The Forest Queen Read online

“Ah, you know, when something gets drowned in the well, or someone buries their house-leavings too close to the stream . . .” She trailed off. “Of course, at the big house there’s always good water. Never mind. Do you like the ale, then? And what’s brandy like? I’ve always imagined it sweet as honey.”

  I leaned in and winked at her conspiratorially. “I’ll find us a bottle, next supply run to Loughsley. And . . . this is bitter, but it’s not bad. I like the bubbles.” I took another swig to check, making sure this time that I left a stripe of white foam on my lips, and I made a face at Little Jane with my new mustache.

  She giggled, then clamped a hand over her mouth; but I could still see the mirth in her eyes. It brought me such joy to make her laugh.

  It was only when we turned back to the rest of the table that I realized I’d thought of stealing from Loughsley again as a matter of course.

  Not stealing. Taking what was mine—​

  No. What was ours.

  The rogues were talking, I was surprised to hear, of the prince’s courting voyage.

  “Where on earth does he think he’ll find a lass good enough for him, if not in Esting?” grumbled Stutely, pausing to quickly drain half his flagon. “The most beautiful women in the world are right here. You ask me, the royals forgot that truth much too long ago.”

  It was true that Prince Rioch wasn’t the first to seek a spouse abroad; the royal family, and the nobles rich enough to follow their example, had been marrying from outside Esting’s borders as long as anyone could remember. The practice helped maintain diplomatic relations, of course, but it was also one of the reasons it was so easy to tell peasants and royalty apart on sight: Esting’s commoners were somewhat fair, with hair that was brown or reddish or blond. Nobles were generally either dark-skinned, with curling black hair and long, thick lashes like the people of the Sudlands, or icy-pale with colorless eyes and the feathery white hair of Nordsk’s snowbound inhabitants.

  Indeed, while my own hair was dark blond and only slightly curled, my skin was darker than that of anyone else at the table: an inheritance from a grandmother who had been a Su duchess. I’d always been taught to value it as a sign of my own nobility. But here, did it only make me conspicuous? I glanced around the pub, suddenly nervous, pulling my sleeves farther down over my wrists.

  Bird, on my other side, shook his head. “Don’t worry.” He nodded toward a back corner of the bar. Following his gaze, I spotted a woman—​one of the ladies of pleasure I’d spoken of with Little Jane and the Mae back in the forest—​flirting with a tall, skinny man; she had feathery, near-white hair and gray eyes, and the expanse of bosom displayed by her tight bodice was certainly very pale. “Plenty of folks with exotic looks around every place,” he said. “Bastards, of course, and very impolite to mention it to them. No one will think you’re an actual noble—​just an unclaimed child of one.”

  I felt naive again, and foolish enough that I didn’t even blink at Bird’s rough language. What he said made sense, of course.

  But I shook my head to settle my hood lower over my forehead, to shadow my dark, long-lashed eyes.

  “Is there no wrong we haven’t done?” I said suddenly, impatiently, slapping my empty mug down on the table.

  Bird leaned forward. “Silvie, I didn’t mean—”

  “Little Jane, how often was the water bad, in the village?” My voice was fierce, hard. I’d stood up from the table without realizing.

  Little Jane looked up at me, cautious. “Why, a few times a year.”

  “And people at Loughsley knew about this? John? My . . . my father?” I hated even to say their names together that way, but I had to know.

  Little Jane shrugged. “They were told. But the big house water could never be spared.”

  I thought of my father’s walled gardens, full of plants from all over the three continents, lush and verdant. I thought of how I’d loved them, without ever bothering to think of where the water that sustained them came from, or what good it might do elsewhere. I thought of the man-made waterfall by the pomegranate trees, where I used to swim in summer—​with a calm river not half a mile away. And a whole village going without clean water, not far beyond that.

  People were looking at me now indeed; all over the pub they were staring. Even the feathery-haired woman had turned around in her customer’s lap, and she regarded me with wary amusement even while the man kept kissing her shoulder.

  I lowered my voice and placed my hands on the table. “We’re going back to Loughsley tonight,” I said, running my finger along the seam between two slats of wood as if I were tracing a path. “And this time we’ll take more than food.”

  * * *

  Loughsley Abbey floated over the water like a ghost, but I was the one haunting it.

  I stole in through the back garden gate, the same way I’d left with Bird after the Hunt Ball, when we were just going for a walk. For some reason, our leaving for good later that night didn’t loom nearly so large in my mind. I felt more and more in my heart as though I’d truly left when I’d fled from the ball, from Lord Danton, from John and the way he looked at me.

  I’d abandoned my home in my heart even then.

  I crept through the gardens in my sturdy hunting boots, remembering how quickly the dew and lake water had soaked through my dancing shoes. I never took dry feet for granted now. How much had I changed in just a few months?

  How much would I change as the year, or the years, wore on?

  I stopped, my head buzzing. I leaned over with my hands on my thighs, and it didn’t feel as if I could breathe deeply enough to steady myself again. The ground below me started to pop and fizz like the ale in the pub. I felt the breaths I was trying to take turn to gasps, then wheezes.

  My hands went slick and cold and they slipped off the front of my skirt. I stumbled forward, still gasping—​

  But before I hit the ground, Bird and Little Jane both caught me.

  “Steady,” Bird murmured, not an instruction but a naming, an invocation; and I found what he called up in me.

  “You all right, Silvie?” Little Jane asked.

  I could feel the steadiness Bird had named coming out in the smile I gave her. “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m not the one carrying a passenger. You’ve more right to faint than I do.”

  She smirked and looked at the ground, then gave my arm a squeeze that I thought might leave bruises.

  “Right,” I said briskly. “Everyone sure of their plans?”

  They nodded silently and let me go. Around them the rogues, the Masons, and Mae Tuck nodded too.

  “Good. We’ll meet back here in no more than three hours.”

  Bird and Little Jane turned toward the Abbey’s stable yard, the others found their paths, and I made my way to what had been my own balcony.

  * * *

  The smooth, twisting ivy made good purchase for my hands and feet, but it was hard to keep a firm enough grip on the slippery bark to pull myself up. I’d climbed down from this balcony so many times that I thought climbing up would be easy—​and how many trees had I climbed, all my life and especially in these last few weeks?

  By the time I made it up to the balustrade and clambered my way over, I was sweating and my muscles burned. I was hungry enough to forget my jewelry box and go straight for the bowl of wrapped sweetmeats that always sat on my bureau.

  The first bite was so sugary it made my eyes water. I coughed and swallowed immediately; I hadn’t had food so rich or strong in weeks, and though I’d always loved sweets, my tongue seemed to be telling me it didn’t like the taste.

  I scowled and opened another candy, forcing myself to chew it slowly, and then I emptied the rest of the bowl into my satchel. The wrappings crinkled against each other like leaves as they tumbled in. The sugar would do almost as much as the fire to keep us warm as the winter set in, at least while it lasted. I wished I’d remembered to tell Bird to take the rest of the confections from the kitchen, for neither my father nor J
ohn fancied sweets, and they wouldn’t be missed.

  How had I taken such food for granted, so short a time ago? How had I smiled at the soft fullness of my limbs and hips and belly only because I knew they were beautiful, and not because they meant I was well fed?

  I heard a muffled sound behind me.

  I froze, still holding the bowl over my open bag.

  Someone was sleeping in my bed.

  * * *

  I stepped closer, not allowing myself to shake. All I could think of, somehow, was an old nursery story: Psyche, the girl who believed she’d married a monster. When she finally raised her candle to look at the bridegroom in bed with her, she saw an angel instead, the most beautiful man in the world.

  I didn’t expect an angel.

  I didn’t think I’d see a monster, either, but John’s face against my pillow made me startle backward with as much revulsion as if I had.

  My brother snored lightly, and he frowned a little in his sleep. He kept as tight a grip on the pillow as he always kept on his horse’s reins, and it made me wonder—​absurd thought—​when I’d ever seen his hands relaxed, rather than clenched into fists.

  Maybe I never had.

  My loose hair fell forward and brushed his cheek.

  His frown deepened, his hand grew tighter on the pillow, and he groaned. It was a sound of such quiet longing, and it made me more afraid than I could remember being since I was a little girl . . . no, since I had seen in his face the impossibility of the life he’d chosen for me at the Hunt Ball. The impossibility that had changed my life.

  I strode quickly and silently back to my bureau, my spine iron, and I tucked my whole jewelry box into the satchel. I told myself I’d bring back the heirlooms someday, the things of my mother’s that my father would miss. But I couldn’t bear to sort through them now, if it meant staying in my bedroom with my brother even one more instant. Breathing the same air that he breathed.

  Before I ran away to the forest, I’d been used to him, somehow, how it felt to be near him, to live in the house where he lived. Still, I’d known . . . something, some wrongness; it was part of what had made me so willing, so eager, to run.

  It had taken me only a few months to forget the taste of sweetmeats. It had taken even less time to forget the weight, the burden, of the fear I carried in this house. The fear I—​

  I still couldn’t name it, couldn’t face it. Not now. I had my jewelry, and I knew where to find the other valuables in the house. I loosed my hold over my body and let myself flee.

  I was halfway down the balcony wall again before I remembered the one last thing I’d wanted to do. I felt sick at the mere thought of going back to my bedroom, but I’d feel sicker tomorrow, and who knew for how long after, if I didn’t do this one thing more.

  I ran across the garden and set down my heavy satchel in the seat of Bird’s secret chair. I looked up at the moon, at the surrounding sky; I thought I had plenty of time left, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I turned back and ran again toward Loughsley Abbey.

  * * *

  I refused to worry too much about my father’s room being empty. John didn’t seem to have booted him from the master suite, at least; his robe still hung in its place by the door, and the toilet table held a half-empty bottle of the Su cologne he’d always favored.

  The bedclothes were rumpled. When I placed a cautious hand on the pillow, it was cold.

  The first place I looked for him, naturally, was the library. Any time either of us couldn’t sleep, or didn’t wish to, it was the first place we would go. If we happened to meet each other there, Father would smile and ring the bell, and a yawning servant would bring us tea, a pipe (for him), and biscuits (for me). How many nights we’d spent reading in companionable silence, the fire stoked for us before the servant left.

  My memories focused on the servant now, as I stood in the dark and cold library. How tired she must have been, called out of bed in the middle of the night after a long day’s work to indulge our whims. How I had never, even once, thought about that before—​or if I had, it hadn’t bothered me.

  What else had I never bothered to see?

  In the shadows, something stirred. Slowly.

  “Father,” I murmured, rushing to embrace him.

  His back was thin and frail, and even through his nightshirt it felt cold. He’d been sitting in one of the wingback chairs by the fireplace, so still—​so still in the dark, and so diminished and thin, that I hadn’t even seen he was there. I hadn’t noticed him at all.

  I pulled the thick sheepskin from where it hung over the back of the chair and draped it around his back. “You’ve forgotten your robe, Father,” I said. “I’ll call someone to—​I’ll get it for you.” When I pressed one of his hands in both of mine, it was cold too, cold as stone, cold as night. It felt shockingly light. There was no weight, no strength in it at all.

  “Kind of you, dear,” he said, shifting his shoulders to settle the wool around them. “It’s a trifle cool in here.”

  I dropped his hand, then touched it again at once. “I’ve missed you, Father,” I said quietly. “I’m so—​I’m so sorry. I had to leave.”

  He shook his head. “I always knew you’d come back. I finished your bridge, you know. In the morning we’ll go look at it, when it’s warmer and light. You mustn’t catch a chill.” I flinched, remembering my mother shivering in her bed.

  The Wedding-Ring Bridge, my mother’s bridge. It wasn’t, as I’d dared to hope, as I’d dared to comfort myself when I couldn’t sleep in the cave at night, that he was just far gone enough not to know that I’d left. He was worse than that. He didn’t even know me; he thought I was my mother.

  But this left open such an evil temptation that I could not resist it. If he thought I was my mother, I could learn the things he’d tell only her.

  “How are the children? Have they grown up well?” I couldn’t quite bear to call him by his first name.

  “John is a good boy. He looks after everything, ever since I got sick . . . He’s the real lord of Loughsley now. He has my judgment in everything. A firm hand.” My father smiled vacantly.

  It took more will than I’d thought not to say anything. But what good would it do to deprive my father of the comfort he took from his belief in John’s goodness, his faith in his son’s?

  “But Silviana . . . Darling, I am . . . I am ashamed to tell you.”

  I steeled every part of myself. “Tell me.”

  “Silviana ran away with a servant boy, because she didn’t love us.” This voice rang out strong and clear behind me, and I wheeled to face it. “Silviana threw away her virtue. She has no proper family feeling. I am so sorry to tell you, Mother, but your only daughter hates us all.”

  John was advancing on me with every word. Wearing only his nightclothes, he reminded me of Father at the Hunt Ball, and the two of them merged, images rippling in a pool inside my mind, until the faces of the father I loved and the brother I feared did truly seem one and the same.

  Was it John or my father who walked toward me, or whose cold hand I held? Which woman was trapped in Loughsley Abbey, and which one lay free in the cold earth at the base of the oak tree by the Wedding-Ring Bridge? Was I myself or my mother? Myself or—​

  My hands were clenched tight and starting to ache. I felt their strength and warmth, their rough calluses. I felt my father’s cold hand in mine and I let it go. I felt the firm set of my feet on the plush Nordsk carpet that lay on the library floor.

  I felt my skin, every inch of it. John touching none. He’d stepped close to me, but then he’d stopped. He wasn’t even reaching out.

  “But if she’s come back,” he said, his voice soft and gentle, “perhaps it means she’s repented. Perhaps it means she loves us after all.”

  John wasn’t touching any part of me, wasn’t holding me there. He never had. I had always been free to go.

  So I turned and ran out the library’s far archway.

  I didn’t even
register most of the rooms I fled through. When I came to the dining room, I snatched up one of the gold candelabras on the table. I meant to take another, but the first was so heavy I staggered from its weight, even with the new strength I’d gained from building tree houses.

  “Silviana!” John was closer behind me than I realized. He caught me around the waist and pulled me upright. “Silviana, here, let me help you . . .”

  That same longing was in his voice that I’d heard when he’d groaned in his sleep, in my bed. The gentleness, the hesitation in his hands when he touched me, when I knew just how violent a man he really was. For all the softness in his grip, I knew how close and hard he wanted to hold me.

  I lifted the heavy gold candelabra and hit him across the temple.

  He fell to the floor, limp, and I kept running.

  I was the last one to return to the Wedding-Ring Bridge. I was cheered like a hero as I turned around the bend in the river’s edge, and for a moment, I felt like one, too.

  Will Stutely took the candelabra I handed to him and whistled at its weight. I saw him stare for a moment at the blood on its base, but he said nothing; his eyes only flickered over me for a moment, as if to make sure that the blood wasn’t mine, and then he tucked it into the large sack he and the rogues had brought back from the treasury.

  “The spare key was just where you told us it’d be, Silvie,” he said.

  To be Silvie again, and not Silviana, was a relief. To cross the bridge into Woodshire Village and then to move on toward the enveloping arms of the forest in the predawn gray light, even more so. We left three coins at each door that we passed, enough to pay the raise in the sheriff’s taxes or to buy food for winter, if they’d paid their taxes already in produce. Enough to keep them going, and more than enough left over to feed our growing band.

  We could melt down the candelabra and those pieces of my jewelry that were too identifiable to pawn. After my encounter with my father and John I didn’t feel the least need to give any of it back anymore, not even my mother’s things. I knew they were going where they would be needed.