My time comes each month when the moon is up and I can find my way into the Greenwood again. The healing green. Too many days, too many nights, I must live in the gray place. My father sends me into exile there. His magic keeps me there. Except for the full moon when I must return. To the Greenwood. To his hand.
My father. I piss on his name.
This last time in the Greenwood, I came upon a field by accident, only in the green there are no accidents. There was a smudge in the air that I could see but could not see through, as if someone worked hard to disguise being there. So I waited. I am good at waiting when the moon is high. Not so good other times.
When the smudge had gone—like a cloud drifting away from the moon’s face—I walked the perimeter of the field carefully. Sniffing around, I found my way past the flowers that masked the smell. How long had he lain there, his death creeping out of his throat through the dark slit? The body was not yet disturbed, the blood still running. And my nose confirmed what my eyes told me. Not long. Not long at all.
This, too, was no accident. But not, I think, my father’s doing. His smell—that dark, dangerous tang, like the death cap mushroom—was not here. Yet this man did not die alone. I smelled another blood, sharper, still living. I smelled a heady mix of perfumes too, compounded of crocus for foresight, heather for solitude, and the strong, sharp rhododendron that signifies “beware.” I will know that scent should I ever meet it again. I followed it on the wind, and found more on a leaf of a nearby tree.
Something written. Something hidden. Who would—who could—do such a deed? It had the look, the smell of a fey thing. I trembled, on point, like a hound.
Taking the leaf in my hand, I shook it loose from its brown and bendy twig. For a moment I held it in my palm and then it started to die as if I had brought autumn with my touch. The tips turned inward, the color began to fade, the sides became brittle. What had been written was now scrawled into my skin. A name. Passerinia. I crumbled the dead leaf and dropped the bits at the tree’s base. And then, I pissed on it, marking it as my own. No one, not even my father, would see what had been written there now.
But I did not howl. In the Greenwood I never howl lest he hear me.