The Forest Queen

by Betsy Cornwell

  But hungry as I was, I ate no more blackberries that day.

  * * *

  When we’d been in the woods for two weeks, I shot a boar.

  I’d climbed a tree a half mile or so from the clearing, just high enough that I could catch the warmth of the thin sunlight that managed to plunge that far through the leaves. I had girded my skirts for the climb, and now I stretched my bare legs in front of me, flexing my ankles and feeling the warmth on my skin, and the gentle breeze over the fine hair on my legs. I’d brought my bow because I carried it always; Bird had won the argument that I needed it for my own safety, but I still told myself I was holding on to it for hunting. The bread and cheese I’d brought from home were carefully rationed every day, and worms or no, blackberries were quickly becoming our staple food. Bird’s falcon had to feed herself now, and so far she’d caught only mice and voles, which we hadn’t quite persuaded ourselves to eat.

  We all missed meat.

  I closed my eyes and turned my face up to catch another narrow shaft of sun.

  I heard the sounds of the forest all around me: the leaves and branches that shifted and groaned so much like waves that it was almost as if I was back at Loughsley, listening to the lap of water against the rocks and cattails on the shore. Birds cackled and twittered and whooped. The sunlight felt as if it had its own noise, too, as liquid as the watery sound of the leaves. I heard its warmth as a smooth trickle running across my eyes and over my face, down from my knees to my feet.

  A heavy whuffling broke my reverie. I stayed as still as I could, opened my eyes, and slowly rolled sideways so that I could see down toward the ground, toward the source of the phlegmy snorting. My legs gripped the branch on either side and I leaned forward, lifting my bow and arrow from my back.

  The snuffling creature lumbered into sight: a boar. I was a little disappointed; I’d been hoping for another hart, like the one from the royal hunt. There’s more meat on a deer.

  But there was still a fortnight’s good eating for the three of us in a boar, and a thick hide for warmth besides, if we could figure out how to cure it out here.

  I took aim.

  I hit the boar just above the heart. But the hide I coveted must have been thick indeed, because I could still see the base of the arrowhead after I struck my mark; I’d barely penetrated the skin.

  The boar squealed and whirled around in a circle, trying to crane its huge, blocky head back far enough to see the source of its sudden pain.

  I aimed again, this time aiming for its jaw, where any hunter knew that a great vein lay close to the surface. If I could puncture that, the boar would fall in seconds, and die in seconds more.

  But the animal was moving fast, and I missed my mark: I struck it in the back of the neck, just missing the spine. It stopped whirling and began to buck and kick at the air with its sharp black hooves. The noises it made now weren’t squeals, but screams not unlike those a human could make. I could smell its panic drifting up to me thicker and thicker, a rank odor like old, sour sweat.

  I felt tears in my eyes. I had to bite down on the inside of my cheek, hard, before the pain was enough to steady my hands and pull me back from abject misery over the boar. It had never taken me more than two shots to make a kill before, not even my first time; the huntswoman made well sure that anyone she taught to shoot was able to kill cleanly before they were allowed to try it.

  But remembering Bird’s mother only made me feel worse. She’d always been kind to me, and I thought of what Bird had told me over the fire, that she’d wanted him to go somewhere new. He hadn’t said the real reason, and he hadn’t needed to: his mother had seen our friendship, seen the warmth and longing I sometimes felt, and she wanted him to be free of those things. Free of me.

  Now that he’d brought me to the forest, he might never be.

  All these thoughts filled the space of only half a moment, half a heartbeat, and I set them aside to focus on the boar.

  I swallowed the blood in my mouth. I forced my hands to still again as I gripped the third and last arrow I’d brought with me. I breathed in, took aim . . .

  And Little Jane appeared in the clearing.

  The boar noticed her just a moment before I did, and it froze—​and then it turned on my new friend, shaking its shaggy head and dragging its long, cracked tusks through the air. It reared up, my useless arrows sticking out at strange angles like demon horns.

  It brandished its tusks and charged.

  “Little Jane, look out!” I yelled, scrambling down the tree, my bow and last arrow still in my left hand.

  She didn’t move: she stood directly in the path of the beast, staring it down from her great height. Her hands were behind her back, and she didn’t even put them out to defend herself.

  Then, as the beast charged her she raised both arms over her head so quickly that I could not clearly see what they held, only that it was some long dark shape that she brought down in a blur on the boar’s broad skull.

  It fell to the ground and lay still. Its head was a split fruit, glistening red.

  Jane lifted her staff, a thick branch of witchwood nearly half as tall as she was. Blood dripped off it and trickled down her hands.

  I walked toward her, staring, and she smiled. “Couldn’t let you leave that job unfinished,” she said. “I wanted to eat tonight.” She glanced at the multitudes of brambles around us and wrinkled her nose. “Really eat.”

  I nodded. “Me too. Thank you.” I crouched down to examine the boar: its smell was so strong that I had to cover my mouth and nose with my sleeve. It was rutting season, which explained why he’d wandered so boldly close to our camp. It also explained the stink.

  Its skull was as thick as my thumb was wide. Even the bone splinters around the crater Little Jane had made in its brain were solid and broad. I tried to imagine what it would be like to wield such force, such strength, as she had in her arms. I couldn’t.

  “I envy you, Little Jane,” I said, pulling my first arrow from where it had lodged above the boar’s heart.

  I looked up at her, smiling, but her face had gone closed-off again, and she turned away.

  * * *

  Juice from the heart, liver, and kidneys sizzled and crisped over the fire, turning from pink to red and then deep golden-brown. Bird turned the spit so expertly that not a single drop fell wasted into the coals.

  The smell tormented me: rich and sweet, seductive enough to cut through the boar’s lingering bloody musk.

  Little Jane and I had cleaned the animal where we’d felled it, to save the offal from souring inside its belly, and we’d left the carcass hanging from a tree to drain. It was high enough to be safe from bears, and far enough from camp that we hoped it wouldn’t draw them to us, either. I’d scrubbed my arms of blood in a nearby stream, and Little Jane had plunged in altogether, shrieking at the cold. I’d shared my dry clothes with her and used her blood-spattered overdress to carefully wrap the offal.

  Seraph picked at the intestines, which we’d packed at the bottom of our makeshift sack; the waste inside meant we could not eat them ourselves.

  But the heart of a wild beast was prized meat for any hunter.

  As the boar’s dispatcher, Little Jane had the honor of eating it. Bird presented it to her with the same flourishing bow that I’d seen his mother use after the culmination of so many hunts.

  She shook her head. “Give the heart to Lady Loughsley,” she said, nodding toward me. “The boar was her quarry to begin with.”

  I pulled away, though I was impatient and hungry. “You made the kill, Little Jane,” I said. “The heart’s yours.”

  Little Jane bowed her head. “You should have it in truth, my lady. You’re the mistress, our leader out here, same as at home.”

  I resisted the urge to laugh. I’d shown time and again that I was the least knowledgeable, the least helpful, of our group. Of the three of us, I knew well that I was the only one who wouldn’t have survived that first night in the forest alone, even
with all my pretenses to plant knowledge and hunting skills.

  I couldn’t even start a fire. I depended on my two companions for everything.

  I looked to Bird, expecting him to say as much, to add something about how spoiled and helpless I was, but he was silent. After a moment he turned toward me and, although with only a nod instead of the full bow, he offered the dripping heart.

  The scent of its smoky sweetness drifted over me, and my mouth flooded.

  I took the meat from Bird. It was still hot enough from the fire that my fingers started to throb.

  “We’ll share it,” I said. “Eating a heart is meant to give you courage, isn’t it? We all need as much of that as we can get.” I glanced at Little Jane. “I’d say the baby does, too. But I will accept this heart from you only as a gift, and not as my due.” I realized I was speaking officiously, and felt suddenly embarrassed. “Is that all right?”

  Little Jane looked at me wryly. “As you wish, mistress,” she said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bird grin, but whether it was at what I’d just said or what he knew I was about to say next, I couldn’t guess.

  “Please, as—​as one more gift,” I said, “just call me Silvie. I’m mistress of nothing out here.”

  I lifted the heart to my mouth and took the first bite. My whole body sang with the relief of nourishment, so that I felt as if I could taste it in my whole body, right down to my toes.

  I heard a growl and realized that it came from me: my throat was rumbling as if I were a beast of prey.

  I silenced myself with surprising difficulty as I swallowed. I offered the meat to my friends, smiling, the juices still on my lips.

  Little Jane shook her head, but she consented to eat her share of the heart.

  SIX

  A New Home

  It seemed like a miracle when the light woke me up the next morning, not a cramped and empty belly. I lifted Bird’s arm from my shoulder. He smiled in his sleep and flexed his fingers.

  Little Jane was already awake, warming her hands by the fire at the mouth of the cave.

  “Someday I’ll be up before both of you,” I said, “I swear . . .” But a yawn overtook my last words, and Little Jane laughed.

  “Sure you’re used to sleeping in, Lady—​Silvie,” she said. “You don’t have to change everything about yourself right away, you know.”

  There was something about that statement I didn’t much like, but she went on before I could parse it. Leaning back with her hands resting on her hips, she surveyed the huge oak and pine branches above us.

  “None of us are sleeping well on the ground, anyway,” she murmured, as if to herself, “least of all me, to be frank. I can feel her at night, shifting around, and then I have to shift around, too. It’s hard enough to fall asleep there, and what’s cold and hard now will only get colder and harder as the season turns.” She cleared her throat; the coming winter was on all our minds, but none of us liked to talk about it.

  “Oh, Little Jane, I didn’t realize . . .” Every time I thought I’d seen all the facets of my selfishness, something new confronted me.

  She tutted. “Why would you? Not your job to think of such things. I copped it the first night, of course, but one of the things I do know about having babies is that I shouldn’t carry around too many heavy things. I’d’ve started cutting the first day, otherwise.”

  I straightened and came blinking out of the cave. I bent down to touch my toes, and when I stood up, Little Jane was giving me one of her skeptical, surveying looks. “I know you’ve never hewn wood before, but I don’t suppose you’d mind learning, if it meant we could sleep in a tree house—​off the ground?” She nodded back into the cave.

  I shivered, then nodded enthusiastically. “I’d do more than that for a warm, dry floor,” I said. “And . . . I hate to say it, but . . .”

  “But the cave feels like a trap,” Little Jane said quietly. “I know. Only one way in and out. It’s been giving me nightmares, too.”

  “I haven’t—” I stopped myself. Sleeping with Bird helped ease my dreams, but they were still there: shadowy faces leaning over me as I slept, small rooms, tight spaces, binding bedclothes. The freedom that I’d so longed for could seem very far away in the cave at night.

  “You’re right,” I told Little Jane. “It is a trap. If anyone found us there—​say, highwaymen”—​I refused to think of John—​“we’d be served up on a plate. But sleeping in the trees, we’d always have the upper hand. We’d hear them coming, and we could be gone before they’d begun to climb.” I felt as if I were planning a war strategy, and I told myself that was foolish. It was only us three runaways out here, after all, not an army.

  But the life that we were somehow eking out together was worth a little planning, a little protection. Warlike or not, I would guard it if I could.

  I nodded at Little Jane.

  “Good,” she replied. “If we get started today, the wood should be just about dry enough to build with before too many hard frosts, if we’re lucky. Not that we’ll have much of a choice.” She paused and chewed on a thumbnail. “It’d take forever to get these trunks hewn. Might be impossible, really. Of course, we might not want to make it as clear as a tree stump where we’re staying anyway, right?”

  I looked up into the trees along with her. “Surely there are some fallen trees we could chop up for wood?”

  “They’d be rotten,” Bird said, rubbing his hands over his face as he came out of the cave and joined us. “Ground’s damp, remember?”

  “I’ve been sleeping on it this past week, too,” I answered. He had that Silvie’s-not-thinking tone in his voice again, the one that set my teeth on edge.

  But then I remembered how he’d put his arm over me when I’d shivered the night before, so obviously not wanting to take anything with his touch, only to give. Maybe all the practical knowledge I lacked annoyed him, but I didn’t. The understanding that Bird loved me, in his sometimes curmudgeonly way, was always there, always clear. I held on to it then, when I wanted to snap at him again.

  “If they were freshly fallen, they’d have cured a little but not had time to rot,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Although I suppose even then”—​I looked back at Little Jane, who still gazed up toward the canopy—​“it would be too conspicuous to clear out whole trees, even fallen ones.”

  “Aye,” she said, still distracted. “We’ll cut down branches. Big ones, but high enough up that they won’t be obvious. We’ll have a small and oddly shaped little tree house, but at least it’ll be warmer and drier than the cave. And—​and safer.”

  I smiled at her, not wanting to dwell on our shared fears. “Right now, I can’t imagine anything better.”

  * * *

  An hour later I found myself up in a tree with Bird again, each of us holding on to one handle of a saw and pulling it back and forth across the base of a branch that was at least three feet thick.

  My shoulders had gone past aching, and then burning, into a sort of helpless numbness. The canopy was too dense to see the position of the sun in the sky, and I had to admit that even if I’d been able to see the sun I wouldn’t be able to read the time with much accuracy. All I could do was push, pull, and not think about how many more times I’d have to do it.

  “Boar again tonight?” I called across to Bird over the persistent wheezing of the saw.

  “Aye,” he said. “Lady and Lord, I could eat the whole beast myself.”

  I thought with trepidation of our stores for winter, but with my head growing light from hard work and hunger, I couldn’t disagree.

  “Hold!” Little Jane yelled. The branch between us creaked, a low whine that I could feel vibrating through the tree itself, out through my legs and up my torso.

  It was harder than I expected to force my arms to stop moving. As soon as I did, it was as if I’d given them permission to tell me how much pain they were in. The muscles in my shoulders immediately seized up.

  With a ghostly moan, the
tender skimmed-milk green wood underneath the thick bark revealed itself and the bough peeled slowly away. The wood cracked and leaves fluttered delicately as the huge branch fell.

  With great effort and pain, I managed to get down to the ground again. Sweat cooling on my face, I turned to smile at Little Jane.

  “No more sleeping in that cave,” I said through my heaving breaths.

  She raised an eyebrow. “No indeed. In a few months, we’ll have wooden floors.”

  I could only stare.

  * * *

  There is a special kind of moss that grows on evergreen trees in Woodshire Forest. Thick, springy, and dense, sheep’s moss is best known for becoming both softer and stronger as it dries. While Bird and I finished cutting and splitting wood, Little Jane spent the rest of that day gathering the moss, using a small knife from Bird’s stores to pare long strips from the rough, rucked bark of the pines and firs. She’d been gathering it since our first day in the forest, piece by piece; in another week or so she would have enough for us to replace the makeshift, scratchy leaf beds we’d made after that first night.

  When she returned in the evening, craning her neck to see over the armful of moss she carried, Bird was turning a cut of boar on the spit. The rest of the animal hung from the roof of the cave, near the opening so that it would catch the rising smoke. Between the smoke and the salt—​we’d rubbed nearly the whole precious bag of salt we’d brought from Loughsley’s kitchens into the meat—​we could only hope we’d done enough to preserve our quarry.

  I was watching Bird carefully, trying to memorize his technique. “You really need to let me cook sometime,” I said.

  “You really need to learn how first,” Bird replied mildly. “If you think I’m going to risk wasting any of this, you’re very wrong. You women stick to hunting, and I’ll tend the hearth.”

  “Ah.” I set down the chamomile I was stringing to dry along with the blackberries. Before I stumbled across the boar—​or it across me—​I’d spent my first days in the forest gathering edible plants. It was the only knowledge I had that my friends lacked, and I felt sharply grateful that I could contribute something of my own. “I hunted these down yesterday, too.” I held up three large cattail roots from a marshy spot I’d stumbled on near one of the streams. “I don’t think they’ll taste very good, but they’re safe to eat, at least. And they don’t die in the winter, so before the ground freezes hard we can dig up lots more.”