Lineage

by Juniper Black

  That Salome and the rest of her line would stay bound in their plane, the Girl understood. It should have been punishment enough. There was no need for the rest of it. There was no need for Nature to take from them.

  ********

  The Girl sang to the Ash on the day Salome should have joined with them. Here was where Freddy had cried tears of joy when the tree-world opened to draw her inside it. Here Rebecca had stood and thrummed with the orange glow of energy.

  Here now the Girl stood and sang. Then the ground rumbled and opened in a fissure. Out of the torn earth, a blue light arose from the depths and pulled itself out of the clay below.

  Her voice stilled. She regarded the blueness as it swayed a moment and then slithered off into the underbrush. An odor lingered after it had gone, and the air quivered with a smell of rotten blackberries.

  The Girl understood that she had taken from Nature. She had kept something that didn’t belong here. She had tried to circumvent an order she had not realized she was bound to. Maybe she had not recalled the details of the old stories as well as she had thought. Nature may have unleashed the thing that had risen out of the underground, but the Girl felt in her heart that she was the cause.

  She looked to the Ash with a face that could not mask her fear and alarm. The blueness had come from underneath them, and they must have felt the wrongness with their roots. Why had they not told her? Why had they not warned her?

  They had made a pact together, and now it had been corrupted.

  ********

  For many years, the blueness did nothing to the women on the Hill. It ate the eggs from bird nests when it pleased and chased the spring fawns for sport. It bided its time by squatting next to the stream like a giant toad.

  The Girl had watched the sickly blue light slither through the forest. It crawled over the tree roots as the crows cried down at it in alarm. They treated the blueness with an anxious familiarity, and the Girl realized they must have seen this blueness before.

  Unlike her little friends, she did not understand the danger. Even if the crows changed into their other form, she had never understood their words. She could feel that they were scared, but it never occurred to her that she should be.

  The blue light had found Salome asleep one day and crept inside while the Girl watched helplessly. How could she stop something that was little more than vapor? She threw protections around Salome but the blueness misted through them. She placed boundaries around her sleeping kin, but the blueness broke them apart like a closed fist.

  The Girl watched Salome wake, and put a hand to her head. She frowned as she slowly stood, and the Girl watched some of the orange light ebb out of her until Salome could only radiate a faint sickly yellow.

  ********

  Salome had fallen ill, and she could not seem to improve. She sat on the rocker on the days when she had a little strength, and Constance sat on the step below her and talked soothingly. Her daughters made her herbal teas to drink. They were made from the recipes in the family book, but even their ancestors’ knowledge could not fix what ailed her.

  Her husband watched her fade day by day and tried to hide his despair. The Girl watched Constance become preoccupied with her mother’s care, and she saw Jeanne begin to turn away from them both.

  The Girl had only wanted to keep them close to her.

  She felt now that all she had succeeded in doing was to break mothers and daughters apart.

  ________

  Chapter: Rose

  Life was hard up here. She hadn’t always felt it so. She and her sister had roamed the forested hills with their father. Their mother Constance had told them stories around the fire every night. Beautiful stories about a girl who could turn into a fish and make you dream. Chilling stories about misshapen creatures in the forest who dwelled in the dark caves.

  When she had been a young woman and both her own babes had run wild over the hilltop, Rose had laughed easy and often. Helen and Cleo were her girls, both fair haired and limber. They brought home wounded animals to coax back into health as often as they brought home baskets of wildflowers and berries.

  “My angels,” she thought silently with a fierce smile. “My heart.”

  ********

  Helen had been born with the touch of some kind of magic that ran through her family. Rose herself had a talent for making wishes come true, although she had hid her gift as much as she could. Living up on the Hill made it easy to hide away from the others in town, but still word got around somehow. Every so often, a townsperson would struggle to the top of the Hill, so out of breath they could barely voice what they had come all that way to ask.

  Her eldest had much more than Rose. She even glowed sometimes, if the light was just right. A talent that Rose’s grandmother was said to possess. Helen knew when a storm was a day away, and if the coming winter would be harsh. She knew which days at the stream were rife with fish, and when the honey was most easily harvested from the bees. She had memorized all of the contents of the book handed down from Rebecca by the time she was seven and had begun to make her own book when she was eight.

  She made up a spell to shield her from the eyes of others. Another to call an animal to her. She made a spell that made someone want to sleep, and yet another to give them strength to fight a sickness.

  Rose’s eldest burned bright and fierce. She was a wonder. So much talent possessed at such a young age. So much exuberant progress made too fast. Looking back, Rose could see the subtle hints that she had brushed aside as nothing. She blamed herself everyday.

  Others said it was only bad luck that Helen fell ill. So many in town had been lost to a similar sickness. Rose found no solace in their words, and she soon found her younger daughter’s sobbing unbearable.

  Cleo needed comfort, of course Rose had known that. She had resented that she herself couldn’t burrow into her sadness. Her husband had died a month before she had lost her daughter. The only thing Rose could think was that Cleo had to grow up fast. She couldn’t afford to let her be a child any longer. Rose needed her younger daughter to function if they were to survive the winter that was almost upon them.

  Rose turned off her grief and forced her mind to work pragmatically. “I’ll fall apart in the Spring,” she had murmured to herself. But by Spring, her heart had hardened. It was easier to leave it in its new condition than break it all open again.

  An entire year passed before Rose thought to take down the books and show them to Cleo. After a few months, it was clear that the girl had no aptitude for what lay within the pages. The mere act of trying to teach Cleo exhausted Rose, and she couldn’t always hide her frustration on the days when she recalled how effortless Helen had taken to their family’s heritage.

  It was no wonder Cleo began to turn away from the studies. It was not surprising when Cleo began to steal away into town more often. Rose had almost expected Redvers Morgan when he knocked on the cabin door one day and asked for Cleo’s hand in marriage.

  Only then did Rose begin to worry that time was running out.

  ________

  Chapter: Rose and Cleo

  There was always a hesitation at the far edge of the stream. To her, it seemed as if there was a thin curtain that she pressed aside. She had to push against the imaginary veil, and when it opened, she would be on the other side of the world. The colors would be clearer, vibrant. The air would smell sweeter. Her legs would enjoy the way the climb up the Hill made her feel strong again. But the trees groaned as if they were trying to tell you secrets they had held onto for too long, and the shaded areas here seemed a darker black than the ones in town.

  Being conflicted about her birthplace was something Cleo had felt all her life. Even from her first memories, she recalled being elated and terrified by the woods around her home. The sensation never abated through the years. She watched her three boys clamber up the Hill ahead of her. Boys through and through. They turned over rocks just to see what was under them. Her eldest tried to climb every other
tree he encountered, and her youngest chased a frog along the trail. Her friends in town had told her that boys would be different, but she never understood how much. They didn’t seem to fear the forest in any way, and she wondered if a daughter would have felt differently. She wondered if a daughter would have clung close to her side, grown quiet as she looked about with widened eyes and clasped onto her mama’s hand. Cleo would never know. The years were pressing on. She had had her three boys one right after the other, but the youngest was now five. Five years with no sign of another coming anytime soon.

  There was a small voice inside her that spoke to her sometimes. It heard the trees creaking and said for them, “No Swavely girls for you, dear one.” Cleo heard the voice so clearly in her mind that she almost stumbled along the path.

  “Just a root,” she murmured out loud and tried to lessen her shaking. The voice inside her never lied. The voice inside her never needed to.

  ********

  The boys were already huddled around their Grandmama. Their “Rosie,” they called her as if she was a playful young girl. She turned a face to them that she had never shown to Cleo. While her friends had told her to expect this, too, once her mother became a grandmother, Cleo had not believed them. The Rose who raised her would never have been so free with the distribution of sweets. She would never have been so forgiving of the standing on furniture.

  After the boys had their blueberry pie, they scattered into the trees as if they were squirrels. Cleo found herself alone with Rose. Side by side, they rocked silently for a bit in the chairs that her kin had built. Cleo never knew how to begin a conversation with her mother. She waited apprehensively and ran her fingers along the carvings in the chair’s arms until Rose said, “They’re fine boys you have.”

  The shock of being complimented stopped Cleo in mid-rock. “Thank you, mama. I think so, too,” she replied cautiously and slowly relaxed her muscles to let the chair resume its forward motion.

  “There’ll be no girls, though,” Rose said softly. As if speaking in a lower tone would soften the blow.

  This is what Cleo had been anticipating. A compliment followed by a statement on how Cleo was insufficient. A quick insult about how Cleo had failed her. In the past, she would have cowed under her mother’s criticism. She would have meekly acquiesced to her mother’s opinion.

  Cleo was not a child any longer. She was a grown woman; a married woman with a good standing in town. She was the mother of three strong children of her own. The thought of them gave her courage. The trees had begun their creaking in the wind again, and the sound of them pushed her past a line she never knew she had inside her.

  “I don’t need a girl to complete me, Mama.”

  Rose turned to her sharply. “But you do! You do need a girl. Your eldest is almost eight, and you’re out of time.” Rose reached over and grabbed her daughter’s hands into her own. “I am out of time, Cleo. I can’t wait any longer for you to come back to me. There are things you need to know.”

  Cleo tried to pull her hands away. There was a dread coming up from inside her chest. Not anything she could explain, but she knew she had felt it before. She remembered it from other times when her mother had looked at her like this and had clasped her hands tight. “I don’t want to know them,” Cleo heard the sound of her own voice and knew that here on the Hill she would always be a child. In town, she could pretend all she wanted that she was worldly and important and grown. After this moment, in the back of her mind, she would remember that a part of her would always remain small, enraptured and frightened.

  Rose squeezed her hands harder. “There’s no choice now. I only have you. I waited to see if I’d have a granddaughter, but there is none. And there is none to come in the future. If your sister had lived -”

  Succeeding in snatching her hands away, Cleo stood and climbed down from the porch. This was a rare moment for her mother to mention the elder sister she had scarcely known. The familiar indignation flared up inside her, mingled with the dread already gathered there, and transformed into an anger that flushed her neck and cheeks. The allusion to her sister, who would have been the one to hear all their family’s secrets, compounded her feeling of insignificance. Another daughter who would have learned all the ancient crafts that Rose had yearned to impart. Even though Cleo didn’t want them, there was still the offense that her mother had never seen her worthy of them.

  “I don’t want to know them,” she spat at Rose again.

  “There’s no one else, child,” Rose started to protest. “Lovely as your boys are, they won’t suit.”

  At the insult to her children, her anger was changing yet again. “Your sister then, or the girl she has.”

  Rose fidgeted in her rocker. “I cannot convince her to come back home from New York.”

  “Then let it die up here, whatever you’re trying to hold onto. What purpose has it served to hide away up here? Never going further than the stream? There’s a whole world out there, Mama, that has nothing to do with the secrets your great-great grandmother handed down nor stands of Ash that glow in mid-summer.”

  Rose almost looked as if she were pleading with Cleo. “There’s a whole world up here, girl, that you have never known.”

  Cleo spied her sons leapfrogging from the forest back into the clearing around the cabin. “Boys, say goodbye to Rosie. We’re leaving for home.”

  Disappointment peppered the sounds they made at the announcement, but it created the result for which she had hoped. The boys ran to cover their grandmother in kisses, and Cleo knew that Rose would change her demeanor for them. She would return their kisses and give them smiles as she stuffed the disappointment of yet another failed attempt to bring her daughter into her circle of knowledge.

  “I’ll try again. In a few weeks, maybe,” Rose thought as she waved from the porch. The Sight had not been one of the gifts she had inherited, though, and she could not know that Cleo would never come to the Hill again. Redvers would always bring the boys in the future.

  Cleo stomped down the Hill, aware that it was trying its little tricks to get her to linger. A burst of color as a tower of butterflies twirled themselves out of the bush just ahead of her. A cache of ginger root in bloom, her favorite flower. “I hadn’t noticed them on the way up,” she thought uneasily. That they had not been there at all was more likely.

  She didn’t want the Hill to distract her and focused instead on the sun glinting off the three blond heads bobbing down the path ahead of her. “They’ll never have to deal with any of this nonsense,” she realized. “They can just live their lives and be men. Go where they please, do as they please.” This had not been the reality for Cleo as the only female Swavely direct heir. She had had to make her own escape. In the past, if Redvers had wanted her, he would have had to move up onto the Hill and eschew the growing society of town. He and Cleo would have had to carve out a life with little else than what their hands and the Hill could provide. That kind of life had never been one that she wanted. She tried to imagine Redvers’ refined hands mangled by the years of labor, his face creased with the burden of a hard country life. “Hillbilly,” the word came unbidden into her mind. It was the taunt from the girls in town that had hurt her most when she was young.

  If Cleo still had her wish to ask of Rose, it would be to press their family secrets onto another. But Cleo had already used her wish. She used it when she asked Rose to let her marry Redvers and leave the Hill. She still remembered how her mother had carefully arranged her features, and how still she had sat for what felt like an hour. Rose had granted her wish, but only if Cleo agreed to be satisfied with living no farther away than the town.

  A large black shadow swooped across her vision to her left. She knew without looking that it would be one of the large crows that shared these woods. They always seemed as if they watched her. She felt the eyes of the one on her left even now. Willing herself not to look, she kept her own eyes on her sons. She tried to hear their gleeful shouts instead of the bird’
s grating song. Soon there was no hope of that as one bird turned into ten. The ugly crows cawed down at her, and the sound at her back made her walk faster. She saw the break in the trees far ahead that signalled the stream was close and felt the relief that washed over her every time she was leaving this place where she had spent her childhood. She looked at her boys again and thought about the girl she never had. She wondered suddenly with a sharp intake of breath if that had been the cost of her freedom. The wish from Rose had been granted, but the Hill had not forgotten to add punishment.

  “I’ll not come again,” Cleo said aloud so the forest would hear her. “You keep your secrets.” She said louder, “I never wanted the girl anyway.”

  She saw the sparkle of the sun on the water ahead and ran for its safety. The small voice inside her protested and flapped its words against the inside of her breast like a trapped songbird.

  “But you do want to know what else lives up on the Hill.

  “You do wish for the girl you never had.”

  ________

  Chapter: The Girl

  There was a rough energy in the forest, and the trees whispered to the Girl to come and see.

  A line of blond children ran up the main worn path of the hill, although they wandered off of it as much as they kept to it. They were exploring for bugs and woodpeckers and any creepy crawly they could spy. The Girl heard a voice call to them and say, “Keep to the path!” It was a voice tinged with anxiousness and a vague sense of alarm. When the Girl heard it echo around the trees, her heart leapt a little with excitement.

  Cleo. Her Cleo was here! Always her favorite. Cleo looked so much like Janie. Her smile was the same. Her long hands and fingers. The sweet determination of her spirit. The Girl could see such things as these.

  Her visits were far fewer than they should have been. Fewer than the Girl would have liked, and certainly far fewer than Rose would prefer. In truth, the Girl was still a little perturbed that Rose had given Cleo permission to leave the hilltop. She understood, of course. Rose’s hands had been tied. Cleo had wished for it, and Rose was bound to honor the gift with which she had been born.