She looked away. Every inch of her body had desperately wanted to leave the house and find a place of safety. In a way, she was a tiny seed planted deep in the soil, waiting for water and sun and music to stretch her roots and rise above the darkness. Oken seemed to embody those elements, everything about him earthlike and alive. She wanted to touch him, but kept her hands tightly clasped in her lap as she remembered how he had disappeared in her dreams whenever she reached for him.
He leaned forward. “I sense you’re unhappy.” He took her hands, slowly gliding his thumb over the wounds he had closed. “Your family starves you and beats you, but you bear it every day without complaint. You have an excellent command over your emotions.”
A laugh escaped her. “I wouldn’t say that. I’ve been awful lately. I killed their plants and I slapped Sybil. I’m no saint.” She almost pulled her hands away at the realization that he possessed so intimate a knowledge of her life, but his touch was gentle. He seemed to fill her with light.
“You are more than what you think.”
Her heart jumped. She thought of the light in her own eyes, the immortal blood in her veins—if it was even true she couldn’t die. It wasn’t as if she had tested the theory, and Odele had not allowed her blood to be examined now that they were in a new land.
It made sense now. Most likely, it was because Odele didn’t want anyone to know what she was and risk digging up the past. What if they found magic now—or at least something in her blood that proved she couldn’t die? She didn’t know what would happen at that point, but since it had caused so much trouble before, she could understand why Odele avoided it. Everything seemed to be coming together as Oken pulled her hands farther into his own and squeezed.
“How do I use my own magic?” she asked with a quivering voice. “I know it’s inside me, like my sister’s magic. They are mortal—at least I think they are mortal. But I’m not. Why?”
His grip on her hands weakened, but his gaze stayed strong on her face. “I can’t tell you these things yet. I can only tell you that if you wish to move beyond your current circumstances, I can help.”
She looked around the fragrant clearing, so rich and green. A part of her never wanted to leave. She leaned toward Oken, her body yearning to feel close to his. She wanted to show him how much she appreciated his kindness for her, but something she couldn’t see stood between them. “Can’t I stay here with you?”
“No, I am sorry. Come, we must go.”
As he walked her back to the house, the rain began to lessen and the clouds separated to reveal a clean, polished sky dotted with stars. The path was muddy now, and her worn shoes slipped. Oken offered his arm and she took it. He was strong and steady. He moved gracefully, like a branch bending in the wind.
“There is something I’d like you to do,” he said. “This will sound terrible because your goat was a friend to you, but since you have prepared meat before...”
“What?” Issina almost pulled away. “Odele wants Thomas to take Cassia tomorrow. He’s going to use her fat for candles.” She tried to keep the disgust from her voice, but failed.
“Before that happens, you must take the goat’s entrails.”
She stopped in her tracks and looked at him. In the pale morning light, the glow of his skin seemed to have faded. He looked almost wilted, but his arm still felt strong. “Her... entrails? You mean her intestines? What will I do with them?”
“Bury them as quickly as possible.”
She winced at the thought of doing something so strange. Gutting a chicken was one thing, but gutting Cassia—an animal she cared for— was quite another.
“Can’t I bury all of her? I can do that this morning before anyone wakes up. They’ll probably blame me when they find she’s missing, but at least it will be done with.”
“No, only her entrails.” He took her shoulders and looked tenderly into her eyes. “You don’t have to do it, but as a friend I want to help you.”
Rain slid down his face, around his nose, between his lips. “A friend?” she whispered, stepping away from him. She didn’t feel the same with him as she did with Braeden. Something deeper rooted itself in her heart when she looked at Oken. She didn’t want to let it go.
“Yes, I’m your friend.” He tilted his head. “If you want me to be.”
“I’ve never had a friend before,” she mumbled. “At least, not one who speaks my own language.”
He smiled. “As I said before, elves rarely interact with humans, but you are different to me.”
“Different?”
“Yes. I hope with time you will understand why.” He looked up at the clouds as they continued to break apart. “Have you ever wondered why it rains every night? Why it gets so cold? When your kind first settled here so long ago, many of you died. Your crops wouldn’t grow in these conditions. Your animals starved. We had no choice but to help you or watch you all perish.”
Stepping back, she let his words surround her. The singing had long since faded away as the rain lessened, and the air was already warm compared to what it had been an hour earlier. Still, the mud seeping through her thin shoes was cold.
“It doesn’t rain like this everywhere?” she asked, knowing full well that it didn’t. She had heard many travelers who came through were astonished at the weather.
“No, it doesn’t.” He brushed a hand across his forehead. His glow was completely gone now, his eyes tired, his breathing almost labored. “Perhaps another time I will show you how elves survive.”
Her mind worked fast now. “So if we couldn’t survive when we first settled here, what happened? You helped us, didn’t you? That’s why we have growers.”
“Yes, that is the reason for the growers.” His breath caught in his throat, and he looked down the path. “I’m sorry, but I must leave you now. I will see you again soon.” He nodded a quick goodbye and turned to walk down the path. In the dim light, he vanished, and she looked at the ground where he had stood, his footprints already disappearing in the slick mud.
Once she reached the house, she found a large clay pot and a knife in the kitchen and slipped out the back door to the stables. Cassia’s body was already beginning to smell, or perhaps Issina imagined it was so. Her body had only been in the stable since yesterday morning, and the cold night should have kept her from smelling too badly. All the same, Issina held her breath and turned the stiff goat onto her back, trying hard not to look at her face.
The intestines? Was he demented? She couldn’t imagine what burying them would accomplish. Still, she slid the knife down Cassia’s belly. When glistening guts spilled out, she covered her mouth. No matter how many chickens she had gutted, nothing could have prepared her for this. This was different.
She located the proper entrails and cut them free, but all of them couldn’t possibly fit into the pot. She crammed what she could inside and pressed the lid back into place. When she saw Oken again, she would have a word with him about making her perform tasks worse than even Odele gave her. She wiped her messy hands on her wet skirt. Finally, she had to take a breath, and the smell almost knocked her over.
“What are you doing?”
She spun around to see Odele in the stable doorway, the early dawn light outlining her figure and matted hair.
“N-nothing, Mother. I’m saying goodbye to Cassia. You said Thomas would take her away today and I thought I’d—”
“You’re soaked head to toe! Sybil and Edryn said you’ve been missing since early this morning.” She stomped through the stable and stood towering over her. “Give me that knife.”
Trembling, she lifted the knife. Odele snatched it from her fingers and pointed to the pot. “What is that?”
She was speechless. She grabbed the pot and stood. Hay crunched under her feet as she backed away.
“Give it to me, whatever it is.” She wagged her fingers at the pot clutched protectively to Issina’s chest. “If you think stealing that thing’s guts will give you something to eat later, you�
�re sadly mistaken.”
“Eat them?” Her mouth dropped open. “That’s not—”
Odele’s laughter echoed through the stable. Their one horse, Juniper, shifted nervously in her stall. “Oh, I forgot!” she shouted at the ceiling between laughs. “I forgot you’ve been getting food in the forest.” Her expression turned stone-cold as she walked slowly toward Issina, the knife in her hand clutched so tightly her knuckles were white pebbles beneath her skin. “Sybil told me all about that. Is that where you were last night? Meeting this mysterious man who’s been feeding you? What else is he doing for you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She felt as if she might split in two. She couldn’t fathom a way out of her predicament, and even with the knowledge that she was immortal, fear of pain and failure consumed her. Tears stung her eyes. She saw Braeden looking intently at her from the dinner table. She heard the fascination in his voice, the kind way he spoke to her. Then her mind turned to Oken and the way he had healed her hands, his lips brushing her fingers.
Odele was upon her now, her lips curling over her teeth. She lifted her free hand and grabbed Issina’s thick braid, still wet from the rain. She yanked.
“You know very well what I’m talking about. Sybil doesn’t lie as you do. Sybil wants to become something beautiful, a grower, something beyond herself, and you,” she glared into Issina’s eyes, her expression deepening with pain, “you have never aspired to anything. You cannot aspire to anything because you came into this world with death on your hands. Everything you touch is spoiled.”
Issina felt acid rise up her throat and into her mouth. Her stomach churned. “I didn’t mean to kill him,” she whimpered. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I’ll leave you forever. I’ll never harm you again.”
“Leave?” Odele released her hair and laughed. “You’re not going anywhere—ever. Who knows what you’d become out there on your own? Something wicked, no doubt, and you’d come straight back here to finish what you started. No, Issina. You’ll stay here under my watchful eye. You’ll never hurt anyone again.”
She took Issina’s arm and dragged her out of the stable, across the chicken yard, and into the house. “You won’t sleep in your sisters’ room anymore,” she said as they went through the kitchen, the hall, and down the stairs. Issina stumbled and almost fell. “You’ll sleep in the storage room next to the cellar, and you’ll freeze as well as starve because you’re not getting food for a solid week.” She yanked the door open and shoved her inside. “Unless you want to eat those guts in your clay pot.” She reached for the pot still clutched to Issina’s chest.
Issina fought as every instinct inside of her cried out to protect the pot. But she was cold and tired from her night outside, and Odele won. She raised the pot and threw it against the earthen wall. Hardened clay broke. Blood and guts dropped to the ground with a dull smack.
Odele slipped the knife into her pocket and dusted her hands off as if she had just finished rolling out dough. “I have two daughters to get ready for a festival tonight.”
She turned and exited the room, slamming the door behind her. A key turned in the lock and Issina sank to the ground, her cloak settling around her, a black cloud hiding the stars.
Hours passed, and the only source of light came from a thin crack beneath the door. Issina stared at it as she lay on the dirt floor. Tears streamed down her face. The light was dim and blue, and she knew it would die as soon as the sun went down.
She listened to footsteps upstairs, quick and light like excited mice. She imagined Sybil and Edryn bathing in perfumed water, powdering their skin, laughing and giggling as they discussed their eagerness to perform in the festival. It was the only night of the year that it wouldn’t rain. Every year on the same day the skies miraculously remained clear, and although nobody had been able to explain it before, she knew it had to do with the elves.
When she finally stopped weeping, she looked around the tiny room. Her vision had adjusted to the blackness and she tried to remember what they stored in the room. No food. There was broken furniture stuffed in one corner, wood boxes filled with extra dishes and clothing so worn out it would be used for rags later, stacks of old paper bundled with twine waiting to be used as kindling. She removed her wet cloak and crawled to where Odele had smashed the pot. There was only one thing to do now. She found the slimy remains of the intestines and gathered them into the neatest pile she could, then picked up a curved shard of clay and started digging.
When she was five years old, a kind neighbor had carved her a wooden duck and fastened wheels to its base. He tied a string around its neck and showed her how to pull it so it followed her. Giggling, she took it everywhere she went. She named it Emily and slept with it in her arms every night, petting its head so much the wood grew slick and shiny. One morning, she woke to find Emily missing. Odele told her to stop crying about it or she would get a whipping, but she couldn’t keep the tears inside. Finally, Edryn led her to the fire where she pointed to a lump of glowing coals. “That’s Emily,” she said smugly, and held up a tattered string. She swung it in front of Issina’s face and laughed. Then she leaned down and looked her in the eyes. “You can’t have toys or friends,” she whispered. “Those are only for good girls, and you’re not good. You will never be good.”
It was just like Gilbert and Gissy. Just like Cassia. They would take everything and everyone away from her. She scraped at the dirt with her shard of clay. Tears fell down her cheeks. They were hot and salty on her lips. She thought of the salted pork hanging from a rope in the next room. She thought of roots and the smooth trunks of trees, of rain and singing and hot bread in her stomach. She thought of Oken rubbing the roots into her wounds, and then her own fingers rubbing the same spot on the duck’s head over and over and over until it was so smooth it became part of her.
At the moment, there was no room left in her heart for anything but the anger she had kept hidden her entire life, and as it began to surface, she dug harder and faster. Finally, she tossed the clay away and dug with her hands. The dirt felt solid beneath her fingernails. Cold. Frozen. She dug and cried, and the ache in her heart grew and festered until she screamed at the top of her lungs, “I hate you!”
She paused and sucked in her breath.
“Not you, Sybil. Not you, Edryn, or even you, Mother. You despise me because you think I killed him. It’s him I hate.” She couldn’t think of him as her father, but she spoke to him as she kept digging. “I hate your cold tiger eyes and how you tried to fix me. I didn’t need to be fixed. I didn’t want to be fixed. You were angry with me and you said words I didn’t understand. I didn’t steal Mother’s magic. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know...”
She slid Cassia’s entrails into the hole and pushed the loose dirt over them. When she finished patting it down, she sank to the ground and pressed her cheek against the dirt. It smelled wonderful. It smelled like Oken.
It was four years after Odele beat her for losing the basket of pork chops before she was allowed to go to the market again. When she stood in front of the butcher, she wasn’t sure if it was the same man as before. This time there were sheep intestines hanging behind him instead of a pig’s head. The intestines had been transformed into smooth-skinned sausages and stuffed with meat and spices that would smell delicious when they splattered hot grease in a pan. Her mouth watered when she looked at them, but they were not on Odele’s list.
“What would you like, Miss?” the butcher asked. His cheeks were rosy and his breath made puffy clouds in the frigid air.
“I need an ox tail, please, and an eel if you have one, with the head.”
“Ah, you must be from the Grenefeld household. Odele loves eel.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re lucky we have a barrel in today, fresh from the coast.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He slapped the dead snake-like fish onto a long stretch of butcher paper and rolled it up tight. Before its head
disappeared inside, Issina scrunched her nose at its wicked, sharp-toothed grin. In a way, it reminded her of Odele. She paid the butcher and carried her heavy basket down the road in search of Lily and her jewelry cart.
This time the cart didn’t sparkle. It was pushed away from most of the crowd, its shelves nearly bare. Lily sat on a short stool with her dark skirt billowed around her as she looked at the ground.
Issina’s heart sank when she saw her. She didn’t seem the same as years before. The tiny shells on her shoes had fallen off. Her hair was matted and dirty, her clothes threadbare. She looked up as Issina approached.
“Ah, you’ve returned,” she said with a half-smile. “I knew it wouldn’t be long.”
Issina tilted her head. “Four years seems like a long time. How do you remember me?”
“I remember your eyes.”
The ground shook beneath them. The earth seemed to stretch, but nothing around them moved. She sat up and realized she was in the storage room. The light from beneath the door was gone. The footsteps upstairs had long since faded. She curled up once more on the cool ground and closed her eyes.
“Did you return to purchase the tiger’s eye?”
“I don’t have any money.” She looked down at her basket filled with wrapped meat.
The earth groaned. She sat up once again, but it was so dark she couldn’t see her hand even when she placed it in front of her face. Maybe it was her stomach making so much noise. If she had slept until nightfall, that would mean she hadn’t eaten all day. Her mouth was parched and lined with dirt. Surely Odele wouldn’t leave her locked up for a week without water. Certainly she would be back.
“That’s a shame I can’t sell you a stone today,” Lily said, and leaned forward. “Your eyes are so lovely. Your father must have been proud of them.”
Bonded: Three Fairy Tales, One Bond Page 19