Two

On a brisk spring day, when the village bustled with its morning routines and the orioles trilled in the leaves, Katrina set out from Greymist Manor with her hair gathered up in sky-blue ribbons, her favorite dress swishing against her ankles, and the faintest blush of rouge lighting her cheeks. She carried a wicker basket in the crook of one arm, thinking she might stop by the Kleins’ stall in the square for a few fresh apples, or the bakery for a pie, which she could bring home as proof to her parents that she was well capable of navigating the village on her own.

Gottfried, the hunter, was the first person to see her, and he stopped in his tracks. The Great Dane puppy that followed him—one from a manor litter that Lord Greymist had traded for a great rack of antlers now positioned over the fireplace—crashed into his legs and flopped onto its haunches, stunned.

“Lady Katrina,” Gottfried said, bending swiftly at the waist, a perfect ninety-degree angle of deference. His hat slid down his gray-streaked hair, and he caught it just before it hit the ground. “I should have known you would be out; the orioles were saying so all morning, but I didn’t listen to them.”

He was a strange man, Gottfried, and had been for as long as Katrina could remember. But anyone who braved the woods as often as he did had to be at least slightly insane.

She gave him a graceful short bow back, smiling, and said, “How is Oswald? I heard his berry patch is already showing promise.”

Gottfried beamed at mention of his husband. “Aye, it is, and I’ll tell him to bring some to the manor when they’re ripe! He’ll be joyed to hear you asked after him, Lady Katrina.”

They shared a few more kind remarks and then Katrina went on her way, Gottfried loping off in the other direction with the puppy—he had named it The Duke, quite a big name for a puppy, Katrina thought—and whistling a merry tune not unlike the orioles’ song.

As Katrina crossed the square, she felt eyes turning to her, attentions drawing away from whatever they had been doing to watch her pass. She was very used to this phenomenon, as it happened whenever she went out with her parents. She had hoped, at times, that everyone would get used to the way she looked, that she could at some point be both beautiful and normal, thought pretty and not fussed over, but she wondered if she would miss the attention. If something would feel wrong were everyone not to notice when she entered a room, or when she turned her soft gray gaze on them.

Now was her chance, though. To be beautiful and to be seen. Her conversation with Gottfried had gone well enough; someone her own age would see her for exactly who she was.

There weren’t many people her age in the village, though. There was Hans, of course, the butcher’s son, who Katrina had always found annoying and—she knew the irony was strong—spoiled. There was a girl, Liesel, who lived somewhere south of the bakery, but she always looked hassled, dragging her little brother, Tomas, on errands around the village. Then there was the fisherman’s son, Fritz, but he was spineless and soft and spent too much time with Hans, besides. It amazed Katrina how much she had picked up about her neighbors from the walks with her parents and the news they mulled over each night at dinner and each morning at breakfast. She felt as if, by observing the village around her, she had always been part of its inner happenings, had always known how it worked and why.

The two people she was looking for were out and together. Heike sat on the stone wall in front of the inn, and Wenzel stood in front of her, leaning on his broomstick and gesturing with his hands, probably reciting one of the many stories he’d picked up from the traveling merchants. There was such ease in their nearness, in the way Wenzel stood between Heike’s swinging legs, but not so close as to be indecent or suggestive; in the way Heike leaned forward and tilted her head back to see him, squinting one eye against the glare of the sun.

They were, Katrina had always felt, the antithesis of her. Not that they weren’t beautiful—she didn’t really think anyone was ugly or deserved to be called such, and Wenzel and Heike would only have been called ugly by someone who wanted to hurt them—but because they could blend into their surroundings where she could not. They always seemed to have so many real things to do, real responsibilities that callused their hands and put dirt on their faces; and, most of all, they had someone who understood them. They had each other. They had easy touches and routines and a silent language that could make them burst out laughing in the middle of the midsummer feast on the village green. She wanted what they had so badly, it was a physical ache in her chest.

She put on a smile and made her way toward them. Heike noticed her first, those gold hawk eyes focusing on Katrina. Wenzel turned. His expression was first blank, then surprised, then welcoming. He smiled.

“Katrina!” he called, which sent frothy bubbles of excitement spinning around her stomach, making her skip across the square. When she reached them, Wenzel looked troubled. “Or—should I call you Lady Katrina?” He turned to Heike then, as if she could give him the answer.

“My parents would make you add the ‘lady,’” Katrina said, winking conspiratorially at him, “but I’m okay if you don’t.” How would she ever make friends if they were always reminded of her title?

“Is everything okay?” Heike asked, cocking her head the same way Katrina had seen her mother, Hilda, do from time to time. “Are your parents okay?”

She sounded genuinely concerned, which made Katrina’s excitement grow. “No, they’re perfectly fine! I convinced them to let me come out on my own today.” The excitement stuttered and so did she; they were looking at her, waiting for her to continue, but she sounded suddenly childish to her own ears. “I suppose that seems . . . silly. They think I’m some kind of doll to be kept on a shelf. . . .” Now she was blurting her problems to them, problems that probably—no, that were—very minimal to two people who had to work every day for their clothes and food and shelter. “I’m sorry, this was a poor way to start a conversation. I’m afraid I’m not very good at it.”

Wenzel waved his hands, one still holding his broom. “No, no! It’s fine, it’s just”—he looked at Heike again, who gave him that level, gold gaze—“we’ve never really gotten to speak to you before.”

Katrina blinked, for a moment feeling very airy and stupid, though she knew she wasn’t, and during that moment her perspective of her memories shifted very slightly. She was so used to seeing the other villagers, watching them, observing them from afar and spending so much of her time putting together the pieces of their lives in her mind, that she had forgotten they didn’t know her. Maybe they didn’t even wonder about her life the way she did about theirs; maybe all they saw of her really was her beauty.

“Oh,” she said, her excitement gone flat.

“It’s nice to talk to you now, though,” said Heike quickly, to which Wenzel nodded. “Before you came up, I was showing Wenzel my new boots.” She thrust a leg up in the air. Her foot was inside a sturdy leather boot, laced up tightly at the top, with a bit of green ribbon woven through the eyelets. “Well, they’re not new new; they were my mother’s. My old ones weren’t even bursting at the soles, and she gave these to me.” A little knot of confusion formed between Heike’s eyebrows.

“Two good pairs of shoes!” Wenzel yelped comically, throwing his arms up. “And you’re complaining?”

Heike smiled and used the extended boot to push his hip, putting him off-balance. Katrina smiled, too, but felt as if she was standing outside the joke, as if the two of them had drawn back into their own world. She wondered what their wedding day would be like, because she was certain they were going to get married. It would be on the green behind the inn, of course, as all the weddings were. Heike would wear a crown of wildflowers, purples and yellows and reds, and Wenzel would get two bear claws or bits of elk antler or rabbit’s feet. The bear claws were the luckiest, but the elk antler wasn’t bad and a much more likely find, while the rabbit’s feet were for those who may as well have been forced into marriage. They’d get them from Gottfried or someone else, and Wenzel would present them on leather cords that he and Heike would wear around their necks until they died or separated, a symbol that they were of the forest, and of each other.

Katrina stopped herself. She was fantasizing, again, about these people she thought she knew, instead of talking to them like she had come to do.

“They’re very nice,” she told Heike. “The boots.”

Heike shrugged and hopped off the stone wall. She was taller than Katrina, and solidly built; Katrina had to stop herself from imagining Heike going about her daily chores, strong enough to lift anything she came across. “I better get back,” Heike said. “I’ll get yelled at if she thinks I’m fooling around in the middle of the day again.”

Hilda yelled at her daughter? Katrina had never seen that. She filed the information away.

“Wait,” Katrina said, before Heike and Wenzel could go back to their work. “I was wondering, since I’m going to be out more, if you’d like to—well, I thought maybe we could spend some time together? We could go down to the lake, or we could take a stroll around the village, or tell each other stories. . . .”

She let her voice trail off, because they were staring at her again, that vague blank stare that told her she’d made some kind of misstep.

“I can’t today,” Heike said, looking sheepish. “I actually shouldn’t have spent as much time here as I did.”

“Neither can I,” Wenzel said, shrugging. “We’re doing repairs on the roof. It’s been leaking for weeks.”

Katrina hadn’t really meant today, but their answers seemed to convey the proper sentiment anyway. She wasn’t one of them; they made time for each other and didn’t have enough left over for her. How could she blame them? If she was the one who had what she needed, why would she pollute it with more?

But she had thought they would, for her. She had always, eventually, gotten what she wanted. As long as someone looked at her long enough, as long as she could hypnotize them.

But no matter how long Wenzel and Heike looked, she knew her beauty didn’t faze them.

She put on a happy smile and said, “That’s too bad. Maybe another time,” and left them to their many responsibilities. She tried not to feel too sore about it, but she was sore; rejection had hurt more than she had imagined it would.

Instead of a pie, she went to the bakery and bought one of Johanna’s apple pastries and sat in the square nibbling on one crimped corner. Her mother always said she was beautiful no matter what mood she was in, and she—her mother, not Katrina—was proud of that fact. Katrina supposed the people looking at her now were doing so because she was a pretty girl eating prettily, not because she looked upset. Even if she threw the pastry and screamed and tore at her hair, they would just say how beautiful she was, how graceful. Her parents had already done so. Tantrums got her nothing.

So she was sitting, scowling—though it probably didn’t look like it—toward the well in the center of the village, when she felt a presence come near.

“Hi, Katrina.”

She looked up. Hans smiled at her.

“Do you want to see something interesting?” he asked.