Forest Born (15 page)
“Wilem is no good,” Rin says. “I was shocked by the things
he said about you. No one talks like that about Agget-kin.”
“That little rodent!” says Kif. “I’ll never speak to Wilem
again.”
What a plea sure to lie! Her feet do not touch the ground, her
blood rushes through her as warm as sleep, her smile feels real. She might do anything to nourish that invulnerable sensation,
might cling to it for days, or perhaps forever.
But the next person she sees is Ma.
“What did Wilem do?” Ma asks, stepping onto her porch in
her sleep clothes, her fists on her hips. “Go on and tell me, Rin,
and I’ll thrash his tunic off his hide.”
Rin sees her ma’s round face, her white-streaked black hair,
frizzy and incorrigible, pulling free from its scarf, her brown
eyes that see everybody. Ma cares for every person in the world
the same, except for Rin. She calls Rin her lily on a pond, her
morning bird song, and everyone knows that Ma loves her daughter
just a little more.
Rin’s heart isn’t floating anymore. Her hands and feet feel
made of stone.
“Nothing. Honest, Ma, he didn’t do anything.”
“You sure, my honey-eyed girl? You sure? Don’t protect
him, now. I won’t put up with naughtiness, not in my homestead,
not to my baby girl.”
Still Rin wants to cling to her strength, wants to keep those
words that remake the world into whatever she likes. And she
doesn’t want to feel sorrow for what she did to Wilem—she wants
Ma to hate him, shoo him away, punish him for not wanting to
kiss her, for having to be tricked, for leaving so easily.
“You just tell me the truth and I’ll take care of it,” says Ma.
The truth. Rin cannot tell her that. “He didn’t do anything. We were playing a game. It was just a misunderstanding.”
Ma frowns, but nods and goes back inside. Kif and Len
groan, discouraged the fun of war is already over. They leave
her standing under a fir tree. It is spring, and the night air has
a bite to it.
The warmth, the surety, the strength drain from her, leaving
her chilled and discarded, a late-winter cellar root. She waits
until Ma is asleep before crawling under the blanket beside her,
huddled on the edge of the cot, her eyes wide. The memory of
that delicious strength stays with her, like the scent of Wilem on
her mouth. She enjoyed it. Even now she does not feel as bad as
she should, and so she knows that makes her worse than bad.
She tosses in bed that night, the chill of her guilt settling over
her. She cannot undo what she did. She cannot run far enough
to get away from hurting Wilem, from lying and commanding. But even more, she is caged by the feeling that the true Rin—
her deepest self, who was not simply mirroring others—was
the girl who lied, who hurt and did not care. At her core, she is
someone Ma would not love. All night, wrestling in the dark
with sleep and with truth, she works to bury herself.
R
in slept inside the oak’s thoughts. Its own memories of weather and growth continued to hum, and like a pond, its stillness reflected back herself. Suspended moments from her life swirled, pelting her like rocks lifted in a windstorm. She saw them the way a tree sees its years, rings circling each other, all memory existing at once—
living in the Forest in silence,
not tree and not girl; getting lost in the trees all day and finally
finding her way home, only to discover no one has noticed she’s been missing;
watching Razo leave the Forest for Tira, and feeling as if her insides
have been scraped out and dumped aside; realizing for the first time that
she is too big to curl up on her ma’s lap.
There, pulsing white, was seven-year-old Rin watching Nordra play. Thinking with the tree made Rin’s own thoughts clear as snowmelt, and she saw that memory anew.
It is the
first time in her life she is without Ma and Razo. She feels so terrifyingly
alone, she scrambles for something to make her stronger, to make her all
right, and discovers an ability sleeping inside her—to see, to speak, to
command. That desire, that talent awakes, never to sleep again. The urge
is compelling, but Rin fears the loss of Ma’s love and squashes it down.
Rin turned inside the tree, tracing memories from the years that followed Nordra and the stick, and saw how weakened she became, fighting something unknown inside, her whole self out of balance, tilting. The tree-speaking gave her a place to lean, but it could not cure her.
Other memories pulsed hot, linked in a white chain from Nordra and the stick to the present—
saying anything to keep
Wilem close; warning Cilie to keep away from Tusken; asking Razo to
guard Tusken with his life; convincing the woman in the inn not to jump;
telling that squat mercenary to let the girl go.
There were more to these moments than she’d realized, a force behind her words, a power in her voice.
With a rising horror, Rin’s sleep-self turned to face the most recent memories—
standing behind a cairn of stones, Razo
and Tusken in a cage; feeling pinned by Selia’s words, subdued and helpless.
Selia speaking. Rin speaking. Words harder than words should be,
words like wind, words like fire.
Rin quaked but forced herself to name it.
I have people-speaking. I am like Selia.
Only then did what was inside her become worse than the world outside. Rin opened her eyes, barely swallowing a scream.
R
in breathed in hard, shuddering gasps, taking in the waking world—the oak tree, the dark sky just stirred by light, Tusken asleep, and Razo staring. “Are you all right?” he whispered.
She nodded. “A . . . nightmare.”
“Don’t blame you. You were sleeping hard there at the end. I poked you for a bit but you didn’t wake. Kind of scared me.”
Rin sat up and leaves tumbled from her head onto her lap. Her hand flew to her hair, and she was suddenly terrified that she’d been turning into a tree.
Razo smiled. “I decorated you while you slept. Made you a little crown. I stuffed one leaf up your nose, but you just sneezed it out and kept sleeping.”
I wasn’t really sleeping,
Rin thought.
I was—
She felt a jolt pass through her as she remembered her dream thoughts.
People-speaking.
She tasted bile on the back of her tongue. Could she really have people-speaking? That “curse” as Enna had called it, that decay that turned people into monsters who forced others to do what they did not will?
Rin hunched over, imagining the huge gray worm of her nightmares curled inside her. All her life, believing she was bad, she clenched up, acted with caution, never sure what she was hiding from. Could she give it a name now?
People-speaking.
Isi had said it was the most dangerous of all the speaking gifts, the one sure to corrupt the speaker. Would she turn into another Selia? She feared she’d already begun—with Wilem, she’d begun.
Razo was lying back on a branch. Tusken was asleep on his chest, his face nestled into Razo’s neck. Looking at them fanned away some of the smoke of her panic. She did not matter, not now. But she’d walk across the ocean to keep Razo and Tusken safe.
Rin peered through the leaves. She could see the dark shape of Castle Daire. “Is it still the same night?”
“What? Of course it is, though near dawn. I think I dozed there for a bit, and I haven’t heard anyone since I woke up. They must be running in all directions, trying to find us before Selia notices we’re missing and gets so angry her face swells up like a frog’s.” This thought seemed to please Razo, and he closed his eyes for a moment, smiling. “All the same, they’re bound to come back for the cage, empty or not, so I think now would be a good time to flee.”
Rin climbed down first, hating the moment her body left the cover of leaves. Her foot crunched on acorns, and she winced in anticipation of crossbow bolts. Razo lowered himself to a branch farther down until he could hand her the sleeping boy. She carried Tusken as they walked, pressing his body as close to her chest as she had strength in her arms.
He’s all right,
she told herself.
He’s out of that cage. That woman
didn’t hurt him. We’ll get him back to his ma again.
After a cramped, short night resting in a tree, her arms gave out much sooner than she would have liked, and she reluctantly handed Tusken back to Razo. Razo groaned with the boy’s weight.
“You think he’s all right?” he whispered. “The way he sleeps . . .”
“He always sleeps like the dead.”
“Good boy. Shows real intelligence, I say.” Razo rubbed his chin softly against the boy’s head. “He wore himself out yesterday, fussing and crying, poor little man. It hasn’t been a feast-day banquet, I guess I can tell you. But we did all right, Tusken and I. We’re pals.”
She had not recovered from the oak sleep yet—her head felt heavy on her shoulders as if filled with sap, her eyes unused to looking around. “Razo, the girls . . .”
“I know.” His voice was tight.
“What are we going to do?”
“Rescue them, of course. Don’t worry, I’m plotting. But first I need to be sure you and Tusken are safe.”
Razo had changed these past couple of years, no question, and not just his height. He reeked with confidence. Rin watched him as she might watch a squirrel if she was lost in the deep Forest, with a hope it would lead her to its cache of nuts.
“Finn left us in Hendric to ride for Geric, to warn him we were going to Kel. Maybe we should get Tusken to safety and wait for Geric to come—”
“Come siege Castle Daire? Start a war with Kel? And in the meantime, leaving Dasha, Enna, and Isi at the mercy of Selia? Not on your life. I’m going in there tonight and I’m going to get those girls out.”
Rin’s stomach did flip-flops like a fish on the riverbank. How could Razo sneak into a defended fortress and rescue three girls without meeting a sword point? But she did not dare argue. The idea of people-speaking throbbed and stung, making her conscious of her every word.
They did not talk, careful in their footsteps to keep quiet. Razo’s face became strained and red, and he seemed scarcely able to hold Tusken. They reached a copse of trees that wore their leaves low, creating an enclosure nearly as solid as a wattle-and-daub house. Razo collapsed inside, muttering that he needed to rest for a few moments. Rin guessed he had not had much sleep or food those past days.
Razo lay Tusken gently on a patch of grass and rested his own head on a tree root, stretching his legs and arms and groaning as if in pain.
“We need to lay low until night offers us some cover. It won’t do our girls any good if I go barging at the castle in full sun and get shot down before I can even scale a wall.”
“If you take a nap,” Rin said, cautious with each word, “I can watch.”
“I think I’d better . . .” Razo’s eyes closed, and instantly came the low, grumbling snores she knew well. Tusken must have been used to the noise too, because he rolled in his sleep and nestled closer to Razo.
Dawn dripped through the leaves onto Rin’s hands. She watched the two boys in their rest, her ears attuned to the sounds of the wood. Selia’s searchers were out there. They would find them, kill Rin and probably Razo too, since he proved to be too much trouble, and take Tusken away. And beneath that worry, the slow, dark, greasy snake kept moving under her skin, that awareness of something wrong. After an hour or more, the anxiety became painful. Her heart beat so hard, it radiated sharp jabs through her chest.
I’ve got to keep watch,
she told herself.
I need to stay calm. I need
to protect them.
But it was becoming unbearable. The anxiety of their situation beat at her, and she could not shut off the questions.
Am I a people-speaker? Have I always been? Am I going to turn into a
Selia?
The night before she had battled past the grimness that had blocked her from the trees’ thoughts, and she had met the memory of what she’d done to Wilem and come out again. Perhaps she just needed more understanding and another encounter with trees to be at peace. She brushed her hand down the bark, alert to the silent hum of the tree. The crackle of bark and awareness of sunlight. A thrum that promised cool silence deep in the core.
She closed her eyes, succumbing to the question until she was inside the tree’s thoughts, spinning again inside her own memories.
It’s the morning after Wilem, and she feels as if she were tied
in a knot only to pull loose by sunup. The events of last night
are oddly hazy. She does not recall exactly what happened, and
a tang of fear makes her fight against trying to recall. But there
is a loose ache moving inside her, and she has an idea that if she
just allows herself to speak freely, the ache will melt into
relief—delight even. Some mysterious elation is still delicious
on her tongue, making her insides rumble with hunger.
But there’s Ma, humming while she works, smiling at her
daughter. Guilt sinks inside Rin, and she’s sure that she said
something unforgivable, something that would make Ma not
love her. So Rin stays quiet, helps prepare breakfast and clean
up, and every moment that ticks by, she feels stretched farther
away from that wild and brilliant Rin. Each time Ma touches
her, speaks to her, Rin feels certain that she doesn’t belong in
this warm, happy house beside her good mother.
this warm, happy house beside her
As soon as she can, she runs.
She runs away from the homestead and their neighbors,
toward deepness. She falls into a fir tree, insisting herself into its
thoughts, demanding its comfort. She expects the woody thoughts
of trees to still her, but instead she is surrounded by what she’s
done.
I lied to Wilem, I shattered his confidence, I filled him with sadness, and I did not even care. And I want to be that powerful again.
The memory catches her in its
teeth.
She’s on her hands and knees, breathless. Scrambling back to
her feet, she stumbles into an aspen grove, the round leaves chiming,
the sunlight filtered to soft warmth. She tumbles against
knotty white bark.
Take it away,
she begs.
Change me, undo me, make it not real. Make me someone else.
The tree does not hear her and obey, not as Wilem had. The
tree simply reflects back to her what she is, what she’s done. She
is a girl with a desire to speak out and control, to raise herself
above the rest. And knowing it was wrong, she still claimed that
power and used it against Wilem. But she’s never heard of
people-speaking, doesn’t comprehend what’s happening, knows
only that she feels wrong. That confusion and wrongness are a
black loathing that suffocates her. She clings to the tree, and the
sensation intensifies, burns spitting hot and smoky like grease
in the fire.
She doesn’t want to remember, she wants oblivion, and all
the trees offer is the truth—who she is, what she’s done. Feeling
twisted and yanked and dumped on the ground, she rips apart
her own memory so she won’t have to look at it anymore. But
hiding from what she did can’t ease her wrongness.
I’m bad. Ma won’t love me if she knows. I’m—
She pulls away from the tree, crouches over her knees, and
cries for as long as the tears will come.
