Ash (3 page)

MALINDA LO

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 stil ness 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 bal 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 vil age. While Anya finished her errands, Ash wandered among the peddler’s stal s in the vil age 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 wil return?”

“No,” Ash answered. “Why?”

But the greenwitch did not answer her question. Instead, she 19

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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 spil ed 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 wil never forget her.”

By the time Anya came to col ect 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 final y asked, coming to join her at the table.

“Father is coming back,” Ash said.

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

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“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 wil be here in two weeks.”

After the letter arrived, the days passed in a blur. Anya was busy preparing the house as Wil iam 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 al 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 al traces of her mother were gone.

It was late in the day when the carriage final y pul ed 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 wil make a wonderful playmate for you,”

her father had written hopeful y—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 al she 21

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could feel at the moment of their arrival was a thick, burning anger inside her. It licked at her bel y when she heard her stepmother comment on the smal ness 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 al .

She skidded down the hil on feet made clumsy from sup-pressed emotion, and sank down on the ground beside her mother’s grave, clutching her knees tight to her chest. Al 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 final y relaxed, she lay down on the earth, her cheek pil owed 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 al 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 al there. If Ash had seen him, she might have thought that he was a fairy, for al around him the Wood seemed enmeshed in a web of il usion. One moment the trees were solid as stone around him; the next it was as if he were standing among 22

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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.

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Chapter III

er father had been back for
nearly a week when Maire Solanya came to see him. Ash almost missed her visit H entirely, because she had been forced to go into Rook Hil 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 cal ed 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 hal , 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—24

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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 hal and saw the greenwitch standing just inside the front door. “You have lived in Rook Hil long enough to know better,” she said, lowering her voice. “Letting her sit out there at her mother’s grave every night—they wil 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 25

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they were to be believed, any fairies who stil 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 tel 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 cal igra-phy:
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 al 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 al owed 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 26

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to her, and she stared often and long at the il ustration 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 skul s, their mouths gaping open.

In the tale, the farmer, a wel -liked man named Thom, vanished on his way home from a vil age 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 ful moon had risen before leaving the tavern, and then he took his customary route home. He was walking past the fal ow 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, il uminating 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 27

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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 cal ed 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 il usion 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 stil 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 wil be trapped forever in this world, never to see your family again.”