The Forest Queen Read online

  It was clear he believed what he said. Here in the darkness, he had found some light to reflect back to me, however faint. He was giving me a gift.

  What else could I do, at the end of my life, but make the choice to take it?

  I closed my eyes, nodding. I wanted to believe, I chose to believe, that he was right.

  “Why did you leave, Bird?” I whispered. “After the May dance, where did you go?”

  He shook his head, his forehead resting against mine. “I’m so sorry, Silvie. I wish I’d never gone.”

  “It doesn’t matter now, I know. Not here. But . . .”

  “I was angry. I saw you pulling away, saw that never look in your eyes while we were dancing, and it was one time too many. I didn’t think I could stay without . . . asking more of you than you wanted to give.” He sighed. “I didn’t want to bind you, when you’d done so much to gain freedom. I was selfish, Silvie. I was weak. I see that now. I saw it almost right away—​that’s why I came back.”

  “You came back? I couldn’t find you . . .”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t face you yet. I thought I’d have time, that we’d have so much time to talk these things through. But John found us, of course. Found all of us. I saw him and his men enter the clearing, with Nell and Nellie Mason held at knifepoint.”

  I flinched. “I thought you’d left with Nellie.”

  “Nellie? Oh, Silvie. I’ve only ever—” he stopped himself. “I know it’s not what you wanted, but I only ever wanted you.”

  I opened my eyes again.

  He had given me a gift, but there was another that I wanted to take, or to give.

  We’d had so much time, Bird and I. Almost all of our lives. I had spent that time refusing the part of him I wanted most, holding back the part of myself I most wanted to share.

  I had gone with him to the forest, but I had not reached out for the life we might have had together. I had been afraid that I would lose it. Lose him.

  Now we had no forest to roam, no secret chair at the garden’s edge, no firelit cave, no life to look forward to at all, together or apart. We had nothing before us but death.

  I couldn’t kiss him passionately. Not here, not in this place.

  But I could put my arms around him, put my lips to his forehead, his cheeks, his lips, and give all of myself to that touch.

  I felt the weight and warmth of all our shared years in his body and mine as we broke our old promise. He kissed me back, and I knew he felt it, too.

  A fire that never went out. An unbridled, unending love.

  Here, at the end of our lives, we gave, and took, the only thing we had left.

  * * *

  After our one, quiet kiss, as we huddled together in the dark, I do not know how much time passed. I kept remembering Anna Robin’s birth, that timeless space where we waited for new life to come, a bright inverse of this dark place where we waited for death. Time had seemed to stop then, too.

  As much as I tried to push Little Jane and Anna Robin from my mind, they haunted me. The first two lives I had tried, and failed, to save.

  We didn’t speak of them anymore—​we couldn’t—​but I knew they haunted Bird, too, their ghosts as present in the oubliette as the flesh and bone around us.

  We clung to each other every minute, every second, of that endless time. Bird wanted to believe that we could find a way out, an escape, if we tried hard enough: and so we paced our cell, stepping over bodies where we could avoid them, running our hands over the smooth, cold, terrible slime of the concave stone walls, looking for a foothold, a fissure, anything.

  There was nothing.

  “Of course there isn’t!” I cried, at the end of an hour or a night or a week of desperate, repetitive searching and trying and working to find a way to survive. We had tied our clothes together to form a rope, but there was nothing to attach it to. We had tried, the Lady and Lord forgive us, to build a ladder of bones. They cracked and crumbled in our hands.

  “If there were any way out, Bird, one of these people would have found it. We had to try, I know. Just to keep from going mad. But there’s nothing. Nothing.”

  Bird didn’t speak. He stared up at the faint circle of light above us, his face already thinner than it had been when I had woken to find us here, his skin sallow and tight, and slick with the stale moisture of the air.

  He sank down, his back sliding against the wall. We still held each other’s hands—​aside from when we were knotting or building, we’d hardly let go of each other for a moment since I’d kissed him, even in sleep—​but there was no strength at all left in his grip, and barely any warmth. He looked at the light above us with a blank despair, like a wild creature that finally understands it has been caged.

  I sat down next to him, moved my hand up his arm to his neck, and gently moved his head to rest it on my shoulder.

  He shivered weakly, but he took the support I offered.

  “Try to sleep, Bird,” I said. “At least we can escape that way.”

  I knew that madness was coming for us; that, presented with the choice between insanity and watching Bird and myself slowly starve in the dark, my mind would choose the former. I was nearly looking forward to that escape.

  So I felt no surprise when an angel appeared above me.

  I thought it was my first vision. It glowed the way an angel is supposed to glow, and it was beautiful and strange, the way angels are said to be. It even had feathered wings.

  If this was a vision, a hallucination, I welcomed it with gratitude.

  The angel’s wings sparked in the dim light as it descended from heaven into our pit, and its feathers, or its eyes, seemed to glow with a yellow light of their own.

  The angel landed on my knee. Its talons scratched me.

  “Hello,” I said to the angel. “Mae Tuck must have had the Lady send you.”

  Its face, round and snowy white, was lovely.

  It leaned forward and pecked my cheek.

  “Ow!” I slapped it away.

  The angel glared at me with its yellow eyes. It squawked. It hooted.

  My thin, starved blood began to rush fast through my veins, my weakened heart to pump quickly with joy.

  This was no angel, no vision, no madness.

  It was my owl.

  I scrabbled up to standing. “Bird!”

  He’d obeyed my instructions to sleep, and he rose sluggishly, but when he saw Scarlet, he gasped and stared.

  “Tie something to her leg,” he said at once. “A piece of clothing, a—”

  I took a lock of my long hair in my mouth and bit it off. I fixed it around Scarlet’s leg with shaking hands.

  John had said he’d killed them all, every one, in the forest. But how could he know for sure? How could we know?

  And what could we do but seize the one strange, small hope presented to us?

  Scarlet didn’t want to leave us. I had to practically toss her upward to get her to fly away.

  Maybe she wouldn’t go back to the forest, now that it was burned. Maybe there would be no one there to find her, no one for her to find.

  But there might be.

  We waited.

  And then . . . an hour, a night, or a week later . . .

  Scarlet came back. In place of the lock of hair I’d tied to her, there was a small and tightly rolled scroll of paper.

  There was only one line, hard to make out in the gloom despite the clear handwriting. I knew that handwriting, I thought . . .

  “Mae Tuck,” Bird whispered, reaching out to touch the paper delicately, as if he thought it might melt in his hand. I remembered her neatly labeled vials of medicine, and I began to weep with gratitude, with the lifted weight of grief taken away.

  Mae Tuck lived.

  John had lied.

  And surely others had survived, too. For the paper read:

  We are coming. Take heart.

  NINETEEN

  The Forest Queen

  The following days were closer
to nightmare than any others we’d spent in the ground. When you think death is inevitable, part of you, some bone-deep animal part, wants to lie down and accept it.

  When you have hope, even a tiny and absurd hope, the human part of you will scrabble after it until your last breath.

  We had no respite, not even a moment of the escape of sleep, for the rest of our time in that place.

  I could count the days that passed, because Scarlet came back to us regularly, at the beginning of what I soon realized was each morning, and she stayed, sleeping in the prison with us, until what must have been nightfall.

  The second time she came, Seraph followed. She cooed and rubbed her head against Bird’s cheek, sweet as a dove. Bird roused himself enough to pet her, his hand trembling, but when she flew away his expression was more despairing than ever.

  On the third day, Much was with them, bearing a trout the length of my hand clutched in his beak, its red gills still fluttering. Bird and I ate it raw.

  I tried not to cling to any hope that Much’s survival meant that Little Jane had lived, too. Owls could fly above a fire.

  I tried not to fix myself with too much certainty to the hope that Mae Tuck and whoever else was left, the “we” she wrote of, would truly be able to find us. I had no idea where we were in the vast prison grounds that John had reopened. I had no idea how many guards were posted around us; certainly no one had responded, or made any noise at all, when Bird and I had tried to shout for help.

  The fourth day, Scarlet brought a rope.

  She dove into the cave with its end clasped in her beak and dropped it, flying out to freedom again at once.

  I stared at it. Grasped it. The slender length of hemp felt rough and light in my hands. My eyes followed it up, up, and out of the oubliette.

  Bird was staring, grasping, too. Together we pulled on the rope, and we brought in maybe ten feet of slack before it pulled taut.

  There was no discussion, no question of trust for the rope or whoever had sent it, no wondering about tricks. Whatever waited at the other end of that line was better than the oubliette.

  We only nodded to each other, and I began to climb. When I let go of Bird to grasp the rope with both hands, it was the first time we’d stopped touching in days. Losing that connection was more than startling, more than frightening. I never wanted to lose it again.

  The oubliette tapered until its walls brushed my shoulders as I climbed. Strange furry mosses, condensation, more pale little fungi brushed against and seeped into my damp clothes. The air got colder as I moved farther upward, away from the heat of decomposition we’d lived in for days or weeks. My clothes grew colder, too, clammy with slime and dew, and they stuck to my skin. I felt my hair pasted to my cheeks and neck and shoulders as if I’d been swimming.

  When I finally pulled myself out, it was like swimming, too, like coming up for breath after too long underwater. The absence of the terrible smell was a miracle. I gasped and fell forward, digging my fingers into the dirt.

  I turned around and offered my hand to Bird. The narrow opening was an even tighter fit for him, and I grasped his arm and helped him pull himself out, first one shoulder, then the other.

  Kneeling at the edge of the oubliette, taking desperate, gulping breaths, he looked like someone brought back from the dead. I knew I must look the same.

  I wanted to embrace him, but we could not waste this chance we had been given. We shouldn’t have even taken the moments we had.

  I stood and looked around, ready to see a guard or a battalion of soldiers or even John himself emerge from the dark expanse around us, the barred cells that I could just barely make out forming a rough square around our prison, around at least ten identical holes in the ground. I reeled, thinking of all the bodies inside them, all the miserable, drawn-out deaths over the centuries. A horrible secret that our kingdom had all but forgotten, until my brother brought it back.

  A voice in the shadows: “Forest Queen!”

  I startled and turned toward the sound. One fluid shadow moved slightly, a silent black-robed form.

  Ghazia. The Su princess had an unconscious guard under each foot.

  “Are you well enough to walk on your own?” she asked. “I thought I might have to go down there to get you. I had to convince them not to come barging in after you, once your owls led us here. They are so desperate to see you safe. Here, come out of the light.”

  The light Ghazia spoke of was just a few torches, but we obeyed her quickly.

  “Who?” I whispered. I was glad, grateful beyond reckoning, to see Ghazia and to have her help, but . . . I had not known her long. Hers was not one of the faces of our forest family that I longed so badly to see, that I had felt so certain I would never see again.

  One of the guards under Ghazia’s feet began to stir. She knocked him out again with a swift and precise jab of her heel, but she shook her head at me and her meaning was clear: Not now. First we had to get out.

  We slipped after her through one room, then another, following the rope the whole time. We moved as quickly as our weakened states would let us. I wanted Bird to go in front of me, to take the protected center position in our trio, but as pale and trembling as he was, he used whatever stubbornness he had left to absolutely refuse. So I looked back at him as often as I could let myself as we made our way out, and out, and out. Often I thought I saw shapes moving in the shadows, perhaps even recognized the form of someone I might know, one of the rogues, maybe—​even, once, I was almost sure, Nellie Mason.

  But I thought I saw movement dozens of times, a hundred times, more. Our group had never been so numerous, even before John’s massacre.

  I knew I was only seeing ghosts.

  We breached three sets of walls before we were outside the prison doors themselves. So much of my strength had drained away in our endless time in the oubliette that every one of them felt like climbing a mountain.

  The prison sat outside Esting City proper, which meant that—​just like every other bit of civilization our country had eked out—​it was on the edge of the forest. Shrubs and brambles crowded in on the old stone walls, and tall pine and oak and beech trees began to rise just a few steps ahead of us.

  And there, under the branches of an oak tree, was a figure I would always recognize, that I could never mistake for anyone else. Little Jane stood tall and watchful, holding a solid, long staff, Anna Robin sleeping on her chest. Beside her stood Mae Tuck.

  Not ghosts. Not shadows. Nothing but themselves, three people, living and breathing.

  I tried to embrace them all at once. I was shaking, laughing. Relieved beyond the power of word or gesture to express.

  “You’re alive,” I rasped into Little Jane’s shoulder. “You’re still alive.”

  I looked at the sleeping baby, her pudgy mouth relaxed into almost perfect roundness, impossibly long eyelashes casting their own faint shadows on her full cheeks. Her perfect, smooth, unburned skin. The miraculous tiny in-and-out sweep of her breaths.

  “How did you survive the fire, the ambush? How many lived?” I asked, stepping back. I turned my gaze to Mae Tuck. “John said you all died. He said he and his men killed you all.”

  The Mae, somber, shook her head. “Kent Mason. Simon Warden. Arthur Tailor. Susan and Eric Caprin, the sweet boy, and his goats.”

  “Silvie . . .” Bird said behind me, his hand still touching my back.

  “I need to know.” But Mae Tuck had said something that didn’t make sense. “I saw Kent, when John took me. I saw him with an arrow through his chest. How could he have lived?”

  The Mae looked at me searchingly. “He didn’t, child. These are the names of the dead.” She made the Lady’s sign on her chest.

  I stared. “So few?”

  “You underestimate your people, Forest Queen.” Ghazia’s voice was low and steady. I turned to look at her, and I was more shocked than I’d yet been that night.

  A horde stood behind her.

  “We had to breach the
prison in layers, and every single person we freed remained with us to join our numbers, to overpower the guards. By the time we got to you in the oubliette, we had an army.”

  Some clearly had been prisoners of the jail we’d just left, wearing ragged clothes and haggard expressions, their bodies thin and malnourished. Dozens more were members of our forest family: rogues, refugees, women and men, and even some of the older youths. Will Stutely stood among them, that smile flashing through his thick beard. He walked up to Bird and they clasped hands, sharing a look of intense relief.

  There were even nobles among the crowd: several more Su dignitaries, who must have followed Ghazia. Clara was there, with three of the ladies I’d seen wearing almond blossoms at the May Festival.

  And hundreds, hundreds, of commoners stood with them. Villagers, farmers, merchants, palace servants still in uniform. Half the population of Esting, I thought, must be there.

  “What is this?” I whispered. Then, louder: “What are they all doing here? They’re all in danger now! What if John comes?”

  “In danger?” Alana Dale stepped out of the crowd, carrying her lute. “There are more of us here than there are soldiers in the palace, not that my lady Ghazia could not dispatch them single-handed.” She gave a little bow to the princess, who raised her hand to her veil as if to hide a blush.

  “And John,” Little Jane said grimly, “is here.”

  I started in fright, but Little Jane laid a hand on my shoulder and pointed to a tree a small distance away from us, where several rogues stood at guard, brandishing knives or staffs. When they parted, I could see my brother, tied to the tree, his face tight with pain or rage.