Ash could hear her breath in the dark: quick, frightened, like a rabbit fleeing from hunting hounds. She put her hands out in front of herself and felt only cold air. She took a tentative step toward the door, shuffling forward until the tips of her fingers bumped against the wood. It was slightly wet. She flattened her palms against the door and then pressed her body to the oak. When she closed her eyes the quality of the dark did not change, and for a moment she stopped breathing, afraid that she could not tell if her eyes were open or shut. She touched her face, her eyelids, and the trembling movement of her eyes somehow reassured her: She was still real. Then she slid down to the ground, her face pressed against the door, her boots dragging roughly across the dirt floor. She gathered her knees to her chest to make herself as small as possible, and tried to ignore the weight of the darkness on her.
She must have fallen asleep, her cheek leaning against the door, because she thought she saw someone sitting next to her, and she thought it was her mother. The woman put her arm around Ash, and Ash dropped her head onto her mother’s shoulder and felt the pressure of her mother’s chin on her forehead. Her mother stroked her hair and said, “Don’t worry, Ash, I’m here.”
Ash felt the soft collar of her mother’s blouse beneath her cheek. She slipped her arms around her mother’s waist and pressed up close to her, feeling the solid warmth of her body. “Don’t go away again, Mother,” she whispered. “I’ve missed you.”
“Shh,” her mother said. “I know. You should rest now. You’ve been out all day and you’re hungry.”
Ash could smell the scent of her mother’s skin now, and it was the fragrance of the Wood, oak and moss and wildflower. She felt the dull thump of her mother’s heartbeat, the lightness of her mother’s breath on her hair, the gentle touch of her mother’s hands stroking down the length of her back. The rhythm was echoed in the sound of her mother’s fingers on the fabric of her dress, a subtle swoosh in the dark, up and down, up and down, the friction like a rope binding them together. Her mother pressed a kiss to her forehead, and her lips were warm.
When Ash opened her eyes, she could see. The cellar door was outlined with daylight, and it illuminated, dimly, bushels of potatoes and apples, sacks of flour and grain. Three trunks were stacked against the far wall; there was an old wheelbarrow, garden tools, a coil of rope. She wrapped her arms around herself and felt the chill of the early morning.
She did not know how long she sat there before she heard footsteps above her. She realized she must be sitting beneath the kitchen floor. The footsteps moved away, and then the kitchen door slammed. At last the steps came down to the cellar door, and a key rattled in the lock. She scurried away from the door and was standing when it opened. She blinked in the sudden glare at the wide, dark shadow looming outside. A key ring dangled from the woman’s hand, and when she spoke, Ash realized that it was Beatrice.
“It’s time to make breakfast,” Beatrice said, as if she were accustomed to letting Ash out of the cellar every morning. “Come outside; there’s work to do.”
Ash followed her back into the world.
For months afterward, Lady Isobel did not allow her to leave the house unaccompanied; she could not even go to the market without Beatrice keeping a hawk eye on her. At night, her stepmother followed her to her room and locked her in from the outside, and in the morning Beatrice let her out so that she could lay the fires and set the table for breakfast. At the end of the day, she would sit at her window and stare out at the Wood until the daylight was gone. She couldn’t stop thinking about the path she had taken to Rook Hill. She often thought of the grave that waited at the end of it, and if she closed her eyes she could remember the smell of the earth there. She also remembered the fairy who had been waiting for her—for surely he could not have been human, could he? In all the fairy tales she had read, the fairies were described as unnaturally beautiful, and now Ash knew what that meant. There had been more to his beauty than perfect features: He radiated an allure that would be nearly impossible to resist.
Each night before she went to sleep, she chose one fairy tale to read until the light of her candle stub died. Her favorite story was about Kathleen, a pretty girl of sixteen who was betrothed to the village baker’s son, a handsome young man with jet-black hair and smiling brown eyes. On her way home from his family’s house one warm summer night, Kathleen, full of the heady rush of first love, lost herself in the Wood. In the distance she saw the twinkling of lights and mistakenly thought that it marked a villager’s house—but it marked the edge of a fairy ring. That night, the story goes, the fairies were dressed in their finest, for it was Midsummer’s Eve. The young Kathleen knew that she should not enter the ring, but there was a fairy prince there with eyes as brilliant as sapphires and a smile that drove away all thoughts of the baker’s son. This fairy prince, who saw Kathleen standing outside the ring, took her hand and pulled her in, and then she was truly lost, for once anyone experiences a fairy’s charm, nothing else, they say, will ever be enough.
Kathleen awoke the next morning in her own bed in her ordinary house, and she longed to be back in that fairy ring so much that her body ached with the memory of it. She ran to the village greenwitch and begged for something to help her find that place again, and the greenwitch—who was old enough to know better—gave Kathleen a wreath of mugwort and told her to burn three leaves every night before she went to bed so that she might dream of that land. Kathleen waited breathlessly all day for night to fall, and when darkness came she plucked the leaves from the wreath and set them afire in a small dish at the foot of her bed. The smoke curled up with a bittersweet odor, and soon she fell asleep and dreamt that she was back in the fairy ring. In her dreams she danced with the beautiful prince, who fed her the most delicious foods she had ever tasted and bestowed one kiss upon her lips every night.
As the days went by, Kathleen began to waste away, for she only truly lived when she slept at night, entombed in the prison of smoke from the magical wreath. Although the baker’s son tried to woo her, she was no longer interested. Her mother plied her with the best food she could make, but Kathleen would not eat. Her friends tried to amuse her with funny tales, but she did not listen. On the night that she burned the wreath’s last leaf, she did not come back from that dream world. When her mother came to wake her the next morning, Kathleen would not open her eyes, though her breast still rose and fell, breathing in the lingering smoke from the burning wreath. They say that she did not die; instead she simply slept there, her mind lost, her body still and empty, alone on her narrow bed.
Ash read and re-read the story as if it were a map to her own future. Though she knew it was meant to be a cautionary tale, now that she had seen that fairy, she thought that Kathleen’s fate was not so cruel after all.
When autumn came, Ash’s stepmother told her to bring out the trunks of winter clothes stored under the stairs, and as she rummaged through the dusty, dark space, she came across a box of books that had been her father’s. Kneeling near the lamp, Ash pulled out volumes on history and trade regulations, old account books, and a small, cloth-bound journal written in a fine hand. Inside the front cover her mother’s name was written, and it was dated years before Ash had been born. She stuffed the book into her apron pocket, and all that day she felt the weight of it on her hip like hidden treasure. That night, squinting at the book in the candlelight, Ash saw that it contained what appeared to be recipes for medicines—or possibly spells. There was a remedy for fever; there was a recipe for alleviation of headache; there were instructions on making an ointment to treat burns. Under a long list of herbs, there was a notation next to the entry for mugwort: “May be used sparingly for lucid dreams.”
On one page titled “To Reverse Glamour,” many lines were crossed out, and the ink had been smeared and blotted several times as if her mother had been trying different combinations. “Take one part feverfew,” read the instructions, “and mash with two thimblefuls of spring dew. Soak for one fortnight in a black glass bottle beneath the shade of a mature hawthorn tree. Add one part wilted bryony stem, brewed with essence of verbena in cotter’s wine. If necessary, add foxglove.” At the bottom of the page was a note: “Maire Solanya believes ineffective. Will test on next full moon.”
There were several pages of notes on love, and Ash wondered if it were an attempt at a love potion, but there were few ingredients. One line was underscored several times: “The knowledge will change him.” But though Ash paged through the entire journal, she never found out who he was.
One morning in early winter, Beatrice did not come to unlock her door. Instead her stepmother turned the key in the lock and woke her, saying, “Beatrice is ill. She won’t be here today.” When Ash went downstairs, Beatrice was not in her quarters behind the kitchen. “She went to her daughter’s to recover,” Lady Isobel said when Ash asked where she had gone.
But she did not come back the next day, or the next one. At night, after Ash had washed the supper dishes and banked the kitchen fire, her stepmother called for her to come to her chamber. “It’s time for you to start learning something beyond scrubbing the floor,” said her stepmother, and held out her hairbrush.
“But Beatrice does this,” Ash said in surprise.
“Beatrice is not coming back,” said Lady Isobel.
“What happened?” Ash asked, startled. “Is she all right?”
“She is fine,” her stepmother said. “But I can no longer afford to keep Beatrice on here, so you will be required to take over her duties.”
“But there is too much work even for two,” Ash objected.
“Then you will have to learn how to work harder,” said Lady Isobel, holding the hairbrush out pointedly. When Ash did not move to take it, her stepmother continued, “You already know who to blame for this: your father. If he had not left so many debts, you might have had a lady’s upbringing. But the best you can hope for now, Aisling, is to be a lady’s maid.”
Ash flushed with anger. “I will not—” she began, but her stepmother interrupted her.
“You are not the only one who must sacrifice. I hope that Ana and Clara’s future will not be shortchanged because of your father’s debts. And if you run away, you will not only be confirming the fact that your father was a selfish man who did nothing more than take my money before he died, you will be at the mercy of whoever finds you wandering out there on the King’s Road.” Lady Isobel asked in a silky voice, “Do you know what happens to girls who are found wandering about without protection?”
Ash reluctantly closed her fingers around the hairbrush and raised it to her stepmother’s head. She began to brush Lady Isobel’s thick hair with short, rough strokes. A small smile twisted her stepmother’s lips as Ash yanked the hairbrush down, pulling out strands of auburn hair. Her stepmother reached up and grasped Ash’s right wrist in a bruising grip and said, “Careful, now. Is that any way to treat your mistress?”
The next morning, Ash moved her belongings into the room next to the kitchen where Beatrice had once slept. There was no brazier in the room, so it was the coldest in the house, but Ash did not mind the chill. Now that Beatrice was gone, there was nobody to unlock her door in the mornings, which meant that Lady Isobel could not lock her in at night, either. At first Ash thought that she would go immediately into the Wood at night—she wanted to find that fairy again. But doing Beatrice’s work as well as her own left her exhausted. At the end of the day, all she wanted to do was lean against the warm kitchen hearth, reading, the soot smearing down the length of her skirt. And just as she became more adept at her work, the winter came in earnest.
It snowed earlier and more heavily than it had in years, and the roads were often impassable. Yule was a subdued affair, for the King and his eldest son were away on a military campaign far in the south, and because of the harsh weather the hunting season ended earlier than usual. So by the time she was able to return to the Wood, stealing out of Quinn House on the first night the chill lessened, it had been almost a year since she had walked back to her mother’s grave. This time, as she wrapped herself in her old cloak and let herself out of the house, she knew what she was seeking, and it made her pulse quicken in anticipation.
When she reached the forest, she hoped that she could find the path she had followed the year before. But although she walked and walked, she did not find it, and as she went farther into the trees the ground became more and more overgrown, so that soon she was picking her way over tree roots and grasping low-hanging branches to keep her balance. Once she tripped and fell, and a sharp stick reared up like a claw at her cheek. She put her finger to her face and to her surprise felt a warm, wet smear, and in the dim light she saw the dark shade of blood on her fingertips.
The night was growing colder, and when a gust of wind blew past her she remembered that it was, after all, barely spring, and the ground beneath her was still frozen, the hollows still dusted with snow. It was dangerous weather; she could freeze to death. Yet she went on with a kind of feverish urgency, driven by a fierce need to go deeper into the Wood. She could feel something calling to her, and that should have been a warning, but she only felt reassured by it: She was going in the right direction. She went on until her feet grew numb from the cold, and at last she found what she had been looking for. There, sitting on a fallen log as if he had been waiting for her, was the fairy who had taken her back to Quinn House last spring.
She went to him, her heart pounding, and knelt down on the ground, pushing back her hood. “I came to find you,” she said, looking up at him. His face was strangely disturbing, his skin like the surface of a pond, but it was also more beautiful than she remembered.
He raised one hand to her face and his fingers curved over the gash in her cheek; it burst into fiery pain at his touch. “You are bleeding,” he said, and rubbed a smear of her blood between his fingers. The sight of her blood on his pale skin made her shudder, and yet she felt herself lean toward him instinctively, wanting to close the space between them.
She said: “Once my mother told me a story: There was a girl whose parents died in an accident, and every night the girl visited her parents’ grave and laid flowers upon it. But one twilight, as she was sitting at the grave, a rider came to the girl.” As she spoke she saw his eyes grow calmer, as if her words were soothing him. She continued: “He was the handsomest man she had ever seen, dressed all in white with a horse as white as snow, and he told her that she should come with him to see her parents. She was so eager to see them again that she agreed, and when the man offered her his hand she took it, and it was as cold as death. He put her on his horse and took her away, and she was never seen again, for he had been one of the riders of the Fairy Hunt.”
When she stopped speaking he said nothing for a moment, and Ash realized that all of the Wood was silent around them—she could not even hear the sound of the wind in the branches, though she felt its cold breath on her face.
Finally he said, “Is that why you sought me out? To tell me a—” He paused, his lip curling, and continued, “A fairy tale?”
She was undaunted. “Is it true?” she asked. “Is the tale true?”
“What is true for your people is not true for mine,” he answered.
“But can you not take me to see her?” she asked, and she yearned for him to say yes.
“Your mother is dead, Aisling,” he said, and the words felt like they were physically striking her.
She took his cold hands in hers, and she insisted, “She cannot be. I have felt her spirit alive. I know I have.”
For a moment as they looked at each other, she thought she saw him wrestle with what to say, but then the hardness returned to his eyes and he said curtly, “You must go home.”
He stood up, letting go of her hands. She scrambled up as well and said, “You know my name. What is yours?”
He hesitated, but at last said, “You may call me Sidhean.”
She tried it out: “Sidhean.” The sound of it was foreign and exotic to her.
He seemed to recoil from the sound of his name on her tongue. “You must go home,” he said again.
“Why?” she asked, and feeling reckless, she added, “Take me with you.”
“It is not time yet,” he said. In the word yet, she heard a promise, and it flooded her with hope.
He held his hand out to her, and when she took it he pulled her close, wrapping them both inside his cloak. Just before her eyes closed, she realized she could hear his heartbeat beneath her ear, as quick as her own.
When she woke up, she was lying in her bed at Quinn House, a thick, silvery-white cloak thrown over her. She sat up, dazed, pushing the cloak aside; it was softer than any velvet or leather she had ever touched. She climbed out of bed and opened the shutters, and in the early morning light she marveled at the sheer beauty of the thing. It was made of some kind of fur that rippled like multicolored scales or iridescent feathers. It was white, but when she looked at it sideways it seemed to glow, and sometimes it shone like polished silver. She picked it up and wrapped it around herself, the weight of it comforting and solid. This is real, she thought, and a shiver went down her spine, for that meant that Sidhean—and all of his world—was real, too.