I CLOSED MY eyes and envisioned that strange day in the forest, how the tree bark had felt against my fingers, how the birdsong had been beckoning me, how afterward I’d dreamed of the wood calling me home. Frightened, I had thought those dreams the danger. How I wished now I was trapped there, amid soil and buds, tangled in thorn-bushes, my wrists cuffed by vines instead of metal. A bitter part of me whispered that I could have been exploring that wood freely, had I not let the impossible desire for Rafe overcome all my good sense.
The thought that pained me most as I stared at the bare ceiling or picked at the meager stuffing of my cot, the truth that was worse than any stab of Coulton’s needle, was the flagrance of my own culpability. Rafe had no doubt played his part, but I’d embraced mine without question, eagerly casting myself as the gullible fool. As I’d proven since my dangerous gestation, from the moment that my mother’s heart stopped beating I was capable of only destruction. I’d been careless, out of control, I had followed my desires too blithely. My father had been right to hide me away for so long. Despite a lifetime of warning, I had placed my trust where I clearly should not have, and, as Peter had predicted, was undone.
Mrs. Blott’s romance novels had taught as gospel that some men would break girls’ hearts. I had always thought them simple, the ingénues blinded by their handsome, ill-intentioned suitors, those who gave the men their whole lives and got heartache in return. Yet here I’d done precisely this, let long-lashed eyes and a chiseled jaw lead me far from the path of Peter’s instruction.
And where was Peter? What had happened to my father? I knew even less of his whereabouts than I had before leaving Urizon. Had he taken sick somewhere? Was he waiting for me to come to him, to nurse him? Had he died? Had he willfully abandoned me to live a life unburdened by my care, by my questions, my curse? Could he have any inkling I was stuck here in this airless room, no way to seek him out? That not even my body was my own? My stupid body, whose lusts and night imaginings had gotten the better of my judgment, despite what I now realized were warnings, despite Matthew’s direct doubts.
How it hurt to think of Matthew, who’d tried so hard to protect me. My only ally, who I’d ordered out the door when his advice ran counter to my desires. Matthew, who had left without a farewell, on such poor terms that he would not turn to face me, would not watch me stumble into what he knew to be a trap.
An Ink of Her Own Blood
In the outside world it is the height of summer—the evening when darkness appears almost fully banished, when children are tucked into bed in awe of a sun that has conquered the sky. Here in the forest, it is eternally the same slow summer evening as the Blakely women go about their business—Emma trying to catch a wood mouse, Mary picking her teeth with a twig—not realizing that it is one of only two nights a year the veil will lower without a sacrifice from those who would enter, one of two nights when villagers will stumble in, the trees claiming their bodies, altering their minds.
The black-eyed girl blinks at the women—Imogen kneeling in prayer, Kathryn attempting to pleasure herself upon a tree stump—fascinated by all that they do not see, despite the many years they’ve had to hone their vision. These trapped Blakely women are no different from the villagers outside the wood, performing their antiquated rituals. Thinking the earth moves as a result of their actions, rather than prompting them. Thinking that walking in a spiral has significance, that tales are told more for their listeners than their tellers.
The black-eyed girl watches Lucy attempting a potion of berries and bark, Helen braiding a noose out of vines. She returns to her clearing, sits cross-legged on her pallet, where she digs her fingernails into the wood, scraping perfectly curled shavings of the sort Lucy is unable to summon. She smiles when the splinters pierce her palms, holding her hands to the light. She does not try to remove the shards of wood.
When the men come, only two this season—one pimply and hairless, the other so tall that he struggles to navigate the trees—the black-eyed girl closes her eyes and tilts her head to listen. She hears Kathryn’s delight, her heavy breathing as she tells the younger, Come. She hears the other become tangled in a spiderweb, a thousand-year-old net of sticky fibers that sweeps from ancient tree to tree. His breath is also quick and heavy, his moan of fear not so different from his neighbor’s moan of pleasure. But when the evening ends, this man will not go free.
ALYS STANDS IN the black-eyed girl’s clearing, her mouth tight with memory. The way the black-eyed girl is seated with her legs tucked in, head cocked so that her hair falls just so. Her eyes fully closed, but faintly fluttering. Alys pictures her young cousin Madenn in communion with the wood, buried deep in a vision. The glow of the firelight, the gold of her hair. The wonder in her eyes once they opened.
The black-eyed girl does not need grandmothers and mothers to teach her the ways of the forest. She does not need books to tell her how to commune with the trees. The black-eyed girl is a part of the forest that made her; she is the shift, the difference, the element of randomness requisite for any evolution. Even now she can open the wood at her will, as she did for Peter Cothay. Soon, once she knows her womanhood, the wood will open for all the Blakely women. The season will finally change.
When she is ready, the black-eyed girl opens her dark eyes. She greets Alys with a slow and knowing nod.
21
In the days that followed, hours of anger interspersed with monotony: the dullness of the colorless room, the endless boredom. The weightlessness of my drugged body. The sound of my blood drip-dripping down into Coulton’s jars. A song stuck in my head, an old lullaby that Mrs. Blott once sang me, the same two lines of melody repeated. The thrum of the plastic-bladed fan. I paced the room, crouched in its corners, searching for some means of escape. I waited for Rafe.
One morning a mouse scampered out from a crack in a wall. I pounced, freezing the creature at my touch. Coulton kicked it out the open door before I could revive it. But the mouse had to have come from somewhere, and, excited, I spent the next few hours trying to peel back the plaster and paint in search of its nest. I used my elbow to make the hole larger, and after what felt like decades of work had made a small opening the size of my fist. I pushed my cot to the side, trying to hide my plan from Coulton when he returned the next morning.
Upon opening the door, Coulton looked from my torn fingernails to the rearranged cot, to the dusty motes of plaster I’d been unable to sweep into the toilet. With his boot, he kicked the cot aside, revealing my means of escape. I thought that he might punish me. Instead he just laughed.
“It’s several feet of concrete past the drywall. Good luck clawing your way through that. You’re more likely to squeeze yourself through the pipes or find a way up to the window.”
I followed his gaze. The windows were at least ten feet above us and not even large enough to fit my emaciated arms. I could not hide my disappointment, my exhaustion. I gave an elbow to the effort, punching the plaster in an attempt at defiance, but as I watched my blood pour into Coulton’s cup, I felt my spirit spill out with it.
TOO AFRAID TO contemplate my future, I tried to maintain hope by retelling the stories of my childhood. I could track each stage of my life by the stories I’d been told. Stories were blueprints for selfhood, ways to mold myself and my surroundings into what I needed them to be. Stories had taught me what to want, and how to want it. Maybe now they’d help to set me free.