by Rebecca Hahn
“I’ll teach you to ride in no time at all, don’t worry, lady,” the lord said as we left Emmy still taking her notes and made our way to the stables. “I’ve been training soldiers how to ride since I was half grown.”
Still, after he’d handed me up onto a gray mare, I needed no more help. Well, it didn’t take brains to figure this out, did it? The stirrups were for the feet; the reins were for the hands; kick the mare to get her to go; lean back to get her to stop—but why would you want her to stop when you could fly like this across the meadows and the whole world was only wind and pounding hooves and grasses rushing by, hill after hill after hill?
I’ve seen horses and riders all my life, stepping their way down the path to our hut or racing into the castle yards with this or that message for the queen or the king. I never once dreamed it would be like this, as if the horse and I were working together to conquer every yard.
It’s only when we’ve come to the end of the meadows south of the city, when we’ve gone so far we’ve reached the fields and villages near Gramps and my old hut, that I pull up, and the mare and I sit there, panting and sweating. Lord Edgar and his roan canter up beside us. They slow to a halt. His mare puffs noses with mine and stamps her feet. We’re up on a hill, and we look out over the checkered countryside, brown and black now that the harvest’s through, scattered here and there with white clumps of snow. Villages and nobles’ great houses dot the valleys, and off to the west the woods stretch south, curving to the east. I shiver, seeing them so close. It’s been almost three months now since I stepped in through those branches, felt their needles under my feet.
“You’re a natural,” Ontrei says. Blast him, he’s barely breathing hard.
“Not much to it,” I say. “Get her going and hold on tight.” I can feel the smile cross my face, though. I can’t stop it from sitting there, lighting up my eyes no doubt, and making me look all friendly and such.
“Twice now,” he says, “we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. Shall we call the past the past and start fresh today?” He’s holding out his hand, waiting for me to take it.
I don’t move a finger, and I only barely keep from laughing at how easy he makes it sound. Just shake hands and we’ll trust each other, never worry about any stabbing in the back. Seems he’s never heard my history with stabbing. “Is that why you dragged me out today? You’re making sure I’m still up for that alliance?”
He looks down ruefully at his poor rejected hand, then brings it back to pat his mare’s flank. “Yes, if you like. You’ve made it clear you’re not interested in my proposals, but there’s no reason we can’t be friends, still, and allies.”
“Hmmm.” I look him over. He’s truthful and eager in the morning sun, not a bit like the shadowy stranger on my Gramps’s porch, nor again like the arrogant nobleman in the great hall yesterday. What sort of man changes day to day like that, as if he were cousin to the shifting winds, the blowing clouds? “Race you to that village.” I point it out to him, check to make sure he’s looked, and then take off before he can say anything.
I don’t push my mare as hard this time, and once we’re back on the road that runs down from the city, I slow her further, to a quick trot. Lord Edgar pulls up alongside with an irritated look.
This time I do let myself laugh, right in his face.
He smiles, looking startled again, and nudges his mare on ahead, grinning over his shoulder. “Better hurry, my lady,” he calls.
I kick, and we’re off again, the dirt hard under the horses’ stamping feet.
He’s ahead, but I’m gaining, and my mare has a determination in her huffing, a straining in her gallop that makes me think she’s with me on this one. I lean forward over her neck, giving her the control. We’re almost there, his mare’s hindquarters a hair from my horse’s nose, and then I see the path leading off down the hill to the west, I catch a flash of the hut through the bushes, and I’m sitting up, pulling back on the reins before I know what’s what.
My mare tosses her head at me, clearly unhappy at our sudden exit from the race. Edgar’s realizing I’m not behind him anymore; he’s looking back, pulling up, stopping. Before he can call out, I’ve turned my mare around and we’re on our way down the hill.
Lord Edgar catches me up as I’m dismounting in the yard before our porch.
He leaps to the ground as well and steps in front of me, his roan following his lead. “Marni, we shouldn’t be here,” he says, all serious.
“Shouldn’t we?” I sidle around him to tie my mare to a bush; she’s happy to munch on its leaves. “Seems to me this is the place they put me when they decided I shouldn’t be anywhere else. Seems they can’t make up their minds if one day this is the only place I’m allowed, and the next it’s the one place I can’t go.”
“I’m not disputing that,” he says. “I know it’s crazy. But you can’t be seen here.”
I climb the porch steps, not paying him any mind. Gramps’s cane still lies there, getting soft with the damp. I rub its edge, and a layer of wood comes off on my finger. “Here’s where we met, my lord,” I say, as cheerful as I can manage. I don’t mean to say it; I don’t want to remember, but it’s as though my Gramps’s shape is there in that old chair, sitting at that selfsame table. He’d be scratching away at a sketch or sipping his cup of tea or looking out along the path up the hill and dreaming.
“Yes,” Lord Edgar says. “I remember.”
I pick up the cane, hefting it my hand. Great bits of it, rotten the lot of them, shed themselves and thunk onto the porch. I watch them fall, forcing my thoughts away. I look out at the lord. He’s holding his horse, framed by our bushes, looking up at me all still, all worrisome, as if he knows my thoughts.
“We should go back, Marni,” he says, and his voice is so gentle I near hate him for it.
“Funny thing,” I say, “how there’s times you call me lady, all respectful, and then there’s times you think it’s fine to call me by my first name. No explanation, neither, no apology, as though we’ve known each other all our lives—or as though you didn’t think me a real lady. Do you think me a real lady?”
“If I’ve offended you—”
“I’m not,” I say. I let the cane drop down the steps, thunk, thunk, rolling onto the grass and stopping a few feet out, another branch among the leaves. “I’m no lady, my lord. I’m no village or farmer’s lass, neither. They called me a flower girl, times past, but they’ve got their own garden beside the king’s castle, and it doesn’t matter how little the gardeners know about flowers; there wasn’t any need for another garden on the edge of nowhere. Wasn’t any need for them to take themselves down here to spend their money when they had all they could want for free up there in their city.”
“There weren’t any flowers like yours.”
I have to admit, he doesn’t talk like the other courtiers. He talks straight and clear, as though he means the words. He stands tall and steady, too, looking at me all somber. He’s seen battle, I remember that. He’s not little inside, not like most of the lords up there.
“You wouldn’t know.” I laugh. “You never bought none.”
I’ve surprised him again—third time today—and he gives me a smile. “You wouldn’t remember, would you?”
I back up until I’m resting against the wall of the hut, just where I used to stay when Gramps had one of his visitors. “I remember,” I say. “I never spoke, but I heard everything they said, saw every one of their faces, and the guilt they kept there, that drove them down to buy their flowers. I memorized them, you might say. You weren’t one.”
“Is that a strike for or against me?”
I shrug. “You got your strike when you sat right there”—I point to my chair, across from Gramps’s—”and told my Gramps he better marry me off to you for his own good.”
Well, and he doesn’t say anything to that, does he? Not for all of a minute, almost, and I can see the thoughts flashing in his head, how he’s going to keep me allied with
him now. I wait until he stops looking at his boots and says, “Lady, I hope—”
“I’m going to see my flowers,” I say, and I slip through the door into the hut.
I don’t look at what’s there. I don’t want to think about how this place, where we told stories and laughed and ate, isn’t ours anymore, how it’s falling back into the earth. I haven’t heard Dewdrop or the chickens since we came down; no doubt some villagers will have come and taken them for themselves. They’re welcome to the animals—but I wouldn’t expect they’d care enough to keep our old hut nice.
So I look straight ahead, and I go straight through our sitting room and the kitchen, out the back door and down the step, and then I’m there in the garden, back with the fading roses and the tangled heaps of thorns.
It’s a few minutes before the Ontrei lord ties his horse up and makes his way around. I walk the rows, looking at it all. It doesn’t bother me that this place has gone untouched. The flowers will fall to the ground; the ones that can will push themselves up again next year, and the ones that can’t will go back to the worms and make food for the rest. Nothing sad about this. They’re happy enough, the sleeping bulbs and dwindling stalks. They whisper greetings to me as I walk through, soft murmurs. It jumps me a little when I pass by the dragon flowers in the center and see that they’ve shriveled up, petals, leaves, and all. I spent so many hours hacking away at them, and now they’ve left on their own.
As the lord’s picking his way around the hut—he doesn’t go through like I did, which I appreciate—I go up past the well and the sunflowers, and then to the wall at the edge of the garden, and I look hard into the woods.
There’s a voice that’s been calling me since the moment we passed the turnoff to this place. It’s grown stronger the longer we’ve been down here, and now, at the start of the trees, it’s near shouting into my head.
“Marni, we should go back.” The lord’s hand barely touches my shoulder, and his voice is as soft as a breeze, careful. My fingers are tight against the wall’s stone. I tell myself to relax, but it takes some will to lay them flat.
“What did I say about my name?” I say, as light as I can, but my voice is shaking; there’s not a thing I can do about that.
“You didn’t,” he says, still soft, still careful. “You didn’t say whether you liked it or not.”
“I like it.”
The voice wants me to follow it. It wants me to jump across the wall and run into the dappled places of the woods, where it will find me, where it will lead me on to things I can scarce imagine.
“They haven’t moved here, have they?” I say.
“What hasn’t moved?” But he knows what I mean. He’s been following the king around for months, probably all year, for as long as it’s been happening, at least.
I don’t want to say it, so close. I turn my head, as if they won’t be able to hear if I’m not looking at them. “The trees. They’re moving in all across the kingdom, yes?”
He nods slightly. Maybe he can feel it too. Maybe he can hear it.
No. It wouldn’t be calling someone like him. “But not here. They haven’t moved an inch since I left for the castle.”
“No,” he breathes, agreeing.
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Marni,” he says, and now he’s looking away from me, at something there, something under the branches. “I really think we should go now.”
It’s her. I know it’s her. I’ve known it was her voice since I heard it, since I stopped my gray mare in our race for the village, since I recognized the tune, the words, the song we used to sing as we knit our gifts.
“You can see her?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t need to. His eyes are as wide as coins; the hand on my shoulder is beginning to tighten.
I turn to face the lady.
She is beautiful. I’ve always thought she was beautiful, even when I was like to die from the horror of her, from the nothingness of her face, from the uncanny brilliance of her eyes. Her hand lights the corners of the woods, throwing shadows here and there, a playground of movement and hidden places, laughing at me, inviting me to come, to explore.
The lord next to me stands frozen. He will not stop me if I go.
“Tulip.” She says it in a way that says she knows me, every bit. She knows the thoughts in my head. She knows the itching in my fingers to launch me over these stones and leave things like castles and uncles behind.
Yes, I want it. I want to forget every sleepless night, to become a thing not swayed by human troubles.
I brush a leaf from the wall; I watch it fall. I think about going over to talk to her. I could ask about my mother, and maybe this time she would tell me something of what happened to her in the woods. I could ask about my father, even, the nameless monster, the dragon I’ve met only in stories.
She holds out a hand to me.
And I near leave right then, never mind my magic needles back in the castle, never mind my uncle, never mind revenging my Gramps. I almost leap across the wall and run to that lady. But as I’m bending my knees, as my hands are pushing against the stone, the Lord of Ontrei’s fingers tighten a bit more on my shoulder.
I stop.
I turn to him, and he’s looking at me, and there’s not just fear there, and not just awe. Behind that, there’s a sadness in his eyes, and I think, without knowing quite why, that he’s sad for me. And I can’t leave. That takes my very breath. That pulls me so firmly back into myself that I don’t even look out at the lady again, but I take this man’s hand from my shoulder and I lead him away from the wall, through the fading garden and into our old, cold hut.
The voice follows me there, of course, still murmuring its offers into my blood, but I ignore it best as I can, and I pile some logs in our blackened fireplace. I take the tinder still sitting on the mantel, and I build us up a grand fire.
I drag in the chairs from out on the porch, but they’re near as bad as Gramps’s cane, so I pull Lord Edgar down to sit next to me on the rug. Time was, Annel and I sat just like this, and as her words spun and twirled, rose and fell with those flickering flames, I imagined sorcerers riding big brown horses and women crying themselves into flowers.
It’s not until the first log is burned half through that the lord stirs himself.
“You didn’t follow her.” He’s not looking at me. He’s looking into the fire; his lips are barely moving with the words.
I don’t tell him how close it was. I don’t ask about that sadness, neither. He hasn’t looked my way since then, and I’m thinking maybe I imagined it. Instead, I say, “Did you expect I would?”
He doesn’t answer.
“You think that was the first time she’s called me like that? You think she’s never tried for me before?” I shake my head. “My Gramps never knew, so if you thought I’d never been to the woods, I shouldn’t be surprised. But I went. I went every day, nearly, as long as it wasn’t knee-deep snow.” I don’t know why I’m telling him this, except that I’ve never known anyone else to see that lady, and I want him, somehow, to know more, to see more.
Still, he doesn’t answer, and now he’s shivering, as if he’s come straight out of a blizzard himself. I fetch the dusty blanket from my bed and wrap it around him before settling back down, my arms holding my knees.
“You came back,” he says.
“Yes. Like I said, it wasn’t the first time she’s done a thing like that.”
“I mean before. You went to the woods every day, and you always came back.”
“Well,” I say, “we lived so close, and there wasn’t much to do with just my Gramps and me around, and—and it’s pretty in there. It calms your head, if you know what to stay away from.”
He nods as though he understands, and I find that I’m holding my breath, waiting for something, I’m not sure what.
“I like to go riding in the meadows up north, where you can go for miles without seeing a village or a field. I imagine
it’s something like that.”
“Sounds like.”
Now I’m all tense. He’s not said a thing to put my back up, not a thing to contradict me or to make me mad. I figure it must be coming soon.
“Meadows are different from the woods, though, aren’t they?” he says.
Ah, this will be it. “They don’t have faceless women reaching out glowing hands, I suppose is what you mean.”
Again, he doesn’t answer right away. He pulls the blanket closer around his shoulders, refusing to look at me, still staring into the fire. Then, “They’ve come in so far now, Marni. All over the kingdom. And the king has been looking for someone to blame.”
“For the woods moving in,” I say.
He nods. “He’s been saying it more and more, louder and louder. That he should have killed you when he had the chance, that you’ll be the kingdom’s doom.”
“But I’ve nothing to do with it.”
He shrugs. “It’s what the king thinks.”
“Isn’t it enough that they want our land?” I hear the anger in my words, and I stop to breathe. “Isn’t that reason enough for them to be moving in?”
“Maybe you’re right. Not everyone agrees with the king. There are plenty who still carry that guilt you were mentioning, plenty who have no wish to see the past repeated.” Now he turns to look at me, straight into my eyes. “The king still blames you, though, and what the king thinks matters.”
Outside, our horses are snorting and shaking their heads; we can hear the reins slapping against their backs. “They’ll be wondering where we’ve gone,” I say, standing. I don’t want to talk of this anymore. “We should get back.”
“That’s why you mustn’t be seen here, Marni,” he says, looking up at me. “Not this close to the woods.”