by Taryn Tyler
I didn't tell him that I would come. I didn't have to.
It was dawn when I got back to the cottage. For once the wood and glen were still, quiet but for a lone skylark warbling a greeting to the morning. The edges of the cottage glowed green then yellow then white as I approached. Otto stood by the door, leaning against Snow's tidy, well stocked woodpile.
“Didn't you sleep?” I asked him.
He raised an eyebrow. “Didn't you?”
“I will.” I placed my hand on the door.
“Where do you go, Rose?”
I turned toward Otto. He had straightened away from the woodpile. Bits of dust glittered in the air between us, lit by the first streams of dawn. I wasn't about to tell him about Boris. He would only wake Snow and run after him with his knives and hatred.
“Who's the heir?” I asked. “The daughter who is older or the son who was born first?”
I knew the answer of course. The son. Not that it really mattered. I didn't want to live in his kingdom, much less rule it.
Otto sighed. He ran his fingers through his messy red curls. “Snow is worried about you, Rose.”
“Snow should worry about herself. Her nightmares have been getting worse, or haven't you noticed?”
“I've noticed.” He pressed his hand against the side of his face. Tired. Weary. “Do you think I like hearing her cry at night?”
At least he slept below the loft. He didn't hear every moan and sniffle -- each a tiny wound inside his heart-- just a few feet across the hay. “Then why do you make her remember?” I asked. “Why do you ask her so many questions about Lucille and her life with her in the manor when you know it hurts her?”
Otto looked at me with his hand still pressed against his face. He looked like a knobby tree trunk choked in vines. “Because we need to know all we can if we are going to defeat her. You think you're safe here, Rose. You're not. Lucille will find you one day and she will kill you unless she is stopped.”
I shook my head. One day could be years away and yet . . . would she send Boris after us? Would he obey her the way he had been trained to? My mind traveled again to Gran's corpse, mangled and bloody on her bed.
“Lucille took everything from us, Rose.” Otto said. “Our father. Our home. It was because of her that we grew up strangers, me scouring the woods as a wild animal, and you spinning thread inside a dreary little village.”
“Maybe I liked spinning thread.” I didn't like the way he spoke of my village as if it were stupid and insignificant. Even if I had grown up hating it for those very reasons.
Otto sighed. The light drained out of his eyes. He looked away. “Don't you wish . . . I wish I had known you as a child, Rose. I wish I had been able to teach you how to ride a horse and take you exploring in the mountain cliffs. There was a cave about half a day's ride from our castle. It was on the very top of the mountains and you could see for miles and miles. So many villages. So many woods and streams. A stream ran next to the cave and all the animals came there to drink. I used to go there to hunt or sometimes just to watch the world live. I think you would have liked it. I wish . . . is it really too late, Rose, for me to be your brother?”
“We had the same parents.” I said and went inside.
I climbed up the ladder and onto the loft, too exhausted to care that I would have to eat cold, lumpy porridge if I didn't make some myself before I went to sleep. I covered my mouth, yawning, as I crawled toward my half of the loft.
Snow lay on the other side of the hay, her eyes closed, her arms stretched above her head as if she were reaching for something in her sleep. Her bright lips curved in a peaceful almost smile but her cheeks were still damp with tears, resting on her cheeks like drops of dew. Which of her dreams would she remember when she woke? Only the peaceful ones I hoped. Of her and Otto dancing together in his castle in the north. Of rescuing hobgoblins in the soft summer rain.
I laid down and closed my eyes, letting the heaviness of sleep overtake me bit by bit. Visions of the night floated, lawless, through my head. The dark cold of the river water. The dangerous charm of Boris's smile. Otto's worried warnings.
Snow stirred across from me in the hay. The wood of the loft creaked as she sat up.
“Rose.” The sound of her voice, soft and wild, brought me away from the edge of dreams. “Rose.” She said again. Less of a whisper this time. More of a promise. I could feel her leaning toward me. Her knees hovered near my half of the loft.
I wanted to open my eyes. I wanted to smile at her and tell her how it had felt to dive off a cliff in the dark. I wanted to laugh with her about the willow who liked to make her roots into a seat for me and the hobgoblin who still ran whenever he saw me coming. But I didn't. Because if I opened my eyes she might leave. Because if I spoke I might tell her about Boris and because she was bound to ask me again if I would help her fight Lucille.
The door opened below, then closed again. Otto's heavy footsteps plodded across the cottage. “Let her sleep,” he told Snow. “She only just came home.”
Snow drew away. She stayed in the loft a moment, straightening her bodice and pulling pieces of straw out of her hair, then climbed down the ladder. It creaked and wobbled as she made her way down, then I fell asleep, listening to her scrape and rattle the dishes near the fire as she made breakfast.
Snow
Otto was a patient student. He wasn't used to the stillness before a knife throw but he was diligent in his practice and consistent in his progress. Within a month he could strike my straw man in the throat from yards away. Within four he could hit it swaying back and forth on a pair of ropes.
Most days, after practicing, we sat inside by the warmth of the fire while I told him everything I could remember about the manor. We each constructed a map of it in our heads and tested each other on our memories. Then we would discuss which points were likely to be weaker, where it would be best to begin the attack. It was strange to be planning to destroy a place that had once been my home but after we destroyed it ---once Lucille was dead –we would rebuild it.
“Every stone. Every passage.” Otto promised. Some days he ventured off into the wood to speak to the hobgoblins. He said that they hated Lucille as much as we did and would do anything to see her dead. Except tell the Red Witch where their hovel was. Or tell me.
“ Nurse gave them the jewelry.” Otto told me one afternoon after practicing knife throws. He had managed a throw from halfway across the clearing and landed it only a few inches short of the heart. “She gave it to them as a gift when they helped her find Rose.”
“ Find Rose?” I closed the door behind us. “But I thought ---” “So did I.” Otto said. “They said the Old Witch –that's what they call Nurse –came to the wood sixteen years ago from far away, asking every tree and woodland creature if they had seen a child princess born on the sixth moon of the year. She didn't believe the hobgoblins when they first came to her but she went to the village anyway and found Rose living with a spinner. She gave the hobgoblins the jewels and built herself this cottage here in the wood to be near her as she grew up.”
I glanced at Rose's sash, lying on the floor unfinished. She had spent all winter stitching and restitching the patterns but had never been satisfied with them. How had she come to live here instead of in the north if her Gran hadn't brought her here? Who had rescued her from the massacre in her family's castle?
“Why are they so afraid of her?” I asked Otto. “Your nurse was a witch too. They weren't afraid of her.”
Otto sat down beneath the loft. He took my hand and pulled me down beside him. “There used to be eleven hobgoblins in this wood when the old king –your father--was still alive. All brothers. Lucille learned of certain powers they had and her soldiers combed the wood for them. She caught four. The other seven almost didn't recognize the bodies they found washed up on the river bank two days later.”
I shuddered, remembering the body Rose had found the night we came to the cottage. “What does that have to do with Rose
?”
“Lucille is a witch. Glen says the bodies were shriveled dry with magic. They didn't even trust Nurse anymore after that.”
I pulled my knees into my chest. “I was there --in the manor-when she did . . . so many things. I should have stopped her. I should have--” I remembered the dreams now. Every night I remembered every scream and atrocity.
“You were hardly more than a child, Snow. What could you have done?”
“Spoken.” I said. “I could have told Papa the things that I had seen --the things that I knew.”
Otto shook his head. “What could he have done? He had already let her in.”
“Because he was powerless against her.” Because he wanted to save me from Boris.
“I'll get your manor back.” Otto promised. “I won't let Lucille keep it from you. Not forever.”
Rose
I thanked the wood alone that summer. Snow didn't come with me. I didn't see any hobgoblins as I gathered fallen wood to burn. I considered asking Boris to come but midsummer didn't fall on a new moon and he was very insistent about only seeing me when there was no chance of him turning. Our visits were few and far between.
I sang as I piled the wood in the center of the clearing. Animals gathered around the edge of the wood to watch. The ghosts drifted just out of sight in the dusk, not quite whispering in my ears, not quite telling me their stories. I had begun to suspect that they all had the same story for as many years as Lucille had been eating human hearts.
I stood still, waiting for the darkness to fall, listening to the deep, deep, thrum of the wood. Crickets chirped. The air stirred. A woodpecker pounded his beak furiously into a pine. The bushes rustled.
And then it was dark and I was dark. I didn't need to sing to light the fire. The heat was already burning in my breast. The piles of wood burst into flame the moment I wished them to. The earth swelled inside me, claiming me as I claimed it. The trees thrummed on and on and on, my own voice, quiet and long, stretching over centuries upon centuries of time.
I saw the trees as saplings, reaching their tiny sprouting roots into the soil. I saw them age through season after season. Their leaves turned green then gold then fell and grew again until finally, one by one, they fell and others emerged in their place. I felt their bark thicken as they grew and grew, each size more painful than the last, each change using more of their strength. The force of each moment was so strong that I could hardly stand and yet I stood straighter and stiller than ever before, drinking in the power of the wood as everything happened at once inside me.
“ Lost.” The ghosts whispered over and over as they flickered in and out of sight. “Lost.”
But I wasn't lost. I was found. I was the wood and nothing would ever stand in my way. Nothing would take me from myself.
Snow
Spring came. Otto did not leave. Every day I thought would be his last day at the cottage but he lingered, hunting, practicing his knife throws, and drifting off to speak to the hobgoblins. He went to see them more and more each week. Some days I thought he had gone at last without bidding me farewell only to come inside with a string of fish or bag full of walnuts and find him stretched out beneath the loft. It was strange to have him at the cottage when the weather was warm. It reminded me how much had changed since he had transformed into a man.
“ I'll go soon.” He kept saying but spring warmed into summer, and still he stayed.
One evening, at last, he didn't return. It was dusk when I realized I hadn't seen him since breakfast. Rose had gone off to roam the woods, he had gone –I'd assumed –to the hobgoblins' hovel, and I had stayed at the cottage, washing laundry, airing out the windows, fingering through the herbal in the garden, practicing my own knife throws. My knife's blade had gone dull from all of Otto's practice. I pulled a pair of sharpening stones out of the shed and sat on the woodpile, rubbing until the blade could cut silk.
The air was warm, grey and soft, as it settled around me. I could hear a woodpecker, hammering his beak into his home some ways into the wood. I squinted at my knife, hardly able to make out the vines engraved on it in the fading light. I hadn't realized how late it had grown.
“We'll need a fire soon, Rose.” I said, forgetting that she wasn't in the garden, trimming and pruning the way she used to in the summer. I looked up and stared out at the flowers and vegetables running rampant through the yard. It had been so long since I'd seen her crouched among the plants. They had grown tangled and crowded. Wild. Some flourished in spite of her inattention. Others looked as if they were on the verge of choking to death. I missed the sound of her humming. I missed the sound of her laugh.
I slid my knife back into its sheath and rose to return the sharpening stones to the shed. I filled the pot with water to start a soup but I wasn't very hungry and we didn't have a flint to light the fire. Rose always did that. I stood in the doorway for a moment, staring out into the wood, feeling as if I had forgotten something. Something important. A light breeze fluttered through the rampant flower garden, rolling the plants like a ripple in a pond. I closed the door, climbed up into the loft, and went to sleep.
Neither Otto nor Rose had returned when I woke. Rose came back mid-morning, grumbling that I only had raw nuts and berries for her to eat. I reminded her that she was the only one who could light a fire and went to collect more nuts.
She was gone again when I returned. It was past dark but there was a fire frolicking beneath a boiling pot of pea soup. I opened my mouth to curse her for almost burning the cottage down when I saw a flint lying on the hearth. I looked up at the table. A large book I had never seen before lay on the surface, thick and smooth and rectangular. I stepped toward it and ran my fingers up and down the thick leather binding, fresh and glossy and neatly cut. I touched the cover, then pulled it open, slowly.
Memories splashed through my head, drifting through me with the clean, dusty scent of the pages. My tutor standing over me as I practiced my writing. Papa, in the library, looking over maps and ledgers while I fingered through books of stories, admiring their bright colored paintings and wondering why there seemed to be so many kings in the world, and why everyone always seemed to want to kill them and take their land. Sometimes, if I waited long enough and quietly enough, if I had practiced my music and dancing and stitching and penmanship, if I didn't fall asleep before he finished his work, Papa would sit me on his knee and tell me a story of his own.
His stories weren't about kings or land or battles. Sometimes they were about princesses like me who were brave and kind and cunning, but mostly they were about birds that talked or water that sang, trees that danced, or boxes that could lock a person's heart away so that it could never be found and they could never be killed. I would fall asleep, listening to the deep, rich sound of his voice and wake in my bed with Dana and Elise waiting in the anteroom to dress me and a hot plate of sausage and biscuits on the table.
My world had been so small, so clean and neat. I had even believed it was safe.
I touched the strong inky swirls on the page in front of me, reading the first line
Behold, the tale of King Agar, seventh son of the mountain god, ruler of the eleven forests. There had been so many books in Papa's library, dozens
--more than dozens-- and I had read them all, then I had read them again. It had been so long since I had touched a book apart from the three little ones tucked away in our cupboard.
“It's for you.” Otto said. I turned, startled by the sound of his voice. I hadn't heard the door open. He stood just inside the cottage with a pile of chopped wood in his arms. His hair was combed back, his curls tucked neatly behind his ears and he wore a new waistcoat and trousers.
“How did you know?” I asked. He smiled. “You always linger when you tell me about the libraries.”
“Thank you.” I closed the book. “I thought you'd left. To the north.”
“Not yet.” He knelt next to the fireplace and unloaded the wood onto the hearth next to the flint. He rose and pre
ssed his hand against the back of his neck. He looked toward the window but didn't seem to observe the stars beginning to scatter across the sky. He pulled in a deep draught of breath and pulled the stool up to the table, motioning for me to sit in the chair. I did as he instructed.
“I'm leaving soon.” He said.
“I know.”
“Tomorrow, I think. Or the day after.”
I nodded, waiting. There was more. His voice was pregnant with it, fluttering around inside him, not sure how it wanted to come out.
“Can I take you to see the hobgoblins?” Otto asked, not quite looking at me. He kept on glancing out the window. “I would rather leave knowing that you and Rose have someone to look after you.”
“They don't want me at their hovel.” I said.
“They don't want Rose. Please, Snow. Let me leave with my mind at rest. There is something--” he touched the back of his neck again. “Something I want to show you before I go.”
I folded my hands in my lap, unsure what to say.
“Please.” Otto said.
I bit my lip. I stared down at the book on the table. Finally I nodded. “I'll go.” I said. “We can leave in the morning.”
Rose was in the herb garden when we left. She had let the flowers run wild but the sage and tarragon were still lined in neat, pungent green rows. I could hear the fiery lull of her humming as we stepped out into the wood.
“If you stayed a few days more” I told Otto “you could come with us to light our midsummer bonfire.”
“Midsummer was two nights ago.”
I stopped, turning to look over my shoulder at the cottage. The space between me and the building was draped by the greenery of the forest. If I listened hard enough I could still catch whiffs of Rose's song. So that's where she had been the night Otto hadn't come back.
“This way.” Otto said. “It's a long walk.”
I expected Otto to lead me toward Rose's village or perhaps downstream a ways where the best hunting spots were but we trekked north, moving closer to the manor. The trees seemed taller than they had ever been, silent, watchful, reaching for me with their brittle fingers. I had never considered before how close to Lucille I had hidden from her. I glanced over my shoulder, almost expecting to see her lurking behind the trees, but there was nothing but oaks and pines and firs, crowded together in clusters.