The Forest Queen

by Betsy Cornwell

  “At least as much,” I said. “The nails are sorely needed, I know, but . . . take someone with you, the next time you want to raid the carpentry. We’re safer together—”

  “Good evening,” came a deep voice behind us.

  My heart jumped so high in my throat that for a moment I thought I’d be sick.

  I leapt off the ground and spun to face the cave’s entrance, cursing myself for leaving my bow and arrows by my bed.

  The others stood, too, Little Jane making two fists and towering above the rest of us, Bird suddenly holding a curved hunting knife. I remembered the dagger in my sheath then, too late to take it out stealthily. I saw Bird look at my empty hands and shoot me one quick, frustrated look, over so quickly it almost hadn’t happened.

  Only Mae Tuck rose slowly. When she faced the cave entrance with us, her face was as open and kind as ever.

  “Who’s there?” I called into the darkness beyond the fire.

  “The Lord and Lady bless all here!” a deep voice replied. Three people appeared out of the gloom: an older man and woman and a girl of about sixteen, all dressed in rough peasant clothes. The man had a bushy brown beard threaded heavily with gray. The woman wore a scarf over her head. The girl’s shiny nut-brown hair spilled out of her own scarf, and she had a pretty, rosy, round-cheeked face. Her eyes were wide with fright at first, but she looked past me at Bird, and a smile of recognition overtook her.

  “Forgive us for startling you,” said the man. “We mean no harm. The truth is, Mistress Loughsley, we need your help.” He made me an unpracticed bow, and the two next to him quickly followed with equally awkward curtsies.

  Bird stepped forward, lowering his knife. The girl’s rosy cheeks grew yet rosier, and I thought the strength of the smile she was giving him might break her face.

  I was still watching her when Bird spoke, so I missed his first few words.

  “. . . you to come so far, Kent?” I glanced at him; his face was still wary. “And how did you find us?”

  “It was my daughter who guessed where you’d be,” the man said.

  The girl giggled. “Don’t you remember when you took me here, Bird?” she asked. “When I heard from Katie up in the Abbey about you and the lady vanishing, I figured this is where you’d hide.”

  I started to feel sick. I scolded myself: how dare I think Bird should only have come here with me, when we were children? We had never promised each other exclusivity, even in friendship. How dare I begrudge him other friends? I had forgotten the cave, our castle, entirely. And this rosy, pretty girl who was fairly glowing at Bird: she remembered.

  I couldn’t look at her, so I kept my eyes on her father instead. He set down a lumpy, heavy-looking sack. “I knew well what’d befall us, if we stayed in the village,” he said. “The jailhouse for me. The young sheriff’s raised Woodshire’s taxes again, and if rumors are true, the king will soon do the same. I’ve little enough work as it is, for . . .”

  “For who can hire a stonemason, when there’s no one with money for building,” Bird finished quietly.

  “Aye. That’s about the size of it. And I won’t leave my family hungry while I rot in that damnable place. But we saw—” The man chuckled, and he made me another rough bow. “We saw what you did to the jailhouse’s wall, mistress, and it’s a mighty thing if ever I saw one. I couldn’t read it, of course, but Nellie here did and told us, and oh, if we didn’t laugh ourselves into stitches! If there’s someone standing up to the young sheriff, telling him nay for once in his bully’s life, then that’s someone I want to stand with. So we need your help, but we’ll stand with you, too. We believe in what it is you’re doing, mistress.” And he made me his deepest bow yet.

  I’m not doing anything, I wanted to say—​I wanted to scream it. I’m not standing up to John. I’m not that brave. I ran away!

  But I knew these people didn’t care about that. What they needed was a kind of help we could give them. That was all that mattered. Not my cowardice, not the jealousy I felt nipping at me as the daughter radiated her smiles toward Bird. All that mattered was how I might help them.

  I stepped forward and took the hand of the stonemason’s wife in my own. “Of course you can stay with us, for as long as you need,” I said. She still didn’t speak, but she nodded slowly and closed her eyes. When she opened them again I could see that she was almost crying.

  I felt suddenly embarrassed. I looked over at Little Jane, and she smiled at the man Bird had called Kent.

  “I was just saying we need more hands as know building,” she said.

  NINE

  Tree Houses

  When I woke up the next morning, pleased with myself to find that the light outside the cave still held a little of the pink of dawn, the stonemason’s daughter, Nellie, was tending the fire. Everyone else was gone.

  “Where’s Bird?” I asked, stretching my arms above my head as I sat up. We’d slept apart since Mae Tuck had joined our group, but somehow I still expected to find him next to me each morning.

  “He’s gone to help cut timber,” the girl said, settling our kettle onto its long hook and chain, then carefully letting go so that it didn’t swing or splash before coming to rest above the hottest part of the fire. It was a practiced, easy motion. She’d tended fires and boiled water all her life, I supposed, so why shouldn’t she be good at it? But something about her ease bothered me.

  “I promised him I’d keep the fire going. He seemed fair concerned about it, too.” She laughed softly to herself.

  I made myself relax my shoulders and loosen my face into a friendly smile before I spoke to her again. She had come here with her parents because they needed friends, after all. Why should I feel anything but friendship toward her? Why should I care that she’d promised anything to Bird?

  I blinked. I didn’t care, of course.

  “That was good of you,” I said, standing up. “Bird thinks we’ll all freeze to death the minute the fire quenches, you see.”

  I laughed, but she didn’t laugh with me. Instead, she prodded the coals again. “He’s not wrong, mistress,” she said, “especially here, inside damp stone like you are. Even a stone cottage gets horrible cold in the winter, if the fire’s out for just one day, or one night. Mam always tells me my most important job, when she’s not at home, is keeping the hearth lit. The house can be a mess, and no food on the table, long as the fire’s going strong.”

  The girl’s chin trembled at the thought of home. I stepped toward her, suddenly finding her much more sympathetic than I had a moment before.

  “Well, you’re just the right one for the job, then, Nellie,” I said. We smiled at each other.

  “Has Little Jane been with you all along?” she asked. “I worried about her when she left the village, and her parents wouldn’t say where she’d gone. Her father kept saying a girl as big as her could make her own way in the world, and not to worry, but . . . I did.”

  “She’s been with us,” I said. “It’s a great blessing to have her, too. She killed a boar that’s still feeding us, and it’s because of her we’ll have tree houses to sleep in come winter, instead of the cave. And she’s lovely company. A lovely friend.”

  “She is. I was almost as glad to see her again as . . . well.” Nellie brushed back the loose hair that had fallen from her kerchief. “I thought you and Bird had run off together, you see.” She looked at me hopefully.

  I despised myself a little for it, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell her it wasn’t that way between Bird and me. “Ah . . . what’s your mother’s name, by the way? I don’t think she told us last night,” I said. It was the first question I could think of that had nothing to do with romance.

  “Nell. I’m named for her. She’d have told you her name herself, only she can’t speak.”

  I hid my surprise—​or so I thought, but Nellie laughed at my expression. “It’s not that uncommon, after the whoop that came through ten years ago. Not uncommon in the villages, leastways, mistress
.”

  That made me remember myself, and why I had asked her name in the first place. “Please, call me Silvie,” I said. “No one out here calls me anything else—​I don’t want them to. I’m nobody’s mistress out here.” That was starting to feel like a mantra. “I’m sorry about your mother’s voice. Is there any way I can—​that is—” I wasn’t sure how to go on.

  Nellie laughed again, and the brilliant smile that I’d thought was just for Bird broke out on her face once more. “Ask her yourself,” she said.

  * * *

  “One, two, pull!” Little Jane called.

  With a deep creaking and groaning sound, the stack of wood on the ground rose into the air. I couldn’t see the vines that supported it at first, although I knew they must be there; for a moment it seemed as if the force of Little Jane’s voice alone compelled it to move. “One, two, pull!” she called again.

  This time I caught the sliding movement of vines through the shadows of the branches. In the dappled forest light, glinting around masses of crisp, colored leaves and ivy and moss and sweeping, low-hanging branches, it was almost impossible to see them.

  “One, two, pull!”

  I could hear labored breathing behind the creak of the vines and the load they bore, behind the rustle of the trees and falling leaves, behind the sound of the wind that swept its way above behind the rush of the river. Kent the stonemason, his wife, Nell, and even Mae Tuck were lined up and putting all their weight into lifting the heavy load.

  But where was Bird?

  “One, two, pull!”

  “That’s grand, so!” called a familiar voice from somewhere up there in the ocean of autumn fire.

  I couldn’t see Bird, but hearing him was a comfort.

  “We should be able to get them unloaded and set down the floor frame here.”

  I went to the nearest trunk, a sturdy hundred-year-old oak, grabbed a branch just above my head, and swung myself up.

  In a few movements I was as high as Bird, I was sure of it. But I couldn’t see him; when I looked down, I couldn’t see the ground for all the overlapping branches and leaves and vines and mosses beneath me.

  “You’re there?” I called in no particular direction.

  “Silvie?”

  Ah. I straightened myself up to standing and walked forward across one sturdy branch, then found another when the first one grew thin and started to bend under my weight. Like the climbing, this was a knack I hadn’t lost since I was a child, and it filled me with a simple happiness: balancing, walking from branch to branch, pushing greenery away from my face like parting curtains as I went.

  And behind the last curtain was Bird.

  He had taken the top piece from the stack of timber and walked it out from the trunk of his tree, an oak so thick it could have fit every one of our party inside its base, even with our three newcomers. Now he was positioning it between two extended branches, where it would form part of the frame of our new home.

  “Hi, Silvie,” he said, looking up at me with a half grin. “Hold that end steady while I tack this one, will you?”

  I hopped onto Bird’s tree, holding the wood with both hands. I felt the vibration of Bird’s hammer strikes coming through the timber, and a splinter or two began to wedge their way into my palms. But I didn’t mind: we were making a new house, a new home; we really were. Soon we wouldn’t be trapped in the cave anymore; soon we’d live every moment in the freedom of the treetops, even while we slept. I thrilled to the idea.

  Besides, the splinters might help me. I was ready to have, like Little Jane and Mae Tuck and even Nellie and her silent mother, the toughened hands of a woman who works.

  * * *

  My palms blistered instead of growing hard and callused. By the time dusk had grown too deep for us to keep working, they were pink, swollen, and weeping, and I couldn’t even close my hands enough to make a fist.

  I tried to keep them hidden, but Bird saw them. His eyes widened at the bloody marks I left on the last of the timber we handled that day. I thought I might be in for another lecture.

  “Oh, Silvie,” he murmured, stepping close to me in the gray shadows and taking my right hand delicately in his, the same way I’d seen him handling Scarlet and Much the day before.

  “It’s nothing—” I started, but he let go and I heard a ripping sound, and then Bird was winding a strip of cotton around my palm, wrapping it in layers from my thumb to the first knuckle of my four fingers.

  “Just to help protect them when you’re climbing down,” he said. “Then you should ask Mae Tuck to dress them properly for you.” He took up my other hand and wrapped that one, too. Just the relief of the fabric, of a shield between the pulsing ache in my hands and the raw air, was so wonderful that I couldn’t even think to protest about his tending to me too much.

  Cupping my mummified hands in his two callused palms, he raised one to his face and kissed the bandage.

  “Now, that should help a little. Just until Mae Tuck can see to it, mind.” He spoke as casually as if he hadn’t just kissed me at all.

  Then he climbed down the trunk, leaving me blinking. I could feel my quickened heartbeat in the throbbing of my hands.

  Getting down was still painful enough that I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out. Without Bird’s bandages it would have been intolerable. They were soaked through with fluid by the time I reached the bottom of the tree, but Mae Tuck was already waiting there for me. She carefully unwound the cloth and tutted over the torn and swollen skin, then led me to the numbing coldness of the stream.

  After all, I thought, as the icy water blessedly stole all the feeling from my hands, Bird hadn’t broken our agreement; he hadn’t kissed me, only a bandage—​the fabric of his own shirt. That was nothing, just as it was nothing when we slept curled together in the cave each night . . . or when we had done, before the Mae and the Masons arrived.

  I missed sleeping with Bird. I could admit that much, if only to myself. I couldn’t quite admit that I wished he’d break our promise.

  TEN

  Band of Rogues

  We roasted two rabbits for the supper that night, and Bird basted them with wine as he turned them on the fire. The smell was as lovely and suggestive as a good dream. I still couldn’t believe how hungry I was at the end of each day.

  The joy of good food and of the company around the fire was nearly enough to make me forget my aching hands, too, especially now that Mae Tuck had painted a mint salve onto my blisters.

  “Take the bandages off in the morning, if you can bear it,” she told me. “Once you’re up in the trees, of course. If you can push through these few days you’ll be well on your way to having skin like leather gloves.” She wiggled the fingers of her own well-hardened hands and smiled at me.

  I smiled back. “What would my governesses say?”

  “Or the Sistren in the convents?” She laughed. “They’re supposed to swear off vanity, but oh, you should see how they mind their smooth hands. Of course, it’s the Brethren who make them that way, but even so . . . no lady’s soft fingers for me, thank you.”

  I took a big bite of the spit-roasted rabbit. “What do you mean, ‘the Brethren make them that way’?” I asked, wiping the juices from my lips with my sleeve. None of my governesses would know me now, that was certain.

  Mae Tuck sighed. “You wouldn’t believe the things they tell the novices, the young girls going in to be cloistered. Through their hands they do the Lord’s work, and so they must keep them pure and soft and untouched by anything rough or earthly. The Sistren are the Lord’s wives, you see; when you take your vows, you marry God. So it’s their whole bodies they’re meant to keep soft and untouched—​but the Brethren find it more polite to speak of their hands, and just to keep them locked up. Out of sight, out of mind.” She shook her head. “They’ve been trying to cloister the Mae for centuries, and it’s nearly worked. I shouldn’t wonder, the kind of work we do. They speak of the holy blood of the Lord, b
ut they’d faint at the sight of human blood. They speak of keeping the body pure and holy, but I think if one of them ever really saw the workings of a woman’s body, the purity and holiness that’s truly there, they’d die of fright.”

  I had to laugh. “Mae Tuck, you’re giving a sermon!”

  She chuckled and took a deep draught from her cup of bramble wine; she’d just opened the first of our batches that morning. “Lady and Lord, I am. No more of that.” She swallowed, then reached for one of the tubers at the edge of the coals. Her callused hands picked it up without flinching, and I determined to keep my bandages off all the following day, no matter the pain.

  “To practical conversation,” she said, raising her cup.

  I touched my own mug to it, smiling. “To holy blood,” I answered, “and to women, too.”

  I must have spoken louder than I thought, because Bird looked up at us from across the fire. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, and he did, with a wink to us both.

  * * *

  Nellie slept at the rear of the cave with Little Jane, their two hammocks strung in a row like hanging fruit; the bags in which the Masons had brought their few belongings had soon been repurposed for sleeping. Mae Tuck still slept in just her cloak and shawl, on a bed of moss near their feet; she said she’d grown used to hard beds as a novice, and wouldn’t be able to sleep on a mattress or hammock if she tried. Bird slept on the ground by the fire, but on the opposite side from me, guarding the entrance; he insisted he preferred sleeping on stone, although I crossly suspected him of being chivalrous. Kent and Nell Mason had refused hammocks, too, choosing instead to bed down together on the moss where Bird and I had once slept.

  “We’ve never slept apart since we were married,” Kent said, “and we’re too old to be starting now. Besides, this one sleepwalks. Liable to trample all of you if we’re not holding hands through the night.”