WHAT GOOD WAS it? Where was the use? I had served, worked, been loyal — for what? An empty alleyway. Yet now they expected me to go on. To serve, as if nothing had happened. As though the alleyway still led home.
I stood with the tray in my hands, looking over at the glass table.
“You’re lucky to still have a job,” the cook said gently, “Go on. The lord is waiting.”
Let him wait, I thought. Let him wait until the giants eat the sun.
I put down the tray and walked out of the hall, straight out of the fort enclosure and down the hill to the gibbet and the pressing box. The guard on the gate called out as I went, “I’ll be closing up in a few minutes, girl,” but I ignored him. I was not coming back.
I went to the gibbet. The crows had had three days at Lidi already, and I didn’t want to look. I watched the gallows instead, and I was ready when his ghost quickened.
Lidi came back not in midair, where I’d been expecting him, but on the platform, which meant that he hadn’t had the quick death I’d thought. He rose, slowly, knowing where he was, knowing what had happened, and I went forward so that he could see me.
He reached out to me, and I to him, but what good was that? His hands and mine passed through each other with a chill that went to my bones. It’s a cruelty of the gods, that they let us see our dead, but not touch them.
“They will not offer reparation,” I said, and only as I said it did I realize that I was crying, hiccuping with a tearing grief. “They never do. But don’t let them condemn you in the next life as well. Cheat them. Go onto rebirth.”
He reached for me again, his face bereft. I put my hand up near the side of his face. He pointed at me and spread his hands as though asking a question.
“I’m leaving,” I said. “I’m going to the Plantation.”
He stilled and nodded, and then tried to smile. He raised his hand and blew me a kiss, and that was the hardest moment of all, I remember, because it was a thing he never did. I used to do it to him as I left for work every morning, but it was a joke between us, that he would never copy me. “It’s a girl’s thing to do,” he’d say. So he blew me a kiss and smiled and faded, gone before I could return the kiss, and I sank down at the foot of the gibbet, my legs unsteady. His body hung above me, laced in chains, three days’ dead.
I couldn’t touch his ghost, but I could touch his body, for the last time. So I reached out and put my hand on his foot, still in the shoes he had made himself. I didn’t mean to, but I set him swinging and his chains rattled. It was like he was sending me a message, and the message was: Run! So I ran. I ran back through the alleyway to the rooms we had called home and I packed everything I could carry into his old backpack and I left, right then, no thinking about it, no planning, I just left and headed north. I spat on the road that led to the fort as I passed. They said he had withheld taxes, but the truth was that he had not bowed low enough. That he was disrespectful.
So he was, and so he should have been. What was there on the hill to respect? I’d always said, “No, love, don’t anger them, just look at the ground as they pass by,” but now I was filled with the anger that had filled him, the anger that had pushed him too far, pushed him right to the gallows.
So I went to the Valuers. We’d talked about it, Lidi and I, in the winter nights, snuggled under our thin blankets. We’d talked about making the trip north, to the Plantation. But I was still in tax bondage, from the bad summer when Da’s crop failed, and they would have chased me and brought me back and branded me too, like as not, if not condemned me to the pressing box. So we stayed, and worked, and saved until I had worked out my tax bondage. We were planning to go that summer. It was Lidi’s dream, not mine, but I would have gone anywhere with him.
Now there was just me, and I was going for him.
Well, it’s a long trip and it took me a good long while to do, and made no easier by the fact that a month out of Whitehaven I found I was carrying. I sat by the side of a stream, my road-sorry feet in the water, and took a moment to count the days. Then I realized — understood that my tiredness wasn’t just from walking so far. Lidi’s baby. Oh, gods rest him, he’d wanted a child so much. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both. I was more determined to get to the Plantation, so that Lidi’s baby would grow up without any overlord, free in mind as well as body.
But it took a long time, and I had to winter over in Pless. I got work as a maid in the clothier’s on the market square. One of the women spoke up for me, said that I was just traveling, not a Traveler, that they should let me stay long enough to have the baby and recover. I don’t know why she did it, but it was life itself to me. Maude, her name was, she was kindness itself. Had no children, she told me, and always wanted one to fuss over, so she helped as though she’d been the aunty. She was a seamstress for the clothier and she made a whole set of baby clothes for me. So beautiful. Fit for a — I was going to say a warlord’s child, but sackcloth would suit one of those better. Fit for a prince from the Wind Cities.
My own little prince was born in the middle of a winter storm, when the wind howled against the shutters and the snow blew sideways down the city streets. So I called him Snow, and it was a good name for he was as fair as Lidi had been. I was glad of that. I’m red-blond myself, but my great-grandmother had been a Traveler, and they say the dark hair can skip generations and appear at any time. I knew it would go harder for a child with black hair, and it had been worrying me — one of those silly worries a pregnant woman gets, yet real for all that. Life is harder for a dark-haired child, there’s no doubt. But my Snow was a tiny blond scrap with long fingers that clung to mine and a cry that went right through your head and out the other side. Oh, he was a cryer, that one! Just as well I was living at the back of the workshop and not in someone’s house, for he would have woken the dead with his bawling. But it was just colic, and he got over it after a month or so, though for that month I walked around like one dazed and the seamstresses were lucky if they got anything to eat or drink, let alone what they’d asked for. But they paid me, and I saved every skerrick.
When spring came, I decided to head north again. Maude tried to get me to stay. “It’s a free town,” she said. “He’ll be as free here as on the Plantation.”
Maybe she was right, but I’d promised Lidi’s ghost. So I went on, through the spring and summer. I made it as far as the North Domain just as autumn was closing in, through a small pass that the stonecaster who came to cast for the seamstresses had told me about. It was harder but faster than going all the way around to Golden Valley. I climbed steep goats’ trails that I would never have dared if I had not needed to get Snow safe to the Plantation before winter set in. I saw no one.
On the evening of the second day after I cleared the pass, I came down from the foothills into a small, wooded valley, no more than a dale full of upright birch trees, where the first autumn colors were late appearing so that the trees seemed like green pillars with a faint veil of yellow fire at their tips. It was a beautiful place. I was glad, because I could hear a stream trickling nearby. I had slung Snow across my chest in my shawl, and now he woke and began to cry for his feed. I drank from a cup made of birch bark, and I was so thirsty I forgot to ask the tree for permission to strip the bark. I drank and sat and fed my babe and was smiling at his tiny fingers kneading my breast when I realized someone was standing before me.
My heart thumped in surprise. I hadn’t heard any sound. I looked up but there was no one there. A trick of the light. I looked down to Snow and again, the figure stood in front of me.
I had known terror, when they came for Lidi, when they killed him, but this fear was different. A holy fear. I have never had the Sight, or heard the gods, but I knew that whatever I had seen was from the other world that they inhabit.
Snow finished and burped, loudly. I flinched and looked down at him without thinking, and again I saw the figure. This time I kept my head down. The edges of the figure were shimmering, moving yet anchored, as leaves move but the trunk stays still. It was not green, though, or any color I knew. More like a lack of color, like heat haze over rocks in the summer. I couldn’t see through it. It was solid, but — not there. Not wholly here, in this world.
“Greetings,” I whispered.
The figure bent and picked up the bark cup I had torn from the tree. It cradled the cup in its — were they hands, or something else? I couldn’t see, couldn’t quite make it out. It hissed, a strange sound like wind through leaves.
I was certain that this was the spirit of the birch tree, come to punish me for stealing the bark.
“I’m sorry, truly, truly,” I stammered. “But the baby needed to be fed and I was so thirsty, I acted without thinking.”
The figure reached a hand toward Snow and I jumped up and pulled him away. As soon as I stood it disappeared from my sight, but not from hearing. The hissing continued.
“It’s not his fault!” I cried. “It’s mine!”
I lowered my head to look at the ground and I could see it, faintly, before me, its hand stretched toward Snow, but stopped, considering. Its head turned up and I realized it was smaller than I was, but its arms were much longer and, perhaps, there were more of them. I couldn’t see, and not being able to see frightened me more than I would have thought. To have the threat to my son disappear when I raised my head… It could be anywhere, go anywhere, spring out from anywhere… I kept my head down and watched it as close as I could.
It looked at me and the hissing increased, until it sounded like a forest in a gale, an ocean of trees tossing in the wind. The hissing came in waves and, although I cannot understand the gods, I understood this. This was not the spirit of one tree, but the guardian of many. And it wanted retribution.
“It was my fault,” I said, “and I will pay the cost. But not now, I beg of you.” My voice broke on the words and I bit back a sob. I didn’t think this thing would understand tears.
“Let me get my son to safety, let me raise him, and then I will pay.”
The spirit hissed more softly, but still not pleased.
“What are a few years to you? Just a few seasons, that’s all. Then I will pay the forfeit.”
I stared at the ground as if it were my beloved’s face, praying to all the gods that were. The hissing dropped away to a faint shushing noise. It understood, I felt. It accepted. Then it reached one threatening hand to my son and poised its long fingers over his throat. The meaning was clear. If I did not pay, Snow would.
“I understand,” I whispered. “When he is grown, I will come.”
But it was not satisfied. It wanted something else. I thought frantically, and remembered the old stories, about bargains between humans and spirits. There were certain words that were always used. I had thought it was just a storyteller’s trick, but perhaps it wasn’t.
“I am Dila, daughter of Sarni. I swear by my blood that I will return to pay the forfeit.”
The spirit fell silent, accepting the bargain. Then it disappeared into the earth, sank into it as one sinks into a bog, but the earth was firm where it had stood.
I went from that place as fast as I could, and I made it to the Valuer’s Plantation the next day. They took us in, just as Lidi had said they would, in those winter nights when we’d planned this trip together. They gathered us in like lost lambs, and I felt a bit like a lost lamb, I was so shaken by my meeting with the tree spirit.
But then there was just life — working in the dairy was my main job, milking and cheese-making, although I helped with the sowing and the harvesting, like everyone else. And like everyone else I voted for the council members and said my say in the open meetings, which was one thing I would not have had in a free town, where only people who own property can vote. We had some fights in those meetings, I can tell you! Everyone helped me build a little cabin and I planted a circle of rowan trees around it to safeguard Snow while we slept, and under-planted them with larkspur, which protects from illusion. But nothing happened, except winter turning to summer and back again.
Until the evening of Snow’s fifteenth birthday, when I had to pay the forfeit.
I had known it was coming. Every new moon I marked his height on the back of the cabin door, and it was three months since that mark had changed. He’d reached his full growth. I had promised to return when he was grown, and that was now. How I wished I’d said it some other way: when he was an adult, when he was settled in a home of his own — anything but this, which had come so soon.
For the last three days, every time I had walked outside the wind had risen, whipping my cheeks and tearing my hair out of its plait. Even the rowan trees seemed to hiss at me. When I walked out to empty the evening slop pail in the pig trough and the larkspurs were laid flat under the rowans by the wind, I knew in my gut it was time to go.
I’d never told Snow about the forfeit. No need to grow up knowing a thing like that. He was a happy soul, a lot like his father, and the Plantation was the safest place in the Domains — maybe in the world — so he’d grown free and wild like children should; grown up to look everyone in the eye and respect only those who’d earned it. He was best friends with a much bigger family — four boys and three girls — who lived a stone’s throw from our cottage. He spent more time there than with me, and I knew they’d take him in, if he wanted it, and cherish him as I would. So early the next morning I went to talk to Cherry, the mother and a good friend of mine, and told her the story.
“I have to go tomorrow,” I concluded. “Or the forfeit will fall on Snow.”
Well, she was troubled and a bit disbelieving, but I’m not one for fancies or telling tall tales, so she took me at my word after the first surprise.
“Do you think you’ll be coming back?” she asked, looking down and pleating her skirt with her fingers so she didn’t have to meet my eyes.
“I doubt it.”
“That’s a high price to pay for a bark cup!” she said indignantly. “We could get the men and go and chop those trees down! That would sort it out.”
I laughed. It was so like her, to fire up in defense of someone she thought was being hard done by. Cherry was the loudest voice for justice in our meetings, and I loved her for it. “More likely sort us out. No. I made a bargain, Cherry, and it was a good one. I got to raise my Snow, didn’t I?” My voice broke a little on that, and she hugged me. I hugged back, glad of the comfort.
“I’ll look after him,” she said.
“I know.” I collected my thoughts and smoothed my skirt. “I’m not going to tell him where I’m going,” I said. “Just in case I do come back. No need to worry him. It’s a hard thing to ask, but will you tell him, if I’m not back in a day or so?”
She made a face, but she nodded. “He can come and stay with us while you’re gone,” she said.
“You’re cramped for space here,” I said, looking around the small house as I stood up to leave. “After I… afterward, why not let the two eldest move in with Snow? They could still come back for meals, but they’d be out from under your feet.”
“Time enough to think of that later,” she said quietly. “Gods go with you, Apple.”
Apple was the new name they had given me, my Valuer name, taken to show my connection to all living things and my respect for the people of the old blood and their ways. It was a good name. Homely, ordinary, but useful and sweet on occasion. I had liked the idea of being Apple, and I liked it still.
I kissed her cheek, which was not a thing we did, normally, and went to find Snow.
It was hard to pretend that I was just going on a trading trip to Oakmere, when what I wanted to do was grab him and cry over him and make him promise to be a good man, a man like his father, and promise to look after himself and eat properly and clean up after himself and to choose a kind, sweet girl to marry — oh, and all the rest of the things a mother worries about. But I just hugged him and kissed his brow, as I had done other times, when I went trading, and he noticed nothing, because what fifteen-year-old boy notices anything about his mother?
Somehow that was comforting, that he was so — workaday. So unknowing that danger could lurk unseen in the wild. That he was safe here.
Then I went. I took just enough food and drink to get me there, because I didn’t expect to come back. I didn’t take Lidi’s backpack, just a potato sack. I wanted Snow to have the backpack.
I was surprised by how much I remembered about the way, considering how upset I had been fifteen years ago. I slept under the same holly bush I had sheltered under then, and next morning found the trail easily enough, but though I had worked hard and was still strong I wasn’t as young as I had been then, and the climb was hard. I was breathless when I reached the ridge that rimmed the little valley where I had seen the tree spirit, and I paused a moment. It was mid-morning, with the sun gilding the young leaves and the birch trunks shining brightly in the shade, almost glowing, it seemed, with the stream chuckling between ferns as though it laughed.
I thought then, and I still think, that it was a place worth protecting. That if I were a tree spirit, I would act, too, to save it from desecration.
I went down the slope and stood by the stream, where I had seen the spirit before, and put my sack on the ground.
“I have come to pay my forfeit,” I said. Nothing happened. No figure, no change of sound, nothing. Then I remembered, and looked at the ground.
There it was, waiting. Silent. It raised its arms, the long fingers wavering as it shimmered in the sun, looking both real and unreal at the same time.
In the old stories, the words had to be said again, almost the same as when the bargain was made. So I took a breath and said, “I am —” and then I stopped, because I did not know what to say. I had made the bargain as Dila, but now I was Apple, and glad of it. I stared at the figure in confusion, and of course it vanished as soon as I lifted my head.
I looked back down at the ground. “I don’t know what my name is,” I said. I must have sounded daft, but it was the truth, and maybe it could hear the truth in my voice, because it hissed — to my surprise — in laughter, like a spring breeze playing in the branches. That gave me confidence.
“I was Dila when I made your bargain. But now I am Apple.”
The spirit hissed again, and this time it was like the wind that rises before a storm.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I’m here to pay whatever forfeit I have to, to keep my son safe. But I can’t say to you, ‘I am Dila,’ because I’m not, anymore.”
It tilted its head, considering, and I considered, too. Was there nothing of Dila in me? Just my love for Lidi, I thought.
Its hissing increased, and now it was a question.
“There’s a little part of me that is still Dila,” I confessed. Should I tell it what? It was growing impatient, I could tell. The wind was rising around us, the trees beginning to shake and the stream had small white waves. “My love for my husband. He’s dead. He died while I was still Dila, so that part of me is her.”
It was a poor explanation, and sounded sentimental to me, but the thing paused and the wind died. For a moment, the glade was silent, waiting. The back of my neck was getting sore from staring down for so long. Then the spirit reached out a hand and placed it on my chest. I thought, goodbye Snow, and I hoped — I remember hoping — that Lidi had waited for me so we could be reborn together.
Then I felt… Oh, I can’t explain. A kind of tearing, in my heart, in my mind, all through my body. There was blood flowing, but not from any wound, just out of my skin, out of my eyes, out of my ears. It hurt. But not unbearably. The pain was not as bad as giving birth, not nearly as bad. The strangest thing was that the blood did not sink into my clothes. It flowed over my skin and down into the ground, disappearing as the spirit had disappeared the first time I had met it.
The spirit took its hand away.
There I stood, whole, unmarked, the blood leaving not a trace on my hands or anywhere that I could see, the pain fading, and me still alive.
The spirit hissed with satisfaction, and disappeared. That was it.
I stood there stupidly for a while, expecting something else to happen, but nothing did. The golden day went on around me and the stream chuckled its way along its bed, and I stood like a booby on the grass with tears running down my cheeks, because I had expected to die and now I was alive.
I climbed back out of the valley slowly, relishing every moment, and it wasn’t until I had reached the ridge and was looking back at the valley that I thought of Snow, and how now I would be able to tell him the story, and I thought of Lidi, who would have to wait for me a bit longer. Then I realized what the spirit had taken. The last bit of Dila. The part that loved Lidi.
I could remember him. I could remember loving him. I could remember my grief when I lost him. But the feeling itself was gone. The part of my heart that had been full since the first day he kissed me was empty. He was just a memory, as though I’d heard about him in a story.
I felt the empty part of my heart every day, as I went about my milking and my sowing and my cooking. I felt both lighter and less solid, as though I had been hollowed out like a gourd. I had no grief, but nothing came to take its place, and I did not think anything ever would, because that was the nature of the forfeit, that that part of me should die.
It was a fair bargain. Blood and love and pain, for the life of my son. I would pay it again. But this was the thing: I knew that Dila badly wanted for Lidi to wait for her, so they could be reborn together. I knew that Dila, that I, thought that it was more likely he would wait for her because she continued to love him so much. So I wondered: I was Apple, wholly Apple, and Apple did not love him. So would he wait? Did I want him to?
I didn’t care. It seemed to me that I would greet him after death merely as someone I once knew, with no more feeling than I have for the weaver in Oakmere who made my cheesecloths. But perhaps the part of me that had died already, the part that was Dila, will come back when it is time for me to go onto rebirth, and make me whole in death as I was not in life. Perhaps I will love him again, and greet him with joy.
I will have to wait to find out.