3

Ger had made us all promise—although I was the only one who had any inclination that needed to be curtailed—never to walk in the woods behind our house without either him or Father for company; the latter reference was courtesy only, because Father was no woodsman. I assumed that Ger meant deep forest, and one afternoon wandered into the first fringe of the big trees with horse and cart, picking up deadwood to be cut up for the house fires; the light scrub that had grown up around the meadow the house sat in had been cut down and burned during our first few weeks here. But Ger saw me from the shop window and came after me, angry; I was surprised to see him angry and explained that I did not mean to disobey orders, and that I was well in sight of the house—indeed, as he had seen me. He relented, but said that he did not want me walking even this near the tall forest trees. This conversation took place during our first autumn, and the leaves were red and gold; it was cold enough already for our breath to hang visible in the air.

He looked up at the tree we were standing under, and sighed. “I’m probably being overcautious, but I’d rather it were that than foolhardy.” He paused, and rubbed a hand over his chin, considering me. “Have you ever wondered why ours is the only house out this end of town—a full quarter mile from the next house in? And why we take all our drinking water from the well on the hill, when a good stream runs right by the house?”

I stared at him, not expecting mysteries. The stories of the north I had heard in the city had swiftly faded once we had become country dwellers ourselves, and we had been troubled by no goblins. “Not really,” I said. “I suppose I thought that the town grew up where it did, and the first smith liked his privacy; and perhaps the stream water isn’t good, though good enough to pour over hot iron.”

“It’s not quite so simple,” said Ger, and looked a little embarrassed. “The story is the wood’s haunted. No, not haunted: enchanted. The stream flows out of the forest, as you see, so likely it’s enchanted too, if anything is. The first smith—well, tales vary. Perhaps he was a wizard. He was a good smith, but he disappeared one day. He’s the one built the house—said he liked the forest, and a forge needs a stream close by, and most of the town gets its water by well. The next smith—the one that left two years ago—dug the well we’ve got now, to prevent the water’s enchanting him; but he didn’t like the noises the forest made after dark. Well, forests do make odd noises after dark. Anyway, he left. And they’ve had some trouble finding someone else. That’s how we got this place so cheaply: It’s very good for what we had to spend.”

“I’ve never heard anything about all this,” I said. “Are you sure you’re not making it all up to scare me into obedience? It won’t work, you know; it’ll only make me mad.”

He grinned. “Oh, I’m aware of your temper, Beauty, you needn’t fear. And I am telling you the truth—you have the sort of mind that prefers to know things.” He said this somewhat wryly; I often pestered him to explain what he was doing and why, when he was using me in the shop; he yielded to my persistence eventually, and I learned to make charcoal, and could shoe a horse, if the horse co-operated. “I’m also going to ask you not to mention this to your family; your father already knows a bit, but your sisters don’t. It’ll come up eventually, I suppose, but I’d rather we lived here a little longer and were comfortable here first. It’s a good thing for us, we’re doing well; it would be a pity to let silly tales scare us.” There was a touch of pleading in his voice that surprised me. “I’m just taking a little—precaution.”

“Silly tales,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything about any of this except what you’re saying.”

“Of course not. Think about it. Blue Hill has wanted a smith; now they’ve got one, I’ll even say a good one, and they don’t want to scare him off. After all, if this wood is enchanted, it hasn’t done anything in over a hundred years—maybe it’s not really enchanted, or maybe it used to be, or maybe it still is, but if we don’t disturb it, it won’t harm us. And the townsfolk aren’t really hiding anything from us; I’m from around here, you know, and Melinda reminded me of this place’s history when she wrote me about it.” He paused.

“What was it that happened over a hundred years ago?” I asked.

The light was failing fast, and the rays from the setting sun lit the autumn-colored woods to royal hues, and warmed the dun-colored house to copper. Through the kitchen window I could see a figure in a skirt standing before the fire. Ger took Greatheart’s bridle and led him a little way along, following the edge of the forest but moving away from the house.

“Well now,” he said at last, and when he glanced at me again his smile was sheepish. “You’ll laugh, and I won’t blame you. I grew up near here, and the tales you hear in your cradle stay with you whether you will or nay.

“It’s said there’s a castle in a wild garden at the center of these woods; and if you ever walk into the trees till you are out of sight of the edge of the forest and you can see nothing but big dark trees all around you, you will be drawn to that castle; and in the castle there lives a monster. He was a man once, some tales say, and was turned into a terrible monster as a punishment for his evil deeds; some say he was born that way, as a punishment to his parents, who were king and queen of a good land but cared only for their own pleasure.”

“Like the Minotaur,” I murmured.

“The which?”

“Minotaur. It’s an old Greek legend. What does the monster look like?”

“No two tales agree on that. My mother made me mind her with stories of a bear with foot-long claws; my best friend’s mother made him mind because a great boar would come and carry him away on its long tusks if he didn’t. And the first owner of the public house here thought it was a griffin. Whatever it is, it must have a mighty appetite. The tale also goes that no hunter ever finds game in there; and you know our garden is curiously free of rabbits and woodchucks—and that in itself is uncanny. And never a deer do you see, and no man has taken one from this forest in the memory of the oldest grandfather’s memories of his childhood’s tales. There aren’t even any squirrels here, and squirrels will live anywhere.”

The sun was almost gone now; firelight sent a warm glow through the windows, and left golden footprints in the garden. Father went whistling into the parlour with an arm-load of my afternoon’s exertions over the woodpile. He paused at the door and called across to us: “You going back to the shop, Ger? I’ve not closed up.” “Aye,” Ger called back. Father went on inside.

“Now, I want your solemn promise,” said Ger. “First, that you’ll not go scaring your sisters with these stories I’ve—foolishly, I suppose—told you. And second, that you will stay out of this forest.”

I scowled at the ground. I disliked promises on principle because my conscience made me keep them. “I’ll say nothing to my sisters,” I said, and paused. “If the magic is dangerous to anyone, it’s dangerous to you too; I’ll stay out if you will.”

Ger didn’t like that; then he grinned suddenly. “You’re half witch yourself, I sometimes think; the forest would probably leave you alone. Okay, I promise. And you?”

“Yes,” I said, and went to unload the cart, and put Greatheart away in his stable. Ger was still in the shop when I was finished. He looked up when I entered. “Eh?” he said. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

“Ger—why did you tell me the story about the forest?”

Ger raised the hammer he was using and studied the signs of wear on its head. “Well now,” he said thoughtfully. “I have a very high opinion of your obstinacy; and I knew I’d never get a promise of obedience from you without telling you the truth of it. I’m not a very good liar—and that old forest makes me nervous.” He grinned a small boy’s grin suddenly and added: “I think it’ll be a relief to me to be on my oath to stay out of it; I won’t have to think up my own good reasons anymore. Tell your sisters I’ll be in in a minute.”

I was awake and sneaking downstairs barefoot before dawn the next morning. I had done a favor for a man who mended harness, and he had said he could fix a soft padded leather collar to go under Greatheart’s harness to protect his shoulders; there were two little bald patches beginning that worried me. Bucky had said that it would be ready for me this morning, and it was a longish ride to his farm, and I’d have a lot to do later. And I liked to watch the sun rise.

I saddled Greatheart and led him out, his big feet leaving not-quite-regular saucer marks in the frosty grass. I hesitated as we came to the stream; we usually went around the shop near the stream, then up the little hill towards the town, and I’d haul us water from the well when we rode by it. Today I led the horse to the stream, and waited, watching him: He lowered his head, wrinkled his black nose at the running water, and blew; then he lowered his muzzle and drank. He didn’t turn into a frog, nor into a griffin and fly away. He raised his head, slobbering over his last mouthful, and pricked his ears at me without any awareness of having done something out of the ordinary. I walked a pace or two upstream and knelt to scoop up some water with my hands, looping the reins over my wrist. The water was so cold it made my teeth ache with the shock; but it was sweet and very good, better than the dull water from the respectable well. I didn’t turn into a frog either, and when I stood up the landscape looked just as it always had. I mounted and we jogged slowly off.

Poverty seemed to agree with me. Grace and I were bridesmaids at Hope’s wedding, and while Grace looked fragile and ethereal and Hope was flushed and warm with love, I did contrive to look presentable. After a year of sun and wind and hard work my skin had cleared up, and since I refused to be bothered with a hat, I was brown from working so much outside, which suited me better than my usual sallow pallor. I also stood up straighter since I had had to stop crouching over books; and I was also very strong, although this is not considered an important virtue in a woman. Grace and Hope were exceptional anywhere, but here in the country at least ordinarily pretty girls were outnumbered by plain ones, and I fitted into the background more appropriately than I had in the bright society of the city. I still hadn’t grown, though. When I was twelve, my sisters said kindly that the size of my hands and feet indicated that I would grow later; but by this time I was sixteen, and resigned to the fact that that growing streak just wasn’t going to arrive. But now that I no longer had to put them in dainty white gloves, I found that my big hands had their uses; and overall I was on pretty good terms with myself. It helped that the only looking-glass in the house was in my sisters room.

We had worried about Grace the first winter; she seemed never to get over the shock of Robbie’s loss, and grew so thin and pale I used to think I could see the firelight shining through her. But with spring she began to recover, and while she was quieter than she once had been, she put on weight, and got some color back in her cheeks. She did most of the work and all of the organizing for the wedding day, and for the feast afterwards; and if she was thinking of Robbie, you would never have known it, seeing her laugh and dance and sing, and watch the level in the punch bowls. She even condescended to flirt a little, very delicately, with the young minister who performed the ceremony; and the poor man went home walking like one drunk, although he had tasted nothing stronger than tea the whole day.

It was the day of the wedding also that Ferdy kissed me, which was how I discovered that looking presentable had its drawbacks. Ferdy was a lad a few years older than myself who helped Ger in the shop when he was needed; Ger said often that the boy had promise as a smith, and he wished he could hire him on a regular schedule. Ferdy was very tall and thin, with bony hands and a big nose and a wild thatch of red hair. We had become friends over the last few months—he’d started working for Ger in early June—and he taught me to fish, and to snare rabbits, and to kill and clean them when they were snared. I liked him, but I didn’t like him kissing me.

The wedding day was blue and clear and warm—hot, after the second cup of punch. The ceremony was performed in our tiny parlour, with only the family, and Melinda and a few more special friends; but afterwards the whole town came to the banquet. We had brought the big trestle tables from the Griffin in Greatheart’s cart, and set them up in the meadow, and added our own kitchen table; and spread on them were bread and sweet butter, and pies and fruits and jellies, and roast meats, plus the punch, and tea and milk for those who wanted it; and some fiddlers had upon request brought their fiddles, and so there was dancing; and while Ger and Hope laughed at their friends’ jokes, and danced with everyone, and thanked them for their good wishes, they never really took their eyes off one another. The day had begun very early, on the understanding that it would end at sundown; tomorrow would be a working day as usual, and it was near harvest, with no time to waste, even on weddings. Grace and Molly and Melinda and I cleaned up afterwards in the young twilight. We agreed with each other that we were exhausted, but none of us could stop smiling.

Ferdy came by the next day especially to see me, though I didn’t want to see him, and especially not when he’d made his visit only for that purpose. He apologized to me for the day before, stammering and shaking and turning a bright scarlet, which looked very odd with his orange hair, and he begged that I forgive him. I forgave him to make him stop apologizing; but I also began to avoid him, and when I did come to the shop when he was there, or when he ate the noon meal with us, he followed me with his eyes as if I wore a black hood and carried an axe, and he was next in line.

Ger, who as a new bridegroom shouldn’t have been noticing anything but the charms of his new bride, noticed the tension between his assistant and his younger sister-in-law. One day when we were out together hauling wood, and there was the pause between throwing the tools in on the last pile of wood and telling Greatheart to get along there, Ger rubbed his face with a dirty hand and said, “About Ferdy.” I stiffened. There was a pause that snickered in my ears, and then Ger said gently, “Don’t worry about it. It’s different with different people.”

I picked up a twig from the forest floor and threw it absently into the wagon. I didn’t know what he meant by “it” and I would have died rather than ask him. “Okay,” I said. And then as I took hold of Greatheart’s bridle I added, “Thanks,” over my shoulder, since I knew he was trying to be helpful.

Hope gave birth to twins ten months after the wedding, in May. The girl was born first; Hope named her Mercy, after our sister who had died, although I privately thought that our family already had more than enough virtues personified. The little boy was named Richard, for Ger’s father. Mercy was a healthy, happy baby from the beginning, and she was born with golden curls and blue eyes that would look straight at a face bending over her. Richard was puny, bald, and shriveled-looking, didn’t eat well, and cried steadily for the first six months; then perhaps he began to feel ashamed of himself, for he cried only at intervals, grew plump and rosy, and produced some reddish-brown hair.

It was in late September that a pedlar from the south came into town and asked at the Griffin if they knew of a man named Woodhouse, or of another, older man named Huston, who used to live in the city. Melinda, after looking him over and asking his business, brought him along to us; and he gave Father a letter with a wax seal.

The letter was from a man named Frewen, whom Father had known and trusted. He was another merchantman who owned several ships, and lived in the city near our old house. He was writing now to say that one of Father’s missing ships was returning to port after all: It had been sighted and spoken by one of Frewen’s own captains, whose veracity his master would vouch for. Frewen could not say exactly when the ship might reach home; but he hoped to be able to do his old friend Huston the service of holding it for him until he could send word or come himself to dispose of it. He was welcome to stay at Frewen’s house while he transacted his business.

Father read the letter aloud to us sitting around the parlour fire after dinner, and a grim silence fell after he was finished. Grace sat as if frozen; if it hadn’t been for the firelight she would have been white as milk, her hands clenched into fists in her lap, twisting her apron. Even the babies were quiet; I held Mercy, who looked up at me with big eyes.

“I’ll have to go,” said Father. Robbie Tucker was an almost tangible presence in the room. “Tom Bradley should be stopping by here any day now; I can go south with them.”

And so it was. Tom arrived a week later, and declared himself delighted to have Father’s company all the way south to the city again. The letter had cast a pall over all of us that the fine clear autumn weather and the babies’ high spirits did nothing to dispel; and it closed down as tightly as a shroud when Father had gone. The worst of it was watching Grace turn cold and white and anxious again, seeing in her a helpless, despairing sort of excitement that she could not quite suppress.

Father told us not to look for him before the spring, when traveling would be easier. But it was a cold night in late March, with the snow nearly a foot thick on the ground after a sudden blizzard, when the front door was thrown open and Father stood on the threshold. Ger strode forwards and caught him in his arms as he staggered, and then half carried him to a seat near the fire. As he sank down with a sigh we all noticed that in his hand he held a rose: a great scarlet rose, bigger than any we had seen before, in full and perfect bloom. “Here, Beauty,” he said to me, and held it out. I took it, my hand trembling a little, and stood gazing at it. I had never seen such a lovely thing.

When Father had set out last autumn he had asked us girls if there was anything he could bring us from the city. No, we said: Our only wish is that you should come home to us soon and safely.

“Oh, come now, children,” he said. “Pretty girls want pretty things: What little trinkets do you secretly think about?” We looked at one another, not sure what we should say; and then Hope laughed a little and kissed him and said, “Oh, bring us ropes of pearls and rubies and emeralds, because we haven’t a thing to wear the next time we visit the King and Queen.” We all laughed then, Father too, but I thought his eyes looked hurt; so a little later I said to him, “Father, there is something you can bring me—I’d love to plant some roses here, around the house. If you could buy some seeds that are not too dear, in a few years we’ll have a garden that will be the envy of all Blue Hill.” He smiled and promised that he would try.

I remembered this now, five months later, the snowcold stem against my fingers. We stood like a Christmas tableau, focused on the huge nodding rose in my hand, snow dripping softly off its crimson petals; then a blast from the still-open door shook us, as it seemed, from sleep. Grace said, “I’ll put some water in a cup for it,” and went to the kitchen. As I went to close the door, I saw a laden horse standing forlorn in the snow; it raised its head and pricked its ears at me. I hadn’t bothered to think that Father must have traveled with some kit besides a scarlet rose. I handed the rose to Grace and said, “I’ll see to the horse.” Ger followed me, and it happened that I needed his assistance, because the saddle-bags were full and very heavy.

When we returned, Father was sipping some hastily warmed cider, and the silence still lay as thick as the snow outside. Ger and I dumped the leather satchels into a corner near the door, and all but forgot them. As we took our places again by the fire, Hope knelt down in front of Father and put her hands in his lap; and when he looked at her, she said gently: “What has happened since you left us, Father?”

He shook his head. “There’s too much to tell it all now. I am tired, and must sleep,” and we noticed how old and frail he looked, and his eyes were heavy and sunken. He looked up at Grace: “I am sorry, child, but it was not the Raven.” Grace bowed her head. “It was the Merlyn; she hadn’t been drowned after all.” He fell silent again for several minutes, while the firelight chased shadows across his weary face. “I’ve brought back a little money, and a few things; not much.” Ger and I caught each other giving the full saddle-bags puzzled looks; but we said nothing.

Grace had set the rose, now standing in a tall pottery cup of water, on the mantelpiece above the parlour fire. Father looked up at it, and all our eyes were drawn after his. “Do you like it, Beauty, child?” he said. “Yes, indeed, Father,” I said, wondering; “I have never seen its like.”

He said, as if in a trance, staring at the flower: “Little you know what so simple a thing has cost me”; and as he finished speaking, a petal fell from the rose, although it was unharmed and blooming. The petal turned in the air as it fell, as if it were so feather-light that the warm eddies of air from the fire could lift it; and the firelight seemed to gild it. But it struck the floor with an audible clink, like a dropped coin. Ger bent down and picked it up: It was a bright yellow color. He took it between his fingers, and with a little effort bent it slightly. “It’s gold,” he said quietly.

Father stood up as if his back hurt him. “Not now,” he said in response to our awed faces. “Tomorrow I will tell you all my story. Will you help me upstairs?” he said to Grace; and the rest of us looked after them when they had gone. Hope banked the fire, and we went our ways to bed. The saddle-bags lay untouched where Ger and I had set them; he gave them hardly a glance as he barred the door.

I dreamed that the stream from the enchanted wood turned to liquid gold, and its voice as it ran over the rocks was as soft as silk; and a great red griffin wheeled over our meadow, shadowing the house with its wings.