The Forest Queen Page 13

  I could see the glow of Bird’s banked, still-burning fire as soon as we entered the clearing. The air was changing, the sky growing paler.

  I felt something brush my face, like a small feather. It reminded me of Scarlet, but she was in her nest with Much. I touched my face and a melting droplet came away on my finger: snow.

  Winter had come, but there was gold in our hands and fire in our hearth. Better still, we’d given that security to everyone in Woodshire Village.

  Bird was already setting a kettle to boil and stoking the fire. I hurried into the cave to join him, trying not to think about whether I’d killed my brother.

  Interlude

  Dead of winter, frozen rivers. White threads through the forest, white tangles on a green loom. A scrim of frost on every fallen leaf.

  Snow collects around Loughsley Abbey, even when it melts away from other places. The masses of rock and shadow in the cliffs hold on to cold.

  Inside the house we would eat wild venison, rich candies, bread baked from taxed grain, and drink mulled wine and hot brandy from realms abroad that cost as much by the cup, I later learned, as would buy a family food for a month in the village.

  In the village they wrapped their feet in flannel so their toes wouldn’t blacken with frostbite. In the village we took so much in taxes that one or two small children would always starve before the spring. We took more than we needed to give to the king, who took more than he needed, too.

  And we used it to buy mulled wine.

  I didn’t know then, but I know it now.

  We might as well have been drinking their blood.

  TWELVE

  Anna Robin

  A red silk purse sailed over my head. It was small, and in my old life I wouldn’t have looked twice at it. But the gold inside was a year’s rent for a Woodshire smallholder, someone who couldn’t abandon his crops or stock or mill to join our refuge in the forest, Kent Mason had said when he saw it. A whole year’s rent, a whole year of shelter, and a whole year of keeping the crops and animals someone needed to feed his own children.

  The purse sailed back and forth through the air like a magic trick, like a children’s game, tossed from one pair of hands to another as we tramped toward the village to deliver it.

  Stutely made a leap and caught it in midair, then swung it around his finger on its silk string. He was laughing and grinning like everyone else, but as we approached the river, with the miller’s cottage across a tiny stone bridge, his face grew somber. The rogues hung back, and after a moment I realized that they were all looking at me.

  “Best for you to give it to them, Silvie,” said Kent, next to me. Nell, beside him, nodded.

  “But—” I looked at the tiny cottage, at the old and patched-together but freshly whitewashed mill stuck in the frozen stream. “I don’t want it to look like pity, coming from me,” I said. “Like—​like patronage.”

  “Afraid of not giving us credit? Isn’t the lass too kind?” Even when he was trying to be serious, Stutely’s good humor shone; his bright blue eyes twinkled over his dark beard as he raised his eyebrows at me. “What, you’d rather it look like thievery?”

  I snatched the purse from his hand. “Just don’t want them to get any kind ideas about us nobles, is all,” I said, dropping into my most formal curtsey. But Stutely had brought out my stubbornness, just as he’d meant to, and as the rogues smothered their laughter I marched toward the door.

  It was true, though, that I didn’t want these people to think I was giving them gold, out of some naive, kindhearted impulse—​especially when my own brother would arrive any day to take that gold back.

  My blow hadn’t killed him, that night at Loughsley. I’d learned that soon enough, when Bird’s falcon had brought a “Wanted, Alive” notice with my name on it back to the forest. A warning from Bird’s mother—​with congratulations scrawled on the reverse of the paper.

  Seeing the reward my brother offered for my capture wasn’t a shock. Long before I’d struck him with the candelabra, before I’d vowed in the pub to take back what he and my family had stolen, before I’d run to the forest with Little Jane and Bird or even shot the prince’s wounded hart—​long before then, I had known deep inside that he’d capture me if he could. Everything I’d done in the past few months had just given him an excuse.

  I looked at the purse in my hand. I was still showing him just how free I was.

  So I pulled my hood low over my forehead, a motion that had grown to almost a habit by then, and I drew my scarf over my mouth, and I simply tucked the purse behind a rock that lay to the side of the door. Whoever opened the door would see the bright silk there, but no one would spy it coming in.

  It was almost dark, and I thought we’d get away undetected. But as I turned to walk back, I saw someone staring out at me through the cottage window: a small face, a red-haired child barely out of babyhood. Her eyes were as wide as if she’d just seen a spirit, and they locked with mine for a moment, each of us caught in the other’s gaze.

  Then the little girl vanished. I knew she’d be running to tell her parents there was someone outside.

  I walked as quickly as I could across the bridge without slipping in the snow. “Come on!” I told the group, and we were moving back to the road and toward our forest home in moments.

  Everyone was smiling and laughing, and there was a buzz of energy in the air, a feeling I’d come to know well in the last month.

  This one had been a highway robbery, holding up a gilded Brethren carriage that seemed to mock the very idea of vows of poverty. I knew Mae Tuck would be delighted by our choice of victim—​but the thrill we all felt didn’t come from knowing we were bringing money to someone who needed it, or that we’d stolen from someone who neither needed nor deserved what they had.

  No; it was the stealing itself, the act of it, the cleverness and coordination of what we’d done together. We had executed the thievery perfectly, with all the grace of a waltz. The soft, complacent Brethren in the carriage never stood a chance.

  It was the same feeling that I used to get from dancing, in fact, or from jumping a good horse. The rush of coming together with someone else to do something elegant, something beautiful, that I could never have done alone.

  It had nothing to do with virtue at all.

  As we moved off the road and into the forest, the sound of the frost under our feet changed from a quiet murmur to a crunch like the gnashing of teeth. Very little snow had made its way through the branches to the forest floor, not all winter, even though we were now a few weeks into the new year. But that same cover meant that the sun never shone through enough to melt the frost, either. Even at noon it dusted the leaves on the ground like fine sugar.

  I heard a familiar caw overhead. Bird’s falcon plunged out of the canopy and circled just a few feet above our heads—​above my head, in particular. She called again, and then again.

  “Stop a moment,” I told the group.

  I knew whom she was calling for, and I squinted into the growing darkness of the forest ahead, trying to find her master in the gloom. For a few minutes I could see nothing. Then Bird emerged from above as well, climbing down the trunk of a beech tree ten yards or so away from us. During our months in the forest he’d honed our childhood knack for moving faster over the network of branches in the canopy than dodging between trees on the ground.

  “Bird, what are you doing?” I asked as he came toward me. He was breathing heavily, and as I got closer I could see that he looked—​not scared exactly, but . . . “I thought we agreed you’d stay behind with Little Jane and the Mae this time, in case—”

  “Yes. In case, yes. In case is happening.” He was close enough to me now that I could see that his color was high. He seemed to have trouble getting even those disjointed words out.

  “Bird?”

  Seraph alighted on his arm and gave his ear a firm nip. As clearly as if she’d spoken, she was telling him to calm down.

  He took a long,
shuddering breath. “You’re right, my lass. Thanks.” He looked at me, his eyes bright. “She asked me to come see if I could find you. She said not to worry, the Mae has her well in hand, but . . . Silvie. Silvie, Little Jane’s baby is coming, right now.”

  “I thought she had another two weeks,” I whispered. An excited murmur rose around us, but I barely heard it. How I had hoped to be there, to hold her hand . . .

  Perhaps it wasn’t too late. “We’ll be quicker up in the trees,” I said to Bird, and he nodded. I turned to the group. “You’ll find your way back all right?”

  Stutely laughed. “Of course we will,” he said. “Can’t swing through the trees like the pair of you, but we’ll still return in time to hear the wee thing’s first holler, I’d say. Go on, go to your friend.”

  Kent stepped past Stutely, his face worried and happy at once. “Bring her all our luck,” he said, “and all our love.”

  Everyone echoed his wishes, but I was already up in the branches with Bird, and flying toward home.

  * * *

  “In the cave, so they’d have the fire,” Bird told me as we stepped, heaving, onto the platform at the edge of the miniature village of tree houses that Little Jane had shown us how to build.

  But he didn’t need to say. I could hear them.

  I’d expected screaming, sharp cries; not from the baby, but from Little Jane. But the sounds I heard, while loud, were not sharp. Instead, there was a low moan, then a pause, long enough for me to realize that I feared silence more than any scream, any noise, because noise meant breath and life. And then another deep, guttural sound, a sound that seemed more as if it might have come from the mouth of the cave itself than from a human throat.

  In the few moments it had taken to listen to those two moans I had climbed down to earth again and hurried through the clearing.

  I crossed the threshold of the cave. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my fingertips.

  But Little Jane would need me to be calm. I remembered Bird’s falcon biting his ear and I forced myself to breathe slowly, to feel the air around me, the solid floor of the cave under my feet, the heat of the fire. I made myself stop trembling as I looked around.

  Little Jane groaned again. She was leaning on her hammock. She wore only her shift, and it was hiked up over her hips. Her bare legs glowed pale where the firelight touched them. Her eyes were closed, and she rocked back and forth as she moaned. Her hands clutched the fabric of the hammock so hard that her knuckles were white.

  Mae Tuck stood behind her, as calm and unassuming as ever, leaning hard on Little Jane’s lower back with her palms, putting all the strength she had into her task. “This one’s nearly over,” she said. “Good girl.”

  I realized I’d been standing as still as a statue. “I’m here, Little Jane,” I said, walking toward her. “I’m here.”

  Her eyes didn’t open; I didn’t think she’d even heard me. She just kept rocking, letting out that long, slow moan.

  But Mae Tuck looked up at me and smiled. “Ah, Silvie,” she said. “You might take this over, would you? You’ve good strong arms, and I want to stir the tisane for the linens.”

  I came forward, my hands already extended. “Just as we practiced, right?”

  Mae Tuck nodded and drew away.

  Little Jane grew quiet, and she turned toward me, her eyes slowly opening. “Silvie,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I’m glad you’re here, Silvie.” It was as if she was speaking to me from somewhere deep inside herself, some country I’d never visited.

  I smoothed a strand of hair that sweat had pasted to her forehead. “I wanted to be here,” I said. “Of course I did.”

  She nodded. Her eyes started to flutter closed again, and this time when she spoke she sounded even farther away. “She’s glad, too,” she said. “She wants to meet—” Her voice cut off; every part of her face grew still and stubborn and tense.

  I put my hands on her back the way Mae Tuck had shown me and I pressed down hard. Little Jane leaned forward, putting all her weight on the hammock, and I put all my weight onto her back. This time when she moaned I could feel the sound vibrate through both our bodies. I felt her change under my hands, every muscle in her torso grow hard, and even from behind I could see her wide belly lift and tighten as it tensed.

  I didn’t know how much time passed after that. I kept pushing against her when she needed me. Eventually each wave of pain would leave her, and she would quiet and her eyes would open. When she tired of leaning against the hammock we paced the cave together, around and around the fire, the Mae coming to us every few minutes to check on Little Jane’s progression. Keep walking, she said; stay upright as long as you can. Lean on Silvie if you want to; lean on me.

  And she did. It hurt to watch her, to witness such pain. I would have shared it with her, if I could, and I reminded myself of that every time my arms began to ache from pressing on her back, or my legs to cramp from helping to hold her up. Anything I felt then, any pain I’d ever felt in my life, I thought, was just a drop in the ocean of what Little Jane felt that night.

  She moaned and paced, and she wept. Her body, big as it was, seemed small compared to the force of what moved in and through her.

  Yet I wasn’t frightened for her: I saw such strength, such stubbornness, in the way she responded to each cycle of pain. When she stopped and looked at me and said, in as clear and present a voice as she’d yet used, “I can’t do it, Silvie,” I knew beyond doubt that she was wrong.

  “You can,” I said, shifting my weight so I could take yet more of hers. “You’re doing it already. You carried this baby in the forest all these months. We made a life here, a life that is better for all of us because of you. Look at how we live now! You brought Mae Tuck to us. We would never have found her without you. And the rogues came in her wake, and oh, look at the homes you taught us to build. We’re surviving the winter out here thanks to you, Little Jane. You’re a mother to all of us already.”

  I was babbling, murmuring what might as well have been nonsense words for all the notice Little Jane took of them. She clutched her belly and dropped to kneel on the floor, her low moans breaking at last into a high, uneven keen.

  “I can’t, I can’t,” she said. Her whole body was shaking.

  Mae Tuck came forward with fresh linens and nodded, not to me or Little Jane, but as if she were in conversation with the birth itself. “It’s time, then,” she announced.

  I looked up.

  “It’s always nearly over when they say they can’t do it.”

  I took a deep breath. Little Jane didn’t seem to hear what Mae Tuck had said, but after a minute her keening lowered again to a moan, and a smallest fraction of the tension on her face began to lift.

  “All right, child, this one’s passing,” the Mae said, kneeling down with her and putting her hands gently but firmly on either side of her belly. “Now, do you think you could lie on your side, so I can see how far you’ve come?”

  Then a sound I never would have guessed I’d hear in such a moment came out of Little Jane’s mouth. It was short, it was harsh—​but it was laughter.

  “Lie down? Don’t have to tell me twice,” she said.

  I grabbed a folded blanket pilfered from Loughsley from a nearby stack and laid it under her head as a cushion. I offered her my hand to hold, but she shook her head. “I’m afraid I’d break your bones, with how tight I’ll squeeze,” she said. “Safer to grab the blanket.”

  “Break my bones if you like,” I said. “It might feel good for you to see someone sharing the pain.”

  She laughed again, but it was even shorter and harsher than the last time. “The next one’s coming in a moment now,” she whispered. “I won’t think anything’s funny—​Mae Tuck . . .” Her voice was fading again, her eyes closing.

  “Yes, you’re doing so well, child, so well,” the Mae said. “Do you feel as if you want to push?”

  “I’m so tired,” Little Jane panted. “I don’t kn
ow if I can . . . Oh, it’s coming, it’s coming . . .” The moan started again, from low inside her.

  “You’re nearly done now, child,” said the Mae. “Your body knows what to do. Let it show you.”

  Little Jane nodded, her head on the pillow, moaning louder. She looked exhausted, her face pale and drawn, her hair soaked through with sweat, but I could see that she was pushing after all.

  “Your hand, Silvie, your hand—”

  I gave it. She squeezed so hard that I thought she might have been right about breaking my bones.

  Little Jane grimaced and then cried out. I could see the tension, the contraction, as it left her belly. She panted a few times, then lifted her head. “It felt good to push,” she told us. “It was what I wanted to do. Was I right? Is it time?”

  “Yes,” said the Mae. A smile was breaking out on her face. “I could see your little one’s head for a minute there.”

  Little Jane and I both stared at her.

  “Silvie,” whispered Little Jane, without looking at me, “can you see my baby’s head?”

  “She can if she comes down here with me for the next push,” the Mae said.

  Little Jane nodded, closing her eyes again.

  I stood up and rearranged myself so that I was kneeling next to the Mae, but I could still reach up and let Little Jane hold my hand. Mae Tuck was just replacing the linen under Little Jane’s bottom with a fresh layer. There was blood and fluid, but as Jane began to push again all I could look at was the small circle, the swirl of dark hair, that began to emerge between Little Jane’s legs.

  Little Jane grunted and squeezed my hand to breaking, and the small delicate head pushed farther, farther, and then as Little Jane cried out at the end of that moment’s strength, the baby retreated inside her again. I thought for some reason of all the rivers running through the forest, all their slick icy surfaces that seemed so still, and all the rushing dark water underneath. Rushing always, moving always, alive through all the seeming stillness of winter.