“This adder, in exchange for first mark of the woods each morn until the day of rest.”
Sunday. That is four days from now—four days of giving up first arrival to the hunting grounds. It is hardly worth it…and yet, I cannot bring myself to deny his offer on a whim or out of pride.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” I tell him, but my gaze burns hard on the adder.
Its venom is gold to my remedies. I could accomplish so much with that one snake, and even more with the foetuses inside of it. Adders, unlike most other snakes, don’t lay eggs. For that, they are all the more interesting to me.
Colton pulls out the knife from the snake, then tucks it into its sheath. “I will bring you one rabbit each day. Now is it fair?”
I reach for the adder, and Colton doesn’t pull away. I take it and roll it up like it is a mere rope to be hung on a peg. “It is a fair offer, and I accept. But heed this warning—” I look up at him and conjure my glower again. “—should you try to trick me with your smallest rabbit, I will know, and our bargain will be at a quick end.”
By the manner of his creased lips, I know I caught his trickery. He thought he could fool me, but no one can.
“So be it.”
Colton strides out of my way and back to the rabbit’s trap. He crouches beside it to check for any damage I might have done.
Once he’s satisfied, we share a brief, cold look.
I continue my journey to Grandmother’s cabin, a sour pinch to my face.
I’m not too proud to admit that Colton is a fine hunter. He brings back the most of any of us from his days in the woods. Sometimes, he stays among the trees for days and nights, and returns only when he has a barrow full of prize. Rabbits. The occasional fox. And rarest of all, a wolf. I have yet to catch me a wolf—and shan’t for the next four days, at least.
Colton’s claim to the hunting ground burdens me greatly. When I am finished at Grandmother’s, I will return to barren woods. No boars or deer or foxes. I should be lucky to catch a mouse, and even so, there is little I can do with just one.
At least there is comfort in that the blasted hunter will bring me rabbits for the next four days. I could roast one a day or make a stew.
But then, there’s always him to rely on.
Dante.
3.
Grandmother greets me before I push through her alder-wood gate.
She stands on the doorstep above potted plants and frowns at me across the icy garden. Her scraggly brown hair is noticeably greying and is fastened into a bun with a piece of twine. She wears no corset; she expects no other visitors but me, and corsets were invented by the devil. I am most positive of that.
“It is too cold a morn for wanderings in the woods, Ella,” she demands. “Come inside before you freeze your bosom off!”
At the snap of her voice, my legs move faster until I’m ducking underneath her arm and into the cabin. Warmth hits me like a blow to the face and with it comes the fragrance of my childhood. Squirrel broth and warm goat’s milk infused with crushed almonds.
“Grandmother,” I sigh, and pull off my bag. It thuds to the floor as the door shuts behind me. “You told me you have no almonds left. I needed only a handful for a loaf of bread I made.”
“Oh, hush.” Grandmother takes off my cloak and hangs it on the rack. “Never have I met a girl who burns bread like you do. And you expect me to hand over what I have left of my almonds to you? Silliness doesn’t become you, child.”
In her eyes, I am—and will forever be—a child to scold. Even at nineteen years of age, she treats me as though I am a toddler running through the garden still. I moved back into the village, made my own business—of sorts—and set up a house for myself, all without a husband. And still, she scolds me.
My eyes roll back as she fusses about. She cannot decide on whether to usher me to the armchair by the fire, stir the stew, pour us tankards of hot milk, or put away my things.
I drape myself over the armchair and kick off my boots.
Finally, she decides on serving up stew and says it’s because I ‘look half-frozen to death’. She means I look like a corpse. Unbecoming.
“I make it my duty to be as unbecoming as I can,” I tell her. “Otherwise, men might have ideas about me and those ideas might lead them to an ale sprinkled with belladonna.”
Grandmother tuts and shoves a hot bowl into my hands. “Just like your mother, poisoning this boy, then this one.”
I blow my cold breath onto the stew.
“It came back to her, it did,” she says. “The first man she didn’t poison, well he killed her and that’s nature for you, Ella. Take lives, and life is taken from you.”
“I killed mother,” I say, then sip from the wooden spoon. “In birth.”
“Yes, but who put you in there!” She points accusingly at the wall. “Oh, your father was the death of her. I told her to poison the foetus out of her womb before it grew too big, but she wouldn’t listen. Now, look at her.”
Her gaze goes down to the wooden floorboards, then she shakes her head.
Mother isn’t buried under the floorboards. But we make no lies of where she rests for eternity. We will join her someday.
Pointing my toes toward the heat of the fire, I ask a question I’ve had trapped in me for a while; “Did he love her?”
Grandmother blinks.
She shakes off my words as though they are bees, then sits opposite on the frayed couch. “Now why would ask such a thing, Ella? Are you having ideas?”
No, I was not. Still, a Hemlock woman can only become pregnant with a man she loves. It can be any man. A baker, a cobbler or a king. It matters only that there is a love so wild that it rattles the mind, body and soul. Mother must have loved my absent father to have had me.
Her life was taken by my very birth and I find myself wondering sometimes, was it worth it? Should she have drank a special brew and rid herself of me? Or did she risk it for love that might not have been returned?
“It was a mere question, Grandmother. No need to get your broomstick all in a twist.”
According to the ordinaries—the non-witches, non-wolves—broomsticks are a witch’s companion, the way horses are to non-witches. There isn’t much truth to it.
Still, I like the silliness of the fib.
“You visited me two morns ago,” Grandmother says. “Why this morn, too?”
Not often do I visit her more than once a week. She is a difficult old woman and she irks me. But her garden is the best in all of England, and I must have some pieces of it.
“I’ve come to tend to the garden. I should hope the valerian has blossomed some.” I place the now-empty bowl on the side table. “How is my mugwort coming along?”
Grandmother reaches out her hand and curls her fingers. She wants payment for her constant tending to the garden and my access to the plants.
I reach into my corset and pluck out a small, blue-tinted phial. “Nothing comes free from you, Grandmother. Extract of toadstool, as requested,” I say and toss it at her.
Grandmother betrays her elderly appearance and snatches the phial with a swift swipe. She uncorks it before she sniffs once. Satisfied, she tucks it into her own bosom, but I can’t imagine how safe it will be in there without a corset to keep it in place.
“What are your plans for it?” I ask.
Toadstools are fly agarics—the red and white mushrooms that grow wild all over these lands and beyond. Grandmother is capable of extracting the oil of it herself, so why she needed me to do it was a mystery that piqued my interest.
Grandmother gives me a lingering look, then closes it off with a wink. “Secrets are best kept among the dead,” she tells me as she rises from the couch. “The garden is where you left it, Ella. Stay as long as you need, but be within those village walls before sundown. You hear?”
“Loud and clear, Grandmother.”
I watch her dip through drapes to the back of the cabin. There’s a room back there, locked tight—the only
door in the whole cabin that has a lock and key.
Often, when I was a child, I’d spend hours waiting for Grandmother to emerge from the Secret Room. I’d conjured up dozens of ideas of what lurked on the other side of the door. Then, I stopped caring the night the wolf came to our neck of the woods and tore apart our garden.
Not a normal wolf…
It was the one that belonged to the village, where it stalked for prey each full moon, and never retreated until it shed blood. The day it came to the cabin, I watched it through the upstairs window, terrified. My cries called for Grandmother, but she stayed in the Secret Room for hours, long after the wolf left.
It was then that it dawned on me the way the sun dawns on the world—there could be nothing as horrible inside the Secret Room than the beast who tore apart the garden that night.
The Werewolf.
For years, no one has seen it. One full moon, it simply didn’t show. And the full moon after, and the one after that.
Some think it dead. Others think it hibernates or has moved to another place.
No matter what happened to the wolf, I am glad it’s gone. Still, I carry a bundle of dried and pressed wolfsbane wrapped in cloth on my person wherever I go. Just in case.
Aconitum.
Sometimes known as aconite, devil’s helmet, or wolfsbane.
4.
The cold wind whips me so hard that I shiver under my cloak and chatter my teeth together. I’m sure my whole face has turned pink by now.
Even as I coax the stems of the plants out from their roots, beneath the gloves I wear, my fingers have gone rigid and stiff. This is gentle work, and should be done with delicate movements, but I fear I have ruined the roots of the plants from my abrasive touch.
I kneel before a plot of the garden. Between me and the belladonna sits my wicker basket, half-full with wolfsbane and mugwort.
I move onto the valerian shrub and hack at it until the entire root is unearthed.
Valerian root is a fine sedative, one that unwinds the worries some of my customers harbour, and eases them into restful sleeps. It is the remedy Abigail comes to me for. Though, I suspect her need for it has gone farther than I am comfortable with. Should she become addicted …
Well, Priest Peter won’t be too pleased with me, and his displeasure is a turn that could push me out of the village and back to Grandmother’s cabin. Villagers would still come to me there for their remedies and medicines.
I would lose business to those too afraid to venture through the woods, not to mention I cannot stand a full life with Grandmother, whose maternal nature had been stomped out of her by her own coarse mother.
It is our family curse.
The Hemlock women are born without the softness expected of us.
And I am no different.
Before I leave the garden, I cover my basket with a cloth and dust some of the snow away from the still-rooted plants. Grandmother takes wonderful care of them, and I realise—that is where her maternal instincts are directed. Perhaps all Hemlock women weren’t born without the softness. Instead, we might have been born with a misdirected care, and it leads us to nature in its bare form.
I go back into the cabin to warm myself with a mug of spiced milk by the fire before I trek through the woods again. I peek through the drapes, but the bed is empty and the herb room to the left is without her presence.
Grandmother must be in her Secret Room.
As a fare-well, I tidy her herb room—pinching enough salt for myself and a few almonds—then leave.
On the way back to the village, I see no sign of Colton, but I spot a handful of his traps. A hare is tangled in one, as stiff as my fingers in the cold. Temptation trickles through me, and I almost reach for it. I am owed a rabbit, but a hare will do just as well.
I stop myself.
Four rabbits will come my way if I leave this hare in its trap. And those four rabbits will give me four days to brew the remedies I need. So I pass the hare, and as I go, I wonder if Colton watches me from the white of the trees, waiting for my betrayal.
It doesn’t come.
†††
Thomas is still on guard at the gate when I return. He has moved up to the watchtower and shouts down at whoever is on the other side of the gate to open up.
I slide through the gap and rush through the village. Bundles of people gather in the Square, where they trade and barter in the snow. Some of the buildings that border the Square are built from stone, and others timber, but they all wear white faces with black panels running across them. I rather think the buildings pretty—but not the straw ones near the farms at the far end of the village.
The stares don’t follow me this time, or perhaps I am so frozen by the chilly air and sprinkles of snow that I hardly notice them.
I live down a lane off-street, as far from the tavern as I can afford. The noise of the drunken fools at night still reaches me, but I’m far enough that the sound blends in with the howls of wild wolves and the cries of the wind.
I unlock the door and rush inside.
Between me and the dwindling flames in the fireplace are two armchairs and a solid table with a candle-lantern on it. To my left, a ladder leads to the upper half-level where curtains hide my bed and clothes rack.
Under the second level, drapes dangle at the mouth of my prized room. Those drapes shield the most important part of my home—the space in which I prepare remedies and treat those who knock on my door after the sun falls.
My home is modest, but it is my home.
I am without a husband and children, and that comes with certain luxuries. As I push myself from the door, I drop my bag, rest the basket beside the lantern, and shrug off my cloak. My possessions are strewn about the home. Sun will fall soon, and I will have to tidy before anyone comes knocking at my door.
Tonight, I expect Abigail for the dosage of valerian and Colton to give me my rabbit.
I sigh at the mental reminder. My body and mind are tired. Should it be so unfeasible that I might have a night to myself? Apparently so.
I slide the wooden bar into its bolts to lock the door. When I first moved in, I invested in a metal lock and key, but I use them only when I leave my home to protect from invaders. While I am inside, I find that the bar works just fine.
I throw some cheap wood in the fire. Soon, I bask in a wide-reaching birth of orange light and begin to put away my things. I pull apart the drapes to my herb room and dump my basket on the bench.
Shelves are stacked all around me in this part of the home, and each holds a phial or jar of something from the garden. Oils extracted from plants, ground leaves prepared for special drinks, and even berries of the poisonous sorts are packed and stored on the shelves.
Some dried meats and herbs hang from ropes above, fruits are flattened on a wooden slab ready to be dried out, and salt is crushed in jars to better preserve foods.
Underneath the bench, I have carved a small cave to store my foods. Wrapped in paper, there are some scraps of cooked rabbit left and a shaving of ham. Oats sit in a woven bag for porridge, and a jar of nuts is tucked at the back, but I find it best to eat the quick-to-spoil foods first. One never knows when food might dwindle.
A loaf of stale bread is closest to me.
Grandmother is right, I am atrocious at baking. It should not be stale for another day, at least. Still, I snatch it and slam it down on the worktop. It lands with a thud so loud that I hesitate. If I had stew, I could soften the bread in it. Alas, I must wait for Colton’s visit, and sometimes he spends days out in the woods.
I risk the bread and eat it with the leftovers of rabbit.
It is a small meal, but it fills me quickly and I itch to untie my corset. My hooded eyes, drooped with exhaustion, slide to the window beside the door. At the edges of the curtain, some slivers of light seep in, but the light has darkened since I came home.
Night is drawing nearer.
I don’t have much time now, and there is plenty to be done.
The valerian is sprinkled over the workbench, ready to be seen to. After I wash and chop the roots of the plant, I drop a handful into the stone mortar. With the pestle, I grind the root until my wrist aches and then some more. I only stop when the root is crushed to a sludge. It should be powder-like, but I haven’t allowed it time to dry out.
Abigail shouldn’t mind. She drinks it with hot water. The difference in taste is slight. Should she add lemon, it might overpower the trace of dirt in the flavour.
I am wrenched from my thoughts when the door rattles.
Has the sun drifted away already?
I wipe my hands on the beige skirt of my dress and bustle to the nearest window. Peeking through the curtain, I can sparsely make out a muscular figure standing at my door. My eyes narrow and I hesitate. Then, I spot the rabbit hanging from his grasp.
5.
I’m quick to unbar the door.
Colton sweeps inside before I can stop him.
My eyes widen as he shrugs off his thick, fur-lined coat and drapes it over my couch. Then he tosses the rabbit on the table, where it rocks the lantern.
“Thank you,” I snap. “That will be all.”
Colton falls back onto the couch and peels off his hat. Auburn curls fall into place, over his forehead, to his temples, and he brushes them to the side. “Close that door,” he demands. “All the heat is getting out.”
I roll my jaw, outrage in my chestnut eyes so sharp that I’m sure I could cut him with my gaze alone. “Leave, hunter.”
His head leans back on the couch’s spine as his eyelids shut. “In a moment. I must warm first.”
With a sigh, I slam the door shut—extra hard to jolt him—and slide the bar into place. “Warm fast,” I say, then approach the table. The rabbit is not too small, nor is it too fat. It’s just right—in the middle. I pinch my lips and sling it over my shoulder, lingering my gaze on the resting hunter that lounges in my home.
Feared Fables Box Set: Dark and Twisted Fairy Tale Retellings, (Feared Fables Box Sets Book 1) Page 2