The Forest Queen Read online

  He dropped the pile of lines in front of us, but I couldn’t tell what they were. I was still listening carefully, as if Jane’s breathing was something I could keep going through the strength of my will.

  Bird dug in the pocket of his leather vest, pulled something out, and struck it between his hands. The lines in the darkness resolved themselves into meaning before me as his flint scattered orange sparks around their base. Leaning down, with a few careful breaths, focused and steady, Bird urged the sparks into fire.

  The hearth in my room was warm and glowing by the time I woke up every morning. Fire followed me from room to room in Loughsley Abbey: lamps and chandeliers, fireplaces, thick beeswax candles by my bed for reading at night, or by my window for doing nothing but sitting there, watching the quiet river, the endless tumbling wildness of Woodshire Forest beyond it.

  But I had never appreciated a fire as I did in that moment, watching Bird coax it into being at the center of the small circle our three bodies made. I had never even bothered to watch one being lit before.

  I had a sudden image of a servant waking early, in a dark and cold room, to come to my chamber and stoke the banked coals for me while I still slept, tucked behind the silk brocade drapes surrounding my bed. She’d be a friend of Bird’s, perhaps, although not of mine. How many people I didn’t know had shared space with me while I slept?

  Bird had clearly lit a great many fires before, or maybe this was just a simple skill. I was suddenly embarrassed not to know.

  “You can call me Little Jane,” the girl murmured suddenly. “It’s all right, I don’t mind. Even my parents call me that.”

  Bird bent over the fire again, cupping his hands around the small flame and blowing gently against it, but I saw the rising color in his cheeks. He nodded.

  I watched him build the fire, and I felt jealousy curl inside me, jealousy and guilt. Bird was doing something practical that could help this girl, that was helping her already. I watched her wring the water out of her linen skirt, then her cotton underskirt, and spread their hems out in layers by the fire. It wasn’t a minute before steam started to rise off them.

  She shivered, a kind of relieved shudder. She spread her hands over the fire, flexing and straightening her fingers. I couldn’t help but marvel at their size, at the length of the wavering shadows they cast.

  What could I say to this girl, who had borne so many more burdens than I had in her life, even though she seemed to be younger than I? What could I say that wouldn’t seem condescending, or even cruel?

  This girl had tried to die. She had tried to do something that I’d known—​even in the greatest depths of misery over my powerlessness in my own family, my own home, my own life—​I would never have the hard determination to do.

  I shifted a little closer to the fire. I knew I could never kill myself, because . . . because I had wanted to, once, too. I’d wanted to when it had seemed that I had no other way to escape from John’s plans for me, from the way he watched me when I climbed trees. I’d wanted to climb so high that he’d never see me again, and if I couldn’t do that, to jump . . .

  But I’d known at once that I couldn’t. Jump.

  Little Jane had found that she could. But that didn’t mean I didn’t know how she felt.

  I raised my hands over the fire to warm them, as she was doing.

  With both our hands casting long-fingered shadows on the ground around us, we looked like witches at conjuring time. I smiled at the flickering shapes we made, and when I looked at Little Jane again I saw a tiny bit of amusement in her eyes, too.

  “Do you need a place to stay tonight?” I asked, suddenly knowing what to say just as surely as I felt I knew what her answer would be—​but feeling more than anything that what was most important was asking her what she wanted, rather than telling her I felt I knew it.

  The spark of witchy humor I’d seen in her eyes closed in on itself; she shook her head. “No. I mean . . . I won’t go home. But I don’t want to . . . be a burden.”

  Bird leaned back from the fire at last, satisfied that it would go on burning without his constant oversight. He looked from one of us to the other. “Surely there’s somewhere for her to stay at Loughsley,” he said. “Some empty servant’s quarters.”

  We both knew how many people John had dismissed, now that my father wouldn’t notice.

  Jane stiffened. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t sleep there.”

  She seemed so certain that I didn’t feel I could argue.

  Firelight made the open space around us seem smaller, not larger; we were closed together inside a radiant circle. Bird’s forehead and cheeks and hair glowed; Little Jane’s face, as she shifted her feet closer to the fire and leaned back from it, was cast in shadow. One hand supported her; the other lay across her belly in a manner that tried to seem careless but was not.

  That hand across her stomach left a curving shadow.

  Suddenly I knew the answer to the question neither Bird nor I had asked, the question that had hissed in the air ever since we’d seen her at the bridge.

  She was a tall girl, breathtakingly tall, and broad and wide and thickly set besides: every line of her body was a solid, hulking curve. But the curve of her belly, with the shadow of her hand falling across it . . .

  I could tell that Bird had seen it too: not from a change in his movement or a look between us, but from something that had shifted in our little closed circle of light.

  Now I was more at ease than he.

  I looked at Little Jane again. I no longer saw someone different from me, someone who had grown up in such poorer circumstances that our lives were entirely alien to each other. I saw another young woman, one to whom something had happened that haunted the dreams of every girl, dreams both good and bad. I saw a sister; I saw myself.

  “How far along are you?” I asked.

  She nodded, her eyes briefly closing. “Five months now,” she said. “I’ve felt her moving for a long time, but my belly only really changed these last few weeks. I managed to keep her hidden for a good while. I thought, maybe . . .” She trailed off.

  I knew enough not to speak.

  Little Jane kept staring into the fire.

  She reached behind her and brought a crooked stick into the circle of light, lightly furred along one side with moss, studded with little pale mushrooms. She tucked it carefully on top of the tallest flame. It grumbled and hissed out steam, and I watched the mushrooms shrivel, the moss grow crisp and brown.

  At last the stick cracked and caught. The fire grew to twice its previous height in moments.

  Little Jane sighed. “I was hoping I might be . . . that with my size . . . that it might not show at all, until she really got here. That maybe my parents . . . that they’d have to love her, once she came.” She poked the fire again. “My father always says how much he loves babies.” She sniffed and turned her head. “But I’m not quite big enough to hide her forever.” She dropped the stick and rested her hand on her stomach again. “First time I’ve ever been too small for something. Little Jane.” She smiled when she said the name, and the smile was just like the one I’d seen on Bird’s face the first time he’d punched John back.

  Well, it had been the only time, and Bird had paid for it both swiftly and painfully. But the triumph of the moment, of the smile, was the same.

  I’d been thinking of her, carefully, as only Jane, but that rebel smile burrowed into my heart and stayed there. Little Jane.

  “When I saw that I couldn’t keep her hidden anymore—​certainly not in a cottage with only the one room—​I knew I had to tell them. And my father, since he’s always loved babies, and never thought . . . never thought I’d get married to have one, I told him first. I was fool enough to think he might be happy.

  “‘Who’d you ride to get that way?’ he said,” she whispered, her voice going deeper to mimic her father’s. “He didn’t yell, which was the other thing I’d readied myself for. I thought I could handle getting yelled at. Bu
t he hissed it at me, cold and soft.”

  I tried to imagine how my own father would react if I went to him with such news. With my child, his grandchild, growing inside me.

  My father thought the world of me—​of both his children. I knew exactly how it would go: first he would ask me if I was all right, or if the pregnancy was hurting me. He’d call for a midwife to make sure of my health.

  And then he would ask if someone had done this to me without my consent. If they had, I would know beyond doubt that I’d never see that person again . . . nor, knowing my father, would anyone else.

  But if I had “strayed,” as my governess used to say abstractly, before I learned what that really meant from the rough talk of John and his friends, and the more natural instruction that no child who spent much time with animals could avoid seeing . . . if I had been with a man, he would still have wanted to help me. I was sure of that much.

  At least, that was how he would have reacted before he fell ill. If I went to him with that news today, he might not even remember who I was.

  And John . . . I couldn’t imagine what he would do. I didn’t want to.

  Jane told the rest of her story piecemeal. She didn’t cry, or even raise her voice; every few sentences she would simply pause for a long while, looking away from the fire, and then she would stare into its light again and go on.

  “I tried to tell him that . . .” A breath. “That I hadn’t done that with anyone, not of my own choice, anyway. That I’d been . . . that I’d been forced.

  “He leaned back in his chair then, my father, and he . . . laughed at me. He clutched his chest with his big hands.

  “‘Sure it must have been a great bear, to force such a one as you!’ he said when he stopped laughing enough to get the words out.” A breath. “I knew it wouldn’t do any good to tell him who it was.”

  Jane looked at me, the first time she’d done so since she’d started talking. “No man would be big enough to force someone my size, of course,” she said. “He didn’t even have to say so; we both knew it.” Another breath. “And it’s true. I’m big enough, strong enough. I could fight off anyone. I should have.” Two breaths.

  I moved my hand slowly, touching her as lightly as I could on the hem of one sleeve. I looked into her eyes, trying to tell her what I knew it would do no good to say.

  The forest shrank and grew around us with the pulse of her breathing.

  “Anyway, what he did say was no man would bother to force me anyway. I’m not pretty, I know. So I had to be lying, and I had to be a slut. He turned me out of the house before my mother came in from milking.”

  * * *

  I crept through the halls of Loughsley. I’d brought a candle with me, but I didn’t dare to light it with guests of the Hunt Ball occupying so many of our bedrooms. Most of them were likely asleep by then, but I couldn’t be sure; and so I moved silently through the darkened halls and stairways, bruising my hips twice when I ran into a table and a banister that I had forgotten. I walked through the house where I’d lived all my life, and it felt as foreign and unknown as a pathless forest.

  I did stop, once, before Lord Danton’s door. I remembered how he had looked at me when John had accepted his proposal on my behalf. So gentle, so mild. I remembered the deference with which he had bowed to me. He was not a frightening man, not cold or cruel.

  I could have a good life with him, I knew, better than many I might have. I could enjoy his offer of “an equal say in the running of things.” As Lady Danton I would be mistress of a small estate in the sunny domains near our far-off southeastern border.

  I remembered his kind face, his eyes with only the suggestion of wrinkles at their corners, the forty-year-old man who might be my husband, and I nearly stopped at the door and went no farther.

  And I remembered John watching both of us, contemplating us as if we were pawns on a chessboard, a small smile on his lips.

  “The sheriff has even offered to have us winter here, every year,” Danton had told me. I heard someone behind me sigh a little at the generosity of this gift.

  But my brother hadn’t given this minor lord an offer. It was an order. Once I married, I’d have no claim to Loughsley at all, no way to help anyone who lived here​—​ and in winter I would return, and return, and return, and John would be here. Waiting. Wanting. Giving me to this man was just another way for him to keep me.

  Still, a life of security and warmth as a nobleman’s wife, and at least my summers spent far away from the nameless fear that haunted me at Loughsley​—​ could I ever hope for more than that?

  I was tempted even then to walk into Lord Danton’s room, wake him from what I was sure was a gentle slumber, and tell him I was happy for the bargain he and John had made. I could have sealed my fate in that moment.

  Perhaps I did.

  I turned away from the door and ran outside.

  Bird was waiting for me in the secret chair, reclining against its stone back in a way that at first reminded me of a king holding court. But Bird wasn’t surveying his subjects or his kingdom. He was looking up at the sky.

  There were still the specks and swirls of star and cloud, the smooth coin of the moon sliced by the shifting branches overhead. It was the same sky that had been there all night, but I knew Bird. He could look up into it forever, as if he were a fisherman trying to fathom the depths of the sea.

  “Is she all right?” I asked as I approached.

  He nodded, still looking skyward. “Asleep in the stables, with a warm drink in her belly. She drifted off all right once she knew I wasn’t going to listen to her talk of not being a burden. But she wouldn’t even set foot inside the house itself. It seemed to terrify her.”

  “I know,” I said, remembering the look on her face when he’d first suggested she sleep in one of the servants’ rooms. “I hate that it scares her so. What is the point of Loughsley, of the house, of my family, if not to protect our people?”

  Bird laughed harshly. “The point,” he said, “has nothing to do with protection, Silvie, and you know it. The point is what your family takes, not what it gives.”

  I was ready to slap him. “And what am I trying to do, Bird?” I lifted the stack of warm clothes for Little Jane that I’d taken from my room. “Am I not giving what I can?”

  He looked at me then, apologetic, and raised his hands in surrender. But I knew that he wasn’t wrong, and I knew, too, that I wasn’t giving even a fraction of what I could.

  I clutched the clothes tighter. “Jane can’t stay in the stables like an animal. And if John were to find her . . .” The nameless fear reared up in me. I swallowed and stopped talking.

  Bird looked at me piercingly.

  My next words rushed out before I even knew what I was going to say. “And, Bird, I can’t stay, either. Not anymore. I want to go to the woods with you, and I want to take Little Jane with us.”

  FOUR

  First Night

  Bird nodded, standing, and took my hand. “Let’s go,” he said quickly, as if he were afraid I’d change my mind.

  But he didn’t lead me away from the estate. Instead, we walked back across the courtyard, and, with the help of a ring of keys I rarely used but always made sure to keep with me, into the storerooms of Loughsley Abbey’s gargantuan kitchens.

  I hadn’t thought, but I was grateful that Bird had.

  I readily took a waxed wheel of hard cheese, heavy in my arms, and passed it to him, and I pulled out a barrel of apples and started shoving them into one of the neatly folded flour sacks stacked by the cavelike ovens. But I hesitated in front of the previous day’s bread.

  “It’s your food,” Bird said, heaving the cheese wheel onto his shoulder.

  “Not this,” I said. “Cook used to give the day-old bread to the hens, but I . . .” My cheeks burned; I hadn’t wanted Bird to know at the time, and I still didn’t. He tended to roll his eyes at nobles’ small acts of charity. “The last day’s bread goes to people in the village now, pe
ople who need it.”

  “Old bread’s good enough for poor people, I suppose,” he said drily.

  I whirled on him. “It wouldn’t be missed! Do you think I’d be allowed to give away anything that would? Do you think John would allow new bread to go anywhere but our own table?”

  Bird shrugged. “True.”

  I started grabbing loaf after loaf, stacking them until I couldn’t balance any more in my arms. “I’m coming, Bird. I’m coming with you. I’m helping Little Jane, or at least I’m trying to. I’m—​I tried to stay at Loughsley till now even though it was killing me, even when it killed me every day, because I thought life might be better for the others here if I could . . . counteract him, somehow. John. And none of that was ever good enough, ever virtuous enough, for you. I’m just a spoiled little coward in your eyes, and don’t think I don’t know it.” I was shaking. “Don’t think I don’t know this is pity, your helping Little Jane and me. Don’t pretend it’s anything else.”

  Bird took a loaf of bread from my arms. “Silvie . . .”

  “I’ll go pack more clothes for the two of us,” I said. “We’ll get a . . . a wheelbarrow, I suppose, to carry everything.”

  He put the bread back on the table. “We can’t take a wheelbarrow,” he said. “It’d leave a track. We’ll bring only as much as we can carry.”

  “Then we’ll leave the apples, too,” I replied, my jaw still tense. “There’ll be plenty of wild fruit in the forest, anyway.” I snatched a fat bag of salt from a nearby shelf instead. It was small enough to carry, and I knew we would need it if we managed to hunt anything large enough to preserve.

  Bird’s look of surprised approval just made me angrier. I stalked out of the kitchen, heading for my own chamber.

  It was easy to pack for Little Jane: even my day dresses had enough excess fabric in the skirts and adjustable laces in the bodices that it would be simple to let them out to fit her.

  But for myself, I hesitated. I ran my hands over a fine dark gold wool dress and a green cloak, and realized I’d practically been picturing myself dressing in leaves and flowers, as if I were a spirit of the forest, or one of the lost children from my nurse’s story.