Some nights in summer, all these years later when it was just the two of them on the cabin's porch looking out at the night woods and all the stars in the sky, he would turn to his sister and see the smile she had always saved for her Stranger. That was a comfort to him. That she had grown older and silvered with as much wonder and joy in her heart as when she was young. If she did not regret the life she had been dealt, then how could he?
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Chapter: The Girl
There was a chill in the air today, and although the Girl was usually immune to such things, she felt the cold creep into her bones.
“Our gift?” the trees swayed and demanded.
The Girl knew she was out of time. The Ash would wait no longer, and that she could feel the chill in her bones meant she had already risked staying too long.
She looked up into the treetops. She let her body sway side to side with their movement.
“Your gift,” she answered. “Yes.”
********
The hardest part, he thought, was smiling through this last evening with his family. Freddy was the last to leave, although Stranger knew she would be back. To care for the forest. To care for Janie. Stranger had made certain.
Janie smiled at him from across the table. She laughed at something Freddy had said. Thomas hadn’t heard what it was, but he cackled with a crow’s laughter while he pretended he had. He looked at the animated face of this girl he had made and at the mirth on the face of his wife. The moment overwhelmed him, and he rose to attend to the fire so they would not see.
A log went on the fire. “Let one man in,” the voice of the elders sounded in his mind. He placed another log on the flames. “Another will always follow.” Stranger felt his heart wrench inside his chest. He stoked the fire to buy himself more time. He couldn’t risk the others witnessing his despair. He knew what came next, what he had to do. There could be no indication beforehand.
Another breath, to still his tears. Another moment, to compose his features. A brief moment of understanding, that the words the Girl’s elders had spoken had indeed been a warning. The Girl had understood the words, but not the meaning until now.
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Chapter: Janie
Janie never told her brother, but she knew her children were blessed. As she grew older, she knew they were blessed because they were from Stranger. She watched them grow and thrive in the world, each in their own way. When her grandchildren started trickling in, she took one look at their green eyes that sparkled like her Tom's and knew that they were blessed, too.
"How far down this family line will Stranger's touch follow?" she asked herself as she watched Cora's son Matthew call out bird songs before he could even speak. A pang of heartbreak went through her chest. It was only for a moment, but she knew this one would wander.
Not like her Freddy nor any of her line. She was connected to the forest around the cabin in a way Janie’s other children were not. While the gifts that the others had inherited may take them far and wide should they choose, Freddy would always stay close to home. Janie knew it would be her youngest who would claim the cabin as her own when she moved on from this world to the next.
Cora's eldest daughter seemed to prefer the woods at the top of the hill more than anyplace on earth, but Matthew was little satisfied with this small stretch of hillside. Janie could tell in the way he wriggled at the table of the family suppers. She could see it when he pressed his lips tight together if he was told to wait. "That one could be trouble later on," she thought to herself. She knew she wouldn't be around to see how much trouble he would turn out to be.
There was no denying that she was getting frailer. She kept closer to the top of the hill around the cabin. Venturing back up had become as tiresome as when she was very young and had struggled up to see Ever. Her eyes had trouble distinguishing the shading of the forest. She had walked into a hornet's nest last summer, and later in the autumn had almost taken a spill down the hillside.
The scare was enough to make her children panic. John had passed away a year earlier, and although his young wife Jehan had stayed on to help Janie, to them it seemed clear that daily visits shared between them was no longer enough. When Freddy volunteered to help Jehan and live with Janie, no one was surprised. Secretly, Cora and Lise were relieved. The hill held strange memories for them.
The time they were followed home by a line of frogs, but only so far as the edge of the woods at the top of the hill. The way the fireflies always seemed to gather around their father in blinking clouds. The afternoon they found another little girl in the woods. She skipped away from them down the hill. Though they chased after her, she was always far ahead. They ran all the way down to the stream where the girl jumped into the shallow water and swam away like a fish. Cora insisted the girl had actually turned into a fish, but Lise said it was just a trick of the light on the rocks of the riverbed.
"Girls can't turn into fishes, silly." Lise flicked her hair behind her as they washed off in the cool stream water. "Everyone knows that."
Cora wasn't so sure. She didn't think Lise was sure either despite her sister's bravado.
When they came home at the end of days such as those, when something fantastical had happened to them, their family members always had the same reactions. Their mother would smile and say, "Really? Did it truly happen?" She said this in a voice that made them know she believed them. Their father, if he was home from hunting, would raise his eyebrows high and give one long, low whistle. James would tell them they had imagined something that wasn't there. As eldest sibling, he felt it was his duty not to let his sisters run wild. But Freddy would never say a word. She sat still and quiet through their tales, leaning in towards them to capture every detail. When they finished their story, she would nod her head once and turn to look outside at the woods around them. The sisters always believed that Freddy had seen things, too. If she did, she never told her own tales to them.
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Chapter: The Girl
She had slept with the trees for a time. Not so long as they measure time, but in the human world of time, the Girl felt she had been gone a while. When the Ash finally released her, she moved anxiously out into the woods towards what had been her home as Thomas Stranger. Her energy was drained, even though she had slept these past many years. The trees took their toll, but her debt had been paid. She would feel whole again in a few days, but her hunger to see what remained of her family drove her on despite her fatigue.
She moved through the wildflower meadow as fast as she could will her legs to move. She briefly wondered if she could cover more ground in an animal form, but she knew the transformation would drain her more and slow the animal’s gait. Better to press on as she was.
The smoke from the chimney caught her attention before she could see the cabin, although that was no guarantee that one of her own was minding the fire. She would have to see for herself.
She slowed to approach the cabin with more stealth, and peered through the salmonberry shrubs. She ate the berries to renew her strength as she watched to see who might exit or enter the cabin. One of her dark feathered friends alit heavily on a branch above her. She put a finger to her lips to shush him from making any noise, and he shivered his body at her instead to show his excitement that she had returned.
Finally, the door to the cabin creaked open, and she held her breath. Freddy walked out.
“Oh!” she thought. “So tall!” She counted the years she had been gone by her added inches. Freddy turned her head over her shoulder to speak to another inside, and in a moment, a woman came to stand beside her on the porch. She walked carefully to the rocker. She used Freddy’s arm as a support as she sunk to sit down in the sunshine. There was silver hair upon her head, although the woman’s face glowed in a way that rejected time. She moved slowly, and the Girl could sense that there was a stiffness in the woman’s bones. A sure sign of age upon the frame. At first the Girl wasn’t certain who she was. Freddy leaned aga
inst a railing as she spoke to the woman softly. Only when the woman laughed did the Girl’s heart sink.
This was her Janie, her body and mind marked by time. The Girl’s skin was still smooth. Her gait would be limber again when she regained her full strength in a few days.
She knew what had happened to Janie was inevitable. There was no power she held that could have made the outcome any different. Not here in this world. Perhaps in her old world, if the others would have allowed it. But then again, this new world was where Janie existed. The Girl’s mind chased the two thoughts around each other. The old world held the power but no Janie. This world held Janie but not enough power. The Girl fretted until she forced her thoughts to quiet.
She watched her wife and daughter from the bushes until they went inside again. The Girl wiped the berry juice from her hands onto her naked thighs. She rose from her hiding place and slowly made her way to her cave and her old nest. The walk was far slower for her now. An exhaustion had set in; the combination of pushing herself too soon after her time with the Ash and of seeing what had become of her beautiful bride.
Dark shapes began to gather around her, she could see them out of the corners of her eyes. They flew down through the tree limbs until they walked beside her, and she was glad of them. They huddled closer as her energy failed her. She felt skin and little claws wrap around her limbs to hold her upright, and then they closed around to carry her completely as she slid into unconsciousness.
********
Her ability to turn into Stranger was gone. She knew that when she left Janie on that last imagined hunt. When she had lied to her wife. The lie is what kept her from going to Janie now in her true form. There was a feeling that doing so was a dishonor to the life Janie had made with Stranger.
The feeling of dishonor was what kept her from her daughter as well. The other children seemed to have disappeared into their lives elsewhere, but Freddy stayed close to the hill. The Girl had ensured that it would be so. She would soon visit her in the woods in the form her daughter would expect. The tall woman who had taught her about the forest, and that was the form she would show to her again. The Woman of the Woods, Freddy had named her.
She would be careful, of course. There would need to be gray in the woman’s long black hair. She should have wrinkles around her eyes. She could not appear to Freddy as she had been when she was young.
She needed to make sure Freddy remembered all she had been taught. There would be a need for her lineage to continue the protections she had made for them in the past. There would be a need because the sight of them was becoming unbearable for her.
When she had made the promise to the Ash, she had thought only of what her heart wanted. She understood the price that was required, and she had paid it willingly. What she had not known was the devastation she felt now. Her life was still here in front of her everyday, but she could not have it. She wanted to comfort Janie, but the form she could do that in was lost to her. She wanted to teach her daughter by her own hands, but there was a shame she felt at leaving her. Freddy had been little more than a child, and now she was a woman.
There was no joy for her. Seeing them everyday was only heartache. She would need to turn away from them if she was to survive. If Freddy remembered all the secrets she had been shown by her when she had appeared to her as the Woman of the Woods, then she could run into the depths of the trees far away from them.
She would stay away as long as she could stand to be without them. Only then would she allow herself to creep back to check on them. To see Janie once more. To see the children Freddy would make of her own someday.
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Chapter: Freddy
“Mama, where is the book?” she asked.
Janie looked up from the yarn she was untangling in the spring sunshine. Her brow furrowed, and she replied, “What book?”
Freddy sat alongside her on the bench. “Your mother’s book. I went to take it from the cave, and it wasn’t there. Did you move it?”
Janie’s head shook a little as she lowered her eyes back to her task. “I don’t know what book you mean.”
Her response caused a panic in Freddy’s chest, and she tried to quell the feeling. Her mother’s forgetfulness was occurring more often these days. If she gave her a minute, she would usually remember important things.
The book was part of her ancestors. It connected her to her grandmother, although Freddy had never been allowed to touch the book when she was little. She was a woman before her own mother invited her to see inside. This was after her father had left them, and well after Janie had mourned his leaving. Janie always insisted that something must have happened to Stranger out in the woods. Freddy never believed this, although her siblings seemed to accept the story. There was something in her mother’s voice that made her doubt the story as truth.
Janie called Freddy to her side one day and asked her to walk through the woods with her. They followed a route that was unusual for her, and after a while, it brought them to the mouth of a cave hidden behind a cover of shrubs. Janie put her finger to her lips to warn Freddy to stay quiet, although she didn’t understand why at the time.
The first few steps inside were pitch black, but soon the cave floor turned a corner and the walls began to glitter with a luminescent orange. “Some kind of glowbug,” Freddy thought to herself, “or else something in the rock itself.” She reached a hand out to touch the substance. Janie caught her arm before she made contact, and she pointed up ahead to draw her attention. A large stone like an altar emerged in the soft light, and as they drew closer she could see a thick book upon the stone’s surface.
She watched her mother stand over the book and clasp her hands at chest level: once with the left hand over the right and then again with the position reversed. She stole the book from its place and gestured to Freddy to follow her back outside.
They spent the rest of the afternoon on a mossy bank outside the cave, and Janie showed her the book that had been in her mother’s family for longer than anyone could remember. Before the words were written down inside the dark leather binding, her family had orally related the contents to the next generation. The words had been repeated until every syllable could be recalled in an instant. Janie’s own mother had still memorized the entire contents of the weighty tome in case it became lost.
The book was fascinating, no doubt. The things she read inside it were different than the things she had already been taught by the Woman of the Woods. On this day of such intimate sharing from her mother, she did not know what stilled her own tongue and stopped her from telling Janie about the Woman and of what she had showed her since she was young.
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Janie had gone for a walk after lunch. She went alone, even though she wasn’t supposed to anymore. She couldn’t quite remember why she wasn’t supposed to, and in the next instant she even forgot that a walk by herself was forbidden at all. Merrily, she wandered a trail that her body seemed to know. She stopped to pick flowers, although she couldn’t seem to recall what kind they were. “Lupine,” the word was suddenly on her tongue. “Of course they are,” she said to herself and nodded her gray head.
The path wound downwards slightly, and she was stopped by a thicket of brush. Something told her to push them aside, and when her hands peeled apart the dark green of limbs, there was a cave nestled behind them. Janie went inside and soon found a strange book. She took it back out into the light to see it better. Once the pages fell open, she knew it was her Mother’s book. “How did Mother’s book get here?” she muttered as she closed it and hugged it to her chest.
She found the trail that she knew took her to the stream. “Such a lovely day for a sit down by the stream,” she thought. She read the book on the bank for a while until a young raccoon broke through the treeline to wash a find in the water. She watched him for a bit and set the book aside onto the moss. The raccoon finished his task and sauntered back into the brush. Janie tucked one knee up and clasped her hands
around it. She watched the clouds in the blue sky until she heard Freddy calling for her. She turned to her voice, away from the book on the bank, and rose to find her.
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Chapter: Freddy and the Girl
She had watched Janie since the cave and had followed at a distance. Her beautiful Janie, now almost unrecognizable.
She had watched her at the stream. Janie reclined on the mossy bank as the Girl nestled herself in a tree nearby. She heard Freddy’s voice calling from somewhere not too far off. She watched Janie rise and abandon the special book, and the Girl waited a long while to make sure no one was coming back for it.
“How strange,” she thought and crept down towards the stream. She touched the smooth leather with her hands and then hugged it to her chest. She meant to return the book to its place in the cave. She meant to do it as soon as she turned from the stream bank, but as she turned she realized that Janie’s scent clung to the book. Soft lavender and rose. She had meant to return it, but she couldn’t bear to put it down. She carried it with her to her own home. She laid the book in her little nest and then curled herself around it.
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