by Amy McNulty
“Arrow!” I shout-whispered. “Here! Don’t go too far!”
Arrow clearly hadn’t insisted on coming out to do his business. Or if he had, he’d forgotten the task entirely and taken to frolicking in the fields of flowers like it was the perfectly natural thing to do when the rest of the village was sleeping. “Arrow!” But he took off even farther.
I’d planned to get a taste of fresh air. Maybe take a moment away from the man I’d once loved—perhaps still loved—sleeping there in the shack beside me. To remind myself that I was finally free to walk away from my problems, to push aside the anger in my head. Regardless, it was clear I was following Arrow’s plan now.
“Arrow! Come!” My voice grew louder farther from the cottage, where I wasn’t concerned about waking Jurij and having him interrupt my escape. “Arrow!” But he wasn’t listening. He ran straight through the fields as if chasing something only he could see.
The moonlight was just bright enough that I could make my way after him. He was heading home—to Mother and Father’s home, to Elfriede. If I could just grab him before he whined too loud outside their door, I could go back without them ever being any wiser.
But damn, that dog was fast.
I gave up on calling after him and headed for the eastern path, not because I cared about getting my dress and cloak stained with the dew forming on the grass, but because I thought I had a better shot of running fast on the dirt path. It worked, but there was still no hope for catching up to him before he got there. By the time I came over the last hill, he was already there panting outside my parents’ door. The slightly cracked door.
I froze. Elfriede seemed to be smiling as she rubbed her hands over his head. I wondered if I should turn back, leave it to her to give Arrow back or to keep him, pretend I never knew he’d run off. But Arrow gave me away, and Elfriede saw me.
I swallowed and pulled the cloak tighter at my neck. “He ran off,” I said, taking a few careful steps closer.
Elfriede’s lips soured, and she wiped her cheeks with the palm of one hand, the other still digging in behind Arrow’s ear, which made him melt in joy beside her. She looked back over her shoulder—a fire was still going, albeit a dying one—and shut the door behind her. “Take him.” She glared down at Arrow, as if he were the one she was talking to.
I stepped closer, running a hand atop Arrow’s head. He looked back up at his former mistress, his tail wagging like he had no sense that he wasn’t wanted. But I didn’t feel that from her, either. “You can keep him if you want.”
Elfriede sniffled. “No.”
“He’s your dog.” I patted Arrow’s head. “He’s always been your dog. It doesn’t matter if he was born from Bow.”
“It matters to me.” Elfriede inhaled a long, tortured sniff, fighting the mucous her pinched tears wanted to let loose from her nose. “Mother and Father are asleep already. I don’t want him waking them up. Go.”
“Sure.” I turned, laying pressure on Arrow’s neck to guide him away, but he wouldn’t budge. I pinched my lips together as Elfriede stared at Arrow. Her eyes sparkled too fiercely in the moonlight. “Why were you with Jaron?” I’d meant to think it, but I was asking it, even though I had an idea of what kind of answer was in store for me.
Elfriede’s eyebrows arched slightly, and she used the back of her hand to wipe furiously at each eye. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
I nodded. “Maybe not. But he’s not exactly known for his faithfulness these days.”
Elfriede glowered at me. “Maybe I don’t expect faithfulness from men anymore. Aren’t you the one insisting women need to start treating men differently?”
“Where did you hear that?” Arrow slid down, throwing his front legs over my feet, as if deciding he and I were going to be standing there indefinitely. “Before today, you hadn’t said a word to me in weeks!”
Elfriede took another ragged breath, too proud and dainty to blow her nose into her sleeve in front of me. “I don’t need to speak to you. Everyone knows you’re going around with all the young men these days, giving them ideas about how they’re finally free from women.”
“What are you talking about?”
Elfriede jutted her chin out, either to appear standoffish or to keep the snot from flowing. “I saw you with four men.”
I flung my hands up in the air. “I wasn’t courting them!”
Elfriede seemed as oblivious to my words as she was to common sense. “Not only my husband, no. You couldn’t just keep it in the family. But Marden’s and Roslyn’s, too!”
Of course. Her friends. The ones I wouldn’t touch with a three-foot stick, although as a child I did swat at them with Elgar, which was basically the same thing. “And you’re spending time with Jurij’s aunt’s former man.”
She seemed to hear that. “It’s not the same.” She squeezed her arms tightly across her chest. “Alvilda never had the slightest interest in Jaron, and you know it.”
“Maybe not, but Mother did!”
Elfriede stopped speaking, but her jaw hung open a moment before she snapped it shut. “That’s a lie!”
“No, it’s not!” I pointed to the door behind her. “Ask her!”
Elfriede threw her arms into the air and sniffed loudly. “Sure, let me wake both Mother and Father and ask if Father wasn’t the only man Mother ever—”
The door opened behind Elfriede. A cold sweat formed on my forehead, and my cheeks flushed. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in so long. It was Father, looking every bit as disheveled and empty as when he was first parted from Mother. “What is going on—Noll? Is something wrong?”
I stared into my father’s bloodshot eyes, a haze of fatigue over his face that seemed to have no hope of lifting. I swallowed. I’d barely seen him the past few weeks—no, months now. I’d run from the castle, but I’d also run from everything else. I’d tried to put it all behind me, thinking things would get better in my absence. “No,” I said, too late, after a moment of staring. “No, Arrow just ran away, and I came back to get him.”
Father grunted and turned his attention to the dog at my feet. A flicker of a smile lit up his face and even made his tired eyes brighter. “Aw, there he is! Missed you, boy!” He crouched and ruffled Arrow playfully behind the ears. Arrow lapped up the affection, rolling over onto his back.
I raised an eyebrow. Elfriede’s lips were pinched as she turned to go back in. “If you like him so much, Father, he can stay.” She glared at me. “But I better not see you here tomorrow, demanding I let you take him back.”
I scoffed. “Wouldn’t dream of it. But if I do miss him, I’ll just send one of my men along to pick him up.”
Elfriede went inside without another word.
Father murmured in an infantile voice from my feet. “Good boy. Good boy, that’s a sweet little boy!” He finally seemed to notice I was still standing there and looked up, his eyes hopeful. “So the dog is staying?”
“If that’s what Elfriede wants,” I said. “I don’t really have a say in anything anymore.”
Father patted Arrow absentmindedly, looking back into the open cottage door behind him. “I have a feeling nobody does, Noll. Not anymore.”
I searched for the moon, wincing as I realized just what it hovered over in the eastern sky. “If we ever did.” Was he watching now, the lord who was “always watching”? I tore my gaze from the silhouette of the castle in the night and nodded at Father. “Good night, Father.”
He didn’t look up from Arrow, but his patting of the dog’s stomach slowed. “Good night, Noll.”
Arrow flipped over and turned toward a sound in the woods beside us that only he could hear.
But then I heard it, too. The turning of the wheels enveloped me with the feelings of nostalgia and dread I’d experienced when I’d heard them every day for months after I refused to visit the lord. My eyes fixed on the path to the woods, my body aflutter with anticipation and revulsion, my mind
spinning and as conflicted as ever.
The black carriage emerged from the edge of the woods, the moonlight glistening off its roof. My heart beat so fast, I could barely make out the pounding of the horses’ hooves. Not quickly, no, never quickly with him. He had nowhere to be in such a hurry. But then again, I couldn’t be sure. Not with the way the moment slowed down impossibly so, cutting me off from everything else, from all my other senses.
White seemed to shine as bright as the sun in the dark carriage window. I thought of his paleness, how his brown hair framed his face, so lacking in color. But my eyes caught his—just for a moment, but a moment that lasted—and they were red. Of course. One of the specters. An Ailill. Him but not him at all.
The specter turned his head and looked forward. I felt dismissed, ignored. Nothing to a ghost of a man. Time resumed its normal pace, and the carriage fled west down the dirt road, fading into dust and darkness.
“What are they up to so late?” I’d almost forgotten Father was still behind me.
I clutched my forearm. “I don’t know.” I shivered from the cool breeze. “But it’s none of my business.”
And it wouldn’t be ever again.
“You thought we were what?” Darwyn rolled a wooden wolf in his palm, dropping a few crumbs from the bread he was chewing atop the wolf’s nose.
I yanked the wolf from his hand so he could devote himself to properly eating and flicked it to send the crumbs onto the blanket. Annoyed with the way the yellow crumbs stood out amongst my forest of animals, I slapped the wolf down next to a doe and picked the crumbs up between my fingers. “Courting women. At the tavern.”
Darwyn laughed and stuffed another bite of the roll into his mouth, oblivious to the spray of crumbs flying from his open jaw. “Just how many women do you think visit the tavern?” The question was partially muffled by the bread, but his tone made it all rather clear.
“I don’t know. Dozens?”
Darwyn swallowed and shook his head. “Most women are pretty angry about the whole former-husbands-leaving-them thing.”
I dropped the crumbs to the side of the blanket, resisting the urge to brush the rest of them from where they’d settled across Darwyn’s tunic and trousers. “Then what have you been doing since we met with Jaron?”
Darwyn shrugged as a woman dragging her young son behind her entered the bakery door beside us. “Working. Sleeping. Eating.”
“Eating at the tavern.”
Darwyn raised an eyebrow and popped the last of his roll into his mouth. He chewed a few times before speaking. “You must really be interested in what goes on at this tavern.” He swallowed. “I’d love to visit this place you’ve invented. Sounds like the women fawn all over you there. Might be interesting to see how it feels the other way around.” He stared off into the passing crowd contemplatively, but I could see the mischievous glint in his eye.
I hugged my knees to my chest, not bothering to fix the skirt that bunched up as I did. “If you’re not courting women, then why hasn’t Jurij gone off with you?”
Darwyn studied me. “Probably because I haven’t been up to much lately. I mean, I’ve gone to the tavern a few times.”
“I knew it!”
“For drinks.” He coughed, and his cheeks darkened slightly. “With friends.”
“Have you seen Jaron there?”
“Yeah, sure. I guess he’s courting women. But there haven’t really been that many there to court. If you care about that sort of thing.” He genuinely seemed like he didn’t. “You think Jurij is avoiding Jaron?”
“Of course he is!”
“Even though he left his goddess—his former wife—of his own free will?”
I buried my nose in my knees. “It’s complicated.” I knew full well it was possible to feel disgust and affection at the same time.
Darwyn nudged my arm with his elbow. “It’s only as complicated as you make it, Noll.”
His gaze traveled from one passing villager to the next, a grin lightly touching his lips. He seemed happy. Happier than I’d ever seen him, though I couldn’t recall ever seeing his face, even after his Returning. I was otherwise occupied at the time, being trapped in the castle.
The door to the bakery swung open, and Darwyn’s mother stuck out her head. “Darwyn, how long does it take you to eat?” She had flour mixed between her black and gray tresses, and more than one lock of hair had fallen out of her bun. The flour reminded me of Alvilda’s sawdust, but I’d never seen so flustered an expression on the woodcarver’s face.
“Yeah. I’m coming.” He rolled his eyes at me as he stood. And he was certainly taking his time to stand.
“Just as useless as your father,” mumbled Darwyn’s mother as she turned to go back into the bakery. “I wish you hadn’t chased Roslyn away.” The rest of her rant went unheard as the door shut behind her.
Darwyn winced at his former wife’s name. The bit of happiness I’d seen was gone, replaced with as much seriousness as Jurij usually wore these days. He wove his fingers together and stared at them. “Roslyn was good at baking,” he said, answering a question I didn’t ask. “Me? Not so much. Even if I was raised by bakers. That’s why I get stuck with the delivering most of the time.”
“She lived here?” I hadn’t known. Maybe Elfriede or someone had said it, but I hadn’t paid attention to my friends’ love lives after they found their goddesses. Most goddesses wanted their men to move in with them. To help their parents with their professions, or just because it was what they were used to, and men would have no complaints.
Darwyn nodded. “Mother asked her. She’d only had sons, and they were all leaving. Roslyn’s parents already had Marden and Sindri to help with the tanning.”
Oh, right. Roslyn and Marden. Darwyn and Sindri. Two sisters paired with two brothers.
Darwyn loosed his fingers and ran one hand over his hair. “She liked it, so she said that was fine. She wasn’t here long. We’d only been married a short while before … well, before.”
I studied him, cupping a hand over my eyes to shield them from the bits of sunlight that trickled across the tops of the buildings. “You don’t hate her.”
Darwyn blinked. “Why would I?”
I blinked back tears from the sun. “She bossed you around? You resented being forced to love her in the first place?”
Darwyn cleared his throat. “Well, sure, maybe. But she wasn’t so bad. And it wasn’t her fault.”
The door to the bakery opened and Darwyn flinched, but it wasn’t his mother. Two customers, the mother and son. The child’s arms were wrapped around a basket full of bread, but he stared at my carvings as he passed. His mother, oblivious to his slowed pace, put a hand on his back, guiding him in front of her.
“Darwyn! Now!” Mistress Baker’s voice made him flinch again, but the door closed and his shoulders loosened.
He grabbed the wolf he’d been playing with and tossed two coppers on the blanket beside me. Holding his purchase out in front of him, he turned the wolf this way and that. “This is good work, Noll. I like it. Reminds me of my favorite mask.”
I tucked that too-long bit of hair behind my ear and grabbed the coppers. I could feel my face flushing as I thought about all the fighting I did with the boy in that wolf mask. “Thanks. You didn’t have to.”
Darwyn gazed over the wolf he rolled between his hands to meet my eyes. “I don’t hate Roslyn. I don’t even dislike her.”
“You’re not at all the Darwyn I remember. I’d have thought you’d be, I don’t know—”
“More agitated?” He grinned, and I wondered if that was the grin he wore as a child, if this was the boy who was once my friend and annoying rival. He glanced back at his wolf before tucking it into his pocket. “I just don’t have feelings for her. Not like that. Staying with her wouldn’t be fair, don’t you think?”
I chewed my lip. “But how can you be sure you won’t fall in love with her again? What if all you need
ed was to spend more time with her, to learn to love her?” I sounded like the villagers back when they used to say the same things to me. Only now I felt like I knew what they meant.
“I would do anything for you.”
Now I was remembering my daydreams as if they were real memories.
Darwyn coughed. “Are you really counseling couplings to get back together now? Or are you wishing they’d stay apart? I’m not entirely clear on that.”
“I’m not counseling anything. It’s not really my business.”
“Right. But since you’re curious, I’m sure.” He laughed. “I’m very sure.”
Certainty was written all over his face, and I flinched, remembering something similar on Ailill’s face the last time I saw him.
Darwyn crouched beside me, balancing on the balls of his feet. “This thing with you and Jurij and your sister, it’s not really my business. But I think you were right to get Jurij out in the fields, get his mind off things.”
Two little girls squealed with excitement as they pattered up to my blanket, one bouncing up and down, her hand clutching something tightly. “Looks like you’ve got customers.” Darwyn stood and reached for the door as the girls crouched before my display of animals. “Get him to the tavern, Noll. You come too. Keep them both from drowning in ale and sorrows.” He saluted me and went inside.
Both?
“You have another squirrel! She has another squirrel!”
One of the girls shoved the squirrel in my face, interrupting my thoughts on what Darwyn might have meant. “Can I have him?”
“Sure. Two coppers.” It was the girl from a month or so ago, the one who’d wanted to buy something when her friend did, that same friend now digging through her pocket to hold up a wooden cat.
My new customer grinned sheepishly and held out her other hand, the one she’d clutched into a fist. “Can I pay with this?”