The Hanged Man: Part 7: Beltane (Entire)

In which you can read without interruption ...

Jennifer Rose

May 21, 2023

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PART 7 BELTANE

May 1; fire festival; midway point between Ostara and summer solstice. Sexual energy and power.

The Card: The Lovers

Relationship, choice and sacrifice

CHAPTER 21

MARIA

In the beginning, the shape of his hands woke her body into desire, the shape and soft pale skin against the colors of her loom. She imagined his hands and her cloth together wove a life of passion and creativity, the kind of life she’d always wanted. The promise of that life ripened her flesh. It wasn’t a temporary arousal, a tidal wave cresting and ebbing, but a slow, moist budding. Skin and hair unfurled, releasing scent. The world caressed her senses, and she received each caress.

Now both beginning and end had withered. She no longer received. She walked through life like a cold ember. Her senses were sterile and the memory of the shape of his hands was bitter. She felt barren in a gravid world.

She wore a dark hooded cloak to shield herself from strange eyes, and all eyes were strange. She had asked Persephone for a body, a cloak to cover it, and leave to go back into the Green World and search for her murdered children.

“So it shall be,” said Persephone. “Maria, you must always be tied to the scent and sound of water. Search where you will along the waterways of the world. You’ll find what you seek near water.”

Since early spring Maria had searched for a clue or rumor of her children. Over and over, hope swelled and died. They’d vanished. As weeks passed, a slow-growing dread stunted her hope. If they lived, someone else cared for them. Would they know her? Would they remember? Would they fear her, and run away from her? Yet still she searched, relentlessly driven. When day softened into dusk, she released her grief and despair, wailing and keening along waterway, spring and well. Others heard, and the story of The Woman Who Weeps crept along at her heels like a gaunt dog with suffering eyes.

Now she walked through the burgeoning fragrant morning, following a river winding through field and copse. The night before she’d woken, wrapped in her rough blanket, to the sound of piping. It blended with the night song of frog and flowing water. It made color, that piping, and texture against the soft darkness, but she didn’t try to discern them. Such inspiration was not for her now. She turned over and drifted back to sleep

Grass grew high and the river chuckled over a shallow rocky bed. She came upon the two girls eating and resting in dappled shade too suddenly to turn aside.

She didn’t intend to pause, but a fierce hunger for companionship leapt in her when she found them there. They’d been laughing together and the laughter lingered on their faces. She saw curly, disordered black hair and the bare brown shape of an arm. The one called Mary leaned forward, offering dried meat and bread. Her hazel eyes showed friendly interest.

“Rosie, is there still some water? And that last cheese?”

The black-haired girl passed Maria water, took a knife from a sheath at her belt and cut a round cheese into pieces. She wore a linen tunic embroidered with trees and forest creatures. Maria longed to examine it more closely.

Maria ate and drank without enjoyment. Dread took taste from the food. They would ask, out of friendly interest, who she was and where she went. She’d made up her mind in Hades she wouldn’t hide the truth. She avoided others as best she could, but when avoidance failed, she was honest.

They proved easy company. Mary lay back on her elbows, her thick corn-colored braid draped over her shoulder and the swell of her breast. Her feet were bare. She and Rose Red talked of friends left behind. Maria understood there had been some sort of gathering or celebration. When it was over, someone called Artemis directed the girls to journey together to a holy well in the forest. At the well they would part.

So much Maria gathered. The girls didn’t question her. Their conversation provided all the information Maria might want while leaving her own business private.

Perversely, she found she wanted to share with them then, as thanks and in reciprocity. Their generous vitality fed her. Once she had been like them, before the shape of Juan’s hands came into her life.

In a few terse sentences, she told her tale.

Tears gleamed on Mary’s cheek. Rose Red’s face was expressionless, her gaze fixed on the ground.

“Maria,” said Mary, “will you take off your hood?”

The dappled shade was kind. Maria wore her sleek black hair smoothly coiled into a heavy twist at the back of her head. Hazel eyes looked into brown the color of dark chocolate.

“You’re beautiful,” said Mary.

Maria clenched her jaw.

“I murdered my children,” she said, pausing after each word for emphasis.

“I’ve lately learned something important,” said Mary. “Life and death are two sides of the same thing. We must come to terms with both to live well.”

Maria heard the words but didn’t understand. She spoke the thought lying like a stone in her breast. “How could I be such a whore?” No words satisfied her self-loathing. Her clawed hand came up to her face, meaning to peel away skin with nails until the sticky blood released her pain.

Rose Red clasped her wrist in a strong grip. “No.” She returned Maria’s hand to her lap. “You wanted to be loved.”

This simple, matter of fact statement swept away the cold defense of self-hatred. Maria clenched her hands together and let tears come. It was a relief.

When she quieted, Mary passed her a wet cloth and she wiped her face and blew her nose. She felt tired. She wanted to stretch out in the grass under this tree and sleep.

“I did want to be loved. I loved him as hard as I could, but in the end, I knew he didn’t love me. Not then and maybe not ever. It all felt like a lie. I knew he would take away my sons. I didn’t want to live without them — or without him. He was my life and my hope. I gave him everything I was and he threw me away.”

“Everyone wants to be loved,” said Mary. “It’s not wrong.”

“It’s wrong to keep trying when there is no love,” said Maria. “It’s wrong to kill for the sake of love.”

“What were you before him — before your sons?” asked Rose Red.

“I’m a weaver,” said Maria. She lifted her chin and looked the girl in the eye. “I was a weaver.” She dropped her gaze to the ground.

Rose Red packed up her bundle. Mary rose, brushing off her clothes. “Come with us,” she invited. “We’re going to the Well of Artemis. We follow the river now the rest of the way. Travel with us.”

Maria hesitated, glanced at Rose Red, who gave her a smile and held out her hand. “Please.”

***

Trees grew around the well. Maria couldn’t identify them. They were slim with white bark and their leaves quivered in the warm air. The well was actually a spring bubbling up out of the ground. A low stone wall surrounded it. Many of the stones had come loose and lay about. Mossy silence held the gentle gurgle of water. Maria felt alien in the dim green light. Her presence made a dark stain in the fabric of this place. She stopped under the trees a few yards from the well and let the others go forward alone. The ever-present hope her children might be lingering here couldn’t overcome her reluctance to approach.

Rose Red and Mary knelt and cupped their hands, drinking. They explored the old stone wall and found offerings left for Artemis. Rose Red discovered a rack of antlers lying on the mossy ground, decorated with a length of bone beads, an old wreath woven of willow twigs and the skeletons of unidentifiable flowers, and a holey stone. They left this mute evidence of prayer and petition where it lay.

Maria watched, unwilling to join them. She pulled her hood over her head. Movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention and a huge white stag materialized between trees. For long moments, she wasn’t sure it really stood there. The whole place felt dreamlike, the great stag just another part of the dream. Its hide cast gentle silver-white light, like starlight. The stag’s antlers were immense, an intricate knot work of bone. It moved regally, balancing the great weight on its head. It met her wonderstruck gaze with large, dark eyes.

It stopped in front of her and regarded her. She reached out a slow hand, palm up. She wanted to touch it, but hesitated. The stag dipped its head and laid its muzzle in the palm of her hand. She felt the “whuff” of its breath and then the flick of its tongue. An indescribable feeling of hideous, painful joy tore through her. She wanted to weep, to vomit, to scream with madness. She broke into cold sweat and at the same time recognized with shame the deepest arousal she’d ever felt. She wanted a man! She wanted to be taken, to surrender. She wanted to be used, to be crushed and nipped and bruised, to feel flesh beneath her fingernails. She wanted! She wanted! She’d never felt such lust for Juan. For him she’d had a despairing, abject love, a twisted, weak emotion compared to this riot of desire.

She stood suspended between a hot clamor of feeling, dim green light and gurgle of water, her hand cupping the White Stag’s muzzle.

“Maria!”

Maria started. Rose Red called her. Was it possible the children…? She turned her head toward the call, opened her mouth to respond, and the White Stag vanished.

Her voice died in her throat. She closed her outstretched hand and brought it, clenched, to her breast. Gone! Had she imagined it, then?

“Come and see! It’s a beautiful place!” Mary called.

Maria found she could. She wanted to. She no longer felt her presence defiled the well. That kingly creature had touched her, scented her, seen her. It hadn’t driven her away.

But her children weren’t there.

***

The three women camped by the well that night. They found an old fire ring and built a fire. The deep silence of the place didn’t diminish with daylight. They sat around the fire, feeding it with bits of wood and bark, each thinking her own thoughts.

Maria thought of the White Stag. The wonder of being alive still filled her. When had she last felt her own existence so vividly? Before Juan. Before she gave up her life for a look, a kiss, a touch from his narrow hand. She closed her fingers around the palm the stag’s muzzle had touched. She’d been seen and accepted. She was allowed. She’d been awakened.

Tomorrow she would leave the sweet companionship of the other women. Clearly, Mary traveled toward some kind of meeting. Rose Red stated no intention. Maria would go to the nearest water and continue her search. Would she find her sons at the next place, or, if not, what else might she find?

“I count four deaths,” said Mary, as though continuing a conversation.

“Murders,” said Maria automatically, determined to spare herself nothing.

“Murders,” agreed Mary, “if you like. I count four.”

“Four?”

“Yes. Your sons may be gone. You may never find them, living or dead. But the other two you can save.”

“Myself.”

“You said before you gave him everything and he threw you away.”

“I threw myself away,” said Maria.

“You died. Now you’ve come back. You’re alive again.”

“I don’t deserve life!”

“Then there are three murders,” said Rose Red calmly. “Three lost, along with all they might have given. And the fourth?” She arched a slim black eyebrow at Mary.

“You said you were a weaver,” said Mary to Maria. “You threw your weaving into the river, too.”

“I’m a weaver,” said Maria, remembering saying the same words to Eurydice in the Underworld. “I’m a weaver.”

“I’m a Seed Bearer,” said Mary. “It’s my gift, my thank you, my love letter to life. It’s what I can do. It’s what I’m for.”

“I’m handmaiden to Artemis,” said Rose Red. “I’m protector of the forest and those who live there.” She smiled sadly. “I know more about what I’m not than what I am.”

“That’s just as important,” said Mary.

“There are many weavers,” said Maria.

“But none are you,” said Mary.

“Where’s your power?” Rose Red asked aloud, though she asked herself.

“Our greatest power is within the circle of ourselves, isn’t it?” asked Mary. “Others come and go around us. We can’t make them love us or want us. But we can choose to love and want ourselves. We can learn to notice if others feed our power or diminish it.”

“Do the people in our lives help us be who we are or take away from who we are?” asked Rose Red.

“That’s it,” said Mary. “That’s what I mean.”

Long after Mary and Rose Red wrapped themselves in blankets and went to sleep, Maria sat by the fire, watching the ebb and flow of color as flame consumed wood. When the flute started playing, she imagined a thin thread of vivid green against red and orange on a background of charcoal grey. She took the picture with her down into sleep.

***

They stood together in muted morning light. Mary held a handful of violet seeds over the spring, brought them to her mouth and breathed on them, held them out again. “Bless these seeds,” she said simply. She tucked them between moss-covered rocks, scattered a few among the prongs of the antlers lying on the ground, shook some between the tree trunks. “Grow,” she whispered to them. “Live.”

Rose Red cupped a green frog she’d found while washing her face in the bubbling water. “Be blessed,” she said to it as she opened her hands. “Create many children and grandchildren. Watch over this place.” The frog hopped with a splash into the stream and disappeared.

Maria thought, I’ve nothing to give, but the thought hardly took shape before she imagined a blanket of warm charcoal grey wool woven with a pattern of red and orange and a single thread of vivid green. If I ever weave again, she promised the well silently, I’ll weave this place.

MIRMIR

“She did weave it,” said the Hanged Man. I saw it at Rowan Tree. Her work always contained something of the desert in it, but that green wasn’t a desert color.” He smiled, remembering. “This is where Mary and I finally come together, on Beltane, the Day of Seeds. Tell me our story, Mirmir.”

Mirmir dipped his head in what looked like acquiescence, but his golden eyes gleamed with humor. “Beltane welcomess many loverss.”

“No one ever loved as we did,” said the Hanged Man.

Mirmir blinked lazily at him and continued. “Beltane, Day of Sseedss, findss Mary, Sseed-Bearer, walking across a field toward conssummation.”

“It finds the murderess, Maria, following the scent of water.”

“On yet another path the dwarve, Rumpelstiltskin, moves between one thing and the next. Love’s grimmest burden bows his shoulders — that of letting go. As he strides along in the dim dawn, he thinks of the young women he’s released. One by one, he dwells on their dear faces. He thinks of what he’s seen in Baba Yaga’s cauldron, mentally shies away, resolutely looks again. The difficulty, he thinks to himself, is not only in recognizing the right action to take. The difficulty is having the courage to take it. He turns for comfort to the feel of the earth beneath his boots, the touch of sun, the smell of the morning forest.”

“In the wood near the holy well a fox trots among trees in tender dawn light. Its long muzzle twitches. It stops. It lowers its head to a patch of damp rotted leaves near a decaying fallen trunk and sniffs, then draws its lips back in a grimace and licks its muzzle. It draws scent into its nose, the back of its throat, onto its tongue. For nearly a minute it absorbs the scent, then lifts a leg briefly and marks the place. Light strengthens.”

“The fox moves on, flowing now on silent feet, slipping through light undergrowth. Trees vibrate with birdsong. The fox approaches a fire ring. The ashes are still warm. The scent of burned wood has beckoned him for more than a mile. Nose to ground, he explores intently. Three have been here. Three gathered wood. Three lay down to sleep. The scent the fox follows is one of the three. He finds it around the bubbling spring; brushed against tree trunks; on stacked firewood; on a flat rock, convenient for sitting.”

“She was here. Her scent is strong and fresh. She was here. The fox raises his gaze from the forest floor. He stands in a shaft of light that glows in his red coat. His thick brush of a tail stands straight out from his body. Ears pricked, alert and graceful, he opens every sense to his surroundings.”

ROSE RED

Rose Red watched from the top of a tree. Her heart hammered. She breathed as shallowly as she could, afraid even to blink her eyes. Afraid to be seen? Afraid to frighten him away? Afraid. She remembered the feel of the fox’s tongue on her lips the night of initiation as he leaned forward out of Death’s rib cage and licked blood from her mouth. She shuddered and the fine hairs on her arms and legs stood up. Afraid? Or unbearably excited?

She’d seen a fox the night she awoke the trees. She remembered his tail brushing against her skin like soft fire. Again, a shudder rippled through her, spreading warmth in its wake.

She didn’t take her eyes off the fox. For a long moment, he stood perfectly still. Then he moved to a nearby tree, lifted his leg briefly, and backed up against the trunk, tail brushing back and forth. He stepped into dappled shadow and vanished.

Rose Red had learned patience in the woods. She stayed still and quiet for several more minutes. The fox didn’t return. Birds sang in tree tops around her, unconcerned. She took a long, deep breath and let it out. He was gone.

The urine smelled musky. When she put her nose to the tree, she thought of violets but then the impression faded and only the heavy wild smell of musk remained in her nostrils. She licked her lips. The scent stirred her in some deep, shadowed way.

She spent the rest of the day slipping through the trees. She’d decided to stay here until she knew what to do next. Artemis bade her come and she’d come. Now she’d wait for further direction. She felt perfectly at home alone in the woods.

She and Mary had talked a great deal about the night of initiation, but much of what Rose Red had learned and felt couldn’t be shared. She went over and over in her mind the dance, the fox, and the process she and Kunik had shared of making peace with their families. Now Maria had given her a glimpse of the path of self-hatred and where it led. Rose Red admitted her own harshness with herself, but it still seemed to her she deserved it

That night, Rose Red opened her eyes and found the long muzzle, stiff whiskers and pricked ears of the fox over her. The blanket had been drawn back and she lay in her tunic, uncovered in the cool night air.

“It’s you?” she asked in a low voice.

The fox regarded her. She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, but she felt the weight of his look. They breathed together. She lay beneath him as though captive, though he didn’t touch her. She felt a powerful longing for…something. She hardly knew what. She wanted to touch him, to be touched by him. Tears slid out of her eyes.

The fox trotted over to the spring and lapped water. Rose Red imagined the cold freshness of it, the slightly woody taste. She felt bereft. When she’d awakened and found the fox there, for a moment everything seemed possible. Then the feeling faded and she called herself a fool to make something out of a curious fox passing by. Her tears wet the blanket that cushioned her cheek from the ground. She lay still.

Movement. A presence leaned over her. Breath stirred against her upturned cheek. She reached out. Already she could feel the red coat, the brush of the tail… She touched flesh. Skin. She gasped and pulled her hand back, began to sit up.

“Hush. It’s me. Do you ask me to go?”

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“You know who I am,” he said. “I watched you wake the trees. I watched you face your past in the mirror. I’ve watched you for a long time. Do you ask me to go?”

She hesitated. “No.”

“I won’t touch you. I only want to smell you.”

Heat blossomed low in her belly.

“To smell me?” she whispered.

“And for you to smell me,” he replied.

She fell back, stunned. To smell…and to be smelled. The words curled hotly inside her. Feeling roared. When she thought again, she wondered if she would she smell bad to him. She’d been on the road for weeks. She thought of her mother’s table, littered with perfumes and creams, hair oil, cosmetics. She remembered the heavy silken fall of her mother’s black hair, her smooth neck, her creamy skin. For the first time, she wished her body to please, wished for artifice and decoration. And here she was with finger-combed hair, sweat of miles on her skin, wearing the linen tunic she always wore, embroidered with Jenny and Vasilisa’s love.

“You might not like the way I smell,” he said. She felt relieved. He had his own fears, then. He crouched over her, faceless in the dark. He didn’t touch her.

“I can’t see you.”

“Night is for scent and touch and hearing.”

She thought, whatever happens, no one will see. No one will know.

She thought he wasn’t wearing anything. She could lift her hand and find out, but if he didn’t touch her, she wouldn’t touch him. There was something poised and wary about him, as though it would take little to send him back into the night forest. Recognizing his tension revealed her own to her. She took a deep breath and consciously relaxed. He brought his face down to hers and she realized he sought her exhaled breath. What did he smell on her exhalation? Once he knew her scent would he be able to find her again in the dark? Would he know her from all others? For some reason, the idea excited her powerfully.

“I want to feel your breath, too,” she whispered.

He moved close. He licked his lips and opened his mouth slightly. She felt him inhale and closed her eyes as he exhaled. His breath smelled of spring water, green forest and a hint of roots nourished by rotting life. It smelled of musk and urine and blood. It was unmistakably, fiercely male. It woke a hidden, sleeping part of Rose Red that stayed awake the rest of her life. A powerful mixture of curiosity and desire swept her. Fear vanished. She lay beneath him.

“Again,” she said.

She breathed with him and then, playfully, breathed opposite, so his inhale became her exhale. The intimacy of it felt explosive. Her body responded with a gush of liquid she knew he could smell, the knowing making her more excited still. Her armpits and groin dampened and she felt sweat spring out at her hairline. She flexed the muscles in her empty vagina and felt wet heat.

Her clothes became an unbearable limitation. She must be free of them.

“I want to take off my clothes,” she muttered.

He withdrew, sitting back on his haunches. She felt the loss of his presence.

“Don’t go! I don’t want you to go!” Impatient and clumsy, she pulled the tunic off and then wriggled out of her other clothing. She smoothed out the blanket under her, moved to an edge. “Will you lie down with me? Please?”

He laid himself down with cautious grace. She bent over him and felt him tense.

“I won’t touch you,” she said. “I won’t touch you, either. But I want to smell you. I want to know you. Please let me?”

For answer, he relaxed and raised his arms above his head, letting his hands fall open on the ground and exposing his armpits.

To smell but not to touch. The power of that delicate challenge! The velvety self-restraint of it! Knowing if she extended her tongue she would taste his sweat, and wanting it more than she’d ever wanted anything before in her life! And it wasn’t just her. He wanted, too. She could feel it, read it in the tension of his body. She could smell it. He too, was slicked with sweat and he radiated heat. She descended into a kind of blind dream, without thought, without time. Only his body and its scent existed.

“Stop.” His voice woke her. She eased back on her heels and felt the ache in her back and chill air on her skin.

“It’s my turn,” he said. She thought she heard a smile in his words. She lay down, somewhat stiffly, and he threw a blanket over her legs.

“Will you know me again?” he whispered.

“Anywhere,” she said.

She thought no more about smelling bad. This experience of knowing, of discovering the smell of a life couldn’t be defined as good or bad. How amazing, that her mother had never grasped that. How strange that scrubbing away the body’s scent, or masking it, had become attractive. We’re lost, she thought, so lost! How did we get so lost?

“Rose.”

It was the first time he’d called her by name.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“Open for me.”

“Oh…” Again, she clenched against the emptiness between her legs. She put her hands over her head. Her breasts flattened and her taut nipples ached but she knew he could see none of this. She stretched, feeling the pull of muscles along her sides. She bent a knee and rested her foot against the inside of her other leg, the movement opening her congested labia and releasing, she knew, a thick wave of scent. He bent over her armpit

She could see the starry sky through a window framed by treetops. She willed this one night to stretch out into many. She felt his breath on her body. She imagined her scent in his nostrils. She moved with controlled sensuality, opening and offering her hidden places as he moved over her. She laced her fingers together and her breath came short and shallow. Her jaw quivered with tension.

His breath stroked her belly. In blind desire, she reached down and flung the blanket off. He paused, not in doubt, she thought, but in a kind of control.

She heard the sound of her own breathing.

“Please,” she said at last. “Please don’t stop.”

He bent over her damp pubic hair and drew in a deep breath. She felt moisture run down between her legs, adding to the damp patch beneath her. He moved over her hip and down her leg.

The blind exploration continued. The hair on her thighs prickled, reaching up to touch the one who scented. She turned on her hip and exposed the soft crease behind her knee. She extended her toes and arched her foot helplessly. It seemed to her she felt the scent of her body being drawn out of her skin in a fine spray of tiny droplets. She felt his inhale as well as his warm exhale, and every cell of her skin gasped for more. Every nerve ending waited helplessly for touch. If he touches me now, thought Rose Red, I’ll scream with the pleasure of it.

Smell but not touch.

He sat up, a dark shape beside her legs.

Rose Red felt helpless with desire. She took a deep breath and relaxed her hands, relaxed her shoulders, her thighs. She’d make him feel this — and more. She’d watch him strain and writhe. She’d feel his body beg, as hers had.

“Lie down.” When he did, she crouched at his feet. He lay on his back with his legs extended and his feet fell apart, relaxed. She smiled to herself.

She opened her mouth and let him feel her breath, let it stir in the damp hair under his arm and among the fine hairs of his body. She moved over the invisible landscape of skin and drank in his scent. He moved his head to left and right and let her smell along his jaw, his ear, his hairline and where the pulse beat in his neck. She swayed over him, going from side to side, moving around him. She moved down his body, mapping out unseen nipple, rib, concavity of belly, umbilicus, ridge of hip.

The soles of his feet smelled unexpectedly musky. The smell seized her with another wave of arousal. She remembered waking trees on the cold spring night of full moon, and it seemed a long time ago. She gathered energy from her breasts and sex; the desire to touch, to feel, to taste, from palms and fingers and tongue, and she imagined running her lips along his naked toes, exploring between them, pushing them apart with the tip of her tongue, the texture of the nails against her teeth. She breathed against them, breathed and imagined her breath warm on his wet flesh, breathed and pushed her desire out like green fire and ice, like sticky sap, like the slippery silver wetness of a live fish. She blew across the harmonica of his toes, blew promise of tongue and wet warmth, blew on the naked soles of his feet. She crouched low and felt her bare sex open in wet, slippery invitation. Knew he could smell it because she could smell it.

Smell but not touch.

When his legs trembled with tension, though not touched, no, not that, she moved up and he in his turn gave her the secret places behind his knees, grooved valleys between his muscles, hard bones underneath their thin layer of skin. She kept her eyes closed and saw none of it but captured every drop of his scent.

Now she smelled the roots of man, of fox, of life. The end place, the crossroads of texture, tissue, membrane and hair. The fecund garden where seed is born, stored and released. Rose drew in the scent of life and use and function, the unique chemical imprint of this unique body. She collected it on the back of her tongue and made it hers. She breathed and she blew a light, warm breath of greeting so hairs stirred, tissue rose up to meet her, fluid oozed, muscles tightened, sphincters clenched.

Smell but not touch.

The fox man growled low in his throat and Rose Red felt satisfied. Her own blood had cooled slightly, but she’d made him feel. She’d made him want.

She stretched out bedside him, careful not touch his skin. He radiated warmth and the skin on her arms and back was plucked into gooseflesh. She lay on her side, facing him, and his shadow flowed as he moved, flowed and diminished and something leapt lightly over her hip, brushing her with a thick tail, leaving behind an electric sensation like nettle rash. She gasped with surprise and felt the fox move up her backbone, the prick of stiff whiskers, the touch of a soft ear, the nudge of a damp nose. It moved to the nape of her neck and she felt the tightly restrained touch of teeth, not quite hard enough to hurt. She shuddered.

The fox walked the length of her body, rubbing along her back, buttocks and the backs of her legs. The thick coat felt like newly grown needles on a pine bough. She groaned and turned onto her back. Her nipples peaked into tight points, begging for touch. The fox stepped delicately between her legs and she spread them, exposing herself, opening to the cool air. The fox sniffed at her deeply, leapt to one side, trailing his tail across her belly. She arched her back to meet the caress. The fox sat like a dog looking at her displayed body. She cupped her breasts, feeling wanton and ashamed, but she couldn’t help it — she must feel his touch! The fox leaned over and gave a quick lick to a nipple.

“Oh,” she groaned, “Yes, yes, again!” and the fox slipped away. The warm weight of the man lay on her and she took his head between her hands and guided him, arching her back and tense in every muscle, and felt his mouth on her breast, his lips, his teeth, his tongue. She thought she would pass out with the exquisite feeling, yet it wasn’t enough. She guided him to the other nipple and then back to the first, beside herself with the sensation

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash

Beside herself. Suddenly, someone lay beside her like a cold ghost, listening to her arousal, watching her naked passion, knowing the shameful scent of her desire. Someone who resided inside her but wasn’t of her. Not the child self she’d seen on the night of initiation, for the child was innocent and judged, not judge. Surely not the lovely, serene old woman. Some other, some outsider, critical, harsh and punitive. She saw herself through that one’s condemning eyes and found herself beyond pleasure in dark chaos. She couldn’t find her breath. She couldn’t find a coherent thought or a place to cling to. She felt overwhelmed, dissolved, shattered by her own nakedness. She reached out blindly and found herself in his arms. Her face pressed against his chest and his heart beat in her ear. The smell of his sweat was already familiar and comforting. Her jaw trembled and she was gasping. Desire tied itself into a knot like an angry snake and took the shape of fear.

She felt deeply and terribly ashamed.

Her sense of exposure was annihilating. She had no place to hide. He knew her scent, the truth of her, more naked than skin, more naked than eyes could see. And she’d been beautiful and…real. She’d met passion with passion. She hadn’t been afraid.

Now she’d destroyed their shared passion. She’d failed this deep connection, this chance to be beautiful and loved, this chance to be strong. In the end she was too broken, not worthy. Artemis was wrong. They were all wrong.

She willed herself not to cry, to retain some vestige of pride. She controlled her breathing. She made herself relax. She regained control of her voice.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. You don’t need to stay. I’m quite all right now.”

She felt his energetic shying away, though his firm hold didn’t change.

“Do you ask me to go?”

She lay in his arms in a state of brutal self-control that turned her singing, supple, pleasure-filled body to stone.

“Yes,” she whispered.

His arms loosened. She felt a swift stir of movement, brush of fur against her bare side, and knew she lay alone.

When the sky was light and the morning chorus of birds finished, Rose Red clambered stiffly to her feet. She hadn’t slept. Her face felt hot and puffy and her eyes swollen. Her mouth was dry. She felt cold all the way to her center, though she’d lain wrapped in everything she possessed after the fox left. After I sent him away, she corrected herself sternly. Her jaw, neck and shoulders ached sullenly and the muscles in her belly and legs felt overstrained and sore.

She knelt by the spring and bathed her face. The cold water soothed her. She drank. She discovered she’d started her menses and made a couple of pads out of moss. She put her back against a tree trunk in a spot where she knew the sun would shine when it climbed higher and sat, wrapped in a blanket. She felt beyond sleep, beyond hunger, beyond the peaceful work of observing forest life. She leaned her head back and watched the light change as it filtered down through new leaves.

A long time later, someone approached. Rose Red drifted between sleeping and waking, soothed by the forest around her and the sun on her face. The approaching steps sounded steady and sure. She had no energy to feel afraid or curious or even shy. She sat and waited for what would come.

Rumpelstiltskin stepped into the clearing, his quick glance taking in the well, rumpled blankets and fire ring. His eyes fell on her as he swung his pack off his shoulders.

“Rosie!”

She looked at him speechlessly. His smile of greeting faded as he regarded her. She found concern and then compassion in his eyes. He laid a gentle callused hand briefly on her head and turned away, building up the fire.

While she watched, he put water on to boil and took food out of his pack. He didn’t look at her again but talked cheerfully and inconsequentially.

“I never dreamed of seeing you again like this. I received word that I’m needed and I’ve been traveling for several days. I remembered this well and the path takes me in the right direction.”

He shook out her blankets and draped them over low branches to dry and sweeten in the air.

“I thought I’d stop here and eat and rest awhile.” He glanced at her with a smile. “There’s no one I’d rather run into than you, Rosie.” His kindness threatened her control and tears rose in her throat.

“After initiation, I took Jenny to Minerva’s school in Griffin Town. I was sorry to leave her, but I know that’s the right place for her now, and I think she’s excited to be with such a teacher.”

The water boiled and he poured a hot drink and added a corner of honeycomb to the cup.

“Come, my dear, and drink this.” He spoke gently, but she heard the command in his voice.

She emerged from the blanket and struggled to her feet. feeling like an old woman. She stretched cautiously and shrugged her shoulders to ease their ache. Gooseflesh stippled her arms.

She came to the fire and let the heat hit the front of her legs and then the back. The warm cup comforted her hands. Drops of wax from the honeycomb floated on the surface and she skimmed them off with a leaf.

Rumpelstiltskin asked no questions. He produced strawberries, a loaf of bread, a round of goat cheese and dried meat. He passed her a bite at a time and she ate automatically. He poured her another hot drink.

“Did you see the fox, then?” he asked.

She froze.

He sighed.

“Do you remember the story of Pandora I told?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. It was the first word she’d uttered.

“Do you remember the dwarve who watched her in secret and then became her guide and teacher?”

“Jasper,” she said.

“That began the relationship between our people. Now and then a young woman who is without family or friends comes to our attention. There are no female dwarves and so we don’t produce children the way you do.”

“Vasilisa told me,” said Rose Red. “She said you watch over and protect female energy and fertility.”

“That’s right. We’re mothers and fathers, we dwarves, and teachers and guides. Not all of us. But some of us. I’ve watched over Jenny for many years, and her mother before her. But Jenny’s mother wasn’t the first. I’ve been thinking about the young women I’ve loved as I walked along today.”

“How many?” she asked.

“Many,” he said. “There was another between Jenny’s mother and Jenny. She was called Snow White.”

Rose Red looked at him with astonishment. “My mother?” she said in disbelief.

“Your mother.”

“I…you…”

He pulled her down to sit on a flat rock by the fire near the stack of firewood.

“Listen, and I’ll tell you…

“Your mother’s father was a king.”

Rose Red looked at him with wide eyes and he nodded.

“Her mother died when she was a young child. Her father, your grandfather, remarried. Your mother’s stepmother was a beautiful, fair-skinned fair-haired young woman, but her heart was small and mean. She was avaricious and ambitious, hungry for power.

Your mother was the most beautiful of all the girls I’ve guided. Her hair was like ebony, her skin white and her mouth red.

Your grandfather was too busy being a king to take much notice of the child, and her stepmother resented her from the first. Snow White was fed and clothed and wanted for no material comfort, but she was constantly criticized. Nothing she did was good enough. Nothing pleased.

This treatment would malform any child, but Snow White possessed an especially sensitive temperament. She felt everything deeply. Something as simple as a thunderstorm moved her. She lived so vividly she became overwhelmed at times. Her stepmother told her she was dramatic and wanted to draw attention to herself with her exaggerations, and by the time I met her she believed her sensitivity was a deformity. She learned to hide, to stay small and silent. She controlled herself brutally.

Her stepmother amputated her from what she was meant to be. Snow White thought of herself as ‘less than,’ and the truth was she was ‘more than,’ so much more than most others in general and her stepmother in particular. That, of course, was the problem. She was an intolerable threat.”

Rumpelstiltskin fed the fire with a few sticks. His face was bleak.

“Well,” he resumed, “I came into the picture when your mother was about twelve years old. By then it was becoming obvious the beautiful child would make an unusually beautiful woman. Her stepmother was, of course, aging too. She possessed a mirror in her bedroom she spent hours looking into while she tended her hair and skin. As Snow White bloomed, she felt herself beginning to fade and she became more and more obsessed with her looks and consumed with jealousy…

Mirror image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay

She made up her mind to kill Snow White.

I haven’t the heart to tell you of the evil machinations that followed. I watched over your mother and kept her safe and tried to undo some of the harm.

Your mother was so hungry for love. Her belief that some external person could fill the empty place where her own sense of power was torn away made her vulnerable. She didn’t understand power is something no other person can give or take away. She thought her beauty was the only value she possessed.”

Rumpelstiltskin sighed and passed his hand over his face.

“Having failed to kill her, Snow White’s stepmother married her off as soon as she could. Your father fell in love with her spectacular beauty and the alliance benefitted your grandfather, and thus his wife, so it was arranged. Some years later, her stepmother died and Queen Snow White inherited the mirror. It was an evil object. When I heard your mother possessed it, I grieved.

In the meantime, Jenny passed into my keeping. I left Snow White with a heavy heart. I’d done my best, but I feared for her. Later I heard she had a daughter and I hoped she’d found companionship and happiness in her marriage.

Then, one day while visiting my kinsmen in the forest, I met you, Rosie. I recognized you immediately. You were careful in what you said about your family, but it wasn’t hard to see how things were. If you hadn’t already caught Vasilisa’s eye and the attention of the dwarves, I’d have found a way to be with you myself, but by the time we met Artemis had already taken you under her protection and I knew you’d be all right.”

Rose Red sat in stunned silence. She felt immobilized by a tangle of pity and rage. “I asked her and asked her when I was young, but she wouldn’t ever talk about her family.”

“I’m not surprised. It wasn’t a happy subject for her.”

“In the end, I hated her.” She threw the words at him. “What happened to her — it was terrible. But…”

“She abused you, Rose. Not in the same way she was abused, but she abused you. I’m angry about that. I understand why she made the choices she did. Understanding is not excusing.”

“She was so unhappy. Always so unhappy. All I ever wanted was for her to be happy and healthy and I tried so hard to make it so.”

“There was never anything you could do to fix it. None of it was your fault. You became as much of a victim as she was.”

“The mirror!” She shuddered and hid her face in her hands.

“Yes. The mirror,” he said grimly. “I know.”

“I needed to leave.”

“You did. Have you ever considered that perhaps the greatest gift of love you ever gave her was leaving?”

She looked at him in astonishment.

“I abandoned her! And…and…I’m not sure I ever want to see her again.” She bit her lip and looked at the ground. “That’s terrible, isn’t it? Terrible and unnatural and hateful. But it’s true.”

“No, my dear. It’s not hateful. It’s wisdom. You don’t owe your mother your life. Even that wouldn’t fix her wounds. Perhaps something new will come into the place you stepped out of. Something that can truly help, some kind of healing. Who knows?”

She picked up a stick and drew a spiral in the dirt around the fire ring. She scuffed it out, and then tried to remember the intricate framework of the White Stag’s antlers. She drew a curve for the forehead and began to build the branching rack, moving back and forth to keep it symmetric.

“She — my mother — felt overwhelmed sometimes?”

Rumpelstiltskin busied himself packing away the food with much fumbling and rearranging.

“Oh, yes. It’s common, you know, for people who are extraordinarily special in that way. They live so deeply. They experience joy and sensual pleasure in the world I’ll never know. Of course, they suffer with equal passion. Such sensitivity is both blessing and burden. Unfortunately, highly sensitive people often feel like freaks and ‘less than,’ as your mother did. In fact, they may be rather isolated, but not because they’re ‘less than.’ Because they’re…”

“’More than,’” she said in a low voice.

“Exactly,” he said, carefully examining the edge of the knife he’d used to cut the food.

“Those few with the wisdom to understand, protect and love a highly sensitive person enjoy a connection of power and beauty beyond imagining. I envy them.”

He tightened the straps on his pack and swung it onto his back. She dropped the stick and stood. He looked up into her face.

“I sent him away,” she said.

“Well, call him back, you ninnyhammer,” he said gruffly.

She snorted with surprised laughter. Tears spilled down her cheeks, but her face relaxed. She stooped and put her arms around him. He hugged her fiercely, gave the black curls a rough caress, released her, and stumped away down the path.

CHAPTER 22

MIRMIR

“So that’s how it began for them,” murmured the Hanged Man. “I didn’t know it was so difficult for her in the beginning. It wasn’t like Mary and me.”

“No,” said Mirmir. “Mosst have not had sso much practisse turning the wheel as you and Mary.” He looked at the Hanged Man, hanging loose in his wrinkled skin, his hair a thin fluff.

“Are you finished teasing me?” inquired the Hanged Man with dignity, though he cocked a roguish eyebrow at the snake.

“Yess,” said Mirmir. “Lissten, now, and hear how it wass on Beltane, Day of Sseedss, when ssubmissive cup found dominant sseed. Hear of Mary, Seed Bearer, holder of death and life, the pivot around which the wheel spins…

MARY

Mary followed the flute. She remembered it waking her from a confused, uncertain time of shifting shapes and stories at Janus House. Mary, mother-friend (her own name had been Molly in those days) had counseled her to follow the flute.

She would have followed in any case. The sound was a silver hook embedded in the green and gold of her desire.

Cycle by cycle, day by day, step by step, breath by breath, she followed. The piper drew her on and up and out into ever widening power.

She carried the seeds against her body. The flute coaxed moist scent up to the surface of her skin and the seeds drank. It called each hair on her body by name. The flute milked blood into engorged tissue and aroused each nerve to shuddering sensitivity, and the seeds trembled. Her tongue remembered, her nostrils, the tips of her fingers, her lips. Empty, she hungered to be filled.

The Day of Seeds. Yr, the sun, looked down and waited. Rain, whose name is Hyash, waited for her turn. Full Noola glowed beneath horizon's covers and caressed herself in anticipation. It was the Day of Seeds.

Mary moved naked under Yr, and he fingered her breasts and combed her hair. Under Mary’s bare soles, Talcrys, the earth, wakened and trembled. Bags of seeds hung against her sex, cradled in the cleft of her buttocks, sheltered between her breasts. The seeds waited.

She unfolded herself to Yr. She lay against Talcrys, spread arms and legs wide and called life from beneath. She chanted. She prayed. She danced, there under Yr in the fields. She wept. She squatted and urinated. Her breasts ran with milk and it dripped, sticky, onto Talcrys. She reached between her legs and called to her menstrual blood, mixing it with urine, tears, breast milk and saliva. This mixture she smeared onto her skin, then rolled against Talcrys until caked with last season's life. Yr looked down. The wheel turned. A new cycle began. It was the Day of Seeds.

Mary reached into a bag between her breasts and brought out a handful of seeds. She breathed into her cupped hand and scattered them. Walking lightly across the fields, she sowed grass, vegetable, flower, fruit and tree. She whispered to them of life and love and death and released them. Her skin slicked with sweat. Damp hair curled at her temples and groin.

Mary planted the seeds.

When the last seed was scattered, a narrow river whispered a cool invitation near a pavilion. Flowers floated in a sun-warmed pool. Cool drinks and food waited. She freed herself from empty bags and pouches, setting them aside. Hyash surrounded her, making small sounds of delight, as she soaked her body.

Yr fell below the horizon. She ate and drank and combed out her hair. She lit lanterns as night darkened and incense sent up pale scented smoke.

She heard a thread of music, far away, then nearer, then far again. She smiled. The flute called Noola and she bloomed in answer, silver and full-bodied on the east horizon.

The flute played. It followed Mary’s path through the day. He was coming. Lugh, goat-foot, green and gold, horns and curly hair and hard flanks. As he came, he added his magic to hers, added his musk and desire, his strength and his breath to the seeds. He blessed them with his own sticky seed dripping down his thighs. He pressed it into gravid Talcrys with his hooves and the wild flute commanded life, whatever it brought, whatever it took.

Mary waited. Noola looked down. Lugh was coming. He was coming and now he played his flute for Mary. Her nipples peaked. She moistened and opened. He called to her, chalice, cup, empty vessel. It was the Day of Seeds and the Seed Bearer came once again to sow.

He stood before her, erect, a milky drop on the end of his penis. Moonlight gleamed on wet streaks along his thighs. He smelled of musk and loam, night trees and dark wells. She touched the cleft of his hard buttocks, the small of his back, the sculpture of his spine. She touched his nipples with her tongue. She knelt before him and licked the milky drop off his penis, watching as another blossomed. She tongued the streaks on his thighs, licking and tasting.

The music stopped. He lifted the gown away from her body. Noola looked down, shuddering with ecstasy.

"Lady," he breathed, "will you take the seed?"

For answer, she took him in her mouth. He tasted of hot salt and smelled of dominance. She fingered his anus in rhythm with her mouth. He groaned and gave up his seed.

She lay back and he knelt above her, engorged penis between her breasts. Milk dripped from her nipples and he thrust against them, the valley and hills of her breasts, holding her with his eyes. She rubbed the rounded tip of him against her pointed tips until fluids mingled and their flesh shuddered in demand. She arched her back to meet the pressure and milk let down in watery jets as he thrust and thrust and gave up his seed.

He knelt between her legs and with long slow licks cleansed the skin of her breasts and neck. His tongue followed the delicate line of her collarbone, lingered in the hollow of her throat. His breath wandered over her upper chest and along the outside of her breasts. He avoided her nipples until she cried out with the need to feel his mouth on them. He smiled. She reached up, feeling pointed horns beneath her hands, and pulled his head down to her. Delicate flick of tongue on her nipple made her gasp. He stopped. "Please," she whispered. He grazed her with his teeth. She writhed under him so his mouth brushed over the other nipple. Again, he flicked, light and insistent, until she felt mindless with sensation.

He moved his mouth down her body and let her feel his breath. She was wet with wanting. He put his fingers to his swollen penis and added his wetness to hers, rubbing, opening. She groaned, rolling her head from side to side. He leaned down, breathing her, smelling her. Her hips rose in invitation. He licked her from anus to clitoris. She flooded with moisture. He licked again. He paused. He licked. He breathed. She was wet, wet, aching and empty. He put a finger in her anus and two in her vagina and flicked her clitoris with the gentle tip of his tongue. His fingers moved, thrusting. He nibbled her engorged flesh, sucked. She cried out and while she climaxed, he thrust into her, opened her deeply and then withdrew slightly. She writhed, orgasm going on and on with the feel of him. She clenched against him. He thrust and the hot hardness of him swelled impossibly, swelled and heated, swelled until his next thrust opened the way and he cried out and gave up his seed to her dark cup in milky spurts.

They lay in exhausted satiety. He reached for a blanket and threw it over them. They slept.

The candles burned down. Incense left its scented ghost and soft gray ash. Noola floated across the sky and sank. Sometime in the night Hyash fell, sweet and cool, blessing the new planted seeds.

RADULF

Radulf was watching the first stars prick into light when he heard it. It had been a long day. His destination was a river, not far ahead now. He’d stop for the night when he reached it. He heard a low, desolate sobbing, nearly a keening. No animal ever made a sound like that. The anguish of it made him feel panicked. He stood still, listening, feeling his pulse beat rapidly in his throat. Was it a death cry? No, he decided, it was a sound of unutterable grief. It was not the bright, easy scream of physical pain but something much, much worse, much deeper, an endless spiritual suffering without hope of healing or respite. He felt appalled by it and part of him wanted to turn away, avoid it, pretend he hadn’t heard.

Instead, he moved forward. He couldn’t ignore such suffering.

He heard the sound of the river before he came out of the trees and saw it. The sobbing continued but the silver sound of water cleansed some horror out of it. The river’s breath cooled the evening.

A figure in a hooded cloak paced alongside the river. Radulf’s gaze swept up and down, but he found no camp, no signs of a disturbance and no one else. Just this lone woman, and he knew it must be a woman because no man could make such a dreadful sound.

He must make her stop. He dropped his bundle, strode toward her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

“You must stop,” he said with firmness.

She turned to look at him. Her face was invisible under the hood and he reached forward, impatient, and twitched it off. Her sleek dark hair was knotted up behind her head. He couldn’t make out her features. He didn’t think she was old, certainly no older than he was. She didn’t seem afraid or surprised or curious. She reminded him of a suffering animal. She’d ceased wailing when he spoke, but her breathing sobbed. Her soundless grief was nearly as bad as her keening.

He tightened his grip on her shoulder and gave her a shake. “I’m Radulf. I won’t hurt you. Are you alone? Do you need help?”

She shook her head but didn’t speak.

Radulf was hungry and worn out. He wanted a fire, a meal and his bedroll. He didn’t want to play games with a strange and evidently heartbroken woman, but he couldn’t leave her to her own devices. She was in no state to take care of herself.

“What’s your name?”

“Maria.”

“Maria, do you mean no, you aren’t alone or no, you don’t need help?”

“I don’t need help.”

He sighed.

“Well, I do. I’ve been afoot all day and I’m tired. It’s time to camp for the night. I want you,” he slid his hand down her arm, turned her away from the water and headed to a spot he’d marked as a good camping place, “to come with me. We need firewood, and some water. I have food.”

She didn’t resist him.

Silently, she gathered firewood while he built a ring of stones. He unpacked a pot and she knelt at the river and filled it. He watched her splash water on her face and wipe it with the edge of her cloak.

He was relieved to see she possessed her own bundle. She pulled it out of a clump of grass, unrolled a blanket and took out some food.

“Maria.”

She looked at him. Her face in the firelight was still and rather beautiful. Not pretty but with quiet strength and strong bones.

“You don’t need to stay with me. You’re welcome but you’re not a prisoner. I don’t like for you to be alone with such grief, is all.”

“I’ll stay,” she said.

She remained silent while they ate. After the meal, she wiped out the pots with a handful of grass, used a spoon to scoop ashes into them and took them to the river. She took his knife from him and cleaned that, too. The fire burned in a good bed of coals. He added wood and stretched out on his back, his head on his pack.

“Will you tell me about it?” She was so self-contained he didn’t think she would. In truth, he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear. It would be pleasant to lie watching the fire, belly full, and think about where he’d been and wonder where the hell he was going to end up. But he knew the relief to be found in sharing one’s story, and she was alone.

Without preamble, she told him of Juan and her sons, the dark time in Hades, and another life of searching, always within the scent of water. She didn’t look at him as she spoke, but into the fire.

“I don’t honestly expect to find them, but I always hope somewhere deep down. This is a small, joyful river, far away from the wide, lazy sun-baked one where they…where I…”

“Of course,” he said. “Of course, you would always hope.”

“It was getting dark,” she said, “and the first stars coming out. The water smelled so fresh and cool … They aren’t here. They aren’t here, my sons, not here, not anywhere. There isn’t water enough in all the worlds to wash away the stain of what I’ve done. I can never make it right. There’s no forgiveness.”

The old wound opened in Radulf as though it had never healed, and he saw in memory Marella’s face, her sea-colored eyes, her look of love for him, her funny smile with one corner of her mouth turned up and one turned down, as though in some hidden pain. He felt sick and ashamed.

Her gaze rested on him now.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked.

He felt bewildered for a moment and then realized she thought he was so disgusted that he’d send her away.

“No. I want you to listen,” he said.

When he’d told the tale of Marella, his heart felt lighter and it was his turn to wonder if she would turn away.

“How long?” she asked.

“Oh, twenty years,” he said. “For twenty years I’ve roamed here and there, trying to forget, or understand, or find forgiveness. Looking for some kind of peace. I didn’t know the whole story until a few weeks ago, but even without that I can’t forgive myself for leaving my family, my wife and my responsibilities. Now I understand I murdered Marella as surely as if I drove a knife into her. Thoughtless, blind, stupid…” But even as he castigated himself, he remembered the wolf with its pitiful courage, gnawing off a leg to escape a trap.

“Radulf.” Her voice sounded sharp. “You were young. You didn’t know. You couldn’t know.”

He returned her gaze. “You, too.”

She dropped her eyes and slumped.

“I should have…”

“So should I.”

“But…”

“No. If I’m absolved in some measure, you are too.”

They remained quiet for a time.

“How would it be,” he asked, “if you found forgiveness? Then what?”

“No,” she said. “There can be no forgiveness.”

“You’re sure about that.”

“Yes.”

“You can’t choose for other people, Maria. What if I forgive you?”

“I don’t forgive myself.”

“Do you ever intend to forgive yourself?”

“No.”

“You refuse to forgive yourself.”

“Yes.” But he thought she sounded less sure.

“If you forgave yourself, you might be able to stop searching, to make a home and begin weaving again.”

“I don’t deserve life. I’ve taken it away from my sons.”

“It’s too late. You are alive again. Will you destroy yourself a second time? How does that help?”

She turned on him like a cornered cat. “What about you, Radulf? If you forgive yourself you can do something with your life, stop feeling sorry for yourself and running away from youthful mistakes, start a family, be a real man!”

He laughed. He held up his hands, palms towards her. “Peace, peace! Don’t hurt me!”

“It’s not funny,” she spat.

“No.” He sobered. “It’s not funny. I’m not mocking you, Maria. You’ve made me see something, though. My guilt and shame shape my life and some part of me is unwilling to change that. If I forgive myself, the meaning of my life is gone. I’d need to live more…honestly.”

“You must go back,” she said abruptly.

“I think maybe I must,” he responded heavily.

“You must make a descanso.”

“What’s a descanso?”

“It’s a resting place, a memorial. It’s a place of recognition for something lost or an important event.”

“Descanso,” said Radulf thoughtfully.

“It’s a way of taking time to honor someone or something. The old people say if you don’t make a descanso for the important events in your life, they haunt you, skulk behind you like snarling dogs and bite you when you’re not looking.”

“That’s true. Every day I think of my wife, Marella and my parents. I don’t want to feel my guilt and shame, or my grief, but I can’t help it.”

“I think about making a descanso too. Someone told me I murdered four times. My sons, myself and my creative life. She said I’d made my choice about my sons but I still possess the power to choose about myself and my weaving.”

He considered. “All I’ve thought about is that Marella’s dead and I can’t bring her back. I don’t look for places where I retain the power to choose. I only stare at the places I don’t.” He sat up abruptly and fed the fire. “I could go back to my people and my place and try to explain. It won’t be easy. I don’t want that life and my marriage is long over. But I could go and tell them how it is with me, say goodbye, tell them I’m sorry.”

“Will they forgive you?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Will I forgive me? Isn’t that what we’re talking about — the place where our power is?”

“Will you forgive you, then?”

He poked at the fire with a stick. “I didn’t mean for it to go so wrong.”

“No,” she agreed quietly. “Nor did I.”

“If I could go back and do it again, knowing what I know now…”

“It would be different,” she finished. “I wonder, if you could ask your little mermaid, would she say the same thing?”

He was surprised. “I suppose she would. To give up everything for infatuation of a strange young man, especially a young, pretty and not very smart young man!” He made a rueful face.

“If you make a mistake on the loom, you go back, take out what you wove, correct the mistake and go on. If it’s a small mistake, the old ones say you leave it in as a sign of humility. Every piece of weaving, properly done, should contain some small imperfection, because something slightly flawed honors life better than perfection.”

“Oh, I like that!” he exclaimed, smiling.

“When I begin a design or pattern I’ve never tried before, I often make a mistake early in the weaving, so small I don’t notice. It’s only later I see I’ve gone wrong and then sometimes I must take most of it out to correct the beginning mistake. I learn, though, every time, what the loom and the wool will do. I learn to recognize those tiny early mistakes and correct them quickly. I learn to read the signs in the pattern when something is beginning to go wrong.”

“Ah,” he said, an arrested look on his face. “It’s like…traveling in a strange place and seeing signs, but not being able to read them. Then you get in a mess, take a wrong turn, and you figure out the signs you couldn’t read. The next time you see those signs, you know what they mean and do better.”

“We see signs that try to tell us something, but we can’t always read them…” she repeated.

“I suppose that’s how we learn,” said Radulf.

“If a handsome young man on a horse with a silver and turquoise bridle stops at my stall, lays his hand on my blankets and gives me a mouthful of honeyed words,” she said with quiet passion, “I’ll spit in his eye!”

Radulf laughed, and on the heels of it yawned. The river flowed. Dark had fallen and stars pinned the night sky.

“I’m ready for sleep,” he said.

For answer, she shook out her blankets and lay down by the fire. He lay down across from her and soon they both slept

EURYDICE

Eurydice put her hand on the thick ridged bark of the ash tree and closed her eyes.

She’d left the timeless winter sleep of Janus House and traveled alone through the ebb and flow of early spring, always making for this tree and this place. She hadn’t hurried. Spring was raw and heady, enticing her onward and then blocking her way with storm. Eurydice walked and sought shelter, walked and sought shelter. Often, she thought of Mary, Molly and Kunik. Once or twice, she’d risen to the silver surface of deep sleep and thought she heard the thin green sound of the flute, as though cold waking trees sang, far away.

She carried the key in her pocket.

She’d left Janus House on an unfriendly day of sleet and storm after a dream. In the dream it sleeted too, a night storm that slapped her cheeks and stung. She walked, feeling cold, wet and miserable, longing for her old home among the dusty, sun-soaked olive trees. A light flickered ahead, like a lantern or a fire, held some way off the ground. It seemed impossible for any kind of flame to stay lit in such a storm. Curious, she made her way toward it, her feet slipping and crunching in heavy wet snow. The source of light was a torch, held by an indistinct figure swathed heavily in a cloak and hood. At her feet sat a large dog, ears pricked alertly. Eurydice approached cautiously.

“You stand at a crossroads, my daughter,” said the figure. Its voice was sexless, strong, and shot through with the hiss and spatter of sleet. “You may go home, to the place where you started, find a mate, take care of your tree and your children. You may grope your way forward into something new. That choice will make you big, but you’ll pay a price.”

Eurydice didn’t hesitate. “I want to be everything I am,” she said. “I want to open the way.”

The torch went out abruptly, leaving only the hiss of sleet. “The way is open, then. Take the path to Yggdrasil.”

She’d woken, hearing sleet rattle against her window. She lay in her warm bed under the roof of Janus House. At dawn, she packed, said good-bye to Hel and stepped out of the door onto the path beneath her feet.

She was going to the edge of the world, where Yggdrasil stood, three pillared, spanning worlds of stars, green air, and roots and bones. She went to meet the Norns, see the Fountain of Urd and its Keeper, but most of all she went to be with Yggdrasil, King of Trees, Tree of Life, and retrieve her discarded skin of bark, twig and leaf.

Hades had told her the truth. There were trees at Janus House, tall stately evergreens with wide boughs, wrapped in snow and winter sleep. She’d longed for trees in the shadowed rock of the Underworld, though she’d left behind the olive trees of her family gladly enough when Orpheus’s music enchanted her. But Janus House guided her away from the evergreen forest, giving her a path down a steep bluff to a cold northern sea, and to friends. She’d walked among pine, spruce, fir, cedar, and hemlock, but they were alien and didn’t respond to her touch.

Now Janus House was a long way behind and Eurydice had laid her hands on hundreds of trees. Oak and maple, birch and beech, ash, poplar, nut and fruit trees, and some she couldn’t name. She’d passed through grove and stand, clump and large swathes of forest, and the trees, waking under the chill caress of capricious spring, welcomed her passing with supple twigs, a spray of cold dew, and the damp, woody smell of roots waking into activity.

As she neared Yggdrasil the wheel of seasons turned and she laid her hands on trees with sticky new leaves, budding and blossoming trees, and finally fully-leafed, fully-wakened trees cupping birds’ nests and gestating fruit, nut, catkin and cone.

“I’m Eurydice. I’m a tree nymph,” she murmured over and over, introducing herself, giving and receiving patient, rooted energy, reclaiming herself.

Now, with her hands pressed against Yggdrasil at last, she said it once more. “I’m Eurydice. I’m a tree nymph.”

She felt movement at her feet and looked down. The world seemed to tilt. She pressed her palms hard against the tree to steady herself and the world righted. Coils of a snake flowed around her feet, not touching her. Neither head nor tail was visible, but the snake wreathed and twined around Yggdrasil’s three wide trunks. The ground was dotted with morel mushrooms, which liked to grow with ash trees. This, she knew, must be Mirmir, guardian of the Fountain of Urd and Yggdrasil’s roots. Hel had told her about Mirmir, saying some called it demon and some serpent, but Eurydice hadn’t expected the endless undulating coils of dull green.

“Yes, yes, I know, you pest! I don’t need you to inform me of what’s going on, you know! After all, I’m in charge of that. Be careful, now. Move! You call me and then you get under my feet! Are you twined around that poor girl as well? She must be terrified! Don’t you know she’s had previous trouble with a snake, you fool? Go away! Go find Urd and Skuld, like a good fellow. Watch out! Stop! All right. This is ridiculous. I’ll stand still and you take yourself off. Don’t knock the poor girl down!”

The snake moved, flowing body diminishing in width until she saw nothing but a flicker in leaf shadows. Eurydice found herself looking into the eyes of a round old woman with a puff of white hair. Glasses sat on the end of her nose.

“Oh, my dear! I hope Mirmir didn’t terrify you! When I realized he was the first one you were meeting, I felt so distressed. Not sensitive. Not sensitive at all! I can’t imagine why Skuld didn’t tell me!” She put her arms around Eurydice and kissed her cheek. Eurydice thought it was like being embraced by a feather pillow. “I’ll have a thing or two to say to her, don’t you worry!”

Still talking, the old woman led Eurydice around the three massive trunks of Yggdrasil.

A neat wooden house sheltered under the enormous tree’s canopy. A spinning wheel sat next to a trunk of Yggdrasil. A scarf of fiber wrapped the trunk. Eurydice thought it looked like animal hair of some kind. She remembered the three Norns used Yggdrasil as a distaff. One Norn spun, one wrapped the distaff and one cut the thread. A basket full of spun yarn sat on the ground next to a chair at the wheel.

“Will you sit here? Shall I bring out another chair? Are you hungry, my dear?” The old woman paused, poised between the chair and the house, looking at Eurydice expectantly.

“I… No, thank you, I’m not hungry. Please sit down. I’d like…” Eurydice gestured to a trunk of Yggdrasil.

“Of course. How silly of me! Make yourself comfortable, then. I haven’t introduced myself properly yet. I’m Verdani.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Eurydice politely. She settled herself on the ground with her back against the tree. She felt cradled between roots, branches and trunk and relaxed with a deep sigh.

“Like coming home, is it?”

Olive Tree image by Angeles Balaguer from Pixabay

“It is,” said Eurydice, and, without meaning to, began to cry.

The old woman took up a trailing gauzy end of the fiber wrapped around the trunk, started the wheel turning and began to spin, her hands moving deftly.

Eurydice felt oddly comforted by this. She allowed tears to come as they would and when they slowed and stopped, she took the scarf from her head and used it to wipe her face and blow her nose. The scarf trapped heat and she ran her fingers through her hair, letting cooler air touch her scalp. It seemed like too much trouble to cover her hair again. Here in the shade at Yggdrasil’s base no one would be able to see the true color of her hair, and was it so terrible if they did?

In spite of the thought, she started in surprise, feeling naked, when she heard footsteps coming around the trunk from behind. She hurried to her feet, the scarf clutched in her hand.

Two women came into view, both elderly.

“She’s here,” said Verdani, gesturing with her chin, as her hands remained occupied.

“Welcome,” said one. “I’m Urd.” She looked like an old piece of rope, slightly frayed but tough and harsh to the touch, and capable of infallible knots.

“I’m Skuld,” said the other on a sigh.

“I’m Eurydice.”

“We know,” said Skuld.

“Why didn’t you tell me Mirmir would be the first to meet her?” Verdani demanded of Skuld, sounding irritated. “Poor girl. You know a snake killed her!”

“Sorry,” said Skuld without sincerity to the air in the general direction of Eurydice.

“It’s all right,” said Eurydice, because it was.

“There he is,” said Urd. Eurydice turned hastily, in the direction of Urd’s gaze, and watched Mirmir climbing up one of Yggdrasil’s trunks.

No one ever saw the top of Yggdrasil. It was lost in the sky, even from miles away. As coils of Mirmir’s body lifted and straightened, curling around the trunk, climbing out of sight, Eurydice wondered if he could climb high enough to reach the top. It seemed possible. As her gaze traveled upward, she noticed, for the first time, several branches overhead were festooned with hanks of yarn.

Urd noticed her look. “It’s a sort of storehouse,” she explained. “We don’t have room in the house for everything we spin. I store it here before sending it on to various weavers. Nothing is ever lost, you know. It’s all spun out and woven into a pattern. It’s quite a job to stay on top of it all.”

“I imagine it is,” said Eurydice in wonder. Her eyes followed the huge horizontal branches with their strange hanging fruit back to the trunk and down its fiber wrapping. “Doesn’t a distaff need to spin?”

“Oh, yes,” said Urd airily.

Eurydice looked at her, bewildered. Clearly Yggdrasil wasn’t spinning — couldn’t spin, yet the wheel hummed and fiber ran smoothly between Verdani’s hands, twisting obediently into thread.

“But it’s not spinning. Is it?”

“Isn’t it?” asked Urd.

***

“How can we help you, my dear?”

Eurydice had been waiting for the question. She’d thought about it during the miles of travel from Janus House and still didn’t have an answer.

“Hel suggested I come,” she began hesitantly, not wanting to say I dreamed I was supposed to come. “You know I spent time in Janus House?”

Verdani nodded encouragingly.

“I’m a tree nymph,” said Eurydice bluntly.

“You came to speak with Yggdrasil, then?” asked Urd.

“Yes. No. I mean — partly. I left my family a long time ago. I stopped being a tree nymph. Except I didn’t. I couldn’t, I mean. I thought I could stop. But then…things happened and I missed that part of myself and now I want to find it again.”

“How will you know when you’ve reclaimed that part of yourself?” inquired Verdani with interest.

Eurydice paused. She frowned, looking down at the scarred wooden table on which sat the remains of the meal they’d been enjoying. “When I’ve reclaimed that part of myself, I’ll feel better. Won’t I?”

“Better how?”

“Fixed. More sure about everything.”

“Hmmm,” said Urd.

Skuld scratched at her scalp with the point of her scissors and then tucked them in their place behind her ear again.

“Maybe she’s not a tree nymph anymore,” said Urd to Verdani. “She says it’s been a long time. Maybe it’s over and done — gone forever.”

“Probably so,” said Skuld in pessimistic tones.

“No,” said Eurydice. “I am a tree nymph. I’m sure I am. I look like all my people.”

“Show us,” said Urd suddenly. “Take off your clothes.”

Eurydice gaped at her.

“Tree nymphs always bear a close resemblance to their trees,” said Urd patiently. “Let’s look at you.”

Eurydice put her hands in her lap and twisted them together. “I can’t.”

“Oh, dear,” breathed Skuld, shaking her head.

“I don’t want you to see. I don’t let people see me without my clothes. I usually keep my hair covered, too.”

“Why?” asked Verdani.

“Because…because sometimes it looks…purple.”

“Does it?” asked Verdani. “How beautiful! Stop moaning, Skuld, and fetch some more light!”

Skuld rose with a sigh and brought two lamps from the kitchen, setting them on the table in front of Eurydice. She bent and looked into Eurydice’s self-conscious face.

“Eyes, too,” she said, and resumed her seat.

Eurydice covered her hot cheeks with her hands.

“I bet,” said Urd meditatively, when you cover your hair people don’t look closely at your face and eyes, do they?”

“No,” said Eurydice.

Three pairs of eyes fixed on her. After a moment, she rose to her feet and removed her clothes.

“Oh, well, olives, obviously,” said Urd. “That’s why her hair and eyes look purple, too. The exact color of a ripe olive. Black with a sheen of purple.”

“Olives have those beautiful thick twisted trunks, don’t they?” asked Verdani with interest. “Can’t one be actually inside some of the old trunks?”

“Yes,” said Eurydice. “We used to sleep in them. The branches twist and curve around us, forming a perfect shape for our bodies to rest in.”

“They’re not tall trees, though,” said Urd.

“The farmers prune us,” said Eurydice, looking down at herself. “They want to be able to reach the olives, you see, so they prune us until we’re short and stubby and fat…”

“Ah,” said Verdani.

Eurydice reached blindly for her clothes and put them on, wiping her face with her sleeve. She resumed her seat.

“Well,” said Urd. “Congratulations are in order. You’ve reclaimed yourself as a tree nymph. I’m glad to see you feel ‘fixed’ and ‘better.’”

Verdani giggled.

Eurydice gave a choked snort.

“Eurydice,” said Verdani. “My dear. Acknowledging the entirety of what and who we are isn’t always pleasant. You’ve already reclaimed yourself as a tree nymph. You didn’t need us to help you with that. You told us yourself what you were. Anyone with eyes can see what you are. Why do you hide yourself?”

Eurydice shook her head, tears running down her face. “I want…I want to be someone…I want to be worth something, not just a tree with a thick trunk! I want to be more than a tree nymph…or a wife…not even pretty…”

Skuld got up, went into the kitchen and returned with a linen dishtowel wrung out in cold water. She handed it to Eurydice, who took it without looking at her.

“Th..th…thank you,” said Eurydice, and buried her face in the cool cloth.

“Well,” said Verdani a few moments later, “now that we’ve embarrassed you, made you cry and you’ve regained your identity as a tree nymph, what else can we do for you?”

This time Eurydice did laugh, though she felt tears close by, like the edge of a storm cloud. She ran a hand over her puffy face. “It’s hard to put it into words,” she said. “I have an idea I’m a kind of…doorkeeper.” Her mouth felt sticky and she swallowed the last of her water.

“Interesting,” said Urd. “Say more.”

“It’s mixed up with dreams I’ve had and stories from other people,” said Eurydice. “I think there might be something about me that helps others find a path forward.” She groped in her pocket and laid the jeweled key on the table. “And then there’s this.”

Urd reached out with a lean arm and picked up the key, examining it closely. She passed it to Verdani, who pushed her glasses up from their resting place at the end of her nose in order to study the key. Skuld took the key reluctantly and set it hastily down, as though not wanting to touch it. She looked down at it on the table, shaking her head.

“Oh, dear,” she said, “oh dear. I remember the endings in this.”

Eurydice picked up a fork and idly traced scars on the table with its tines. “I know it sounds crazy, but the key came to me out of a dream. In Hades, I found a door and I’ve dreamt of that door. I don’t know if I’m to find a door and unlock it with the key, or if I am a key, or if I’m to give the key to someone else. Hel told me the Fountain of Urd is a source of power. I guess I thought I might find answers here, or some kind of clarity about what to do next. I know Yggdrasil drinks from the well and Mirmir guards it. Am I allowed to drink the water? Is it accessible? Is there a ritual or an offering I must make?

“I’m sorry to disappoint your expectation of grandeur, my dear,” said Verdani, “but you’ve been drinking water from Urd all evening.”

Eurydice looked at her empty cup in surprise.

“We wash dishes in it, too,” said Skuld helpfully, “and our clothes.”

“Hel makes it sound like the Fountain of Youth or something,” Urd grumped to Verdani. “Why make such a deal out of it? Lots of people get their water from a well, after all! And why call it a fountain? It’s just a plain well.”

“I suppose fountain sounds more important, and beautiful. People like to worship things, you know,” Verdani replied. “If you enjoy access to something solemn and important, then you get to feel solemn and important.”

“I never wanted to feel important,” sighed Skuld, “and I refuse to be solemn.” She looked mournfully at Eurydice, who couldn’t help but smile. Skuld looked as though she’d never been anything but solemn in her life.

“We’re not a bit solemn,” said Urd. “No one who watched us swimming in the Well of Urd would ever call us that.”

“You swim in the Fountain of Urd?” Eurydice asked, astounded. She had a mental picture of three naked old women splashing one another in a well laced with tree roots.

“Sometimes,” said Urd matter-of-factly, “we’re mermaids, you know.”

“Mermaids?” Eurydice’s voice squeaked with surprise.

“Don’t tell her that,” begged Skuld, scarlet faced. “Everyone will find out!”

“Can we get back to the subject?” asked Verdani irritably.

“What was the subject?” asked Urd. “I forgot.”

“The subject was Eurydice telling us what she wanted from the Well of Urd,” said Verdani impatiently. She turned to Eurydice.

“So, my dear. You’ve been drinking water from the well since you arrived. Do you feel powerful and filled with mystical revelation?”

“No,” said Eurydice. “I feel exactly the same.”

“Of course, you do,” said Urd stoutly. “Sensible girl. The fact is this pomp and reverence is ridiculous. You don’t need anything you don’t already possess.”

“I don’t?” asked Eurydice.

“You don’t,” answered Verdani. “Child, if you want to find out who you are and what you’re for there’s only one thing to do.”

“I want to know what to do next, how to be a doorkeeper.”

Verdani fixed her with a sharp eye. “I repeat, if you want to find out who you are and what you’re for and what to do next, there’s only one thing to do.”

“What?” asked Eurydice.

“Be yourself,” snapped Urd with an air of finality.

“You say you think you may be a doorkeeper, is that right?” asked Verdani, more gently.

“Yes.”

“The first person you open a door for is yourself. Allow yourself to be. Allow your body to be. Be who you are, fully and joyfully. You don’t need to be fixed and you don’t need to be different. Let that go. What’s needed is you, yourself, nothing more and nothing less. The source of power is — you.”

“We all come to it,” said Skuld hollowly. “We must be ourselves. Everyone else is taken.” She shook her head. “There’s no help for it.”

Verdani caught Eurydice’s eye and rolled her own in silent amusement.

Eurydice grinned, feeling suddenly light and free. “What about the key?” She looked from Urd to Verdani.

“The key came to you,” said Verdani. “When it’s time to do something with it, you’ll know.”

“All I do is just…be? That’s it?”

“It sounds easy,” said Verdani, “but actually it’s much harder than making offerings and pilgrimages and observing rituals. Creating something to worship is easy. Learning to respect and honor ourselves is terribly difficult. How do you feel about going around with your hair uncovered?”

Eurydice put her hand up to her hair, flipped a lock over her shoulder and examined it in the lamplight. She dropped it. “Uncomfortable,” she said.

“Naturally.”

“I see.” Eurydice sobered. “If I work at being myself, though, the rest will work out? I’ll find a place to belong and I’ll know who I am and how to be a doorkeeper?”

“You will,” said Verdani. “Start where you are. You’re an olive tree nymph. You’re a doorkeeper. Be those as often as you can, as well as you can, and see what happens.”

***

Eurydice stayed with the Norns. She was glad to be off the road. It was good to stop putting one foot in front of the other.

There was plenty to do. Verdani spun, day after day, hour after hour, keeping up a stream of talk about what was happening as she spun. She called this “Current Events,” and Eurydice understood why Urd and Skuld were often away on their own business. In their absence, Mirmir had the benefit of Current Events. When Mirmir was absent, Verdani told the tree. Eurydice was a welcome fresh audience.

Urd astonished Eurydice the day after she’d arrived by running nimbly up a ladder to a thick bough of Yggdrasil. Once in the tree, Urd climbed from branch to branch, hanging new skeins of fiber and fetching others to transport to weavers around the world. Urd moved about the tree with strength and grace, as at home as if she was in her own living room.

It was Urd who wrapped Yggdrasil’s trunk in fiber for Verdani to spin. She was the keeper of what had happened. “I don’t feel a daily monologue on ‘Past Events’ necessary, though,” she told Eurydice with some acerbity.

The Norns had a childlike love of stories. At the end of the day, when the last meal had been eaten and the dishes washed, Eurydice told all the stories she’d learned from Maria, Kunik, Mary and Molly, as well as stories from her own people.

Verdani had been spinning hemp when Eurydice arrived, but it was nearly gone. The next material had been a subject of some acrimonious debate, with Skuld in favor of flax. “The blue flowers are so cheerful,” she said dolefully, “and they’re blooming now.”

Urd favored lichen and moss.

“How on earth do you wrap a distaff in lichen and moss and spin it?” asked Eurydice, astonished.

“Oh, it’s simple,” Verdani answered. We gather lichen, fungi, and moss — it’s the perfect time of year for it — and wrap them in cobwebs. Then Urd puts it on the distaff, Yggdrasil, I mean, and I spin it.”

“What does it make?” asked Eurydice, fascinated.

“It makes the threads of life, networks of filaments too fine to see connecting every plant and tree in a forest. It spins spores and mushroom gills, insects and bacteria, tiny leaves and stalks, mats and layers.”

“My knees hurt for weeks after we do that one,” complained Skuld.

“You don’t get enough exercise,” said Urd. “You’re lazy and your muscles are weak.”

“I don’t,” agreed Skuld promptly. A gleam in her eye surprised Eurydice. “I am and they are. I should work harder. You work so hard, Urd. Would you like me to take over your job for a while? It would be good for me and you’d get a rest!”

“Oh, give it up Skuld!” said Verdani crossly. To Eurydice, she said, “She’s always trying to get out of her job.”

“I don’t know why I’m stuck with the worst job,” said Skuld. “Why am I the one who cuts? Everyone’s afraid of me. I’m always to blame. All I can talk about is what shall happen, and nobody wants to hear about that unless it’s good.”

“But endings are only beginnings,” Eurydice began and then stopped. Skuld looked at her in amazement, her depressed aspect suddenly interested and animated. Eurydice remembered who she was talking to, lost her confidence and swallowed the rest of what she’d been going to say. “Aren’t they?” she asked weakly instead.

“Say that again!” demanded Skuld.

“Well, I don’t know, of course, because I’m not wise like you are,” began Eurydice.

Urd made an impatient noise. Eurydice caught her eye and Urd scowled at her.

Eurydice pulled herself together. “In Hades, I learned endings are beginnings. The words describe two sides of the same event. If you’re in charge of endings, then you’re in charge of beginnings, too. Beginnings can’t happen unless an ending happened first. Don’t you see?”

“I’m in charge of beginnings,” said Skuld, as though tasting the words.

Urd looked at Verdani with an eyebrow raised high.

“Why, I’m like… a mother!” said Skuld. “I’m a midwife! I help new life come into being!” She took the scissors from behind her ear and looked at them in wonder. “I’m not a destroyer, I’m a creator!” She wandered around Yggdrasil and out of sight, looking raptly down at her scissors and mumbling to herself.

“Well,” said Urd grumpily. “There’ll be no holding her now!” But Eurydice saw a smile in her eyes.

“Well done, Eurydice!” said Verdani. “Thank you! Poor old thing’s been moaning and complaining for hundreds of years about her part of the job.”

“Thousands,” corrected Urd.

Eurydice felt nonplussed. “No one ever suggested that before?” she asked tentatively. “You’re so old, so wise…”

“You do possess a tendency for grand expectations, don’t you?” inquired Urd.

“We’re just like you, my dear,” said Verdani. “Doing our best every day and learning as we go. I think it’s safe to say if someone suggested that to Skuld before she didn’t hear it properly. Now she has, and you’ve made our lives much more enjoyable.” She looked up at Urd, who leaned against Yggdrasil. “Let’s celebrate by doing flax next. Skuld’s right, it’s the season, and we can take care of water for the summer if we do a good solid lot of it.”

“What do you mean, water for the summer?” asked Eurydice.

“Have you seen flax growing wild in fields and along roads and paths?” asked Urd.

“Yes,” said Eurydice. “It makes me think of water, too, blue pools and puddles.”

“Exactly,” said Urd. “Flax is a good fiber for making cloth, but it has a scent of water about it and part of what we spin will be threads of water gurgling and trickling here and there across Webbd.

“Also, dew, rain and mist,” said Verdani. “Summer water. Do you see?”

“I see,” said Eurydice, marveling.

The fountain was a stone-lined pool about ten feet in diameter. Water bubbled from between the stones. Eurydice had always heard pure white swans swam in the Well of Urd, but they were not in evidence. Eurydice asked how deep the well was, but all Verdani would say was, “Deep enough for Yggdrasil’s roots to drink,” which was no answer at all, really.

Mirmir came and went. Eurydice knew he spent some time up in Yggdrasil, out of sight. A hole lay in the ground between the trunks of Yggdrasil, concealed by a thick web of roots and leaf litter.

The Norns treated Mirmir like a large clumsy dog that frequently left home but always came back. Eurydice wasn’t afraid of him. She’d never been afraid of snakes. The shock of her death had been in the dying, not in the snake itself. Generally, Mirmir was nothing more than muscular coils draped on the ground or in lower branches of Yggdrasil. His body felt cool and dry, a uniform dull bottle green color.

One sunny morning she went out to sit with Verdani while she spun and found Mirmir hanging head down out of the tree. His head rested on a bulge of protruding root while Verdani kept up a running commentary on current events and flax flowed through her fingers.

Cautiously, Eurydice approached the snake. Verdani fell silent and the only sound was the whirring wheel. An eye regarded Eurydice. The pupil was a vertical black elongated oval in an extraordinary blend of gold, orange, green and black flecks. She wondered suddenly about the eyes of the snake that had killed her. Had they been so full of wild, golden life?

Eurydice sat down carefully in her usual place with her back against Yggdrasil. Mirmir’s gaze returned to Verdani, the heavy coils of his body motionless.

“He came down to give me the latest news,” said Verdani.

“News?” asked Eurydice, startled.

“Oh, Mirmir’s a terrible old gossip,” said Verdani. “Spends half his time in the top of Yggdrasil talking to crows.”

“Crows?”

“Yes, child, crows. Surely you know how they talk? Sarcastic, nosey, raucous creatures, crows. Into everything. Never miss anything. Never stop talking at the top of their voices about it all. The ravens aren’t quite as bad, mostly because they’re more solitary, but they croak and carry on too.” She paused and her mouth quirked. “Rather like Skuld.”

“Here’s the last of the flax,” said Urd, appearing at the door with her arms full. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, wrap it on,” said Verdani. “There’s room for it now. I was telling Eurydice about Mirmir and his crow cronies.”

“Who was it this time?” asked Urd, stepping over a length of Mirmir as she began to wrap flax around a trunk of Yggdrasil. “We haven’t heard from Odin in some time.”

“Odin?” asked Eurydice, feeling dazed.

“What’s the matter with you?” demanded Verdani. You act as though everything we say knocks you over.”

Eurydice, indignant, said, “But…”

Urd interrupted, laughing. “Well, explain to her, goose,” she said to Verdani. “Honestly, Verdani, you’re always talking but you don’t explain yourself. It’s enough to confuse anyone. I’ll be right back,” she added to Eurydice, and stepped out of sight around the trunk, wrapping flax.

In a few moments, she reappeared on the other side of Yggdrasil. “Mirmir,” she informed Eurydice, “absolutely loves stories and gossip. He’s great friends with several birds. Mirmir hears current events from Verdani, what has happened from me, and endings — and beginnings,” she smiled at Eurydice, “from Skuld. Crows and ravens are associated with all kinds of important people, so Mirmir and his friends exchange stories.”

“As I was saying,” said Verdani, crossly, “Odin is associated with crows.”

“And Mother Baba Yaga,” said Urd.

“And then there are shapeshifters who take the form of crows or ravens,” continued Verdani happily.

Crow image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay

“Not to mention the owls,” continued Urd.

“Wait!” said Eurydice.

They looked at her, surprised.

“Don’t tell me anymore,” said Eurydice. “It’s too much to take in at once. I can’t keep it straight.”

Urd disappeared behind Yggdrasil again, wrapping the flax.

When she reappeared, Eurydice asked, “What about the eagle and swans?”

They looked at her blankly.

“What eagle and swans?” asked Verdani.

“The eagle everyone says lives at the top of Yggdrasil.”

“Oh, that eagle,” said Urd. She sighed. “People will insist on making things more important than they are. There’s no eagle. There never was an eagle. It’s just that an eagle sounds impressive. The Tree of Life should have the most impressive bird living in its top. It wouldn’t do to say a murder of crows flies back and forth, picking the bones of gossip with the great demon Mirmir. Nobody wants to hear that. Now and then swans stop in when they’re migrating, though. We’re glad when they go. They scare Mirmir.”

“Oh.” It was Eurydice’s turn to look blank. Her gaze fell on Mirmir, who regarded her once again out of a glowing eye. Verdani giggled.

“Are you terribly crushed, my dear?”

Eurydice laughed too. “No, of course not. But it does make a fine story. A demon, an eagle, a tree of infinite height and infinite roots. A magic fountain so pure white swans live in it. The three terrible Norns, wrapping and spinning and cutting. All that power and majesty!”

“Exhausting,” said Urd promptly. “No, thank you. I’d rather be a stringy athletic woman of middle age who gets a proper amount of exercise and takes adequate care of responsibility.”

“Don’t forget the mermaid part,” reminded Verdani, snickering. “You’re also a stringy mermaid — sometimes!”

“Huh,” said Urd. “Stringy athletic mermaid.”

They were laughing when Skuld appeared. “Are you having fun without me?” she asked, but she smiled in sympathy with their mirth. “I came to see if you‘re ready for me.” She knelt by the basket at Verdani’s side, nearly filled with heaps of spun flax.

Eurydice watched Mirmir. His body undulated, rubbing against Yggdrasil’s rough bark and the ground. He wasn’t moving to another place but his body rippled and writhed.

“Ah,” said Urd. “It’s time for another shedding.”

“Oh,” said Eurydice, understanding. “How often does he shed?”

“Every few months,” said Verdani. “It always starts like that. As though he’s one big itch, poor thing. We’re glad when it’s over. The new skin is a lovely grass green, as though he gets freshly painted.”

“We spin the old skin,” said Urd, patting Mirmir’s head.

“Into what?” asked Eurydice, fascinated.

“Into skins, of course,” said Verdani. “Excellent timing it is, too. Ever since you told us your selchie stories I’ve been thinking about skins. I haven’t remembered for a long time all the selves we each are and might be.”

Eurydice developed a daily habit of spending time nestled amongst the roots and trunks of Yggdrasil. The ash tree enclosed her in its embrace. She gave herself up to it, surrendering body and mind utterly to the tree’s strength. She lay under its endless canopy of leaves, sunlight and shadows, studying the jeweled key, turning it over in her fingers.

In her mind, she wove a rough net of lyre music, doors, stories, keys, snake’s eyes, selchies, the sound of sea, and the hot green smell of dusty leaves, slightly bitter. She wrapped the net around herself, Yggdrasil and the key, letting her gaze rest on one thing and then another, thoughts and images brushing through her head, striving for nothing and making no plans.

***

“The door is opened,” Verdani said one morning, coming in with a full pitcher of water. She set it on the table around which they sat for breakfast.

Urd looked up for a moment and then returned to her plate of eggs.

Skuld murmured, “Oh dear.”

Eurydice looked from one to another. “What door?”

“Yggdrasil guards a door. Perhaps more than one. Who knows? The door I mean opens up among the roots from time to time.” Verdani spoke in a businesslike manner while dishing potatoes onto her plate.

“A door to where?” asked Eurydice.

“No idea,” said Urd airily, gesticulating with her fork. “Might be anywhere, and different every time. Not our business.”

“Yggdrasil lives a life we don’t know about,” said Verdani. All we know is the part of the tree available to us. What happens above, or on the other sides, or in the roots, is not our concern.”

Eurydice set down her cup and went to see.

It looked like the den of an animal, like a fox. It led down and out of sight at a steep angle, roots lacing the sides. The rounded edges didn’t look fresh or raw. A layer of leaf litter, twigs and such plants as could grow in Yggdrasil’s shade softened the ground.

Eurydice went back in, thinking. She wondered if the opening would enlarge.

It did. Mirmir appeared and inspected, disappearing head first, but no more than ten feet of his body had slithered out of sight before his head returned.

“What’s in there?” asked Eurydice. Mirmir never spoke to her and didn’t now, merely looked at her out of his beautiful gold-flecked eyes.

By midafternoon the tunnel had grown large enough to accommodate her.

The Norns helped her gather her belongings. Urd packed food and water. Skuld moped, getting in the way, sighing lugubriously and fiddling with her scissors.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said, hovering over Eurydice as she tied up a bundle.

“Skuld, you know I must.”

“Everything will change again when you leave.”

“You’ll be fine. You’ll go on learning to smile sometimes, and feel happy. You’ll make lots of beginnings.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

Eurydice pushed hair out of her eyes with an impatient gesture. Sometimes she missed the confines of a head scarf. “I want to go. I’m supposed to go, and you’re going to help me!”

Skuld looked mutinous.

“You’re going to cut, because this time is over and the next thing is here. You’re going to end my time with you so I can begin something else.” She softened her tone. “You’re going to give me a great gift. And you can’t pretend you don’t know what’s happening. Not with Miss Current Events out there!” She jerked her head at the doorway. Verdani sat at her spinning wheel.

Skuld pulled her into an embrace and they rocked together for a moment. Eurydice picked up her possessions and went out, Skuld behind her with her scissors in her hand. A hard, quick squeeze from Urd and a feather bolster hug from Verdani and Eurydice was ready. She looked around one more time, at Yggdrasil, the spinning wheel, the house and fountain, and a few coils of Mirmir on the ground. The front half of his body was invisible in the tree canopy. “Do you have the key?” inquired Verdani.

Eurydice laid her hand on the outside of her pocket, feeling the key’s contours, and smiled. She walked forward between the ash trunks and stepped across the threshold into the tunnel.

She found exactly what she expected. A door.

It was only a heavy black outline against a wall made of horizontal layers of roots, rock, soil and leaves. She discovered no handle but there was a keyhole. She put the jeweled key into it and turned. The door swung open and Eurydice stepped through.

She stood in a desert. The setting sun just balanced on the horizon. She could smell rain. Examining the sky around her, she saw an approaching storm, a dark smudge under towering white clouds. The rest of the sky stretched clear and empty, except for a vulture turning in lazy circles far overhead.

Desert sun image by Pezibear from Pixabay

The door she’d come through was gone. Desert stretched in every direction. She’d left the key in the door. This didn’t distress her. That first door was for me, she thought. It was special. The key helped me find it. Now I’m a doorkeeper and I don’t need the key. I am the key. She felt as happy as a child. She wanted to skip, stretch her arms out and turn in circles until she was so dizzy she fell down. The way opened before her.

She saw movement at her feet and looked down at a coiling snake. After Mirmir it looked tiny and rather appealing. She stood still, respectful but not terrified. The snake lifted its head and looked up at her face. Its eyes looked flat and dark. It lowered its head onto the sand and slithered slowly away. She watched it go, relieved. She hadn’t wanted to be bitten. The snake stopped and looked back, over its shoulder if it possessed a shoulder, expressionless and silent but seeming to wait for her. She took a step toward it, testing. The snake lowered its head, but continued to gaze at her face. She took another step.

The snake led her straight toward the storm. Damp air made tendrils of unconfined hair spring out around her face. Light faded out of the sky. Cool air and soft misting rain surrounded her. The whole world became a moist blur of shadow and she was beginning to have trouble seeing the snake on the ground in front of her when she heard a drum beat. At first, she mistook it for thunder, but the beat was steady, not a rolling crescendo. She hadn’t heard a drum in a long time. It sounded utterly familiar and she wondered if she would walk out of the mist onto a frozen shingle in the middle of a long winter, and see friends around a fire.

The drumbeat guided her, along with the snake, and she smelled campfire smoke, acrid in the heavy air. The misting rain turned into something harder. The fire struggled, burning hot in the middle and smoking at the edges. A figure stood near the fire, shrouded in wet gloom.

The snake slid between two people standing looking down at something. It disappeared over some kind of an edge. One of the figures played the drum, solid and broad in shape with short dark hair. Next to it stood a taller figure and next to it, right next to the opening, some kind of a large frame.

The drum stilled. The drummer’s face was blank with surprise. Rain slicked down his black hair, running down his face like tears.

She called his name. She felt his arms go around her.

CHAPTER 23

JENNY

Jenny watched the sturdy figure of Rumpelstiltskin walk down the crowded street. She had a good view from the second story window. Now and then the dwarve stepped aside for a horse, a heavily laden laborer or a cart. More often, though, others made way for him. He nodded to people, but he didn’t stop to speak to anyone. He looked small and alone. The busy street scene blurred into a jumble of colors. She felt an impulse to lean out the window, call him, beg him to take her with him. She stood still and watched until he moved out of sight. Her tears felt warm on her cheeks.

Behind her, the large, high-ceilinged room was filled with light and activity. The pungent, bitter smell of dye mingled with the oily scent of wool. The sound of looms at work punctuated a murmur of female voices.

Jenny wiped her eyes with her sleeve and turned from the window. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through a series of large west windows. Looms of every size and description stood in rough rows. Women bent over them, baskets of yarn at their feet, sliding shuttles back and forth.

Minerva leaned over Amanda’s loom, pointing at the design, talking, gesturing with her clever hands. Her cap of short hair shone palely in the sun. Half spectacles sat on the end of her nose. She finished the conversation with a brief touch on Amanda’s shoulder and a nod, straightened her back and caught Jenny’s eye. Her eyebrow quirked up in inquiry and Jenny managed a smile in return.

After the initiation of Ostara, Rumpelstiltskin and Jenny had set out on their last journey together. Jenny accepted the invitation to become apprentice and student to Minerva, one of the greatest weavers and dyers in the world. Her business and workshop were located in Griffin Town, a bustling small city clustered around a seaport. Here Rumpelstiltskin parted from her. He’d received word of another young woman in need of guidance and Jenny understood he released her, with love and confidence, into her own life. Nevertheless, she felt desolate. For so long he’d been her only friend and support.

Before Ostara, she assumed Rumpelstiltskin would always be there when she wanted him. She knew he’d mentored other young women, but she didn’t envision him actually leaving her. She imagined she and her friends, Vasilisa and Rose Red, would go through initiation together, passing over a threshold from one cycle to the next, like stepping through a doorway. After initiation, she’d know where to go, what to do and be taken care of. Past hurts would heal. She’d be at peace with her memories of her parents and her brief marriage. She’d be safe.

Instead, she had shared a dance of joyous passion with the Firebird and watched it murdered in a net of her own creation, a net in which she also imprisoned herself. It was an ugly, brutal lesson and Baba Yaga did not spare Jenny. “Who are you?” the crone had challenged. “What are you?” All Jenny could come up with was, “I’m a woman. I’m a spinner.” Little enough. And now, because of the deadly net, she was afraid of her spinning.

The Firebird, miraculously and unexpectedly, had been reborn from Baba Yaga’s cauldron the morning after initiation, but Jenny would not soon forget watching it slowly and inexorably strangled by Death. The Firebird might be reborn, but she doubted she had the same power. She must find another way to disentangle herself.

Her mother had died, and her father had tried to sell her. The king had desired her because he thought she would make him rich. Hans had wanted her only because he thought she made him look more important and powerful. Rumpelstiltskin alone loved her for herself, and he alone stayed by her, as he had her mother before her. He was the only family she possessed, the only one she trusted to take care of her. How would she survive without him?

Initiation. The owl feather. The final journey with Rumpelstiltskin. Now she was in a strange place with strangers around her and she felt terrified. Yet she clung stubbornly to her identity as a spinner. In some confident depth, she knew it was what she was for — to spin. Perhaps Minerva could show her the way to free herself from the golden net of her own making so her gift was not bloodstained.

Jenny walked down the center of the long room. Minerva came to meet her.

“You’ve said good-bye.” Minerva smiled at her and Jenny felt better. “Today I want you to wander around, look at everything, make some friends. Go down and investigate the dyeing room. Go up and say hello to the owls. Unpack your belongings in the dormitory. Tomorrow you and I will sit together and start to know one another.”

Jenny looked into the clear, grey eyes. “I…I’m not sure I belong here.”

Minerva’s gaze was steady. “Why not?”

“I created something bad, something hurtful and hateful. I’m afraid I’ll do it again.”

“Most spinners use fiber or animal hair in their spinning. You spin out of life, which is to say you spin out of death. Never have I had such an apprentice. If you don’t belong here, it’s because I’m not an adequate teacher for you. Perhaps we should both suspend our fears and see what we can do together. Are you willing to do that?”

“Yes.” Jenny lowered her gaze to the floor. “I want to learn,” she told it. “I want to get out of the net.”

“The pattern is on the loom,” said Minerva. She turned away and Jenny went down to find the kitchen and something to eat.

The following morning Minerva took Jenny to a room with an eastern exposure. Sunlight fell through the windows onto a wood floor the color of glossy honey. Jenny saw a spinning wheel, a loom, a wooden stool the same color as the floor, and a long worktable against a wall. The windows opened onto the courtyard garden.

“This will be your classroom. We can be alone here. You may join in the weaving room anytime you want, but your work won’t be quite like the work of the others and I want you to be private when you want.”

“It’s beautiful. Thank you so much!”

“You’re welcome. Are you ready to work today?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a business woman, Jenny. That means I know what things are worth. By things I mean what we buy and sell but also people and experience. Learning is worth little if the student has no power to shape it to her own needs and desires. We haven’t talked much, you and I, but you already seem to know what you want and need. I think you hope I can teach you certain things?” She raised her eyebrow and Jenny nodded.

“I propose this morning you tell me about yourself. Tell me about this spinning of yours. Help me understand what you’ve learned so far. After you’ve done that, I want you to write down, in fifty words or less, what you bring to the world.”

Jenny was astonished. “What I bring to the world,” she repeated. “Not much.”

“Is that so?” Minerva gave her a sharp look. “It seems to me you possess certain unique talents.”

Jenny shook her head, wordless.

“Well, it should be an easy assignment, then. Perhaps you’ll need fewer than fifty words.”

“I’m a spinner — I think,” said Jenny. “That’s about it.”

“Very well. Write that, then.”

“Who are you?” Baba Yaga sneered in her memory. “What are you?”

“All right,” said Jenny.

“Good.” Now sit down here in the sun with me and tell me your story…”

And Jenny did.

***

Two mornings later they met again. Jenny was ready and read aloud her fifty words about what she brought to the world.

“My name is Jenny. I can spin straw into gold, but the gold disappears if it’s taken from me, so I can’t make anyone rich. I’m good at embroidery and using the gold thread I spin to decorate cloth. I can weave a little.”

“Good,” said Minerva. “What did you learn?”

“I learned I don’t think I’m worth much,” said Jenny, “and I feel irritated by it. I don’t really believe everyone has more value than I do. It feels more like a bad habit, or even a lazy habit, than a considered assessment. I didn’t expect to feel that.”

“Sometimes taking things out of our heads and putting them on paper helps us see more objectively,” said Minerva.

“Fifty words sounded like a lot, but they were used up fast. When I read what I first wrote, I found myself crossing things out and trying to choose better words.”

“Better, how?”

“More specific. Stronger. It was almost as though I was writing for someone else, a friend, who I supported and liked and believed in. I didn’t think I cared that much about showing myself in a good light.”

“A good light or a more realistic light?”

Jenny looked away. “Even now, I feel angry when I read it. It still sounds weak and tentative. Why don’t I believe in myself?”

“A good question. Have you felt that others believed in you?

“Only Rumpelstiltskin.”

“Perhaps that answers your question.”

***

Jenny began to recognize the shape of her life in Griffin Town. She spent mornings talking to Minerva, who encouraged Jenny to use her notebook for reflection, as well as making notes. It seemed to Jenny many of these hours of exploration and discussion had nothing to do with spinning, weaving or dyeing, but she began to understand Minerva was teaching her how to manage her life in new ways. Jenny was learning about herself.

In the afternoons, Jenny joined the other girls in the large weaving room. To her relief, Minerva demonstrated no interest in her ability to spin from anything nontraditional. Minerva paired her with girls skilled at spinning with various kinds of animal hair and fibers, and in this way she grew comfortable with hemp, linen, flax, cotton, silk and many kinds of fleece and wool. She also made friends, though most of the other students seemed young and inexperienced to her. She asked questions and listened but said little about herself and nothing about her short marriage, Rumpelstiltskin, or her initiation at Ostara. These girls were not like Rosie and Vasilisa. Still, she made friends to eat with, chat with, work with, and giggle with before the lights went out in the dormitory. She was relieved to find Minerva didn’t treat her differently from the others.

Jenny let it be known she was a beginner and her mornings with Minerva were private tutoring to help her catch up. The other students accepted this without comment or much interest.

During her time with the other girls, she was introduced to each fiber, learned where it grew and how, its method of harvest and what its properties were. Samples were heaped in a basket on her worktable, and one of Jenny’s favorite exercises was to close her eyes and identify each fiber by texture, smell and some indefinable sense of unique life clinging to it. This she couldn’t explain, even to herself. It was the deep knowing she had used to spin gold out of straw that first time as Rumpelstiltskin talked in his low voice about the grass from seed to harvest.

As the girls and Minerva shared the story of each fiber, Jenny later heard it told again in the dwarve’s voice as she spun, and often the old cradle song rose up in her mind and flowed through her fingers, though she never sang it aloud in the weaving room.

Once she knew the story of the plant or animal, its scent and texture, the thinking part of her stepped aside and she became the whirring wheel; the turning spindle; the flowing, twisting fiber moving through her fingers. In these hours, everything around her faded away, time disappeared and she roamed, free and confident, through a world of her own making.

Other times, though, her fingers were clumsy. The thread broke or formed in uneven lumps. The wheel didn’t sing sweetly. In these times, she doubted. She remembered Baba Yaga’s words, “You’re nothing! What can you do?” and feared it was so. She was nothing and she’d never be a true spinner. She felt certain the others watched her incompetence and wondered why Minerva allowed such a clumsy, unskilled student into the workshop. What had the Baba said? She’d called her a cuckoo, yes, a “cuckoo in the nest.” The good days, the powerful days, were a lie, a lucky chance, a pretense succeeding only temporarily. This is who she truly was, fumbling, uncertain, holding back tears, destroyer rather than creator.

After these times, she crept out to the courtyard garden and cried, solitary among the plants and flowers.

One morning Minerva asked her to define integrity.

Jenny thought. “Is it doing what you’ll say you’ll do?”

“Yes. That’s part of it. Can you think of more?”

She thought of Rumpelstiltskin with the usual pang. “It’s being trustworthy.”

“Good. Trustworthy in the sense that others can trust you, or that you can trust yourself?”

“Both. It must be both. Wait — trusting yourself is the most important, though. That happens first.” She thought of her father. “Others may not trust if we don’t do what they want us to do, but that’s not about our trust in ourselves.”

“That’s an important distinction. The simplest way to think about integrity is wholeness, completeness. A person with integrity is everything they are and nothing they aren’t.”

Jenny thought of the ‘Me! Not Me! game she’d played with Rosie, Vasilisa and the dwarves at the long wooden kitchen table.

“You must to know who you are, then,” she said.

“Exactly. You need good power management.”

“Power management?”

“Pick up a hank of flax.”

Jenny stooped to the basket at her feet and did so.

“Close your eyes. Now, you know that’s flax because your eyes, fingers and nose tell you so, but you recognize it more deeply than your senses do. You feel the power of its life — and death. Another word for power might be…energy, perhaps.”

“Yes,” said Jenny. “I never know quite how to put that kind of knowing into words.”

“Are you doubtful about your power to recognize one hank from another in this basket?”

“Absolutely not,” said Jenny with great confidence. “Once I’ve learned them, I know them.”

“Your power is intact. You trust yourself. You know what you can do.”

“Right.”

“Sometimes when you spin it feels like that.”

“Yes. But sometimes I can’t get to that feeling. I can’t seem to do anything right.”

“What happens? Why do those times come when you know what you can do and have done it so many times?”

“I don’t know,” Jenny said, frustrated, “Sometimes I just can’t do it.”

“Is it that you can’t do it at times, or that you don’t do it at times?”

“I’m not sure. Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”

“No. I’ve seen you spin as though it was the one task in the world you were born to do. It’s not only that you’re fast and skilled. You work with your material in a way that brings life to it and to you. So, I know you can do it. What I want to know is why sometimes you don’t do it. What needs to happen in order for you to spin with the same confidence you feel when you identify the hanks in the basket?”

“Am I in my own way somehow? Like being in that net? It doesn’t let me move freely?”

“Does that feel true?”

Jenny thought. She turned the hank of flax over and over in her hands, dropped it back in the basket, closed her eyes, stirred the bundles of yarn and chose another. She sat with her eyes closed, feeling the yarn between her fingers. It was alpaca.

“It feels true. If I wove the net, then…”

“Then you can unmake it,” said Minerva. “You will. It’s a simple problem of power management, Jenny.”

“Integrity?”

“Integrity,” Minerva agreed. “You’re a spinner. You’re not less than that. I suspect you’ll make the word “spinner” much bigger for me than it’s ever been before, but certainly not less. Right now, something is in the way of you living completely in the integrity of being a spinner.”

“I don’t think that net was real,” said Jenny. “I think Baba Yaga somehow pulled it out of my head and gave it a real form to show me how dangerous it is, but I think it’s a really just a net of thoughts, not something I did with my hands. She told me what the strands were made of, and they were all things in my head.”

“Can you remember them?”

“I think so. At least some of them. One was “being good.”

Minerva laughed. “The thing that irritates Baba Yaga the most! She would disinter that!

Jenny laughed too, a little unwillingly.

Minerva met her eyes with amused understanding. “She’s not gentle, is she?”

“No.”

“It’s not her job to be gentle. Some lessons can’t be gently learned.”

“I suppose not.” Jenny sighed.

“What else can you remember? Let’s look at this net of yours more closely—see what it’s made of.”

Jenny shut her eyes and remembered the firelit scene, the heavy smell of the burning herb Artemis had put on the fire and the despair that had filled her because the beautiful, magical Firebird was dead and it was her fault.

“Being good,” she said, “no need, trying to please, but that’s like being good, isn’t it?”

“Usually being good is about what other people think is good,” said Minerva dryly.

“Yes, she talked about other people. ‘They.’ What they say, what they expect, what they teach and their rules.”

“Notice who holds the power in that language. They, not you.”

“What else?” said Jenny. “There was more. Oh, I know! Hunger. Soul hunger and heart hunger. And then injured instinct. I remember that, because Baba Yaga talked about Vasilisa’s doll.”

“Excellent!” Minerva looked at Jenny over the glasses on the end of her nose, her grey eyes sharp and clear. “Baba Yaga practically gave us a map!”

Outside the windows fog and misting rain softened the view. Their chairs faced the window, side by side.

“Let’s talk about needs,” said Minerva. “What can we say we need?”

“Well, things like food, water…”

“Of course. Let’s assume those are present. What else do we need?”

“Safety.”

“Interesting. What does safety mean to you?”

Jenny looked out the window at the grey morning. “Well… there’s someone to take care of you, someone you can trust.”

“What does taking care of you look like?”

“Someone who won’t hurt you or abandon you, someone who loves you.”

“Like family or a friend?”

Jenny looked down into her lap, feeling painful tears in her throat. “It’s nice to have…a friend. Not a need, like food and water, but nice.”

“Why do you say it’s not a need?”

“Well, one can be alone. A strong, good person can be alone and doesn’t need to depend…”

“Wait. Stop.”

Jenny fell silent and watched her falling tears spot her tunic. She rubbed at the spots.

“My dear,” Minerva said. “Don’t you know everyone needs others? Have you ever heard of failure to thrive?”

“No.” Jenny looked up, wiping at her cheeks.

“Babies who receive no human connection don’t grow and develop normally, even with plenty of food and water and a roof over their heads. Sometimes they die. It’s not a question of being dependent on one another. It’s interdependence with one another. We need and are needed in equal measure.”

“It’s not weak to…to want to be loved?”

“It’s essential to love and be loved.”

Jenny looked out at the clinging, cool morning. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

“No one ever told me,” she said at last.

“Now you know,” said Minerva. “Does it feel true?”

“It seems obvious, now you’ve said it.”

“Now let’s take it a step further. We all need others, some kind of connection. Think about the connection you felt with your father and your husband -- remind me of his name?”

“Hans.”

“Yes. Think about your relationship with those two and compare them to your relationship with Rumpelstiltskin.”

“They weren’t the same at all.”

“Which satisfied your need for love and connection?”

“Rumpelstiltskin. I always knew he loved me. I felt safe with him.”

“Do you think, then, we can say we need healthy connection?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t ‘we’ include you?”

“Yes. I suppose it does. You mean, it’s okay to want that? Truly?”

“Absolutely. It’s your responsibility to yourself and everyone in your life to create and nurture healthy connection. “Do you regret leaving your father or Hans?”

“No. I feel I should regret it, but I don’t.”

“Going back to the net you wove and what Baba Yaga said, now can you understand the destruction of having no need?”

“I think so. It still seems bad… No, bad isn’t the right word. Dangerous? Yes, it seems dangerous to need, especially other people. When you say we do, though, it feels true.”

“The need for healthy connection starts with yourself,” said Minerva. “You used the word safety. You said safety meant someone who took care of you, someone you could trust.”

“I was thinking of Rumpelstiltskin.”

“I know. But aren’t you the person who can best care for yourself? If you don’t trust yourself, how can you ever feel safe? Can you love yourself for who you truly are, or do you work hard to please yourself?”

“I never thought of it like that,” said Jenny.

“Think of it now. Are you unworthy of love because you can’t feel a pea through a feather bed?”

Jenny laughed. “A feather bed and a mattress,” she reminded.

“Oh dear,” said Minerva. She took off her glasses and polished them. “Where do people get these idiotic ideas?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t. Well, never mind. Where were we? Oh yes, connection and being safe. I suggest you consider your relationship with yourself. Is it more like your connection to Rumpelstiltskin or your connection to your father, or to Hans? Think about it for a couple of days. We’ll talk again later in the week.”

When she’d made friends with the fibers and wool spun in the workshop, Minerva sent Jenny to the dyeing room. This was a large, hot room on street level filled with steamy eye-watering smells. Each student was required to learn every aspect of weaving from spinning to finish work.

Jenny found new faces in the dyeing room among familiar ones. She quickly appreciated the enormous amount of information and traditional lore involved in dyeing. One could spend a lifetime learning the subtleties of the craft. Not only did every material take dye differently, the combinations of agents to achieve a desired color were numerous, and a good dyer was always experimenting with new possibilities.

As she worked among the vats, grinding plants and insects and learning to achieve subtle gradations of intensity and shade, she began to imagine herself as part of a complex web spun in every direction. Achieving the right color required her presence as much as the cloth or any agent. Creating gold out of straw required her hands, her skill, herself. She’d always known herself strengthened and enriched by Rumpelstiltskin. Now she glimpsed the possibility that he was strengthened and enriched by her. Interdependence appeared to worked in every direction, connecting each to each equally.

Maybe she was essential in the pattern of life. Maybe her simple presence was her unique contribution. What would it feel like to please herself instead of everyone else? What would it feel like to simply be pleased with herself without trying? Did Rumpelstiltskin try to please her? She didn’t think so. Minerva didn’t try to please, and she admired Minerva more than she’d ever admired another woman.

But how could she be pleased with herself when she’d done such stupid things, like marrying Hans? She didn’t know how to use spinning straw into gold to help herself, and she was scared nearly all the time. You don’t even have a family, she told herself. What kind of a person has no family to love her? And you made that terrible net.

I’ve always done my best, though, she argued silently with herself. I’m kind. I want to learn. I think I could be a good spinner. I can make things.

Why did Rumpelstiltskin love her? She’d never wondered about that before.

Why weren’t other people trying to please her? Why was it always the other way around?

***

“Let’s talk about trying to please and being good,” said Minerva.

It was evening. They sat in Minerva’s room in front of an open window looking down onto the harbor. The smell of sea and fish was strong and raucous gulls flowed up and down between sky and water as fishermen gutted the day’s catch.

Jenny sighed. “Let’s not.”

Minerva laughed. “It’s worked out that well for you?”

“It never works but I go on trying to do it.”

“You’re not alone. Why do we do that?”

“I suppose we’re trying to find healthy connection. But if we need to constantly strive to please someone, isn’t the connection already unhealthy? If we can’t be loved for our true selves, why do we go on trying so hard?”

“Good question. Do you find being good and trying to please hard work?”

“It’s exhausting work. It’s never finished and I never feel like I succeed. It’s day after day of failure.”

“Now we’re back to power management. That feeling of exhaustion and futility usually means we’re giving away our power. If you know you’re a spinner — that’s who you truly are and what your work in the world is — can you do that effectively and try to please others, too?”

“I can’t. Maybe someone else could do both, but I can’t. I think I should be able to, though.”

“You think you should be able to or others think you should be able to?”

“Both, I suppose. Look at the king I spun gold for that first night when I learned to do it. I was trying to save my own life, but it turned out I couldn’t spin gold to permanently enrich him even in order to save my life. It doesn’t work that way. I think everybody has to figure out how to spin their own straw into gold, if that makes any sense. Not literally spin straw into gold, but make something valuable and beautiful out of one’s experience. What I do can’t be bought or stolen or coerced.”

“It makes perfect sense. So, since you can’t make gold for them, is it your job to make up for it by making others happy and comfortable in other ways?”

Jenny hesitated. “When you put it like that it sounds stupid. Of course not. Nobody’s happy and comfortable all the time. I don’t have the power to do that. Happiness is something we choose ourselves — or not.”

Minerva regarded her steadily.

Jenny thought of Baba Yaga. “Being happy and comfortable — I haven’t learned the most when I’ve been happy and comfortable.”

“Yes. It’s not a very motivating state of being!”

“I wonder, do you think Hans learned as much from me as I did from him?” Jenny asked suddenly.

Minerva smiled. “Probably not. What do you think?”

“Well…probably not,” Jenny agreed. She shook her head and laughed, though grimly.

“So,” said Minerva, summarizing. “Being good and trying to please aren’t effective. You can’t do that and be fully in your power as a spinner. Also, you conclude a relationship in which you work hard to please isn’t worth having in the first place. Is that right?”

“Yes. But…”

Minerva arched an eyebrow.

“I guess I’m afraid I’m not lovable unless I try to please and follow the rules,” said Jenny.

“Think about the people who you felt loved by,” said Minerva. “Do you try to please any of those people? Do they need you to be good — whatever that means? Must you earn their love?”

“No. They just…like me.”

“Like you or love you?”

“Both.”

“Good. Now let’s turn it inside out. Do you like you when you’re trying to please others?”

“No. I feel exhausted and like a failure.”

“It’s not within your integrity.”

“No. I hate myself because I feel so false.”

“Now contrast that with your worst day at the spinning wheel, when nothing’s working.”

“Oh…” Jenny smiled. “That’s all beautiful. It’s learning. It’s going deeper into what I am. Nothing else matters when I’m spinning.”

“Do you like that young woman who spins, no matter how clumsily?”

“I love her.”

“I love her, too.”

Jenny looked up in surprise. Minerva never made personal remarks.

“So, at least two people love Jenny for who and what she truly is,” Minerva continued. “Jenny herself, and her teacher.”

“I love the girl who spins,” said Jenny, “but I’ve found out I don’t love everything I am. Not like Rumpelstiltskin does. Not like I imagine my mother would.”

“Interesting,” said Minerva. “Tell me more.”

“You asked me to think about my relationship with myself when we talked about safety, remember?”

“I remember.”

“It turns out I’m not loving with myself. Not like Rumpelstiltskin. He would never say the words to me that I say to myself. I love myself when I’m spinning, but otherwise…“ She shook her head.

Minerva laughed, and Jenny looked at her in surprise.

“You remind me of myself. The joke’s on us, Jenny. All the things we most need, like safety and respect, trust and love, are internal wellsprings, not something external. If you’re safe with yourself, nobody can take your safety away. We only need to claim our own power. When others love you, it will be a precious gift, but you won’t need to depend on such a gift, or earn it, or search for it. All you need to do is turn toward pleasing yourself and following your path.”

“I want to spin,” said Jenny stubbornly.

“Then do. No one can stop you except yourself.”

***

“My name is Jenny. I’m a spinner. I can spin straw into gold. I’m good at embroidery and using the gold thread I spin to decorate cloth. I can weave.”

“I like the way that’s changing,” remarked Minerva. “Have you thought about what you want after your time here?”

Jenny frowned down at her hands in her lap. “I think I belong here — for now,” she said. “But I can’t see a place to belong in the world for always — a home. Someplace where I can be myself and be part of healthy relationships and be able to take care of myself. I want to explore interdependence, but I feel more confident about finding healthy connections if I don’t need to depend on anyone for food and a place to live. I want to learn to take better care of myself, not only to live externally, but internally, too. I didn’t say that well. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think what you’re trying to say is you want to find the right balance of independence and interdependence for yourself, and you see value in being able to support yourself, physically and emotionally.”

“That’s right,” said Jenny, sitting back and relaxing.

“Very good,” said Minerva. “That’s what I wish for myself and every woman. It brings me to a subject we’ve talked around but not directly about yet. Is it fair to say you want to make a contribution to your own needs and well-being?”

“Oh, yes. Contribution is a good word. More than that, though, I want to be worth something in the world and to other people. I want to be valuable in some way, in some real way that’s not trying to please but just being who I am.”

“You’re a spinner.”

“Yes.”

“Then I think you can assume that’s what the world needs from you. When we discover what we’re born to do, the activity that gives us the greatest joy, that’s what we’re for. Engaging with that activity will bring us into the life waiting for us, where we’re most needed. What you’re seeking is also seeking you.”

“Oh…” for some reason this last idea made Jenny tearful. She swallowed.

They sat in front of the windows in Jenny’s work room. It was another grey, misty day and fire popped and snapped in the grate behind them.

“Today I want you to begin working on the loom with Amanda,” said Minerva.

“While you’re learning to string the loom and weave, think about what home means to you. We’ll talk about your ideas next time.”

***

“It’s odd,” said Jenny, “but it seems to me home is not so much a place in the world, like a house, as it is an internal sort of place. I always thought of home as four walls and a roof. I want a place to work, but when I look at what feels like belonging, it’s more about the kind of life I want than the kind of house I want.”

She and Minerva sat outside in the sunny garden in cushioned wicker chairs. Minerva had been looking over Jenny’s notebook, crossed ankles propped on a stool with a bright cushion. Jenny held a sprig of bruised rosemary between her fingers. The indigo staining from her dyeing classes was nearly gone from her hands. The scent of rosemary was sharp and aromatic in her nose.

“A useful observation,” said Minerva. She handed the notebook back to Jenny and laid her head back, tilting her face to catch the sun and closing her eyes.

“Some people never understand that. They spend their energy and resource building a beautiful home and call it a life. A home is a great comfort but it’s not enough. That’s why learning to nurture an internal life is so important. That’s home too, and one more lasting and powerful.”

“I’ve told you about my friend, Vasilisa?”

“Yes.” Minerva smiled, eyes still closed. “The doll in her pocket.”

“She and her doll and the fiery skull made a home. If she possesses her own house, I never heard her speak of it. She’s always on the move. Everywhere she goes she has the doll, which is like having her mother with her, and she has the fiery skull.”

“The fiery skull is like having Baba Yaga with her.”

“Oogh,” said Jenny.

Minerva laughed. “But, you must admit, a wise guide.”

“Yes. But the doll is an internal guide. The kind of guide who lets you learn from your experience and makes you look at what’s hard. Not like unacknowledged rules.”

“Ah,” Minerva opened her eyes and looked at Jenny. “Are you thinking about the strands of the net that have to do with ‘them?’”

“I am.”

“Go back and find that list and read it to me, will you?”

Jenny paged back in her notebook and read aloud, “’What they say. What they expect. What they teach. Their rules.’”

“Who are ‘they?’ asked Minerva.

“I’ve no idea,” said Jenny with exasperation.

Minerva laughed. “They wield a lot of power for anonymous folk,” she said.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Jenny hotly. “What is this thing we do — follow these rules without ever seeing what we’re doing?”

“This also takes us back to power management. The only power ‘they’ possess is what we give them. As soon as we choose to retain our power ‘they’ shrivel up and disappear. Don’t forget, every one of us is trying to get loved, and most of us are secretly afraid we’re not worthy of it. The hunger for love and connection and the fear we won’t find it are powerful motivators. As long as we believe ‘they’ are in charge of whether or not we’re loved, we’ll do anything ‘they’ say.”

“Like giving away our power?”

“Exactly. Letting someone else make choices for you. What is power? What does it mean to you? What creates it and what diminishes it? These are important questions. Go back to Vasilisa. Her mother left her a precious gift — a bridge to her own power. The doll doesn’t make rules based on external expectations. It’s an internal navigator. It’s intuition and instinct. You said Vasilisa feeds the doll?”

“Yes, she feeds it little bits whenever she eats herself, but I think that’s just — I don’t know, for show. What she truly feeds it with is belief in its guidance. She trusts it. Maybe that’s the same as saying she trusts herself?”

“Exactly, Jenny. She’s confident. She stays in integrity with her own instinct, not arbitrary external rules and expectations.”

“’Injured instinct’ is another strand in the net,” said Jenny.

“Another way of saying ineffective power management,” said Minerva. “Staying in power with yourself repairs and nurtures your instinctive wisdom and clarity.”

“Wisdom. I don’t aspire to that.”

Minerva chuckled. “My dear, wisdom is the simplest concept in the world. People worship it like a God, seek it, long for it, philosophize, meditate, study and pontificate about it. Yet wisdom is so easy its symbol is an owl, an instinctive wild creature.”

“What is wisdom, then?” asked Jenny.

“Wisdom is what works. Nothing more and nothing less. It might be different for every person in every situation, but it’s always the choice that works the best.”

“How do we know what’s best?”

“Excellent question! What’s best is what your integrity demands.”

“Well, I want connection to be healthy. I want everyone to be able to be authentic. I want compassion and kindness.”

“Then you make choices with the intention to foster healthy connection, authenticity, compassion and kindness, having the wisdom to understand others may be making choices out of different intentions.”

“I can’t control what other people do, though.”

“That’s right. Stay with your own power and do the best you can. Make friends with your own integrity. Make choices that support your power and help others do the same.”

Minerva stretched her arms up over her head and swung her feet off the stool. “Lunch, I think, and then the weaving room.”

“I’ll be in shortly,” said Jenny, not moving. “I want to think for a few minutes.”

Minerva dropped an affectionate hand on her shoulder as she passed by. “As long as you like. I’ll see you in a bit.”

In the weaving room, Jenny worked on looms of different sizes, using whatever material and color came to hand. She learned what each fiber could do and how it behaved according to technique. She found her favorite shuttle and her favorite loom. She explored combinations of material and the texture they produced. Finally, she added the variable of color, going back to the dyeing room and dyeing her own colors for a finished product that demonstrated what she’d learned. For a time, she unwove as much as she wove, learning to catch tiny mistakes and flaws before they spread into the whole piece, but eventually she discovered the satisfaction of creating a piece of cloth of her own design. This she took with her to the sewing room.

The sewing room was the final step in the process. In this room, Jenny was not a student, but a teacher. Minerva paired her with Ruth, who had guided Jenny in the dyeing room. Ruth was a talented dyer but had never learned to sew. The two girls sat together in front of a sunny window and Jenny showed her the different needles, silks and threads. She taught Ruth to hem and embellish. Ruth had woven a length of heavy pine green wool and wanted to make a cape. Together they cut it out, stitching hood, hem and arm slits. Ruth wanted a design of autumn leaves along the bottom and chose silks of gold, russet and deep red.

Jenny wove a bed cover for Rumpelstiltskin. It was an earthy design in neutral colors of stone and wood with a touch of orange and green. She had privately spun a hank of fine gold thread from straw and she and Ruth attached a plain linen piece of cloth the same size as the cover and hemmed them together in the gold thread. They left the last few inches open and Jenny bought goose down at the market and stuffed the space between linen sheet and cover to make a light, warm comforter.

***

“Absolutely beautiful.” The cover draped over her knees, Minerva examined the gold hemstitching. She looked up at Jenny. “Are you pleased?”

“I am,” said Jenny. “I can hardly believe I made it myself. I’m so proud I’m embarrassed!”

Minerva laughed. “Nothing wrong in acknowledging your own abilities, my dear. This is something to be proud of. Even without your special talent at spinning, which I believe I detect in the hemming of this cover, by the way--” she raised an eyebrow and Jenny smiled in response, “you could easily support yourself with work like this. Well done!”

She handed the cover to Jenny, who folded it carefully, tucking lavender wands she’d made in the folds to keep it fresh. Jenny set the cover aside. They sat inside this morning, the day being bright but breezy, as it so often was in the harbor town. “It’s for Rumpelstiltskin.” Jenny laid her hand on the cover in a brief caress. “As soon as I hear from him, I’ll send it.”

“He’ll love it.”

They smiled at one another.

Jenny’s notebook lay on the table. “I’ve read your notes,” said Minerva. It seems to me you’ve come to the end of this part of your apprenticeship. You’ve mastered the steps of spinning, dyeing, weaving and finishing. I set out to help you discover yourself and your desires in life. You wanted to escape your golden net and find answers to several questions.”

“My name is Jenny. I’m skilled at spinning, dyeing and finish work. I’m able to spin straw into gold because I feel what its life was. I use the gold I spin in making beautiful textiles,” Jenny quoted from memory. “I’ve worked with that so often I have it memorized.”

She smiled at Minerva. “I thought I was coming to learn how to make cloth, but you’ve given me so much more.”

“I’m glad. I’m grateful to you, too. To teach is to learn, and you’ve taught me a great deal as well. We’ve been important for one another. In fact, I want to make a proposal. You’re certainly well able to go out into the world and make a life for yourself, and if that’s your choice I give you my blessing. On the other hand, if you’re interested in staying here with me, we could work together in my business. I have plans and ideas about marketing and increasing profits so I can reach more students.”

“But, Minerva, I don’t know anything about business!”

“I do. You know more than you think. I’ve already taught you the basics. Successful contribution and marketing, which is to say business, always starts with the building blocks of integrity, clear self-knowledge and goals, and sensible choices. I’ll teach you what I know and then we’ll fumble along together and learn as we go.”

Jenny laughed. “I’ve never seen you fumble a single time!”

“Well, I do. All wisdom is based in plenty of fumbling. You know that now.”

“’Wisdom is whatever works,’” quoted Jenny.

“The catch is, what works is always changing,” remarked Minerva. “That’s where the fumbling comes in. The business is only half my proposal, Jenny,” Minerva said, more seriously. “The other half is this unique gift of yours. I want to explore it with you. I don’t know what might be possible for you. Could you spin gold out of other materials? How do we understand and work with a transformative ability like yours? What might you do with it? I’m fascinated.”

“I don’t know what to say,” said Jenny.

“Don’t say anything right now. Think about it. In the meantime, I suggest you take a break. You’ve worked hard and made a lot of changes in a short time. I’d like to send you on a trip. Get out of the house and the town. Go out into the world. Enjoy the summer. Get some exercise. Think about what you want to do next. When you come back, we’ll talk. Whatever you want to do, I’ll support you. Whatever you want to do, I’ll love you. It’s been a great privilege to know you, my dear.”

It’s nearly summer solstice, Jenny realized with amazement. In Minerva’s workshop, she hadn’t paid much attention to passing time. A few weeks ago, she and Rumpelstiltskin had journeyed through the spring landscape from initiation to Griffin Town and Jenny’s apprenticeship. Now it was full summer, rich and ripe.

“Go and see the shrine of Coventina,” Minerva suggested. “She’s my own special guardian. She’s a water spirit and presides over a river. She has a beautiful shrine. It’s a peaceful spot. There are a few huts for visitors to stay in. You can be quiet there and take time to think. Coventina assists with fertility. Ask her to help you choose the next part of your path. She understands about creative energy and independence.”

Jenny happily fell in with this suggestion and left a day later.

It was wonderful to be alone and free. She ambled along, in no hurry, pausing when she felt like it for a bite to eat, a rest, or to sit mindlessly in the sun with her back against a tree, thinking of nothing.

It was restful to walk after so many weeks of bending over wheel, vat and loom. She discovered she was worn out in mind and body. She’d learned much and made many changes in a short time.

She looked forward longingly to the shrine. She’d brought some gold thread she’d spun in order to dress a tree and petition Coventina, although she really didn’t have a request. She thought she knew what she wanted to do. The gold thread was more of an offering of gratitude. She’d seen such offerings at holy wells and shrines before, but she’d never dressed a tree with gold.

Minerva had described a stone pool with water lilies floating in it along a river, and she planned to sleep, bathe and sit in the sun to her heart’s content.

Image by Susanne Jutzeler, Schweiz 🇨🇭 💕Thanks for Likesa from Pixabay

The absence of fear made her realize how present it had been in her life, always muttering in her ear. Her golden net was made out of fear, and with the help of Minerva she had begun to unravel the strands. She felt strong and confident, unburdened. She knew who she was. She knew what she was for. She could take care of herself with her skill. She was free to choose what she wanted. Anything and everything seemed possible. Each minute was a pleasure and the future filled with promise.

She thought of all she had to tell Rosie and Vasilisa when she saw them again and wondered what her dear Rumpelstiltskin was doing. She could hardly wait to tell him what she’d learned.

CHAPTER 24

RAPUNZEL

Soft color painted the evening sky over the lake. Rapunzel never tired of watching the sky. To see sky was to be free. In this place, her favorite spot was a wooden pier jutting out over water. Seated on weathered wood, facing water, she felt suspended between the pale mirrors of sky and lake, birds and insects dancing between. Fish rose in soft swirls and plops. The sun sank toward the horizon.

She softened her gaze and looked across the lake, absorbing color, sound and the day’s last cool breath.

Alexander’s eye rested on the weathered wood beside her. It seemed right to let it enjoy the sight of the evening, as their owner no longer could. Perhaps that’s why it had brought her here in the first place, to look across the lake at dusk.

If it had brought her here at all. She wasn’t sure. It was still a fanciful game, to wander according to the eye’s gaze. She had no way of knowing if it meant anything, or if the eye opened and shut simply at random. Still, it entertained her to follow its gaze.

A sudden wailing sound of grief broke her peace. She rose to her feet without knowing she’d done so and searched the empty rocky shingle. Here and there a piece of wood or a scatter of rocks punctuated the shore. Scrubby bushes and grass grew above the high-water mark. Now and then the slim trunk of a small tree rose out of the tangle of lower growth.

The sobbing cry was repeated, low and anguished. She turned her head and saw movement in the fading light. Someone walked along the shore, moving toward the pier.

Rapunzel hurried up the pier and jumped lightly onto shingle. As she did so, another figure came rapidly along behind the first, not running but taking long strides. The newcomer’s head was uncovered and Rapunzel felt confused for a moment, obscurely afraid. She walked to meet the crying woman, who wept more quietly now.

“May I help you?”

“My dear, let me help you!”

Words tangled together, followed by silence, during which the world seemed to still.

“Mother?”

“Rapunzel?”

The woman between them pulled back her hood, revealing smooth dark hair knotted at her neck and a face ravaged with grief. “Have you seen my children?” she asked.

***

They sat together in the inn where Maria was staying. The kitchen provided shepherd’s pie and a pot of tea. Rapunzel would have preferred a steadying mug of beer, but tea was a conciliatory beverage and this was strong, hot and heavily sweetened, her mother’s favorite anodyne to emotional upset.

Rapunzel didn’t want to eat. She wanted to ask questions. Across the table her mother looked just the same. Dark, silver-threaded hair was pinned around her head. Her face was pleasantly ordinary and gave no hint of her feelings. Now we’re not in the tower, Rapunzel reminded herself. I’m free. She can’t hold me. She didn’t know what to feel, looking at that face. Love? Anger? Elizabeth had taken her briefly in her arms in a hard embrace that felt very like desperation at the lake before turning her attention to Maria. For a moment, Rapunzel had felt like a child again, safe in the arms of perfect love and trust. Now that child seemed far away.

Lamplight revealed lines of grief in Maria’s pale, still face, and Rapunzel, with a mental sigh, put aside her impatience. Talking could wait a few minutes, anyway. Elizabeth poured tea for each of them, picked up her fork and began to eat.

It was good shepherd’s pie. Not too soggy. Rapunzel hated soggy shepherd’s pie. The tea was good, too, and before she knew it her mother was pouring her a second cup. With some irritation, Rapunzel realized she felt better. Calmer. But her curiosity had reached irresistible proportions.

“What are you doing here?” she asked her mother. She sounded like a ten-year-old to her own ears and was torn between annoyance and amusement.

“Looking for you, of course.”

“But…”

Elizabeth held up a hand. Rapunzel stopped. Her mother turned to Maria.

“Do you feel better?”

Maria lay down her fork. She’d eaten about half her portion and was drinking her third cup of tea. “Yes, thank you. I’m quite all right.”

This was so obviously untrue that neither Rapunzel nor Elizabeth responded to it.

“I’m Elizabeth and this is Rapunzel, my daughter, as you’ve probably realized.” Elizabeth glanced at Rapunzel and gave her a rueful smile. “We haven’t seen one another in…a while.”

Rapunzel snorted, avoided her mother’s eyes and took another swallow of tea.

“There’s no need for us to bore you with our family… dramas.” Rapunzel rolled her eyes and Elizabeth gave her a quelling look. “I’m more concerned about you. What can we do for you? Are you in trouble? Can we help you find your children?”

“You’re kind. I’ll tell you who I am and what I’m doing, and then you may not feel so compassionate.”

As she listened to Maria’s story, Rapunzel noticed a dwarve sit down at a neighboring table, shrug his pack off wearily, and gratefully attack a mug of beer and a plate of shepherd’s pie.

When Maria fell silent, Rapunzel said, “I’ve been here for several days. I visit the lake every evening and I’ve never seen any children there.”

“I took a long walk this evening around the lake,” said Elizabeth. “I saw no sign of any child.”

Maria pushed aside her half-eaten plate of food and looked into her tea cup. “I always hope they’ll be in the next place. They never are. Tomorrow I’ll move on, maybe follow the river below the lake.”

“It’s lonely,” said Elizabeth.

“Lonely, yes. Many won’t travel with me, knowing what I’ve done. I can’t blame them. Now and then I do fall in with strangers who don’t shun me. I’ve lately traveled with a pair of young women, Mary and Rosie, and after parting with them I camped one night with a man, Radulf. He told me his story and I told him mine and we talked. It helped. Together, we understood things we hadn’t before. I’m beginning to realize there are many in the world who are burdened with a load of sorrow or guilt. I’m not the only one, though I often feel I must be among the worst.” She looked up into Elizabeth’s face. “I don’t want to be intrusive, but I’m curious about your own ‘family drama.’ Would you share with me if I promise not to be bored?”

“Excuse me. Did I hear you speak of Rosie and Mary? And Radulf?” The dwarve stood next to Maria. His face looked weary. He was dressed in brown and dull green and his eyes were green, like shaded moss. He smiled.

Maria returned the smile. “Yes, two young girls walking together, and a man of middle years, rather lean, with grey hair and hazel eyes. He reminded me of—“

“A wolf,” finished the dwarve.

“Exactly!” said Maria.

“Will you join us?” invited Elizabeth.

***

The next day found the four of them on Rapunzel’s dock sharing a picnic basket. They’d decided the evening before it was too late and Rumpelstiltskin and Maria too weary to talk further. Elizabeth suggested a picnic, Rapunzel suggested the pier, and they agreed to meet again on the morrow.

Image from PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Maria gladly put off her plan to move on. She had begun to appreciate chance meetings. Telling and retelling her story eased her heart and made unexpected connections with other people. Hearing the stories of others made her consider her own experience differently. Now it appeared she had unwittingly reunited mother and daughter after a long separation, an intriguing irony. The dwarve, Rumpelstiltskin, with his green eyes and air of solid strength, won her trust immediately. His love and affection for Mary, Rosie and Radulf was evident.

The inn provided cold meat, cheese and bread, along with bottles of cider. It was another beautiful afternoon. The lake lay still and Rapunzel sat on the end of the dock and wiggled her bare toes under the water, watching the resulting ripples.

Elizabeth set out food while Maria repeated her story to Rumpelstiltskin. They ate companionably, talking casually. Rumpelstiltskin took out a knife and cut up cheese. When everyone had cider, he turned to Elizabeth.

Before he could speak, she said, “I’ve both hoped for and dreaded this day for a long time. I never imagined it would come in a place like this in the company of new friends.” She turned to Rapunzel. “My dear daughter — Rapunzel — I’m so sorry. I was wrong. I did a terrible thing to you. I know it. All these months I’ve searched for you to tell you how sorry I am. I’m here because I received word that your…friend is living here. I came to see if I could do anything for him, and in the hopes of finding you. I’ll try to understand if you can’t forgive me, but I ask you to believe I acted out of love as well as my own selfish fear.” She looked at Maria. “I never knew I could love like this before I had a child.”

Maria returned her gaze. “Will you tell us about it?” she asked.

Elizabeth sent an inquiring glance to Rapunzel. Rapunzel nodded and Elizabeth told them.

Rapunzel, listening, realized for the first time what a changeling a story is. Her mother’s story was her own story, at least in part, but her mother’s story revealed thoughts, feelings and choices Rapunzel had been unaware of, including her own true origins. She was stunned, pitying, angry and appalled by turns. She suddenly saw her mother as a person separate from herself, a person much wider and deeper than ‘Mother.’ She saw a proud, lonely woman living an empty life, starved for love and friendship. She saw a wise, skilled woman who longed to pass on her knowledge and experience. She saw a woman capable of rage and hate, a fallible woman who made mistakes.

Elizabeth talked steadily until the end and stopped. Her face was stoic. She met no one’s eyes. In those moments, Rapunzel thought she looked strangely akin to Maria herself, who also had learned to wear a mask of neutral calm, whatever her emotions.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Rapunzel. She didn’t feel angry, merely bewildered. “You mean I’m not your daughter?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. She met Rapunzel’s eyes. “You’re not the child of my body, but you’re the child of my heart.”

Rumpelstiltskin grunted and shifted position.

Maria chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful of bread and cheese, swallowed, and said, “I can’t help be curious, Rapunzel, about your part of this story. What happened? How did you meet this young man, and what happened to him? Will you tell us?”

Rapunzel looked doubtfully at her mother.

Elizabeth smiled and shook her head. “I admit, I’m curious too. It’s in the past, my dear. I won’t be angry.”

“That’s not it,” said Rapunzel. “Will it hurt you?”

Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears. “No, Rapunzel. I hurt myself, don’t you see? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Rapunzel pulled her feet out of the water and sat cross legged on the dock. The soles of her feet felt cool on the inside of her thighs.

“His name is Alexander.”

She told them about her tower room and the day she first saw the young stranger. She told about his visits and his stories of the outside world. She told of taking her hair down so it enclosed them in a golden tent. Then, she told of the last morning when she stood naked in the sunlight and cut off her braid, the key to her prison, and climbed down into the world.

When she recounted the call back to the tower, leaving out mention of Alexander’s eyes, her mother sighed. “I’m so glad you went back. I thought I’d killed him but I never could find his body. I hardly dared hope he escaped somehow, found some kind of help. I’ve searched for word of him ever since. Have you been with him all this time?”

“No.” said Rapunzel. “He doesn’t truly want me. He loved my hair. He thought I was beautiful. His blood was hot and he thought of me as a princess in a fairy tale. If he could see me now, he wouldn’t want me.” She passed her hand over her short hair, thick and curling at the ends. “The truth is,” she looked up with a mischievous smile, “he’s boring. His only real interest is himself.”

Rumpelstiltskin chuckled.

“I made sure he was well cared for and I left. I came back a few days ago to check on him. I feel sort of responsible for him. I’ve been hanging around watching, but I don’t want to talk to him again. I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. He doesn’t even know I’m here.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I arrived yesterday and found his house. It seems to be a good place, prosperous and comfortable. There’s an older woman there. He was sitting in the sun. I saw the scars on his face.” She shaded her eyes with her hand for a moment, then replaced it in her lap and looked up. “I didn’t speak to him, though. I couldn’t bring myself to.”

“Don’t,” said Rapunzel. “There’s no point to it. I’ve been there every day. That woman cares for the house and feeds him and looks after him. He has friends. One day a man came and read to him. Last week he rode with another friend. He comes from wealthy people. I think he has everything he needs.”

Elizabeth nodded without responding.

Maria stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned back on her hands, looking across the lake. “Should I have let my children go with Juan?”

“Who knows?” said Rumpelstiltskin.

“I’ve never heard anyone talk about this part of being a parent,” said Elizabeth. “How do we love them so much and let them go? Why are we required to tear ourselves apart?” She grimaced and tears fell down her cheeks.

“Mother!” Rapunzel protested.

“It’s not your fault,” Rumpelstiltskin said to her. “Children are right to grow up and go into the world to live their lives. It’s the natural way of things. It’s also the harshest requirement of love, the final sacrifice. Every parent faces it.”

“I didn’t do it well,” said Elizabeth. “I failed you, my daughter. I was selfish and weak.”

“And I was worse than that,” said Maria quietly. “My sons will never be free now.”

“We dwarves have loved and cared for young women for generations,” said Rumpelstiltskin. “We’re father, mother, guide, teacher, and friend. One of the most ancient pieces of female power is to ‘let die what must.’

“Let die what must,” repeated Maria.

“Let die what must,” said Rumpelstiltskin. “Knowing when to let loved ones go and being able to do it is one of the hardest lessons we ever learn. Women are vessels of life, yes, but to be fully in their power women must also learn to work with death. Allow it, dance unafraid with it, and sometimes even cause it.”

“Ah,” said Maria. “Mary said that to me!” She looked at the dwarve. “She said ‘Life and death are two sides of the same thing. We must come to terms with both to live well.’”

Rumpelstiltskin smiled. “Good for her. She’s right. In fact, my own story touches on this business of letting go as well. Will you hear?”

They listened while he told of Jenny’s mother and Jenny. He spoke briefly of the initiation in order to explain Jenny’s apprenticeship with Minerva, though he didn’t speak of what he’d seen in Baba Yaga’s iron cauldron.

“So, I took her to Minerva’s workshop and left her there,” he finished. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve without embarrassment. “I miss her more than I can say, but I know she’s where she needs to be, and she knows it, too. Another young woman alone in the world waits for me on the road ahead and I’ll love her too. One day I’ll part from her as well. It’s the way of things.”

MARIA

Listening to Elizabeth and Rumpelstiltskin, Maria became aware of a new aspect of motherhood. In her desperation and fear over losing her sons, she’d never considered allowing them to go. Her shame and horror over destroying her children was so large it had obliterated the perspective of motherhood as a long harrowing journey for every mother, filled with regret and imperfection. Love for a child, she began to understand, was a complex and tricky emotion, changing over time and frequently bitter.

Rapunzel sprang to her feet in a single, supple movement, distracting Maria from her reverie. She tugged off her clothes, dropped them on the pier and dove into the lake without a word. Drops of water flew. They saw the flash of her pale skin under water.

“Oh, honestly!” said Elizabeth.

Rumpelstiltskin laughed. “I expect she wanted to cool off. She has a lot to assimilate.”

They watched her swim in smooth, easy strokes toward the center of the lake. Rumpelstiltskin’s smile faded. “I left out part of it,” he said, “because I didn’t like to say it in front of her.” He nodded toward the swimmer. “During the initiation, I saw…” He swallowed. “I saw Jenny’s death.”

Neither woman said anything but the silence was warm with sympathy.

“It didn’t change what I needed to do — to let her go, I mean,” said Rumpelstiltskin.

“But it made it harder,” said Maria.

“Yes and no. It made it harder, but even more important to do it well, because she deserves to live her own life, however short it is.”

“You’ve done what I couldn’t do,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve always been proud of my power, too proud to admit how lonely I’ve felt or to reach out to others. My pride made me desperate to keep my girl with me. I called it love, but some of it was pride.”

“She loves you,” said Maria. “I don’t think you’ll lose her altogether.”

“That will be up to her,” said Elizabeth. “I think I’ll find a small town, like this one,” she gestured beyond the lake, “and buy a house with a garden and make some friends.” She looked at Maria. “Will you go on searching for your sons?”

“Do you think I should stop?” asked Maria, looking from Rumpelstiltskin to Elizabeth. “Should I let them go?”

Rumpelstiltskin shook his head. “I can’t advise you in this. I think only you can decide what to do. If you find them, what then?”

“I don’t know. I’ve wondered about that. I suppose I thought in the beginning we’d find some place to live and start over. But maybe they’re with someone else now in a new home. Maybe they hate me, or fear me, or have forgotten me. Now I wonder if maybe I need to find them in order to set them free. If I can find them at all.”

Elizabeth sighed.

“I know,” said Maria. “But I think, yes, I must go on searching, at least for now.”

“I’ll get back on the road tomorrow,” said Rumpelstiltskin. “I’m needed ahead. I’m glad we met. I haven’t told a living soul what I saw in that cauldron and it’s been a heavy burden in my heart. I feel better having told you.”

***

Rapunzel and Maria decided to travel together for a time. Rapunzel possessed no particular plan or destination. Maria wanted to follow the river running out of the lake and continue her search. The next morning Rumpelstiltskin set out early. Elizabeth took a walk while Maria and Rapunzel packed and made themselves ready. When she returned, Elizabeth embraced Rapunzel, rocking slightly and speaking into her ear. Maria turned away, happy for their reconciliation but with a pang in her own heart. Would she ever again hold either of her sons against her breast?

By the time Rapunzel and Maria set out, the day was overcast and smelled like rain. Rapunzel enjoyed wild weather and Maria was undaunted, so they dropped rain capes like tents over their bundles and packs. They planned to follow the course of the river flowing out of the lower edge of the lake. Maria wanted to move downstream.

They traveled silently, for the most part, during the afternoon. A fine misting rain settled in. Maria searched up and down both sides of the river for any sign of her sons as they made their way along it. The going was rough in places and they occasionally lost sight of the water, detouring around thick brush or swampy ground.

Frog image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay

The day waned into damp evening. Maria felt tired and chilled. They stopped for the night within a circle of evergreens. There was a pond nearby, noisy with frogs. Rapunzel was enchanted with their various sounds, delighted as a child with the peeping, squeaking, gulping, belching chorus. They found relatively dry ground under the trees, soft with duff and years of pine needles. They hung their rain gear over boughs to dry. Rapunzel went to the river for water and returned to say the clouds would move out by next morning, leaving it clear and fair. They made a good cold meal, not wanting to start a fire under the trees, wrapped themselves in blankets and slept. The sound of frogs followed Maria into her dreams.

The next morning was indeed sunny. They rolled up their blankets and rain capes and ate. Rapunzel watched Maria comb out her dark sheet of hair, twist it deftly and pin it.

“Do you ever think of cutting it short?”

“Of course not! I couldn’t do that.”

“Why?”

Maria looked at Rapunzel. “It’s the custom for a woman my age to grow long hair and wear it up.”

“Why?”

“It just is, Rapunzel! It’s the way we do it where I come from.”

Rapunzel giggled. “Don’t get mad. I’m not being a brat. I only want to know why it’s the custom. Who made the rule? What happens if someone doesn’t follow it?”

Maria shook her head. “I can’t answer you. I don’t know. I never thought about it before — it’s the way it’s done.”

“Okay. If it wasn’t the rule would you ever think about cutting it, just to do something different?”

Maria felt irritated without quite knowing why. “No. I don’t want to be different. I want to be like everyone else.” She fixed Rapunzel with a stern eye. “Don’t you dare ask me why.”

Rapunzel, whose lips were framing the word, burst into giggles instead. Maria laughed too, in spite of herself. She picked up her bundle. “Are we going to walk or are you going to stand here all day asking idiot questions?” But she still smiled.

They walked. This morning they found a path along the river that made the going easier.

“I wasn’t being provocative, Maria. I’ve been thinking about my mother. I never knew she felt so lonely. Why must a powerful woman like Mother be outcast? Must everyone fear her, or is that just a social rule? We seem to live by so many invisible rules, and no one ever questions them or talks about them, like your hair rule.” She gestured toward Maria’s neat knot.

“We need rules, don’t we?” asked Maria, interested now, irritation forgotten. “There are always social rules.”

“Yes, but how important are they? Why does it matter how we wear our hair, or how long it is? And who makes the rules?”

“I suppose rules about hair aren’t important in any real sense. But there’s a real kind of punishment if you don’t follow them. I don’t know who makes the rules in the first place, but everyone enforces them.”

“Do you think less of me because I cut off my hair?”

“Of course not! It’s your hair, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Maria, I don’t think less of you because you had two sons with a man you weren’t married to.”

Maria felt like she’d been struck. “Oh, Rapunzel, that’s not the same at all! Marriage and children — that’s a religious rule. It’s the most powerful law there is.”

“Maybe for you, but not for me. Not for Juan, either. Why did you have to follow that rule and he didn’t?”

“Because he was a man,” Maria said with some bitterness.

“You mean different rules apply differently to men and women?”

“Why are you badgering me? You’ve confused me now.” Maria’s voice sounded angry in her own ears. “That’s enough!”

“I’m sorry. I’m only trying to understand.”

They walked along in silence. Maria strode down the damp path. Wet branches and grasses brushed against her. Sunlight shone off the river’s surface. Automatically, she watched the bank for signs of her sons. She tried to find the familiar mental resting place of dull grief and shame but Rapunzel’s questions niggled at her. Rules. So many rules. Who did make the rules? Who gave Juan the power to take her sons away from her? Why was she the only one punished for the results of their love?

The river curved and a crescent of rocky bank was exposed to sun. A fallen tree made a convenient bench. Maria left the path and jumped down onto the rocks. Rapunzel followed without comment and they set down their burdens and settled on the fallen tree trunk, side by side.

Maria watched the water flow by. Had any drop of this water news of her lost sons?

“I’m sorry. I feel like a fool. Your questions are good questions. I wonder why I’ve never thought to ask them -- and find answers. I don’t like knowing I’ve followed these rules without ever thinking about them. What am I, a sheep?”

Rapunzel laughed, then sobered. “It’s really not funny, is it? Rules carry such power. Why do you think we accept them and follow them so blindly?”

Maria frowned. “I suppose we think if we follow the rules, we’ll be safe. People will approve of us.”

“We’ll be loved?”

“Does that mean we can’t be loved unless we follow the rules?” Maria felt her temper rise again but this time it wasn’t directed at Rapunzel.

“Well,” said Rapunzel slowly, “my mother loves me, even though I broke her rules. Do you think Juan loved you?”

Maria shook her head. “I want to say yes, of course he did. I don’t think so, though. In being with him I broke rules because we weren’t married. Having children with him was evidence of breaking rules.”

“At least twice,” put in Rapunzel slyly.

Maria gave her a playful slap. Rapunzel laughed.

Maria continued, “I broke the rules because I wanted him and I was afraid if I insisted on marriage he’d go away.” She winced. “That’s hard to admit, but it’s true.”

“So, he didn’t love you because you broke the rules and you don’t think he would have loved you if you’d played by the rules?”

“I don’t think the damn rules had anything to do with it at all, except they protected him, not me. He’d nothing to lose by breaking rules.”

“You did.”

“Did I? Only because I believed in them in the first place. Only because I agreed it was important to be married because of the boys. Only because I agreed to think of myself as a whore!” She stooped and picked up a stone at her feet, flung it into the river.

“If you’re a whore, Maria, so am I.”

Maria turned on her. “Don’t you call yourself that! You’re not a whore. That’s an ugly, ugly word.”

“But I do call myself that! If a whore sleeps with a man outside of marriage, that’s what I did. I wanted to. I even liked it. I didn’t like Alexander much, especially after the first couple of weeks, but I liked the way I felt with him. I’d do it again. I’m even worse than you because you loved Juan and you thought you were building a family. I didn’t love Alex.”

Maria poked at a handful of rocks, laid them out carefully in a row on the log beneath them, chose one and threw it into the water.

“It seems to me,” said Rapunzel, “the only difference between us is you wanted to follow rules I don’t care about.”

“I never thought about following rules at all,” said Maria. “I thought about what other people thought of me and my sons. I felt ashamed. I was expected to behave in certain ways and I didn’t meet those expectations. Now we’re talking about it, I guess that’s another way of saying I cared about following the rules, but that’s not how I thought of it then.”

“If those rules made you so unhappy you wanted to kill yourself, then maybe they’re bad rules. If rules are made, can’t they be unmade? Can’t we say no, that’s a bad rule, I won’t follow it?”

Maria clenched her hands together and twisted them in her lap. “Did I murder my children because of invisible rules I didn’t make and didn’t agree to? Was it nothing more than that? I threw them in the river and watched them get swept away because of other people’s rules and expectations? Those were more important to me than my children’s lives?” Her voice rose and broke on the last word. She found herself on her feet. A bitter rage rose in her, too large to contain. She threw back her head and howled.

This was nothing like the helpless, resigned weeping of The One Who Weeps. It was a passionate, violent protest. Giving it voice wasn’t enough. Maria clawed at her hair. A pin slid out of the knot and a tail of hair untwisted. Rapunzel stood up as Maria tore at her cloak. She pulled Maria’s cloak off, took her wrist in a hard grasp and waded straight out into the middle of the river, hauling Maria along behind her.

The spring runoff had passed. The water was cold but reached only to their knees. The current was surprisingly strong and the river bed slippery underfoot. Maria hadn’t been in water since the day…the day… The pull of cold water, the uncertain footing, the heavy wet skirt dragging against her legs brought it back with terrible vivid detail. She screamed. She wouldn’t do this terrible thing. She wouldn’t do it! But it was too late. No small hand held hers, no weight rested on her hip. Even her bundle of weaving was gone. She had done it. They were gone. She’d given them to the river and the river had swallowed them. They were gone. All gone.

Rapunzel held her wrist with bruising strength. Maria’s screaming became a torrent of weeping. She pulled, trying to break Rapunzel’s grasp. Rapunzel took a step, adjusted her footing and wrapped her free arm around Maria. She began to speak. She didn’t raise her voice and her words carried no urgency.

“Maria, water is emotion. Water moves. It passes through and over. It ebbs and flows. It rises and falls. It floods and recedes. It washes everything away. It makes a new path, a new bed, a new outline. It drips, it drops. It trickles and murmurs and bubbles. It gushes and chuckles and sings. It moves up into the sky and falls down again. It flows from top to bottom and is carried up again. Its secret name is Hyash. Water is life, Maria. It’s an endless cycle of life.”

Maria hung her head and cried in deep gasps. Her voice sounded hoarse. The bottom half of her face was slimed with mucus. She stood more quietly and Rapunzel cautiously loosened her grip on Maria’s wrist. The strong arm around Maria’s body became a hug rather than a restraint. Maria pressed her forehead to Rapunzel’s. She trembled. Her shoulders heaved. The river slid around them, passed by them, pushing and pulling at their wet clothes.

They stood together, forehead to forehead, and after a time Maria realized Rapunzel wept with her.

CHAPTER 25

BRUNO

The man watched Juliana’s house and garden from his place in the tree. It made an uncomfortable perch for his thick body, but he would endure any amount of discomfort in order to satisfy his need to see her. She was too observant to miss signs of his regular visits if he stayed on the ground. He was careful to approach from different directions and made some attempt to move without leaving a trail of tell-tale broken twigs and disturbed ground. The hard tree pressed painfully against various parts of his flesh, adding to his smoldering anger and lust. Her scorn, her coldness, made it necessary for him to crouch here like an animal in the shadows. He hated her. He felt consumed by his need for her. One day he’d make her beg for his attention. He’d make her want him. He’d make her pay. One day he’d take what was his.

White stag image by Jim Cooper from Pixabay

MIRMIR

“This is part of Dar’s story,” said the Hanged Man. “I never knew Juliana. Bruno …?”

“Now comess a tale of a dessolate sseed, a tale of unlife, abortion, malformation,” Mirmir reminded him. “Now is a tale of drought, of poisoned ground, of absent sun.”

“The balance,” whispered the Hanged Man. “The story must be balanced.”

“Yess,” assented Mirmir. “Bruno played hiss part, but we won’t linger with him long.” He twined himself luxuriously around the branch from which he suspended the Hanged Man, tensing and stretching his thick coiled body. The tree creaked. “The White Stag knew.”

“The White Stag knows all, and sees all. He might have saved them,” said the Hanged Man.

“The sstory must sstay true to itsself,“ said Mirmir.

“I know,” said the Hanged Man, “let die what must. But I wish…”

“Will you hear the sstory?” interrupted the serpent.

“Go on, then,” said the Hanged Man.

BRUNO

The sound of voices came to the man and he turned his eyes from the house in the clearing to locate the speakers.

He saw a woman with a heavy knot of black hair at her neck. Her companion looked much younger. They carried packs and bundles and their voices mingled with evening birdsong.

“…a place for the night?” the young woman was asking.

“It looks like there’s a clearing ahead. We can camp there.” The dark-haired woman faltered and stopped.

“Rapunzel…do you see it?”

The two stood still, looking away between the trees at something the watching man couldn’t make out. He cursed to himself. Was he going to be seen? What was happening?

Evening mist off the river made the air hazy and heavy. He felt angry at the intrusion. Why did they interrupt what he and Juliana had?

MARIA

The White Stag stepped regally through the undergrowth towards the women.

“What is it?” asked Rapunzel, in a low, awed voice.

“I’ve seen it before,” said Maria, “near the Holy Well of Artemis. It’s a white stag. It’s…otherworldly.”

The stag stopped in front of them and regarded them out of dark eyes. Maria held out her hand, palm up, and the stag briefly dipped his muzzle into it. Maria shuddered at the power of that recognition.

“This is a creature of deep magic,” said Rapunzel. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Maria. “But it feels…good. I’m awed by it, but not afraid. It sees me clearly and it…doesn’t mind.”

Rapunzel loosened the straps of her pack and took it off, then turned her back to the White Stag. She didn’t know why she did it but she knew it was the right thing to do. The stag took a step toward her, extended its thick neck in an oddly graceful gesture and laid its muzzle against the exposed nape of her neck. Maria saw Rapunzel clench her hands and heard her involuntary gasp. The stag exhaled and inhaled noisily, once, twice, and then moved its muzzle lower to the damp patch between Rapunzel’s shoulders where the pack had lain.

When Rapunzel turned around her face was pale. She looked at Maria.

“I know,” said Maria. “Me, too.”

“What should we do?” asked Rapunzel.

“Walk on, I think. It will stop us if it wants to.”

Rapunzel shouldered her pack again and they stepped forward. The White Stag turned and walked in front of them, leading the way.

The White Stag led them on a curved path to the clearing. As they stepped out of the trees, the green sound of frogs vibrated joyously. Maria heard the tiny, ear-splitting flutes of peepers, medium-sized croaking and big bullfrogs booming in a glorious and muddled chorus together.

In the clearing stood a tiny house. A small orchard, a large garden, a chicken house and a well clustered around it. The river spread out into bog, curved gently, narrowed and deepened again. Blossoming fruit trees were alive with humming bees. Chickens scratched and wandered about. The garden was neatly fenced, a mixture of newly laid out rows and clumps of old leaves and stalks showing fresh growth.

The White Stag led them into the orchard. Under the trees he paused, regarding them out of dark eyes. He raised his head so his antlers mingled with low branches jeweled with pink blossom. A mist came off the river. Maria never forgot the sight of the glowing, ghostly coat, the crown of pink and white blossoms and background of river mist, all against the clamor of frogs. Fallen petals sprinkled the stag’s shoulder.

Maria heard a step behind her in the orchard grass. She turned and a woman materialized in a pink shirt and rose-colored skirt. The wet hem was stained a richer color of pink. Water beaded her mass of unruly hair. Mist was turning to fog now.

“Hello, my friend,” said the woman, and threw her arms around the stag’s massive neck. “There’s a crown fit for a king. Did you bring visitors?”

The stag nuzzled her affectionately, turned and disappeared into the cloudy air.

“Come in with me. We can’t talk out here!” The woman took each of them by the hand and hurried under the trees. She opened a door at the back of the house, cautioned them to duck under a low lintel, and pulled them inside.

“Stand there a minute while I make a light.”

She shucked off her boots and lit a lamp. Her feet were bare. They stood in a neat kitchen, with butcher block, sink, clean cup and plate drying in a rack.

Gratefully, Maria loosened her straps and took off her pack. With their burdens on the floor, the kitchen seemed at once to be too crowded.

“Come in where we can sit.”

The only seating consisted of a low chair and hassock by the fire and a stool in front of a large loom. The loom, Maria saw, stood empty. The woman tossed cushions onto a cream-colored rug with a rough textured nap in front of the fire and lit lamps.

Her hair was a strange mixture of silver and gold, curling and springing around her face and down her shoulders. Maria judged her to be her own age, possibly older. She sat down in the chair and swung her feet up onto the hassock. A toe ring gleamed.

“I’m Juliana. The White Stag never brought me visitors before. You must be friends!”

Maria and Rapunzel introduced themselves and for some time they sat getting to know one another in the gentle way of women at ease, asking and answering questions and establishing connection in small impersonal ways. Later they shared a meal and later yet they settled down to sleep, Juliana in her bed in a tiny closet of a room off the main room, and Maria and Rapunzel in front of the cold hearth.

The next morning dawned clear and warm and Maria, waking early, searched the river and marsh for any sign of her sons. She slid Juliana’s rubber boots over her bare feet. Outside the door, she met an orange cat, who greeted her in a friendly manner with raised tail and a polite comment. It slipped in as she stepped out.

The morning frog song was muted and her sloshing steps through the bog resulted in temporary pockets of offended silence. The river looked lazy and glassy in the morning light. Drops of water beaded stem, twig, leaf and blade. Later, she would empty her bundles and wash her clothes in the river. She would wash herself, too, stretch out naked and let the current gentle the miles away from her body and hair. Since Rapunzel had stood knee-deep in the river with her while she gave up some of her grief and anger, she felt able to be in water’s healing embrace again.

The well was cool and dark. Ferns grew in crevices between the rocks that made a wall around its throat. She couldn’t see the bottom, but the bucket splashed about ten feet down. The water tasted sweet and green. The grass was sprinkled with violets and a cluster of creamy pink mushrooms.

Juan and Carlos weren’t there.

***

While Rapunzel spent long hours in the garden helping Juliana, Maria sat at the loom. The first morning, Juliana found her sitting on the stool running her fingers longingly over it. Maria had already shared her story.

“I’m between projects, Maria. Would you like to weave something?”

“I couldn’t,” said Maria. But her fingers danced in and out of the strung loom.

“Why not?”

“Then you can’t use it. And I don’t know how long we’ll stay. It’ll take some time. Where would I buy material?”

“Are you afraid?”

Maria swallowed and dropped her hands into her lap.

“Yes.”

Juliana opened a chest against the wall. She came back to the loom with two baskets filled with neatly wound hanks of fiber. “I hope you’ll stay a long time. Rapunzel is going to help me in the garden. Weave me something I can trade during market day.” She looked into Maria’s dark eyes. “Call yourself back, Maria. Call yourself home.”

After a while the cat came in, made a nest, and slept in one of the baskets. At some point, Maria was vaguely aware of voices in the kitchen, but no one disturbed her.

In the evenings, the three women took a lantern and blankets out to the orchard when the weather was fair. If it was foggy or rainy, they made a fire and relaxed on cushions and talked.

Juliana told of her years as Waiting Woman. Rapunzel was delighted with the hidden thin gold chain around her belly and the charm with its single word, “precious.”

They compared stories about the White Stag, Maria and Rapunzel fascinated by Juliana’s night with the stag man.

“What do you think he is?” asked Rapunzel.

“I don’t know. I haven’t tried to know. He’s like the forest made into one being. He’s wild, you know? Untamed. Wise. He gave me what I most needed that night, though I didn’t know exactly what it was myself. He looked into me, somehow.”

“It was like that for me, too,” said Maria. “I stood there feeling so ugly, like a stain in that beautiful place around the Well of Artemis, and the other girls were so innocent and young — unblemished. I wanted more than anything to belong there, to be clean and beautiful all the way through, but I knew I was dirty, foul beyond hope…and then he came and saw me, smelled me, and he accepted me. He didn’t turn away. And I felt…allowed. He gave me what I most needed and wanted, though I didn’t know what that was.”

One evening, as they lay on their backs in the grass under the boughs and watched the night insects twirling around the hanging lantern, Juliana told them about Morfran.

Rapunzel stirred. “It sounds so beautiful. I’m glad to know something like that can happen, that there are men in the world like that. I want something like that. But what if I never find it and I never find anything else, either, because I don’t want to settle for less?”

“Waiting for the right man is twice as hard when you’re waiting with the wrong man,” said Juliana. “Take it from me. I think it’s better to make a life out of loving ourselves than hurt ourselves with something less than we want.”

“Isn’t that like waiting for a prince on a white horse, though?” Rapunzel clapped a hand over her mouth. “My God, what am I saying? I take it back! Spare me the prince on a white horse! Anyway, it wasn’t white. Close up it was a dirty kind of grey.”

Maria said with some exasperation, “Honestly, people lack imagination. Why can’t it be a princess on a black horse with bared breasts and short hair? Why can’t the prince be the one who waits?”

“How about a naked middle-aged broad with a toe ring?” asked Juliana. “Why isn’t anyone dreaming of her?”

“Amen, sister!” Maria nearly shouted.

They filled the orchard with laughter, shocking the frogs into momentary silence.

“I love the frogs,” said Maria when their mirth had subsided and the frogs resumed. “They make me smile. They’re so…”

“Persistent?” asked Juliana.

“Deafening?” said Rapunzel.

“Yes,” replied Maria. “They insist on being themselves. Nobody can make them be quiet.”

“Ah,” said Juliana. “You remind me of a story Morfran told me about a little sparrow called Cassandra…”

“Poor little bird,” said Rapunzel softly when the story was finished. “I’m so glad she flew away.”

“We all flew away,” said Juliana simply.

“Be silent,” said Maria to herself. “Be silent. Yes.”

“Not yes, no!” said Rapunzel.

“I mean no,” Maria laughed, pretending to cower away from her. “I mean, no, I won’t be silent! No! No! Yes, I won’t be silent! No!”

“Oh, shut up!” said Rapunzel, and the three of them lay and sent laughter up to whirl with the light-drugged insects, the blossom-laden branches and the spangled night sky.

The pattern on the loom gradually took shape. Maria never spoke of it beyond asking for opinions about which hank most exactly matched the White Stag’s coat. The colors were different than what Maria used in her old life. Juliana’s yarn was in more neutral, natural shades. She found pink, light but rich, and set that carefully aside. She asked Juliana to save the hair from her comb. In every row, she wove one of the silver or gold hairs. They were all but invisible in the overall pattern but they brought the weaving into subtle gleaming life.

One evening, as the frogs tuned up (Maria thought of it as the time when the thin day shift gave way to the much larger and busier night shift), she asked Rapunzel and Juliana to close their eyes and tell her what color they heard.

“Color?” asked Juliana. “Color of what? What do you mean?”

“Close your eyes,” said Maria patiently. “Now, listen. Can you smell the bog and river?”

“Yes.”

“And the trees blossoming,” put in Rapunzel.

“Good. Now, listen for the color of the evening and everything it contains.”

“Hardly room for anything but the frogs!” said Juliana.

“So, listen. What color are they?”

“Well…” said Juliana slowly. “It’s obvious and maybe not what you want, but…green.”

“Yes,” said Rapunzel, head tilted, eyes closed. “But a thread of brown—there—where the bullfrogs are. A rich brown, but not too dark. Like a cattail, maybe?”

“Like the way the water looks flowing over rocks on an early summer morning. Sort of tea-colored but clear,” said Juliana.

“That’s it!” said Rapunzel. “You’re good at this. Let’s see, what else? Green, and brown… Maybe a hint of blue? Pale blue, like a puddle of water when the mud isn’t disturbed? Or like the river when the sun’s high and the sky’s clear?”

“Thank you,” said Maria, and returned to the loom.

For a long time, Maria had forgotten the place of not thinking. She’d filled the emptiness of thought with memories of Juan and her children the way bitter smoke clouds a fresh sky. Now, weaving again, she rediscovered the inner stillness where nothing existed but color and texture, line and pattern. She didn’t do. She didn’t have. She merely was. Time lost its power. Guilt and shame were absent. Nothing existed but the weaving and the loom. Rising from the stool, straightening her back and neck, remembering how to speak, set a table, prepare a meal, wash an armful of clothes, was an effortful journey from the deep center in which she wove. Falling back into it past the necessity of tasks and communication with the others, past the shoulds and musts of life, past the fear of appearing selfish, lazy or uncooperative, was equally difficult.

Yet the loom called her home and her initial tentative return transformed into calm confidence. She belonged in front of the loom. It was what she was for. What had Mary said? It was her love letter to life.

She wondered how she’d ever left it.

RAPUNZEL

One day, Rapunzel noticed Maria had taken apart some of her work, reducing the piece on the loom by nearly half. It had looked flawless to her own eye, but she supposed Maria had her reasons and refrained from comment. The next day Rapunzel found a new color in the pattern, a dark bruised purple paired with a lighter, more playful violet shade.

Alexander’s eye was open. It still made her shudder, carrying it and touching it privately so often in its dark pocket, if it was open.

After her meeting with Maria and her mother, she felt more inclined to believe the open eye was a message to her, a sign to watch for something or someone. She’d followed its guidance surreptitiously since she and Maria left the lake town. She was glad it seemed to want to the follow the river with Maria.

Now it had remained open ever since they’d left the lake town. Not once did she find it closed. It never slept. Its unwavering alertness made her uneasy. Once she arrived in the lake town the eye slept off and on, as though relaxed, making her feel she was in the right place and all was well. Why was it so vigilant in this place?

When she looked at Maria’s weaving and the thin, wandering threads of mingled deep purple and violet, she felt the same unease. There was something unsettling about it. It was like an itch in her mind. The colors didn’t seem to go with the rest of the pattern, and yet were integral, she could see that. They must be there. The textured, nappy white background wasn’t white, exactly, but a creamy, organic color, unmistakably that of the White Stag. The flowing borders of brown and green and a touch of blue were river, bog, frog song. The clear pink was the crown of blossoms the White Stag had worn that first evening and Juliana herself, like an animated flower in the evening mist in her rose-colored skirt and pink shirt. Thin gleaming gold and silver hairs could hardly be seen and at the same time were impossible to overlook. And that wandering, weaving, inexorable purple thread. Was it menacing or playful? Rapunzel didn’t know. But it made her uncomfortable.

BRUNO

Bruno watched from his perch in the tree. His anger with the intruders simmered a little hotter every day. The woman with the dark knot of hair was not so much in evidence as the young one with her ugly cap of yellow. A woman’s hair should be long and curl and cling, shining silver and gold in the sun, like Juliana’s. He hated the short-haired woman. He hated her competence in the garden. He resented her frequent laughter and her physical affection with Juliana. She wasn’t fit to touch his woman. It wasn’t her place to spend the summer days with his woman.

With all his being he wished them gone, these interlopers. They ruined his pleasure in the hours watching and waiting for a glimpse of Juliana. They bathed and did laundry, worked in the garden, lounged in the sun, cleaned out the henhouse. He saw them dressed and undressed, at play and at work, and remained unmoved. He would rather see Juliana come out of the house and draw water from the well for three minutes than watch the woman with the ugly short hair bathe naked in the river for half an hour.

He told himself he’d wait until they departed, find other things to do and watch no more, but he couldn’t stop himself from stealing through the trees every day. He told himself he’d just check to see if she was alone again and spent miserable hours watching anyway when he found she wasn’t.

It was ruined. Nothing ever came right for him.

MARIA

Rapunzel and Juliana planned at breakfast to spend the day working on the chicken coop. The roof leaked and the fence was inadequate against foxes. Rapunzel borrowed a ragged pair of overalls and Juliana tied up her hair in a brightly flowered dishtowel stained with berry juice. They assembled hammer, nails and chicken wire and left Maria to finish her work.

She sat for a time with the finished cloth draped across her lap, feeling peaceful, satisfied and pleasantly remote. After a little she left the loom and went outside to hand Rapunzel nails, silent but glad to be with the other women as they worked. She picked up a shovel and began the dirty job of cleaning the floor under the perches, shoveling straw, manure and feathers into a wheelbarrow. Gradually, she joined in the conversation.

Rapunzel announced she was hungry and called a halt. They sat in the sun and ate cold meat, bread, and fresh greens.

“I’m finished,” Maria said quietly.

“I want to see,” said Rapunzel at once.

“Tonight.”

Filthy but pleased with themselves and the newly reinforced chicken coop, they stripped off their clothes and let the river wash away sweat and dust. Juliana nursed a sore thumb from a miss with the hammer.

When they were clean, they sat in the grass and dried naked in the sun, leaving their clothes where they’d dropped them.

“We’ll do laundry tomorrow,” said Juliana lazily. “They can lie here for the night. As if in agreement, the cat appeared, kneaded briefly in the heap of clothes, and lay down.

Clean, clothed and refreshed, they gathered around the loom. Maria’s weaving lay draped over it.

Without a word, Juliana picked it up and took it out into the evening light.

Maria knew it was one of the best things she’d ever done. It was also unlike anything she’d ever done. She waited to see what they’d say.

Rapunzel and Juliana bent over it, tracing patterns with their fingers, feeling the texture. Juliana picked the weaving up by two corners and swung it behind her and over her shoulders. With one hand, she freed her hair from under it and let it fall in its usual glorious tangle.

She laid her hand against Maria’s cheek. “This is the most beautiful piece of weaving I’ve ever seen. I’ll treasure it the rest of my life. Thank you.”

She stood proudly with lifted chin, and the blend of colors and patterns wrapped around her as though she was a queen. Maria never forgot the sight of her, clothed like a bride in the pattern of her own life.

That evening, after they’d eaten and put the kitchen to bed, Rapunzel showed them the eye.

She set it on the table. It rolled and came to rest, the eye looking at Juliana. Maria was both fascinated and horrified.

“Rapunzel! You’ve carried this all along?”

“Yes. I reach into my pocket and touch it many times a day. Most evenings, when I’m alone, I take it out and look at it. It has power. I’m not sure how to use it yet, but I’ll learn.”

Rapunzel looked at Juliana, who sat as though paralyzed by the gaze of the blue eye. “I’m trying to understand why the eye is open here. I’m afraid for you. I think maybe it’s a warning of some kind. When I look at the purple thread in Maria’s weaving, I feel the same way I do when I think of this open eye. Something about it seems wrong. No, not wrong. It seems so right, that color and thin thread in the pattern. Right but scary, something frightening around you.”

Purple abstract image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

“I don’t know what that purple thread is,” said Maria slowly. “I had a clear picture in my mind of the pattern and I was well into the weaving before I realized something was missing. I don’t like the thread either, to tell you the truth, but it needed to be there. I had to take what I’d done off the loom and begin again with this in it. The color doesn’t go with anything else but at the same time this part of the pattern goes with everything else. I can’t explain.” She reached out and traced the wandering purple in the weaving lying over Juliana’s shoulders like a shawl.

Juliana sighed. “Rapunzel, move that marble, or eye, or whatever it is so it’s not looking at me, will you? I don’t want to touch it and I can’t think with it staring at me.”

Rapunzel poked at the eye and it rolled slightly so it directed its gaze into the table top.

“Thanks.” Juliana settled the weaving around her shoulders and leaned back in her chair, relieved.

“You know what I think of when I look at this purple thread?” she asked Maria.

“No. What?”

“I hear the sound of a flute,” said Juliana with an apologetic smile. “It’s not the green fluting of the frogs here,” she pointed to the blended bands of green and brown with their hint of blue. “It’s a…mmm…more playful sound, a joyful sound, but it moves. It wanders, like the pattern. It’s like a bird call you might hear from a distance, moving closer and then farther away. Mysterious and attractive.”

“Yes,” said Rapunzel. “I know what you mean! That’s the lighter color, I think. I feel that, too. That part doesn’t bother me. But there’s something underneath, something darker and more menacing — isn’t there?”

“So, is it one thing with two faces or two things that somehow go together?” asked Maria.

“You tell us,” said Rapunzel.

“I can’t. Do you think this is what the eye sees?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it’s your life,” said Maria to Juliana. “What do you think about it all? Why are we guessing?” She felt cross.

Juliana ran her fingers over the shawl’s folds. Maria and Rapunzel watched her silently, aware of unspoken words hanging in the air.

“There is something!” said Rapunzel. “Tell us.”

Juliana looked up with a hint of defiance. “But there’s always something, isn’t there?” she asked. “That’s life.” There’s always a thread somewhere in everybody’s life that doesn’t work quite right, or is painful or even actively threatening. I’m not special.”

“You are to us,” said Maria.

Juliana’s face twisted and Maria realized with amazement she was trying not to cry.

“Juliana?”

“Oh, all right. It’s a bit of a story, though.”

“Tell,” ordered Rapunzel.

“Well, you know I came here after I stopped waiting.”

The other two nodded.

“I ran into the White Stag and then I found this place and it felt like home.”

They nodded again.

“There’s a village nearby. It’s a pretty place but the people are…simple. Very God-fearing.”

Maria winced.

“Everyone goes to church. There’re a lot of rules. So, I come along and I don’t go to church. I’m a woman alone, no man, no children. Nobody knows where I’ve come from or anything about me. I don’t dress the way they think I should and my hair is like an insult.” She smiled mischievously. “I must confess I enjoy that part!”

Rapunzel giggled.

“I find this place and it suits me. There are a few others living here outside the town, all outcasts, people who don’t fit in. I can’t do anything like this kind of work,” she smoothed the weaving again, “but I love to weave linen and I’ve supported myself with that. I take my work into the market and sell or trade for what I need.”

“These aren’t bad people, just limited. After I settled here, I started a kind of private game of giving my work away anonymously. I would hear about a wedding at the market and drop off a set of linen sheets for the marriage bed. If I heard of an impending birth, I made a gown or two, and provided some sheets and pieces for the birth and the baby. When someone died, I left a shroud. I like to lay those over the lavender and rosemary bushes so the scent folds into them. Nobody knows it’s me. The villagers think they’re some kind of a gifts from God because they’re so devout.”

“Oh, Juliana!” said Rapunzel.

“I know,” said Juliana. “It started as a small contribution I could make. I didn’t think they’d accept the gifts if they knew they came from me.”

Maria remembered her village, the heads of the old people together, whispering, condemning, judging…

“I bet they don’t even know your name,” she said shrewdly.

Juliana looked down into her lap.

“They call me ‘the woman with the silvery gold hair.’”

“What about the others in the forest?” asked Rapunzel. “Have you made friends among them?”

“No. Some are hunters and they wander from place to place, never truly settling down. Some are quite poor and have too many children to support. They live in poverty and ignorance. The charcoal burner and his wife and son live here. The charcoal burner’s son is rather a problem.”

Now, thought Maria, we’re getting to it.

“A problem how?” she asked.

“The charcoal burner’s a brute. He’s a big, rough man. I hardly ever see his wife and when I do, she’s always bruised and cut. They have a son, a young man. I think he probably had a hard time growing up. He never looks battered, but he’s the same size as his father now. He slouches around in the forest and has a disconcerting habit of appearing suddenly in my path. He’s…friendly.”

Maria made a sound of distress.

Juliana looked up quickly. “It’s all right,” she assured. “I’ve made myself clear. I’m years older than he is. I think more than anything he’s attracted because I’m clean and colorful and happy. He’s never seen a woman like me. He probably wants a mother figure more than anything. He’s not very bright. He never learned anything growing up.” She glanced at the eye on the table. “I always carry my knife.”

They’d seen the knife. It was razor sharp and she wore it under her clothes and used it frequently in garden and forest.

“I don’t like the sound of this,” said Rapunzel. “Is this the purple thread?” She turned to Maria.

Maria looked at Juliana.

“It might be,” Juliana said reluctantly. “But don’t forget, it’s only a thread. The White Stag is a much bigger part of the weaving, and the river and bog, and the blooming trees. This is only a small part wandering through. I said before, everyone has something like that in their lives.”

“Are you safe here, Juli?” asked Maria.

“It’s my home. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

“But you’re so alone!”

“I have what I need,” said Juliana stubbornly. “The White Stag is nearby.”

With that they must be content, Maria realized. Rapunzel picked up the eye, rolling it thoughtfully in her palm.

***

Once the weaving was finished, Maria began to feel an urgency to continue her search. She wanted to see the sea. It was time to leave.

Yet she didn’t want to leave Juliana.

She talked with Rapunzel, who intended to stay longer. Juliana herself said she’d be pleased for them both to stay indefinitely, but understood Maria’s need to move on.

Once her mind was made up, a few days of preparation passed quickly and Maria found herself standing in the sun embracing Rapunzel, and then Juliana, and then Rapunzel again, with her pack on her back and the long summer day in front of her.

***

Maria crested a low hill and found the sea. The air looked milky with humidity, the sky pale and blending into muted green and gold land, and there on the horizon the sea lay like a gently palpitating blanket of pearly mist. She left the winding river course and struck out in a straight line toward it.

It was farther away than it looked. As the sun climbed, the color of the day intensified and the mist burned off. The coastline was rocky; bluffs and cliffs took shape as she neared them. The sun felt warmly comforting and then hot. Maria’s clothes hung damp and her skin grew sticky.

On she went, determined to see waves meet land. She didn’t think of finding her sons. She was conscious of no plan and no hope. She only wanted to get there.

For a long time, she stood looking out over the water. She’d put aside her bundle and stood with bare soles. Waves creamed up over rocks and between her toes, feeling sticky and somehow heavy against her feet. It was quiet except for the ocean’s sough, like the breathing of a great beast. Nothing else moved, not even a bird. She felt like the only living human being in the world. An irregular line of drying plant matter — seaweed, she thought, marveling — and debris lay on the shingle above where waves lapped. Under her feet lay smooth stones, bits of shell, now and then a piece of wet wood, and scoured pieces of broken stuff she thought must be glass. Was this sea glass? The colors were muted and cool, grey and tan and pale water colors with a tinge of pink. Stone and shell and wood. Milky colors. Cool neutral colors for a large rug in a room flooded with sun. It would be fun to use different weights of wool to provide subtle texture under a bare foot.

She wandered, seeing patterns, lulled by the waves, her mind empty of everything but each moment’s sensation. The sea sighed to her left and the rocky bluff rose into a cliff on her right. Hidden in a fold of the cliff she found an opening like a wide shadow. A cave.

She approached it over dry, smooth sand that coated her bare wet feet, stepping out of sunlight into cooler air. There was a strong smell of sea and underneath it another smell, something familiar. It was only a tang, gone before she could identify it. She walked forward, wondering if the sea reached this far and washed in and out of the cave. The crack widened. Rocky walls moved farther apart and she wondered how she could see — why she could see in a cave. Was there an opening overhead? Walking forward, she looked from side to side and up, but realized the light wasn’t daylight but a dim flickering light that released shadows more than it illuminated.

She turned a corner and found a fire burning and a huge squatting black iron kettle. The figure of a woman with a mass of matted hair down her back turned to look at her, turned smoothly, glided with a muscular coiling movement that wasn’t human at all, and Maria saw pendulous breasts, a sharp outthrust chin reaching up to meet a bony nose, and below raddled, puckered, sagging skin on the upper body the thick smooth form of a snake ending in a blunt tapering tail like a flaccid thumb.

It — she? — brandished a slender pale stick with shreds of dark material clinging to it. “The One Who Weeps, as I live and breathe! And as you live and breathe, too!” She cackled. “I’ve been waiting for you. Every day I take a little drink, a special little drink of your tears. They stain the sea, yes they do, stain the sea and coat the tongue and I dip them out, one by precious one, and roll them in my mouth!”

The thing leered and moved forward with sinuous motion. Maria stood still, her own mouth puckered and dry with horror as though she herself had been drinking salt water. Her eyes fixed on what the creature held. Every muscle in her body cowered and clenched. She groped with her mind — what was it? What word named it, that slender object with an obscenely rounded end and dark shreds hanging from it? Her heart pounded and squirmed in her chest, in her throat, like a panicked thing, and still she couldn’t name what her eyes saw, but she must, she must recognize it and name it and understand…

The creature casually brought it up to her mouth and gnawed at it, sucked at it, ran a scabrous tongue over the curving end, and Maria thought, Bone! It’s a bone! That’s it — a half-gnawed bone! In the same instant, she understood the fleeting odor at the mouth of the cave. It was blood, of course. Blood and rotting flesh. A distant scream began to rise from every cell of her skin, from the delicate fronds of each nerve, from the powerful smooth muscle coiled and hanging like fruit in her belly, from the sponge of her lungs, while a logical, cool detached voice in her head said, ‘Chicken? Beef? Pork? Fish?’ Then the scream swept aside that voice, obliterated it in a wave of metallic horror and she knew, she knew…

Greedily, the thing watched her face, feeding on her confusion, her fear, and the rupture of her last defenses. It threw back its head and shrieked with laughter and that laugh severed Maria from consciousness. She pitched forward gratefully into nothingness.

When she became aware again, she heard, “Now, what did I do with my pretties? What did I do? Where are you hiding, my daubs and dobies? Come to Baba, my beauties! Come to my hand, naughty ones!”

Maria opened her eyes and saw the flickering light and shadow of firelight. Her cheek lay against sand. She closed her eyes again, retreating into dullness, numbness, darkness. She wouldn’t wake up. She wouldn’t. She would lie here until she died and refuse to think anymore, see anymore, feel anymore.

“There you are! There you are, my pretty taws!” The voice crooned and Maria heard a gentle clinking sound, like pebbles being stirred. She wondered if this thing would kill her and hoped so. Perhaps it would kill her and eat… but her mind shied away. Mustn’t think of eating. Mustn’t think of anything.

“Ha! There you are, my ducks! You and you…yes, yesss, you two as well! The rest of you go back to your bed and sleep and wait…. waaiitt. Your time is yet to come.” Again, Maria heard the clinking and then a soft thump like a small weight being tossed onto the sand.

“Sit up, girl. It’s too late for quitsies now. Too late. What’s seen can’t be unseen. What’s known can’t be unknown, no, no. Pandora’s jar is opened. Bluebeard’s chamber is unlocked. And you needn’t think I’ll help you escape. The Lamia eats children, Weeping One, the children of women. I’ve eaten my fill — for now. You’re not a child and you stink. You stink of burnt offering. What use are weeping and wailing and searching and seeking? An easy life, that! A cowardly life!”

Maria sat up numbly. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. There was nothing left to lose now, no place left to hide. Pretense and defense alike had been swept away by the sight of the Lamia chewing on one of her son’s bones. Grief and penitence and self-loathing had cushioned her for a time from what she’d done, but the Lamia was right. Her long search, her restless wandering and endless weeping were a sterile martyrdom healing nothing and making up for nothing. She felt too weary even to hate herself. It was over and she felt hollowed out, emptied.

The Lamia glided close, held out her closed hand. Her nails looked like iron claws. Maria extended her palm and felt four small, round objects dropped into it. She closed her hand around them, rose clumsily to her feet and left the cave without another word.

The sun slid down the sky. Maria sat with her back against the cliff and her face in warm light. The sea flowed in and out in curling-edged waves on the shingle. The sound comforted and the touch of the sun felt kind. She opened her palm and looked at what lay there.

Four white marbles of medium size, white marbles with a round brown iris and a black pupil in each one.

Maria closed her fingers, leaned her head against the crumbling face of the cliff and shut her eyes against the sun. She took a deep breath. Wave after wave of memories washed over her.

Juan’s first day. Standing inside the door, looking out with her new baby in her arms and knowing that day was the first day in an entirely different life. Her low chair by the fire, her bared breast, the fierce suck of the infant on her tender nipple and the hot pleasure of her milk letting down in jets that the baby gulped greedily. The small clenched brown fist waving. Brown eyes, dark, like melting chocolate, staring up into her face with the wide, wondering gaze of the very young. Dark, dark eyes like her own, spaced wide apart, fringed with damp lashes. As he nursed his gaze softened, became less intent, and his lids fell. His suckling grew less and less urgent and then stopped, though he still held her nipple in the soft vacuum of his mouth. The heavy damp weight of him, the baby smell of clean sun-dried diaper and breast milk, the line of thin dribbled milk from his slack mouth as he fell into deep sleep and released her nipple, wet and molded by his palate and gums.

Carlos. A laughing child. His round cheeks pushing his eyes into slits when he smiled. They were lighter brown, like coffee dashed with cream, like sunlight on dark water. Carlos, surrounded by pots, pans and spoons on the kitchen floor. Carlos laughing at a hen pecking in the yard. Carlos unwinding a hank of wool with glee, draping and tangling it all over the room. Carlos bringing her a handful of stones, a wilted flower, a cricket, a frog, smiling into her eyes, toddling around the house like a drunken sailor with his diaper half way to his fat knees.

She opened her eyes and looked again, rolling the marbles gently in her palm.

“I’m sorry,” she said to them. “I don’t ask for forgiveness. I don’t ask for understanding. You were the joy of my life and I killed you. There’s nothing I can do to take it back or make it right. I loved you so much.” Her voice broke.

Clutching the marbles tightly in one hand, she took out her bedroll and made a shallow depression in the sand against the cliff to lie in. She wasn’t hungry. She put a blanket around her shoulders and sat against the cliff watching the sun sink and the water ebb and flow. Stars came out. The dark air felt warm and soft. She slept sitting up with the marbles in her hand.

She dreamed. She sat by the fire and watched Juan at her loom. He was weaving and she marveled, because she hadn’t taught him to do this. “Listen, my mother,” he said, serious, “and I’ll tell you a story.”

“A red desert hides under a wing. It lies on the path of every journey. Into every life comes a time to wander lost in the red desert. Nephthys, Lady of Bones, lives there. You can meet her.

You’ll know her by her ancient eyes. She’s so old, she’s once again a child. The sole of her right foot is red and the sole of her left is black, for she straddles the border between fertile black earth and red desert. She’ll lead you to your bones.

Nephthys plays with the red desert, rolling in its arms and tickling it to make it reveal its treasure of bones. She takes the bones to her cave and lays them on the sandy floor, and when she has a skeleton assembled, she sits before her fire and thinks about what she’ll weave.

When she’s ready, she dances around the bones, hopping, skipping, crooning and chanting, firelight playing with her shadow on the wall.

As she sings, tissue, vessel and nerve entwine the bones, connecting them. She skips around and around and weaves flesh and fur or scales or feathers. She dances and a snake made of dots and dashes and lozenges ripples around her arm while gold earrings sway against her neck, and the creature on the cave floor breathes and opens its eyes.

Nephthys laughs, and the red desert giggles with her while a live creature leaps up and goes running, free and wild, down the canyon.”

Maria wept, tears falling from under her closed eyes as she dreamed.

“Mama,” said Carlos, “Mama.”

“Mi Madre, gather our bones from the Lamia. Follow the cave. It will take you to the navel of the desert under the wing. Go to the Lady of Bones.”

“’ady of ‘ones,” echoed Carlos.

“Make a life with our bones,” said Juan. “Mama, make a life with our bones.”

“’Ife,” said Carlos. “’Ife.”

Maria woke.

Morning sky over the sea was like a pearl.

***

The cave was dark and bitter with the smell of cold embers and rancid meat. The Lamia wasn’t there. Morning sun illuminated the crack and laid a wide finger on the cave wall. By its dim light, Maria discovered the iron kettle and jumble of bones within. She had no way to carry them.

Looking around, she spied a large rumpled piece of heavy cloth like a tarp. She spread it out and piled the bones on it, handling the pathetic, fragile white shapes with tenderness. The smell brought thick saliva into her mouth and she swallowed repeatedly. She found no skulls and didn’t know if she felt glad or sorry.

When the kettle was empty, she knotted three corners of the tarp together. She would drag it by the fourth. She put her back to the sunlit crack and the sound of sea and walked into shadows, dragging the bones along the sandy floor of the cave behind her. She half expected to come up against a cave wall but every step revealed the next. Another six or seven steps brought her into near total darkness.

She found herself in a stone corridor about six feet wide. Sand felt fine and dry under her feet. The floor was fairly level. The corridor was not absolutely straight but jogged slightly to one side and then the other. She kept her free arm extended, brushing the left-hand wall with her fingertips.

A faint white light, dim as starlight, came from somewhere. She stopped, looking for the source. She couldn’t reach the ceiling. When she looked up, she found only blackness. She looked back at the tarp.

The heap of bones knotted into the rough pocket of tarp emitted a faint, pale light. She pulled out a slender bone about four inches long. It felt unpleasantly greasy under her fingers, but the spectral light was enough to warn her of any sudden abyss in the cave’s floor. Bone in one hand like a torch’s ghost, tarp corner in the other, she walked forward.

“Show me the way,” she whispered.

Being in such darkness dislocated her sense of time and distance. For uncounted steps, she saw nothing but the stony hallway and dim light. She took another step and discovered light ahead. It wasn’t daylight or bonelight, but a flickering, warm living light like a fire. Did the Lamia wait for her in another cave ahead? The Lamia, or something worse?

The corridor narrowed. Now she smelled wood burning. The bone in her hand knocked against the ceiling. She felt claustrophobic. Would the corridor narrow down to a slot she couldn’t make her way through? Firelight grew brighter. She bent her head, stooping. The dragging tarp brushed the corridor’s walls and she pulled harder against the resistance.

She stepped out into a wide cave, saw a cheerful fire and a figure bending over something next to it. The figure stood upright, turning toward her. She saw a child on two legs, not the coils of a snake. The air smelled dry and clean, wood smoke like incense. Next to the fire, on the sandy ground, a partial skeleton lay like a disarticulated puzzle. She saw four legs and a skull with a long canine nose. Too large to be a fox, Maria thought. Perhaps a coyote. Months later she would weave a blanket out of ivory and sand, grey and brown, shot through with warm orange and red.

The child stepped forward. She wore a rag of cloth draped around her hips. Her hair was bound into a thick bundle of tight black curls. She smiled, and Maria saw glinting gold earrings.

“Oh, good! My tarp! You found it!”

Maria opened her mouth, said nothing, and closed it again.

Nephthys, for it could only be her, came forward, gently took the bone out of Maria’s hand, turned it over in her own, studying it intently, and carefully placed it with the others. She took the corner of the tarp and pulled it off to one side, against the cave wall.

“Tomorrow we’ll finish cleaning these,” she said. “They’ll be safe until then.”

She took Maria by the hand, shook out a blanket with a snap of her free hand, dropped it by the fire, divested Maria of her pack and pushed her down onto it.

“Let’s eat.”

A small iron pot hung over the fire. Nephthys stirred it, ladled the contents onto a tin plate and handed it to Maria, along with a cup of water and a spoon.

Maria tasted the food. It was meat, mild and tender, in broth with starchy roots, seasoned with something like chilis. Maria ate without pausing until the plate was empty and then drained the cup. The water tasted warm and sweet.

Nephthys squatted once more over the skeleton. She was working on one of the paws. A heavy canvas cloth, much like the one Maria had taken from the Lamia’s cave, lay next to the fire with a jumble of bones on it. From this larger pile, Nephthys sorted a smaller heap of bones and picked these up one by one, piecing together the framework of the coyote’s paw as Maria watched.

Maria set plate and cup aside. At the mouth of the cave, she looked out into a night landscape of canyon walls and stars. The air smelled of sagebrush and sunbaked stone. The night held no scent, sound or sight of water.

Maria fell down into sleep listening to the child’s murmuring chant as she clothed coyote bones with life.

The next morning, Maria followed Nephthys out of the cave, stepping down onto a broad, flat slab of rock and then making her way along a twisting, narrow path, steep and stony, after the nimble child. Nephthys’s confident grace made Maria feel old and brittle.

The path took them to the cool-shadowed floor of the canyon. As they walked along the sandy floor the walls fell away, or the floor rose, though Maria had no sense of walking uphill. The heat increased with every step, the cool shadows retreating until Maria found herself in a red landscape of desert, the sun glaring like a fiery eye.

Nephthys skipped in circles and spirals, humming to herself, arms outstretched as though she might fly at any moment. Her earrings gleamed in the harsh light. She led Maria to a large mound of gravel housing an ant colony, and they laid the children’s bones carefully onto it. The black creatures flowed eagerly over the bones. Nephthys smiled.

“We’ll come back later,” she told Maria. She turned away, folded tarp under her arm. “I’m going out to play.”

Maria returned alone up the twisting canyon and climbed to the cave. Sitting cross-legged in the cave entrance in a patch of hot sunlight, a young man carved a nubbin of bone. He set this aside as Maria climbed up to him. His dark hair flopped into his eyes, straight and glossy. He looked Indian to Maria, with olive skin and dark almond-shaped eyes. His smile was friendly. He moved over in invitation and she sat down next to him in the sun on the doorstep, resting her feet on the stone below.

“I’m Kunik.”

“I’m Maria.”

“Did you come to see Nephthys?”

“I think so,” she said uncertainly.

He laughed. “You don’t know?”

“Did you come to see her?” she asked, sidestepping the question.

“I’m here as a sort of apprentice. I don’t put together skeletons but I make things -- carve things, you see?” He put a half-carved seal in her hand. It fit conveniently into her palm, its exquisitely detailed lines vividly expressing life. She exclaimed in delight, turning it over.

“It’s a long way from home,” she said, returning it to him with a last caress.

“We both are,” he agreed.

“You don’t live here? In the desert, I mean?”

“I’m from a place of ice and snow,” he said. “I’ve never seen a desert until now.”

He picked up his knife and continued working on the seal, shaving thin flakes of bone as he shaped it. His hands were deft and broad. He was missing the tip of his middle left finger. She watched with pleasure, feeling peaceful.

“What are you learning here?” she asked after a time.

He looked up with a smile. “Funny you should ask! I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned, what I’m learning now, and what to do with it all. I thought I was coming to learn about making pipes out of bone, and I have learned things from Nephthys about that. But I’m not sure that’s the most important reason I’m here. To tell you the truth, I feel confused. My head is muddled. That’s why I’m carving. Sometimes it helps me clear my mind.”

“Is it working?”

“Not noticeably.”

They laughed together. She was intrigued. This attractive, obviously talented young man seemed a strange person to meet in a desert cave.

“Would it help to talk about it?” she asked shyly. “I’m trying to understand things, too. I’m not sure why I’m here and I don’t know where to go next. What exactly does Nephthys do?”

“She plays with bones. She gathers indestructible fragments of life. She brings them back here and puts them together and then she pours herself over them. She sings and chants and sometimes dances, and the bones reanimate into some new living creature.” His deft knife stilled. “I’ve never seen anything like it. She says everything lost can be found again, that it’s all here in the red desert.”

“The red desert hidden under a wing,” murmured Maria.

“Where did you hear that? It sounds like poetry.”

“I dreamt it,” said Maria. “In a dream, someone told me the story of Nephthys. I wanted to see if you would say the same.”

“Did I?” he asked seriously.

“Yes.”

***

Nephthys reported on the ants’ progress with Juan and Carlos’ bones every day. She spent most of her days in the desert collecting bones. Kunik and Maria stayed in the cool shade of the cave or sat in the doorway looking down into the twisting canyon below and talked.

He hadn’t been horrified by her story, either her choices or her grisly tale of the Lamia.

“I believe I’ve met that lady myself,” he said wryly. “Only she stood on legs when I saw her.” He told Maria about Ostara and his family and she listened, amazed.

When she showed him the four eyes, he took them unhesitatingly into his broad palm, rolling them gently.

“Find Nephthys and make a life with our bones,” he murmured to himself.

“Yes. That’s what they told me to do. But what does it mean?”

His dark eyes met hers. “I’ve an idea about that. Let’s wait until the bones are clean, and see what happens.”

She nodded, letting it go for the moment. “So, what have we learned, Kunik?” she asked. “How do we think about this clearly?”

They sat on a broad ledge of rock protruding from the canyon wall. They sat in shade but sunlight glared off the opposite wall, radiating heat. Overhead, a vulture floated in circles, silent and watchful.

“What can we say we know?” he mused aloud. “Have we learned who we are?”

“You mean who our families are, or who we truly are, or how we’ve been shaped by the people we’ve been with?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. “All right. We know who our families are, yes. We know some things about who we truly are.” She fell silent.

“For the moment let’s try not to think about the pieces of ourselves we don’t much like,” said Kunik. “I’d prefer not to dwell on my capacity for rage and violence.”

She gave him a grateful smile. I suppose if we claim to know who we truly are it means we see our entire selves with clarity and acceptance. Otherwise, it’s just a lie, if we only look at what feels good and deny the rest.”

“True. Then we agree we know something about who we are, yes?”

“Yes. I’m not sure I’m clear about the difference between who I truly am and how I’ve been shaped by the expectations of others, though.”

He frowned. “That’s more complicated. It’s safe to say we don’t accept some of the rules we were expected to follow, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely. Maybe that’s enough to know for now. We know there are rules and we reserve the right to make choices about following them.”

“So, we know some things about who we are,” summarized Kunik. “Can we say why we are? I mean, what we’re for?”

“I’m a weaver,” said Maria instantly. “I’ve had this conversation before.”

“I uncover the hidden shape of things,” said Kunik.

“That’s clear, at any rate.” Maria smiled.

“Where do we belong?” he asked. Then, as though hearing his own question, he repeated thoughtfully, “Where do we belong?”

“Not in the place where I started,” said Maria. “Not in Hades, not now, anyway. Not searching the waterways of the world. That’s over.” She looked up at the circling vulture. “You know, Kunik, I’m tired of wandering. I want to find a home. I just realized it.”

“I don’t want to go back to my village,” said Kunik. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and looked across the canyon, letting his gaze drift over the dry, rocky wall. “I don’t belong here. I’ve seen beauty everywhere, in the ice, in the forest, in the sea, now in the desert, but I don’t call any place home.”

“Do you want a home?”

“I think maybe I do. I’ve never given it much thought before.” He considered. “Yes. I want a home and I want…people. I want to be with people. Good people, who are kind and compassionate and want to learn. People who love without rules. People like you.”

She felt deeply touched. “Thank you, Kunik. I’d like to be with people like you, too.”

They remained silent for a time. The vulture drifted away. Maria watched sunlight move on the opposite canyon wall. The day was getting old. Nephthys would come skipping along the path with the day’s harvest of bones soon.

“Are we here to look for a home, then?” asked Maria uncertainly. “What does that have to do with Nephthys?

“Why don’t we ask her?”

“Talk about what home means,” Maria invited Nephthys, confident she need not go into a lengthy preface.

The three of them sat together by the fire. The air coming in the cave mouth felt chilly. Nephthys leaned over and picked a bone up off the sandy floor of the cave. She turned it over in her hands.

“Jackrabbit, I think.” She handed it to Kunik.

Maria watched him close his eyes and run his fingertips along the length of the bone, as though feeling for a pattern. He turned it over in his hands, then ran it up and down the underside of his forearm. He opened his eyes and handed the bone back to Nephthys.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Life sleeps in this bone like a rabbit in a burrow,” said Nephthys. “If I call its name it will wake, and stretch and put on its clothes, come out into the world. The bone is home. The burrow is home. The world is home.”

“Layers,” said Maria.

“So, home is a place outside but also a place inside?” asked Kunik.

Nephthys smiled. “To call a life you must know its name. I couldn’t call a jackrabbit from a desert pig. I couldn’t call a desert pig from an armadillo.”

“You must know what it truly is,” said Kunik slowly.

“That’s the part about knowing who we are. Who we truly are,” said Maria.

Nephthys continued, “In order to bring something into life you need to know it. You need to love it. You must understand why it wants to live — why it needs to live. You must find out why life needs it.”

“You must know what it’s for!” said Maria.

Nephthys clapped. “The last rule is someone outside the life must call it into being. It can’t call itself.”

“It’s like weaving,” said Maria. “Each part of the pattern is a piece of something bigger. Each color and texture has meaning by itself and even more meaning in the context of the whole. It’s all meant to be connected, and some hand must do the weaving.”

She watched Kunik turning this over in his mind the way he’d turned the bone over in his hands. “So, there are many ways to look at home. It might be external. It might be internal. It might be in a larger context of connection or community.”

“But it’s not broken into pieces like that, Kunik,” said Maria. “It’s all of those woven together. It’s who we truly are, what we’re for, and our connection to others. You and I have worked on the first two. Now comes the third.”

She turned her gaze on Nephthys. “But I still don’t know what to do next. How do we find the community we want?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Nephthys, smiling. “Whatever you’re looking for is also looking for you.”

Maria sent a quizzical glance to Kunik, whose placid round face looked serene in the firelight. “Interesting,” he said, without further explanation.

“You’ll find your way,” said Nephthys imperturbably. “But I know the first step.”

“What?” asked Maria.

“The bones are clean.”

The next morning, they carefully gathered the dry, smooth bones off the ant mound. Nephthys laid the desiccated body of a bird with a few feathers and strips of tissue still attached in their place. They hauled the bones up to the cave and heaped them on the floor.

Nephthys skimmed around the cave, packing bundles. “Kunik is going to play with me now.” She tossed him a hide bag. “Let’s take some jerky and the water skins,” she directed him, nodding at a ledge of rock. “Maria is staying here.”

Maria thought about being alone in the sunbaked silence of the red desert, nights and days slowly revolving around her. Alone with the bones of her murdered sons, her memories, her questions and her fears. “Don’t leave me,” she said, feeling like a child.

“You’ll be safe. We’ll come back.” Nephthys looked her in the eye and Maria glimpsed an ancient being. “Call out of the bones the life they’re waiting for. Call your life to you. Call yourself home.”

She turned away, tossed a heavy bundle to Kunik as though it weighed nothing, said “Byeee, Maria!” and disappeared out the cave entrance. Kunik turned and smiled at Maria reassuringly before he stepped down onto the steep path to the bottom of the canyon.

Maria took the four brown eyes from their resting place in a pouch between her breasts and laid them in a row on a flat stone that ringed the fire pit. They were open. She settled herself onto the clean, dry sand, put her hands in her lap, and allowed everything to drain away.

Many times in her life and death and this new life she’d been alone. Never had she been as naked with herself as she was now. Time made a flexible skeleton out of minutes, clothed itself in hours and slithered out into the sun to find a warm rock and bask. Maria knelt by the pile of bones and caressed them with her hands. She removed her clothes. She released her hair and it swept over her breasts, her shoulders, her arms and hands and what remained of her children in a raven sheet. She wept and tears jeweled her skin and glittered among the bones. She crawled, naked, around the pile, sand cool and gritty under her tender knees. She spread out the white sculptured bones, handling each one, and then piled them up, stacking, fitting them together, sorting by size. She rubbed them over her body, under her arms, between her legs. They felt cool and hard against her nipples. She pressed them against her cheeks, her inner thighs. She licked them. She squatted over an iron pot and urinated and dipped the bones in her urine, rubbing them dry with handfuls of sand, polishing, tending.

There was day. There was night. There was hot air. There was cool air. She slept among the bones, holding them to her chest like an armful of white flowers, nestling them safe between her breasts and legs. She tangled them in her hair and then untangled them, using delicate finger bones as combs. She wept, and slept, woke, wept again. She spat on the bones, massaged saliva against smooth planes and curves, scoured them with sand. She built a fire and watched light play over the framework of her children’s bodies.

She laid out memories and fantasies of her lover, Juan, on the cave floor among the bones, the way she’d laid out the eyes. She draped herself on a bed of bones and ran her hands down her body, shuddering at her own touch, pinching, caressing, releasing her flesh from its cold solitary prison of self-hatred. She called up the memory of his breath, smudged with the smoky liquor he liked to drink that made his eyes warm and his flesh bone wrapped in velvet. She allowed her body the memory of his lips, his hard male buttocks, his masterful hands.

In her dreams her three beloved male creatures, warm-fleshed, humid with breath and sweat, came to her. They rolled in her arms, greedy toothless mouths sucking at one breast while carefully restrained teeth teased the other. They trailed their scent across her lips, her hands, her body. They painted her with their hair and broke her heart with the familiar arch of an eyebrow. Over and over, she counted fingers and toes, nuzzled hidden places, danced a woman’s loving dance over their landscapes. They giggled and murmured, whispered and groaned in the final moment of climax, the bones, the memories, the children, the man.

She fingered the bones like beads, shuffled them like a pack of cards, laid them out and shuffled them again, seeking a different message. She threw them with a clatter and read their patterns by firelight, throwing again and again, searching for different meanings. Memories clinked and clicked together in her mind, inexorable, encased within a hard, white husk of that which does not die. The world of bone. The world of flesh. Worlds layered one over another. Worlds between worlds, folded, hidden, one supporting the other. Dreams merged with waking and she dissected through flesh in search of bone, found life in bone, called it forth, and reclothed it with flesh to be dissected through again. Her tears, her saliva, her urine, sank into the sand, and the bones of her beloved rested on the bones of rocks, and her body rested on both while the two pairs of brown eyes watched, one pair like dark chocolate and the other like light glinting on dark water.

In that timeless place of bone and sand, Maria discovered love again.

CHAPTER 26

A winged shadow disturbed the sunbathing snake of time and it slithered back into the red desert’s navel, flesh falling away into hours, flexible bones disassembling and reassembling into minutes. Maria washed her body and her hair, collecting water from the cool trickle that came into the cave. She shook out her clothes, lying like discarded ghosts on the sandy floor, and put them on. She made a neat pile of the bones. She ate and drank, replenished the wood pile after a brief walk in the cooling evening. She used a broom leaning against the wall to sweep the sand smooth, picked up the eyes and put her lips to them where they lay in her palm. “Sleep,” she whispered. “I’ll take care of you.” The eyes closed and she returned them to the bag between her breasts, cinching it carefully at its neck.

The first tentative stars gleamed in the sky when she saw the figures of Nephthys and Kunik coming down the twisting canyon bottom. She sat quietly on the threshold, watching them as they climbed toward her. They stopped in front of her and the three of them looked at one another. Maria reached out a hand to each of them.

“I know what to do,” she said, “and I need help.”

KUNIK

The evening Nephthys and Kunik returned to the cave, Kunik recognized and did not recognize his friend Maria. The change was difficult to put into words.

He thought the woman he’d left was wrapped around self-destruction. If he’d pared away the flesh of the old Maria, he would have found a knife with an inward-facing blade that stealthily cut the hand holding it.

The woman who met them and asked for help contained the kind of power and wisdom that are shaped by grief and pain. Now the hidden shape within her was a vessel, a container that would never break.

Maria had drawn pictures in the sand showing the construction of a loom, and when Kunik put his hands on the bones the shapes of the graceful frame revealed themselves to his hands and his knife. Nephthys knelt in the sand and sorted through the fragile frameworks that had once been clothed in Juan and Carlos. If she caught the scent of urine or a woman’s musk, she made no mention of it. Now and then she carefully unwove a long black hair from between the fragile bones.

Kunik took each bone from Nephthys, turning it over, finding its place in the design, shaping it with his knife until it fit perfectly into its new place. In this way, slowly, Maria watched her new life take shape from the old.

When they’d built the loom, she asked Kunik to cut off her hair.

Kunik sharpened his knife against a whetstone while Maria unpinned her hair and let it fall. Kunik hadn’t seen it loosened before. It curtained her hips in black. She used the comb he’d carved for her out of a bit of bone they hadn’t used for the loom and ran it from her scalp to the ends of her hair, a section at a time. When it lay smooth, she braided with deft fingers, keeping each section an even thickness and equally taut. Nephthys provided two lengths of tough dried tissue like rawhide. She tied one of these around the end of the braid.

Maria knelt in front of Kunik, her back to him, and he took the thick plait in his hand and slipped the blade of the knife between her neck and the hair. He sawed gently, holding tension on the hair with his left hand. It was surprisingly hard to cut, but he was patient and he felt the hairs part gradually under the insistent blade.

When the braid came free, she passed him the second tie and he captured the cut ends. She knelt there a moment without moving. He thought her shorn head made her look young and vulnerable and regretted what he’d done, even as he knew it was the right choice.

She stood and faced him, putting up both hands to feel the back of her head. She ran her fingers through the sawn ends of her hair and shook her head. She smiled but he noted a sheen of tears in her eyes as she looked at the long braid draped over his hand. He handed it to her and she went to the loom without a word and began to string it, a hair at a time.

All the time Kunik searched the childrens’ bones for the shape of hidden things and brought them from death into life, part of his mind stayed busy with what Nephthys had shown him.

For hours, she’d led him through trackless desert, obviously knowing exactly where she was going. Sand rippled away in front of them and the angle of sun, always changing, cast shifting shadows. Now and then they passed clumps of sparse vegetation, often amongst scattered rocks that Kunik supposed were enough to shelter determined growth. He’d been with Nephthys long enough to realize the desert was far from empty, but its subtle life hid from the sun’s heat and camouflaged itself from impatient eyes. It took time to recognize the flick of a fleeing lizard and pick out the shape of toad, snake and tortoise from folds of sand and rock. Every spine and fleshy stem, every patch of shade, concealed life, but it didn’t give itself easily to the casual eye.

Nephthys was tireless. She seemed as much a part of the landscape as any desert creature and nothing escaped her notice. He’d never gone out with her before when she didn’t gather bones, but now she walked unburdened and scanned the sky and horizon as often as she did the ground.

The swift desert night was winging over them when he discerned something taking shape ahead in the darkening air. Shapes like trees, or perhaps standing stones, blurred into the dimming sky. Nephthys continued walking, and he following, and night overtook them. In starlight, the sand glowed dimly with its own soft light. The air cooled rapidly and then chilled, but Kunik felt warm with the miles.

He was remembering starry snow and a night sky rippling with color when Nephthys stopped and he came abruptly out of his reverie.

They stood inside a ring of short bushy trees. Overhead the sky was studded with stars above a net of bare twigs and branches. The trees didn’t smell green. The cool, sterile scent of bare desert was in his nostrils, without a tinge of cedar, sage or mesquite. He could see no silhouette of leaves against the sky.

“Are the trees dead?” he asked Nephthys.

“They’re water bones,” she replied absently, as though this made perfect sense.

Kunik was silent, struck by the incomprehensible union of water and bones, groping for creative sense.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“We sleep here tonight,” she replied. She unrolled her blankets with a flick of her wrists and lay down. After a moment, she turned on her side, bringing her knees up and curving her back.

Kunik, amused, accepted that no more information would be gained from her that night. He too laid out his bedroll and gave himself up to sleep.

Kunik woke to find Nephthys tending a fire. He smelled coffee. He rose stiffly to his feet and stretched, looking around.

In daylight, the impression of a ring of trees was less strong. It was more of a ragged clump, interspersed with towering Saguaro cacti. There wasn’t a leaf to be seen. He walked among the trees, gazing up at the boney branches. Some grew vicious thorns, long and thick with points like nails. Most of them stood upright and looked firm, naked and sere but enduring. One or two had fallen, though, and Nephthys’s fire consumed the debris of these. He saw smooth trunks fissured with cracks, and vertically ridged, rough trunks. He touched none of them.

The Saguaro disturbed him. He found it impossible to think of anything but outstretched, pleading arms when he looked at them. Some of the main trunks grew forty or fifty feet high. It was difficult to judge from the ground. The outside of the trunks was a dull, sandy, faintly green color with short spines. The flesh looked waxy. Some of the bases were black and appeared dead and one was crowned with vertical ribs, like an aged drunken fence of bleached dry sticks.

Troubled, he returned to the fire and accepted a tin cup of coffee Nephthys handed him. She smiled serenely into his eyes.

“Water bones?” he invited.

She nodded, looking mischievous, and handed him a leathery piece of dried meat, spiced with chilis. He took a bite, sawing with his teeth, and the strong taste filled his mouth and nose. “Once there was water here.”

“Now it’s gone, leaving…its bones?” he asked.

“Did you touch them?”

“No. I didn’t like to, somehow.”

“Silly!” she giggled.

Sun shone warm on the back of his neck, with the promise of burning heat to come. The fire burned low, flames sinking away to coals. He thought how intangible yet unmistakable the difference was between heat of sun and heat of fire against the front of his legs. He wondered, vaguely, why. Heat was heat, wasn’t it?

His coffee cup was empty. He set it down on a rock near the fire. He’d start with a tree.

He felt shy under Nephthys’s gaze and so chose a tree on the outside of the clump, away from the center space where they’d slept. On impulse, he took off his shoes. The ground felt gritty beneath his bare feet. He looked carefully for insects, thorns or reptiles, approached the trunk and laid his hands on it.

He concentrated on his hands and the rough texture of the wood. He laid his thick fingers in the fissures. He closed his eyes and opened himself, but what he felt was from his feet. Later he would remember half a tree’s life is hidden underground, but in the moment, he was surprised, unprepared. The soles of his feet itched. It seemed to him roots twitched underground, aware of his presence and the pressure of his body on the earth over them. The thought made bristles of hair stand up on the back of his neck. It didn’t occur to him until later that a dead thing doesn’t twitch. He took a deep breath, calming himself, and stepped sideways from the thinking part of his mind to the feeling part, putting his awareness into his hands and feet.

Later Kunik couldn’t say how much time he and Nephthys spent with the water bones. She was always there when he returned to the center of the circle, tending a fire, ready with a drink or something to eat. He was fuzzily aware she engaged in her own work of sifting the desert for remnants of life, as small piles of fragile bones appeared around the camp. They hardly spoke at all.

He spent hours in wordless, thoughtless communion with the trees and cacti, following hidden dry waterways through root, pith and trunk. Empty and echoing, sterile and desiccated, the waterways beckoned him on, and the memory of threads of water, silver and gleaming, murmured just below the level of his hearing, stirring the hairs in his inner ears.

Desert image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay

Water. How to find water in the desert? He didn’t know, couldn’t imagine. But the hidden thing, the shape within the shape, the life within the husk of death waited for water. Water would wake it, shape it, be contained by it, flow through it and open the way. Open the way to what? For whom? He didn’t know. In this his clever hands, his knife, were useless. He never even took the blade out of its sheath. He could name the use, the shape, but he couldn’t do more by himself.

In the dark night hours, he sat up. The blanket slid off his shoulders and cold night air flowed around him. Starlight trickled in his dazzled eyes. “I need help,” he said. “Of course. I can’t do it alone. That’s what you wanted me to see. I need help.”

Nephthys sat by the fire, a blanket around her shoulders, and firelight reflected in her eyes as she turned her head to look at him.

“We must go back to Maria,” he said with certainty. He lay down again on his side, pulling the blanket up over his shoulder. “It’s time to go back to the cave…”

“…To She Who Weeps in the red desert’s navel,” said Nephthys quietly. “The Weeping One…”

The lovely sound of the name followed him back down into sleep. “She Who… Weeps…. She…Weeps…”

The next morning Kunik didn’t wander among the trees and Saguaro but helped Nephthys safely wrap brittle bones, rolled up his belongings, ate, drank, and they set off across the desert, finding their way home.

Maria met them at the cave entrance, holding out a hand to each of them, and spoke the words waiting in his own mouth.

“I know what to do, and I need help.”

MARIA

Maria had strung the loom. She and Kunik gathered and bundled their few possessions, Maria carefully wrapping the bones unused in constructing the loom. Kunik gathered a large pile of fuel for the fire while Maria shook out skins and blankets, sending gritty showers of sand to the bottom of the canyon as she stood in the cave entrance, and swept the floor smooth.

When everything was ready, they left the cave. Maria looked back once from the bottom of the canyon, seeing the dark blob of the cave entrance high above. It was like a navel, she thought, a hidden indentation in the body of the red desert, an old portal to…elsewhere. She turned away and followed Nephthys and Kunik into the desert. The sun cast her shadow onto the sand, distorted and top heavy because of the loom on her shoulders.

The ragged clump of trees remained the same. Kunik wouldn’t have been surprised to discover it was gone, a dream or enchantment fallen to dust. But the trees still stood, dry and stark, and the fire ring showed signs of their recent fire. Maria set the loom down and looked around with wonder.

“What is this place?” Her voice was low, as though she was afraid to be overheard.

“This is the Well of Bones,” replied Nephthys.

Kunik was surprised. He hadn’t heard her call it that before. “There was a well once, then?” he asked.

“There still is,” she said simply.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” he asked, exasperated.

“You didn’t ask,” she replied grinning. “You know the water is gone. There are only bones here now.” She busied herself unpacking two pots, a spoon, the water skins, and her bedroll. She wandered away beneath the trees, probably, Kunik thought, in search of firewood.

“What are we doing here?” asked Maria, searching his face.

He’d explained nothing, only asking her to trust him. He looked at her, wordless, trying to frame a sensible explanation. He made a sound of frustration, dropped his bundle, and took her hand.

“Come. I’ll try to show you.”

They approached a towering Saguaro. The top third branched into jutting appendages, smaller than the main trunk. As they neared, a bird flew out of a hole near the top, twittering with agitation.

“Be careful,” he said, guiding her hand. “Touch here, with your fingertips, between the spines on the ridges.”

Tentatively, she ran her fingers up and down the waxy, fleshy trunk in the valley between the neat rows of spines growing at the top of each vertical ridge. He laid his own fingers below the next ridge over, about an inch and a half away from hers.

“Everything here is like a dry streambed,” he said. “I can feel hidden places where water once ran. They still remember scent and feel and sound of water, these waterways. They’re waiting for water to return. They’ve waited a long time. They’re waiting to once again be what they’re for, do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “I understand.”

His voice became less urgent. “I can feel what they are — what they need. But I can’t give them water. I can’t make water. I can only speak for them and I’m no good with words, Maria. I’m good with my knife. But I can’t make water with my knife!”

She took her hand off the cactus and laid it on his shoulder. He took a deep breath.

“It’s not only that — the water. I want to find a way to bring water back here — to the well. I think, if we do that, we might find something to help us, too, to help us find our place, a home. But I can’t do it alone. Like you couldn’t make the loom alone. And I thought of you…She Who Weeps…and the eyes…and water…” he trailed off.

“You think somehow I can help you bring water here, that together we can find a way forward?”

“Yes. With the loom. I keep thinking about what you told me about a resting place — what’s the word?”

“Descanso.”

“Yes. Somehow there’s a way to fit it all together and make something, weave something, open some kind of a way, but I can’t see it clearly and I can’t find the right words to talk about it.”

Nephthys released an armful of dry wood behind them with a clatter. They turned. Late afternoon sky arched above her, cloudless, glazed with sun to a hard, pale blue. She dusted her palms together and looked around at the ground, searching for something. She darted around the space surrounded by the patient standing bones of water. She wiggled her toes in the sand, sweeping with the side of her foot, pausing now and then to stand with her eyes closed as though listening. She hopped on one foot, then the other. She looked ridiculous, like a half-mad child, and at the same time rather powerful.

Nephthys’s wandering course tightened, became more purposeful, until she was focused on an area about three feet square looking, to Maria’s eyes, identical to the rest of the ground. Nephthys knelt and used her hands to brush away sand, scooping it aside.

Maria and Kunik, kneeling on either side of her to help, discovered a curving line of flat rocks, concealed under six inches of pebbles, sand and the ghost of earth that had once nourished and supported the trees.

Moving on their knees, they gradually uncovered a stone circle about three feet in diameter.

“The Well of Bones?” ventured Maria.

“It once possessed another name,” said Nephthys. She rose to her feet and stood, looking through the trees and into the red desert beyond. “Now the bones wait for water to come again.”

She strode to the fire ring in her bare feet, bent over an untidy pile of kindling, and the smell of smoke came to Maria’s nose, choking in the hot air.

“Maria,” Kunik said, “put your loom over this. I think it’ll rest perfectly on the stones.”

They set the loom across the stone circle. “Be careful. Don’t step in the ring,” he cautioned.

“But it’s filled in with sand,” she said, amazed.

“For now,” he said.

Kunik took off his shoes and then his shirt. The sky glared down at his smooth, hairless chest. His shoulders looked broad and powerful. Sun beat down on Maria’s black head and she felt glad of her shingled hair. She kicked off her own shoes.

The fire blazed, radiating shimmering heat waves nearly invisible in the afternoon glare. The air was breathless and still. Under the trees the shadows were lean and hot.

Next to the fire, Nephthys began to chant in a childish voice. It sounded like a skipping rope rhyme. She chanted faster and faster, her face gleeful, and suddenly stooped and threw a small drum at Kunik, which he deftly caught out of the air. He tucked it between his knees and picked up the rhythm of the chant easily. He’s done this before, Maria thought. How little she knew about him, this new friend!

The earth beneath her feet was hot and gritty. She wiggled her toes, working her soles into a cooler layer below the surface. She stood looking down at the loom, strung with her own black hair. She ran her hands up and down the bone frame, feeling Kunik’s fine carving and delicate shaping. The sun beat down, throbbing against her the way the drum throbbed under Kunik’s hands. Nephthys’s incomprehensible chant filled her ears. Sweat wet her forehead and the back of her newly exposed neck. It ran between her breasts. She looked down and found a dark wet patch on the front of her dress. She reached for the bag hanging around her neck. It felt wet. She loosened the neck of the bag and tipped the eyes into her hand.

The brown eyes wept. Tears made a puddle in the palm of her hand, found the creases, and dripped onto the hair-strung loom. The teardrops clung to the hairs momentarily, then dripped onto parched sand inside the stone lip of the Well of Bones.

Image by Leandro De Carvalho from a Pixabay

The eyes cried, soundlessly but steadily, and she could give no comfort. No body to hold, no head to cup, no round back to pat. She couldn’t run her thumb over a soft cheek and blot the tears away. The eyes looked into her own out of the palm of her hand, weeping, weeping, wide and unblinking, and tears dripped from her hand to the loom and from the loom to the ground. Her own eyes burned and overflowed, her tears falling onto the brown eyes in her hand. She Who Weeps stood in the desert hidden under a wing, stood with her life and love, guilt and shame cradled in her hand, and wept with the sons she’d murdered.

A smell of burning mesquite filled the air. Nephthys, nearly naked, gleeful, an ancient desert child, began to dance, raising each knee in exaggerated movement and stamping hard as she circled the fire. Kunik’s drumming was insistent, demanding movement, demanding obedience. The sun beat down.

Maria wept. Her cupped hand overflowed. Drops hung on the hairs of the loom like stars, like jewels, like candles made of mesquite-scented sun. The drops merged together into a trickle. Maria remembered the sound of water, the sound of rivulet, stream, river, gurgling spring. She remembered the cool glug of a stone dropped in a well, the green frog scent of moss and shade and hidden water. She remembered the feel of the surf on her feet, lapping, and the way the sand under her moved as waves washed over her toes. The memory grew until it wasn’t a memory. The harsh, dry earth under her feet moved, here, now, as though something writhed within it like a snake. The lip of the Well of Bones was clean and wet. A little fountain spilled from her palm and the eyes bobbed and clicked together as water bubbled in her hand, fizzing and tickling. A damp spot grew in the circle of stones. The sand sank.

Kunik’s hands made the drums speak of firelight, starlight, sweating bodies, flesh and bone, pulse and breath. His dark eyes blazed. The drum filled her head. The sound and scent of water filled her ears and nose. She looked up and saw smudged clouds, heavy and sorrowful. She looked down at her feet, where sand and soil rippled.

“It’s the roots, Maria. The roots are dancing. There’s water in the desert.” Kunik’s voice sounded exultant.

Roots reached for the Well of Bones.

She felt a tiny wet kiss on her nose, and then on her cheek. A cool current of air stroked her bare arms. Kunik’s dark hair was spotted with damp. She felt pattering drops on her own head. The fountain in her hand spilled. She’d forgotten to weep.

It rained.

The fire hissed and popped. Nephthys threw more wood on it and flames roared in the fresh dry fuel. Maria shut her eyes, tilted her head up and felt rain on her face. She began to weep again, now with joy. Her tears mingled warm with the cool rain on her cheeks. She held out her palm full of marbles and water fell from it. The loom was strung with drops of water like a cobweb on a misty morning.

Something slid over Maria’s bare foot and she looked down. A snake slithered over the stone lip of the well and fell onto the sinking damp sand, circling and spiraling gracefully in a sinuous dance. Kunik’s hands stilled and the drum’s voice fell silent. Maria saw, lining the well, knotted roots swelling and bulging as they drank water.

Kunik made an inarticulate sound she heard clearly over the pat pat pat of falling rain. He was looking over her shoulder. His face looked shocked. She turned her head, still holding her hand over loom and well.

A woman came striding toward them, a short woman with broad hips and loose black hair in damp waves over her shoulders. She smiled with unconcealed joy at Kunik. Raindrops dappled her bare arms and legs.

“Kunik!” She embraced him. For a moment, he stood frozen and then his powerful arms tightened about her and one hand cupped the back of her head, her hair clinging to his wrist and forearm in wet tendrils.

“Eurydice!”

She laughed, gently released herself, and came to stand next to Maria, looking down into the ever deepening well where the snake slid in endless spirals.

“Oh, my friend,” she said to Maria, “you’re so beautiful! It’s been a long time since Hades. Are you ready?”

Maria looked into her joyous face, wordless.

“I’m Eurydice.” Eurydice held out her hand to Nephthys, who took it, swinging their linked hands, laughing.

Hand in hand, they came to stand with Maria and Kunik. Nephthys held out a hand to Kunik and he put the drum into it. He picked up his bundle and handed Maria hers.

The rain fell, pattering like a thousand small feet, and a smell of cool, wet earth came to Maria. She looked up and gasped.

“Kunik! Look!”

The trees were covered with leaves, reaching out and cupping the precious rain, murmuring and whispering.

Nephthys dropped Eurydice’s hand and stepped back.

“Behold, children!” Her voice sounded deep, old as stone and sand. “The Womb of the Desert! Life becomes!” Nephthys spread her arms wide and began to sing in an unchildish voice full of sand and small stones. The earth under their feet vibrated. Maria wondered if it responded to Nephthys or roots really danced underground. In wonder, she watched Nephthys’ arms become pointed wings.

Rain fell more steadily and the pattering grew to a roar. Nephthys’s song swelled, rain drummed, and sand and earth in the center of the well fell away, the snake going with it, in the sound of water gurgling and bubbling, rising nearly to the well’s lip. Then it began to sink steadily, as though draining away, and roots snaked across the surface of the ground, reaching, trailing into the water in brown gnarled ropes, lining the sides of the well in the same sinuous movements the snake made, and the roots already there swelled and bulged, swelled and bulged, lifting and cracking rocks.

“Take the loom, Maria,” called Kunik over the sound of falling, soaking, hissing, splashing, gurgling water in the desert. Maria closed her fist tight over the eyes in her palm, took the loom in her other hand, felt Kunik take her arm and watched him reach for Eurydice’s hand.

Nephthys’s chanting voice shook the desert, the womb opened wide to receive them, and they stepped into it and left the desert hidden under a wing behind.

CHAPTER 27
BRUNO

Bruno didn’t see Rapunzel leave. He witnessed the other’s leave taking, the older woman with the thick knot of hair. He’d been pleased until he realized the younger woman, the one he resented the most with her short golden hair that seemed to mock him, stayed behind. To come so close to having his sweetheart to himself again and then be disappointed roused his already smoldering anger to sullen flame. This he took out on his mother and then his father, when even that hardened brute was moved to intervene on his wife’s behalf. His father still bore the marks of Bruno’s frustrated passion and rage, but the intruding slut stayed on. Perhaps she’d never leave. For several days Bruno stayed away from his observation post in sullen despair.

One day his compulsion again overran his intention and he found himself in the familiar tree overlooking the back of the house and a piece of orchard. Clothes belled out with the summer breeze on the line. A few minutes’ watching rewarded him with a glimpse of Juliana herself, tending the garden with her skirt tucked up above her knees. He watched all afternoon and never saw or heard a sign of the interloper. Juliana was quite alone.

He climbed down from his perch stiffly but filled with amazed hope. Perhaps they were alone again together.

In the following days, he spent hours at his post before allowing himself to believe it was true. After five days, he felt sure. Spurred by weeks of frustration, he made up his mind to approach her directly, claiming his right to be at her side and share her life before some other obstacle presented itself. He’d courted her long enough. It was time for her to accept him. He would contrive to meet her in the forest and speak.

He rose up in her path one evening as she made her way home with a basket over her arm. He expected a startled gasp or cry but she only paused, meeting his gaze calmly. Obscurely, he felt this put him at a disadvantage and he resented it. He forgot what he’d been going to say. They looked at one another.

She reached into her basket and handed him a neatly folded length of linen, tied with a narrow ribbon the color of blackberries. Automatically, he took it. A scent of lavender came from the linen.

“For your family,” she said. “This is all I can give you.” She stepped around him, melting away between trees.

Bruno was triumphant. She’d pledged herself to him! No words had been necessary. She accepted him.

Once in the privacy of his room, a drunken lean-to added to the side of the house, he clawed apart the folded linen. It trailed on the dirt floor. A bag of cheesecloth fell out of the folds. Fumbling, he untied it, and tiny dried lavender flowers spilled into his hand. Carelessly, he flung them away.

He couldn’t use such a thing. It occurred to him she meant him to sell it, buy himself something. Of course! She was showing him her worth. Not only would he own a beautiful wife, but she could earn money for him. Dimly, he recognized the quality of the linen. People paid money for cloth such as this. Clumsily, he wadded the linen into a semblance of the original neat folds.

On the next market day Bruno took the linen and confidently set it on the counter to pay for a purple velvet waistcoat, the kind of clothing an important man wore. The tradesman’s mouth dropped open in surprise. Dubiously, he shook out the cloth. It was smudged and smeared with dirt and the greasy soot that covered everything in and near the charcoal burner’s hovel. A print from Bruno’s boot showed plain where he’d inadvertently stepped on it.

The merchant snorted contemptuously, snatched the waistcoat out of Bruno’s hands and swept the linen off the counter onto the ground. Bruno defended himself hotly and loudly. The tradesman raised his own voice, calling him an ignorant lout. A crowd gathered, jeering and laughing.

Bruno slunk away, seething. She’d deliberately made a fool of him. He’d teach her! He’d show them all!

JULIANA

Juliana missed Rapunzel. She’d never before been so conscious of loneliness. The only visitor she’d ever had in the house by the river was Morfran, and he only for a day or two. Maria and Rapunzel had spent several weeks, and after Maria left Rapunzel had stayed a further three weeks. Now Juliana’s beloved place suddenly felt empty and hollow.

She told herself not to be a fool. The White Stag was nearby. She knew he watched over her. Ranger, the cat, was always somewhere about. Summer ripened around her and the long days weren’t long enough for the work to be done. It was a busy time in the village and market as well, and she needed to spend time at the loom. If any woman lived a full and useful life, it was her. She was independent, self-sufficient, and made a contribution to others, albeit secretly.

But all the while, underneath her brisk matter-of-fact thoughts and busy days, a grieving internal voice whispered she’d made a home and called it a life.

***

Juliana felt weary. It had been a good day. She carried money in her pocket. Everything had sold, not only her fine linen but strawberries and peas from the garden and a basket of eggs. She’d contrived to secretly leave a set of sheets on the doorstep of a newly wedded couple in the gloaming. She’d bought supplies for the loom and a meat pie for her supper.

She was opening her door when something warned her of danger, but before she could turn and look behind her or step into the safety of the house an arm encircled her upper chest with a crushing grip, knocking the air out of her lungs, and a knee in the small of her back propelled her into her peaceful house.

The door slammed shut behind her. Hanks of linen thread spilled across the floor and the meat pie landed upside down with a splat of brown gravy. Her sharp knife, her only weapon, fell with a small clatter among the linen, the sound lost in the greater sounds of their struggle.

Bruno took her shoulder in a bruising grip and forced her around. His face was dark red, congested. He let go of her so suddenly she staggered, pulled back his fist and hit her on the cheek. She fell sideways into a small table with a crash. He picked her up and shook her, like a terrier with a rat, snapping her neck painfully back and forth.

“…trusted you…” he said, spittle flying, “…you bitch! …laughed at me…teach you…respect…”

He punched her in the pit of the stomach and as she doubled over helplessly another blow came up under her chin. She fell backward and the sound of the back of her head hitting the floor reverberated through the bones of her skull, carrying her away, out of reach. She felt him tear away her skirt and force her knees apart from a distance and then darkness separated her from him and she was safe.

Bruno clambered to his feet and stood looking down at her body. He’d seen death before and recognized the broken doll look of it. Her pubic hair curled wetly, exposed and vulnerable, and his penis hardened again triumphantly. He’d shown her! She’d never mock him again! He’d never felt so powerful, so excited. At last he’d gotten what he deserved, after all these long months of teasing and torture. His flesh throbbed and he groaned with renewed lust. As he fell to his knees and took her again, he thought about all the women ahead.

He buried her hurriedly in a patch of bog where reeds grew. It was easy to dig a shallow grave. He wasn’t afraid someone would find her. She never had visitors, except for the two strangers, who had obviously left the area. Even if someone came across the house, who would wade around in a bog?

He rolled her into muddy ooze at the bottom of the grave and covered her carelessly with a few shovelfuls of heavy mud and broken reeds. He exulted. He was free! He’d leave this place now, tonight, and go out into the world. Next time he’d choose a younger woman, one with firm, rounded flesh and high breasts. He threw the shovel aside and stepped into the woods, making his way to the broken-down hut he’d called home all his life. If his parents were there, he’d give them something to remember him by before he left.

MIRMIR

“So that was Juliana,” said the Hanged Man. “Dar loved her, you know.”

Mirmir nodded without speaking.

“The White Stag should have saved her!” The Hanged Man scowled. “What a waste! What a world, when a monster like Bruno roams and destroys a woman like that!”

“Wissdom undersstandss the larger sstory,” said Mirmir. “Let die what— “

“Oh, shut up!” said the Hanged Man. “There’s no comfort in that! Easy for you to say when you’re not the one dying!”

“Ss! Ss! Ss!” Mirmir’s body shook with amusement, making the Hanged Man sway.

“Your breath stinks,” said the Hanged Man. “What have you been eating?”

“The white sswanss that sswim in the fountain,” said Mirmir, his smile sly.

“You have not. You’re terrified of the white swans, you fraud. Keep telling.”

“The tale iss told,” said Mirmir. “The White Stag stood in the river. Summer dusk crept among branch and leaf. Frogs shrilled. The house stood empty, door slightly ajar, giving the place an air of mild surprise. When the man threw aside the shovel and melted into the shadowed woods, the White Stag moved out of the river like a patch of mist and stood for a time on the grave, silent and watchful. The river flowed away with the last light of day and night dropped a kind, sheltering hand over garden and orchard, churned mud and broken reed bed.

The only one who noticed Juliana’s absence was Ranger. He crept in, hair bristled and green eyes wary. He sniffed at the floor where she’d fallen and licked up the remains of the meat pie. The hearth was cold, the door open. She wasn’t there. He left the empty house and began sleeping in the gardening shed.

The garden grew. The chickens, secure in their coop, ran out of food and water and died. The house stood peacefully in sun, moonlight and rain. A mouse came in and made a nest in a cushion. The loom stood waiting.

Juliana lay quiet in her muddy grave.”

ROSE RED

Rose Red didn’t leave the holy well. For two days and nights after her night with the fox and Rumpelstiltskin’s appearance, she did little more than sleep. She put the dwarve’s story of her mother in the back of her mind and left it there. She gathered firewood, washed at the well and made herself a comfortable bed from the blankets Rumpelstiltskin had aired. She was asleep before light left the sky the first night, and slept until after sunrise next morning.

The second day she gathered more firewood, ate the rest of her food and took a long circular walk around her camp, absorbing the life of the forest. When she woke from her second night’s sleep, she felt ready to think again and make plans.

She wanted to stay where she was. She wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t ready to leave, that was all. It wasn’t time.

She’d seen and heard turkeys in the forest. She set a snare. Artemis had taught her to hunt with efficiency and mercy. Rose Red accepted the need to take life as well as protect it, understanding the necessity of balance. She didn’t possess a bow and arrows with which to hunt larger animals, but was able to snare and fish with materials at hand.

She snared a fat turkey hen, killed it with a skillful stroke of her knife, plucked it, dressed it and roasted it. It would take care of her food for some days. There were berries, mushrooms and edible plants in the forest.

As she worked, she held her mother’s story in her mind, not trying to come to any conclusion. She eventually identified a feeling of sadness.

For the first time, she felt the meaning of the words, “It’s not my fault.” She’d said it to Kunik and known it was true — for him. In the depths of her heart, though, she didn’t believe it was true for her. A persistent, gnawing, whining thing within her said it was her fault, all her fault. She’d failed because she wasn’t good enough.

That voice fell silent now. In its place were sadness and weariness. If it wasn’t her fault, she could stop trying so hard. She could stop punishing herself. She could rest and be free.

Rumpelstiltskin had talked of ‘less than’ and ‘more than.’ Was it possible all these years she’d been ‘more than’, not ‘less than’? Had her parents been so — what, exactly? Stupid? Blind? Uncaring? Had they deliberately cut her down, kept her small, ground away her sense of value? Or were they so broken and preoccupied with their own pain and survival they had no thought for her at all?

This made her angry. Why didn’t anyone take care of her? Why hadn’t they tried to heal for her sake? Why hadn’t she been able to help?

I sound like a child, she thought. There are no answers to questions like these. It was what it was. We each did what we could. Isn’t the real question where to go from here? I couldn’t help them but I can help myself. There are people who love me and believe in me.

She remembered her anger with Maria, and her pity. She remembered saying, “You wanted to be loved,” and Maria’s weeping.

She took a deep mental breath. If I’m ‘more than’, not ‘less than’, she thought, then I’m okay. I’m not unlovable or unforgiveable. I’m special in a good way. It might be harder to find friends and people who understand me, but it’s not because I’m ugly and bad. And some people do love me. Some people do want me.

“I’m staying here because I want him to come back,” she said aloud. She sat on a flat rock turning the spit on which the turkey roasted. Fat sizzled in the fire. Light faded out of the sky, revealing the first faint stars.

Yes. She wanted the fox to come back. She wanted to find the place they’d inhabited again. This time she’d know better how to be in the experience of her own passion. She remembered his tension, the way his legs trembled beneath her as she breathed in his scent in the dark. Perhaps he’d understand. Perhaps he was like her and they could help one another, hold one another together even as they strove to dissolve the boundaries between them.

She shifted, aware of warm, sticky flow between her legs and heaviness in her low belly.

Would he come back? He’d told her he’d watched her for a long time, but when she sent him away had he left altogether? Or was he watching her still? Rumpelstiltskin had told her to call him back, but how?

She ate her fill of turkey that night, carefully put away the meat and let the fire die down. She stood with her back to it, warming the back of her legs, and looked into the dark forest.

“Come back,” she called softly. “Please come back. I’m sorry I sent you away. I want…” She faltered. “I want another chance.”

She rolled herself in blankets, but it was a long time before she slept.

In the morning, she was still alone.

Her menstrual flow was nearly ended. She felt strong and well. She stood shivering in the cool morning, wiping her bare body with handfuls of dew-covered leaves and grass. Her nipples puckered and her arms bumped up in gooseflesh. The cool moisture excited her skin.

Smell but not touch, she thought. Smell but not touch. She ran the leaves in a long stroke from the inside of her wrist, up to the inside of her elbow, over her armpit and down the curves of her ribs, waist and hips. She made a careful pile of the leaves at her feet and pulled a handful of soft grass. With this she cleaned thoroughly between her legs, wiping away the night’s accumulation of bloody flow. The handful of grass joined the leaves. In this manner, she washed the rest of her body. Dressed again, she carefully collected the discarded leaves and grass and the pad of moss she had used the day before. It was splotched with blood and tissue.

She walked into the forest, moving in a straight line from the Holy Well of Artemis for half an hour. Then she turned and began to walk in a circle, keeping the well to her right and using the sun to navigate. Every few minutes she left a few blades of grass and leaves she’d washed with, and a pinch of the moss with her blood on it. She squatted next to the pile and released a few drops of urine, wiping with another handful of leaves and leaving that, too.

It was the kind of morning that begs to be touched. She let her fingers stray over trunk, branch, fern, earth, rocks, fungus and briar. Twice she stopped, took off her shoes and stood barefoot beneath a tree, eyes closed, palm against bark, feeling the wordless mystery of sunlight, water, soil, root and leaf.

She buried her face in clumps of ferns and flowers, ran her hands through bushes and leafy branches. She put her arms around trunks and rubbed her cheek on bark, fissured and smooth. She deliberately walked through wet undergrowth and thickets. She loosened the top of her tunic so she could cup her breasts, and her nipples felt as sensitive as her fingertips. The forest was alive and she swam in its scent and released her own in saliva, sweat, breath and blood and urine.

When her circuit around the camp was complete, she turned and walked straight toward the holy well.

Smell but not touch. Her fingers smelled of green growth and bark, of mushrooms and rich earth. She reached into her clothes and cupped her sex, ran her fingers lightly over her labia and then between. She felt slippery and moist. The scent of her roots mingled with the scent of forest on her fingers. She brushed them against tree trunks as she walked.

Come back, she thought. I want you. Come back.

When she returned to the spring she found, lying next to the fire ring, a bit of dark-splotched moss. It was wetted with a few drops of familiar musky urine.

The next morning she woke alone but felt the circle of the fox and herself drawing closer and closer around her and was satisfied to let it be. She’d made up her mind and sent out the call. The call was answered. There was nothing else she need do.

She was perched in a tree near the Well of Artemis when she heard a disturbance in the forest. Birds gave alarm calls and took nervous flight above the treetops. She closed her eyes and thought of bark, branch, leaf and twig, sinking into the living matter of the tree around her until the boundary between its life and hers grew thin. She opened her eyes and waited.

Something heavy moved through the trees. The sound wasn’t aggressive or dangerous, just large and rather clumsy.

“Drat! Oh, drat, again! I’m so sorry! Excuse me! Ouch! You’re tangled in my hair! Sorry!”

The voice was female, breathless and apologetic. It came from somewhere around Rose Red’s elevation.

“Oh, good! The path! That’s better! Here we are!”

Into the campsite stepped an immense young woman. No, thought Rose Red in wonder. A young giantess! Her hair was an unnatural but cheerful color of blue, nearly turquoise, and gathered into a messy bundle held precariously by a couple of small branches. Flowers randomly poked through the bundle and a thick lock fell down onto her shoulder, evidently snagged on her way through the forest. She wore a red dress like a tent and carried an immense wooden bottle with a cork crammed in the neck. She leaned the bottle against a tree and looked around at Rose Red’s camp.

“Oh, dear! Someone’s here. I suppose I frightened them.”

The giantess stood looking down at the fire ring and Rose Red’s neat pile of blankets and bedding, utterly disconsolate. Even the flowers in her hair drooped.

She sighed and ashes from the cold fire whirled in a miniature grey storm. The young giantess drew in her shoulders, hunched her back slightly, bent her knees a bit, pulled her elbows in tight against her sides, clasped her hands together and called in a strained voice that was nearly a whisper, “It’s all right! I won’t hurt you! Don’t be afraid of me, please! I came to get some water.”

Rose Red wasn’t afraid. Fascination had kept her hidden, but the poignancy of watching this lavish creature make herself small and quiet had her climbing down the tree in a moment.

“Hello! I’m Rosie. I’m not afraid of you. I was only surprised!”

“I know,” said the giantess humbly. “I’m rather large. But I’m harmless.”

Rose Red’s gaze traveled from dusty, scarred leather sandals on feet the size of wheelbarrows up thick ankles and brown legs. The dress encased a pair of bulging, generous hips, a round curving belly and a pair of luscious breasts. A web of scratches, some freshly oozing blood and some nearly healed, covered thick freckled arms.

Tipping her head back, Rose Red met eyes the precise shade of pine needles, large, vulnerable and thickly fringed. Freckles scattered across the giantess’s jutting nose and round cheeks. She smiled tentatively and her eyes were like a dog’s eyes, gentle and imploring. Rose Red had never seen anything like her, never imagined anything like her.

“You’re beautiful,” she said impulsively, not sure exactly what she meant but knowing beautiful was the right word.

The giantess’s eyes filled with tears and overflowed.

“You mustn’t say that,” she said. “I’m not beautiful. I’m just…me.”

“I think that’s what I mean,” said Rose Red slowly.

They smiled at one another.

The giantess wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “I’m Gwelda.”

“My friends call me Rosie.”

“Pleased to meet you. I came to—Oh! Hee hee hee.”

As Gwelda giggled and squirmed, a squirrel poked its head out from the neck of her dress. It climbed onto her shoulder, frisking its tail, chattering, and examining Rose Red with bright eyes.

“They tickle,” said Gwelda apologetically. “What was I saying? Oh, yes, I came to get water from the well for my trees. They always enjoy Artemis’s well water the most, but it’s a long way to carry it so I don’t come more than three or four times a summer.

“I’m glad I was here. Are you in a hurry? Will you stay and talk? I want to hear about your trees.”

“You want to play with me?” The giantess looked absolutely delighted. “Truly?”

Rose Red laughed. “No one’s ever asked to play with me before. Yes. I want to play with you. Will you stay a while?”

They wedged the bottle into the bubbling spring so it could fill. Gwelda found a comfortable spot to sit, leaning back against an old tree with a wide girth. Rose Red climbed a few feet up another tree so they could talk on a level. A chickadee alighted on Gwelda’s untidy knot of hair and made determined efforts to dislodge one of the slender branches holding it.

Gwelda’s shyness and uncertainty made Rose Red feel unusually assertive and protective. They quickly discovered their mutual interest in the forest. Gwelda had long admired Artemis and listened breathlessly to every detail about her Rose Red could dredge out of her memory.

“And she chose you to serve her and watch over the forest,” breathed Gwelda. “How amazing!”

“Now you tell,” urged Rose Red. “Tell about your trees.” She’d noticed the giantess wore a ring, a wide gold band with a pattern of leaves etched around it. It would have made a heavy bracelet for Rose Red’s arm. “Is that a wedding ring? Are you married?”

Gwelda blushed, turning nearly the color of her dress. “I just married a wonderful man. He loves me!” She said this with such surprised satisfaction Rose Red laughed aloud.

“Tell me.”

“Really?”

“Yes! I want to hear everything!”

“I’ll make it a story. I love stories.” Gwelda thought for a moment, indenting her chin with a thick finger. “It really begins before I met Jan, though.”

“When I was a little girl I lived with my father. My mother was human, but she died when I was young. I don’t remember her. Dad’s a giant. He’s a Professor of Entomology.”

Gwelda looked at Rose Red apologetically. “I hope you don’t think I’m bragging. That means he loves insects.”

Rose Red assured Gwelda she didn’t think she was bragging.

“Dad spent his time collecting, preserving, and studying insects. I was a trial to him.”

Gwelda heaved a sigh.

“As giants go, I’m rather small. Even puny. But I’m far too big and clumsy for Dad. He hoped, at first, I’d be human-sized like my mother, but I grew and grew. I tried not to. I wore tight clothes but eventually they split apart. I slept in a small bed with a headboard and footboard so I couldn’t grow in my sleep, but I had to keep curling up smaller and smaller and it made my back hurt. One night I kicked out in a dream and broke the footboard, and after that I gave up.

What Dad loved best was the world of insects he saw through a magnifying lens. He was fascinated by mouth parts, antennae, wings, scales and eyes, all invisible without a lens. He said small things are like neat little miracles, little treasures waiting for someone to appreciate them.

I did the best I could to take care of him as I grew up. I tried to be quiet and step lightly, and keep everything tidy. I wasn’t good at it and he was often cross with me.

I started to spend more and more time outside. We lived in mountains and I loved to roam, playing with trees and rocks.

One day my father showed me a special kind of butterfly that flies in the tree canopy and said he wanted some specimens.

I was so happy to know a way to please him! I went right out and climbed the largest tree I knew, one I’d often visited before. It was so wide I couldn’t get my arms around it, and it was one of the tallest trees in the forest. I was sure butterflies would like to be flying around a tree like that.

I climbed higher than I ever had before. It was a strong tree, else it would’ve been dangerous, but I was determined to get the butterflies for Dad. I’d decided I couldn’t climb anymore and was looking around for the butterflies, when the tree spoke to me!!”

Gwelda said this in such a tone of childlike wonder Rose Red smiled. “What did it say?” she asked eagerly.

“It said, ‘Who is this in my arms?’”

“And then what did you say?” encouraged Rose Red.

“I’m stupid,” said Gwelda. “All I could think to say was, ‘I’m Gwelda.’” Her face looked so rueful Rose Red couldn’t help giggling. Gwelda grinned.

“That’s how I met Borobrum. The best friend I ever had.”

“Borobrum,” said Rose Red, letting it roll in her mouth. “Borobrum.”

“I found the butterflies, and I caught some in a net and took them right home to Dad, but I’d forgotten about pleasing him by then. I ran back out and spent the rest of the day with Borobrum. That was the beginning.”

“The beginning of what?” asked Rose Red.

“The beginning of making myself big,” said Gwelda.

“Borobrum was old, and he knew things. He said:

‘Make yourself big and life will find you!’”

Gwelda extended her arms wide, threw out her chest and lifted her chin. Her left hand was in a shaft of sun and a dragonfly came to inspect the gleam of her ring. A bird perched on a finger of her right hand, hopping busily up and down its length, exploring the fingernail for edibles.

“’Make yourself big and life will love you.’”

A cloud of butterflies came from among tree branches overhead. They floated around Gwelda’s red dress, weightless and fragile. They clustered together on her knee and clung to the sleeve of her dress, wings opening and closing. Gwelda closed her eyes, and one brushed against her cheek while another explored her eyelashes.

“’Make yourself big and life will play with you!’”

A pair of squirrels scampered down the tree Gwelda leaned against. One ran down the neck of her dress, sending her into a gale of giggles. The other missed the opening and scampered down her chest and belly, darting to and fro in search of its mate. Rose Red could see movement under Gwelda’s dress as the squirrel inside flicked his tail and ran about. It pushed itself into a sleeve, making Gwelda shriek with laughter as its sharp feet scrabbled in her armpit, flowed down her arm and poked its head out, chattering. The squirrel chasing it, with a nearly human look of surprise, began to scold upon seeing it emerge. They circled around Gwelda, running up and down her arms and chest, and then climbed the tree, spiraling up, chattering madly.

“I understood what he meant because he was full of life. Hundreds of insects crawled on his bark and flew among his branches. He held seven bird nests. One day we counted up all the eggs. There were nineteen! A squirrel family lived in his top half and a chipmunk family in his bottom half. Way up high, a bat colony lived in a cavity where a branch had died and been torn away.

Then there were visitors. Sometimes a hawk or an owl perched on his arms. Now and then a pine marten came hunting.

Generations of trees grew around him, his family and others, and they shaded a whole world of plants and fungi.”

Gwelda paused.

“He sounds wonderful!” said Rose Red. “I’d like to meet him.”

“You can’t,” said Gwelda sadly. “He’s dead.”

“One day a terrific storm came with lightning and thunder. When it passed I ran to Borobrum. When I got close to where he grew, I began to see chunks of wood and bark. The wood was wet and smooth, like some strange kind of fruit. I found big pieces of wood, too, pieces of his body…”

Gwelda was crying. Rose Red sat in silent sympathy while the giantess wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“He’d been hit by lightning, Borobrum,” she resumed sadly. “He was one of the tallest trees, you see. It was just like he’d said. The smaller lives were protected because he took the lightning instead of them. He just…exploded. I still keep a piece of him at home.”

She paused again, looking so sad that Rose Red groped for a distraction.

“So how did you meet your husband?” she prodded.

Gwelda’s aspect lightened. “Oh, Jan!” she said. “That’s where I was going, wasn’t it?”

“After Borobrum was gone I decided it was time for me to leave Dad. To tell you the truth, I think he was relieved. I was such a problem for him.

Before I left, I gathered up some of Borobrum’s children. I went out in the world to look for places to plant them.

I traveled around, seeing the world and settling the children, thinking about what I wanted to do. I always felt happiest in the company of trees, so I decided I’d take care of them, plant new ones and do what I could to keep them healthy. I’ve had some fine teachers, but mostly the trees themselves tell me what they need.”

Gwelda looked at Rose Red. “They don’t actually tell me,” she said apologetically. “I mean, I just know somehow.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Rose Red.

“Well, one day I heard of a woodsman who wanted a partner to replace trees he cut. Some woodsmen just cut and cut, thinking only of the money they get and caring nothing about the forest, but others love trees and cut carefully, planting a new tree for every one they take.

The woodsman was Jan. I liked him right away and we decided to work together. He told me once I have a great heart.”

Gwelda paused and looked and Rose Red anxiously. “Am I talking too much? Is this silly and boring?”

“No. You’re helping me. I need to hear. I want to hear! What happened next?”

“Well, one night Jan arrived with this hidden under his shirt.” She held up her finger with the wedding ring around it.

That night we sat on a log under the stars and Jan asked me to marry him and wear the ring. I wanted to, but I kept thinking about my father. I told Jan I was worried we weren’t well matched after all, him being human and me being a giantess. He said he’d always felt frustrated by how small other people were, not outside but inside. He said at last he’d found someone with a heart big enough, a joy deep enough and a passion rich enough to satisfy him. He said we’d spend our lives together learning how to be bigger.”

“He climbed up a tree next to us — fast as a squirrel! — and kissed me. On the lips!”

Rose Red laughed.

“So, we married. I wove flowers into a canopy for our bed.”

Gwelda looked away and blushed deeply, her freckles disappearing momentarily.

“We play and we laugh and he says, ‘Make yourself big, Gwelda! Make yourself big!’ And I do.”

***

Later, Gwelda left with reluctance, corked bottle in hand.

“If I’m late, Jan worries,” she explained. “Come with me?”

“No,” said Rose Red regretfully. “I’m meeting someone here.”

“Maybe we’ll see each other again?” Gwelda sounded like a disappointed child.

“Maybe. I hope so.”

Gently, Gwelda tipped an inquisitive chipmunk out of her palm and offered her hand to Rose Red. Rose Red stepped onto it and Gwelda lifted her up so Rose Red could kiss her on the cheek.

The chipmunk scolded, sounding like an irritated metronome.

“You are beautiful,” said Rose Red, and a tear fell down Gwelda’s freckled humid cheek. She set Rose Red down, wiped her face, squared her shoulders resolutely and left. For a long time, Rose Red could hear her moving through the trees. The sun set and the short summer night enclosed the Well of Artemis.

That evening Rose Red sat long by the fire. Her mind was a kaleidoscope. She again saw Gwelda’s face suffused with a tide of embarrassed joy, the white tip of the fox’s tail. She remembered the stubby finger of a dwarve stirring through a pile of stones. Her mother’s face in the mirror said, “You hate me.” “Smell but not touch,” the fox whispered. When she lay down to sleep, she took the kaleidoscope with her and turned it around and around in her dreams.

After her midday meal the next day, she felt sleepy. She sat on a fallen trunk that made a bench against the base of a standing tree. She quieted her mind and sank into vivid green moss, lacy fern, web of earth and roots. She imagined traveling slowly up the quiet halls within the trunk of the tree, moving toward far-off green surfaces of leaves absorbing sunlight. The spring bubbled to itself. The sun laid warm fingers on her eyelids.

Something stirred nearby. She opened her eyes. A man wearing deerskin leggings and nothing else approached her with catlike silent grace. He dropped to his knees on the cushion of moss over rotten wood at her feet and laid his head in her lap.

Her whole body flamed into vivid life. She put her hands on his head and his hair felt rough and thick under them. She pushed her fingers through it, seeking the shape of the hard skull beneath. He pressed against her thighs. She wore the tunic and pants Vasilisa and Jenny had made for her so long ago. The clothing was well worn now, molded to the shape of her body and smelling of her and the forest. She opened her thighs beneath the sculpture of his jaw, cheek and temple. She wet her index finger between her lips and traced the curves of his small, neat ear. He quivered and pressed his face further between her thighs, hiding the ear from view. His arms came up and clasped the top of her legs.

She was always the most sensitive and responsive in the week following her menses. Her sex opened like a flower for the bee, oozing moisture and scent. Nothing lay between him and the center of her except a layer of linen and a layer of buckskin leggings.

Smell but not touch.

She laid her head back against the tree trunk and took a deep breath. The sun glowed against her closed eyelids. The weight of his head in her lap anchored her. She relaxed and felt him do the same in response. Her fingers moved dreamily in his hair.

“What’s your name?” She smiled because the question seemed ridiculous.

“Rowan.”

“Rowan,” she repeated. “The tree of protection.”

“Protection for portals and thresholds,” he said, voice slightly muffled against her lap. Then, “You called me.”

“Yes. I’m sorry for…before.”

He raised his head and settled himself on the ground with the log she sat on at his back. Dappled shade touched his head, his left ear and cheek. She could see the curve of his mouth, the sharp, fine cheekbone covered with red stubble. In sunlight his hair looked tawny, a combination of gold, cinnamon and copper. Coarse, curly hairs on his chest were deep red, like the stubble on his face.

“Do you know what I fear, Rose?”

“No.” She was surprised.

“The hounds. The gun. The trap.”

Of course, she thought, he would fear those. She groped for words.

“I fear… It’s hard to feel so much. I’m afraid I’ll be torn apart.”

“And if you’re not torn apart?”

“Then there’ll be too much to lose.”

“Ah,” he said, understanding.

Rose Red closed her eyes again. The spring bubbled peacefully to itself.

“I don’t really think I’ll be torn apart,” she said after a time.

“No?”

“No. I can learn how to be with what I feel. But learning can be…”

“Messy?” he suggested with a smile.

She laughed. “Yes. I want…I want to be better than that for you. For us.”

She opened her eyes and found his gaze on her face. “Let’s say we get good at being with what we feel,” he said. “Then there’ll be a great deal to lose, won’t there?”

“We’d lose more if we didn’t try at all,” she said with decision.

“Ah,” he said again. He wriggled down until his shoulders and head rested against the log, lying nearly full length in the fern and moss, and looked up into the tree canopy overhead.

“Rowan?” she said when a few more moments had passed.

“Mmmm?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to be free in the forest, fox or man, and I want to be with you.”

“Oh.” She was filled with pleasure.

“What do you want to do, Rose?”

She imitated his direct simplicity. “My apprenticeship to Artemis is over. She’s given me a part of the forest to take care of. I want to go there and begin my work.” She thought of Gwelda. “I want to find out how big I can be. How big we can be together.”

“It appears,” he said lazily, eyes shut and hands laced together over his stomach, “we’re traveling in the same direction.”

She laughed then. He reached up and pulled her down beside him. She laid her check against the skin of his chest and heard the steady thud of his heart, inhaled his familiar musky scent and felt his hand move through her tangled black curls.

“This is it,” said Rose Red. “I thought it would be thicker forest, though. There’s a lot of open space here.”

She and Rowan, in his human shape, stood at the crest of a hill. Behind them grew thick forest, sun dappled and busy with summer sounds and growth. Ahead, the ground sloped gently under a green blanket of grass, seedling trees and wildflowers.

“It looks like a river, down in the valley,” said Rowan, shading his eyes against afternoon sun.

“It’s beautiful, I suppose,” she said doubtfully, “just not what I expected. I didn’t think it would be so…tame.”

He laughed.

“Wild creatures are shy. Perhaps it needs time to get used to you before it reveals itself fully.” His amber eyes met hers steadily and her pulse quickened at the meaning underneath his words.

She looked away. “It’s where Artemis wants me to be, so I’ll love it and guard it as best I can. Will you…do you like it?”

“I do.” He tilted his face up and sniffed. “I smell water, closer than the river. Maybe there’s a spring.”

They walked along the tree line, Rowan following the scent of water. The river wound through the valley below, hidden now and then by the shoulder of a hill, patched with forest. Rowan turned back into the wood and she followed him into a glade enclosed by trees, heavy with the last white blossoms of their flowering. In the glade stood a stone structure, three leaning walls of moss and lichen-covered stones. From the shadow of the roofless walls came the unmistakable fresh scent of water.

“Rowan trees,” said Rose Red, looking around the glade.

“Home,” said Rowan.

(To read Part 8 in its entirety, go here.)

A Stone, a Web, a Story

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