Chapter Four: The Bower
My first memory on waking was of moonlight streaming in a thick shaft through a window that contained no glass.
I realized I was sitting up, staring at it, and I had no idea of where I was or how I’d gotten there. A blanket, soft and warm, was coiled around me in tiers, and I was grabbing hard to the high sides of a strange sunken bed that lay in a cut out section of the wooden floor. I shook my head, just a small back and forth motion that jarred me out of my waking dream, and came back to myself.
I looked around, and took almost nothing in. My eyes had simply glazed over and I wasn’t seeing anything. The world was a soft silver blur, with tiny hints of green and gold interspersed throughout. There was a light burning nearby, and I fixated on it. It was coming from a small knot on the wall, and it flickered like fire, but the light was silver instead of gold. Still, its light was close enough to the color of the moon or the sun seen through mist that this singular point of familiarity helped me come back from the edges of my over-exposed mind. I didn’t know where I’d gone – didn’t even know who I’d been – but the flickering light in the wall, so like the fires we’d clustered around in the Hall, drew me back into my body.
I blinked once, and the room came into focus in a rush of images that sprang forward, eager to assault me. I was in a small room with a low-hanging, unadorned ceiling. Everything was wood, and all perfectly smooth and of one piece as if carved from a solid block. The only breaks in the flowing curves were the window and a row of ten cutout rectangles with rounded corners spaced evenly down the center of the room. I was farthest from the window at the very end of the row – or the beginning, perhaps – and looking across the other nine sleeping spots I saw the nine forms of the other children from the night before.
An image came back to me of us breaking through the tree line into the clearing for the first time, and looking up at the impossible tree.
The Bower. He called it the Bower.
Once again, movement drew me out, and I turned my head to follow it.
A woman was approaching me – or at least what I thought at first to be a woman. Her features were certainly female, but in an undefined way that was entirely confusing. She had low cheekbones and a long jaw, and her torso tapered in at the waist, which was easy to see since she wore no upper-body clothing. She didn’t need to: Her chest and shoulders bore the tracery of well-define muscles, but she had no breasts to speak of, nor any nipples. It was simply smooth skin – skin dyed colors that I didn’t know skin could be. Pinkish-red was the predominant color, like some strange, exotic flower, and the rest was a flaky white: Not the slightly pink-tan to which I was accustomed, but actually white, as in the pure color of ivory or alabaster.
She said something, and at first I was unable to respond. She took a step closer and my mind snapped back to life.
“Done staring, nestling?” she snarled, thrusting her face into mine. Her teeth tapered to points, and she carried with her an air of command.
I recoiled and ducked my head, mumbling something incoherent and vaguely apologetic. One of the lessons you learn very quickly as both an orphan and an urchin is that pride is the privilege of those who know where their next meal is coming from, scant though it may be. The truly destitute would rather have food, and remain unharmed. That was me, through and through.
But something from the night before had changed me just enough that a flash of resentment flared for a brief instant in my gut before guttering out. It was like a spark hit off a rock in a dark room – a flare of brilliance that, without fuel, immediately begins to fade. I paid it no mind – if anything, I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. Pride got you hurt; pride got you killed, if you were truly unlucky. I would allow it no place in my heart – not even here, in this place that felt so right to me, like an old coat where you know all the pockets.
Why did it feel so right? I still can’t remember.
“Get on your feet,” she said, after quite a long time staring at the top of my head. I did immediately as she commanded and rose out of my bed only to realize I was stark naked. I fell back down immediately and covered my chest and groin with hands that were much too small to cover all the bare tan-pink skin.
“Are you having some sort of seizure, nestling? I told you to stand!”
I looked up through the strands of my long, ragged hair and just stared at her for a second, not knowing what she was asking. But then I saw something building in her pink-red-white eyes, and I discarded all the strange training of a life lived in deprivation. I surged to my feet and stood stock-still, my hands by my sides, fighting against an entire life’s worth of training that told me to cower and protect myself as best I could. I felt something open in my thoughts, a strange divergent road I’d never thought to take. My whole mind changed in that instant, as if something had been severed or reversed, and the instinct toward privacy disappeared as I realized on sheer intuition that worse was soon to follow.
This night was just beginning.
I still wasn’t looking the half-woman in the eye, but that was for the good. She circled me, her breath hot and heavy on my skin, so close she was almost touching me. I felt her eyes scanning my body, examining me. I tried to block her out, letting my mind go back to that strangely dreamy state I’d woken in. I was worried about the cold, standing there, but despite the moonlight streaming in through the windows, the air seemed almost balmy, and was heavy with the humidity present just before a summer storm. I felt a smile trying to rise to my lips for no reason and fought it back.
Finally satisfied, the woman-creature passed me by and moved on down the row, looking into the other small round-edge rectangles cut in the floor. One by one she woke the others, all of who seemed at first disoriented, but quickly remembered where they were. A number of them had much more trouble being naked than I did – three of the boys wouldn’t stand up straight, even after the woman-creature approached them and hiss-snarled in their faces. Her voice was the sound of knives being sharpened, and it carried with it the same sense of open danger. How they did not sense that and react to it, I will never know. I suppose that, for all the horror of my childhood, I should be grateful that it left me far better prepared for the Bower than any of the others.
“No!”
I almost forgot myself and turned my whole head to look at the sound of the noise, but stopped at the last second. The boy next to the one who’d shouted did turn and even lunged forward to help, raising a hand to strike the woman as she pulled the first boy to his feet. Faster than any of us could see, she slapped him across the face with an open palm, rocking him back. Shock rang through the room like the vibrations of a struck bell, and the boy, cowed into stillness and silence, stood numb and red-cheeked.
“Do not interfere,” the woman-creature said with stone-cold certainty that she would be obeyed. “If you interfere, you will be punished.”
I couldn’t help but shift my eyes just enough to peer out from behind the ragged curtain of my hair and glance toward the offending boy. He had long black hair cut about his head to cover his ears and fall over his forehead, and was the particular kind of skinny that comes by nature not by deprivation. His large brown eyes were round and made him look like a cornered animal, but try as I could to feel sorry for him, I didn’t. This world played by the rules I was familiar with, not the ones he was privileged enough to expect – he would learn them, or he’d face the consequences.
“No – no! Give us our clothes! You can’t hit me!”
She sneered at him, and I knew instantly that he had said, if possible, something to make the situation even worse. I still do not understand people who try to assert what is patently untrue. Whoever or whatever this person was, she certainly could hit us.
He saw the look as well and his fear turned to anger in a flash of emotion that roared across his face like a flood. His mouth pulled down and out as his full lips turned into the pouted curl of contempt, and he kicked the woman.
The
foot landed a solid blow, smacking against her thigh, but she stood rock-still, unmoved. She looked down at him still, but now the sneer was gone, and in its place was an emotionless slate that was ten times as frightening.
The responding blow was brutal. She struck him with the side of her hand right at the base of his neck, causing his limbs to jerk out straight and over-extend as if struck by lightning. He cried out and tried to retreat, but she grabbed him and rammed her knee into his stomach. He cried out again. I saw tears collect in his eyes, and that spark in me was struck again, seeing him in pain for nothing more than asking for clothes, but just as quickly I smothered the thought. She’d told him there would be consequences – she’d given him the choice. If he didn’t listen, then it was his fault he suffered.
“Stand up straight,” she hissed at him through her pointed teeth, and he obeyed, even as the pooling tears rolled down his face and his whole body shook. I tried not to look at him, his nakedness now somehow more shameful than the rest of ours, and told myself to stay away from him; he was the weak link in this group, the impulsive one. You always had to stay away from people like that – they were the first to go.
The other two boys, the one he’d been trying to help and the one beyond him, stood up as well, though not completely straight, somehow convinced they could conceal some of their nakedness if they curved their spines. The second boy was about the size of the first boy, though with a decidedly rounder stomach and a darker complexion, but the third boy was at least as tall as the woman-creature herself, if not half an inch taller. He was the only one of us that had hair anywhere but on his head, and what there was of it was thick, black, and curling. Something flashed in my mind about what Robin had said the night before to the wolf-like man he’d called Gwyn ap Nudd, but I dismissed it from my mind. He hadn’t been talking about that boy – or if he had, it had only been in jest. No, he’d been talking about the last boy, the one at the end of the line, who, like me, had purposely done nothing to provoke our warden. As soon as he’d woken and realized what was going on, he’d stood up, hands at his sides, and stared at the ground. I don’t know if he was conscious of me then, but I suspect it.
The other girls, like me, had caught on and were at least smart enough to stare at the floor. One of them was silently weeping and shaking with fear; another looked too shocked to react; a third looked up and spoke.
Like an idiot.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Immediately, the half-woman was back in front of the girl, staring her down, snarling in her face. The girl cowered back, curiosity replaced with shock and terror.
“I – I just asked a q-question –”
“Let me help you understand something,” the woman hissed, her tongue momentarily flicking out of her mouth to taste the air, sampling the girl’s fear. “From this moment on, you ask no questions, you get no answers, and you do nothing but what I say. If you speak out again, you will regret it, more than you already do.”
She stared at the girl, who, too late, realized she should lower her eyes. Her recently washed honey-blonde hair in numerous braided tails fell in front of her face, and she quivered from head to toe.
“As for where you’re going,” she moved away from the girl and turned to me; I immediately flicked my eyes back to the floor, getting them there just before she noticed I’d been watching, “you go nowhere until you straighten your nestle.”
Her sharp teeth just barely missed each other as she sneered at me; I could hear her mouth opening wide and shutting with a clack.
“Do not make me repeat myself, nestlings,” she hissed, spitting out the final word as if it were an accusation. “All of you – now!”
Galvanized into motion, I spun to look at the bed in which I’d slept.
Was that a ‘nestle?’
It was the only messy thing I could see, with the soft yellow-white sheets pulled from under the sides of the bed and the small round pillow crammed between the mattress and the wooden side.
Of course, I’d never straightened a bed before.
Feeling the woman watching me, I bent and began pulling the sheets at random points, straightening them and trying desperately to think of what else I could do to make it neat. On a spur of inspiration, I began tucking them in around the sides of the mattress. I’d never had a mattress, aside from one with busted seams spilling straw that we’d found in an alley, but this one seemed to be stuffed with what felt like several pounds of feathers.
“Don’t just watch her – do it!”
It was only then that I realized I was the only one who’d burst into motion, but at the woman’s whipping command the others fell to the floor and began pulling their own sheets straight in imitation, and I felt a huge sigh of relief well up inside me. I stifled it before it could pass my lips, but I still felt it course through my body.
I finished and stood again; I glanced at her, not expecting a word of praise, but at least expecting an acknowledgement of what I’d done. The woman-creature raked her eyes across my face, snarling neither praise nor criticism, before she turned to scrutinize the others. Her entire back was covered in miniature red spines, like those of a porcupine. They were almost like thick hairs, protruding from just beneath her skin.
As soon as the others finished, she strode in front of us again, flicking her eyes back and forth between us all, watching us for any signs of rebellion. This time none of us, not even the black haired boy with the slap-reddened cheek and blooming bruises, looked at her.
“Good. You will call me Ai’Ilyn. I am your Ilyn.”
She pronounced the name “a-ill-in,” and the title “ill-in,” and didn’t deign to explain either. I waited for one of the others to ask her about it, but it looked like all suicidal tendencies had, for the moment, been suppressed.
“You are Oberon’s children now. All who come here start off as you do, and they start off earning their place. All of you are here for a reason, even if that reason is not clear to you. All you need to know, all your entire world should be focused on, is that you must obey me in everything you do. There is no one else who wants you – no one who is willing to spirit you back to the place from whence you came. You are part of the Fae, and you are under my care and command. There is no choice in this – do not make the mistake of thinking that there is. You were born to come here, and there is no way out but through.”
She fell silent and watched us. What was she talking about? All of us were here for a reason? We were born to come here?
“From this point on, you will speak only when spoken to. All privileges here are earned; in time, you will earn the privilege of speaking. If you do not follow this rule, you will be punished; if you do, rewarded.”
“But what if we want to go back?” the black-haired boy said, the words squeaking out through his tear-and-snot-streaked lips. I cringed even before Ai’Ilyn approached him, and the slap that rang hollowly through the room came as no surprise to anyone. The boy cried out and cringed back, and then did something even more foolish: he came forward and swung a fist.
I was so stunned that I didn’t truly understand what happened next until later, when I’d had time to put all the pieces together in the right order. Ai’Ilyn reached out and grabbed the boy’s fist, stopping his pathetic flail dead, and in the same movement struck with her other hand, knifing into his throat with a stiff-finger blow.
He gagged and doubled over immediately, all thought of further conflict totally absent, his only concern now the need to get air into his lungs.
I remember very clearly that none of us tried to help him. I think we all expected someone else to, but none of us ended up doing it. Something in me still hates that, even knowing him as he became, knowing that he deserved that and more. But back then, back when all of us were new … maybe it would have changed things.
Ai’Ilyn knelt in front of him as he continued to gag and gasp and cry. That was when I first saw through his mask – his shock had forced him to drop it, and I could se
e a cold calculation behind his eyes, like a thief caught in the act of robbing. His tears had stopped, and I realized that they too were a mask, that he’d been putting it all on for show.
“Speaking is a privilege you have yet to earn,” Ai’Ilyn said, her voice barely above a whisper but loud enough to carry. “The next time you break this rule, the punishment will be worse. Should you break it again after that, the punishment will be worse again, and so on. Perhaps you’ll heed this warning and stay silent, or perhaps you’ll test me until you find yourself with broken bones. Do not make the mistake of thinking that you will garner pity by being a martyr: none of the Fae care about whether you hobble around the Bower. Until you change, you are beneath notice.”
She stood and looked at the rest of us, her face cold, bare stone.
“All of you are beneath notice.”
She let that pronouncement sit, her eyes pulling in our fear, harvesting it as if she intended to feed on it, almost appearing to swell visibly as she breathed it in.
“Follow.”
She left the room.
None of us moved at first. The darker-skinned boy with the round stomach turned to the boy who was still choking as he tried to breathe and hesitantly tried to help him to his feet. The other boy knocked his hands away and continued to cower on the floor, while the rest of us remained in our frozen positions. We just looked at each other, all too shocked to move.
The silent boy on the opposite side of the room from me was the first to break the tableau. He moved quickly, with determination, and made directly for the entrance to the room, set in the wall across from the window. When he crossed in front of me, he caught my eye, and I was struck by the realization that we, at least, knew how this game was played.
I fell into step beside him, and together we left the room.
The way out was strange – the opening led to a short twisted pathway barely two steps long that then led out onto a long corridor that seemed to be entirely encased in one solid tube of wood. This main corridor that we emerged into was the dark russet brown of deep bark and I felt a sense of vertigo as the pieces of our prison fell in place.
We were inside the branches of the Bower tree.
How it was possible, I had no way of knowing, but I accepted it with the simple reasoning of a child, the kind of reasoning that believes in dreams and fantasies as readily as facts. Looking back, I think that’s what kept me sane.
A handful of creatures were walking past us down the long narrow corridor into which we had emerged, lit by silver light that beamed down from bright stones sunk into the wood of the ceiling. The creatures were made strange and terrifying by the shadows the light cast, and their varying shapes and sizes, some huge and bulking, some lean and tall, still others short and shifty, blended together to create one large canvas of unfamiliar life. Some of them, as they passed by, watched us curiously, their expressions hidden by the shifting shadows that my daylight-accustomed eyes could not yet pierce.
I felt the first boy, the smart one, shift, and realized he was hurrying to follow the disappearing form of Ai’Ilyn as she moved off to our right, the red spines of her back now flush against her skin, coating it in streaks of red through which the flaky white base color glowed in the moonlit halls. I hurried to catch them both, and heard the scrabbling of bare feet over wood as the others left the room and fell into a line behind me, all of us too overwhelmed by the creatures around us to even think of leaving the company of fellow humans. Even I was crouched over now, trying to hide my nakedness, though whatever shame I might have felt was drowned in the overwhelming sense of dislocation that grew in me with every step.
We passed through corridors so long they made up what could have been entire streets. What the half-woman Ai’Ilyn had called the Fae moved around us, giving us a healthy space, going in and out through a series of open passageways that branched off to either side of us down the long span of the corridor. The path we took twisted and turned in the irrational, chaotic way of all growing things, but Ai’Ilyn led us unerringly forward. We took a blind turn and I felt fresh air hit my face. I rounded the corner and emerged from the side of the leviathan Bower onto the first of a series of platforms that had grown out of the tree itself, a flat place with not even the hint of a railing. We were higher in the air here than I could have thought possible, and I could see the green expanse of the field far below us, glinting and winking as moonlight reflected off the gathering dewdrops that clung to the blades of grass. There were creatures there that looked like Ilyn, moving among the field, and smaller figures too, ones that I couldn’t quite make out.
I gasped, even though I knew the importance of remaining silent. Ai’Ilyn either didn’t hear or didn’t care – she kept walking, and the boy in front of me did as well, the muscles that lined the brief expanse of his shoulders outlined in the light of the too-large moon that filtered down through the long flat leaves of the branches above us.
As we continued our journey, crossing back into the Bower trunk through a hole in the thick bark that looked like a black mouth, I realized we were descending now, going down through ever-widening corridors past an increasingly bizarre collection of creatures. Towering beasts with gray-green skin walked by us, and smaller insectile creatures hissed and buzzed. Several creatures that looked like Ai’Ilyn moved past us as well, in colors either a few shades lighter than her or a few shades darker, but all of whom she greeted with a vicious smile and an affable nod. Some were different colors entirely, and these she largely ignored save for a chosen few to whom she nodded. The ten of us children, the only ones in this strange menagerie that bore any strict resemblance to humanity, clung very closely together. I doubt any of them, even those who’d acted out against Ai’Ilyn earlier, had any thoughts of running or resistance then.
We passed through the Hall from the night before, and I noticed that the rows upon rows of braziers that had been lit with the strange silvery light had been banked, and that the tables were empty. There were figures moving up and down the rows, apparently cleaning, but I couldn’t make out what they were doing. I lifted my head as much as I dared and strained my eyes, trying to see –
Other children.
They were older than us – old enough that some of the boys had begun to grow gristly patches of hair on their faces and the girls had long, uneven waterfalls of hair halfway down their backs. They wore strange off-white clothing that hid most of their bodies save for their arms and faces, and when the silvery light caught them I could see that some bore scars across their faces, hands, or arms. But despite whatever past wounds they had sustained, there were no current wounds in sight, and they all looked strong and dexterous. They moved in a simple rhythm, each gesture fluid and graceful, no effort wasted, scrubbing the tables and floor with hard pumice stones and soapy rags.
We rounded a corner and they were lost from sight, though my mind continued to grasp at them and wonder why they were here and if we were meant to become like them. I tried to focus back on what was happening around me and realized I was completely lost. I didn’t know where we’d gone in the great Hall or which door we’d taken, but it was very clear that we were still headed on our downward trajectory, following Ai’Ilyn down a circling stair that curved around and around into the earth. Roots began to poke through the ceiling in small cracks, and the smooth wood of the tree turned into stone and hard-packed dirt.
I felt the walls begin to close in on me, and I started to find it hard to breathe. I had never been in a space like this before – never been underground at all, and now here we were, descending deep, deep, deep – deeper underground than I had ever been above it, even on the highest hilltop I had ever climbed.
We burst out into a cavern. Cold air hit me in the face, and a harsh, sharp smell singed my nostrils. I hugged myself as I shivered, the skin all over my body bunching into goose bumps, and tried to keep up as I stared around at still stranger wonders. Flickering moonstones that shone with their eerie, unnatural light lit the rocky
edges of the monstrous cavern, and a single shaft of light speared through a hole above us, streaming down between giant, gnarled fists of root to spill silver illumination across a lake of black water far below. The pool itself was perfectly still and so wide across that I couldn’t see the other side. I heard splashing but knew that made no sense: no ripples disturbed the surface of the underground lake. I strained my eyes and saw shadowy figures moving on the far shore that I could almost just make out, but they disappeared as if aware I was watching them.
Ai’Ilyn continued to lead us down, this time along one of several paths that branched out from the base of the stair. The path led away from the still, black lake, and the smooth feel of wood beneath my feet gave way to the grainy, painful slip of cold, rocky dirt.
After several twists and turns, we rounded a large boulder and I saw two smaller pools below us, both of which were bubbling with foul-smelling minerals. The path down was narrow, and only one of us could go down at a time. I followed Ai’Ilyn and the boy in front of me with caution. After the long trip down the tree into the bowels of the earth, I had begun to suspect that more than just altered pigmentation separated this strange woman from humanity. Each step she took was sure-footed, and her balance was perfect, while the rest of us stumbled, nearly blind in the dark, and cut our bare feet on sharp rocks that jutted up between the smaller capillary roots of the giant tree.
I ran suddenly into the boy ahead of me before recoiling from the cold slap of his skin. I’d been looking down, trying to find a clear path to take, and hadn’t noticed that Ai’Ilyn had pulled up short.
I looked up just in time to see a flash of white and red skin cross my vision, and sudden shocking fear swept over me. She was rushing toward me, and I felt heat rolling off of her bare androgynous chest, saw her filed teeth gnashing in a snarl –
She shot past me, throwing me into a root outcropping that dug into my back and sent pain through my body. I gasped and tried to breathe, looking up desperately to see what was happening.
The skinny black-haired boy from before had taken the opportunity of the winding single-file path to run. Through the white fog of pain, I could see his coppery-skinned body loping back up the path at an impressive speed, his bare feet kicking up tufts of dirt as he jumped over roots back up the path. I thought for a mad, wild instant that he would do it, that he would break free and rush back through the Hall, through the trees, and into the world we’d come from, if only he could reach the stairs.
Ai’Ilyn caught him in seconds.
She didn’t move like a normal woman – didn’t move like a human being, even though she bore some trace resemblance. She bounded forward, ripping her feet into the earth and throwing herself forward, jumping up to push off the high curve of an arcing root and send herself flying through the air straight for the boy.
The first blow was so savage that it threw the small pale figure straight to the ground. Ai’Ilyn dropped out of the sky above him, landed on his back, and smashed his head into the ground. She reared back her head and a high keening wail filled the air that made me shiver uncontrollably.
The boy was concealed now behind the roots that lined the path, and I couldn’t see what was happening; I only saw the Ilyn reach down and grab something, and heard the blood-curdling shriek of the boy.
Someone farther up the line retched over the side of the path, one of the other girls, the blonde one, whose fear had punched her in the gut. I felt nothing but numb, filled as I was with the sudden perverse certainty that she had killed him. Images of blood soaked hands filled my mind, blood covering red and white skin like glaze on a finished tile. I was frozen to the spot, truly at a loss for the first time since coming to the Bower, truly realizing the horror of our predicament, realizing we had no way out, realizing that I’d made a mistake after all, that everything I’d felt the night before about belonging here had been a trick, a terrible lie.
I was only jostled out of that mind-numbing shock when I saw Ai’Ilyn turn and stand straight. She came walking down the path with a swift, arrogant tread, the walk of a hunter who has demonstrated her mastery, and I saw she was carrying a pale, limp form effortlessly in one hand, as if it weighted nothing. I thought suddenly that she had skinned him, that she was carrying his flesh back to us like some grotesque spoil of war, but with the first full breath I’d managed to take in the time since I’d been thrown into the gnarled root, I was able to grab hold of myself again. The figure wasn’t just a skin, it was the whole boy, and he appeared, if unconscious, mostly unharmed. There were bloody marks on his back, likely from where he’d been driven into the rocky dirt, and his eyes had rolled up in his head to show pure white, but he was still whole and intact. All the blood had rushed from his face, leaving his copper complexion a few shades lighter, and his nakedness made him seem pathetic – made him seem like nothing more than the young, frightened boy that he truly was.
A hand grabbed my shoulder.
The fear I’d been too numb to fully feel rushed through me with fiery insistence, and I grabbed the hand, ready to twist it, break it, get it off of me in any way possible as if it were a disembodied entity separate from the arm and head and person I should have rationally known directed it, a venomous personified spider that threatened my very life.
“Stop!” hissed a voice.
I loosened my grip a bare fraction as the human voice penetrated my mind and pushed away the roiling cloud edges of my fear.
The boy behind me, the one at the head of the line.
“Get out of her way,” the voice whispered, pulling insistently at my shoulder but stopping short of actually forcing me back.
Ai’Ilyn was coming toward us, the boy held in one hand, and she was not slowing down as she approached. The others were still along the path, save for the girl who’d retched over to the side, and I spotted what the boy behind me had seen only seconds before: anyone caught in her way would very surely live to regret it.
I shrugged his hand off of me and moved as far to the side as I could, pushing myself against the wall of roots and soil into which I had just recently been thrown. The smart boy did the same, and as he ducked out of the way the silvery moonlight coming through the hole in the cavern roof caught his hazel eyes and revealed a look of cool, calculated understanding.
Ai’Ilyn continued down the path, and the others realized too late that she wasn’t going to stop. The last in the line, the other boy who had protested the original introduction of Ai’Ilyn into our lives, didn’t move in time. Indeed, he almost seemed sure she would stop.
She strode up to him and cuffed him across the face, sending him sprawling to the side of the path with a shout of surprise. The next one in line, the girl with the light honey-colored hair and freckled skin, tried to move, but was too slow, and, in turn, suffered the same fate. The others dove out of the way, rushing to either side of the path, two coming perilously close to the downhill slope opposite the wall I’d pressed against that led down a sheer rocky cliff side to the shore of the dark lake below.
Ai’Ilyn came to us, the hazel-eyed boy and me, and paused.
“You’re learning,” she said. “Good.”
She stood there, looming over us as we cowered among the cold dirt and roots, and then continued on as if she’d never stopped, still holding the unconscious form of the black-haired boy. Waves of alternating fever and chills ran through me, and my hands unconsciously grasped handfuls of cold dirt from the wall behind me. There was a root pressing into the small of my back, bowing my naked chest and stomach out in front of me, but my bare body was the least of my worries now.
Ai’Ilyn turned back after several steps, seemed to sense we needed further provocation, and shouted back with a voice that boomed around the cavern:
“FOLLOW!”
The hazel-eyed boy and I were the first to move, scrambling back to our feet and launching ourselves down the path in her wake. I heard the others making noise behind me, but I didn’t look back to see if they were followin
g. My eyes stayed trained forward, keeping the back of our savage leader in constant sight.
I glanced at the boy in front of me, noting with distaste the way the dirt from where we’d squeezed around and under the roots had coated the side of his body. I surreptitiously scraped as much dirt as I could off of myself, almost daring him with my eyes on his back to turn around and look at me again.
We rounded a final mound of rocky soil and saw before us the two pools I’d noticed from farther up the cavern side. They were lit by a ring of torches that flickered with gold and amber fire that licked the end of oddly spear-shaped wooden staves. It was the first golden light I’d seen here, and it gave everything a ruddy glow that seemed somehow forced. The water itself was opaque and bubbling, boiling up from somewhere down below with a viscous yellow substance that collected along the edges of the pool like scum along the rim of a pond.
Other creatures lined the far edge of the pool. Half of them looked up at us and left as soon as we emerged around the final pathway turn, but three of the ones who stayed stood and turned to us, and we all faltered and stared at them, even the boy in front of me.
They were huge, towering over us, and their skin was a deep green mixed with brown and gray, like sprouting seeds covered in rich dark soil. They wore no clothing, and didn’t need to – their skin looked as thick as bark, and they appeared totally sexless.
Ai’Ilyn strode forward into the pool and threw the boy into the churning water.
Fear clutched at me as I shrank back, but my panic was dispelled when the boy broke through the barrier between water and air with a gasping, hacking cough that turned into a drowned shriek. He floundered about blindly, but two things were immediately clear: he could stand, and he had not been scalded. He tried to pull himself to shore, pushing through the pool and throwing off waves of mineral-crusted water about him, even disturbing one or two of the creatures at the far end of the pool, who looked over at us with dark, predatory eyes.
Ai’Ilyn grinned; the torches turned the expression into a leer laced with obvious traces of eagerness, and she grabbed his head and thrust him under the water again, holding him there as he thrashed about.
“All of you are to wash yourself,” she said casually over the flaky, molted skin of her red-pink shoulder. She never took her avid gaze off of the boy she was casually drowning. “You stink of the human world.”
I kept my breathing even as I watched this, telling myself she wouldn’t let him drown, forcing myself to believe it. But my hands were balled into fists, my nails digging into my palms, and my teeth were clenched so tightly that I could feel the tension all the way through my neck and down into my back. I wanted to do something, knew I should do something, but I stayed where I was.
She’ll only do the same to me.
And then the darker, harsher thought:
And he deserves it anyway.
Ai’Ilyn turned and looked straight at me.
I stood frozen to the spot, my feet trying to ball up into knots of cramped tension around the gritty patch of dirt beneath me. My eyes were open so wide they felt ready to pop out of their sockets. Her red eyes were brilliant, burning into me as she dared me to protest, but I forced myself to stay where I was, forced myself to stare back. I screwed up my face and held her gaze. She wouldn’t do it – she wouldn’t let him drown. She was punishing him for breaking the rules – that was all – that was all – wasn’t it?
She smiled, revealing her pointed teeth, and let the boy go. With an explosion of water, he surfaced again, this time crying in fear and relief, gasping and choking for breath, snot and tears running down his face. I breathed out a ragged sigh of relief. One of the giant gray-green creatures caught him and pulled him away from us, as easily as a cat with a half-dead mouse.
The other two approached us, their skin eerie in the torchlight.
“Wash yourselves,” one of them said, the voice coming out like the creaking, settling sound of an old tree in high wind, “or the Urden will wash for you. The Urden are here to assist the Ilyn. This is the Urden’s only warning.”
I was the first one to move, though Smart Boy was only seconds behind. We both plunged down into the water, gasping as the heat swept over us, burning our extremities as we became accustomed to the warmth. I waded in further, ignoring the pain of rushing blood, and began to scrub against my skin with my bare hands.
“All the way in,” Ai’Ilyn said.
I turned and saw she had abandoned Trouble Boy, who was half-in and half-out of the pool, lying on the rocky shore as he tried to regain full consciousness, watched over by one of the hulking shapes – one of the Urden.
I scrubbed more fiercely, trying to show that I was doing what was required of me, but she only sneered and took another step forward. I tried to pull away from her, but she was too fast.
I felt a sharp pain as my dirty, tangled hair was grabbed in her fist, and then just had time to close my eyes before I was doused in the deep pool. My first instinct was to panic, and I felt a scream building up inside my chest, pushing its way up my throat. But the force of Ai’Ilyn’s hand holding me in place was undeniable, and I knew, with whatever part of me that was mulishly holding onto my mental faculties, that if I struggled she would only make it worse. She enjoyed this – she enjoyed forcing us to obey.
The only way out is through.
I went limp in her arms, and my fear disappeared.
The heat died down after the first few seconds, and I kept my eyes squeezed tightly shut. The cuts that I had accumulated on my body and face during the previous night’s mad dash toward the Bower burned like acid and ate away at my self-control, but I forced myself to let the pain flow around and past me, keeping myself immune, like a boulder in a rushing stream.
More time passed. I felt the fear begin to gnaw at the edges of the self-contained void into which I had cast myself, threatening to shatter it, but I refused to let it in. I pushed the fear down, deep inside, forcing it into the shape of a black box, and walling it up behind wall after wall of stubborn resolve.
The hand released me.
I emerged from the water in a crashing wave and gulped down a huge gasp of air, water rolling off my head and rinsing through the straggled strands of my hair. I turned around, not knowing whether I intended to break away from Ai’Ilyn or to wait for her next action, only to find myself alone. The triangular figure of her back and shoulders was moving toward the shore, to where one of the other children was performing the same half-hearted cleaning that I had been. Two of the giant forms – the Urden – had circled around behind the rest of the children and were forcing them in toward Ai’Ilyn.
One of them glanced toward me, a shockingly human eye staring out from tight pale green skin, and I immediately began to scrub myself again with vigor, running my hands through my tangled hair, pulling at knots to undo them, nearly ripping the offending locks from my head in my desire to show my compliance.
The other children – the smart ones – were doing the same as me. Smart Boy was scrubbing himself with some kind of porous stone he’d picked up, all the while keeping a hazel eye on Ai’Ilyn as she terrorized the others, and two girls to my left were taking turns furiously scrubbing each other’s back.
The rest of the children were on the shore still, waging a losing battle.
I doubt even a fully-grown man trained in combat could stand a chance against one of the Urden, and the melodramatic tantrums of the children who hadn’t yet realized the position they were in was almost comic. They beat against the thick arms and rock-wood chests with no effect. The creatures gathered them up in their huge hands and simply waded into the water and dunked them with the unceremonious boredom of workmen doing a routine job. Ai’Ilyn rounded up the stragglers, including the black-haired Trouble Boy who’d finally regained enough presence of mind to start wailing at her once again. She cuffed him across the mouth and threw him back in the water. He came back up, gasping for breath and crying out for help.
I tu
rned away and continued scrubbing. Eventually his yelling stopped, though I couldn’t bring myself to look at him again. Images of a broken jaw, or missing teeth, filled my mind. I wanted to hope that wasn’t what was happening to him – wanted to hope that the thudding sounds I heard coming from the direction of the other children in the hands of the Urden, too, were nothing more than superficial reminders of who held the power here, reminders of who was in charge.
What had we been pulled into?
But as terrifying as the experience was, it could only last for so long. Far apart from the torture it at first had seemed, the pool truly did clean us, and those of us who took it upon ourselves to do as we’d been commanded soon found ourselves left alone to perform our task. When I started feeling as though I was about to scrub my skin off entirely, I noticed the others were retreating back from the shallow middle of the pool to the rocky soil of the shore, wringing out their hair and brushing off the yellow scrum of minerals that had collected on their bodies.
I hurried to follow them, and saw that Ai’Ilyn was dragging Trouble Boy and another boy with dark skin up onto the shore, both of whom seemed to have taken it into their heads to disobey by trying to do nothing. I looked away from them again before I saw the inevitable punishment that was to follow.
She would break them. I’d seen it happen to others in the life I’d come from – I didn’t need to watch it again. The outcome would be the same.
When we had gathered, the towering Urden who’d spoken before spoke again:
“Leave the pool,” it said to us, its voice creaking and settling with an enchanting regularity that seemed almost like a song. “The Urden are done with you. The Urden leave you with your Ilyn. The Urden will see you when the moon turns. Do not come at other times; always come at this time. If you do not come, the Urden will find you and the Urden will bring you here. We three are tasked to you, and you alone, for this place and time. Do not try to avoid the Urden.”
They turned as one to leave, and that was the end of it.
“Follow.”
Ai’Ilyn’s voice came from directly behind me, and I jumped to the side, my skin crawling. She walked past, dragging the two trouble children behind her, their feet madly and ineffectually scrambling at the ground. The rest of the children followed after, all resistance gone. I was the last to fall into line, except for the hazel-eyed boy.
As we fell into step our gazes caught and tangled. He looked like a bedraggled rat now, black hair clumped and flattened, and the resolve I’d seen earlier was flickering. I realized that he was trying just as hard to hang onto sanity as I was. I wanted to say something to him, but the words caught in my throat.
We followed Ai’Ilyn with no further incident up and away from the pools, meeting not another soul until we were back at the base of the giant tree, where we proceeded to make our way up through the Hall, up the stairs, and through the long circular passageways. She led us through the maze of corridors past rooms with vaulting ceilings, through small side passages barely wide enough to squeeze through, and along railing-less platforms that branched out over thin air, hauling the two boys in her tight-fisted grip the whole time. They continued to fight, screaming and crying, lashing about at anything and anyone who happened to be passing, but she largely ignored them until one of them came close to striking a passing Fae.
She pulled up short and hefted the boy into the air with no prelude.
It was the first boy, Trouble Boy. His face was bloody where it had been cut against the rocks, and his eyes were round with terror as he shouted, again and again, senseless words that echoed up the corridor and struck the rest of us like a lash, making us cringe and forcing us to look away.
Ai’Ilyn arched her neck and rammed her head against his.
The boy’s eyes rolled back in his head, and his body went limp. The sound of his screams cut off, and I could hear my own heart beating in my ears as I stared at Ai’Ilyn as if she were the only thing in the world.
That was the first and last time I seriously contemplated running. In that moment, watching Ai’Ilyn and the obvious pleasure she’d taken in silencing the boy, seeing how absorbed she was in her triumph and hatred for whatever he was, for whatever we were, I thought madly that this was my one and only chance. My feet shifted beneath me, and all the carefully reasoned arguments about following instructions I’d been plying myself with ever since I’d woken to that alien face now seemed to disappear in a puff of smoke. I saw my escape – she was occupied, I could run, I could go, now –
A flicker of movement caught my attention from the corner of my eye, and I turned to see three other creatures like Ai’Ilyn walking past us, all watching carefully. Ilyn – that was what she’d called them, that was what she’d said she was. The flaky whiteness was all but gone from them so that most of their skin was red or pink. As they walked past me, I stopped moving. My weight shifted back, and all thoughts of running stalled. I could see what would happen if I did – I could see why Ai’Ilyn didn’t need any help from others of the Fae to keep us in line. We were known here. We had all come in the night before – was it only the night before? – and we stuck out like sore thumbs.
How could I have thought I belonged here? None of us belonged here. We’d been called into an alien world and placed in bondage. We were captives, and, if we tried to run, every single creature we passed would grab us and hold us until Ai’Ilyn had time to track us down, one by one, and punish us for disobeying.
As if beckoned by my thoughts, she turned to face us, and sneered, a small smear of the boy’s blood spread almost artistically across her forehead.
“I am in control,” she said, her filed teeth glinting in the dim light of the branch corridor. “No one cares how much you cry or whine or beg. You are here because you must be. You will not and cannot leave. All you can do is what you are told.”
She turned and continued on, still holding the boy by the hair, dragging his feet along the ground behind her. The other boy, the one with darker skin, looked so shocked by his companion’s unconsciousness that he forgot to resist. He simply went limp and followed along beside Ai’Ilyn as she pulled him. In fact, when she realized he was now walking under his own power, she let him go with a hiss, and continued on without looking back. The boy quickly fell into line with the rest of us, his eyes wide.
After another series of turns, we emerged from the side of a branch so high up in the limbs of the Bower that I had to stop myself from retreating back inside. The world beneath me seemed to narrow and spin, the ground mocking me from so far below.
I looked up, trying to keep my mind on moving forward, on following Ai’Ilyn along the path that wound through the branches here, a path with no rails, and saw the moon riding high to my left. It was beautiful, and perfectly clear, and far larger than I’d ever seen before. Wind whispered through the leaves above us.
We passed from the precarious path into another room, this one built outside the tree in graceful lines that belied expert craftsmanship. It looked almost as if the room had grown out of the tree itself.
All of us, all nine as one, froze where we stood.
The room was huge, far larger than it looked outside, and filled with thousands of beautiful strands of yellow-white silk, some as thick as a rope, already braided, others so fine they were almost translucent. In the center of the room, sunk into the tree in a perfectly round pit, was an enormous loom that towered up toward the ceiling, its shuttle clacking and pounding as it raced back and forth.
Tending the loom and spinning the silk were creatures with the torsos and faces of women, and the bulbous bodies and limbs of spiders.
They crawled all over the room before us like a collection of spliced nightmares, faceless terrors from an ancient story. The skin of their torsos and faces was normal human skin, while the bulbous lower spider’s body was universally dark, either black or deep earth brown. I caught traces of red and purple that crossed the abdomens in distinct patterns, and the creatures ranged in siz
e from those no larger than a child my age to some that looked to be as strong and heavy as one of the Urden who lived down deep below. As we entered, a number of them paused and turned to look at us, and I saw that some of them had many eyes stuck into their heads haphazardly, as if a god had constructed and sent them out into the world without caring to refine the work.
Terror clutched me and froze me to the spot. I heard gasps and groans from the others, and more than one of them began to weep.
But none of us ran. None of us even tried.
“Arandil!”
One of the creatures at the loom turned at Ai’Ilyn’s call.
“We need clothing for the nestlings!”
My knees went weak at the mention of clothing – I never thought I’d be so relieved at the thought something so simple – but the relief turned to revulsion as the creature called scuttled forward on her eight long legs, tilting her head to the side as she approached, watching us with a neutral expression. She scanned us one by one with eyes that were blank and glazed, high black orbs that took up too much of her otherwise human face. My breath caught in my throat in a spasm of indrawn air, and I rocked in place, locking my knees to keep from falling. The edges of my vision blacked out and I realized I was only a little push away from fainting.
“Are these them? They looked well scrubbed at least. Poor darlings – terrified as always. I’ll take them from here, Ai’Ilyn.”
The voice that came from her mouth was soft and motherly, and it made no sense at all. How could this creature, this hellish creation of a child’s nightmare, speak like a kindly woman?
Ai’Ilyn grunted in acknowledgement. She dropped Trouble Boy where she stood, leaving him in a heap on the floor, and retreated to the edge of the room to lounge against a wall, the perfect picture of apathetic boredom.
The creature scuttled forward, her powerful legs, black and segmented, making scrabbling scritch-scratch sounds on the wood floor. The rest of us retreated, drawing together as if for warmth, and watched her bend over Trouble Boy, whom Ai’Ilyn had left to puddle on the floor. The second boy was frozen in terror, and a small pool of liquid began to pool beneath him as he wet himself. The half-woman spider reached out her human hand for him.
“Do not worry, child,” the woman said, her mouth smiling in what should have been a reassuring way. “You will suffer no harm from me.”
She turned and hissed something back into the cavernous room.
Two creatures detached themselves from the shadowed weavings and came forward, their human torsos both clothed in simple yellow-white shirts. They gathered up the two boys in their arms – neither child gave any resistance as one was already unconscious and the second had just fainted in a pool of his own urine – as if they weighed no more than dolls.
“Take care of them,” the first creature said. “We will fit them last.”
She turned back and spoke in a matronly voice.
“My name is Arandil, and I am the First Weaver. We are the Caelyr, first given shelter by Oberon, Erlking and Ruler of the Moonlight Realms, many years ago. In return for shelter, we do what we can to clothe those who wish it, and heal those who come to harm.”
She gestured to the towering loom behind her.
“This is where we create and cut our cloth. We will make one set of clothing for each of you – and you will receive a new set each month until you pass into the madness.”
“Arandil!”
The outraged shout echoed around the room as Ai’Ilyn came away from the wall against which she’d been skulking. All activity in the room ceased as the Caelyr around Arandil turned to Ai’Ilyn and hissed. A number of them even dropped down from above her, powerful looking creatures dressed in black instead of white, blending them in perfectly with the shadows.
Ai’Ilyn didn’t seem to notice. Something about her had changed, something almost imperceptible about her stance and bearing, like an actor dropping character. She was staring at the spider-woman with a different kind of anger, one tinged with fear and shock, and she looked somehow older. But in the next second the change had reverted, and she was snarling at Arandil.
“I apologize for speaking out of turn,” Arandil said, her motherly voice now cold. “But you will keep a civil tongue in your head while you are here, or you can wait outside.”
“The nestlings are in my care,” she retorted, “and they are to know only what I tell them. That is not my wish – it’s his.”
There was a beat of uncomfortable silence.
“Indeed,” Arandil said, looking suddenly regretful. “I am in error. I shall speak no more of it. Now let me go about my business so you can go about yours.”
Ai’Ilyn retreated back to her place leaning against the wall, but, for all her apparent nonchalance, her shoulders were tight.
“Come, children,” Arandil said to us, beckoning. She turned around and moved away, her segmented legs moving in a flurry of quick, precise motions.
We moved forward as a group this time, all of us clinging together, so close that we were nearly on top of one another as we tried to stay as far away from the edges of the room and its shadowed occupants as possible.
The loom rose up before us, a huge construction of beams and pillars that grew directly out of the floor and disappeared seamlessly into the ceiling so high above. As we came closer, I looked down the hole that contained the base of the structure: a number of off-white strands of silk spun off the larger weave of the pattern made by the flying shuttle ratcheting back and forth; each strand was caught and separated into a braided pile of its own by other Caelyr, working with human hands and spider forelimbs.
Arandil led us down into this pit, where dozens of the human-spiders labored, spinning the woven silk into piles and piles of cloth, cutting off lengths with the sharp pincers of their shortest legs. She hissed something to the others, and a few of them made odd sounds back, strange rhythmic thumpings that came from deep inside their chests; it was only after a few seconds of confusion that I realized they were laughing. They looked up from their weaving work in curiosity, saw us, and smiled.
If I hadn’t been so terrified, I might have felt oddly comforted.
“Ah, here we are.”
I looked back at Arandil and saw that the two boys had been returned. The gashes in the first boy’s skin had been bound with sticky patches of off-white binding. The second boy was also bound, though around the head, and I realized he must have struck himself on the floor when he’d fallen. Neither was moving, but both had full color in their cheeks, and I could see their chests rising and falling rhythmically.
“Ellenum will help you; please step forward one at a time.”
None of us moved.
“Come now,” Arandil said, chiding us with a stern look. I felt a simultaneous shiver run through all of us at once. I realized that, if one of us didn’t step forward now, more than likely we would be forcibly separated.
I stepped forward, putting myself well within striking distance of the half-woman spider should she wish to indulge in a rash of moonlit child-feasting.
“Very good. This way.”
I followed her outstretched arm toward a second Caelyr, this one slightly smaller, brunette, and with hairy spider legs that looked a little wilted. She held out her hands and motioned me toward her, a gesture I’d seen countless times among the mothers of the towns I’d gone through, but a gesture that had never been made toward me.
I approached, still shaking, and the new Caelyr, Ellenum, grabbed my arms and spun me around. My heart started hammering in my chest again, but the skin of her hands felt entirely normal, and I realized she was measuring me. She made a clucking sound with her human tongue.
“Right leg longer than the left,” she said in perfectly understandable, though strangely accented, speech.
Another spider-woman off to the left nodded and began to pull sheaves of silk cloth out from the piles that had formed at the base of the loom, the entire structure of which still shook and quaked, l
etting out tremendous bangs every so often that were loud enough to sound like thunder.
Each of us were pulled out of the group and measured, and we soon found ourselves draped in soft silk clothing, an off-white color that looked like freshly laid eggs or the clouds in summer when they’re highlighted with the yellow reflection of wheat fields. We were given no shoes, and I was surprised when I felt a pang of disappointment.
When the two trouble boys woke, they twitched violently and let out cries of alarm, but soon quieted, apparently paralyzed by fear. It seemed that whatever madness had taken control of them had been tamed by their brief incapacitation, and they meekly allowed the Caelyr to dress them, staring at the spider-women with wide eyes and seemingly unable to move their own limbs.
When all of us were clothed, we were shuffled back to Ai’Ilyn with little ceremony; the Caelyr seemed to have forgotten us and returned to obsessing over their weaving. The one exception was Arandil, who escorted us back across the room and bade us farewell in her motherly voice. When she was gone, Ai’Ilyn took over and eyed the two newly woken boys, clearly watching for a word or noise of protest but finding none. Seeming satisfied, she growled at us to follow her. I clutched the new silk shirt tightly about me – even the smallest layer of protection was welcome.
We were led back down the tree, down through the enclosed corridors and hallways, through the grown-in hollowed-out halls and chambers draped with forest finery, and down to the ground level where the bark seemed to vibrate with activity.
Ai’Ilyn spoke to us not at all during the journey; indeed, she barely even looked back once to confirm that we were following her. She seemed absorbed in her private thoughts, and we were happy to leave her there.
We emerged once more from the large central stair into the great Hall. I saw that the others from before, the children like us, were gone. There were still people there, or at least Fae creatures, but they were the hulking green-gray of the Urden or the flaky-white-and-colored of the Ilyn, and so I withdrew into myself, wondering about the others who had been here, who they were, and where they had gone.
We passed straight through the Hall, heading this time for the large opening that spilled out onto the field through which we’d run the night before. The moon was high in the sky, as it had been the night before, but I saw now that it had begun to wane.
I wondered suddenly, for the first time, why they had woken us at night instead of during the day. And then a stranger question came to me, for which I had no answer:
What if here there was only night?
I had to squint at first – the inside of the Bower was so dark that I felt like I was emerging into daylight with the bright silvery cast of the over-large moon shining down. Gathering dewdrops covered the grass and flowers of the clearing, turning the green carpet into a spangled, twinkling field, and I realized that the humidity and heat I had woken to not so long ago had faded. I was once more grateful for the clothing we’d been given.
My eyes adjusted to the bright, moonlit scene, and my breath caught in my chest as I saw movement in the field. My mouth dropped open.
Hundreds of children, my age or a few years older, were standing just out of the direct moonlight in the shadows created by the root-hills that arched to either side of the entrance to the Hall. They were waiting restlessly, some speaking softly to one another, in clothing the same off-white silk as mine, with an air of anticipation.
I couldn’t believe it. Where had all of them been the night before? How were there so many?
I hadn’t realized how alone I’d felt, even in my group of ten. But here was the proof I wasn’t alone, not truly –I was displaced, I was disoriented, but there were others here like me. I knew that the feeling of belonging I’d had before couldn’t have been misplaced – I had been right, I did belong here –
And then I saw the Ilyn lining the walls around the children.
There were scores of them in a dozen different colors. They were watching the children carefully, with everything from steely, expressionless masks to sneering grimaces of disgust, and I realized that none of these other children were free either. The Ilyn held their chains as tightly as Ai’Ilyn held ours.
“Listen to me,” Ai’Ilyn said, breaking into my thoughts. She had turned to face us and was staring us down, her face a cool, dispassionate mask. “You are here to learn. Tonight you only watch – do not attempt to join.”
She turned back around and stood with her weight rested casually on one hip, arms crossed across her chest, waiting.
I realized then that we too had stopped just outside the light cast from the moon. We were still inside the lip of the Hall, and from our vantage point we could see everything that was happening in the long patch of the clearing before us, where stood clustered the other children. They were all waiting, but for what, I couldn’t understand.
Seconds ticked by, and then minutes, but still nothing happened. Those in my group shifted nervously and cast surreptitious looks at one another. Most of the others seemed to avoid looking at me, even the other girls, but Smart Boy caught my eye. His hazel gaze was bright.
“READY!”
My head jerked around. A lone boy, tall, with dark hair down to his shoulders, had raised a hand into the air and was pointing upward. I followed the gesture and realized he was pointing at the moon. The almost-full circle of silver light, hanging huge and heavy in the sky like a burnished silver platter, was toward the zenith of its arc.
There was a rustling that spread across the clearing, and I saw the other children raise a series of somethings made of strange black and silver material. They unrolled the material and shook it out to reveal gathering-bags, the kind that farmers would use to collect cotton when it was ripe and ready to be picked.
The moon crossed into the space directly above us, and the world exploded in silver light.
Moonbeams fell from the sky in silver arrows as thick as a man and struck the dewy grass in a cascade of light. The dew that had collected there caught the moonlight and refracted it in glittering rainbows of color that nearly blinded me. I threw a hand in front of my face and took a step back, but I remember feeling that I had to look. I remember the moonlight … calling to me.
I lowered my arm and squinted against the blaze.
The children had burst from their confines, rushing in from the shadows. They were racing across the field, grabbing up handfuls of dew that sparkled with beautiful silver light to sluice them into the black-and-silver bags they carried slung across their shoulders. The children raced from one side of the clearing to the other in alternating waves, a complicated dance to which I felt I would never know the steps. They seemed to race the light as the moonbeams crashed down to earth in huge waves; they ran with complete abandon, whooping and shouting like madmen dancing on the lip of a crumbling mountainside, knowing they were cheating death, knowing and never caring.
The Ilyn stayed hidden in the shadows, and I saw Ai’Ilyn cringe back. Their sneers were gone, and I could see carefully controlled apprehension on more than one face.
A profound need rose up in me, a compulsion that told me to join the dancing children. They were laughing now, their bags nearly full with the moonlit dew, and what was left over they were drinking, pouring it into their mouths as they scooped it up from the grass of the clearing. I took a step. Someone next to me grabbed at my arm, trying to pull me back, but I shrugged off the offending hand and moved forward, almost past Ai’Ilyn. I don’t know what would have happened if I had made it out there on that first night – don’t know if I would have survived to tell this tale, or if I would have ended up like the ones who … burned. But I suppose I will never know.
Just as I was about to rush past Ai’Ilyn, the moon shifted past its zenith high above, and the dazzling display of light disappeared into a thousand sparkling motes of crystalized light that faded into the night.
I came to a stop and stood, not understanding, desperately yearning for it all to return so that I could
be a part of it. Disappointment filtered down through me, settling in the pit of my stomach like a heavy weight, but there was nothing I could do: whatever we had witnessed was over now. The children were laughing no longer; they had all returned to their respective Ilyn with their bags now overflowing with dewy drops of moonlight, and the Ilyn were snapping orders out, gesturing toward the Bower.
Ai’Ilyn turned around and saw me, standing several steps in front of my group. I stared up into her strange eyes and knew I should back away, but my mind was still blank. She casually raised her arm and backhanded me across the face, sending me stumbling back to the others, who caught me and kept me from falling. She advanced toward me again, and black terror sank its claws into my gut, ready to tear me apart if Ai’Ilyn didn’t do it first.
She stopped an arm’s length away from me and, for a moment did, nothing. Other children flowed into the Hall around us, passing without so much as a word, though I’m sure any number of covert glances were shot our way. We hung there frozen, the ten of us children cowering, me at the front, with Ai’Ilyn towering over us, until they’d all passed us by.
Finally, when we were alone, she spoke.
“Back into the Hollowed Hall,” she said, much softer than I expected her voice to come out. There was something in it – a yearning almost – that I couldn’t understand. “You’ll be catching moonlight soon enough.”
“When?” I asked, pleading. The word slipped out before I could stop it, and I felt the others tense behind me, the hands of whomever had caught me, clutching my back through the thin layer of my new clothing. I needed to know – needed to find out when I would be a part of what I’d just witnessed. I remember feeling that need course through my body like nothing I’d ever felt before – like a drug that made my blood rush.
“Did you question me?”
The tension behind me increased tenfold at the threatening quality of her voice. I knew I should look away from her, knew in every finely-tuned fiber of my urchin’s body that I was being stupid, but I couldn’t. I stared into her red-white eyes and felt again what had confused me before – felt the yearning that she was trying to hide.
I slowly shook my head.
She grimaced and strode away, leaving us to follow in her wake.