzled me and I felt my throat tighten. I buried my face in his neck and inhaled his familiar scent, pressing close as if to fuse us, trying to hold on to the feeling of life against my skin.
“Stay,” I said, though he seemed not to need instruction. He watched me as I moved toward the waiting car, which chugged comfortably, billowing gray smoke. I took my place in the back seat, squished against suitcases, leaving the front free for Rafe.
I kept my head turned and my eyes on Marlowe as the car pulled away. I watched him sitting there, growing ever smaller, watched the house and the gardens grow smaller, until we were out onto the main road and I was, at last, leaving home.
RAFE WAS WAITING for us at his bed-and-breakfast, his own luggage compact, shirt freshly ironed. He took the map and unfolded it wide across the front seats once he’d s
ettled next to Matthew.
“We aren’t far from that one,” I said, pointing, stretching the limits of my seat belt to lean forward, very careful not to brush against Rafe’s neck. The mark I referenced was the nearest to Urizon, at the farthest edge of Mr. Abbott’s extensive property.
“Excellent!” said Rafe. “I’d say that’s a wonderful start. We’ll head there directly.”
Matthew rolled his eyes. “So you show up at each of these spots and do what exactly? Some chanting? Dance around? Is that how this game’s played?”
“We simply have to be there,” Rafe said pleasantly. “It’s like running an engine to get the heat going. Or raising one leg of a bridge. Do you see?”
I did not see, though I’d be damned if I’d admit it. Matthew’s expression informed us that not only did he not see but he doubted the legitimacy of anything Rafe said. I kicked the back of his seat, hoping he’d understand my warning and stop voicing his doubts, but he didn’t turn around. Rafe ignored both of us.
“We’ll travel here,” he said, brushing a mote of dust from the map, “and then this river, and then on to our final destination in the city, after which we just need to apply the right force . . . then we’re through.”
“Okay,” said Matthew, his voice rather louder than necessary, “and how exactly do you intend to meet up with Maisie’s father? We’ll just happen upon him in one of these spots?”