The Forest Queen Read online

  I wasn’t tied down, but there was someone standing over me. A tall, broad-shouldered figure, faceless in the darkness.

  Not Bird.

  My brother.

  SEVENTEEN

  In Ruins

  “Oh, Silvie,” he said. “You let me find you at last. I knew you wanted me to.”

  It was just like the nightmare again. The air felt thin and acrid; my breath caught in my throat, my voice strangled to nothingness. John wasn’t touching me, not even a hand on the blankets, but he was close enough, close enough to touch . . .

  The knife. I kept my garter on even while I slept, and I’d finally grown used to it; sleeping on my side as I was, I thought I could reach down under my blanket before John would know just what I was doing.

  But for another few painful seconds, I couldn’t make myself move. My blankets and cloak felt too much like the bedclothes that had tied me down in those dreams, and the monster bridegroom was here, here at last, and I was overcome with the horrible, unknowable understanding that I’d always known exactly whose face I would see if I lit my lamp and held it out . . .

  I forced myself out of the nightmare. I was waking, and I could move. I grasped for the knife at my side.

  John’s man was on me before my hand could reach it. He wrenched the blankets around me, binding me fast while I was still half-tangled in the hammock. Two more men came out of the darkness—​I should have known; he was never alone, never—​and even though one of them took hold of my legs and the other bound my arms in his strong grip and they lifted me bodily off the floor and moved me toward the mouth of the cave, even as they manhandled and bruised me, I was grateful for their presence. I knew now what I feared John would do if we were alone, what I’d always feared. I knew at last why I’d left him, and what the shape of my nightmares had been.

  I only wished to the Lady and Lord that I didn’t.

  I struggled against John’s thugs, but they didn’t even seem to notice. They carried me as lightly as if the blankets that bound me were empty.

  Outside I met a new horror: a blaze of red and yellow, of gold stained through with blood. So bright I thought for a moment it was dawn, but morning under the canopy was never so bright.

  The tree houses. The trees. The whole forest.

  All of it was on fire.

  The smell that had made me choke . . . as soon as they carried me out, I knew it and wondered how I hadn’t recognized it before, even in dream: it was smoke, black smoke that bled the air thin and made me struggle to breathe. The smoke caught the brightness of the fires and glowed red and gold, too, so that the unnatural light grew even brighter. I wanted to scream for Little Jane, Bird, the Mae, Stutely, and all the rest, just to hear their voices, just to know they still—​But I wouldn’t say their names, not within John’s hearing, or his men’s. I wouldn’t risk telling him anything he didn’t know.

  One of the thugs heaved me over his back like a sack of grain. My head finally began to clear, and I was able to look around. I’d still been half in nightmare for those crucial minutes in the cave, and I cursed myself for my sluggishness, my fear. Could I have overcome him, if I’d only been more alert those few moments?

  With my senses waking up at last, I realized something perhaps most horrible of all. I heard the harsh crackle of the fires, the crash as burned ruins of tree houses and platforms fell to the earth.

  But I heard no screaming. No voices at all. Not one sound from the dozens of people who lived here with me, whom I had worked so hard to help and to protect.

  Their silence made me find my own voice at last—​and with my voice came my strength. “Let me go!” I yelled as loudly as I could. I heaved my bound legs and arched my back, throwing my weight so that the thug who held me stumbled. His hold loosened for just a moment, and that was long enough for me to force my knee up toward my hand inside the blanket and grab my knife. He gained hold of me again almost instantly, and I hadn’t had time to pull my hand out of the blanket, but I was ready. He would put me down eventually.

  “Calm yourself, Silvie, or I’ll have them bind you truly,” came John’s deep voice from behind me. “And I can’t promise they won’t enjoy it.”

  My fingers tightened around the dagger. I felt it make a slit through the blanket, and an idea began to form in my mind.

  I went limp, and the thug chuckled. I felt someone gently stroking my hair, although the man who held me kept both hands firmly on my legs and my hip.

  The touch on my head was smooth, smooth as a snake. “Good girl,” murmured John, low and close to my ear, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath even in the unnatural heat from the fires.

  My hand on the knife tightened. “Please, John,” I said. “You’ve found me again, as you said. Take me home, do with me whatever you like. Just don’t—​just don’t hurt anyone else.”

  He laughed. “A little late for that, Silvie. Tom, set her down.”

  I saw my opportunity, and I made sure to keep myself carefully limp as the stocky man dropped me roughly to the forest floor. I let my dagger slide through the blanket as I fell, and then I leapt free of it at once. I brandished my knife, ready for a fight.

  I noticed something, someone, in the light of the fires overhead. A burning scrap of timber fell down and knocked Kent Mason’s shoulder where he sat slumped against the trunk of a tree. But he didn’t move, even when the flame from the wood began to lick up his sleeve. He didn’t blink. He just kept staring ahead. A dark wetness bloomed on his chest where an arrow had pierced him.

  That moment of shock, of immobility, cost me dear. The knife trembled in my hand, my secret exposed, and I couldn’t move quickly enough to act on it.

  It was bright enough from the forest fire that I could see men all around us, uniformed soldiers to one side, the silver stars on their black crests gleaming in the firelight, their eyes hard beneath metal helmets. So many of them, and Kent dead, and who knew how many others, and the houses, all the tree houses, all the forest burning. I could see a new, harsh light coming from the cave, too, brighter than Bird’s fire had ever been.

  Bird. Thank the Lady and Lord he had left—​

  But even as I had the thought, I saw him, too, bound to a tree not far away.

  “Bird!” I cried, my voice a smoke-strangled rasp. He moved, thank the Lady and Lord: he jerked against his bonds and looked up at me.

  “Lord, John, she’s hardly going to come quiet no matter what you think,” I vaguely heard one of his men saying. “Don’t you think we should—”

  “Fine.” Footsteps approached me from behind, but I couldn’t bother to think of them, to think of anything but Kent, and to wonder how many others . . .

  John’s thug hit me, and I felt myself falling.

  EIGHTEEN

  Oubliette

  I wasn’t bound.

  That was the first thing I knew as I came back to consciousness, wincing at the headache the blow had given me. I thought I might have awakened before and been struck again, even several times, but it was hard, so hard, to tell nightmare from waking . . .

  No. The pain I felt all over my body was specific and sharp and throbbing and very real. I was awake now. I could be sure of at least that much.

  But I couldn’t tell where I was. My eyes were open, but the place where I found myself was so dark that it made little difference. I was leaning against a hard, curved, slimy surface, so cold it stole the heat from my body. Stone: a wall of stone blocks.

  I tried to push myself up to sitting; my limbs were oddly arranged, my left arm and leg twisted underneath me. Both were numb, and as the blood rushed back into them with my movements they flooded with pain.

  The smell in this place was far worse than anything at Woodshire’s jail. The scent of death packed the dark air, heavy as dirt.

  Something crunched underneath me as I moved; while the walls were clearly stone, parts of the floor felt soft, almost malleable. My fingers dragged through something yielding and spongy.
/>   My eyes were adjusting: I could see the faint, still outlines of several people around me. There seemed to be one faint source of light far above us, filtering weakly into the darkness.

  “Silvie,” came a quiet voice nearby.

  One of the figures moved. I flinched, but with the first touch of his hand I knew it was Bird.

  “Silvie,” he said again. “I’m here. I’m with you. Try not to be afraid.”

  But I could see better through the gloom with every passing moment, and I could not contain my fear.

  There was no one else in this small dark, dank space with Bird and me. No one else living. The other figures were corpses.

  Some were barely more than skeletons, the spongy resistance I’d felt the last remnants of flesh hanging off their bones. Some were almost human-looking still, their bodies nearly in one piece but emaciated, starved, their faces slick and leathery and rotting. All dead. All dead.

  I began to scream.

  I went on screaming screaming screaming, because at least that took up part of the space in my mind, space that was filling with the understanding, as certain and irreversible as rising floodwater, of what had happened to the bodies around me, of what was going to happen to Bird and me, of where we were.

  This was John’s oubliette: the bottle-shaped dungeon he’d vowed to reopen when he became sheriff.

  No one ever left an oubliette. It was in the name: you were put there to be forgotten.

  My screams started to die away, and I listened to them as if from outside my body, as if the ragged sounds came from someone else.

  “Silvie.” Bird kept saying that name, quietly, calmly, the way he would speak to a spooked animal, keeping his hand on the screaming girl’s arm. “Silvie, Silvie.”

  I did not want to come back to myself. To this place.

  And yet, in this stone hole gouged into the earth, I needed to feel the touch of someone I loved.

  Slowly, I let myself feel his hand on me, even though it meant that I also had to feel the panicked juddering of my rib cage, the shaking that rattled me to the ends of my limbs and hair and teeth. Worst of all, I had to feel the give and crunch of the floor beneath me, and know that it was made of the remains of yet more, older corpses, and of whatever slime and moss and fungus could grow on such sustenance in the darkness.

  Everyone who had been tossed like refuse into this hole in the earth had died of starvation, if they had not first dashed their heads on stone walls or bone, if they were not poisoned by eating the gray mushrooms I could see growing out of the corpses’ flesh, or, out of madness or desperation, by eating the flesh itself . . .

  In which of those ways would I die? And Bird?

  “Silvie, Silvie.” My name was losing its meaning with each of Bird’s repetitions, but it was, if not a comfort, the closest thing there was to comfort in this place.

  “Bird.” Giving his name back to him somehow made mine have meaning again. I was still myself, still someone I knew, and someone Bird knew, too. We did not share the fate of the others in this death-steeped place, not yet. Not yet.

  I gripped his arm with both hands, and I managed to slow my breathing until it matched his, until we could breathe as one body in the darkness, our heads bent close together so that beyond or above the stench of death, we could take in, at least a little, the scent of the other person, still whole. Still living.

  I drank in his—​fresh wood and lanolin—​as if it could keep me alive. Bird had always smelled good to me.

  “They tell me you’ve woken,” came a voice from above us.

  I looked up at our one source of dim light: the narrow opening perhaps twenty feet above us, at the top of this bottle-shaped dungeon. The light that filtered down was flickering, surely from torches. John’s face appeared as he leaned over to look at us.

  “I’ve always been gentle with you, Silvie, always been kind. I know that you know I haven’t been that way with everyone.” His voice was quiet, reflective; I believed he really thought it was gentle. “I would always have been gentle with you.”

  I felt sick. Every cell in my body recoiled from him, even when recoiling meant pushing myself farther back into the dungeon.

  “How many times did you come into my room at night, John? How many nights did you watch me sleep?”

  John’s mouth tightened. “I never touched you, Silvie.”

  I met his eyes. I knew he was telling the truth, and I could see the honesty and the lie at once, the threat that he’d never let himself carry out.

  “But it was always there, wasn’t it?” I already knew the answer.

  “What, Silvie? That I love you? Yes, that’s always, always been there.”

  I was starting to lose my breath again.

  “You don’t love her.” Bird’s voice was loud and harsh and steady. “Silvie, he never, never loved you. Only thought he owned you. Silvie.”

  My head was buzzing. John owned me now, would own me forever, would keep me here, where no one but he could find me, until I starved and died and dissolved into mold and dust . . .

  I could feel nightmares closing in again, and I felt myself begin to shake . . . Who stood over me in the darkness? Who was dead in the ground, and who was living?

  Someone kicked me, hard, in the leg.

  Not John. He was right: he was always gentle.

  It was Bird. I forced myself to be fully awake, to see him. He was glaring at me with his fiercest and angriest look, the one most like his falcon’s.

  I swallowed. My world came into focus again.

  Meanwhile, John was going on as if Bird hadn’t spoken at all. “I have done nothing to you, ever, Silvie, that you didn’t want done,” he said. His voice echoed strangely through the oubliette’s narrow neck. “I never wanted to take from you anything you didn’t want to give. I just hoped that maybe, if I waited . . . There is no sin in wanting, Silvie. But you, you wanted . . . squalor. Wilderness. Chaos. Him.”

  I was looking at Bird, because otherwise I would have to look at something dead, or at John. I was looking at only my Bird: my friend since childhood, my companion, my salvation.

  John was right. I had always wanted Bird.

  “There’s no sin in wanting,” John repeated. “But what you’ve done, Silvie—​not just wanted, but done—​that’s sin indeed. Putting you down there was the only way to save you from it.”

  “Let Bird go, John.” There was no way out for me, not any longer. I had only one weapon left, and John, whether he knew it or not, had provided it. “Let him go, and I’ll—​I’ll come home. I’ll stay with you, be with you.” Loughsley Abbey, walled gardens, dark libraries, the prison I’d spent my whole childhood loving, not knowing the ghosts that we fed on . . . and John, John in every corner, watching, waiting, wanting, every day, and every night . . .

  “Let him go, John, and I’ll come home with you, and we’ll be together.”

  “Stop, Silvie, stop—” Bird’s voice was losing its steadiness, but John cut him off before he could go on.

  “It’s too late for that, Silvie. I told you, I know. I know why you left with him.” I could hear the vicious assurance in his voice. “You were always the weaker of us, Silvie. I’ve spent my life resisting your temptations, and you—​you run off to rut with serfs in the forest at the first opportunity.”

  I had to stare up at him then. He was watching me, his face calm at first glance but violent in its depths, the face he had always had. “You’re offering me spoiled goods, Silvie. The only thing you’ve given to the poor is your virtue, and you’ve gotten nothing back.”

  “I was happy, John, in the forest. I belonged to myself, and to people I love. I only wanted to help them belong to themselves, too.”

  He scoffed. “Belong to themselves? Everyone who joined you in the forest is dead, Silvie. Every one of them but you. It was you who killed them, really, by letting them think they could escape the king. You lied to them all. This trick you pulled with the palace stores—​no one will even know
it was you. The king and I have forbidden anyone to speak your name, to mention the Forest Queen. You won’t even be a story. Oubliette means ‘forgotten,’ did you know that? I have you somewhere now that only I know about, and only I will remember you.” My brother stood up, and his face vanished from the small circle of the dungeon’s opening. “He may have claimed your body, but I have both your souls.”

  I heard his steps grow fainter, until Bird and I were utterly alone.

  * * *

  My eyes were stinging; my mouth was dry.

  “They’re all dead.”

  Bird and the corpses watched me.

  “It was cruel of me to say I could help them,” I said. “I didn’t help. I turned them into revolutionaries, just like Ghazia said. I turned them into people their kingdom thought they could kill.” I raised my hands to wipe my tears, but remembered the slime and rot they’d just trailed through and recoiled from myself.

  “Silvie, you freed them. Everyone who came to live with us. The men in Woodshire Jail. Mae Tuck. Little Jane.”

  “Don’t say their names.” I saw Little Jane burning in my mind. John had taken everything from her after all; neither of us had gotten free of him, and she had died in pain, burning, burning. And Anna Robin—​

  I couldn’t. I couldn’t think of it.

  “Bird, they’re all dead. I never helped them. I only brought them to ruin. My life, my . . . death—​it doesn’t matter. All of their lives, all of their hopes, the hopes I sold them—​they burned away. That matters.”

  “Right.” Bird stood, yanking me up with him. Our feet sank into the murky filth, crunched on decaying bones. “Right. Silvie, by the Lady and Lord, you won’t die believing you failed.” He glared at me, fixed and determined. “You—​you and I and Little Jane, and all of our band together—​we proved that there’s a different way to live, and we taught everyone how to live it. Not just the family we made in the forest, but . . . Do you think anyone will stop telling their story, our story, because of John’s threats? The whole country knows now, Silvie, that there are other choices than the life the nobles hand to you. Knows that it’s possible to help ourselves and help each other. John has made us martyrs now, every one of us. Everyone who died in the forest.” Bird was faltering, his eyes glancing around at the inevitable death that surrounded us, but I watched as he steeled himself again, looking into my eyes. “He’s lost his own war, and it’s his hand that did it. Silvie, they’ll never stop telling your story.”