Ash (26 page)

Ash

water and a cloth at her side with which to wash her hands.

“This is fairy food,” she final y said, after she had dried her hands.

“Yes,” he agreed, and now he was sitting in a similar chair across from her.

“Is it real?” she asked.

His face was in shadow, but she saw his lips curve as he smiled at her. “Of course it is real. We are real, you know. We simply do not live in your world.”

“Am I no longer in my world?”

“Not right now, no. When you took the moonlight path you came to my world.”

“You brought me here,” said Ash. “Why?”

“You told me a fairy tale once,” he said, “and now I have one to tel you.” He flexed his fingers and folded them on his knee before continuing. “Once, a long time ago, when magic was stronger in this land, our two races were much closer than they are now. In those days, there was a reason for us to take humans into our fold, because together we created a kind of balance that was good and necessary. But over the centuries, almost all the magic within your people has disappeared. We do not know why. At the same time, your people often chose to ignore their mortality. No one is more impressionable than young humans. They are fooled into thinking they can live forever, when in fact they are about to die.”

“I am not fooled,” Ash said.

“No,” he agreed. “You are not. And once there was another girl who was not fooled. She was no ordinary girl; she knew al the old stories. I could feel her more clearly than any other girl 224

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I had encountered in many years, for the old magic was alive in her. It was slight, but it was enough to awaken my interest. I have taken countless human girls, but not for many of your lifetimes. There has been no reason, for your kind does nothing for my people anymore, and my people are reaching the end of our own time. I cannot deny that we are not what we once were.

“Nevertheless, there was an opportunity in this girl. I sent her many dreams to lure her into the Wood at night, but she did not come. Finally, on Midsummer’s Eve, when our magic is strongest, I went to her home and cal ed to her. She came to her window then, and when I asked her to come down, she did. I thought that she would fold easily, but when she came outside she did not follow me. Instead, she cursed me. Such a small, brittle girl—I did not expect it.”

“How did she curse you?” Ash asked when he did not go on.

He did not look at her when he said, “She cursed me to fal in love with a human girl, because she believed that might cause me to understand why what I have done over the course of many hundreds of years is wrong.” His voice carried a tinge of bitterness. “Her curse did not seem to work at first. I did not think she was powerful enough of a witch to make the curse stick; whatever magic she had in her was tiny, compared to what I could hold in my hand. After al , I have lived for centuries, and she was nothing but a girl.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Ash asked.

He said softly, “She was your mother.” When their eyes met, she saw that he looked at her with something like pain. “And 225

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the first time I saw you, I knew that her curse would hold. But I do not think she knew that her daughter would be the girl caught in her spel .”

After everything that had happened that night, his words sank like stones in a still pond. She felt numb; this last revelation was too much, right now, to absorb. Final y she asked, “Is it such a bad curse?”

“It is agony,” said Sidhean.

“It is not real,” she protested.

“It is as real as I am,” he claimed. And then he lifted her up out of her chair and he was holding her hands in his as they stood together, and she felt him press her hands to his chest, where his heartbeat thudded insistently against her fingertips.

She would not look up at him, and because he was tal er than her by a head, she found herself staring stubbornly at the embroidery on his waistcoat it was a pattern of leaves and vines and perhaps roses in silver thread on silk of pearl gray, finer than any cloth she had ever seen. She had never been aware of such detail before: Had he never worn anything so beautiful?

Or had she simply never opened her eyes? They stood together for what seemed to be an hour, or several, and she wondered if the world were spinning around her, for she felt dizzy. When he let her go she stumbled and nearly fel , but she caught herself on the edge of the chair and sat down again, hard, breathless.

“Something has changed within you,” he said accusingly.

She could not deny it.

But the force of him was stil al around her and she could not see clearly. He drew a deep breath and said, “You are not 226

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ready. Do not return here until you are, but do not delay for too long. I wil not wait much longer.”

His words lifted her up from her seat, and at the edge of the clearing the moonlight path still floated. His face was turned away from her, and though she wanted to go to him, she could not. Her legs moved her against her wil down the path, and then she was running through the Wood, crashing over the undergrowth and sending up waves of fairy light as she fled.

She could not stop herself, even as she stumbled over tree roots, but at last she broke free of the Wood and began to cross the meadow. The pushing at her back was less intense now, but she could stil feel it as if there were hands on her shoulders, pressing her forward and it directed her back through the kitchen garden and down the steps into the cel ar.

She pul ed the door shut, and then a great, whistling wind came and shot the bolt home.

At first she stood, bewildered, in the dark. But as reality crept back into her consciousness the chil of the cel ar, the smel of it she felt her way back to the trunks against the far wal . She unlatched one and fumbled around inside until she found something that would substitute for a blanket. Feeling drained, she lay down on the hard-packed dirt floor, and she slept.

She dreamed that she was running through the tal est, dark-est trees of the Wood, her feet slamming into the uneven ground as she raced toward her goal. At last the trees parted and she found herself by the hawthorn tree in Rook Hil , and there was the grave of her mother, and beside the grave a young girl sat al in white, reading a book of fairy tales.

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When Ash crashed into the clearing the girl turned to look up at her, and Ash saw that the girl’s eyes were empty, and her skin was so pale it looked as if she were dead, and when the girl’s mouth opened no words came out but Ash knew she was saying her name:
Aisling
. Ash backed away from the ghost girl, but the girl stood up and came toward her, her hands out-stretched, and mouthed her name again. Ash did not know what to do, for she recognized the dress the girl was wearing—it was her work dress that she had worn while cleaning the parlor the other day—and that meant the girl must be herself.

But the girl looked like a specter, and if she were Ash, then Ash knew she had died as wel .

She tried to run away, but she tripped on the root of the hawthorn tree and fel onto the grave, and the earth was heaving and warm beneath her, a monster rising out of the dark, and Ash wept, for she wanted to live.

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Chapter XIX

er stepmother did not release
her from the cellar until mid-day. After she had awakened from that dream, she H had tried to keep her eyes open, afraid of what other dreams might come. But as the crack of light around the cel ar door brightened, she nodded off into an uneasy doze. When the door final y opened it was noonday light that poured inside, and Ash put a hand over her eyes to block the sudden glare. Her stepmother said, “You’ve slept enough. Get to work. And change out of that ridiculous dress.”

The fairy gown had not vanished in the course of the night, but in the light of day, it seemed to have faded. The crystal beads looked like paste now, and where Ana had torn the bodice, ordinary threads hung loose. In her room, Ash saw that the lid of her trunk was open, and inside where she had kept the fairy cloak and her books, there was nothing but her old work dress. She ran out through the kitchen after her step-229

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mother, who was about to go upstairs, and demanded, “What have you done with my things?”

Her stepmother paused on the bottom step, her lip curled.

“You stole from me, Aisling. Did you think I would not search your room to see what else you might have taken?”

“I did not steal from you,” Ash said angrily.

“You are a liar,” her stepmother said coldly.

“Where did you put my things?” Ash asked again.

“Goodness, it’s as if you did have something valuable in there,” her stepmother said. “If you stil want those musty old books, you’re too late—I burned them.” At the stricken look on Ash’s face, her stepmother smiled and then continued up the stairs.

Feeling defeated, Ash went back into the kitchen, where she saw the cracked mirror on the table. She went to throw it away, but caught sight of her reflection in it. She looked a mess. Her hair, which she had remembered as being comical, looked like something out of a nightmare, especial y with the bruise that had risen across her cheek and the dried blood on the corner of her mouth. She propped up the broken bits of mirror against a bowl, dampened a cloth in some water, and dabbed it against the cut. Then she picked up the kitchen shears that her stepmother had left on the table and clipped away the uneven ends of her hair. When she was finished, she combed out the inches that were left and stared at her unfamiliar reflection in the jagged pieces of glass. She noticed, for the first time, a light sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks, and she touched them in wonder. Had they always been there? Instead of throwing away the fragments of the mirror as she had planned, she folded 230

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them into an old rag and put the rag into the empty trunk.

As she stood up and went to the door, she saw a glimmer of silver out of the corner of her eye, and on the hook behind the door, the fairy cloak was hanging. It was as pristine and gleaming as the day she received it. She reached out to touch it, and saw the moonstone ring stil on her hand.
Do not delay for too
long
, Sidhean had said. As if the mere thought of him had set it off, she felt the ring begin to pulse like a living thing. For the first time, it made her angry. He had also told her not to come back until she was ready. Wel , she was
not
ready. Until that day, Ash resolved that she would not wear this ring that chained her to him.

She wrenched it off, stuffing it into the cloak’s interior pocket but the pocket was not empty. Her fingers brushed against a book, and when she pul ed it out she saw the faded fabric cover of her mother’s herbal. She felt a surge of relief as she opened it to read her mother’s handwriting, neat and measured, on the yellowed pages. She could not remember putting it in the cloak pocket, although at one time she had carried it with her like a good luck charm. She wanted to believe that she had left it there and forgotten about it—not that it had been placed there by any fairy magic. Deliberately turning away from the cloak, she laid the herbal in her trunk beside the broken mirror, and she did her best to ignore the phantom presence of the moonstone ring on her hand.

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Over the next several weeks, her stepmother did not al ow her to leave the house unsupervised. She had to bring Clara with her on marketing days, but though her stepsister now control ed the purse, she did little else to restrict her. She spent much of their time together stealing sideways glances at her, as if Ash had become some sort of strange creature or, perhaps, an invalid. Once, as they were walking home from the vil age, Clara asked her, “Where did you get those jewels, Ash? Did you real y steal them?”

“Of course not,” Ash said.

“Then where did they come from? Did Ana tel you that by the next day they were nothing but paste? I thought they were diamonds, the night before.”

“They were never diamonds,” Ash said, though she did not know if that were true. Her younger stepsister paused and gave her a skeptical look, but she did not ask again.

As Yule approached, Ash went with her stepsisters while they were fitted for their new gowns: an emerald green one for Ana, a light blue one for Clara who had yearned for a new gown for years. Neither of them spoke of the prince in Ash’s company, though once when Ash was approaching the seamstress’s dressing room, she heard Ana say, “All anyone wants to know is who that woman was—apparently the prince keeps asking after her, but nobody knows her.” When Ash appeared in the doorway with the extra ribbon they had requested, Ana gave her a chil y look and did not speak of it again.

At night, before she fel asleep, her thoughts went in circles.

At first, she had thought that with each passing day, she would come closer to accepting the fate that she had asked for. Per-232

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haps she would remember how she had once wanted to trade her life away for an eternity she could not imagine. But she discovered that the opposite was happening: With each passing day, she wanted more time. This life that she had once hated no longer seemed so bleak. Her stepmother’s words did little to upset her anymore. And more than anything, she wanted to see Kaisa again. But how long could she delay going back to Sidhean? Would he become angry? She began to wonder if any humans had ever managed to disentangle themselves from a fairy contract. None of the tales she had read gave her reason to hope; even Eilis, who had succeeded in her quest, fulfil ed her end of the bargain.