Ash (14 page)

Ash

was too strong. Final y, she threw off the blankets and dressed in her warmest leggings and a thick woolen dress, and then opened the smal trunk at the foot of her bed and pul ed out the silvery cloak. She swirled it over her shoulders and went out the kitchen door.

The moon was ful that night, casting a clear white light over the field and the line of the Wood in the distance. She left the kitchen garden behind her, closed the gate with a soft click, and set off across the field. The night air was like a whip against her skin, and she pul ed the hood of the cloak over her head and hunched her shoulders against the cold. She felt anxious and twitchy, and as she walked al the events of the past week flooded through her mind: dressing Ana for the masque; the rain of gold coins at the bonfire; the words of Gwen’s gir-lish spel . And beneath it al , the dream of the empty grave making her stomach turn.

She paused for a moment at the edge of the Wood and looked back across the field at the bulk of the house, dark and stil . She thrust her hands into the cloak’s interior pockets, and it rippled like the trail of a quick fish through a silent pond.

Then she raised her head to the dark Wood and looked for what she was seeking. At first she only saw the trees: tal trunks edged with moonlight, fading into black-upon-black in the distance. As her eyes adjusted to the night, she gradual y began to pick out the shapes along the ground, and final y she saw it: the slight signs of the beginnings of a trail. She turned toward the path and began walking.

The Wood was dark and silent, the moonlight threading its way down between naked branches to shed long dark shadows 116

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along the ground. Soon the thin, overgrown trail became a path, and then the path opened into a lane wide enough for two horses to walk abreast. She had been walking for just over an hour when she heard the music in the distance: pipes and lutes and high, clear voices singing. The music was so beautiful she ached to run toward it, but she kept her feet on the path and her eyes focused forward. She pul ed the cloak closer around her as if it were armor, and tried not to listen to the music. There was laughter, too, the bright sparkling laughter of women and the answering tones of men in a language she could not understand, and it made her quiver with the urge to find the people who spoke those words.

She began to run then, forcing herself onward even though fear pulsed inside her. When she recognized the gentle slope that descended past the last few trees into the clearing behind the old house at Rook Hill, she almost sobbed with relief. She broke free of the great heavy arms of the Wood and emerged, breathless, at the hawthorn tree. She knelt down beside her mother’s grave, which was whole and untouched, and wiped away the dirt and moss that had overgrown the headstone. She lay her head down upon it and closed her eyes.

Almost immediately she felt the warmth of her mother’s embrace, her hands smoothing back the hood of the fairy cloak and brushing her dark hair away from her face.
Mother
, she tried to ask,
what must I do
?
I cannot go on the way I have been
…

Her mother answered,
There will come a change, and you will
know what to do
.

But when Ash tried to demand a more specific answer, she felt her mother slip away from her as if she were made of melt-117

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ing snow, and when she held her tighter, there was only the tombstone beneath her hands. She felt a gaping emptiness within her that hurt like nothing she had ever felt before, as if this time, finally, was the last time her mother would come to her. From the depths of that emptiness came an upwel ing of rage that made her push herself away from the grave.

“How could you leave me?” she cried out loud, scrambling up onto her feet. Her voice sounded ugly and guttural to her ears, and she did not feel like herself. She wanted to kick the gravestone; she wanted to tear out the earth beneath which her mother lay and pul the body out of the ground and shake it until it gave her an answer. She fel to the ground again and dug her fingers into the winter-hard earth, scrabbling at the soil until her fingers began to bleed.

The ground would not come up. It was frozen. Her mother was dead.

Numbed with cold, feeling as though the inside of herself had been scraped raw, Ash stood up on shaky legs several minutes later and turned her back on the grave to go back into the Wood. This time when she heard the music, she went toward it. Leaving the path, she picked her way across fal en branches and drifts of snow, and soon she saw flickering lights like fire-flies in midsummer. The trees parted to reveal a mossy clearing hung with strings of silver lanterns, and in the center of the clearing a bonfire was lit, sparking and burning with unnatural-118

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ly red flames. Around the fire a circle of girls danced, and some of the girls were human like herself, except when she looked at their faces, they looked mad.

Some people said that girls who were tempted to enter fairy rings lost al of their humanity from the ecstasy of the dancing.

Others said that only a girl who was mad would enter a fairy ring in the first place. Ash decided that perhaps she was mad that night, so she stepped past the lanterns and entered the clearing. Al around the dancing circle, men and women—no, these were fairies in their unearthly splendor—lay on cushions, crystal goblets in hand. When she entered the circle they looked at her and smiled, and then someone next to her fingered the cloak she was wearing and spoke to another in a musical language she didn’t understand. One of the fairy women came toward her, her skin nearly translucent it was so pale, her eyes hard like sapphires, but the smile on her face was entrancing.

In a lilting voice she asked, “Why are you so sad, little girl?

We are al joy here.”

Ash couldn’t answer, because her grief and anger now seemed so superfluous in comparison to the perfection of this fairy woman, who took her hand to lead her into the dancing circle. The woman’s hand was strong and supple, and Ash saw that despite the fact that it was winter, she wore only a thin dress made of what looked like cobwebs, or maybe moonlight, if it could be run through a fairy loom. Then Ash felt someone take her other hand and pul her back away from the dancing girls, and the fairy woman turned to look at who had restrained her. The sharp anger in the woman’s eyes startled her; it was as 119

Ash

if a beautiful mask had slid off to reveal the hungry beast within. Ash recoiled from her and looked back at the person who was pul ing her away, and it was Sidhean.

He was furious; she could see the muscles of his face taut beneath his white skin, and he roared at the fairy woman in their foreign tongue. Ash felt the woman let go of her, and Sidhean dragged her out of the circle, his fingers nearly crushing her arm. “You’re hurting me,” she gasped, but he would not stop moving until they were wel removed from that place and she could no longer hear the intoxicating music.

“What were you doing?” he demanded at last, letting go of her as though she burned him.

“I had a dream,” she said, and she felt confused, lightheaded; the glamour of the circle stil clung to her and she looked around desperately, trying to find any trace of it in the distance.

“A dream,” he repeated coldly. “A dream of what?”

“I dreamed of my mother’s grave,” she said, and as she spoke it seemed to help banish the magic a little. She began to feel the heft of the cloak around her shoulders and the night air on her skin. “I dreamed,” she said, “that it was empty—that she had been taken.”

She looked up at him with unfocused eyes; there was some kind of fog between the two of them. He grasped her shoulders and shook her. “Your mother is dead,” he said forceful y.

She twisted out of his hands. “Stop it—don’t say that!” she shouted at him, angry.

Perhaps her vehemence cleared away the last of the glamour, because Ash suddenly saw him staring intently at her, and for 120

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the first time the skin and bones of his face were knit together into one, and he looked to her astonishment like he was worried. Something inside her crumpled; a weight settled. “I know she is dead,” she said, and at last, it felt like something that had happened long ago.

She took his hands in hers, and for the first time she felt him warm at her touch. She had seen the wild, ancient creature in him before, but this time that inhumanness edged into something she recognized with her gut: He looked at her with desire. It was overwhelming in its intensity, and she felt as though she could not breathe.

He spoke as if he could not help himself: “You look like her.” And he cupped her head in his hands, turning her up to face the moonlight sliding through the tree branches.

His words registered dimly at first, for she was mostly aware of him, his nearness, but as the silence fil ed the space between them she realized what he had said. She closed her eyes, feeling his thumbs trace the line of her lips. She asked in a faint voice,

“Who do I look like?”

He pulled away from her slowly, as if reluctant to let her go, and when she opened her eyes he had turned away. Final y he said, “Elinor. You look like Elinor.”

The name hung between them like a ghost.

Astonished, Ash said, “Do you mean my mother?” He nodded very slightly, but stil would not face her. She went to him and put her hand on his arm and asked, “What was she like?”

He made a sound that she recognized as something of a laugh. “She was . . . she was different from any other human woman I have known,” he said. “She was not afraid. She was 121

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stronger than I expected.”

“What do you mean?” Ash asked. “What did you expect?”

“Humans are weak,” he answered. “They are easily tempted.

But not . . . not Elinor.”

She asked, “Am I like her?”

He turned toward her and swept a strand of hair out of her eyes, his fingers leaving a burning trail on her skin. “In some ways you are,” he said. “But you are more reckless than she ever was.”

“How am I reckless?”

“Every time you come near me,” he said, “you come closer to the end of everything.”

“It does not feel that way,” she said. “It feels like I am coming closer to the beginning.”

“You do not understand.”

“Then explain it to me,” she said, and took his hands in hers. His fingers were curled up into fists, hard and closed.

“It is not time,” he said, and she felt him withdrawing from her.

She held his fists more tightly in her hands and asked,

“What did you tel that—that woman?”

“I told her that you were mine; that I had given you this cloak; that she could not have you.” The tone of his voice was curiously flat, as if he were reining himself in. He turned away from her and said, “I wil take you home.”

They stood in silence until the white horse emerged, ghostly pale, out of the dark. He mounted the horse and then reached down to help her up behind him. “Hold on,” he told her, and turned the horse away from the fairy ring. She slid her arms 122

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around his waist, twisting to see if she could catch a last glimpse of the dancing circle, but there was nothing there.

The rhythm of the horse’s paces lul ed Ash into sleepiness, and she lay her head upon his back, closing her eyes for what she thought was only a moment. When Sidhean pul ed the horse to a halt, she awoke and saw that they had reached the edge of the Wood. “You wil walk from here,” Sidhean said to her. “It is almost dawn.”

She slid off the horse and it was a long way down, and when she looked up at him, he seemed very tal and strange. “Thank you,” she said.

He nodded, and then took something out of a pocket and handed it down to her. It was a round silver medal ion with a jewel in the center, and in the depths of it a faint light glimmered. Around the rim strange words were written, and though she could not read them, their shapes were beautiful, as light as flying birds. “Take this,” he told her, “and if you should need something . . . impossible . . . use it to find me.”

She held it in her hands and asked, “Why are you giving this to me? Why have you never kil ed me? In al the tales, no human—”

“Your tales do not tel the whole story,” he interrupted her.

He looked down at her for a moment, the light of dawn seeking out the color of his eyes and making him look almost human. Then he turned his horse around to go back into the Wood, and she watched him go, feeling as if her world had split wide open. On the other side it was not dark as midnight, but rather bright as sunshine in the middle of winter: blinding, dazzling on the snow.

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PART II

T H E H U N T R E S S

Ash

Chapter XI

na was already awake when Ash
came in to light the fire the next morning; she was sitting in the chair by her window A overlooking the front yard. “Good morning,” Ash said, and as she knelt on the cold hearth she felt the weight of the medal ion in her pocket, banging gently against her thigh.