by Cat Hellisen
“Oho,” said the raven, and flew far ahead, till it was nothing more than a white star in the green and black heavens of the forest dark. Sarah could hear the soft caw in the distance as she battled her way through the close-growing trees.
Oho, oho.
* * *
The rain was a steady downpour by the time Sarah reached the castle. She raced across the clearing, hopping over the clumps of tangled blackjack weeds and wiry grass. Even though the rain pelted down, at least it was warmer here. Sarah ran under the stone archway and stopped before the great wooden door, her hair dark and dripping. The door was locked against her, or it was too heavy for her to budge.
She settled on rapping her knuckles against the black wood, so hard that the bones felt shattered under her skin.
Finally the doors groaned and swung outward, so that Sarah had to jump back a little. Nanna stood on the other side, stern-faced and gray like a standing stone. But also dry.
“Um, I was exploring,” Sarah said, even though Nanna hadn’t asked. “And I got a little lost.”
“Hmph,” said Nanna, but she stepped aside. “Come in out of the wet, fool girl. You’ve missed breakfast,” she added as the doors closed behind Sarah, through their own power, it seemed.
Magic.
“Sorry,” Sarah mumbled. She shivered in her damp clothes.
Her grandmother snorted and snapped her fingers in impatience.
Heat flickered over Sarah’s skin, snake-fast, and as soon as it was gone, Sarah’s clothes were dry. Bone dry, and her hair, which had been hanging in dripping tails, was warm and soft.
Magic.
There was no way she could carry on denying it. And if it was all true, then the raven wasn’t lying either. Cursed. She thought of the beast outside in the shed, and how the water must be pouring through the holes in the roof, how the beast—how Grandfather—would be lying in mud, would be cold and damp and with no chance of respite. “Um,” Sarah said again.
Her grandmother was striding along the corridors and hallways, and down a flight of unlit stairs. The castle was already a gloomy place, but with the storm growling and spitting overhead, it was even darker and gloomier. Sarah hurried to catch up.
They came to a vast underground kitchen. Here, at least, were warmth and lanterns and huge iron ranges with pots of gleaming copper. A spoon swirled lazily by itself in one bubbling stewpot, and the aroma of beef and vegetables and garlic hung heavy. Nanna pointed to a covered plate on the huge kitchen table. “Your eggs will be cold, but that’s hardly my problem. Sit. Eat.”
Nanna was right, the eggs were cold, and so were the bacon and the toast, but they were still there. Another snap of her fingers, and steam rose from the plate. “And that’s more than you deserve,” she said. “Now. What is it you wanted?”
At least Nanna hadn’t decided to start starving her, Sarah mused. The way things had been going for her, that was almost a relief. “It’s about Grandfather,” Sarah said, and then quickly took a bite of toast to give herself something to do. And because she was hungry. It turned out that fighting your way through a snowy forest before breakfast did severe things to the appetite.
“What about him?” Nanna asked flatly. She’d crossed her arms and was staring narrowly at Sarah. Behind her the pots bubbled to themselves, the spoons stirred, the smells wafted.
Sarah swallowed her toast. “Well … it’s … he’s probably cold and wet where he is now, right?”
“And what would you have me do—bring him in here to keep him dry?” Nanna sniffed. “I think not. He’s a beast now, and that’s all there is to it. Beasts have hungers. They can’t be trusted.”
“And beastkeepers?” asked Sarah.
Nanna said nothing. Instead she looked at the table very hard, as if by staring at it long enough she could turn it into something else, or make it prance about on its four legs. Possibly she could. “Eat your food,” she said finally. “There are chores that need doing.”
Sarah pushed a crispy piece of bacon through the remains of her eggs. “Nanna?”
“What is it now?”
“What happens if you leave here?”
Instead of answering, her grandmother stared at her for a full minute, then, grim-faced, she got up and swept from the room, her skirt trailing like the broken wings of a bird.
9
WE MUST BE ENEMIES
IT TURNED OUT that Nanna’s idea of chores all seemed to be ones that kept Sarah outdoors. Whatever it was that kept the castle running, or fueled Nanna’s magic, perhaps it didn’t extend to the grounds.
That was fine by Sarah; the castle gave her the creeps. Every moment she was inside its walls she felt as if she were being slowly crushed in a damp stone fist. Even if the sunlight outside was thin and not very warm, it was better than the choking dust and mold inside. And it helped to not be around her grandmother.
Nanna set Sarah to weeding an area that had once been a vegetable garden. There were still some straggling, yellowed cabbages among the weeds, and a few shriveled beans here and there, but mostly the garden had been left to its own devices. In one far corner, arum lilies grew against a low stone wall, spearing the sky with their green hearts and yellow tongues. They were her mother’s favorite flower, and something about their creamy simplicity made Sarah feel a little better. As if by sitting near them, she was sharing something with her mother.
They made the corners of her eyes prick, it was true, but after a while she stopped feeling so sad, and instead she talked to the flowers in the same way she had spoken to her mother when she’d come home from school. She shared her thoughts and her worries, until her tongue fell as silent as the lilies’. After that she felt a little better.
A few bees swirled dazedly around the tall lilies, pausing every so often to crawl along the cool marble throats of the flowers. Her mother had always loved bees, Sarah remembered. She would tell Sarah that bees were good at keeping secrets, that they carried the dead across from this world to the next. All kinds of nonsense Sarah had hardly believed back then. She wondered now if any of it was true. After all, the world was more magical than she’d ever realized.
One bee landed near her. Sarah paused in her work and stared at it. “And if I told you my secrets,” she whispered, “what would you do with them?”
The bee neatened its antennae, then flew off toward the forest.
Sarah turned back to her work. She dug away with her trowel, tidying rows and filling a rusted, decrepit wheelbarrow with weeds. Despite the cold, she was sweating. It was harder work than she was used to, but at least the rain had stopped, and the clouds were thinning and giving way to a faint, watery sunshine.
“I think I’d rather be back at school,” she said to the flowers as she slammed her trowel into the earth and a clump of cold, wet soil rocketed into her eye. “Ugh.” Sarah leaned back and shook the dirt out of her face. And what was going to happen with school? Her father couldn’t have planned on leaving her here for good, cut off from the world, to grow old and mad like Nanna.
She hoped.
Thinking about her father made Sarah’s chest go tight and hot. I miss you, she thought, but I don’t even know if you miss me. She had no idea where he was—anything could have happened to him. She remembered the way he’d been before they left to come here. How he’d been all wild about the edges, like a dog who’d missed too many dinners.
Who was making him food now? He never remembered to eat—it was always Sarah who had to remind him. The thought made Sarah’s heart feel small and scared. And maybe he’d lied to her about how things were going to get better. He’d said everything was going to go back to normal, but instead he’d left her here, with this broken magic.
He had to come back for her. If he was gone—gone the way her mother was—there might be no escaping, ever. He might have left her here for good. That thought was so enormous, so terrible, that Sarah had been skirting it for days, pretending it wasn’t really sitting in the middle of her mind like a sharp
rock. There was no running away from it now. It was too late; she’d looked at that rock and she couldn’t unsee it now, or pretend that it didn’t exist.
She had no idea where her father was, or what had happened to her mother.
Without them, she was truly alone. Nanna hardly counted, since there was not the slightest hint of grandmotherliness about her at all, and Sarah didn’t know if her other grandparents were even alive.
A hot prickle filled Sarah’s eyes, and her lip began to tremble. She missed her parents. She missed them so much that it made her throat tight and her whole chest feel like someone had wrapped rubber bands around it until she could hardly breathe.
A sound of feathers brushing together made her turn quickly, wiping her face as she did. She didn’t need anyone feeling sorry for her—or worse, feeling nothing at all.
“Oh, it’s just you.” Sarah scowled at the raven and tried to keep the quiver out of her voice. “You’re sneaking up on me now.”
“So I am. How did you hear me?”
“I don’t know. I just did.” She shook her head. “Raven, I need to know … is my mother dead?”
The raven didn’t answer her directly. Instead it pecked at the ground, as if it had been distracted by plump, wriggling worms. But the earth in this patch was empty. Sarah knew, because she’d just been digging it over earlier. The raven was trying to ignore her. Perhaps the question made it uncomfortable.
“Do you know?” Sarah prodded at it with a wisp of old grass, and the raven hopped back, feathers ruffled. “You don’t, do you?”
The raven clacked its beak. “Of course I do. I certainly know more than a little monster of a girl like you.”
“So tell me.”
The raven puffed up its breast, and gave a sigh that sounded far too human. “She’s not dead yet. But like all creatures, she will have her allotted span.”
Sarah frowned. Whatever that means. The curse, of course—but what about it? It was all too complicated and messy. It made her think of the time when her mother had tried to take up knitting and how that sad little ball of wool (which was supposed to have become a scarf) had become a tangle of knots and bits of dirt, oddly intertwined with a small key that didn’t fit any of the locks in the house. The curse was like that—it had turned something soft and jewel-bright into a snarled mess of filth. The thing was to find the loose ends and slowly unpick it. To try to find a truth in the lies, and smooth it out and follow where it led her. “And … my dad?”
It occurred to Sarah that the truth might not be something she wanted to hear, and she swallowed, waiting for the answer.
The raven calmly straightened its feathers with its sharp beak.
Impossible thing! Sarah tried for a different thread. “What happened to my grandfather—now that my mother is gone, is it happening to my dad?”
“Undoubtedly,” said the raven. “He will begin to change, faster and faster, until there is nothing human left in him at all, except for the memories of the man he was.”
“Can—if he falls in love with someone else? Someone who loves him back? Could that save him?”
“By the terms of the curse, only the first love counts.” The raven looked down its thick beak and prodded at the ground, as if it couldn’t face Sarah. “I’m sorry.”
Sarah’s trowel fell from her numb fingers to land on the soil with a soft thunk. “But why did he bring me here, then—why leave me and run away?”
“Perhaps he did not want you to see the change,” said the raven. “Humans are such prideful things.”
“We have to stop it,” Sarah said. “We have to find my mother and make her go back to him and—”
“And what?” cawed the raven. “Keep him in an iron cage and feed him scraps? Your mother did right, leaving him. It’s better than what Inga did, too scared to run, too scared to change.”
“What do you mean, change? You said the curse would kill her. Now you say it won’t—or is it all lies?” A little bit of hope grew in Sarah. Perhaps her mother was out there still, waiting to come back one day.
“I never lie,” said the raven. “The terms of the curse are … complex. Even if your grandmother falls out of love, she has to stay, unless she wants to be turned. If she leaves, she changes too. The witch who decided the terms thought them most amusing and ironic at the time—” The raven suddenly clicked its beak shut, as though it was stopping itself from saying more.
“She turns too? Into a beast?” Was that what had happened to her mother? It was better than death. It had to be.
“No,” said the raven. “Not a beast. But death will come to her, sooner than you think.”
It was too much. Curses on curses. Sarah stood and slapped the mud off her knees. Enough was enough. Her father hadn’t gone to some special hospital to get better; her mother wasn’t going to turn up out of the blue and pretend that nothing had happened. The whole mess felt like a nightmare, but Sarah had finally realized that it was real. And no one was coming to save her.
There was no way to find the truth in all these tangles. And what would she get for it if she did? A monster for a father, and a mother who had left her.
“Right,” she said. “I’m leaving.” The tears had all dried up, and in their place was a hopeless, hard anger. She marched toward the gravel road that her father had driven down. The raven flew after her, wings clapping awkwardly.
Gravel crunched like dry cereal under Sarah’s sneakers. No one called out after her, screamed at her to return. The only other sounds were the hushing of the leaves, the slow flap of the raven’s wings, and the muted calls of the birds in the forest. Sarah walked for an hour, following the deserted road hemmed in by trees, putting the castle far behind her. The raven followed and said nothing, until Sarah rounded a curve in the road and stopped, her heart plummeting like a rock tossed into a still pond.
The raven cawed once, an apologetic sound, and flew off.
Ahead of Sarah stood the crumbling castle, overgrown with ivy and moss, outlined by the red light of late afternoon.
There was no escaping the forest, it seemed. Not without a guide.
* * *
The rest of the week, Sarah moved in a haze, only half aware of what was going on around her. She ate breakfast, tended the gardens, helped feed her grandfather at night. Her skin was numb, her brain bundled up in fog.
She didn’t speak to Nanna or to the raven, just nodded dully and did what she was told. At night she sat on her bed, Steg and Hedge on her lap, a book balanced open. The words would swim in front of her eyes. No matter how hard she tried, it seemed not a single line would stay still, would make its way into her brain. When she felt like crying, she would cup her hand over the little hard nugget of the silver bear on its chain, and push until it felt like the tiny animal was clawing into her chest.
It was on the seventh day that she finally spoke again.
Sarah rammed her trowel into the ground—she’d cleared most of the castle vegetable gardens by then, and had been instructed that her next task was to try to bring order to the blackberry canes on the far side of the clearing. When she spoke, the words felt thick and dusty, all crammed up in her throat like balls of old newspaper. “What about me?” she croaked.
The raven, which had been pecking delightedly at a stringy earthworm that Sarah had turned up while digging, paused and looked at her. It ruffled its feathers once, gave the earthworm a last jab, then hopped up onto the nearest handle of the wheelbarrow. “What about you?”
“When do I turn into a beast?” she asked softly. “When I fall in love?”
The raven was silent.
“Well,” said Sarah, looking around at the new-turned earth, the bundles of dying weeds, “I won’t let it happen. I’ll never let it happen. And I won’t let Dad stay a beast. And I won’t be lied to.”
“If you say so,” the raven cawed sadly, and flapped off over the trees until it disappeared like a melting snowflake.
Sarah stood up and shivered. Her jacket l
ay folded on the low, tumbled remains of a wall, and after a brief hesitation, she grabbed it and pulled it on. It left her feeling hot, but Sarah knew that where she was going, she’d need it. She’d stuffed woolen gloves into the pockets, and a narrow scarf. Perhaps, underneath the stumbling zombie she’d been for the last few days, the real Sarah had been planning this all along.
Sarah grinned to herself, even though a ripple of shivers spread in circles down her shoulders and back. I’ll find them. I’ll fix it.
The raven had told her not to go to the Within, that the witches were all gone and no one could help her family now, but Sarah no longer believed this. She’d noticed that the raven told her only what it wanted her to know. It was Nanna’s creature, but it also wasn’t. Captive and spy, it played its own games, Sarah thought as she set off into the forest.
The trail was easy enough to spot, and she followed it, avoiding the garlands of webs and the spikes of the low branches, always listening for the faint trickle-rush of water that would tell her she’d reached the river she wasn’t to cross.
She followed the cold, the puff of her breath, and the wet-black trunks of the pines. Animal tracks zigzagged through the undergrowth, confusing her steps, but she carried on, teeth clenched with determination.
* * *
Sarah was lost. She turned around, shoving branches out of her way and panting. “Stupid.” She ducked to avoid a particularly low-hanging tangle of twigs. “Tree.” A bundle of pine needles scratched against her cheek. “Thing.” She wasn’t upset yet—at least, not upset enough to start crying—but she could feel herself getting more and more nervous, her heart going faster. What if she stayed lost forever—starved to death in the forest?