Ash Read online

  Two weeks after her mother’s funeral, Ash’s father left for the Royal City. At breakfast that morning, she asked him, “When will you come back?”

  “Possibly not until autumn,” he said. Before her mother died, her father would leave them for months at a time to do business in the south. When he returned he would bring back gifts: slippery, shiny silks, or thick woolen tweeds, or toy dolls made of pale, cold porcelain.

  “Did Mother ever go with you?” she asked, and he seemed surprised by her question.

  “She did travel with me to Seatown once,” he answered, “but she did not like it. She said she missed the Wood.” He suddenly looked deeply sad, and he rubbed his hand over his face as if he were brushing away the memories. “She did like visiting the booksellers’ bazaar, though. She’d spend hours there while I worked.”

  Ash asked, “Will you bring me a new book, Father?”

  He seemed taken aback, but then he said gruffly, “I suppose you are your mother’s daughter.” He reached out and ruffled her hair, and he let his hand linger, warm and firm, on her forehead.

  After breakfast, Ash sat on the front steps and watched her father and his driver loading trunks onto the carriage. It was a week’s journey from Rook Hill to the Royal City, barring any mishaps. When they were ready to depart, he came over to Ash. She stood up, and he put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Be a good girl and listen to Anya. I’ll send news when I can.”

  “Yes, Father,” she replied, and looked down at the ground, staring at the toes of his polished black boots.

  He lifted her chin in his hand and said, “Don’t spend too much time daydreaming. You’re a big girl now.” He touched her cheek and then turned to go to the carriage. She watched as it pulled away, and she stood on the steps long after it had gone out of sight around the bend.

  After her father left for the City, she went down to the grave every day, usually at twilight. The letters carved into the headstone spelling out her mother’s name were sharp and fresh, and the rectangle of earth that marked the length of the grave was still distinct, but even within a few weeks of the burial, wildflowers and grasses had begun to grow. Sitting with her back against the tree, she remembered a tale her mother had once told her about a fairy who lived in the mountains north of Rook Hill. This fairy was a shape-shifter, and a cruel one at that. If a family had just lost someone, this fairy would visit them, knocking on their door after sunset. When they opened the door, they would see their departed loved one standing there, as real as could be. It would be tempting to invite her in, for in the depths of grief, sometimes one cannot tell the difference between illusion and reality. But those who gave in had to pay a price, for to invite death inside would mean striking a bargain with it.

  “What price did they have to pay?” Ash asked her mother.

  “Generally,” her mother responded, “the fairies ask for the same thing: a family’s first-born child, to take back with them to Taninli and mold into their own creature.”

  “What sort of creature?” Ash asked curiously.

  Her mother had been kneading dough that morning, and she paused in her work to look out the kitchen window at the Wood. “You know, I’ve never seen such a creature,” her mother said thoughtfully. “It must be a strange one.” And then to dispel the dark mood, her mother laughed and said, “It’s nothing to worry about, my dear. Simply don’t answer the door after sunset.”

  And she reached over and caressed her daughter’s cheek, leaving a light dusting of flour on her face.

  The summer passed slowly. Her father sent news every few weeks, punctuating the warm stillness with reports from the south: There had been a storm on the road, and it had delayed them. When they arrived in the Royal City, a new King’s Huntress had just been appointed, and there was a grand parade. In Seatown, her father had attended a ball at a grand estate on the cliffs. Ash and Anya read his letters together, and afterward, Ash folded them between the pages of her mother’s favorite book, a collection of fairy tales that had been read so often the cover had come loose.

  One market day, Ash went with Anya into the village. While Anya finished her errands, Ash wandered among the peddler’s stalls in the village green. Coming to a cart piled high with herbs, she buried her nose among them and inhaled. When she looked up, the greenwitch was standing beside the cart, watching her.

  “Where is Anya?” Maire Solanya asked.

  “She is at the candlemaker’s,” Ash said.

  “And your father? Has he sent news of when he will return?”

  “No,” Ash answered. “Why?”

  But the greenwitch did not answer her question. Instead, she bent down to Ash’s eye level and looked at her closely. The woman had strangely pale blue eyes and sharply arched gray eyebrows. “Do you miss your mother?” she asked.

  Ash stepped back, startled. “Of course I miss her,” she said.

  “You must let her go,” Maire Solanya said softly. Ash felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes. “Your mother was a great woman,” the greenwitch continued. “She is happy where she is now. You must not wish her back.”

  Ash blinked, and the tears spilled over; she felt as if the greenwitch were tugging them out of her one by one.

  Maire Solanya’s features softened with compassion, and she reached out and brushed away the teardrops. Her fingertips were cool and dry. “It will be all right,” she said gently. “We will never forget her.”

  By the time Anya came to collect her, she had stopped crying and was sitting on the stone bench at the edge of the green, and Maire Solanya had gone. They walked home silently, and though Anya asked her if she was upset, Ash only shook her head. At home a letter had been left for them, wedged into the edge of the front door, and Anya handed it to Ash as they went inside. While Anya put away the items she had purchased at the market, Ash unsealed the letter, spreading it out on the kitchen table. She read it twice, because the first time she read it she could not believe it.

  “What news?” Anya finally asked, coming to join her at the table.

  “Father is coming back,” Ash said.

  “Well, that’s wonderful,” Anya said with a smile. “Sooner than expected!”

  “He is bringing someone with him,” Ash said. Something in her voice caused Anya to take the letter from her, puzzled, and read it herself. “I am to have a stepmother, and two stepsisters,” Ash said. She was stunned. “They will be here in two weeks.”

  After the letter arrived, the days passed in a blur. Anya was busy preparing the house as William had instructed. Later, Ash could never remember if she had helped to clean her mother’s things out of her parents’ bedchamber, or if Anya had simply swept them all into a trunk and out of sight. But she did remember that on the morning of her father’s scheduled return, she visited what had been her mother’s room and stood on the thick gold-and-brown rug in a pool of sunlight coming through the leaded glass windows. The wardrobe was empty now, and the door was partway open, as if inviting Ash to look inside and make sure that all traces of her mother were gone.

  It was late in the day when the carriage finally pulled into the courtyard. Ash went outside to meet them, and her new stepmother, Lady Isobel Quinn, looked at Ash with an expression hovering between resignation and impatience. As her new stepsisters climbed out of the carriage, Ana, who was twelve—“just your age; she will make a wonderful playmate for you,” her father had written hopefully—complained of hunger. Clara, who was only ten, looked up at the house with wide, anxious eyes. Anya had told Ash to be polite to them, but all she could feel at the moment of their arrival was a thick, burning anger inside her. It licked at her belly when she heard her stepmother comment on the smallness of the staircase; it throbbed at her temples when Ana demanded that Ash’s own room be given up for her; it roared inside her when her father reached for his new wife’s hand and led her into her mother’s room.

  That night, while her father and stepmother and stepsisters sat together in the parlor, exclaiming over
the gifts he had brought them from Seatown, Ash slipped away from them all. She skidded down the hill on feet made clumsy from suppressed emotion, and sank down on the ground beside her mother’s grave, clutching her knees tight to her chest. All her frustration and sadness began to bubble up to the surface, sliding out of her in hot teardrops. She tried to not make a sound—she did not want anyone to hear her—but her body shook as she cried. When the tightness inside her finally relaxed, she lay down on the earth, her cheek pillowed on her hand, staring slackly at the faint outlines of her mother’s tombstone in the dark.

  She didn’t see the man standing in the Wood beyond the house, watching her. He had white hair and eyes so blue they were like jewels, and he was dressed all in silvery white. The air around him seemed to crack in places, and his moonlight-colored cloak wavered at those cracks as if he weren’t quite all there. If Ash had seen him, she might have thought that he was a fairy, for all around him the Wood seemed enmeshed in a web of illusion. One moment the trees were solid as stone around him; the next it was as if he were standing among grand marble pillars in a magnificent palace. But Ash did not see him. She lay there in the dark, rubbing away her tears, and when she was too tired to cry anymore, she turned over onto her back and fell asleep.

  Chapter III

  Her father had been back for nearly a week when Maire Solanya came to see him. Ash almost missed her visit entirely, because she had been forced to go into Rook Hill with her stepmother and stepsisters. When they returned to the house, a horse was tethered in front of it. Lady Isobel looked at it suspiciously but merely herded her daughters upstairs and called for Anya to attend them. Ash dawdled behind, stroking the horse’s nose, hoping her stepmother would forget about her. When she went back inside she heard voices coming toward the front hall, and she ducked into the parlor to hide. As they came closer, she realized one of them belonged to the greenwitch, and she sounded upset.

  “I think you are making the wrong decision,” said Maire Solanya angrily.

  “You have no evidence to support your claims,” Ash’s father objected in frustration. “What you are saying is simply—they are simply tales told to children.”

  The greenwitch snorted. “Very well,” she said coldly. “If you do not believe what has been true for thousands of years, I cannot change your mind now. But you have to watch out for her—your only daughter. Her mother would have sent her to me in time. Without her mother here to watch over her—”

  “She has a stepmother now,” William interrupted.

  “That woman knows nothing of this,” Maire Solanya hissed. Ash peered into the hall and saw the greenwitch standing just inside the front door. “You have lived in Rook Hill long enough to know better,” she said, lowering her voice. “Letting her sit out there at her mother’s grave every night—they will come for her.”

  Ash’s father did not seem convinced. “Elinor may have shared your fancies, but I do not,” he said. And then he put his hand on the doorknob in a clear indication that the greenwitch should leave. “Have a safe journey home.” After he closed the door he sighed, rubbing his eyes. Ash slid back into the parlor before her father turned around, and she tiptoed to the front window. The courtyard was empty; the greenwitch had already left.

  Ash wanted to know what Maire Solanya had meant—who would come for her?—but she did not dare ask her father. He was restless and aggravated for the rest of the day after the greenwitch’s visit. What she had overheard reminded her of the argument he had had with her mother, and she wondered, not for the first time, how many of those tales told to children were true.

  Her mother had told her plenty of fairy tales, of course. If they were to be believed, any fairies who still walked this land were most likely to be found deep in the Wood, where no one had traveled for generations. Sometimes at twilight, when Ash was sitting at her mother’s grave, she thought she saw things—a silverish shadow, like heat waves in the summer, or the movement of a creature who did not quite set foot upon the ground—but it was only out of the corner of her eye. Whenever she turned to look, there was never anything there. She knew her father would tell her that it was only the fading light playing tricks on her.

  So she had been surprised when the book that he brought back for her was a volume of fairy tales. It was bound in dark brown tooled leather, and the frontispiece was a painting of a fairy woman, elegant and pale, wearing a beautiful golden gown. The title of the book was lettered in bold, dark calligraphy: Tales of Wonder and Grace. Each story was preceded by a detailed illustration, hand-painted in royal blue and crimson, silver and gilt.

  “Thank you,” she said to her father. “It is beautiful.”

  The tales were not all about fairies—some were hunting stories, some were adventures—but many of them were. When her father saw how she was transfixed by the book, he allowed her to skip Ana and Clara’s lessons with Lady Isobel. “She is young,” he said to his new wife, who frowned at this indulgence. “And she misses her mother. Let her be.”

  Ash recognized some of the stories in the book as tales that her mother had told her: “The Golden Ball,” “The Three Good Advices,” “The Beast and the Thorn.” But the lengthiest story in the book, “The Farmer and the Hunt,” was unfamiliar to her, and she stared often and long at the illustration that accompanied it. In the picture, a ruddy-faced farmer stood at the edge of a broad field, and riding across it was a ghostly host of hunters outlined in silver paint, their horses’ eyes glinting gold. The riders were as pale as the fairy woman on the frontispiece, and their faces were hollow skulls, their mouths gaping open.

  In the tale, the farmer, a well-liked man named Thom, vanished on his way home from a village tavern. He was found three days later when one of his neighbors discovered his horse tethered near a wooded copse down by the river. Within the copse, Thom was fast asleep on a bed of dried leaves. Although he was very confused when he awoke, after he had been brought home and fed a good supper, he remembered what had happened. On the night he had disappeared, he waited until the full moon had risen before leaving the tavern, and then he took his customary route home. He was walking past the fallow field west of the Wood when he saw lights dancing in the copse by the river, accompanied by the most beautiful flute music he had ever heard. Because his sweetheart, who had died several years before, had played the flute, Thom was drawn toward the music and wondered who was behind it.

  Within the copse he came across a scene so beautiful it made his heart ache. There were sparkling lanterns hanging from the branches, illuminating the clearing where dozens of finely dressed men and women were dancing, their bodies as graceful as blossoms bending in a spring breeze. At first they took no notice of the farmer standing on the edge of their circle, and as his dazzled eyes adjusted to the light, he finally noticed the musicians playing along the sidelines. There was a violinist who played a gilded instrument with finesse, but whose face seemed strangely weary for someone who was making such sweet music. And there was the piper whose flute had called to the farmer; she was a young woman wearing a relatively plain gown in comparison to the dancing ladies. As the farmer gazed at her face, it was as if a glamour slowly fell away from it, and he recognized her as his sweetheart, Grace, who was believed to be dead.

  When she looked up and met his eyes, the illusion disappeared, and she put down the flute and came to him. In wonder, he took her hands in his, and her hands were as cold as death. She said to him: “You must go back, Thom. I am lost to you forever, but you can still leave.”

  As she spoke, the dancing people began to notice him, and one of the women came toward them, her eyes great and blue, and offered him a goblet of wine. “Will you drink, sir?” she asked sweetly.

  He took the goblet without thinking, and the girl departed, but just as he was about to take a sip Grace said urgently, “You must not drink of that wine. If you do you will be trapped forever in this world, never to see your family again.”

  Her words made him hesitate, but he said, “I had th
ought you were lost to me; where is this place I have come to?”

  “You have stepped into fairy land,” she answered. “Three years ago, I was walking home one night when I encountered the Fairy Hunt, and they offered to take me the rest of the way. I should not have believed them. As soon as I mounted one of their horses, they took me to Taninli, their home, where they gave me food and drink. I was so hungry and thirsty that I gave in, but now I must serve them for eternity, for no humans are allowed to taste their delicacies.”

  “I will join you,” he said, “for I love you and would be with you for eternity.”

  But she shook her head, and her eyes were dark with pain. “I am but a shadow of myself and can never love you as a human could,” she said. “The fairies have taken my heart away from me.”

  He could see that she told the truth, for no blood warmed her skin, and there was no pulse beating in her throat. Yet a part of him still wished to be with her regardless of what form she had taken, and when she saw this in his heart, she led him out of the copse, fearing for his safety, and took the goblet away from his hand. “You must forget about me from now on, and if you see the Fairy Hunt riding, never approach them,” she warned him. And then she touched his cheek and he fell down in an enchanted sleep and did not awaken until his neighbor discovered him.

  But as is the way with these encounters, Thom could not forget what he had seen, and every night he yearned for Grace, his heart aching anew. At last he took to wandering near the wooded copse by the river, hoping to hear Grace’s flute. One night at twilight, Thom saw a dozen ghostly riders coming toward him, and soon he recognized them as the Fairy Hunt. But he ignored Grace’s words of warning and gladly went to meet them. After that night he was never seen again, and no one knows if he succeeded in finding his way back to Grace. But a month later, the same neighbor who had awakened Thom from his enchanted sleep came across the farmer again, except this time he would not awaken, for he was dead.