The Forest Queen

by Betsy Cornwell

  Bird stared at the misshapen brown bulbs. “That’s wonderful, Silvie. That’s perfect.”

  “We just have to stab them before we put them in the coals,” I muttered, taking out the knife I’d started keeping in a sheath at my side to do just that. “Otherwise they explode.” If I couldn’t cook, I was determined that my small knowledge of plants would be useful, at least.

  And the tubers, it turned out, were delicious.

  * * *

  We’d been in the forest a fortnight when Little Jane started getting sick.

  It was only small things at first, signs she tried her best to hide from us: paleness when she stood for too long; eyes that didn’t seem to focus at the end of the day; the way she often had to lean against a tree trunk, and then to sit with her hands supporting her head, while she told us how to hew the timber. It had become clear that she was right about how long building would take—​we’d be lucky to have our tree house up by the new year.

  I could have faced a winter in the cave, however reluctantly. Baths in the hot spring were a favorite ritual, and Bird’s fire had never yet gone out. Seraph started to bring in rabbits and even the occasional trout. I could nearly forget the trapped feeling in the cave, most nights, with Bird’s arm around me, his steady sleeping breath in my ear. But for Little Jane’s sake, as each week wore on and her belly grew while the rest of her seemed to fade . . . She couldn’t go on like that. And I wouldn’t let her.

  “You should go in to see the Mae,” Bird said one evening as we sat around the fire, when Little Jane had set down her portion of tubers and boar without eating. “Little Jane, please. You’re not well.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t go back there,” she said, “to the village. I never want to—​to see them ever again.” She stared into the flames. “I know what they must think of me, now that I’ve left. Since my family hasn’t kept me, and I haven’t kept my honor. I know they all think the way my father does.”

  I felt my heartbeat quicken with anger. “Kept your honor? Died, you mean?”

  Little Jane still looked at the fire. “You went to church growing up same as I did, Silvie, even if your church was prettier. You know the saints same as I do.”

  I swallowed. I understood precisely what she meant: Every story of a female saint ended the same way. The girl chose to die rather than to live in dishonor, whether that meant marrying a heretic or disavowing the faith . . . or submitting to rape. Her death was what made her a saint.

  “Surely there’s more honor in—​in going on,” I said. “Surely that’s what we’re doing out here. We’re making our own honor, instead of letting other people tell us what it means.”

  The truth was, I was more certain of Little Jane’s virtue than my own, surer that she deserved protection and freedom. Believing that she needed those things was my excuse to give them to myself, too. But if she didn’t know that already, I wasn’t going to say it out loud.

  “I know,” Little Jane said. “But even so, I can’t bear to think of how they’ll look at me back home. I’m going on, I am. I’m here, aren’t I? But I’ll do my going on away.”

  I was still almost shaking with anger, that Little Jane should feel that way, that the people she’d grown up with should make her feel it. But Bird’s voice, when he spoke again, was as calm as the water in the spring behind us.

  “The Mae is a woman of the church, Little Jane, and I don’t think she would call you dishonored.”

  Little Jane laughed softly. “Maybe not. She’s always had her own funny notions. But it’s not her I want to avoid.”

  I had an idea. “Where does the Mae live?”

  “The parsonage annex,” Bird said, “at the edge of the village.”

  “What if we went at night, then? What if we went to her when the rest of the village was sleeping?”

  Little Jane looked hopeful for a moment, but then she shook her head again. “I wouldn’t want to be a bother,” she muttered.

  This time it was Bird who started to get angry. “Lady and Lord, Jane, you’re not—”

  I caught his eye, and he stopped.

  “Surely it would bother her more, a midwife as she is, if something happened to you out here that she could have helped to prevent,” he finished.

  Jane’s jaw clenched. “I suppose so.”

  “Right, then.” I bit into my tuber with gusto. “We’re going tonight.” A Sistren midwife with “her own funny notions”—​even without Little Jane’s clear need, this was someone I wanted to meet.

  SEVEN

  Mae Tuck

  “Lady and Lord, Silvie, it’s just a few tea leaves.”

  “And a sack of oats. Or two. And maybe some more apples.”

  “Sure, why not?” Bird bent down to pick a sprig of mint, then placed it in his mouth. “It’s only as much as you’d eat if you were still here. It’s not robbery.”

  “But I’m not here.” I pulled my hood low over my forehead. It was night, and the heavy cloak and men’s trousers I’d borrowed from Bird kept me disguised, but I didn’t want to take chances. The feeling that John’s eyes were on me had grown stronger as we’d left the forest and approached Woodshire Village. When Little Jane had parted with us to go see the midwife, and Bird and I had crossed the Wedding-Ring Bridge and made our way back to the gardens at Loughsley, that queasy feeling had only grown stronger.

  I tucked more peppermint into my pockets. “Isn’t it enough that I helped Little Jane get away, Bird—​and, Lord, that I left myself? Do I really have to steal food from my own family, too?” I clenched my fists, sticky with mint sap. “How much more are you going to ask of me?”

  “I ask of you?” Bird’s eyes flashed. “Has it even occurred to you, Silvie, what I’ve given up to bring you and Little Jane to the forest?”

  “You asked me to come! You begged me.”

  He froze, every line of his body stiff. He stalked away toward the secret chair.

  I followed him quickly, already ashamed of what I’d just said. I hadn’t thought—​or rather, I’d pushed the thoughts away. I remembered feeling that I’d betrayed Bird’s mother by not killing the boar cleanly. I’d known even then that I’d betrayed her far more deeply by taking her son away.

  Bird stood facing the chair, staring at it.

  I sat down, then looked at him pleadingly.

  “You gave up your whole life for me—​for Little Jane and me, I mean. I know that, Bird. I’m so grateful to you that it’s hard for me to think about it. That I don’t think about it. But I should. You gave up your family, your work, your income, your place in the community . . . you gave up everything. For me, for Little Jane. And I’ve never even thanked you.”

  His shoulders dropped, and his stance relaxed. After a moment he joined me on the chair. I kept looking at him, trying to tell him with that look that I was sincere.

  Finally he embraced me, cupping the back of my head and bringing it to rest on his shoulder. “I did ask you to leave,” he said. “I won’t say beg, but I asked so many times . . . You saw the supplies I had ready in the cave.” I could feel his fingers slowly stroking the wool of my hood. “I’ve always seen the wrongs here, the injustices. When John beat us, I knew as well as you did we could never tell anyone. John would never be held accountable, nor would his friends, as long as they had money or his protection. I never even told my mother—​just said I’d hurt myself playing, climbing trees.”

  I pictured Bird’s sharp-eyed, skeptical mother. “She must have seen through that.”

  He shrugged. “Probably. Well, definitely. But didn’t she know the same thing? Doesn’t she spend her life guiding rich idiots through the hunts, protecting them, finishing the kills they can’t make themselves, and all for barely enough pay to keep the two of us alive? She never was invited to the Hunt Balls, Silvie, not even in your father’s prime. The huntswoman.” He took a shaky breath, and it was obvious that the slights against his mother bothered him more than those against himself. “So, no, I don
’t feel I’ve given much up in leaving my work behind. We still hunt in the forest, don’t we? But now the lass and I get to keep all our kills, and share them only with those we love, those who need them. Not give them in tax to rich bullies like your brother, to be left hungry ourselves.”

  I heard a rustle of feathers; Bird’s falcon was never far away.

  “But you left her, Bird. You left your mother. And your friends—​sweethearts, I don’t know—​in the village. Everyone you love.”

  “Perhaps.” Bird lifted his hand for Seraph to catch as she landed, and I looked up. The falcon had something tied to her right foot: a rolled piece of paper. I realized it must be from his mother.

  “We have our ways of staying in touch, she and I. It’s useful, too, to know what goes on back here—​to know if John starts sending out search parties, for instance.”

  I flinched. That was something else I hadn’t let myself think of.

  Bird stroked Seraph’s back. She pressed herself briefly up against his hand, then took flight again. Bird tucked the paper into his vest pocket.

  We watched her climb the sky. “I wish I could do that,” he said. “See everything from above so clearly, as she does. As the Lady and Lord must do.” He paused with a chagrined half-smile; Bird had always been more religious than I was, and we’d had our share of spirited arguments about each other’s beliefs.

  Just then, though, I found myself wishing for the same divine clarity Bird sought. I nodded, briefly closing my eyes before I reopened them to the ocean of stars.

  “Sometimes I think I’d know how to fix the world, if I could only see it from far enough away. Going to the woods with you feels a bit like that. And as for everyone I love . . .” He looked away from the night sky and toward me. “Well, Silvie. You know all about that.”

  I felt a glow steal into my skin. I touched Bird’s cheek, but that wasn’t enough. I embraced him as he had me, pulling his head to my shoulder. “I love you too, Bird.”

  We kept perfectly still against each other. I hardly wanted to breathe; there was something both holy and fragile between us just then. Almost holy enough to make me believe.

  I made myself take that breath. I pulled away from Bird, gently, knowing what I had to do next. “I don’t want to steal from Loughsley, but . . . you’re right. I’m entitled to a few tea leaves . . .” Bird began to smile in earnest, and I grinned right back at him. “And a couple bags of oats. We still have some time before we’re due to meet Little Jane.”

  * * *

  Bird was waiting when I got back to the stone chair. I set down the sack of staples I’d brought from Loughsley’s kitchens: tea leaves, salt, dried beans, a small and precious bag of sugar. Bird had oats and barley from the stables.

  Little Jane wasn’t with him.

  “She’s gone back to the cave already?” I asked, hopeful but doubting. I adjusted the hood that kept my face shadowed. It was hot, especially with my long hair wound up under it, but I wouldn’t take it off, or the thick scarf that concealed my mouth, until we were deep in the woods again. “To rest?”

  Bird shook his head. “Not back yet.”

  Suddenly the nebulous sicknesses and fears I’d faced in my old home began to seem trivial and foolish. The only reason Little Jane wouldn’t have appeared would be if there was something wrong with her, with the pregnancy, something that worried the much-admired Mae Tuck enough to keep her there long past our planned meeting time.

  “Right,” I said. “We have to go to her.”

  “We have to get out of here before dawn,” Bird said, “get all of this back to the cave, and cover our tracks, too. We won’t do Little Jane much good if your sheriff brother finds us, or if we starve to death this winter.”

  “Bird—” I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t being fair, always assuming I’d forgotten the practical things. “Just because I don’t always think of the same things first that you do, that doesn’t mean that I want us to starve.”

  Bird glared at me. “Want us to? Of course not, but how do you think we’ll keep that from happening? Not by holding each other’s hands, Silvie. We live by food and warmth and shelter now, or at least, we live by those things before we get the luxury of thinking of anything else. Kind intentions are no good without bread.”

  I remembered the warm embrace in which we’d woken up that morning, and the one we’d shared just a few hours ago. In the coming winter it wouldn’t be enough, I knew that, but still . . . still, that closeness didn’t have to be nothing.

  “If Little Jane needs us, that’s more important,” I said. “We can always come back for food later. This is still my—​These things are—” I couldn’t quite say mine, or home, either. Just knowing John was close by made me feel sick.

  But Little Jane . . . she had endured something the likes of which I, feeling sick over a brother who sometimes looked at me in a way I didn’t like to think about, couldn’t even imagine. And all she wanted, and all that I could give her, was love and kindness, freedom in the wake of horror. That was a kind of warmth, a kind of food, even if Bird couldn’t see it.

  “I’m going to get her,” I told him in the Daughter of the House voice he hated, the imperious tone with which I’d first asked him why he knew my name. “Do what you like with the food.”

  I stalked off through the woods and down toward the river and the Wedding-Ring Bridge, but after a few steps I had to turn around. I could feel my face flaming as I said to Bird, “If you will only tell me where Mae Tuck lives.”

  “I’ll show you,” he said, and I was grateful that he didn’t laugh.

  * * *

  Mae Tuck’s annex, it turned out, would have been easy to miss.

  Whitewashed, with a freshly thatched roof that was barely taller than I was, it hardly seemed like the grand accommodations most clergy had. Brother Mayhew, who had overseen the spiritual life of the village since before I was born and who was a good friend of my father’s, lived in the main house. That was made of stone, tall and spacious and well-appointed.

  This outbuilding, in comparison, might as well have been a shed. I was sure that Little Jane couldn’t stand up straight inside it.

  I was so taken aback by how small the place was that it took me a few minutes to realize that no smoke was rising from the chimney, and that no light, not even a candle, burned inside.

  I knocked cautiously on the door. There was no answer.

  Someone moaned behind us.

  I whirled around.

  There, sitting on the ground huddled against the parsonage’s garden gate, was Little Jane.

  “I only felt weak when I came,” she said. “But when I found she wasn’t here, I got dizzy, I . . . I just had to sit down for a while. I think I’m . . . sicker than I realized.” She touched a hand to her forehead; the motion was so feeble it made my heart ache. “You were right to tell me to come here.”

  I crouched and took her hand. “Is the baby . . .” I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Oh, she’s grand. Getting stronger every day, only . . . it’s as if she takes it from me. She’ll probably be bigger than I am by the time she comes out.” Little Jane tried to smile at her joke, and so did I. Neither of us succeeded.

  “Look,” Bird whispered. He pulled down a piece of paper that had been hammered into the frame of the window near the door.

  Taken to Woodshire Jail, it read, for grievous offenses against the noble family of this village.

  “John,” I whispered.

  * * *

  I’d never been to the jail before. I hadn’t even thought about it much, only been glad that it was there, to keep us safe from the brigands and thieves and highwaymen whom John always bragged about capturing.

  “It’s so . . . small,” I murmured. Not just small: the stone building was squat and dilapidated. It looked neglected, too: the walls had been whitewashed once, but only a few worn patches remained, and parts of the heavy timber door were pocked with woodworm. Even the guard who stood at the doo
r looked ill-equipped, in dingy clothes, holding a crooked spear.

  “What did you expect, a grand ballroom?” Bird retorted.

  I said nothing.

  Little Jane, standing shakily behind us, looked pale. “What if she’s not here?” she whispered.

  “She’ll be here,” I said, with somewhat more conviction than I felt. And to Bird: “Where is the women’s cell?”

  He laughed. “There’s just the one cell, Silvie.”

  I stared at him. “You mean they put a woman in there with—​with the kinds of men they have to keep in prisons? Why, she’s—” I pulled the dagger from its sheath at my side, all fear and hesitation gone. “We have to get her out of there, now.”

  Bird frowned. “And what kind of men are these, exactly?”

  I turned on him, forgetting the knife I brandished until I saw him automatically step back from it; in that moment I didn’t mind if I frightened him. “Thieves. Murderers. Brigands.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “rapists” with Little Jane right there, but Bird knew it as well as I.

  He shook his head. “Men who’ve crossed your family, the sheriff, the king. That’s the end and the size of it, Silvie. You’ll see.”

  “Oh yes, because you see everything, don’t you, Bird? Those men are all innocent, and my villainous brother is the devil incarnate? John is—​he’s—​I don’t approve of what he does, either, as well you know, and I don’t even like him.” I couldn’t remember feeling defensive of John before, not ever, but the feeling ran hot in me now. “But just because he does bad things, Bird, that doesn’t mean everything about him is bad! And my father committed some of these men to prison, too! You will not be telling me my father is the same kind of bully John has somehow become!”