“I don’t have a trousseau,” Ash said. Or a mother to help me with one.
“You don’t?” Gwen said, shocked. “Goodness, you must begin at once. You’re so pretty, Ash, you can’t expect to be a maid forever. Whom do you wish to marry?”
“I don’t know,” Ash said. Gwen’s questions made her uncomfortable.
“I mean, do you want him to be tall, dark, fair, a butler, a merchant?” Gwen persisted. “I think Colin would be ideal for me. We would both be able to stay in the same household.” When Ash didn’t respond, Gwen asked, “Is something wrong?”
“I’m sorry, I suppose I’m just tired,” Ash said.
“All right, all right. Go to sleep then.” But Gwen didn’t sound angry with her, just amused, and she turned her back to Ash and fell silent.
Ash lay on her back for some time, staring up at the ceiling, not in the least bit weary. When she heard Gwen’s breathing take on the even rhythm of sleep, Ash carefully rolled over onto her side, turning away from Gwen. Her father’s second marriage had only made her life miserable, and she had never respected Ana’s single-minded quest for a husband. But Gwen’s words opened up something inside herself that she had long forgotten: the memory of being loved. Once, things had been different. Tears pricked at her eyes, and she held herself very still, her body tense, not wanting to wake Gwen.
When Ash finally fell asleep, she dreamed of the Wood, the tall dark trees, the shafts of sunlight that shone through the canopy to the soft forest floor. She could smell the spicy pine, the dampness of bark after rain, and the exotic fragrance that clung to Sidhean. It was the scent of jasmine, she remembered, and night-blooming roses that had never felt the touch of a human hand. But though he was walking next to her, she could not turn her head to see him. Instead, she could only look straight ahead, where the huntress was walking purposefully down the path, her green cloak fluttering behind her. If only she would turn around, Ash thought, then the huntress would finally see her. But she would not look back, and Ash could not call out her name, for she did not know it.
When the morning bell tolled and Ash opened her eyes, the dream still clinging to her, she could not at first remember where she was. Then she felt Gwen sit up beside her, and she smelled the cold morning air and heard the creaking of the townhouse as it groaned into life. There were footsteps on the back stairs, and the voice of one of the other maids on the other side of the wall. She was in the City, and Yule was over, and she would be returning to Quinn House that day. Sidhean was waiting.
Chapter X
Ash spent the morning packing for their return to West Riding. She was struggling to fit Ana’s newest acquisition—a heavy velvet wrap lined in rich blue silk—into her already overstuffed trunk when Gwen knocked on the open door and came in. She was carrying a folded piece of paper that she held out to Ash, who was kneeling on the floor in front of the trunk.
“It’s a spell,” Gwen said in a conspiratorial tone.
“What do you mean?” Ash asked, unfolding the paper. Written in what Ash assumed was Gwen’s handwriting were several lines:
Good Lysara, play thy part
Send to me my own sweetheart
Show me such a happy bliss
This night of him to have a kiss.
“Tomorrow is the Fast of Lysara,” Gwen whispered, kneeling down next to her and trying ineffectually to close the trunk.
“Oh,” Ash said. She had first heard the tale of Lysara when she was very young, for it was a popular one, but she hadn’t given it a thought in years. Lysara had been a beautiful but penniless young woman from the far Northern Mountains, and when the King, whose name had long been forgotten, first set eyes on her at a Yule bonfire, he fell in love with her, and she with him. The King’s advisors disapproved of the match because it was thought that she was half-fairy, for her eyes were as deep and richly verdant as the forest. But even though everyone knew that no good could come of a union with a fairy woman, the King was so deeply in love with her that he arranged to be married within a fortnight. The first year of their marriage was marked by uncommon prosperity and joy, but it was also their last. Exactly one year after their wedding, Lysara died giving birth. During her short reign as Queen, the people had grown to love her dearly, for she was the embodiment of true love, steadfast and sweet. So the anniversary of her wedding day became known as the Fast of Lysara, when young girls made wishes upon their clean linen pillows to dream of their true love.
“Lysara watches over us,” Gwen insisted, giving up on latching the trunk shut. “You must fast tomorrow in her honor, and before you go to sleep, say this spell—my mother’s aunt gave it to me, and she knows a greenwitch who says it will work—and you’ll dream of your future husband. That way you’ll recognize him when you see him.”
Ash must have looked startled, and Gwen misread her expression as apprehension. “It’s all right,” Gwen said reassuringly. “We all do it—all of us servants, anyway. We just don’t tell the mistress. And it won’t hurt to give it a try.”
“Thank you,” Ash said, bemused, and slipped the note into her pocket. “I’ll try.”
“Good,” Gwen said. She impulsively reached out and pulled Ash into an embrace. “It’s been good to have you here, Ash. I hope you’ll come back with Ana again.”
Ash awkwardly put her arms around Gwen. “I’ll try,” she said again.
Quinn House was cold and dark when they returned later that afternoon. While Jonas carried the trunks back upstairs, Ash lit the fires and began to prepare supper. She was surprised to find that she missed the bustle and excitement of the Page Street mansion; she missed being one of many, easily overlooked. She thought about Gwen, who wanted so desperately to dream of Colin; she thought about Ana, who wanted a life of luxury. What did she want for herself? Ash swept a pile of dried peas into the kettle hanging over the kitchen fire and added a handful of ham. She stoked the fire, and as the flames leapt up she remembered the bonfire, and the dancers, and the look on the huntress’s face. Ash put the lid on the kettle and did not think about her question anymore.
The next morning, Ana did not come downstairs for breakfast. Lady Isobel sipped at her tea and said, “Aisling, go upstairs and see what is taking Ana so long. Her breakfast is getting cold.”
When Ash opened the door to Ana’s room, she found her stepsister awake and sitting at the window looking out at the courtyard, dusted with snow. “Your mother is asking for you,” Ash said.
“I’m not going down,” Ana replied. “Tell her I’m ill today.”
Ash eyed her stepsister skeptically. She did not seem ill. In fact, Ana was particularly lively, with a glow in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes that made her look as if she were holding back a secret. “You don’t look unwell,” Ash observed.
Ana’s brow creased in annoyance. “Tell her I’m sick,” she stated again. “And don’t bring me any food; I can’t stand it right now.”
Ash shrugged and went to deliver the message, but her stepmother insisted that she bring Ana a boiled egg and some tea. When she carried the tray upstairs, she found Ana sitting in the same position. “Your mother told me to bring this for you,” Ash said, depositing the tray on the small table by the window seat.
“Take it away; I won’t eat it,” Ana said.
“Fine,” Ash said curtly. “I’ll just tell your mother you wouldn’t eat. She’ll probably call the physician.”
This caused Ana to actually look worried for a moment, and then she turned to Ash and said, “Aisling, I really can’t eat it, but you mustn’t tell Mother.”
Ash looked at her stepsister’s face, flushed with desperation and hope, and said, “You’re fasting, aren’t you?”
Ana colored, asking unconvincingly, “Why would I do that?”
Ash shook her head. “I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you,” she said archly, “to revert to old superstitions.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ana said, and turned away from Ash.
But Ash could still see her stepsister’s cheeks, pink from the lie. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the folded note that Gwen had given her. Walking over to her stepsister, she placed the paper on the window seat. “Here,” she said. “Read this aloud before you go to bed tonight.” She picked up the untouched tray and began to leave the room.
“You won’t tell Mother?” Ana said in a low voice.
“I won’t,” Ash promised. She took the tray back down to the kitchen, where she poured herself a cup of tea from Ana’s untouched pot, and very deliberately cracked the egg on the countertop, watching the shell splinter. She peeled it away and salted the damp, slippery white surface of the egg. When she bit off the top, the yolk fell in golden crumbles onto the scarred wooden table.
That night, after the supper dishes were washed and put away and her stepmother and stepsisters had retired to their beds, Ash sat wrapped in a warm quilt on the hearth, nodding over a book of hunting stories she had found in the library. She was half-dreaming about horses and hounds and a leaping white stag when the last log on the fire cracked, sending cinders crashing through the grate. She awoke with a start and then decided to drag herself off to bed.
As she lay her head down on the pillow she could feel herself falling into a dream, as if she were tumbling into a well involuntarily, and when she stopped falling she found herself walking down a path through the Wood. She recognized it almost immediately: This was the path that led to Rook Hill. She could see the ground ahead of her, illuminated, and she realized she was carrying a lantern in her right hand and a spade in her left. She had not been walking for long before she saw her destination: the hawthorn tree and her mother’s grave. But unlike in previous dreams, this time she had no trouble reaching the end of the path. When she emerged from the Wood, she looked toward the grave and knew with a sense of rising dread that something was wrong. She took the last few steps, her legs shaking, and saw that there was a gaping hole where there should have been earth and grass.
She shone the lantern light into the open grave, and the roots of the hawthorn tree jutted out from the soil like gnarled fingers, reaching for something that had been snatched away. The light fell on the spade she held, and she saw dirt on the blade, and the torn end of a tree root.
Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she awoke abruptly, her breath rasping in her lungs. The moonlight was streaming in through the cracks in the shutters, and she felt herself damp with sweat. The hall clock began chiming, and she counted twelve strokes before it fell silent. She lay down again and tried to go back to sleep, but the memory of the dream was too strong. Finally, she threw off the blankets and dressed in her warmest leggings and a thick woolen dress, and then opened the small trunk at the foot of her bed and pulled out the silvery cloak. She swirled it over her shoulders and went out the kitchen door.
The moon was full that night, casting a clear white light over the field and the line of the Wood in the distance. She left the kitchen garden behind her, closed the gate with a soft click, and set off across the field. The night air was like a whip against her skin, and she pulled the hood of the cloak over her head and hunched her shoulders against the cold. She felt anxious and twitchy, and as she walked all the events of the past week flooded through her mind: dressing Ana for the masque; the rain of gold coins at the bonfire; the words of Gwen’s girlish spell. And beneath it all, the dream of the empty grave making her stomach turn.
She paused for a moment at the edge of the Wood and looked back across the field at the bulk of the house, dark and still. She thrust her hands into the cloak’s interior pockets, and it rippled like the trail of a quick fish through a silent pond. Then she raised her head to the dark Wood and looked for what she was seeking. At first she only saw the trees: tall trunks edged with moonlight, fading into black-upon-black in the distance. As her eyes adjusted to the night, she gradually began to pick out the shapes along the ground, and finally she saw it: the slight signs of the beginnings of a trail. She turned toward the path and began walking.
The Wood was dark and silent, the moonlight threading its way down between naked branches to shed long dark shadows along the ground. Soon the thin, overgrown trail became a path, and then the path opened into a lane wide enough for two horses to walk abreast. She had been walking for just over an hour when she heard the music in the distance: pipes and lutes and high, clear voices singing. The music was so beautiful she ached to run toward it, but she kept her feet on the path and her eyes focused forward. She pulled the cloak closer around her as if it were armor, and tried not to listen to the music. There was laughter, too, the bright sparkling laughter of women and the answering tones of men in a language she could not understand, and it made her quiver with the urge to find the people who spoke those words.
She began to run then, forcing herself onward even though fear pulsed inside her. When she recognized the gentle slope that descended past the last few trees into the clearing behind the old house at Rook Hill, she almost sobbed with relief. She broke free of the great heavy arms of the Wood and emerged, breathless, at the hawthorn tree. She knelt down beside her mother’s grave, which was whole and untouched, and wiped away the dirt and moss that had overgrown the headstone. She lay her head down upon it and closed her eyes.
Almost immediately she felt the warmth of her mother’s embrace, her hands smoothing back the hood of the fairy cloak and brushing her dark hair away from her face. Mother, she tried to ask, what must I do? I cannot go on the way I have been….
Her mother answered, There will come a change, and you will know what to do.
But when Ash tried to demand a more specific answer, she felt her mother slip away from her as if she were made of melting snow, and when she held her tighter, there was only the tombstone beneath her hands. She felt a gaping emptiness within her that hurt like nothing she had ever felt before, as if this time, finally, was the last time her mother would come to her. From the depths of that emptiness came an upwelling of rage that made her push herself away from the grave.
“How could you leave me?” she cried out loud, scrambling up onto her feet. Her voice sounded ugly and guttural to her ears, and she did not feel like herself. She wanted to kick the gravestone; she wanted to tear out the earth beneath which her mother lay and pull the body out of the ground and shake it until it gave her an answer. She fell to the ground again and dug her fingers into the winter-hard earth, scrabbling at the soil until her fingers began to bleed.
The ground would not come up. It was frozen. Her mother was dead.
Numbed with cold, feeling as though the inside of herself had been scraped raw, Ash stood up on shaky legs several minutes later and turned her back on the grave to go back into the Wood. This time when she heard the music, she went toward it. Leaving the path, she picked her way across fallen branches and drifts of snow, and soon she saw flickering lights like fireflies in midsummer. The trees parted to reveal a mossy clearing hung with strings of silver lanterns, and in the center of the clearing a bonfire was lit, sparking and burning with unnaturally red flames. Around the fire a circle of girls danced, and some of the girls were human like herself, except when she looked at their faces, they looked mad.
Some people said that girls who were tempted to enter fairy rings lost all of their humanity from the ecstasy of the dancing. Others said that only a girl who was mad would enter a fairy ring in the first place. Ash decided that perhaps she was mad that night, so she stepped past the lanterns and entered the clearing. All around the dancing circle, men and women—no, these were fairies in their unearthly splendor—lay on cushions, crystal goblets in hand. When she entered the circle they looked at her and smiled, and then someone next to her fingered the cloak she was wearing and spoke to another in a musical language she didn’t understand. One of the fairy women came toward her, her skin nearly translucent it was so pale, her eyes hard like sapphires, but the smile on her face was entrancing.
In a lilting voice she asked, “Why a
re you so sad, little girl? We are all joy here.”
Ash couldn’t answer, because her grief and anger now seemed so superfluous in comparison to the perfection of this fairy woman, who took her hand to lead her into the dancing circle. The woman’s hand was strong and supple, and Ash saw that despite the fact that it was winter, she wore only a thin dress made of what looked like cobwebs, or maybe moonlight, if it could be run through a fairy loom. Then Ash felt someone take her other hand and pull her back away from the dancing girls, and the fairy woman turned to look at who had restrained her. The sharp anger in the woman’s eyes startled her; it was as if a beautiful mask had slid off to reveal the hungry beast within. Ash recoiled from her and looked back at the person who was pulling her away, and it was Sidhean.
He was furious; she could see the muscles of his face taut beneath his white skin, and he roared at the fairy woman in their foreign tongue. Ash felt the woman let go of her, and Sidhean dragged her out of the circle, his fingers nearly crushing her arm. “You’re hurting me,” she gasped, but he would not stop moving until they were well removed from that place and she could no longer hear the intoxicating music.
“What were you doing?” he demanded at last, letting go of her as though she burned him.
“I had a dream,” she said, and she felt confused, lightheaded; the glamour of the circle still clung to her and she looked around desperately, trying to find any trace of it in the distance.
“A dream,” he repeated coldly. “A dream of what?”
“I dreamed of my mother’s grave,” she said, and as she spoke it seemed to help banish the magic a little. She began to feel the heft of the cloak around her shoulders and the night air on her skin. “I dreamed,” she said, “that it was empty—that she had been taken.”
She looked up at him with unfocused eyes; there was some kind of fog between the two of them. He grasped her shoulders and shook her. “Your mother is dead,” he said forcefully.