“Nevertheless, there was an opportunity in this girl. I sent her many dreams to lure her into the Wood at night, but she did not come. Finally, on Midsummer’s Eve, when our magic is strongest, I went to her home and called to her. She came to her window then, and when I asked her to come down, she did. I thought that she would fold easily, but when she came outside she did not follow me. Instead, she cursed me. Such a small, brittle girl—I did not expect it.”
“How did she curse you?” Ash asked when he did not go on.
He did not look at her when he said, “She cursed me to fall in love with a human girl, because she believed that might cause me to understand why what I have done over the course of many hundreds of years is wrong.” His voice carried a tinge of bitterness. “Her curse did not seem to work at first. I did not think she was powerful enough of a witch to make the curse stick; whatever magic she had in her was tiny, compared to what I could hold in my hand. After all, I have lived for centuries, and she was nothing but a girl.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Ash asked.
He said softly, “She was your mother.” When their eyes met, she saw that he looked at her with something like pain. “And the first time I saw you, I knew that her curse would hold. But I do not think she knew that her daughter would be the girl caught in her spell.”
After everything that had happened that night, his words sank like stones in a still pond. She felt numb; this last revelation was too much, right now, to absorb. Finally she asked, “Is it such a bad curse?”
“It is agony,” said Sidhean.
“It is not real,” she protested.
“It is as real as I am,” he claimed. And then he lifted her up out of her chair and he was holding her hands in his as they stood together, and she felt him press her hands to his chest, where his heartbeat thudded insistently against her fingertips. She would not look up at him, and because he was taller than her by a head, she found herself staring stubbornly at the embroidery on his waistcoat—it was a pattern of leaves and vines and perhaps roses in silver thread on silk of pearl gray, finer than any cloth she had ever seen. She had never been aware of such detail before: Had he never worn anything so beautiful? Or had she simply never opened her eyes? They stood together for what seemed to be an hour, or several, and she wondered if the world were spinning around her, for she felt dizzy. When he let her go she stumbled and nearly fell, but she caught herself on the edge of the chair and sat down again, hard, breathless.
“Something has changed within you,” he said accusingly.
She could not deny it.
But the force of him was still all around her and she could not see clearly. He drew a deep breath and said, “You are not ready. Do not return here until you are, but do not delay for too long. I will not wait much longer.”
His words lifted her up from her seat, and at the edge of the clearing the moonlight path still floated. His face was turned away from her, and though she wanted to go to him, she could not. Her legs moved her against her will down the path, and then she was running through the Wood, crashing over the undergrowth and sending up waves of fairy light as she fled. She could not stop herself, even as she stumbled over tree roots, but at last she broke free of the Wood and began to cross the meadow. The pushing at her back was less intense now, but she could still feel it—as if there were hands on her shoulders, pressing her forward—and it directed her back through the kitchen garden and down the steps into the cellar. She pulled the door shut, and then a great, whistling wind came and shot the bolt home.
At first she stood, bewildered, in the dark. But as reality crept back into her consciousness—the chill of the cellar, the smell of it—she felt her way back to the trunks against the far wall. She unlatched one and fumbled around inside until she found something that would substitute for a blanket. Feeling drained, she lay down on the hard-packed dirt floor, and she slept.
She dreamed that she was running through the tallest, darkest trees of the Wood, her feet slamming into the uneven ground as she raced toward her goal. At last the trees parted and she found herself by the hawthorn tree in Rook Hill, and there was the grave of her mother, and beside the grave a young girl sat all in white, reading a book of fairy tales.
When Ash crashed into the clearing the girl turned to look up at her, and Ash saw that the girl’s eyes were empty, and her skin was so pale it looked as if she were dead, and when the girl’s mouth opened no words came out but Ash knew she was saying her name: Aisling. Ash backed away from the ghost girl, but the girl stood up and came toward her, her hands outstretched, and mouthed her name again. Ash did not know what to do, for she recognized the dress the girl was wearing—it was her work dress that she had worn while cleaning the parlor the other day—and that meant the girl must be herself. But the girl looked like a specter, and if she were Ash, then Ash knew she had died as well.
She tried to run away, but she tripped on the root of the hawthorn tree and fell onto the grave, and the earth was heaving and warm beneath her, a monster rising out of the dark, and Ash wept, for she wanted to live.
Chapter XIX
Her stepmother did not release her from the cellar until midday. After she had awakened from that dream, she had tried to keep her eyes open, afraid of what other dreams might come. But as the crack of light around the cellar door brightened, she nodded off into an uneasy doze. When the door finally opened it was noonday light that poured inside, and Ash put a hand over her eyes to block the sudden glare. Her stepmother said, “You’ve slept enough. Get to work. And change out of that ridiculous dress.”
The fairy gown had not vanished in the course of the night, but in the light of day, it seemed to have faded. The crystal beads looked like paste now, and where Ana had torn the bodice, ordinary threads hung loose. In her room, Ash saw that the lid of her trunk was open, and inside where she had kept the fairy cloak and her books, there was nothing but her old work dress. She ran out through the kitchen after her stepmother, who was about to go upstairs, and demanded, “What have you done with my things?”
Her stepmother paused on the bottom step, her lip curled. “You stole from me, Aisling. Did you think I would not search your room to see what else you might have taken?”
“I did not steal from you,” Ash said angrily.
“You are a liar,” her stepmother said coldly.
“Where did you put my things?” Ash asked again.
“Goodness, it’s as if you did have something valuable in there,” her stepmother said. “If you still want those musty old books, you’re too late—I burned them.” At the stricken look on Ash’s face, her stepmother smiled and then continued up the stairs.
Feeling defeated, Ash went back into the kitchen, where she saw the cracked mirror on the table. She went to throw it away, but caught sight of her reflection in it. She looked a mess. Her hair, which she had remembered as being comical, looked like something out of a nightmare, especially with the bruise that had risen across her cheek and the dried blood on the corner of her mouth. She propped up the broken bits of mirror against a bowl, dampened a cloth in some water, and dabbed it against the cut. Then she picked up the kitchen shears that her stepmother had left on the table and clipped away the uneven ends of her hair. When she was finished, she combed out the inches that were left and stared at her unfamiliar reflection in the jagged pieces of glass. She noticed, for the first time, a light sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks, and she touched them in wonder. Had they always been there? Instead of throwing away the fragments of the mirror as she had planned, she folded them into an old rag and put the rag into the empty trunk.
As she stood up and went to the door, she saw a glimmer of silver out of the corner of her eye, and on the hook behind the door, the fairy cloak was hanging. It was as pristine and gleaming as the day she received it. She reached out to touch it, and saw the moonstone ring still on her hand. Do not delay for too long, Sidhean had said. As if the mere thought of him had set it off, she felt the ring beg
in to pulse like a living thing. For the first time, it made her angry. He had also told her not to come back until she was ready. Well, she was not ready. Until that day, Ash resolved that she would not wear this ring that chained her to him.
She wrenched it off, stuffing it into the cloak’s interior pocket—but the pocket was not empty. Her fingers brushed against a book, and when she pulled it out she saw the faded fabric cover of her mother’s herbal. She felt a surge of relief as she opened it to read her mother’s handwriting, neat and measured, on the yellowed pages. She could not remember putting it in the cloak pocket, although at one time she had carried it with her like a good luck charm. She wanted to believe that she had left it there and forgotten about it—not that it had been placed there by any fairy magic. Deliberately turning away from the cloak, she laid the herbal in her trunk beside the broken mirror, and she did her best to ignore the phantom presence of the moonstone ring on her hand.
Over the next several weeks, her stepmother did not allow her to leave the house unsupervised. She had to bring Clara with her on marketing days, but though her stepsister now controlled the purse, she did little else to restrict her. She spent much of their time together stealing sideways glances at her, as if Ash had become some sort of strange creature or, perhaps, an invalid. Once, as they were walking home from the village, Clara asked her, “Where did you get those jewels, Ash? Did you really steal them?”
“Of course not,” Ash said.
“Then where did they come from? Did Ana tell you that by the next day they were nothing but paste? I thought they were diamonds, the night before.”
“They were never diamonds,” Ash said, though she did not know if that were true. Her younger stepsister paused and gave her a skeptical look, but she did not ask again.
As Yule approached, Ash went with her stepsisters while they were fitted for their new gowns: an emerald green one for Ana, a light blue one for Clara—who had yearned for a new gown for years. Neither of them spoke of the prince in Ash’s company, though once when Ash was approaching the seamstress’s dressing room, she heard Ana say, “All anyone wants to know is who that woman was—apparently the prince keeps asking after her, but nobody knows her.” When Ash appeared in the doorway with the extra ribbon they had requested, Ana gave her a chilly look and did not speak of it again.
At night, before she fell asleep, her thoughts went in circles. At first, she had thought that with each passing day, she would come closer to accepting the fate that she had asked for. Perhaps she would remember how she had once wanted to trade her life away for an eternity she could not imagine. But she discovered that the opposite was happening: With each passing day, she wanted more time. This life that she had once hated no longer seemed so bleak. Her stepmother’s words did little to upset her anymore. And more than anything, she wanted to see Kaisa again. But how long could she delay going back to Sidhean? Would he become angry? She began to wonder if any humans had ever managed to disentangle themselves from a fairy contract. None of the tales she had read gave her reason to hope; even Eilis, who had succeeded in her quest, fulfilled her end of the bargain.
She could not find a way out of the trap she had set for herself, and she was closer to despair than she had been since her mother died. She felt that the curse that Sidhean said her mother had lain on him might be the key to it all, so she took her mother’s herbal out and re-read the faded handwriting by candlelight, but it only raised more questions. The only section that seemed to be remotely related to magic was the recipe to reverse a glamour, but it was not clear if the curse were a glamour at all. Sidhean had said that what he felt for her was as real as she was, and from what she recalled from the fairy tales, a glamour was only an illusion. If his love was real, it could not be a glamour.
She kept coming back to the pages her mother had written about love, but they were confusing. The notes on various herbs and plants seemed to be more informational than prescriptive, and there was no clear-cut recipe for a love spell or its reversal. There were notes on the weather—“wait until the spring equinox has passed and the first rain has come and gone”—and there were notes she could only guess about: “To charge someone with love is a great responsibility; there will be an equal yet unexpected reaction.” And then, at the end, was that sentence her mother had underlined: “The knowledge will change him.” She did not know if her mother was referring to Sidhean, but she rolled the sentence around in her mind while she did her errands during her stepsisters’ fittings.
One afternoon, her head spinning with these thoughts, she passed the church on her way back to the seamstress, and the black iron gate to the cemetery was hanging open. Ash began to pull it shut, the hinges squeaking, and the bottom of the gate dragged against the ground until it lodged in place, still partly open. She tugged on it but it wouldn’t close, so she pushed it open again to free it, and then it seemed the most natural thing in the world to enter the yard. The browning grass had recently been clipped short, and the brick path leading to the graveyard was swept clean. She walked down the path and hesitated in front of the small, neat cemetery. There were still only a dozen or so headstones; few had been added since her father’s funeral.
Ash went to the row farthest from the church, and there on the third tombstone she found her father’s name. She remembered, from her childhood in Rook Hill, visiting her grandparents’ graves in the family plot behind her mother’s old home. Her mother had been the last in her family, so it was usually only the two of them who visited the graves on Souls Night, for her father was often away on business. Her mother would clean off the headstones with an old cloth and burn sage in a shallow pewter dish. She always left a loaf of bread on the ground when they departed, and sometimes, if they had them to spare, a bowl of red apples. They would sit on the ground among the old headstones and wait until the sage had burned away, and Ash still remembered the way she would fidget after only a few moments of stillness. Her mother would say to her gently, “You only visit once a year, Ash. Sit still and give them a chance to see you.”
Ash ran her fingers over her father’s name, and they came away covered with dust. She looked at the other gravestones, and some of them had been cleaned; some even had the burnt remnants of incense or herbs on the ground before them. Lady Isobel’s prohibition of the old ways had not, Ash realized, been followed by everyone. She had not visited the grave since the day of her father’s funeral, though she had passed the cemetery countless times since then. She looked up at the sky, and the blue-gray clouds were like bruises above her. She did not know how many days she had left here. She knelt down on the cold ground in front of the tombstone. The least she could do was sit still.
The weeks passed, and there was no sign of Sidhean, at least in her waking hours. Sometimes she dreamed of him: He would be walking down a long, moonlit hall, or he would be sitting in that clearing with the crystal fountain, but she could never see his face. She knew that he was waiting for her, and he was growing impatient. Sometimes she dreamed that she was walking in the Wood, passing the same stand of pine trees repeatedly; she would grow increasingly frustrated until she woke herself up, her hands balled into fists. Once she dreamed that she and Kaisa were lying on a blanket by the river, the sun warm on her hair, and they were laughing. She did not want to wake up from that dream, and when she did she turned her face into the pillow, yearning to spend one more moment in that summer afternoon. But it was winter, and outside the dawn was cold.
At supper, a fortnight before Yule, Lady Isobel informed Ash that she would be going with them into the City again, to spend the week at her sister’s house. “But you will not be attending any of the celebrations,” her stepmother said. “I’ve told my sister that you’re not allowed to leave the house and that her housekeeper is to keep an eye on you to make sure you don’t steal anything.” Ash poured her stepmother more wine and did not answer. “Did you hear me, Aisling?” her stepmother said.
“Of course,” Ash said.
“And
you will speak with respect to me and your stepsisters,” Lady Isobel said sternly. “Don’t think that your brief taste of civilized life means that you’re worth anything more than a life below stairs.”
Her stepmother’s words washed over her; Ash barely heard them. She was thinking of one thing only: At Yule, she could see Kaisa—perhaps for the last time.
Chapter XX
This year, there was no sign of the Royal Hunt as they drove from West Riding to the City, though every time Ash saw a rider on the horizon, she held her breath until they were close enough for her to see that it was not the King’s Huntress. In the City, the palace winked at them between buildings as they drove toward the Page Street mansion. Once again Ash shared Gwen’s small attic room, and that night as Gwen lay asleep in bed, Ash lay awake, thinking.
Gwen was engaged, now, to a butcher’s son. Colin had left the household and gone south to find his luck in the trades, Gwen had told her before she went to sleep that night. “I never liked him that much anyway,” Gwen whispered. “Peter is so wonderful to me, I can’t believe I would ever have wanted anyone else.” She beamed, and Ash envied her. “You must let me introduce you to him tomorrow night when we go to the Square for the bonfire.”
“I am not allowed to go,” Ash said, hanging her spare dress on a hook behind Gwen’s door.
“I heard about that,” Gwen said. “But no one will care if you go; you know we all detest Lady Isobel, don’t you?”