CHAPTER TWENTY

Into the Woods

I ran back to the rock where we had seen Bettina but found that the stick I had left in the portal had snapped in half with the weight of time. I would have to find Sida again before I could get to Bettina.

I pushed myself up the switchbacks towards Fenlen Forest. When I reached the top of the ridge, I did not pause to give my blood. I did not think about the path I took, and my strides were certain. I sought to forget myself in action, but instead my thoughts crowded in on me. The evening air was cool against my face and I realized that summer would be turning into fall. Not soon, but it would inevitably come. Then winter, and with it, the anniversary of Bettina’s disappearance. I wondered how they would commemorate it, whether there would be cups of brandy to fill and empty or songs to sing. Or if I could find her, as it seemed Sida wanted me to do…what then?

And perhaps because I had so completely forgotten my desire to go home, it happened.

I stumbled to a halt. That tree…It was a large birch that had been rubbed pink over successive generations of unicorns rubbing off their horn velvet. The hairs on my arms prickled. I knew I had found my old trail, that I had connected my two worlds. The tree was on the path I had been creating from Melina’s house. Yet it was not far from Ma’s clearing. I could walk home with my eyes nearly closed. Either home. The shock made my skin tingle as the world reoriented itself. I suddenly saw myself from two overlapping directions.

I was standing east, heading west. I could run back to Ma now. I could be there in two days. I would salve her bitterness with the knowledge that I had not abandoned her. I could have my routine of living my solitary life, grooming unicorns and jogging down the old paths on the hunt for alicorn. Or perhaps I would help my mother leave the log house and find a new life for herself elsewhere. One she had chosen.

I could walk away without finding out what had happened to Bettina. Without making sure that Telka got home without any trouble. Without saying goodbye to Torun.

I could go home, but not yet. I had work to do.

I turned back.

Retracing my steps, I made my way to where Torun and I had helped the doe deliver her fawn. The herd was on the move but couldn’t have gone far. I saw the flattened circles of grass and whorls of disturbed loam where fawns had curled up and slept. I followed them north until I spotted Sida, her silver-grey coat standing out against the fading light. She was near the back of the herd, with the specked doe and her fawn.

They must have smelled the villagers at the base of the escarpment and decided it was unsafe to stay close to the edge.

The matriarch tried to nudge them into hurrying, but the fawn limped and was taking shallow, panting breaths. The doe gave a small kick, warning the matriarch not to push them. She led her fawn under the low-hanging branches of a pine tree and settled down there with her legs tucked under her. The fawn followed suit. When they lay still, they were almost invisible amongst the dead needles.

The matriarch paced worriedly in front of the pine tree. Sida came to her and mimicked her movements. The matriarch stopped and Sida stopped as well. The matriarch stepped close to her and leaned over to nip gently at Sida’s mane, a sign of recognition. She stepped aside and herded the rest of the does and fawns away, leaving Sida to guard the speckled doe’s hiding place.

I let the herd retreat through the trees before I approached Sida.

“I need your help,” I said. “I need you to help get to Bettina.”

Whether or not Sida understood my words, she understood my tone, the anxious tang in my sweat, the tension in my shoulders. But she flared her nostrils and stepped backwards. She wasn’t going anywhere until the speckled doe and fawn were ready.

“Well, I suppose I’m not going anywhere either.” I sat down by her feet and ate the cheese pie that was in my pack.

Underneath the tree, the fawn had fallen asleep. They wouldn’t be moving until daybreak. Unless I left for Melina’s house now, I realized, I would be here all night. If the family hadn’t realized I had snuck away, they would now. Or Telka would have told. My stomach gave a swoop. What would they think, to find me gone?

I kissed Sida on her broad cheek and hurried back to the escarpment. I looked down over the valley. There was a bonfire burning in front of the family enclosure and I could see the black silhouette of people standing around it. The wind brought snatches of song to me and the smell of woodsmoke.

But closer by, beneath me on the path, I saw a flicker of something between the trees. Torchlight. Oh no. They had realized I was gone and had come looking for me. And then I saw who it was. Heino, carrying a bundle with him in one arm and a torch in the other. I gasped, and he looked up. His small teeth glinted. I backtracked, but not quickly enough.

Heino caught sight of me and called out. “Holding out on us, are you? Well, I don’t need you.”

He dropped his bundle, which unfolded itself with a little whimper. Telka. Heino leaned over, seized one of her upper arms and pulled her up.

A surge of hate and fear weakened my knees as I remembered Julian looming over me all those years ago. I needed to save Telka, but in order to do so, I needed to be sly.

Heino took large strides for a man of his height. Telka stumbled forward. She couldn’t see anything. The flame of the torch stopped her eyes from adjusting to the night.

I drew back into the shadows and heard a nicker. Stupidly, I had led them right to Sida.

I ducked down behind a tree. Heino moved his torch from right to left. He couldn’t see me. I couldn’t risk calling to Telka. Not yet. I slipped from tree to tree parallel to them as they walked forward.

A branch snapped under my feet and Heino chuckled. “I know you’re there.” They were too close to the speckled doe and her fawn. But Heino was blind to what lay outside his golden sphere of torchlight. He stepped right past the pine tree under which the doe was hidden.

A few more steps and he would pass by them completely. He would never know they were there. But he paused.

It was too close. Sida couldn’t risk the danger to the doe and fawn. She stamped her feet in the darkness.

Heino turned away from the pine tree and took a few steps forward.

“Telka!” I shouted.

“It’s you!” She stretched her short arms out towards me.

“I’m coming!”

I snatched her up and ran out of the circle of torchlight. I crouched down under the pine with her. A grunt told me that the doe was there, awake, alert, but maintaining her stillness.

But Heino didn’t care that Telka had disappeared. He saw what he had come for.

“Sida! Get back!” I called.

But Sida danced forward, stamping her hooves. Her horn was not long enough to look threatening, but long enough to be dangerous.

As she approached, Heino swiped in front of himself with the torch. The air filled with the smell of singed hair. Sida reared back with a shriek of fury. The skin on her right shoulder was red and raw.

“Come at me, you stupid beast.”

She limped forward with her horn down.

In the dark, the cry of another uksarv cut through the still of the night. Not the matriarch, I thought. She wouldn’t jeopardize the herd’s safety.

The barrel-chested buck, the one who had stolen the speckled doe, had come to steal his prize away and now saw her threatened by a stranger. He stood beside Sida. His horn glinted dangerously in the torchlight. Though he was in danger, Heino’s mouth twisted into a grin. I could see his thoughts clearly. The buck’s horn was worth three times Sida’s. The buck was the one he wanted.

Heino fumbled in his belt for a knife. It fell and he knelt to pick it up. That was his mistake. Sida and the buck charged at him. The torch went flying from his hand and rolled across the ground, setting alight the dry pine needles. I ran towards the torch and picked it up, stamping at the tiny flames on the ground with bare feet now thick-soled from my forest ramblings. Behind me, there was a scuffle as Heino started to run.

There was a scream and a thud.

Then the heavy breathing of the buck and Sida. And silence.

I turned and raised the torch.

“Telka?”

“I’m here,” she said, crawling out from under the tree.

She shook the branches as she came and a high bleat told me that she had woken up the fawn. Telka ran towards me and I hugged her to my side.

At the sound of the fawn, Sida and the buck emerged from the shadows. They were equals in strength and in their determination to protect.

Telka gasped at the sight of them. The buck bobbed his head at her, but he did not seem to think she was dangerous. Instead, he ducked his head under the branches to look at the fawn, who emerged looking a little sleepy, but fresh and alert. The doe followed her fawn and guided it in the direction the herd had gone. The buck turned back to Sida, who was limping. He touched his horn against her burned shoulder, place by place. She stood patiently while he worked.

Watching, I realized the horn’s healing power had to do with time. It turned a fresh wound into an old one, encouraging scabs to form more quickly to protect the flesh from the world.

After a few minutes, the buck stepped away. The four of them moved close together and then walked off into the night, following the herd.

I wanted to call Sida to me, but I had Telka to look after. She was shivering with exhaustion, wonder and fright.

“Do you think you can climb on my back?” I said. I had the torch in one hand—I wouldn’t be able to hold her with both arms. She shook her head. I sat down on the cold earth with her and she curled into me.

I wished I could put out the torch. My arm was aching and it was making me see spots of light in the darkness. No. There were more torches. More people. My gut clenched. More hunters?

“Heino!” It was Pa’s voice. “Where’s my little girl?”

“Pa!” I cried. “We’re here!”

I tried to rouse Telka and she groggily stood. I picked her up and we walked slowly through the dark towards the light.

They had stopped.

I saw Pa kneeling beside Heino and turned Telka’s face towards me. Behind Pa were Giron, the drummer, and a few others. They watched us suspiciously.

At first, I did not see the wounds. And then, the red, damp holes, two of them, a thumb’s width wide, right where his heart lay.

Pa sat down on a fallen tree. “I don’t think the unicorn hunting would be a profitable plan,” he said quietly.

“No.” I swallowed. This was his way of admitting that I was right. The night’s events had made the spit thick in my throat. “Do we take the body?” Telka shivered in my arms and then went very still.

Pa looked at Heino and then quickly away. “I don’t think it’s ours to take.”

I took a step closer and saw why he had so spoken. The forest had already begun to claim the corpse. Vines had furled around his arms, between his fingers. Grass already poked through the weave of his shirt. Buds and leaves spread through his hair. I was reminded that I had never been at home in the Fenlen Forest. I had only ever been a guest. For the first time, I fully felt the honour of rambling through the trees in utter safety.

“Give me my child.” Pa took Telka very gently, without looking into my eyes. He held out the torch and we began walking back. The darkness was starting to break; the sky was no longer black, but a deep blue against the trees. I recognized the path even in the murk. Guest I may be, but the forest had begun to be familiar again.

My heart hurt. Sida had not waited for me. Perhaps she had outgrown me. A thought occurred to me suddenly: would Ma welcome me home if I no longer had the unicorns? She must, I thought. She must.

Moaning in her sleep, Telka nestled closer in Pa’s arms and he stroked her hair. “I told you not to run away in the night,” he said to me.

“Look who’s talking,” I shot back. But my tone was half-hearted. I knew he was thinking about Bettina’s disappearance. The other men muttered behind us, not daring to stray too far from us.

Pa’s brow wrinkled and he shifted Telka in his arms. “I never knew what a miracle it was that I made it across,” he said suddenly. “That night, when I left.”

“Why did you leave? You and Ma were a mismatch, I understand that. But why leave then? Why there?”

“I botched it. We had sold bad stock all down the road. The trick of selling cheap pots and pans at high prices to poor folk is to keep moving. Never go back until they forget their anger. But the road ended. I might have been lynched.”

“Over a cracked pan?”

“I might have also passed on bad coins. And I cuckolded a man three villages before.”

“Pa!”

He shrugged. “Sylvia found out about it all, of course. She was giving me freezing hell. You’d know how it is, of course. Cold looks, sharp words and elbows.”

“You deserved it.”

“Ah, did I? I was a few years older than you. Torun’s age.”

I coughed in surprise. I could not imagine Pa near my age, with a small child, a wife. It was like imagining that Telka was my child or that Torun had left her alone at a forest’s edge. Impossible. We were out of the forest now, at the switchbacks. I went first and then held my arms out to make sure that Pa kept his balance.

“I was scared out of my mind,” he said. “So I took the pony and rode away. As I went through the forest, the trees loomed and there were strange animal sounds. The pony threw me and ran away with the money. I had nothing. And I prayed that I would change my ways, that I would start again.”

“Of course,” I said, but he didn’t catch my sarcasm.

Pa wobbled on a loose stone, and I steadied him. I did not want him to drop Telka.

“I have done honest trade, though I drive a hard bargain and keep my eye sharp for a good chance. I have kept faith with Melina. And I do not want to lose any more children.” This last part he said rather fiercely, as if I should forget that he had already lost Bettina, that his deal with Heino had almost lost him Telka.

“You know,” he continued, “sometimes I think I should have let Bettina come trade with me.” Pa gave a wet sniff. If he cried, he’d scare Telka, so I patted him on the back. We walked together in silence. This was the first time I had talked to my father as an adult. I still did not like him, neither did I trust him. Tomorrow, he’d be preening and self-contented. But in this moment, I let myself feel sad for him, just a little bit.