They stayed by the fire that afternoon. Skalmir was finding it more and more difficult to know how to help Rose, who was frightened and pale most of the time, jumpy, superstitious. He hadn’t seen the ghost of the washerwoman, but the encounter had gotten under Rose’s skin. All afternoon, she watched the place by the stream where she said the washerwoman had hung out the clothes, gnawing on her fingernails and softly clearing her throat. Clouds had come over her eyes. Again, he had the uncanny feeling that he was looking at Rowan, grown, and it sparked his protective instincts.
They didn’t speak, and even when the sky began to grow dim she sat there still. He was about to suggest they eat something when there was a loud rustle in the leaves a little farther into the dark wood, then confident footfalls.
Rose sat up straight. Skalmir tensed, listening.
“A person?” she asked.
“Four-footed,” he said, and thought of wolves, though they were usually softer on their feet, more cautious and canny.
The footfalls grew faster. Skalmir stood and grasped Rose’s hand to pull her to her feet, his blood sounding an alarm. “Run,” he said, just as an enormous black hound burst from cover and leapt toward them.
They ran, Skalmir dragging Rose by the hand, leaving their camp with their food and their packs and their fire behind. Rose shrieked as the monstrous dog snapped at their heels. Skalmir kept his head up, searching in the early-evening gloom for just the right tree to climb to escape it. They were being driven into thinning woodland. He could see a mass of sky, the corner of the moon, then a huge ash tree came into view in the center of it all. Some of its mighty branches reached nearly all the way to the ground.
“Rose, the tree,” he said, redoubling his speed as the dog barked and snarled.
He propelled her ahead of him, and she climbed up onto a low branch and then from there scaled her way up and up, to sit in a fork high above the ground. He followed. The dog easily reached the lower branch and took a bite out of his foot, piercing through his shoe leather. Skalmir pulled his foot free of his shoe and climbed up next to Rose. The dog mauled the shoe, then stretched its huge paws up on the tree and barked and barked, slavered and sniffed, but could not reach them.
Skalmir had never seen anything like it. Even Bluebell’s war dog was less than half the size of this thing. Its gigantic black head was like a boulder, and its eyes shone an uncanny red like embers. Rose shivered on the branch next to him, clinging to the trunk with white fingers.
“We are too high up for it,” he said soothingly, then pressed a finger against his lips to quiet her. “It will eventually go.”
Eventually. After a few more minutes of barking, the dog curled up at the base of the tree, scratched itself for a time, then went to sleep. Skalmir’s foot stung where the dog’s tooth had ripped a jagged wound in it. Rose tore a strip of material from the hem of her dress and bound it for him.
“I am afraid it will never leave,” Rose said.
He opened his mouth to say something reassuring, but the words “Perhaps it never will” came out. He clamped his mouth shut, shook his head as though addled.
“What? Do you really think not?”
“No, I—”
“I don’t know if you’re cruel and I oughtn’t trust you.” This time it was Rose’s turn to press her hands over her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that.”
Realization dawned slowly on Skalmir. “It’s a true tree,” he said. “The First Folk legends say that the oldest ash in the forest makes people tell the truth.” He gazed down at the dog. “The black hound is another First Folk legend.”
“And the washerwoman?” Rose asked.
“Perhaps. I don’t know them all.” Rathcruick’s words came back to him: You see only a sliver of the wood. My people have been here since the time of the giants. Skalmir and Rose were wandering somewhere ancient and enchanted, a place made of trees and old legends, where the First Folk reigned. He was more certain than ever that Rowan was in here somewhere.
“So we are constrained to tell truth while we are here?” Rose asked.
“I believe so.”
“Then perhaps it is best if we don’t talk.”
Skalmir looked at her, saw the corners of her lips turn up, and chuckled. “Perhaps, if we want to stay friends, we should talk. Is it true, then, that you don’t trust me?”
She shook her head while saying, “Yes. I am trying to trust you, but I don’t know you and you are a man and stronger and taller than me by miles, so I have wariness in my heart.”
He took her hand. “Remember, I have kept Rowan safe these four years.”
“You lost her. You lost her to the First Folk. I would not have lost her.”
“You already did.” Again, the strange sensation of words jumping on to his lips without his permission.
Rose’s brows drew together sharply. “Stop talking,” she said. “We must stop talking.”
So they did. They sat in silence a long time while the dog snored beneath them, but now Skalmir’s curiosity was roused and so he asked Rose, “Why did Wengest hide Rowan from you?”
The look that crossed her face hurt him, so he held up his finger to her lips and said, “Forget I asked.”
But she spoke anyway, her breath warm against his fingertip. “I loved another. Wengest found out. I was simply lucky that he never suspected Rowan wasn’t his.”
“Is she his?”
Rose shook her head. “Her father is Wengest’s nephew, Heath. I loved him in the way only the young can love: foolishly, burningly. I wanted him because I couldn’t have him. I risked and lost everything to grasp at imagined happiness.” Her eyes were sad. “I expect you’ll tell Wengest.”
“I won’t,” Skalmir said. “Nothing could persuade me to.”
She looked at him, and a smile came to her eyes. “I believe you,” she said. “Because in the true tree, you couldn’t lie to me.”
He smiled back. “See? It’s not so bad up here. I can say to you that I will protect you because of the love I hold for your daughter and your sister.” The last words came out completely unbidden, and he drew a sharp breath.
“My sister?” Rose said, eyes narrowed. “Which sister?”
“Bluebell.”
“How well do you know Bluebell?”
“I…” Everyone knows Bluebell. Say it. Say everyone knows her and she’s not special to you and she never visited Rowan. “I am in love with her.”
“She is your highborn lover?”
Skalmir nodded and waited for Rose’s mind to tick over, to realize—
“She’s seen Rowan, hasn’t she? She’s been to visit you and Rowan? She’s known all along where my daughter was and she told me nothing!” Her voice grew wilder, infused with repressed sobs. “Four years! Four years I have been apart from my own child and she swore she knew nothing!”
“She thought it for the best.”
“She always thinks she knows best. She doesn’t.” Rose looked down at the dog. “Leave us be, you foul creature. We need to get out of this tree before the whole world shatters with the horrors of the truth.”
Skalmir put a hand on her sleeve, aware of how soft she felt beneath it. “Don’t, Rose. Bluebell knew how much it would hurt you if you knew. She only wanted to be part of Rowan’s life.”
“So did I,” Rose said, then fell to silence.
Skalmir turned away from his guilt and applied his mind to the problem at hand. The woods were silent and still. The dog had fallen asleep; they couldn’t stay up this tree forever.
“I’m going back to the camp to get my bow and arrow,” he said.
“You won’t get past the dog.”
“I have a plan. Of sorts.”
“Tell me what I can do.”
“You need to do nothing but wait up in this tree for me to kill the dog,” he said. “You don’t seem much use.” Again, he wished for the words to return. “I’m sorry,” he said, because that was also true.
Rose gave him a hard look. “Good luck,” she said. “I don’t want to die in the forest alone.”
“We understand each other” was all he could say as he eased off his remaining shoe and threw it with all his might deeper into the forest.
The dog woke, lifted its head and sniffed, then got to its feet and padded off toward where the shoe had landed. Skalmir jumped from the tree, jarring his joints and sending pain shooting up through his injured foot. At once, he heard the dog’s footfalls stop, turn…
Skalmir ran. He was quick, but he was shoeless, and he was not entirely sure which direction to take to return to the camp. The dog gained on him, hot breath on his heels. Leaves plowed up on either side as they ran. Skalmir heard the stream, reoriented himself and redoubled his speed, broke through the trees and skidded to the ground, reaching for his bow and loading it just as the dog landed with a crushing thump on his chest, knocking all the breath out of him.
Then crack.
The dog yelped and turned, snarling. There was Rose, launching another rock at the dog’s head, clipping it over the ear.
Skalmir nocked an arrow, shot it.
It slid through the air and into the base of the dog’s skull, right into its brain.
It froze, shuddered, and fell over on its side.
Skalmir stood and filled the damned thing with arrows: heart, liver, lungs. Making sure it never got back up.
Then he stood back, catching his breath. He glanced up at Rose. “I’m sorry I said you were no use.”
She smiled at him. “It wasn’t true.”
The feeling of nights and days melting and washing into one another was not simply a trick of time and tiredness, Rose realized. The hours actually passed differently here in the Howling Wood. They would lie down to sleep only to find the sun rising an hour later. This distortion of time grew more skewed every day, until Rose was just as baffled by when they were as where they were.
“It’s because we are drawing closer to Rowan,” Skalmir said one evening—or was it early morning?—as they gathered fuel for a fire. “I know it. Closer to where Rathcruick hides his tribe.”
“I hope you are right. I am tired all the way into my bones.”
“Let’s hope it stays dark long enough for us to sleep well,” he said, dumping an armful of kindling in the circle of stones she had laid out. “Stand back.”
He dribbled fire oil on the kindling and lit it up. Rose watched his face from the other side of the fire, waves of heat blurring the detail. He looked weary, too. Whatever had passed between them in the true tree had not put them at odds with each other; quite the opposite, in fact: It was easier to trust now that they knew each other’s shadowy thoughts.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
He shook his head, sat down. “I don’t know. I don’t know when I ate, when I slept, when I shit. My body is as confused as my brain.”
Rose sat down, too, then lay on her side. “Tell me something I don’t know about Rowan,” she said. She asked him every night, or at least every time they lay down to rest. It saddened her to think that he would likely never run out of stories.
“Hmm…what this time?” he said, leaning forward to drop a log on the fire. In the bright firelight, she noticed for the first time a streak of gray in his blond beard.
“What did she dream about?” Rose asked.
He furrowed his brow, thinking. “Just before her fifth birthday,” he said, “she developed a fear of the dark. She’d been utterly fearless until then. Nothing scared her; not spiders or storms or strange noises in the night. Then suddenly, she wouldn’t sleep without a candle burning. One night, I smelled smoke and she’d managed to roll on the candle in the night and make her blankets smolder. After that, I would have to put her to bed screaming about the dark, screaming about how her body came apart in the night…I think that’s how she said it. I remember it being a very difficult time and thinking I might have to send her back to Wengest. I was grieving my wife’s death and presumed Rowan was, too, in her own way.”
Rose’s heart squeezed tight, thinking about Rowan’s distress. Remote, yet needling under her skin.
“But then one night, she stopped resisting. And that made me guilty, as though I had broken her spirit somehow, and I said to her the next morning that I was sorry it had been so hard on her. Do you know what she said to me?”
Rose shook her head, realized he couldn’t see her, and said, “No. What?”
“She said, I’m all right now because I found Mama.”
A rush of feeling crashed over her. Her eyes grew damp. Maybe the feeling she had often experienced, of Rowan curled up against her back, hadn’t been just her desperate imaginings after all.
“She never displayed any fear of the dark after that. I was never quite sure what she meant. Perhaps she had a dream…I don’t know. It was enough that the thought of you gave her comfort.”
Rose propped herself on her elbow. “I haven’t seen her for so long, Snowy. The idea that I might see her soon…it doesn’t feel real. And all the while, my other child is without me. Missing me. Maybe crying in the dark.” No, not Linden, she reminded herself. He would endure and say nothing.
“You have another child?”
“Yes. A boy.” She didn’t elaborate, didn’t name the father. “He’s nothing like Rowan, but I love him with my whole heart. And I often think, which of the gods did I upset so greatly that they won’t allow me to have both my children with me at once?”
“The gods don’t care so much about any of us,” Skalmir said. “I lost two children before they were even born. To me, you seem lucky. Yours are, at the very least, alive somewhere in the world.”
Rose fell quiet, chastened. After a while, curiosity got the better of her. “Is that how your wife died, too?”
“Yes. The child was due in the winter, but both died in a torrent of blood in the autumn.”
“Did Rowan miss your wife?” she asked gingerly.
“Mildrith? Of course. In her way. She has a…hardness about her that I attribute to her losing you so young. She loves, of course, but to her mind love is always bidding farewell.”
Hardness. Rowan had grown hard. Whatever happened next, whatever reunion and further separation they had to endure, Rowan was already changed by these years apart, by Rose’s own actions and the impossibility she had felt about giving up Heath. The thought weighed heavily on her. Love, now, seemed a gentler thing than it had then. Perhaps, in some bright corner of her heart, she’d kept believing that the Rowan who would return to her would be the little chubby-legged, smiling girl she’d last seen four years ago. But too much time and experience had passed; a river of change had washed through both of them. There would be no return, only reparation.
“She has been happy,” Skalmir said. “I promise you, she has been happy.”
“But always so far from me…”
“I’m sorry to make you sad.”
“My life is sad.” She took a deep breath. “But so is yours.”
“If we live long enough, rough winds will eventually blow our way. But at least we are still out here, with the wind on our faces. Many are not. Many know only the still air of a tomb.”
She sat up so that she could look at him, and he was smiling lightly, his eyes turned toward the darkening sky. “Bluebell could do a lot worse than marry a man like you,” she said, then instantly felt guilty for bringing it up.
“I don’t want to marry her,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of making a claim like that on her. I just hope that she will keep wanting to come to visit me and be with me, even when I am old.”
Rose didn’t ask further questions. For some reason it made her desperately uncomfortable to think about Bluebell making love or being in love or talking about love or even thinking about love. Bluebell and love didn’t even belong in the same sentence. Besides, Rose was still monstrously angry with her sister for withholding news and information about Rowan for all this time.
Her own thoughts turned to Heath, to memories of the full-bodied man she had loved, and to the half-bodied invalid she had left behind. And she smiled, too, wondering if there might be a future with him that she had been waiting for all this time, without realizing that was why she was waiting. Living with Eldra, not returning home. The irony of Heath raising Linden while Wengest remained Rowan’s father was almost too much for her to bear.
“What was that?” Skalmir asked, but without alarm in his voice.
“What was what?” she asked.
He stood and pointed over her head, and she turned to see a handful of small blue lights darting about between the trees. “Fireflies?” she asked.
“Not blue,” he said, transfixed. “Is it a chance they are a sending? From Rowan?”
“Or Rathcruick,” Rose replied, her voice cautious.
“Rowan is with Rathcruick,” he said. “If we find him, we find her.”
Rose climbed to her feet and came to stand next to him. There was something hypnotic about the lights. They ducked and wove among one another, and she thought she could hear a faint musical hum.
“Can you hear…?” she said.
“I keep thinking of the singing tree,” he said.
Suddenly, the lights gathered together in a blue ball and shot toward them. They stepped apart and the light arrowed through the air and into the woods.
Skalmir bent to tie the rags back on his feet and started after them. “I’m going to follow,” he said.
“We oughtn’t—”
“Wait here. I’ll whistle so you can hear where I am. I won’t go far, I promise.”
Then he was limping after the blue ball, which disappeared into the gloom of the forest. Skalmir disappeared too, but she could hear his whistling and she waited, not quite ready to sit down again. She turned her eyes toward the sky, could see it was becoming light again. They hadn’t slept.
Skalmir’s whistling abruptly stopped.
A shot of heat hit Rose’s heart. “Snowy?” she called.
Nothing.
“Snowy?” Louder this time, and she could hear the note of panic in her own voice. She warily edged toward the woods, but it was dark still and the fire was bright. Perhaps he’d start whistling again soon. She waited, every fiber in her body tensed to hear the whistling, to know that she wasn’t alone in this place.
Nothing. Silence.