Forest Born (2 page)

They were not laughing anymore. The thrill cooled, and Rin was exhausted from trying to keep him. It was late when he left for home, his head bowed and shoulders stooped, and she was certain he’d never kiss her again.

The next morning she felt wrong, as if day had dawned only partly made, as if Wilem had taken half of her away with the kiss. She touched her lips. What had she said? She shuddered, an ache and a twisted stomach suggesting she had said too much. Something was wrong. She’d spied her older nieces sharing kisses with neighbor boys, and the next day they were full of sly smiles and giggles, not aches and shudders.

Coals burned inside Rin, hotter and hotter, while she dressed and helped Ma with the morning chores. She did not understand why she burned, but she wanted to cry from the pain.

As soon as she could get away, she ran, falling into the arms of a fir tree.

She tried to throw herself into the soothing thoughts of the tree and seize its peace, but she could not forget Wilem.

What had she said? She did not want to remember. The harder she worked to shut that out, the more twisted and dark her feelings became. Had she simply outgrown her connection to trees? Or was it possible the trees were shunning her for what she’d done? After making Nordra cry, her mother had thought Rin was bad and turned her back. After kissing Wilem, it seemed the trees did the same.

Rin ran to another tree, leaned against it to listen, and was accosted by a dizzying darkness. She fled to the aspens, and in place of green calm she felt clutched at and pulled down. She sat on the forest floor with her arms over her head, too lost and confused to cry. If the voice of the Forest was simply silent, then she should feel nothing at all, not this loathing—as if all the trees spat hate and disgust at her. Her stomach turned, her head felt hot, her arms were too weak to lift. She wished she could die.

When evening came and she still had not died, Rin stood up, brushed off her skirt, and went home. It would not be too hard to hide her misery. Lately, no one took much notice of Ma’s shadow.

Chapter 2

S
pring gusted into summer, and every day Rin ran. She ran over pine needles that snapped and moss that hushed. She zigzagged and changed S paths, bolted through sunny clearings and back into cool shade. She sweated to exhale the tightness in her chest, to hide from a world that felt crowded, hostile, and too dense to breathe.

The exertion helped some, but today guilt cut her run short—Ma had need of her, and her brothers and their wives too. She took one look toward the deep Forest, longing to test its promise that she might lose herself entirely in its echoing silence. Someday perhaps. But now she veered toward home.

When she reached the clearing of the homestead, she rested her hands on her knees, waiting for her breathing to slow. There stood her ma’s house, one room built of wood, shutters wide open in the summer afternoon, fir boughs on the roof turning brown. Dotting the small clearing were five other houses, built by her big brothers for their own families. Everywhere children wrestled and shrieked and chased. The whole place bustled, motion constant, the family like a huge beast with a thousand parts.

Rin spotted Ma, a sobbing grandchild on her hip and a long wooden spoon in her hand. Rin’s mother was nearly as wide as she was tall and looked sturdy enough to face down a root-ripping storm.

“Brun, your Lila there is making a ruckus that’ll scare the squirrels into winter,” she shouted as she crossed the clearing, sounding loving even as she scolded. “See to her or I will. Gren, don’t you knock over that pot I just filled if you want to live to supper! Jef, you sack of bones, get back to work. I didn’t raise you to nap like an overfed piglet. Look at you children—what pretty needle-chains you made! Now don’t go scratching each other’s eyeballs. Tabi, let go of your brother! He’s not a branch to swing from.”

Rin followed Ma through the clearing and to the fire pit on the far side of the little house. When Ma began to stir the pot hanging over the fire, Rin took the spoon from her hand.

“Rin, there’s my girl, only sensible person for leagues. Keep the stew from burning while I patch up Yuli’s knee, will you? I can’t think what those children meant by . . . now wait just a minute.” Ma peered at Rin’s face. “What’s wrong?”

Rin tried to smile. “Nothing, Ma.”

Ma sat Yuli on a bench, his sobbing more habitual than urgent, and put a hand under Rin’s jaw. “You sure? You’ve been quiet lately . . . but it’s not so much the quiet as something inside the quiet.”

Rin shrugged, though her insides were turning to ice. Had Ma noticed these last months how often Rin ran off? Could Ma see that she was shaking inside? Would she speak the words, would she pronounce the problem and then make it right?

Ma felt her forehead, her cheeks, made her stick out her tongue, prodded her belly, listened to her elbows for creaks, pulled down her earflaps to look for rash. “Seem fine. You not feeling fine?”

Rin shrugged again. She’d never bothered anyone about the spiny things in her heart. It did not seem right to complain, especially not to Ma, who worked from the moment her eyes opened until she groaned as she lay down at night. Maybe everyone felt knotted like that but it just was not something spoken aloud. Or maybe only Rin was all wrong. If so, she’d never speak it, especially not to Ma.

“Could you . . .” Rin stopped.

“Ask me, Rinna.” Her mother rarely told her what to do. Rin was the child who never needed scolding, who heard what her mother wanted before she’d even finished speaking. But Ma commanded her now, with fists on hips and eyes almost angry, daring her daughter to stay quiet. “Ask me.”

And so Rin was surprised into saying exactly what she was thinking. “Could you hug me?”

Without hesitation, Ma pulled her in close, hugged her as if she were a tiny baby scared to be in the open world. Rin’s head pressed into her mother’s warm shoulder, and she breathed in wood smoke and juniper.

“My girl,” Ma mumbled against her daughter’s head.

“My treasure. My perfect girl. How I love you and love you.”

Rin wished she were six and could fit on her mother’s lap, and every bad feeling or big scary terror could be drowned out by that ferocious love. There inside her arms, Rin’s ache soothed a bit, but the snarled unease did not untangle. Rin had not believed one embrace could fix what was wrong, but she’d hoped enough to try.

“Thanks,” she whispered.

Ma hugged her firmer still and smattered her head with kisses before letting go and returning to Yuli, whose cry had become offended.

“Anytime you want a hug, my treasure, you just blink,”

Ma said over her shoulder as she wiped Yuli’s knee with a wet cloth and gave him a heel of bread to chew. “Can’t think what’s the matter with me if my little girl has to ask for love.”

“I’m all right,” Rin said, eager to hide it again. “Maybe I’m just feeling lonely for Razo.”

“Yes, I bet that’s it. That’ll be it.”

But where would she go?

In the yard everything quieted, then silence burst with hollers and calls of greeting. Could it be Wilem? He had not returned to the homestead since that night four months ago. Many times when she’d been running, Rin had almost turned toward his home. For what purpose? She did not understand why she’d felt so desperate for him to kiss her or why the trees now kept their peace to themselves. But surely nothing she could say would fix it.

Rin tiptoed around the side of the house. In her nervousness, her hands rose to cover her mouth.

A couple dozen members of her family gathered, her Ma squealing and administering hugs. In that sea of dark heads, Rin caught sight of orange. Her heart beat harder. There was only one person in all of Bayern with hair that color—Dasha, the ambassador from the country of Tira, and her brother Razo’s girl. That meant Razo was here too.

Rin could hear Dasha saying, “It is a plea sure to return to the homestead again, Mistress Agget.”

The Tiran girl had taken to referring to Ma as Mistress Agget, a formality that actually made Ma blush. All the folk known as Agget-kin called her Ma, including her grandchildren, who referred to their own mothers as “my ma” to avoid confusion. Even the nearest neighbors called her Ma. Only Dasha would stiffen things up like that. Apparently she was wealthy, her home in Tira a palace. “Isn’t it wonderful how she’s so comfortable here too?” Rin’s family often said. But early last spring when Dasha had first arrived at the homestead, Rin had detected shock in Dasha’s expression, even a little disdain. So why had Dasha stayed with Razo? That was what Rin wanted to know.

At last she glimpsed her brother, just exiting his mother’s embrace. Razo looked the same—he was the youngest and shortest of the brothers, his cropped dark hair sticking straight up. Just the sight of him made her want to giggle. He was her best friend. And she had been his best friend—until Dasha.

Rin smiled, straightened, and waited for Razo to look for her, because he always did. She was usually standing a ways back, and he would call her Rinna-girl and push everyone aside to hug her or wrestle her or challenge her to a race or just knock his forehead against hers and smile.

All these months she’d been planning what she would say on his return. “Razo, how can you stand to be away from the trees in the city? Or don’t you feel anything from them? I used to think with them, through them, and feel calm. But not anymore.” If she said that much, she’d also have to explain. “But then I kissed Wilem, and the trees changed toward me. I must be really bad if even the trees want me gone, and maybe if Ma knew me inside instead of out, she wouldn’t love her girl anymore.” If she could explain, perhaps he could help her make sense of it and fix it.

Only now did she understand that she could not admit it, even to him. He would not know how to mend her or the trees, and she could not reveal her secret ugliness, not without the risk of losing his love. That comprehension knocked her as if she’d fallen back-first out of a tree.

Razo waved. “Rinna-girl!”

She put her hands over her face and cried.

Everything went quiet. She could hear one of the children whisper, “Is Rinna crying? Why’s she crying?”

“Uh . . . ,” said Razo. “Um, Rin? Did I—”

“What’s the matter with our girl?” her mother asked the general gathering. “Does anyone know?”

“Kif, did you and Len do something?” Ulan asked her oldest boys.

But for the slamming pain in her chest, Rin might have laughed. It was ridiculous, her family looking dumbfounded while she cried without reason or sense. She would have tried to shrug it off and pretend that she’d stepped on a sharp rock or something, but the sobs kept pulling out of her chest, stuck to each breath like pine sap on her fingers.

Dasha spoke in a casual voice. “Rin and I are dying to take a walk together. It’s been months! We should be back by supper.”

Dasha’s arm hooked Rin’s and she walked her away from the homestead, whispering directions. “Don’t trip, there’s a big rock on your left. Duck under this branch. Let me help you hop over this fern.” By the time Rin dried her face and looked around, they’d left her family far behind.

“Is this the way to that sunny clearing with the aspens?” asked Dasha. “The one we went to last time I was here?”

Rin just nodded. Dasha was such a happy, bouncy kind of person, and Rin did not have the energy to try and reflect her mood.

The clearing was much smaller than the homestead, but wide enough that daylight streamed through the canopy. Aspens sunned themselves, leaves turned up and quaking. It used to be Rin’s favorite place in all the Forest. The last time she had pressed her forehead to an aspen trunk here, instead of soaking in their green calm, she had jerked back from the heart-battering ugliness.

Dasha sat on a rock and sighed. “Now, shall we just sit or would you like me to blather?”

“Blather please.”

“With plea sure.”

An hour flowed by as Dasha recounted her first sea voyage that previous spring, traveling north from her home country of Tira to a port in the kingdom of Kel.

“Razo made friends with the whole crew, as you can imagine, and they had him climbing ropes and hoisting sails. He learned seafaring songs, a few he wouldn’t repeat.”

Dasha described Kel, the green slopes around the seaport, the charming hats the Kelish ladies wore, and meeting King Scandlan. “He was odd, really. Perhaps I expected all kings to be as warmhearted and gallant as Bayern’s King Geric, but Scandlan was distant. Razo noticed it too, though he did not find the king’s behavior as odd as I did.”

Rin could not resist adding, “Razo probably felt sympathy for the king, figuring he was plagued by an itch that he couldn’t decently scratch in public.”

Soon the shadows were thick, crossing the clearing as if fleeing to the east. Dasha stared at the sky soaking up a darker blue.

“I could stay here all night,” she said casually, without looking at Rin as if not to pressure her. “Or we can go back. Whatever you like.”

Rin squinted toward home. She was not eager to face her family, but the day was quickly exhaling into night. She sighed. “If we head back now, we’ll get there before dark.”

“Thank you. Sometimes being around family is best, and sometimes it’s not.”

“Those are true words,” Dasha said, her eyes on the path. “I love my father, but it is nice being in Bayern without him. He is not like your mother. He is rather . . . hard. But I imagine even with a large, loving family, sometimes it would be good to get away.”

Dasha took Rin’s hand, a sisterly gesture. Rin did not want to hold her hand—she wanted to banish her back to Tira and have her brother all to herself.

“There you are!” Razo jogged up, slightly out of breath. “Everything all right, Rinna-girl?”

“What? Oh, you mean earlier?” Dasha said before Rin would have to explain. “Oh yes, she’s fine, that was nothing.”

“Oh. All right. So, while you were gone, I challenged the brothers to a slinging contest. They’re still bandaging their egos.”

“You’re the best in the world.” Dasha kissed his cheek, and Razo shrugged to hide his gratified smile.

Rin watched him, aware more than ever how he had changed in the past couple of years. There was a confidence in him, as if he were always dressed in armor from helmet to shielded boots. She did not know what had caused the change—his adventures in Tira, or getting out from under the shadow of five older brothers. Or Dasha.