Two and Twenty Dark Tales (23 page)

And there I bought a petticoat, a cloak, and a gown.

I went into the woods and built me a kirk,

And all the birds of the air, they helped me to work.

The hawk with his long claws pulled down the stone,

The dove with her rough bill brought me them home.

The parrot was the clergyman, the peacock was the clerk,

The bullfinch played the organ, we made merry work.

– Mother Goose

T
HEY
cast me out of the village the day my mother died. When they tore me from her body, I fought, kicking and scratching, fierce in my grief. A stinging slap to the face startled me. The second left my ears ringing.

The rough hands belonged to the blacksmith. He drank wine all day and punished his wife by night. That’s what the birds told me, anyway.

“We’ll have no more o’ that now,” he said.

The raven on the windowsill didn’t approve of such rough manners. She took to the sky with a loud “caw!” that echoed off the stones around us. My hand reached for Mama but only managed to grasp one of the pennies weighing down her eyelids.

“Give her t’ other coin as well.” That was the woman who spent her early morning hours baking pies for the school children. When the birds spoke of her wares, they told tales of cat meat and sawdust. “It’s all she has in the world.”

“More than she deserves.” The storekeeper shoved the second penny into my hand. The birds didn’t have to tell me that he sneaked his thumb on the scales whenever he weighed out flour and salt; I’d seen that for myself.

“The second death in as many days,” the pie woman mused as we exited the cottage. She wore her discomfort like the prickles on the blackberry vines. Yesterday, the miller’s daughter had been found, drowned in the pond. “There’s something at work here.”

“Devil’s child.” A chorus of spitting followed that one, a ward against evil, but no one would meet my gaze save the blacksmith’s son, Ayden. A ragged urchin of a child a few years older than I, he had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. When he caught me looking at him, he turned tail and ran back to the forge.

The two largest of the villagers wasted no time after that, carrying me to the outskirts of the town. The others had rope and rocks and harsh words, though they were nothing I hadn’t heard before. I let it flow over me like the water in the creek bed.

Mama was gone, never to come back. We’d no other family save each other, and for seven years, that had been more than enough. She sold one set of herbs by sunlight at the market and the other by moonlight out the back door of our cottage, enough to put food on the table. Our arms were never empty, wrapped about each other at night. That morning, I’d gone to pick what berries I could reach from the hedge. Returning, I’d found her pale and lifeless, as stiff as a fallen bird, her skin as soft as feathers ruffled by a wind.

Our presence was barely tolerated as it was; now that Mama was gone, I was to be rooted out, a weed from a flower garden. At the stone mile marker, the blacksmith set me down in the dust. The birds watched from the trees overhead.

“Go quietly,” the meat pie woman advised, “and don’t come back. It’ll go worse for you if you come back.” As one, they left. No one glanced over their shoulder; to do so would bring grave misfortune upon them.

I stood there, a rock digging into my bare foot, until I was quite alone on the road. My hands opened like two flowers in the sun, and two pennies winked at me in the light. The pearl-plumed dove alighted on my shoulder and offered a soft coo of comfort in my ear.

“Of course,” she said next, “you’ll need something warm to wear, Little One.”

I looked down at my dress. It was threadbare with washing, but it had been clean when I’d put it on that morning. Darned in a dozen places, but with such skill that you’d have to be told to know it. It had been Mama’s, the last of her scent clinging to it like a mother’s arms.

“Right then,” I said, turning my nose north. “To Darlington.”

It took the better part of a day to reach the town. It was leaps and bounds larger than our village, the roads paved with stone, the buildings of brick and wood. It wasn’t for me; I knew that before I smelled the coal fires or saw the brightly clothed children heading for the schoolhouse. Skirting a low rock wall, I chanced upon an untended laundry line. There was a plain petticoat that fit. A cloak hanging next to it was the darkest of greens, far too long for me, but heavy and warm. I left the coins pinned to the line as payment.

It was easy to disappear into the forest. Almost at once, I felt I was merely another leaf growing on the trees. When I sat, I was no more than a clump of moss on the shaggy log. When hunger found me, there were berries and nuts and mushrooms enough to turn it back. The dove helped, flitting from branch to branch, showing me the best path through the brambles.

When we came into the clearing, I reached for the first stone.

***

The hawk rode my wrist, preening over her kills. As well she should; the fat brace of rabbits I carried in the other hand would fill all our bellies that night and beyond. Though the leaves had not yet turned, the number of nuts the squirrels had stored promised the leanest of winters. The stone building where the birds and I had sheltered these ten years held up against the fiercest storms, but I’d learned the starving way to lay in enough food and wood in the autumn months.

Luckily enough, I had my mother’s trick with herbs. I pulled them from their wild beds and sold them in Darlington during the summer. Copper pennies accumulated in an old leather bag I kept hidden in the owl’s tree, and the rest of my hours were spent berrying and hunting, drying food over small, smoky fires, and waiting for the snow to arrive. Weeks would pass in which I didn’t speak to a living soul that wasn’t feathered. I had little use for the pale town’s creatures who requested my wares in whispers, the ones who scuttled away from my stall like black beetles. I sometimes imagined the birds scooping them up and gobbling them down, crunching through their gaily colored carapaces.

As for myself, I dressed in gray, but the woolen cloak I’d taken years ago off the laundry line was still the darkest of greens. Mossy embroidery grew along the hem now. I’d lined it with tiny down feathers donated by my friends. When I walked, it rustled like wings. Reason enough for the villagers to whisper. Reason enough to cross the road when they saw me coming.

“That’s the Wild One,” mothers would whisper to their children. “She’s more animal than child.”

And perhaps I was. Perhaps one day I would step back into the forest and my feet would take root in the dirt and my arms would reach up to the heavens and leaves would sprout from my fingertips. It wouldn’t be a bad way to spend a few hundred years. At least then, I’d have a bit of rest. But that wasn’t to be my lot today. The moment I got back, I needed to skin these small sacrifices, prepare the meat, clean my hunting knife—

I drew up short the moment I entered the clearing. There was an odd bundle collapsed upon the gray flagstone threshold. A filthy arm reached for the door, but several inches separated fingertips from wood. The birds sat atop the roof of my sanctuary, unnaturally silent witnesses to this strange scene.

There is nothing quite as unsettling as a large gathering of very quiet birds.

In agreement and in warning, the hawk dug her claws into my leather glove. “Take care, my pet.”

“Tsh.” Though I soothed her, I set down the rabbits and pulled out my knife as I approached.

The stranger saved me the trouble of jabbing it in the backside. With a groan, the heap of rags rolled over, revealing its owner: a young man who’d come up on the wrong side of some coin. Both his eyes were swollen shut and encrusted with blood. His mouth was a ragged gash in his face. I could have ended his misery, slit his throat from ear to ear, but I only ever killed what I was going to eat.

“What are you doing here?”

The raven on the roof echoed my query in his raspy, black-feathered voice.

Filthy hands sought out the hem of my cloak. “Water?”

Loathe to let him enter my sanctuary, I wavered a moment. When the dove trilled a plea for mercy, it reminded me of a day long past, a day in which a friendly hand might have been welcome. Stepping over the rag-man, I retrieved the bucket by the hearth and dipped up a tin cup. Returning to my guest, I pressed the cup to his cracked lips.

He drank greedily, water sluicing down either side of his face like two muddy creek beds. When he was done, he managed a lopsided smile. “My thanks.”

Uncertain what to do with his unexpectedly charming manners, I retreated a step and repeated my question. “What are you doing here?”

“Escaping hell,” was his quiet answer. “My dad’s beaten me for the last time.”

“Ah.” Dipping the oldest scrap of linen I owned into the bucket, I approached with caution. “Your father did this?”

“And more.” He winced when I pressed the rag to his face, but didn’t protest. The worst of it cleared away, the boy managed to open his eyes; they were the vivid green of lichen in unexpected sunshine.

The dove cooed in recognition. “That’s the blacksmith’s son.”

The other birds nodded and dipped their heads. “The blacksmith’s son.”

“His son—” It sounded like the bullfinch wanted to say more, but the peacock stopped her with a nip of her beak.

The lad looked up at me and blinked. “Sida?”

It had been ten years since someone had last called me by name. I had to remember the way of answering to it. “Yes. And you’re Ayden.”

A long moment passed between us, and it was as though cottages popped up around us like wild mushrooms, the memory of smoke and pig slops and shit drifting through the clearing. I cast it all away from me as I would the guts from the rabbits. “Where will you go?”

“To the water.” When he ducked his head, grubby locks of hair fell into his swollen eyes. “I’ll find a ship and sail for the islands. You can gather the gold dust off the beaches by the handfuls.”

“You’ve never been on the water before.” I don’t know why I offered the argument. It’s not like I wanted him to stay. If an animal wasn’t going to hunt for me or scavenge seeds for me or tell me where the ripest of the blueberries were to be found, I had no use for it whatsoever.

“I’ll learn,” Ayden said with a fierce scowl. “And I’m strong enough to lift whatever they like.”

That bit was at least true. The muscles of his arms couldn’t have belonged to anyone except a man who hammered metal into subservience. “You’ve been doing your father’s work.”

“For the last three years. When he hasn’t been sleeping, he’s been piss-drunk, not fit for anything but raging and rutting.”

“What will he do without you?”

“Starve, most likely.” When Ayden shrugged, though, he winced again.

“What’s wrong?” My concern surprised me; I should have been showing him to the road by now.

“My wrist. I think he broke it.”

Reaching for the rabbits, I made my mind up about something without consulting the birds. “You can’t lift-and-carry on a ship with a broken wrist. You’ll have to stay here until it mends.”

“I can’t do that.” He looked about. Reflected in his eyes, I could see the rough way I’d been scratching out a living. “You’re barely keeping yourself alive out here.”

The birds laughed at him then, filling the clearing with raucous jeers.

“We manage better than you think,” I said. “And you can earn your keep, never fear. Even with only one good arm, I think we’ll find use for you.”

***

Ayden proved his worth within the first week, chopping wood and fetching water and dragging fallen limbs into the clearing while I was out hunting with the hawk. The birds kept a wary eye on him as he cleared out the cotes and spread clean, dry grass on the floors and brought back blackberries by the bucketful and caught a string of fish with only a hook and a prayer; in seven days, he’d earned their respect and my own. Evenings were spent outdoors in the pleasant, late-summer twilight. I used my voice more then than I had in all the years since leaving the village.

Never reminiscing, though. Neither of us wasted words on the past.

Thinking he would need it aboard a ship, I taught him the constellations. I had my own names for them, my own stories: an egg sitting upon a wall; a brother and sister traipsing up a hill; the mouse running down the face of a grandfather clock.

We decided he couldn’t leave until he could climb a tree as he would the rigging on a merchant vessel. Sooner than expected, the day arrived when I woke to hear him patching the roof of my sanctuary. I knew his wrist must be nearly healed. The autumn was gone; winter decorated everything with hoarfrost. I lay abed far longer than I ought, listening to the sound of Ayden’s merry whistling.

I didn’t cry, whatever else the birds might tell you.

Over our breakfast of thick porridge and nuts, I kept my gaze to the table. “It’s the last market day of the season.”

“Aye?” Mouth full, that’s all he could manage.

It will be better when he’s gone. He eats enough for three.

Though he works more than six.

I sighed into my water cup. “Will you come with me or stay here?”

“Better to stay,” he said, shifting upon his rough seat. “Someone might recognize me there and carry word back.”

I nodded. Burdened by something more than the straw packs full of herbs, I found the walk to Darlington longer than usual. Thorns reached out to claw at my ankles. Plagued by errant winds, the trees murmured their unease. I set up my stall with less care than usual. When I wished myself home, I followed that with inward curses.

You’ll be sorrier still when he leaves.

The thought was as heavy as a stone sitting upon my heart. I watched them pass by: the baker who over-salted the porridge so his children would eat less of it; the schoolmaster who cried o’ nights, taking the whipping switch to his own back. My next customer was the magistrate’s wife. The birds had little to say about her, other than she spent money she could ill-afford upon hats decorated with the feathers of their fallen comrades. I counted out her change and wrapped her rosemary in brown paper. I couldn’t manage a smile or thanks, and she marched off in a huff.