I was shuttled back and forth between home and the forest all the spring of my fifteenth year. Each night I walked home to set the wards around the house, protecting David from notice; then I walked back again. I came to enjoy the quiet of my nightly walks despite the new, uneasy stillness I felt in the forest.
As the days grew warmer and longer I stayed more often with Mother and Gwendolen for dinner. Gilbert was often with us, playing chess with David and sharing a supper plate with me: we squabbled over treats and quarrelled amicably about the Wolf of the Forest. Gwendolen was rarely without one or two dinner guests, either. Sometimes it was the Gantry girls, whose company I really enjoyed, but more often it was one or two of her beaux, whose company I could have done without. Gwendolen seemed to like them all impartially, but from conversations with Mother and Liz Gantry, I discovered that Gwendolen had also attracted the notice of a certain, older man who had lost his young wife just over a year ago. Liz as well as Mother seemed to think his chances were good, and both of them seemed to be relieved at the idea: Mother because she liked the man, and Liz, I had begun to suspect, because she was a little bit sweet on her friend Harry. I had a feeling that she would be glad to see him free from Gwendolen’s coils.
Gwendolen didn’t mention the man at all, and looked away when his name was mentioned. This, I discovered to my surprise, seemed to mean that she liked him very much. When I asked her about him, eyeing her narrowly, she would only tell me that his name was Thomas and that he was a blacksmith, and wasn’t very forthcoming with any other information.
When I had a spare moment I took myself off to the place where Akiva had found David. The field where she had found him was just outside the forest and still in disorder, even after a few months’ respite. Leaves had been dashed from the surrounding trees, and the bareness of the boughs made it easy to see where branches were missing. Others, cracked almost to breaking point, hung forlornly from their trunks, and smaller branches lay here and there on the grass below, as if a storm had passed through. I took it in with silent rage and asked myself what sort of curse could have caused this much damage. There were still streaks of blood in the grass where David had lain, though they should have washed away when the snow melted, and the deep gouges in the earth looked more ruddy than earthy. The blood was mingled with an oily residue of curse, and I rubbed two fingers over a patch resentfully, disgusted at the way it soiled the forest air around it. I wiped my hand gingerly on my apron and threw another thoughtful look around the clearing. I remembered the gashes on David’s arms, and it occurred to me to wonder for the first time if the attacker might have been an animal. The gouges on the ground were large and widely spread, as if the animal had been very, very big. More importantly, they were familiar.
Horned hedgepigs, where had I seen those before? Another circle of ruined trees sprang to my mind, these ones snow-encrusted; and the sound of a gryphon screaming in pain seemed to echo in my ears again. They were gryphon claw marks! I was sure of it.
If someone really had set a gryphon to attack David, they had probably set it to attack me as well. I puffed out my cheeks in quick surprise. I’d been lucky that time. I was pretty sure that it was Mara who saved me from the gryphon: I had recognised her black-and-white hair when I saw her on the warden council.
No one had been there for David when he was cursed and attacked. My jaw became mulish but this time I didn’t try to stop it. Somebody was going to pay for David.
I crouched by the greasy scarf of curse again and pinched it between my forefinger and thumb, grimacing. Patchy but clear, it trailed back into the forest. I followed it, unspinning it as I went. It gave me great pleasure to take the twisted nastiness and repurpose it to shore up the fraying edges of the forest, which had been starting to show for quite some time now. I followed the trail over Kendra’s boundary, stopping briefly to snatch a leafy sprig and tuck it into my buttonhole before I stepped over the invisible line. The forest around me went in an instant from new spring green to early, russet autumn. I could still see a trace of the curse corrupting the gold of the forest lines, but the trace vanished after I crossed into Kendra’s old wardship. I couldn’t tell if it was gone because I didn’t have Akiva’s hood, or if it really had disappeared.
I scowled, hands on hips, but the forest wasn’t to be intimidated into giving up anything else. In the end I had to be content with dissipating the remaining threads that I could still see.
I was scattering those few threads to the breeze when I felt a twinge in the forest lines that meant someone else had entered Kendra’s wardship. It was a gentle twinge, but it was enough to startle me: I couldn’t help remembering that two wardens had disappeared from this wardship. My inability to see the forest lines here made me feel uncomfortably blind, and I hurried for the border with a chill crawling uncomfortably down my neck.
I had almost reached it when I saw Mara striding through the trees toward me. Relief flooded through me at the sight of her sensible, no-nonsense face, and I waved, forgetting that though I knew her face, we had never actually met.
She stopped, frowning, but wasn’t slow to work it out. “Ah. Rose?”
I nodded, wondering if I should curtsey.
“You shouldn’t be about at a time like this,” she said. “Stay in Akiva’s wardship where she can keep you safe.”
I nodded again and made my way back home without protest, but as I left deep forest for the path I wondered very much who was going to keep Akiva safe.
As the spring wore on and Akiva didn’t vanish I was able to push my fears to the back of my mind. She began to teach me the proper modes of communication with mythics (by which I learned that I had not been nearly respectful enough to the gryphon I had met) and the forest began to feel safe again: or at least as safe as it had always felt. Akiva sometimes took me into other wardships: journeys to assist the birth of an oddly-coloured, less-than-human creature, or to find new plants; and once to help bind up a wound that Gwydion had gotten from a wild boar. His wardship was in late summer, only months ahead of Akiva’s, and the forest had begun to go wrong for him just like it had for the rest of the wardens. As we travelled through the warden-less pieces of deep forest, we saw the decay and general malaise that the forest had fallen into.
“It looks like its fading away,” I said in sorrow, when we returned from patching up Gwydion. “Can’t it do without a warden?”
“No,” said Akiva. “It’s the balance. Never a forest without a human warden; that’s the way it works. That’s how the forest remains Forest even though each of us are in different places and sometimes different countries. If there were no wardens there would be no deep forest.”
I shivered. I couldn’t think of existing without deep forest now that I knew of it: there was such a depth of quietness to it, and at the same time such a heady excitement. I didn’t know how Mother and Gwendolen could exist in their flat, simple little lives with only parties and villages to brighten their days. I felt as though I had been blind and deaf before I went into deep forest.
“Can’t Mara look after it?”
“She is,” said Akiva shortly. “By and large. As are we all: the council as a whole is meant to care for empty wardships until a successor is chosen. But Mara has her own wardship to attend to, and it’s not so easy to meld wardships. It means more power, but a lot more work.”
“How much more power?” I asked curiously.
“Each successive wardship exponentially increases the power a warden can draw on,” said Akiva. “I’ve never known a warden to take on more than three at a time. Six is unheard of. The warden who took it on would be the most powerful warden the forest has seen.”
I sucked in a breath and said: “That’s a pretty good motive.”
“Perhaps, but no one could tell who the wardships would be appointed to. It would make the risk of killing hardly worthwhile.”
“Who are the wardships going to be appointed to?”
“It’ll be decided tomorrow when the council meets. The vote seems to be pretty evenly divided between appointing them all to Mara or distributing them amongst all the wardens. Mara is the elder, so it’s really her decision without need of a vote but she insists that a council vote shall decide the matter. Cassandra’s the dark horse: she could say yea or nay, whichever drops into her pretty little head at the time.”
“Which will you vote for?”
“With more power, Mara should be able to prevent another attack,” Akiva said, shrugging. “I don’t like any of us having that much power over the others, but if anyone has to do it, I would choose Mara. She hasn’t leapt at the chance, and she could have if she wanted to. I like that.”
“So you’ll vote in favour of Mara?”
“Most likely. We’ll see when the case comes up tomorrow.”
“Can I come?”
“No. I want you to be with David. I don’t think anyone knows that he’s alive, but I’d rather not take the chance while all of us are otherwise occupied.”
“There’s no getting out of it, then,” I said gloomily. Akiva raised her brows at me, and I explained: “The first dance of the spring is tonight.”
Akiva’s lips curved in the first real smile I had seen on her since the summer. “I am very much afraid that you will simply have to suffer, child.”
I went to the dance that night feeling rather aggrieved. I felt that I had been shut out of all that was adventurous and interesting, and left to do the mundane chores. I sulked in the shadow of the refreshment table until Gwendolen came and adjured me not to be so grumpy, and David forcibly bore me off to dance. I kept an eye out for Gwendolen’s widower, but when I asked her about him she said airily: “Oh, he’s not here tonight; he doesn’t always come.”
I couldn’t help but grin. I liked the man already.
When David wasn’t dancing with me he was dancing with Mother. It had been years since I’d seen her dance: in fact, the last time I had seen her dance was with Father. I was surprised to find that she danced light and fast, almost like one of the deep forest dryads. With her face flushed and her blue eyes bright, she looked like one of the young people. I saw more than one knowing look exchanged between the matrons attending the refreshment table. David, his memory still not intact, looked happier than I had ever seen him. I wondered what would happen when he regained it – his attacker, Kendra, and all – and I wondered if I should mention Kendra to Mother.
After David I danced with Gilbert and also Harry, who was now quite willing to dance with me when Gwendolen was otherwise occupied. Wanting to do Liz Gantry a favour, I’d suggested her as a likely partner, and I had the smug satisfaction of seeing them dancing animatedly together some time later. Harry had at first been doubtful, remarking that it was a bit too much like dancing with his sisters, but if Elizabeth wasn’t quite so brilliantly lovely as Gwen, she had her own mischievous charm, and she was looking very pretty tonight. Once he got over the habit of thinking of Liz as his sister, Harry might come to see things in a different light. It certainly wouldn’t do Gwendolen any harm to lose a few of her admirers to other girls.
I found myself part of a noisy group of four at supper time, much to my surprise. Liz and Harry had joined Gilbert and me, and we made a cheerful ring around a flat-topped tree stump, which we had turned into our own refreshment table. To my amusement, Harry didn’t look as if he were pining to be a part of the crowd around Gwendolen. He joined with enthusiasm in the conversation that had somehow turned to a light-hearted discussion of what Gilbert in sepulchral tones called The Werewolf of the Forest, and volunteered the information that his second cousin twice removed had supposedly seen the creature.
“And did your cousin have her heart eaten?” enquired Gilbert, cheerfully bloodthirsty.
“Unfortunately not,” Harry said, likewise ghoulish. “She’s ninety if she’s a day and she must have been fifty then. I think her mangy little heart was so shrivelled and wrinkled that he took one look at it and ran.”
I grinned, because I had gathered that Bastian did tend to like pretty women better. “Gilbert says that he’s a prince put under a spell by someone’s jealous stepmother.”
“I think he was a villager who wanted to marry a duchess,” Liz said. “But her family was a wizarding family, so instead of just horsewhipping him they cursed him.”
“How would they break the curse, if a witch did it?” I asked, always eager to hear anything that might help.
“In the stories it’s always a kiss,” said Elizabeth. “They’d probably think it was poetic justice: a romantic boy steals a few kisses, so they curse him until a kiss frees him.”
“It’s a good thing most families hereabouts aren’t witch families, then,” Gilbert said, grinning; “Or there’d be more than a few boys turned into whatever animal or plant came first to mind.”
I considered the idea. It certainly sounded very like Cassandra. The irony of it would have appealed to her: a kiss to free the man who had broken her heart.
“What if there was more than one part to the curse?” I asked, neatly snatching the last cream puff from the plate before Gilbert could.
“He would have to grovel on his hands and knees in abject apology for a month,” Gilbert retorted, and threw the scrunched napkin from the cream puffs at me. “Not unlike young ladies who steal the last cream puff, I’ll have you know.”
I gave him a creamy grin and licked my fingers.
Liz said, in slow interest: “You know, I’ve never heard of a woman being cursed before. Isn’t that odd? It’s always the prince, or the woodcutter.”
“That’s because villages are over-run by women,” Harry said immediately, and dodged an olive that Liz threw at him. “We’re all under the thumb, and we know it.”
“Only men get cursed because only women are clever enough to break the curses,” she retorted, but she was laughing. “It’s the natural balance.”
I thought about it later, on my way home. I had absentmindedly set the wards for David and said goodbye to Mother and Gwendolen at the house, but Liz’s voice stuck in my head, saying: “It’s the natural balance.” It cheered me, because I knew then that whatever Cassandra had intended, and whatever the evil little man who wrote my curse book intended, curses were meant to be broken. Just as man was for woman, and woman for man, or medicine for illness, there was always a remedy for a curse. They balanced each other so that nature always remained in harmony. I thought I understood, dimly, the fairies and their bloody sacrifices.
I arrived home quite late, but Akiva hadn’t returned. I sighed a little as I pushed open the door to an empty house. The salamander was a glow in the fireplace that faintly lit the room, and despite the moonless dark, I didn’t bother to light a lamp. The peach-desk had begun flowering again and the leaves whispered to themselves in the darkness, active in their spring newness. It was a comforting sound in the semidarkness.
I took myself off to bed early, overtired enough to be brightly wide awake, and spent the next few hours sitting bolt upright on my mattress, staring at the lightened square of my window. I don’t remember what I thought about, but when I woke the next morning it was with the pleasant feeling that my sixteenth birthday wasn’t far away now. I scrambled out of bed, displacing the salamander, who hissed at me, and dressed myself. The silence from the outer rooms had already told me that Akiva wasn’t back yet. It was going to be a busy day.
When at length Akiva did return, it was with the information that Cassandra’s deciding voice had swung the vote in favour of Mara. She’d told me herself that Cassandra could decide either way, but I could tell the result puzzled and worried her.
“Cassandra helps no one unless it helps herself as well,” she said grimly, when I asked her why it should bother her. “And at the moment I can’t see any reason for her to help Mara. I’m flying blind and I don’t like it.”
I didn’t like it, either. Cassandra was in this up to her white, slender neck. Why was she giving power to someone else? A small germ of an idea came into my head: an idea that said Cassandra needed watching.
How, I wondered speculatively, did a person go about following an enchantress? Whatever else it involved, I was pretty sure that a big part of it would be keeping Akiva from finding out.
Fortunately for my plans, Akiva was kept so busy for the next few months that she barely noticed if I was there or gone. The wardships didn’t take kindly to being amalgamated into one wardship, separate as they were physically, and so long as I did my chores and continued to travel back and forth to put up wards around David, Akiva allowed me to come and go as I pleased. She wouldn’t allow me come with her when she travelled out in deep forest, and before long I stopped asking.
I wasn’t naïve enough to imagine that Cassandra wouldn’t know immediately the moment I stepped onto her wardship. I spent the first month in investigation: wandering Akiva’s wardship and analysing the vibrations that the forest put out every time a human stepped into the forest. Before long I was familiar with the particular hum the lines put out, but though I could recognise it I couldn’t yet stop it from happening. Unless I transformed myself into a tree or an animal it didn’t seem possible to walk into Cassandra’s wardship without her knowing. For a week or more, it seemed as though I might have to give up on my idea, until it occurred to me that if I couldn’t prevent the disturbance from my presence, I could at least alter it.
Bastian had told me once that I set the forest buzzing when I went into deep forest, and I regretfully found out that he wasn’t exaggerating. No one else who strayed into deep forest set off half the row that I did when I stepped from the paths. Akiva always made the forest lines sing almost audibly, but the repercussions didn’t last nearly as long as they did with me. I wasn’t sure if this was because the forest liked me or because I was still too unlearned to be able to manage better.
I first taught myself to soothe the lines as I walked, and practised until they barely murmured when I slipped into deep forest. When I’d succeeded pretty well at the exercise, I turned my attention to altering the type of vibrations I set off in deep forest.
By the time I knew that I was ready, late one night on my way home from drawing the wards over David, the knowledge was bolstered by the equally pleasant knowledge that tomorrow was my birthday.