Ash shook her head.
“Your father’s business was not doing well when he died,” Lady Isobel said bitterly, “and he spent my inheritance on it. I did not know this until now. This letter says that your father has debts that I must pay for him now that he has died.” Her voice took on a steely quality as she said, “I do not have the money to pay for your father’s mistakes. My first husband left me with only this property to support me; that is why I married your father, because I thought he was a good man who would provide for me and my daughters. But he was a liar.”
Ash objected, “He was not. You—”
“Be quiet,” her stepmother said. “I am telling you these things because you need to know what sort of family you come from. You are not my daughter; you are your father’s daughter, and you are going to pay his debts.”
“What—what do you mean?” Ash asked in a thin voice.
“Because of these taxes, I must sell your father’s house in Rook Hill,” her stepmother said. “It is of no use to me. That will solve some of these problems, but not all of them. I could send you out to service in the City, but I can make better use of you here. Therefore you will start by helping Beatrice in the kitchen every morning. In the afternoon you will review Ana and Clara’s lessons on your own, and then you will assist Beatrice in preparing and serving supper.” Lady Isobel paused, and then looked directly at Ash before saying, “If your father had known how to manage his finances better, you would not be put in the position of paying for his mistakes. As it is, I will expect you to work off his debts without complaint, because you are his daughter and it is your responsibility. Do not shirk your duties.”
Ash was silent. She felt numb.
Lady Isobel folded the letters and put them in the desk drawer. “Now go and find Beatrice. I’ve already told her about this; she’ll need you to help her tonight because Sara won’t be coming here again. I can’t afford to pay Sara when you can do the work instead.”
Ash stood up and left the cold parlor, and went slowly to the kitchen. Beatrice was pulling the stew pot off the stove, and when she saw Ash hovering in the doorway she said, “Come over here, girl, and give me a hand. Lady Isobel told me you’re to work with me now.”
Ash went toward the broad wooden table where Beatrice had set the pot down.
“Get the plates and bowls from the cupboard,” Beatrice ordered. “Don’t just stand there.”
Ash went to the cupboard and took out the plates she was accustomed to eating on. The stew smelled like thyme and roast mutton that night, and when Beatrice lifted the lid, the fragrant steam wafted up in a hot cloud. Beatrice dished out the stew into three bowls and began to slice the bread. “Take that out to the dining room and light the candles,” Beatrice said, gesturing to the bowls.
The dining room was dark and Ash lit the candles with shaking hands. As the room came into light, it was as if the world had shifted: three place settings, three chairs, three plates. There had never really been a place for her, after all. She went to tell Ana and Clara to come for supper.
Chapter VI
As the winter passed, Ash learned the feel of firewood in the morning, the cold bark digging into her fingers as she carried the rough logs upstairs, depositing them one by one into each bedroom. She learned how to set the tinder in place so that the wood caught fire as quickly as possible; she learned how to breathe gently on the first sparks to coax them into flame. Her fingers became calloused from scrubbing the hall floor, and she learned how to carry the heavy bucket of soapy water up the stairs without spilling a drop. When she flung the dirty water out the kitchen door, she watched the brown liquid soak into the ground where it left a stain on what remained of the snow. And she came to know the corners of the drafty stone house well. On the first floor landing there was a chip in the plaster where a dark hole opened up in the wall just above the floor, and sometimes she would lie flat on her belly and peer into the darkness. In the parlor, the window seat lifted up to reveal a locked chest carved with vines and roses; the keyhole was wedged shut with a wad of tissue, and she could never quite pry it out.
When she had first begun to work, she had been clumsy and slow. She knocked her knees against the bucket, bruising them. She cut her hands on the firewood and nearly singed off her eyelashes while fanning the morning flames. Her stepmother berated her for her mistakes, and initially Ash would reply sharply, but each time she felt the sting of her stepmother’s ringed hand on her cheek, she sank further into silence. Once, as Beatrice was sponging off a cut on the corner of Ash’s mouth that had been delivered by her stepmother’s hand, she said gruffly, “You’re making things harder on yourself. It does no good to anger her.” Ash looked at the housekeeper, whose mouth was set in a frown. Sometimes Ash felt as though her own heart were frozen. She did not dare to let herself feel a thing except anger, because that warmed her. But in that moment she saw the hint of tenderness on the older woman’s face, and the grief inside her reared up again, coming out of her in a broken sob.
Beatrice looked startled, and Ash covered her face with her hands, pressing the emotion back down. “It hurts, does it?” Beatrice said, not unkindly. “It’ll heal up sooner than you think.”
That winter seemed to stretch on interminably, but spring finally crept back to West Riding to suffuse the meadow in a glow of pale green. Ash’s thirteenth birthday was shortly after the Spring Festival, when flower peddlers flooded the market square with buckets of daffodils and crocuses. In Rook Hill, her mother would have woken her up with gifts wrapped in silk, but this year Ash woke up alone just as dawn broke and dressed quickly in the dim light of her bedroom. She went outside to the pump and paused in the kitchen garden, smelling the spring air: the sharp tang of the herb garden, the slight sweetness of new meadow grass, the trace of damp that lingered from the morning dew. She had dreamed the night before that she was walking down the hard-packed dirt path that led from the Wood to the hawthorn tree where her mother was buried. She could see the headstone, but though she kept walking, she could never reach the end of the path.
She had dreamed that same dream many times over the course of the winter, but in recent days, it had become more insistent. Now she stood in the garden looking out across the meadow at the budding trees of the King’s Forest, and she felt something inside of her turning toward those trees. Perhaps, she thought, she could just leave.
The idea sent a jolt through her, and she glanced back at the house as if someone might have overheard her thoughts. But all she saw was the kitchen door hanging partway open. Taking a deep breath, Ash picked up the wooden bucket and went to the pump, where she lifted the cold iron handle, creaking, to release a flood of icy water. Her hands trembled.
The opportunity came a week after her birthday. Lady Isobel had taken her daughters to luncheon with the village philosopher, and Beatrice had gone into the City on an errand. Ash stood at the front door and watched the carriage roll away with her stepmother and stepsisters inside, and then she shut the door after them. The house was silent. She took her cloak and went out the kitchen door and did not look back.
It was a pleasant, warm day, and the sun was nearly overhead. The herbs brushed against her skirt as she went down the path and out the low iron gate to the meadow. She thought that if she walked along the border of the Wood she would eventually come to another village where she could hire a carriage with the promise of payment upon arrival in Rook Hill. But when she reached the treeline she felt a compulsion to continue into the forest instead of turning west. The sound of birds was clear in the air; the sun dappled the ground in patches of yellow and light green; the new leaves whispered gently when the breeze rustled through. The trail was carpeted in a slightly damp layer of fallen leaves from last autumn, and the ground was spongy beneath her feet. As she walked into the rich smell of sunlight and growing things, a path opened wide before her like an old carriage road just rediscovered.
Her original plan, tentative though it was, had been forgotten. Her
feet moved as if of their own will, and she felt a dim sense of surprise that she was so sure of her destination: straight forward along the path, where the distance lay shadowed in green and yellow and brown, magnetic in its mystery. All around her she felt the Wood breathing, her senses alive. It was as if she could see the leaves unfurling gracefully from their jewel-like buds, the young beetles creeping purposefully forward on the earth. She did not think of her stepmother anymore.
She walked this way for a long time, but the light did not change; it seemed to always be morning. The sun continued its bright blinking overhead, and when shafts of golden light came through the leafy canopy, dust motes hung in the air, glittering as bright as diamonds. It was an enchantment, she was sure. This Wood was so gentle in comparison to the dark, thick forests near Rook Hill. There, the evergreens were so tall and so old she could not see the tops of them; here, oak and birch branches broke the sky into lacy filigrees of light green, exposing the tender blue above.
But at some point in her passage, the trees began to change. They stretched taller, and the soft, pale bark darkened, roughened. She put her hand to a tree and touched the lichen growing dark green upon brown, and it felt like old cork, dry and crumbling. Here the sun mellowed, took on the cast of late afternoon, and the shadows seemed to fall a bit longer; the forest had sunk into a deeper silence, magnifying what sounds did arise. The sudden, quick crash of a fox bounding through the brush was as loud as the slam of a great wooden door.
She came upon a bubbling stream, and she knelt down and dipped up a handful of icy water to drink. She gasped at the shocking cold of it. Wide, flat stones showed her the way across the streambed, and she stepped across carefully to avoid falling into the water. On the other side of the stream the Wood transformed into the dark forest she had known as a child: peeling, soft brown bark on the trees, and leaves like drooping feathers. The sky seemed to retreat far above, and she had the strange sensation that she was shrinking, that soon she might be no larger than an ant crawling over the ground. Here the Wood was a secret place, and she knew she was trespassing. But she went on, because she could not go back.
The path had narrowed; it was no longer the wide highway used by hunting parties. Instead, tree roots crossed the path, half-hidden by the mossy undergrowth. She passed young saplings clustering around the bases of the tallest trees like children surrounding their mother. She felt an old peace there, and something in the air that smelled like magic. When the path shrank to an uneven track that she could barely see in the deepening dusk, she felt a part of her heart sink into place: This was where she should go. It felt like home. The gathering darkness, the rise and fall of the ground, the giant, silent trees around her like columns supporting the vanishing sky—all of it was familiar. And soon the path became clear again: It was narrow but hard-trodden, and the trees parted from it willingly. In the distance she could see the edge of the Wood, some kind of building outlined in dim light, and perhaps a hill. She felt a faint prickling on the back of her neck, as if she had been to that place before. The ground descended in a slope toward the edge of the Wood, and when she approached the downhill portion, she knew where she was.
She stepped out of the Wood into the shadow of the hawthorn tree, and looked up the hill at the house where she had grown up. The windows were dark and empty.
She went to the tombstone that marked where her mother lay buried and knelt down on the new grass before it. She felt tears well up in her eyes and let them fall down her cheeks. She touched the stone marker, feeling the imprint of her mother’s name with her fingers. And then she lay down, pressing her cheek against the edge of the stone where it met the soft ground, and closed her eyes.
She slept on the earth over her mother’s grave, and she did not dream.
When she awoke it was dark, and the night air was cool against her skin. She was lying with her belly to the ground, breathing in the scent of the soil. She could feel the steady beating of her heart, the rhythmic pulsing of her blood through her veins, and beneath her the dense, solid earth. She rolled over onto her back and looked up through the branches of the tree, the new leaves a dark pattern against the black night sky. She wondered if Anya would be awake still, at her daughter’s house in Rook Hill. She wondered if Anya would send her back to her stepmother. With that thought she woke up completely, the memory of the last several months flooding back into her with depressing efficiency. She sat up slowly and brushed the dirt from her hair.
Opposite her, a man was sitting on a rock. A thrill of fear coursed through her body, for there was something odd about him. First of all, there had never been a rock there before, and second, the man did not look exactly human either. He was dressed like a man, but a very exotic one. He wore white breeches and boots and a white shirt with white lace at the throat, and the fabric of his clothes gleamed as if there were light trapped within its threads. And then there was his face, which on first glance was just like a man’s face, except that his skin was as white as his clothes, and his cheekbones were sharp as blades. Though his hair was pale as snow, he did not look old; he looked, in fact, like he had no age at all. His eyes glowed unnaturally blue, and when he opened his mouth to speak, she saw his skin sliding over the bones of his skull.
“What are you seeking?” he said, and his voice was silky and cold. Though they were separated by several feet, she was disconcerted by the intensity of his gaze; she felt as if he could pull her open from afar.
She answered, “I came to see my mother.”
His eyes moved to the gravestone and then back to her face. An expression of some sort passed over his features, but she did not recognize it. He said, “Come closer.”
She was compelled to get up; her muscles would not obey her own commands; and when she was standing before him she trembled from fear. She wanted to look away, but she could not turn her eyes away from his. They were cool, measuring, as faceted as finely cut jewels; they traveled over her face methodically, cataloguing her eyelashes, her nose, her mouth, her chin. He reached out and stroked her hair, and she could feel an icy chill emanating from his hand. She wondered if his touch would spread a frost over her, snowflakes blooming over her skin like a dress of winter. When he took her hand in his and ran his thumb down the center of her palm, the blood in her veins seemed to freeze. The pain of it freed her voice from her throat, and she managed to ask, “Are you the one who sent me back that night?”
He looked back at her face, and she swallowed. For a moment he did not speak, and then he said, “There are many of us.”
“Who are you?” she asked, her heart thudding in her chest.
“You know,” he said, “who we are.”
She felt like a fool, but she pressed on. “I wish to see my mother,” she said, and her voice shook.
“Your mother is dead,” he said.
“Can you not bring her back?” she asked desperately.
He let go of her hand and warmth rushed back into her fingers, making them ache. “You dare to ask for such a great gift,” he said, and there was a note of amusement in his voice.
“Please,” she begged.
But he said coldly, “No.”
Her stomach fell, and she whispered, “Are you going to kill me?”
At first she thought that he might strike her down where she stood, for a look of ravenous hunger came over him, as if he could not wait to spill her blood. But as her heart hammered in her throat and cold sweat dampened her skin, he seemed to change his mind, and the expression on his angular face smoothed out until he was as unreadable as before. He stood up, towering over her, and said, “You must go back the way you came. You took an enchanted path, and you cannot remain here.”
“Go back?” she repeated, and she was flooded with disappointment. “Don’t make me go back,” she pleaded.
“You have no choice in the matter,” he said curtly. He turned, lifting his head as if he were listening for something she could not hear, and he said, “I will take you there.”
/> And then a tall white stallion with golden eyes came out of the Wood toward them. In one smooth motion, the man picked her up and lifted her onto the saddle, and then he mounted behind her. She sat stiffly, afraid to lean back against him. The horse beneath her felt powerful and wild, but he moved so smoothly that Ash found herself relaxing against her will. As they glided through the dark trees, the texture of the air seemed to change—as if space were being compressed on their journey, and when she inhaled, it was like a gust of wind thrust down her throat. She could smell the scent of night-blooming jasmine and something indefinable—perhaps it was the smell of magic. Her head fell back against the man’s shoulder, and soon her eyes drifted shut. She dreamed of gardens full of white roses, their perfume intoxicating. Above them a city of white stone towers—so tall she could not see their rooftops—rose to the blue sky.
When the horse slowed down she blinked her eyes open, and they were crossing the meadow. She saw Quinn House ahead, a single light burning in Lady Isobel’s window. She sat up, pulling herself away from the man self-consciously. When they stopped outside the garden gate she tried to dismount hastily and he had to catch her hand, wrenching her arm back painfully, to prevent her from falling. When her feet touched the ground her knees almost buckled, and she grabbed at the horse’s mane for balance, her other hand still held firmly in his grasp. “You must not take that path again,” he said to her. She looked up at him, and here in the ordinary darkness, he seemed to have lost some of his otherworldly glow. “Do you hear me?” he demanded.
“Yes,” she said quickly, afraid to upset him. He dropped her hand then, and she felt momentarily unbalanced. He turned the horse back toward the Wood, and within the blink of an eye they had vanished and Ash was left alone outside the garden gate.
Feeling as though she were fighting her way back through a fog of some sort, she reached for the gate to steady herself. She took a deep breath and realized that she was cold and hungry, for she had not eaten all day. She opened the gate and made her way back inside the house on shaking legs.