The Willows: Haven

by Hope Collier

  Kevin disregarded the beauty of the garden and hurried on. A pair of wooden doors, taller than any I’d ever seen, creaked open as we closed in on the palace. A pleasant looking girl with dark hair bowed and ushered us inside.

  “Thank you,” I offered, and the girl’s skin paled.

  Kevin jerked me to his side. “What are you thinking?” he hissed. “We don’t speak to the help unless you have a request.”

  “Well, that’s just rude.” I turned back and smiled at her. She dropped her head and hurried through the foyer like a scolded dog.

  I studied the walls in the entrance, intrigued by the structure of mirrors scattered about. A shaft stretching through the ceiling sent a ray of waning sunlight in and expertly reflected it throughout the foyer and hallways.

  I glanced from room to room as we continued down a dimly lit corridor. Typical light fixtures adorned the walls on the interior side of the mountain. Kevin explained that the waterfall fueled their hydroelectric power, which was more than enough to run the entire Valley ten times over, but they preferred natural light during the daytime.

  A pair of male servants opened the last set of doors on the eastern side of the house. The dining room held a table large enough to seat twenty on the other side. Heavy wooden armchairs surround the mahogany table, and to my surprise, each seat held a place setting.

  The echo of doors closing at the opposite end of the room caused me to turn. A lovely couple, who I could only assume were Kevin’s parents, walked toward us. I recognized their faces as those on the statues in the fountain. His mother broke from her husband and hurried to pull me into a hug.

  “You must be Ashton,” she said, her honey-tinted eyes sparkling with joy. “It is such a pleasure to meet you, my dear. I’m Ilana. You’re even more beautiful than my son let on.”

  “Um, thank you,” I murmured, caught off guard by her kindness and beauty.

  “This is my husband, Aiken.” Ilana smiled and wrapped her petite arm around the muscular waist of her towering mate. Easy to see where the Hawthorne brothers got their menacing size.

  “Welcome to our home.” Aiken’s rich voice echoed over the marble floor, polite yet reserved.

  “Thanks. It’s great to finally meet you both,” I said timidly.

  Ilana relieved me of Kevin’s grip and wound her arm through mine, leading me to the far side of the room. “The others will be here shortly. Tell me, how has my son been treating our future princess?”

  Which son? I thought. “Everyone has been very welcoming. Thank you.”

  We paused at the end of the table, and Ilana met my eyes. “We’re all delighted to have you here, dear. Please understand though, this is very new to most of our clan. It may take time for some to adjust.”

  Myself included. “Sure.” I tried to smile. “Does your family get together often?”

  “At least once a week. We’re very close.” She smiled and squeezed my shoulder. “Of course tonight is a special occasion.”

  The same doors Aiken and Ilana came through opened once more. A plethora of chattering family flowed into the dining room. Hugs and well wishes surrounded me as Kevin’s countless siblings filed in. In total there were five boys, all of which I knew, and seven girls.

  Aurelia fluttered to my side and kissed my cheek. “It’s wonderful to see you again, Ashton. You’re looking very well.” She smiled, her eyes crinkling in the corners like her mother’s.

  “Thank you,” I said and returned her smile, hoping I didn’t seem panicked at the thought of the last time we’d spent together.

  Aurelia pulled a female version of a younger looking Kyle over. “Ashton, this is our youngest sister, Adare.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I offered, confused by her standoffish attitude.

  “Right,” she quipped with a sarcastic smile. “Excuse me.”

  She turned and stalked away.

  “Don’t mind Adare.” Kyle’s husky voice sounded through the mix. “She needs to learn she isn’t the center of the universe.”

  Seeing Kyle calmed my nerves. The rigid muscles in the back of my neck began to unknot as we each took our places at the dinner table, Ilana insisting I sit across from her. Servants attended each family member and everyone dug in as they carried on, discussing everything from human politics and business to home design and fashion. I fell into simply trying to seem interested, though I couldn’t help but feel like Ilana was watching me.

  After dinner, Kevin led us to the sitting room. Ilana motioned for me to join her on a long sofa near the fireplace. I choked back the notion she could see through me and took my place beside her. She smiled as if she were trying to relieve my anxiety. I prayed she wrote it off as anything but what it was.

  “How are you adjusting to things here?” she asked kindly.

  “It’s been … interesting.” I tried to put on a good face.

  “I imagine it is a very complicated transition. I don’t pretend to understand the difficulties this new life has put on you. I’m certain you feel pressured — especially with your changing — but I would offer you anything I can to help. We want you to be happy here.”

  Nice, I thought. It’s going to be impossible to hate this woman.

  “I appreciate that very much, Mrs. Hawthorne.”

  “Mrs. Hawthorne?” She trilled with laughter. “I’ll have none of that. You call me Ilana. We’re family now.”

  No, we’re not. “Sure. Ilana.”

  I peered around for Kyle. I hadn’t seen him since dinner and even then, he sat quietly at the opposite end of the table, but he was the one Hawthorne I couldn’t find.

  “Are you looking for someone?” Ilana questioned.

  “Hmm?” I stalled, trying to drum up an explanation. “Um, no. I was just taking in the general beauty of everything. This place is amazing.”

  “Thank you.” She laughed once, her eyes dropping to her hands in her lap as she toyed with a ring on her right hand.

  “That’s really beautiful,” I said, gesturing to the quarter-sized emerald.

  “Thank you, dear. I rather like your stone, as well.” Her knowing eyes flitted to my face. I looked away from the blue-green rock on my index finger and tried to slow my breathing.

  “Would you like to see the rest of the palace?” Ilana mentioned offhand.

  “Sure, that sounds great,” I said, hoping to mask my panic.

  Ilana took my hand and pulled it through her arm again. She led us through the sitting room to an antechamber deeper into the mountain. A stone staircase spiraled upward, leading to the second floor.

  Ilana guided me to the furthest door at the end of a seemingly endless hallway. She lifted a key from around her neck and inserted it through the lock. We stepped into an elegant parlor full of feminine touches.

  “Raising twelve children could be tiresome at times. Aiken built this parlor for me shortly after Pearse and Elon were born. This became my place of solitude.” She sighed as she glanced around the room.

  Books lined two of the walls floor to ceiling while paintings of her family and various musical instruments covered the third. The wall against the windows held a high-back Victorian-era sofa.

  “Please, make yourself comfortable.” Ilana motioned for me to sit then she lifted something from one of the overflowing shelves.

  I eyed the dark leather-bound book she cradled against her chest as she joined me. Her head tilted to the side in an attempt to gain my attention. When my gaze met hers, there was an air of expectancy about her. It felt as if she could see through my pretenses, like she suspected my real motives and feelings about everything.

  I bit my lip and focused on the book.

  “Did you know that I am not a Hamadryad?” she asked, taking an unexpected direction. “That’s why I’m darker than my husband and some of my children. I am a Meliai, from the ash trees.”

  I nodded, unsure how to respond to her.

  “You’re wondering why this matters,” she stated confidently. “It matters b
ecause, as you probably have not heard, the families of Dryads typically marry within their specific clan — a clan being the various types of Dryads. Hamadryad, Meliai, Epimeliad and so forth, are all clans. It is a bit confusing at first.” She smiled sympathetically at my wide eyes. “We do this in order to keep our bloodlines clean and strong.”

  Yeah, that one I’d heard.

  “You see, the Hamadryads gain their strength from the oaks, as mine come from the ash. When you mingle our clans, you arrive at a being that is in between trees. On the one hand, you have a Dryad who can draw strength from two separate trees — on the other, you also have a Dryad who never reaches their full capacity because there is no ash-oak tree, you see?”

  My mind reeled. I couldn’t imagine Kyle, Oren and the rest, being at their full potential.

  She laughed once. “Again, why does that matter, right?”

  I smiled.

  “It is a weakness,” she stated. “Our kind does not want to appear weak, let alone have an actual weakness. Being Hawthornes, we have an even greater desire and need to be strong.”

  But even in my understanding, it didn’t add up. Why would this happen, especially in a royal family? The Naiads certainly didn’t seem to tolerate things like that.

  Ilana didn’t explain further, though she undoubtedly saw the questions shuffling through my mind. She laid the large volume across her lap and opened the cover of what turned out to be a photo album. I looked down at the first page. A breathtaking island stared back at me. It seemed to be suspended in endless blue, impossible to tell where the sky ended and the ocean began.

  “There weren’t cameras back then.” She lovingly brushed her fingers across the painting. “This is my home. I left when I traveled here, and I’ve never returned.”

  For the first time this evening, Ilana’s demeanor fell in sadness.

  Whether it was from her sudden mood change or the possibility that she really didn’t know what I was thinking, I had to ask the burning question in my mind. “Why?”

  Her soft smile returned, but it held a hint of sadness. “I’m forbidden to return. I can never leave The Valley now.”

  Without thinking, I stretched my hand across the album to take hers in mine. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. For whatever reason, she was stuck here, too. It brought me a small comfort knowing that, in one way or another, she understood my position.

  “We live such complicated lives. Sometimes I wish things could just be simpler,” Ilana said, speaking to herself more than to me. “You understand?”

  I offered a sad smile. For once, I did know.

  “Would you like to hear my story?” she asked.

  “Very much,” I said.

  Ilana drew a deep breath and began. “This was my home,” she repeated. “The Island was as close to paradise as one could get. Friends. Family. Love. Everything I had ever known was there.”

  Ilana paused then, seeing things I couldn’t, lost in the memory of her former existence. “It was absolutely perfect. Nothing tainted by pollution or human touch. One of my favorite things there were the underwater caves. My best friend so enjoyed swimming and frequently wanted to explore them. As you know, our kind typically shies away from water, but he and I were always a bit strange.” She smiled warmly. “No one else on The Island knew about the caves because they avoided swimming, so it was our secret place.”

  I lifted an eyebrow in question.

  “He and I weren’t permitted to spend time together. My family didn’t approve of our friendship,” she explained. Her tone turned bitter. “He was adopted in a sense — not a Meliai, to say the least.

  “I had always known that he was special. It never mattered to me one way or the other. I didn’t treat him differently than I would have anyone else, not because he was adopted, that is. He was so very unique. He had pale features — light-blonde hair and vivid green eyes; his skin was fairer than anyone else on The Island. And he could swim with amazing finesse.”

  She turned the sheet over, and my mouth fell open.

  Ilana nodded her eyes locked on the beautiful face. “He was a Naiad.”

  My mind swirled with questions and confusion. How did a lone Naiad end up there? Why did he stay? Why would the Dryads even take care of him? My thoughts transformed into blatant disbelief in the fact that Ilana, a Dryad, was so obviously crazy about him.

  Shaking her head, the smile returned and she continued. “As I was saying, there was a waterfall there in the center of The Island that poured into a large pool, and beneath the pool was the entrance.”

  She turned another page to reveal a tall mountain at the heart of The Island, a powerful waterfall cascading from the heart.

  “Only the passageways were submerged,” she continued, “the rest of the area was like any other cavern, except there was some natural light from openings in the ceiling.”

  I repressed a shiver at the sketches of the inside of the mountain on the opposite page. Caves would forever be a nightmare for me.

  “On a day like any other, we agreed to meet in our cave, and as we swam, he professed his love for me. I was overjoyed for I too was in love with him … more passionately than I could have ever imagined possible,” she said on a smile. “We spent the next several hours discussing our future and hopes, speculating about the possibility of children and the places we could live.”

  She laughed, but there was an unmistakable edge to the sound. My hand tightened around hers.

  “You must understand, things are done differently here. Commitments made among our kind are enough in themselves. We are unwaveringly devoted beings. So in that very place — the cave we held so dearly — we dedicated ourselves, our lives, to one another. Pledging with no greater a passion than would have set the world on fire, that we would spend our eternity together.”

  My own passion stirred inside, former dreams and memories overwhelming me. Ilana’s eyes held a sadness I knew mirrored my own. She stroked the image of her breathtaking Naiad, her face a picture of steadfast adoration yet utter heartbreak.

  “We held each other long into the evening, until it came well past time to leave. He walked me home, my hand in his, through the darkness. We agreed to speak with our families at first light and explain what we had done, that we had bound ourselves.”

  Ilana drew a steadying breath. “Neither of us realized that my eldest brother had been looking for me nor stood, not thirty feet away, hidden in the shadows. He watched as my forbidden friendship turned into something much more unthinkable. Little did I know he immediately told our parents.”

  The silence stretched on. I could imagine, all too well, the picture Ilana painted. My own shattered heart ached in my chest with the reminder of such a passion. It seemed she and I were both meant to live without a heart — a likeness I hadn’t anticipated sharing with anyone, let alone the Dryad meant to be my mother-in-law.

  “I didn’t deny it when my father broached the subject,” Ilana began and shook her head, tears welling in her eyes. “He lashed out at me, ranting about my thoughtlessness, writing my love off as childish and unrealistic. He stated that my marriage couldn’t be real because I was too young, that I didn’t know what I wanted or what I was doing. In his mind, I had been deceived or persuaded into marriage. I was forbidden to even leave the house until everything was … dealt with.”

  I flinched at her wording, and the all too familiar lump knotted in my throat.

  “I escaped in the middle of the night to warn him to leave and never return or they would…” She took an unsteady breath. “I forced him to go, promising we would find a way to be together again someday; I would find him. And then I watched him swim away.”

  My head spun. I realized I’d stopped breathing and drew a lungful of oxygen.

  “What happened?” I asked, unable to stop myself.

  Ilana wiped the moisture from her cheeks and sighed. “I left The Island to search for him, only to find that he had located his birth family.” She laughed grimly. “As
it turned out, he was part of royalty himself. We would never be together again. Now it was his family’s turn to assure that that would never happen.”

  “But how did … you’re with Aiken now,” I pressed, wanting to understand but scared of overstepping a boundary.

  “One day, while hunting in the forest, Aiken found me beside a pond, gazing into the water and crying. There was something so gentle about him. He was so different than my former love, but he loved me more than I deserved. Ignoring his family’s wishes, Aiken married me and we have been happy together since.”

  “I can see that.” I smiled when she patted my hand.

  “Aiken accepted me as I was. When I married the first time, we committed wholly to it, you see?” Ilana searched for my understanding, and I responded with a nod. “Aiken and I were married quickly … so the child I’d brought with me from The Island was no more than a rumor after a time. He was sent to live with his father, bearing too much of a resemblance and likeness to his side of nature.”

  Child? She was forced to give up her heart and her baby?

  She turned the page of her album, her fingers trembling. A baby as beautiful as a cherubic angel smiled back. Dark curly hair covered his head and he wore a smile that would melt your heart. The love in Ilana’s eyes was scarred by heartbreak.

  “I haven’t seen him since he was just a few months old. You cannot imagine that kind of loss, Ashton. Every piece of me … gone.” Her red-rimmed eyes brimmed and spilled over with fresh tears. She was right. The pain I’d experienced over losing the love of my existence was nothing compared to giving up my love and my child.

  I leaned forward and wrapped my arm around her shoulders. She smiled and leaned her head against mine. “You’re probably wondering why I shared my personal history with you.”

  Again, she was right on target.

  “I loved my Naiad more than the stars combined.” She smiled nostalgically. “But it could not be for us. Maybe if things had been different — a different time in our lives, a different place — things might have worked out, but it just couldn’t in our circumstance. My point is, you may only have one heart, one time to offer it completely, but there is always love to be found.