Changeling: Rea

[badgersandjam.livejournal.com]

Heh.  I used phrases in my last comment from my background, which of course I never posted.  It is thus under the cut.

The forest of Inapercu hides the maze of Heart’s Desire.  Anyone who follows the signs in the forest may find the maze and then, if they are steadfast enough to find the centre of the maze, they will find their heart’s desire.  Only it is truly what lies in their hearts, not what they think lies in their hearts.  If they dream of a bonny lover who shines like the sun, they may find after all that their love is just an ordinary person.  A person who has a fear of fire may find she controls fire—but no flame will warm her ever again.  Beware of what your heart wishes for.  It is said even the Gentry are wary of the maze.

            The path through the forest, such as it is, is marked by oak trees.  An ancient oak on the very skirts of the forest points its long gnarled finger inwards, and then a succession of oak trees mark the path, each pointing onward.  The trees become younger as they go deeper into the forest, whether because they are closer to the heart of desire or whether because the lives inside them are younger, no one knows.

            In March of 1962, a young girl walked through Jedburgh to the Capon oak (http://www.a2jlp.co.uk/photos/capontree.html).  It was early morning, and she was alone.  She liked to climb trees, but this one was special, because it was so old.  Because it was so old it was also forbidden, but the girl was small and light and her feet didn’t even leave a trace on the grass and she walked over to it. 

            They were old friends, the girl and the tree.  But today, someone had been there before her.  Today, in the high branches, there was a cage, with a bird that cried out song. 

            Mother always said it was wrong to cage birds.  She started climbing, small feet and legs shinning where necessary and leaping where they ought.  As she got closer, she saw that the bird was part flesh, part clockwork.  How odd.  But still it sang as if her heart would burst.  She finally got to the cage.  It was almost as big as she was, obviously hand-made, finely crafted, possibly with more primitive tools than the ones her father was teaching her to use.  She carefully unlatched the door and held it wide open.  The curious bird flew out over her head, and she looked at the cage where it had been, and the floor was swirling and swirling and then suddenly she couldn’t draw back and she was falling.

            It was the song that guided her out of the fall.  She came to to the singing, and the bony hands on her shoulders. “Stop wriggling, little one,” he said, sweetly.  “Mistress, it’s not grown yet, but do you fancy a younger one?”

            “Vestigere,” came a voice she couldn’t describe, even though she was hearing it.  A tall lady took her hand and led her over to an old oak, much like hers, only bigger and taller and darker and heavier and greener and…she ran out of ands in her head.  She didn’t say anything aloud.  The Lady was an incredible sweetness.  “My oak is dying, little girl.  It’s bad that trees like this should die, isn’t it?”

            She nodded, once, slightly.

            “What’s your name?”

            She didn’t say her name, because this was a Stranger.  She’d never been certain what a Stranger was before, the ones you shouldn’t talk to, but this was exactly it, she realised now.

            “Very right,” cooed the lady.  “And it’s not as if it matters.”

            Vestigere made a noise in his throat.  The lady didn’t even look, but he stopped.

            “Climb the tree,” the Lady said.  Maybe if she’d been older she could have recognised the elements in her voice that should have warned her, but Up was at least away, and a long way Away from what she saw.

            So she started climbing.  The Lady started singing, and it was sweeter than the bird had been, and she grew confused.  And then her hands and feet were sinking into the tree, and then she was inside, and her hands flowed out through the limbs and her feet sank into the ground, her toes becoming long and hard.  She could just, still, hear her heart, but it was a long way away.

            “I do hope this one lasts longer,” sighed the Empress of Choirs.

 

            Rea blinked.  The white stag had come again, the one she saw at the end of the chase, with several more people following him.  Her leaves murmured and at her feet grew choice grass, and nuts fell from her branches.  The stag grazed, joined by another one who sometimes came by, and they vanished into the forest together.  One young man gazed at the Empress as She approached and an apple fell from his hand to the grass.

            She blinked.  The stag had come and gone again and now there was a tree where the apple had fallen, and a beautiful young woman was tending to it, lovingly, like she remembered someone doing…that she remembered…didn’t she?  Oh, there was the stag.

            She blinked.  The singing started.  Vestigere walked with the young woman through her orchard, and Rea sent all the growth she could around her, to make it green and to make the beautiful woman more beautiful and Vestigere sing more sweetly.  And apples grew and fed those who wandered into the forest, following her sign, into the heart, to find the heart.  She knew where hers was.  It was here, ka-thump-shhh, and the singing went on.

            She blinked.  The singing had stopped, and the grass grew high in the orchard.  No feet had trodden here, though the stag still came, and she fed him.  When next she blinked, the young men and woman who chased were afraid of the orchard, saying it was haunted, where the moss grew like shrouds.  Unheimlich.  The word rose unbidden to one of their lips. 

            She blinked.  Both stags were here now, older, more adult, and a doe, whom she had seen with what she thought of as her stag more than once.  The other stag tried to get the doe to leave with him, but her stag refused to let it, and in so very little time they were fighting, antlers raking each other’s flesh.  She couldn’t help but watch.  They were right at her feet.

            At one point the other stag looked nearly beaten, and the other one backed off to give him time to surrender.  The other stag turned on the doe and his tines sank into her chest, and she sank to the ground as her eyes turned cold.  She thought the Empress would be displeased.  This was Her place, and not a place for duels or deaths She did not order.  The stags were in a frenzy now, blood flowing freely, darting around her trunk, trying for advantage.  Maybe if she stopped it, the Empress would spare a word for her.

            She reached down her lower branches and snapped the vees in the branches around the tines of both stags, immobilising them mid-leap, one on either side of her bole.  They screamed in rage, but they were both spent, and the likelihood that they could break her embrace even if they weren’t was slim.

            Time passed.  The doe’s body grew cold.  She held the stags, who shuddered and drooped from their wounds. 

            A small child walked up then, and examined the scene through his magnifying glass.  He laughed.  He was one of Them.  He said something softly to the stags, but his laugh reminded her of the Empress, so she didn’t listen.  When his hand went to the imprisoning branches she released them.  She heard what the Child said then.  He said, “Run.”  They did.  He picked up the doe and threw it over his shoulder and walked into the distance, laughing.

            The stag, another stag, came again and again, and the people walked into the forest and never walked out.

            She blinked.  It was colder now.  Her fingers turned back on themselves except for the one that pointed outwards.  Gnarls like faces grew in her bark, issuing twisted screams.  The orchard was fully overgrown, the moss hanging from the pointed, sharp, ill arms joining with the grasses in a great tangle of brown and olive.  She’d lost count of how many faces she’d seen walking further into Inapercu.  She’d lost track of when she last saw the Empress, who still came to select some of the younger captives, or some of the older men.  When She came, She used the branch that swooped to the ground as Her throne, and held court.  Sometimes dozens of the Gentry came, and then, laughing, they would process into Inapercu.  But they never had a word for Rea.

            What woke her at last was a great explosion of light and the smell of pain and fire.  The great oak’s trunk cracked in two.  Rea was alight, her bark charring as she shivered in the night air.  She pulled at her limbs.  They were longer, yet not as long as she remembered.  Her body was thicker set.  She stumbled and fell repeatedly, as the great tree burned, tangling a sprig of appleblossom in her hair.  She just knew that now, now, was the chance to get Away, and go where people could see and touch her.

            She fled to where the stag came from, and found thorns, endless thorns, scratching at her charring bark till the bloodflow was almost a relief.  The blossom in her hair ripened to fruit as she ran, blindly, Away, Away from the Strangers, hours and hours away, but never getting anywhere.

            A beautiful young woman was harvesting fruit in the Hedge.  Evie saw an older woman stumbling, an apple in her hair coming to ripeness—a smell she remembered—and then dropping off and rotting.  The woman gazed at her, obviously trying to make her weakened and clumsy body obey her and run.  The thorns had scored her charred flesh in semicircles, like bites from thousands of mouths.

            “I remember you,” said Evie, gently.  “I think you should come with me.”  In time Evie found Rea was the oak, and not the apple, but the result would have been the same.

            The one thing Rea found afterwards was a picture of a young man in uniform in her pocket.  She fixed it up and framed it, and it’s all she remembers, though she remembers nothing.