The Forest Queen Read online

  I laughed at myself, and I took the dress and cloak with me, as well as my warmest red flannel underskirts. Their colors would fade soon enough, I supposed, and then I’d be as disguised as I should like. Leaves and flowers would hardly keep me warm in the coming winter.

  The thought of winter sent a harsh warning through me. I shivered, even in the warmth of my bedroom.

  What on earth was I doing? Why on earth would I leave this place?

  I looked back at my empty bed. I thought of Little Jane curled up in the stable, believing herself a burden. I thought of Lord Danton sleeping a few rooms away, of the offer he’d made for me. I thought of John . . .

  I yanked open a drawer and packed thick stockings for Little Jane and me. I looked in my vanity mirror one last time, at the long hair falling and frizzing around my face, at the emerald drop earrings almost hidden in the dark blond mass. I took out the earrings and stared at them, wondering how much they’d buy us of what we’d need to survive the winter.

  But these earrings had been my mother’s. All my jewelry had.

  I opened my jewel box and placed them carefully inside, letting my fingers run over the plush velvet and then the shellacked exterior as I closed it again.

  I’d taken food and clothes. I refused to let anyone think me more of a thief than that.

  The clock chimed for two in the morning as I brought my bag through the gardens. It had been the work of an hour to gather everything I needed to leave my life behind.

  * * *

  The nighttime forest was its own species. No trace of the sun-speckled shadows, the warm light dusty with pollen, that I knew so intimately from my years of daytime climbing with Bird. The lush green layers of moss and ivy and sorrel that covered stones, trunks, and fallen and rotting branches all were lost in darkness.

  There wasn’t even birdsong. Only silence, and the shuffle of six feet.

  When an owl hooted overhead, I flinched.

  We were too far away from the Loughsley clock to hear it chiming when three came, but I was sure it must have, and the next hour, too. I thought of asking Bird how long it would be until the sun rose, but I was starting to fear that if I said anything that made me seem too coddled, too naive, he’d tell me we shouldn’t be doing this at all.

  I was unduly grateful for Little Jane’s presence at my side, even though, I kept reminding myself, she had to be much more frightened than I was. Even though, of course, I was doing this for her. Of course I was.

  Bird walked just ahead of us, carrying a lantern. It wasn’t a comfort. I thought the woods might seem less alien, less unknowable, if only we could move through the darkness instead of apart from it. As we walked farther and farther the notion took me over, until it felt as if hidden beasts and monsters walked with us, just outside the lantern’s reach.

  “Bird,” I said at last, “douse the light.” I hoped my voice sounded strong, that I had betrayed no weakness that might make him think less of me.

  He stopped. I could see a question forming on his lips as he turned, but when he looked into my face, and Little Jane’s, he nodded. “We’re just about there anyway,” he said, then lifted the lamp and blew it out.

  The darkness was a relief. The beasts I’d imagined just outside the circle of the light vanished; or rather, I became one of them, and we were not monsters at all, but only three more creatures sharing the forest with all the others.

  And the forest wasn’t silent, as I’d thought; there was no birdsong but the occasional owl, true, but there was a kind of rhythm in the air around us that wasn’t quite breeze or creaking branches, but a subtler, sleeping version of both. I would never have heard it if I could still see my next steps clearly in the lantern light.

  Beside me Little Jane was breathing a bit heavily. I took her hand. “We’ll rest for a while,” I said.

  She laughed. “Not too long,” she said. “If I really rest I’ll fall asleep. I feel as if I could stay sleeping until the baby comes.”

  “You can, out here,” I said. “No one will ask anything else of you.”

  Her next breath had a little hitch in it.

  In the dark, in the deep forest, it was easy: I put my arms around her.

  She rested her chin on top of my head, the surprising hardness of her round belly pressing against me as we held each other. She smelled like sawdust and river water.

  “You know, I think we’re here already,” Bird said, and I could hear him walking a few paces away. When I turned my head to look, still holding Little Jane, I could see him; my eyes had adjusted to the darkness more quickly than I’d expected.

  He came back within a few minutes. “Yes,” he said, sounding almost giddy. “We’re here.”

  We followed him into a small clearing, small enough to walk across in ten paces. Huge old oak trees ringed it, each at least twenty feet around at its base. And just like the clearing where we’d met the hart—​that seemed so long ago now—​this one had a rockface at one side.

  There was an opening at the rock’s base like a mouth, black as could be.

  “The cave,” I whispered. “Oh, Bird . . .”

  I walked toward it as if I were following a memory. In truth, I was. One summer Bird and I had come here every day, and pretended it was our castle.

  Bird lit the lantern again and handed it to me, his eyes smiling.

  I had to duck my head at the entrance. Inside, the cave expanded, its ceiling rising steeply. There was a small hole in the roof, and in the daytime it let sunshine in. The cavern went back maybe ten yards, its floor increasingly furred with moss that grew wet under the feet in the last few steps. And at the very back, waiting for us, was something I remembered as if in a dream.

  A spring. A little deeper and wider than the large bath in my chambers at Loughsley, its sides slick with moss, the water just warm enough to give off small curls of mineral-scented steam.

  I trailed my hand through the still surface and briefly closed my eyes in pleasure. I hadn’t felt myself grow cold during our walk, but now that liquid warmth seemed like heaven.

  How had I forgotten this place?

  “Look, Little Jane,” I said, but there was no answer.

  I turned around. Bird was already busy building another fire, just at the mouth of the cave. Little Jane was huddled in her cape against the wall between him and me, utterly still, so still that it frightened me until I realized she was asleep again.

  Surely that was a good sign, I told myself; that she had relaxed enough to sleep so quickly. Surely it meant she could . . . heal, here.

  I joined Bird at the fire, watching him carefully and hoping to learn something. “I can’t believe that I forgot.”

  He sat back from the kindling, the fire leaping between us. “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Thank goodness.”

  He shook his head. I moved closer to him, but as we leaned together I felt a bone-deep weariness.

  “Go to sleep,” Bird said. “I’m just making sure the fire’ll stay going, and then I’ll do the same.”

  I pulled myself upright. It took more effort than it should have, and all my muscles complained. “Happy to obey,” I said, and I walked stiffly over to a spot against the wall not far from Little Jane.

  * * *

  I must have fallen asleep quickly, but I awoke almost immediately, my heart pounding.

  A face had leaned over me in the darkness. John, come to take me back to Loughsley.

  I had to work hard to convince myself, to convince my body, that my brother was nowhere nearby.

  There was someone beside me when my eyes finally opened, though.

  Not John.

  Bird.

  I reached for him before I was fully awake.

  His hands were on my shoulders; he must have been trying to rouse me. “You’re all right, Silvie, you’re all right,” he kept saying.

  It was a few seconds before my breath was even. “I know,” I said. “Thank you.” I hated that he’d seen me that way, so afraid,
so vulnerable; but I was grateful, too.

  He shook his head, then let me go and stood, turning back toward the fire. As soon as he did, I felt the grip of the nightmare coming back to me.

  “Bird.” I wasn’t going to let myself think about what I said next. “Will you sleep next to me, when the fire’s ready?”

  “It’s ready,” he said. “I was just . . . sitting. Thinking.”

  “About what?” I asked. “Leaving Loughsley? Your mother?”

  He smiled softly. “My mother’s tough,” he said. “She’s been telling me for a long time that I should leave Loughsley, leave her. She’s always thought it would be good for me to get work somewhere else. That it would help me let go—​or grow up, I guess.”

  I frowned. “You never told me that.” I’d wondered, sometimes, if Bird’s mother thought he and I were too close; but she was an inscrutable woman, and of course a servant couldn’t tell the daughter of the house not to befriend her son.

  Bird shook his head. “Why would I? Come now, Silvie.” He stood up and joined me by the cave wall. “You know I’d never leave you.”

  I did. I’d known it all my life, or at least since I was five. I had taken it for granted, his coming out here with us, bringing Little Jane and me to the forest. What was Bird giving up, in leaving his life at Loughsley? What else had he never told me?

  I was too tired, and too grateful, to ask him then. I shifted and spread out my cloak so we could both lie on it.

  He opened his own cloak and drew it over us. His was rougher, but thicker, too; warm from his body, with a faint scent of lanolin. He leaned back and I tucked myself against him, my head in the hollow of his neck and shoulder.

  I fell asleep more slowly this time, but also more gently, and I looked up all the time toward the place where I remembered sunlight streaming through the cave’s ceiling, on that so-long-ago summer.

  Just before I drifted off, I saw it glowing a little gray.

  FIVE

  Little Jane Kills the Boar

  A bright shaft of sunlight was lancing down by the time I woke later that morning, and Bird and Little Jane were nowhere in sight. Bird’s cloak still covered me, and his fire burned merrily, piled with fresh wood; I knew they couldn’t have gone far. Smoke swirled into the air and out through the hole many feet above our heads: a natural chimney.

  We’d been right as children. This was a castle.

  Including its cold, hard stone. When I stood, my back and limbs ached as if I were an old woman.

  The hot spring glinted with reflecting sunlight. The cave was still gloomy and cool, but I could see into its shadowy recesses as I hadn’t the night before.

  They were far from empty. A small collection of tools sat neatly arranged along one wall: I recognized a mallet and an axe, but there were several others whose names I didn’t know. A small, dented cauldron and two shallow, rough clay bowls had their own place nearby. I found two wooden drinking mugs and a kettle inside the cauldron. There were a coil of rope and two old blankets there, too.

  I tried to pick up the blankets, but in the damp air of the cave, they’d long since moldered through; they sagged and tore under their own weight as I held them. The rope was furred with moss, and the cauldron was rusty. All of it must have been there for years.

  I frowned and replaced the blankets. Limping, still sore, I made my way outside in search of my friends.

  Bird emerged into the clearing, carrying more firewood. Seraph perched on his shoulder, grooming herself with her hooked beak. Bird dropped the timber just inside the cave’s mouth with a heavy exhale, then turned to me. “Easy as finding wood in a forest,” he said with a grin. He chucked Seraph under the chin, and the fearsome bird chirped like a pet canary.

  I stretched. “If only it were as easy to find feather beds.”

  Bird scoffed, mock offended. “I hope you’re not suggesting any violence toward my lass, here.”

  “I would never. And I suppose I did sleep on a Bird, even if he doesn’t have feathers.”

  I said it smiling, but Bird’s cheeks reddened a little, and he looked right at me, suddenly serious. “We should find more bedding, of course,” he said quietly. “Were you cold last night, Silvie?”

  I shook my head. “Not at all, thanks to you.” I paused. “Bird . . . the blankets and tools, inside the cave . . . did you bring them here? Did you know . . .” I hated to think Bird might have known my own mind before I did, might have known me better than I knew myself.

  He stepped forward and clasped my arm. “I didn’t know, Silvie. I just wanted us to have the choice, the chance, to go to the woods, to be safe here. I’d be surprised if we can even use much of it now, although I’ll be glad of the pot to boil our drinking water.”

  “When?” I could feel how tense my arm was under his hand, but I couldn’t make it relax. “When did you stock the cave?”

  “Years ago. Years . . . I was ten, I think. I had great faith in myself, thought I could be some kind of hero. John was starting to—” he hitched his breath. “I was thinking of our summer out here, and I wanted to give us that freedom back. Just in case you ever wanted it again. But I never knew, Silvie. I never presumed. I just wanted you to have another choice than—​what I thought they were going to force on you. Your father, and John.”

  “My father would never—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I suddenly wasn’t sure at all of what my father would have chosen for me, if his mind were still sound. He had been so orderly and prideful in his prime, pious, strict with the tenants of his estate, a model lord and servant to his crown.

  Anyway, what good would it do to wonder what choices I might have had, in some other life? My father’s mind had eroded, John was lord and sheriff, and I . . . I ran away. I chose the forest, the freedom my friend had wanted for me.

  “Thank you, Bird. For the choice. And for . . . for keeping me warm, out here.”

  Silence stretched out after my words. Bird just kept looking at me in his grave way. Where his hand lay on my arm, I almost thought I could feel the beat of his heart.

  “You’re a great man to start a fire,” I added brusquely, in the same gruff tone Bird’s mother had always used when she praised her son, and in a pale imitation of her rough North Esting accent, too.

  Just enough mirth came back to his face that the moment between us was broken and I could relax again. “Starting a fire is one thing,” he said. “Keeping it from quenching is much harder. But between the three of us I’d say this fire needn’t go out all winter.”

  I swallowed. The specter of winter made me shiver again, just as I had when I’d thought about which clothes to bring for myself and Little Jane, back at Loughsley the previous night. I ran away from the idea of it as fast as I could. In my mind we three wandered through a perpetual autumn forest full of red leaves that glowed like Bird’s fire, safe and free and unfreezing, forever.

  Some brambles nearby echoed the harvest-time image in my mind: heavy with glossy black fruit, their papery copper leaves wound between branches thick with thorns. “I thought I might pick blackberries today, and dry some over the fire,” I said. “We might want them . . . later.”

  I couldn’t even quite make myself say the word winter. How foolish, how naive, to imagine we could survive out here . . .

  Don’t think about it.

  I took a berry and raised it to my lips.

  Picking blackberries was one of my few good memories with John. We’d wander the edge of the estate together, down to the bridge and then back home, eating berries all the way, until our mouths were stained with juice—​or mine was, at least. John didn’t like to eat them himself, but he’d find a particularly big and juicy one, examine it, and then tell me to open my mouth. I’d catch the berry he threw, every single time. I was only little, maybe four or five, but blackberry-picking with my brother was a precious, peaceful memory for me—​compared to all my worse memories of him, at least.

  Something else I didn’t want to think about
. I popped the berry into my mouth and lingered over the flavor of the rich, thick juice.

  “That’s a good idea,” Bird said. “I’ll help you string them this evening.” He started to stack the firewood into a neat pile. “Just watch out for worms, of course.”

  I had been about to swallow, but his teasing made me laugh, and the end result was a kind of choking cough. I waved him away when he came over to pound my back.

  After I caught my breath, I said, “You’re not going to fool me so easily again, Bird. We aren’t children, and blackberry worms aren’t as scary as the dragons you said lived in the damson tree.”

  “Ah, but I got to eat all the damsons, didn’t I?” He smiled and pulled a fat berry from the bramble. “I’m not telling stories, though. Look.” He showed me the stem end.

  It was white in the middle, between the black globes. I pursed my lips at him as I leaned in ever so slightly to see. I was more than ready for him to squish the berry against my face.

  Then it moved.

  A translucent, ridged worm sat curled up in the white center. It raised its eyeless head as if looking at me.

  I knew at once why John had looked at each blackberry he gave me. Not to check that worms weren’t in the ones I ate, but to make sure they were.

  I swallowed again, a seed stuck in my throat.

  “They’re harmless,” Bird said quickly. “In fact, a bit of extra meat will do us good, going into winter. That’s all they really are.” He cupped his hand and lifted the berry to his mouth.

  “Don’t!” I said, smacking it away.

  I was afraid Bird would laugh at me, but he didn’t. “We can flick them out as we string them,” he said. “They’re only in maybe one out of five, mostly.”

  I didn’t want to tell him about John, about my one good memory stolen. Bird already despised my brother, and there was no point in driving that anger deeper. Not now that I was free of him.