Jie could pull a pregnant nanny goat from the muck left in the pen by unseasonable rain. He could carry Mormo a mile or more when the billy goat was feeling particularly elusive and obstinate. He could climb inside from the roof through his bedroom window when the ladder fell. In fits of heroism, Jie could fight a fox for the life of one of his beloved hens and win.
None of these feats made him much of a runner.
He was shocked by Dari’s speed, given her difficulties navigating stairs. She outpaced him before he could make it to the edge of the marketplace cobblestones. He’d run after her, tripping on more roots than he remembered rising through the road through the woods outside of town before the forest rose up around him.
Jie considered himself very much a town person. As a charmsmith, he was a skilled forager; so skilled, in fact, rarely needed the forest for anything--if one knew where to look, and Jie did, nearly every ingredient he wanted could be found in the woods on the edge of town.
People went into the woods. Harold cut scrubby trees for firewood there. A forager of elderberries ran an excellent chance of making a good trade with a forager of ginseng without having to trundle all the way back to the market. There was even adequate light through the overgrowth. The woods were Pickaway’s somewhat less common common, really.
The forest was different. Rarely, Jie found himself in need of something--persnickety mushrooms, herbs which grew best in the dark--from the forest. When those needs arose, he bartered with Bryjer. An elf in the forest was well enough, one of Bryjer's stature even better. Uncanny magic was mother's milk to an elf. But even the elves had their own limitations out there. In the same way humans and dwarves gave burial mounds so ancient as to resemble miniature hills planted on otherwise flat plains a wide berth, there were forest places elves feared to tread, places Bryjer refused to even speak of.
Unlike the sun-dappled, lush, green woods; the forest was darkened by a dense canopy even at noon. Its trees were of a different order altogether: massive, proud, ancient things that remembered a time before Sapients. It was the sort of place witches ate children, in common parents’ stories, which Jie found silly. Children should be so be lucky to be eaten before they starved to death or fell into a sinkhole in the forest.
Hunters saw things in the forest. Jie had seen the odd relic retrieved from the ruins further out, stone carved with symbols too ancient even for the Mori to have recorded. Ruins were nothing unusual, and really, given the drinking habits of many hunters, Jie had always supposed the voices, the stalking shadows, the untarnished silver icons weren’t so unusual themselves.
Jie was skeptical of much. He was not skeptical of the power of the Lich, despite his denials to the contrary. Unlike Deliatus’ Star Mothers and Sisters, he had empirical evidence to support his belief in the cruelty and strength of His magic, the brutality of His followers and creations. He was skeptical of the hunters’ stories, too. But skepticism in the forest took a good deal more effort than skepticism behind the bar at the Bough.
Jie stood at the edge of the road, peering into the deep-blue darkness of the forest. He looked overhead at the late-afternoon sun and down at his lengthening shadow. In a moment of cowardice, he looked back the way he’d come. A strand of violet hair hung tangled in a bramble just off the path. Jie pushed himself forward. If he hurried, he may even find Dari and return before sundown.
Approaching the bramble where Dari’s hair had snagged, Jie slipped, tumbling down an incline of dense leaves, his hair, clothes, and limbs catching against briars. Closing his eyes, he held his hands to his face to protect his glasses. He caught his breath at the bottom of the unseen ravine. He laughed, a dry, sarcastic bark--sundown was irrelevant, from where he lay. It was always night in the forest.
sThere had been no Lich attacks as far out as Pickaway, but Jie was not the only villager who’d found their way there because of one. News was slow to arrive. For all Jie knew, the Lich controlled the entire continent now, and the forest crawled with mad trolls, Departeds, and magical experiments too strange for proper names.
With great force, he dismissed these thoughts as irrational.
Wolves, there was a logical fear to have of the forest. Wolves were a welcome fear. They were easy to understand. Wolves were cowards on their own. The pack was their strength--encircling deer with their snapping jaws. Jie had read that in some cases, wolves needn’t even directly attack prey, simply frightening it until its heart gave out. Wolves didn’t attack humans nearly so often as hunters would have the others believe. Unless they were desperate. Or the human was small, or slight. Or alone.
“Dari!” he called, pulling a briar from his hair. “Did you fall too? Dari, please, I’m sorry!”
A deeper fear of being forced to return without Dari quickened his heartbeat like a nearby howl, magical or otherwise.
A cornflower blue thread lay across a tangle of blackberries, as if it had been laid there specifically to mark a trail. He’d tracked Mormo before, though never this far out. Tracking a panicked human should be much easier.
He hoped.
The moon rose, casting scant silver light against the shadows of the trees. Jie did not allow himself to consider the possibility of becoming lost. If he and Dari were gone too long, Sam would send someone. Sam had an army of skilled, or at least sympathetic, someones in her easy-going thrall, after all. Bryjer knew the forest, though Jie was beginning to suspect he’d wandered further than even the strong-backed elf would go without proper warding and a heavy club. Harold, a blameless sort of man in every way, would undoubtedly blame himself and insist on trekking out, even at his age. Lujain's scrying was good enough, if she could come by a bit of his hair. Orm was suicidally chivalrous where Sam and Deliatus, and by extension, Dari, were concerned, regardless of how much he'd had to drink.
Sam would send someone.
Every time Jie thought he had lost Dari’s trail, he would find a path of trampled undergrowth, a strand of hair, a mark like a human footprint, drawing him deeper into the forest. He shivered as his feet landed on occasional flat, hard spaces like stone pavers.
“I’m reasonably sure you’re here, someplace, Dari,” Jie called to the darkness. He could practically feel her, the buzzy energy of her hand in his, of her speaking. Dari was trying his skeptical faith. He was no Sensitive. Logically, Jie knew he could no more sense a person at distance than he could handle magic. And yet.
“Do you remember the night we met, Dari? You sang for me, before I knew you could speak.” Jie cleared his throat, and sang, his voice thin and crackling:
You are the sun, my only love
Your light warms and strengthens me
He stepped into complete darkness, trusting the prickling energy he recognized as Dari growing warmer. Tunelessly, he continued:
Sleep, our skin bathed by stars above
The dawn breaks, hear me entreat
Jie paused, listening. He was rewarded with a rustle ahead. Raising his voice, he sang on.
Stay, share my body, share my mind
Come, love, let me kiss you sweet
Come, your hands gentle and heart kind
Stay, Love, rest the dawn with me
Stay, love, rest the dawn with me an echo--not his own voice, not Dari’s-- reached Jie’s ear.
Jie froze, clutching the knotted clan scarf at his throat, an old reflex. He’d heard the stories; strange voices lured men deeper and deeper into the dark of the forest, down ravines, into caves. These were stories he believed, but for different reasons than most. Most men, especially men like himself, were accustomed to the unnoticed background noises of life in town. The sound of wheels on cobbles, the plop of simmering stew, the ever-present chatter of other people arguing, teasing, talking; the soft whoosh of fires stoked and tamped, for ‘town people’, Jie thought, was its own sort of magic. The persistent pitter-patter of background noise meant things were proceeding as they should. Everyone was safe, everyone was preoccupied. Quiet, to the town-minded, was for sick rooms. For holes torn in wire and bloody feathers. A drawn breath before a thrown punch.
In short, the town-minded were not built to cope with the oppressive silence of the forest. Minds filled in empty spaces with voices. Jie had once read of a particularly cruel old Mori experiment carried out on prisoners of war, wherein soldiers isolated at the bottom of a dry well reported voices of the Mothers, spirits, all manner of nonsense calling out to them within hours.
Silly little scholar! To think only one thing may be true at once. For all my children slain, pulverized and tattooed so that you might learn, your imagination is tragically limited.
Jie pressed himself against a tree, making himself as small and still as possible. This was only his imagination. His anxiety wrought mind toying with him, like a bored, fat tavern cat who’d discovered a field mouse in the barley sack.
If you won’t answer me, little scholar, perhaps you will sing again? The cold, lilting voice laughed. What manner of skeptic are you? You sang to her as if you spoke a summoning spell! Do you even understand what you summon?
Cats occupy an odd niche in the food chain, Jie thought, his mind flickering between random facts, searching for sound in the silence . He yanked at his own hair. He had to focus. He had to find Dari. Whatever taunted him, it was in his head, and if it wasn’t…well, he needed to find Dari, anyway.
Cats aren’t as cruel as they seem, is the thing. They don’t toy with animals before they kill them because it’s ‘fun’.
“Stop! Look for a trail!” Jie scolded himself, tugging his clan scarf, close to hyperventilating.
Cats are efficient predators, this is true. But they’re quite delicate, and preyed on by other animals. If they’re injured in a hunt, they may as well lie down in front of a weasel hole.
Jie rubbed his eyes.
Little scholar, why do you hide? You are a scholar, yes? How long it's been since I felt a mind like yours! What questions I have for you, and what knowledge! Come and speak a little while with me. Come, sit in my library. It lives, little scholar, my library’s heart beats with knowledge yours, dead and dry and forgotten by so many, never could.
Jie wished, for a moment, for a spirit of Largely Irrelevant Trivia to thank, letting his mind unwind the metaphor.
So cats toy, they tease, they run their prey ragged, just out of reach, until whatever they’ve cornered is too weak to fight back, to potentially injure the cat. Often, birds and rodents die of over-exertion before the cat needs to strike a blow.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Jie said to himself, snapping his fingers. “Which am I in this metaphor, though, cat or cornered? And how do the cornered escape? Do they escape?”
Cats’ chosen method of hunting yields mixed results for the cats themselves. Potential prey might escape, it tends to die soon after, anyway. Hence why most inns have cats--even if they don’t catch the mice, the mice die, nonetheless.
“Oh, come off it!” Jie shouted, more at himself than anything, furious that no spirits of Mostly Irrelevant Trivia existed, as he could not burn all of their holy places to ash.
Bells.
Right! Yes, in the lostros of Mother Breka, the Daughters’ cats wore dancing bells around their necks to announce their presence to songbirds, which were sacred to Mother Breka. A cat who still managed to kill a songbird would itself be killed. Jie surprised even himself with that particular recollection, gleaned from one of Deliatus’ interminable sermons. He further recalled an old folktale, a gathering of rodents, intent on placing a bell on a barn cat, only to…
Damn it all, Jie swore. He screwed himself up to his full height. No cats. No bells. No magical thinking. His mind was twisting in odd directions. He’d navigate around it.
“This is not real,” Jie said aloud. “I am hearing things that are not real. I will find Dari, I will bring her home. I will not answer to voices that are not real.”
Reality is a malleable thing.
The voice sounded as if it hovered at his side.
He took a bold step forward in the stygian darkness, his feet taking the forest floor for granted, meeting air instead. Down the slope, punctuated with rounded stones, as if stairs had been planted there once, where innumerable thorns now grew, he tumbled, his arms thrown around his head.
Do you know what she is? The voice demanded, never leaving his side.
Something special, Deliatus said. Something, not someone. A bit fae, Bryjer had said. Not Elvish--elves may’ve come from the Fae generations back, but they were well separated from that place now. What was most likely, that Dari, with all of her languages and strangeness and beauty, was an ordinary, if traumatized and deeply odd human, or that she was…something else.
“She is my friend!” Jie shouted. “I summon my friend! I don't care if you're real or not, just as I don't care what Dari is, aside from my friend!"
A bare foot nudged Jie in the shoulder. He let himself be rolled by it, tumbling over a curve of ancient masonry. Grasping little hands yanked the waist of his breeches, dragging the rest of his body over the curve of stones, into what a ring of recently turned soil.
Friend? The voice laughed, echoing around him. Even now, you fear her, little scholar! You fear what humans cannot scratch into paper, don’t you?
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“You must to move to the way that you are to be behind to me,” Dari’s voice hissed above him.
Jie looked up. Dari stood above him, outlined in silver light of the moon breaking through a tiny open space in the dense forest canopy. He could just make out the shape of her shaking her head. “I have the thought the best idea to you would to be to close to your eyes,” she said, not before he caught sight of movement nearby, all sharp angles and predatory pride.
“Dari!” He cried, grasping the girl’s ankle. “I came for you…” he began, trailing off as a headache like a dagger driven behind his eyes struck without warning.
Beyond the painful throb of his head, he heard Dari, her voice even, calm, and cold. She didn’t halt or lilt as she did when she spoke Kanglais or the numerous other languages she possessed.
She spoke with the confidence of a native.
He could not parse the language itself. At once familiar and alien, cogent and incoherent, like something that might rise from a dream only to evaporate on waking. Dari's words surged through his mind like quicksilver: dynamic, dazzling, devastating in its beauty. Fighting to grasp at the elusive syllables, Jie tasted blood. Releasing her ankle, the agony behind his eyes disappeared as swiftly and mysteriously as it had appeared.
There was the second voice. The one he was certain was in his head. It spoke in halting snippets of the strange, sonorous syllables flowing from Dari's lips.
Dari barked a phrase with the tone and cadence of a rebuke. The wind rose and Jie knew, for certain, they were alone.
He opened his eyes.
Dari held an arm out to him, the other wrapped around her chest. Jie sprang upwards. Seizing Dari around her shoulders, he buried his face in her hair. A desperate impulse, he kissed the top of her head. Unable to stop himself, he drew her against him, desperate and rough, punctuating a barrage of kisses in her hair with breathing deep lungfuls of her scent.
“Are you real? You smell real,” he babbled. “It’s too damn quiet out here, Dari, you start to think you hear all manner of things.”
“Real,” Dari said.
“And…that voice?” Jie ventured, only to feel Dari’s hand press against his lips.
“Do not do to the speaking to it in this place,” she said. “Later, if it is being to the necessary thing, I am having the thought. I am having very a lot of sorries,” she whispered.
“No, no, no,” Jie prattled, still clutching her to his chest. “I’m sorry. I pushed you, I didn’t listen, I…”
“Your face is having to the bloodiness,” she said, pushing a small space between them. "Please, to let to me
to be giving to you very a lot of the apologizing. I was not having the thought you would to follow to me.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Jie asked.
In the deep dark of the forest, he still could not see her, but glimpsed the shadow of Dari’s free arm moving, felt the hem of her dress pressed against his face, gently wiping blood and dirt away.
“Thank you,” Jie said, touching his nose, tender from his fall. He felt for his glasses--they were whole and unbent. He’d much sooner have a broken nose than broken glasses. Closing his eyes, he let himself relish the warm hum of her touch. Opening his eyes, he could make out the shining outline of her in the dark.
“I have given to you to the harm,” Dari said, her voice trembling. “I did not have the intention to do to this.”
“I hardly felt it,” Jie lied.
“The man had the scariness to me. The wood,” Dari began, but could not speak further, hiding her face in her hair.
"It's my fault," Jie insisted. “I spent hours tending to wood spirits with you. I should’ve had the sense not to force you to a cordwood stand.”
“You are not having to the fault. I had very a lot of the ignorance. I had very a lot of the confusion, very a lot of the fear.”
“I should have listened to you. You do not always behave in a way that is rational to me, Dari," Jie said, releasing her, but for her hand, at last.
“This is the thought I am having to yourself, as well,” she countered.
“But I should never simply dismiss you, even if I do not understand you,” Jie insisted. “I admit a lack of experience with friendship not predicated on barter and banter. Might I ask your patience as well as your forgiveness?”
“Patience?” Dari asked. She shook her head. “I give to you all the forgiveness, but I am not having to the belief this place has the safety to you. You should to go to the Bough with the quickness.”
“I tend to agree, but only if you come with me,” Jie implored.
“Do you have the certainty to this?” Dari asked, her eyes shadowed in confusion and shame.
“Come home, Dari. Please.”
Dari nodded, dabbing her eyes. She could not remember crying, and once begun, could neither recall how to stop.
“I have given to you very a lot of the troubles, and to Sam and Deliatus I have given the feeling of worries and torn to the dress in the way which is very a lot bad and like to Deliatus says ‘shows my bits’ and I gave to many people the offense…”
“Shh, shh,” Jie soothed, giving her head an awkward pat, registering just how much the torn seams of her dress had exposed for the first time. “Here,” he said, pulling his workshirt over his head, thankful for an early-morning chill coaxing him into a scratchy woolen undershirt. “It’s not in much better condition after that second set of stairs, but ought to serve your purposes.” Recalling Dari’s utter incomprehension of modesty at the last moment, Jie turned his head as she raised her arms, pulling his shirt to cover the missing parts of her former dress.
“Good?” Jie asked.
Dari sniffled and nodded, taking his hand. Carefully, she lifted her foot over the stones that encircled them.
Jie, rarely a magical thinker, but always a practical one, took care to do the same.
Together, they climbed the ancient stair-slope: muddy, leaves, dirt and grit ground into their faces and hair. .
He had become lost, but Dari crossed the space as if drawn back to the Bronze Bough like iron to a lodestone. She never loosened her grip on his left hand, fingers twined together, folding her arm behind her to rest their hands on her left hip, his arm crossing her back. It was only good sense to stay so close in the dark, Jie reasoned. Walking together, they must have appeared far more formidable to any watching wolves.
Jie could not explain later how he knew, deep in his bones knew the moment when ‘forest’ turned back into ‘woods’. Moonlight gushed through the trees like sweet spring water over stone, bathing them in blessed light. Peepers squeaked their funny little early summer love songs, whipporwills called back and forth, a barred owl sang out ‘who cooks for you?’ in its odd, self-serious baritone. Further off, he could hear the impatient mutterings of cows, pigs, and horses put away for the night, the gentle warble of sleepy chickens, muffled shouts and laughs of people in houses gone dark but for a single light.
Jie took a deep breath for the first time in what felt like a great, long while, gasping, as if he were breathing the sound of town, letting it heal him of the fear and strangeness that plagued the forest.
“Dari, I need you to promise me something, ok?” Jie said, still clinging to her hand near her hip.
“I can to give to you the trying,” Dari replied.
“Please,” he pleaded. “Please don’t leave again.”
Dari tilted her head, a conflicted half-smile tugging a corner of her mouth.
“I can to give to you very a lot of the trying,” she answered. “Can you to give to me very a lot of the trying to keep to me?”
Jie grasped in the darkness for the vocabulary of explanation, of promise, of apology, of a peculiar, new devotion he could not, even in the confines of his own mind, put words to.
“Yes,” he told her, instead Opening the door to the tavern, Jie and Dari were met with an ecstatic, raccoon-eyed Deliatus, who held Dari, mud and leaves and all, to her chest as if she’d been lost for years. Kohl running in rivulets down her face, she kissed deep red lip-prints across Dari’s cheeks, cooing and crying. Sam, pale and silent, gave Jie a firm hand that pulled into a firmer hug. He opened his mouth to explain, but Sam shook her head, patting his back. “Harold stopped by to check up on you two. You did good,” she said, her chin on his shoulder. “Glad you’re back. I won’t have to murder you for breaking ‘Latus’ heart now.” Deliatus released Dari only to leap onto Jie. "Oh, poor loves! Oh, but it's my fault, as well, practically pushing dear Dari out the door before she was ready!" she wept, smudging lipstick stains in Jie's already smudged cheeks. "But Jie, Darling, what an absolute hero, a perfect first-born of the Mothers to retrieve her so quickly and without assistance! Another twenty minutes and I, myself, would've needed to be tied down to stop me searching for the pair of you!" Jie apprised the small crowd outfitted with loops of rope and flame-charmed citrine necklaces: Harold, Bryjer, Orm, a pair of bandy-legged Vandalian twins who always ordered mead that he could never keep straight, even Lujain--hair swept into a sleek heather grey turban, a set of rough men's overalls beneath her healer's robes.
"Thank you, all of you," Jie ducked a shy bow. "Sam, might everyone have a round of ale on me?"
Brjyer scoffed.
"Ale? After a fright like that, you two owe us hard spirits."
Jie recoiled at the word "spirits", only to be brought back to himself by Lujain's muslin-gloved hand on his shoulder.
"Plum brandy, if any is left in store would suffice." The healer leaned to whisper, "but a generous pull of water in Orm's, yes? There isn't enough pickled swamp root in the continent for the hangover he'll have, otherwise."
Dari felt her waist squeezed and looked down to find Orm’s short arms wrapped around her hips. She smiled, bending to return his hug.
“They tol’ me you run off, an’ I couldn’t hardly believe it, I said, ‘Musta had a reason, that girl, she’s right sensible. Not the type to go runnin’ after wild hairs,’ is what I tol ‘em,” Orm said, patting Dari’s back. "But I'll bring 'er back, just the same. Wouldn't be the Bough anymore without our songbird, would it?"
“Sensible,” Dari said, tilting her hand back and forth, “Not sensible.”
“Well, we all gots our days, I always says,” Orm assured Dari, climbing back into his stool.
“Harold’s been waiting since around sundown,” Sam said, curving her hands over Dari's shoulders. Dari tensed: she'd seen Sam make the move before, on drunks who stood at the borderline of reason. A soft grip to reassure or restrain, as the need arose. “He said you seemed a nice girl, and felt real poorly for upsetting you, given your troubles."
Jie froze, seeing the woodcutter standing behind Sam.
Dari glared, still and cold. Her anger billowed around her like smoke, bringing several patrons silent to watch the seething girl and the smiling woodcutter.
A soft plink sounded against Orm’s helmet. A tiny limb had appeared in the support beam next to the dwarf's head. Swiftly, discreetly, he sliced the avenging branch off with his ax.
“Beg pardon, miss, I want to apologize for the ruckus earlier today,” Harold said, “Times is tough all over, don’t we all know, and I hate to think what it was about me that upset you so. I brung you a little gift, mayhap we could be friends, from here? I made her today.”
Horrified, Dari saw he held a chunk of dead wood out to her.
No. Wood, but neither truly dead nor a chunk. Harold held carved, diligently worked wood--about ten inches tall, smooth and rounded, a figure of woman with arms raised, notches suggesting leaves etched into her long hair. Dari allowed Harold to settle the carving into her outstretched hands.
“Might take a little explainin’. That there’s Sister Lulia, the Star Sister who watches after the forest, an’ after woodcutters, too. My gran always said Sister Lulia was partial to Pickaway, an' I believe it. She don’t like to see trees cut up much more than you seem to, Miss Dari. There’s a story, see, where she got real upset with woodcutters. But them that were faithful, we made a deal with Sister Lulia: we’d take no more than was needful, we’d plant as well as cut. Do right by the trees who do right by us, like. She asked our first guild headman why it was she ought to believe we'd hold our end of the deal, an' that was a right fair question. So the first headman give her his axe head, a token, you see, an’ says to her ‘make a new kind of tree outta this here, an’ I’ll plant ‘em my life long, strike me down should I lie.’ Sister Lulia made the first Amaranthine Oak, may they rest and return, outta that axe head, an’ our headman kept his word, passed the oath down to all of us, at that.” Harold made the sign of the Star. “You put me in mind of the story, for as much as I upset you, an' I am right sorry, Miss Dari. And with your hair the color of Amaranthine leaves. your eyes, too--got me right nostalgic, truth told. You're too young to have seen one, I expect, but they was right beautiful and tough as anything. Whole lot like you, Miss Dari, if your friends are to be believed." Harold finished with a nervous laugh and smile.
Dari felt the little idol pulsing with pride in what it was, with joy at its form, with love for the hands that felt it in a log of firewood and freed it.
Jie offered his hand, but Dari shook her head.
“Thanking to you. Beautiful," she stuttered. Touching a light bruise above Harold’s left eye, she mouthed through several languages before finding the Kanglais she sought. “Many sorries. Harold, like Lulia. Friends?”
The woodcutter took Dari’s hand in his own--rough, but scrubbed clean of pitch.
“Friends, of course! I knew you was a right lovely girl. You make sure Jie takes good care of you, or he’ll have more than just Sam and Deliatus after him,” Harold smiled, patting Jie’s back, tilting his hat to the patrons who’d broken off conversation to eavesdrop before taking his leave.
Jie sighed; muddy, his glasses askew, hair tangled forest detritus, nose bloodied from his care of Dari.
“Good care,” Dari repeated, touching her forehead to his shoulder.
Satisfied with the pair's saftey, patrons returned to their own concerns, Deliatus gone in search of some fresh clothes for Dari, Sam back behind the bar to pay out her preempted search team.
“The very best,” Jie agreed. He rummaged beneath the bar, producing two heating charms. “You even get the bath first. Put just one in, and if it’s not warm to your liking, half at a time. And you’ve got a few scratches I don’t like the look of, so a sachet, too, ok?”
“Okays,” she agreed. “Thanking to you,” she covered his hand with hers, taking the charm tablets. “I am having to very a lot of the happiness to be to home.”
“Me, too,” Jie said. He stood, holding Dari's hand, the day’s fear and anxiety evaporating. With a smile of relief,he released her.
Watching Dari totter up the stairs, Jie could feel Sam’s eyes on him.
“Can’t help who you love,” Sam said, looking back to the bar faster than he could turn. “Just how you love them.”
“You project your own experience,” Jie said, too exhausted to force enough conviction into his voice to argue in earnest. “But I had not realized just how deeply I value Dari's presence until threatened with her absence. She is my friend, in need of more patience and understanding than I always know how to offer. In that way, taking care to love a friend to her own needs rather than my own, you are correct, lady-lord.”
“I’m still your lady-lord, then?" Sam jibed. "Taking off on wild hairs, playing hero like that? Almost like you struck out on your own.”
“As if you could be rid of me so easily. There’s only wolves and magic unknown out there in the dark. We’re creatures of habit, Sam,” Jie smiled. “We’re practically Bound to each other, by now.”
Sam tousled Jie’s hair.
“Ah, the both of us could do a lot worse, kid. Don’t know if I believe in the Mothers as such, but you’re at least ‘Latus-sent. That’s enough for me,” she said, squeezing Jie around the shoulders.
Ignoring Jie’s instructions entirely, Dari’s ochre skin flushed vermilion with two heat charms in her bath. The sting was a comfort. Just at the edge of scalding, her scratches felt cleaner. Moreover, the heat seeping into her flesh reinforced the fact she was made of flesh. Hazy memories were irrelevant--if Dari had been made of something else some time before the short time she could recall, she was no longer. She was flesh; soft, vulnerable flesh thorns seemed to have a taste for.
Dari’s fear and anger at the market had been genuine, yet she burned with embarrassment to recall her emotions. Her memory of life before finding the Bronze Bough receded, it seemed, by the day. She was uncertain how she’d known the way to the place Jie had found her, but knew it was no accident she’d come to hide there. She’d thought to go back. Back to what, she couldn’t quite comprehend. Dari shuddered, recalling the rejection of the dark, cold earth. How she’d clawed into the little pit, searching for signs of familiarity, how she'd been repelled. In the little pit, she’d curled up like a sprout waiting inside a seed. The earth would be forced to take her in. The earth knew what she was, even if her own memories were lost.
The voice in the forest had been a surprise. She seemed to remember what Dari had been. She wasn’t evil--not at all, though some things are so strong the difference is negligible--but was hurt in general and, from what she could glean, aggrieved with Dari in specific. She could have taken Dari’s confusion, her fear. Perhaps even remade Dari as she once was. Idly, Dari wondered if She might be a forgotten part of herself incompatible with this new life. Inhaling the aroma of herbs floating around her, a scent very like Jie's, Dari decided she’d made the right choice. Loneliness was the most difficult part of being human, wasn’t it? Fleeing the square, Dari had been so certain she’d doomed herself to life alone.
But Jie had come.
He had brought her back, where Sam and Deliatus and Orm and others who, for reasons she could not understand, seemed to care about her waited, planning a difficult search for her.
Pushing the air from her lungs, Dari sank to the bottom of the bathtub, watching her long, tangled, violet hair float above her. Dari trusted little of her memory. Whatever she had been before wasn’t what she was anymore. Of this, she was certain.
Underwater, Dari heard the muffled rattle of Deliatus knocking, trilling about clean clothes and help with her hair. Dari could manage washing own hair, but couldn’t deny Deliatus the pleasure of fussing over her. Likewise, Dari couldn’t deny herself the comfort of being fussed over. Deliatus pulled out leaves and thorns, painlessly wove a pick through pernicious tangles, worked a rich soap sharp with the scent of spearmint into Dari’s hair, turning the girl nearly catatonic with relief as she massaged rosemary oil into her scalp. All the while, Deliatus poured words as warm and healing as the bath itself over Dari, prattling the blessings of the Mothers and Sisters, Jie’s heroics, her own joy over her safe return home.
Dari knew thousands of words for ‘home’, but, much like her own new, concise name, she felt certain this one, an intimate, single syllable, was the truest, the closest to her heart.
“I could use help today, if you’re up to it,” Jie said, the next morning. His face was slightly prickled with what seemed a purposeful shadow of stubble, slightly pink from scrubbing. He’d been waiting on her, it seemed, his raven’s wing hair pulled into a topknot even so early, before the nanny goats would consent to milking.
“Up to it,” Dari repeated, with a nod.
“Dari wants to help. Dari does not want to help,” Jie said, pouring himself a cup of tea.
Dari snatched at his hand, but he darted away.
“Dari. Wants. To. Help. Jie,” She tapped each word out on the bar.
Jie smiled, opening his hand to her.
She took it, smiling at the hum of their connection.
“You’ll have to trust me.”
“I trust to you,” she agreed. “You brought to me to home.”
“I’m not sure it would be home without you, anymore,” Jie said, eyes on his teacup, his hand still cradling Dari’s. Unlike her own, Jie’s hands were no worse for their misadventure’s wear. Dari traced a callus the precise shape and angle of a spade handle across his palm with her tender, nettled fingertips.
“I’m planting seeds today. Chamomile, Coneflower, a few other flowering herbs over here. Things for medicines and charms. If you choose not to assist me, I will not be offended in the least. You must be a little bit brave.”
“Little bit brave?” Dari asked, unable to see any danger in gardening.
Jie nodded toward a small tin bucket full to the top of wood ash.
Dari’s breath snagged in her chest.
“Trust?”
“There's something I thought you should see. Or, rather, you need to see, in order to mitigate certain anxieties. ‘Latus taught me a prayer you’ll appreciate. But it’s your choice, Dari.”
Jie looked up, meeting Dari’s gaze. Shimmery and dark as always, his eyes hid an air of exhaustion Dari had not seen before. His tea sat half finished, a subtle swell of fatigue plumped underneath his eyes, no breakfast plates sat on the bar. Dari frowned--she was certain, as militantly logical as Jie was, she had convinced him to leave before any real damage had been done the previous night. He was perhaps just a bit ill with overexertion, surely.
Pushing away the creeping dread of the wood ash, Dari summoned the whole of her courage. Jie had weeks to plant--Dari did not remember planting dates, precisely, but simply knew it in the way she knew she needed to breathe--yet he was forcing additional work on himself to help her.
“I trust to you. Show to me the thing which I am having the need to see to it,” Dari said, standing to follow Jie through the kitchen, out to his gardens.
The dark. rich soil lay already turned, waiting for seeds. Dari winced, rooting her feet to a corner of the garden bed, forcing herself to watch as he walked, pouring the fine, grey-white powder onto the bare earth.
“Dari is afraid. Dari is not afraid,” Jie said, his voice gentle.
“Dari is not afraid,” she parroted, despite the uneasiness in her stomach.
“This is what ‘Latus told me,” Jie said, coming to stand by Dari, extending his hand. “We’re supposed to hold hands for this, and touch the soil. You needn’t touch the ash.”
Dari took Jie’s hand. Following his motions, she knet at the edge soil laden with ash, pressing her empty palm to the earth.
“From earth you grew, to earth we return you. We, the young ones, offer thanks for your for life. We, the weak, offer thanks for your beauty. Bless us, Sister Lulia, mother of the forest, with blooms, those who your children warmed, may they rest and return,” Jie recited. A show of good faith, Jie tapped a clumsy sign of the Star across himself slowly enough for Dari to imitate. A spark of recognition glittered in her memory, but skipped into darkness too quickly to follow.
“I have liking to this prayer,” Dari said, surprised to find she told the truth.The ash had lost its of horror. “But you are not being to the person who is having to the faithfulness. For what is the reason you give to the wood ash to the burial with the respect?”
Jie smiled.
“A handful of the practices of the faithful are predicated on good sense. I used ash on my gardens for years before Deliatus told me anything about its Faithful significance. From their perspective, returning to Lulia what was hers gladdens her--in the case of vegetables and herbs such as we have, it’s said she confers with Sister Vandana of Harvests Future to bless the coming crops.”
“But you do not to put to the ash to the soil for this reason.”
“Correct. It’s all sound science, as ancient as agriculture itself. The use of ash to enrich soil is practically all The Mori bothered to record of the Reedrunner people, in fact,” Jie shook his head, catching his tangent before it could spiral further away from him. “Put short, the ash helps certain plants grow in specific soil, particularly blooming flowers,” he said, turning a space of ash and soil, intermingling the two into a rich black sown with white, as if the night sky lay at their feet. “I could provide an extraordinarily long-winded lecture on the chemistry of the process, which I am certain you ache to hear almost as much as you ache to dig for yourself,” he laughed.
“Ache to hear,” Dari challenged, plunging her hands into the earth, drawing fine, deep furrows with her fingers.