Everywhere has an edge. And on the edge of the forest so feared that it no longer has any name and is only called dark by those who know that when the sun goes down the predators walk, there is a village and its farms.
Nothing grand, nothing special. Only a cluster of cottages and the fields that feed them, huddled together against the world. Anywhere something exists, there is an edge, and edges always bleed.
The dogs set up barking before Sarah even sees the man coming down the lane, the overgrown, leafless branches of the willows tugging at his coat and bag. That's what they're for and she doesn't mind the noise; it brings her out of the cottage and means she's watching when the man does come into view.
He's a soldier. She can see that in him at once. It's the bearing of his body, sure - and it's also the air that comes with him as it comes with all soldiers, as if they can't help but wear the charnel house stink of the battlefield wherever they go. Not everyone can taste that air as it follows a man, but Sarah can and here Sarah does.
And to be fair, it's also the stagger of drink in them, because it seems like they're the only ones who can afford anything but small beer. The publican might be generous with a cup or so, but not enough to make a man unsteady on his feet.
Without hurrying, she gets the axe from the wood-pile and lays it near to the side of herself on the bench; then she calls the dogs to hold by the gate and to shut up, so that by the time the stranger makes it to the rough fence about the cottage and cowshed, Grip and Bale have taken up their places between Sarah and the man and are growling to frighten a wolf.
He's tall, is the stranger. He carries an axe himself - though a fighting thing, his, and no farm's tool - and knives at his belt, a pack on his back and what might once have been a sergeant's marker at his collar. He's none too clean and doesn't look out of place for this part of the kingdom: hair that would be fair if it weren't filthy, skin browned only a little by sun and wind, a strong jaw. When he speaks, though, he sounds more as if he's from over mountain-way more, a long way from home.
With an irritable glance at the dogs, he hitches his pack back into place and says, "Call'em off, I'm not here for trouble."
"You'll forgive me if I wait to see what I think of that," Sarah says. She puts the basket she's been weaving beside her and says, "And I might think more of it quicker if you told me who you are and where you may be coming from. Even what you might be wanting."
The stranger has the same look all of them have - so many men, young and old. Once, all the young men of any village ran off as fast as they could to join the dukes and counts and their valiant armies; then long after that stopped, the queen's soldiers took every man or boy who looked as if he could walk more than a mile without falling over. Those as hid their sons or nephews and were found out suffered for it, and there's always someone in any village willing to carry tales to the queensmen for some coin or some other favour.
Or just because they don't see why anyone else should escape the loss they've been saddled with.
Sarah's hid as many as she can, each time the recruiters sweep through, teaching them how to lurk in the edges of the Dark Forest and neither die nor be caught. But this village suffers, same as they all do. The young men for the battlefield and now and then a young woman for some bastard's bed.
Often, Sarah wonders what the queen thinks she'll rule, if she kills her subjects all.
This stranger has that same haunted, flat look to his eyes behind the cloud of mead or whisky or wine; it's in his voice, too, when he says, "Looking for food and a place to sleep, willing to work for it. Publican says you've all three - bed, board, work."
Sarah glances at the dogs. They're growling still, but only because she hasn't called to them yet; there's nothing of their own fear or dislike in the sound of it. She whistles sharp and they relax; she calls "Grip, Bale, to me," and they come and settle at her feet. Their ears are pricked and they watch every move the stranger makes, but that's all.
"Depends," she says, and notes that even though the dogs are gone, he doesn't take that as his invitation, staying outside the gate and only leaning one hand on it. She jerks her chin at what's hers and says, "I've a woman, a man and a child; with that you can see I don't need help with the farm or the animals. I've better need of a man who can hunt, who can track and snare in a forest without leaving a wreck behind him or being frightened by shadows."
The stranger's eyes narrow, and he glances over Sarah's head towards the shadow of the woods beyond. "That forest?" he asks and Sarah nods
She watches him as he stares at that horizon, thoughts hidden behind the shadow already so at home in his eyes. Then he says, "I've hunted."
Sarah purses her lips and then asks, "And what would your last captain say of you t'me if I asked him?" and for the first time gets more from his face than his following ghosts.
It's a dark smile to be sure, but it's also the first time he looks at her in the eyes; and what he says is, "Nothing. I cut his throat after he nailed an old man to a door."
There's something about how he says it that makes her believe him, about both the act and the reason. It also says he's quick, to know that telling that tale here wouldn't cost him anything and might gain him much. Sarah lets her brows lift and says, "Is that why you're about here instead of getting yourself killed?" because as much as she may approve of that, she can't afford having the queensmen here looking for vengeance.
"No," he says. "Ravenna's leaving that fool duke in his castle to rot. The war's over. We've all been let go."
Another thing to calculate, that, Sarah thinks. Because she knows what the fields do to a man, and not all of them come back who they were, but they all come back with weapons and the knowing of their use, and many come back thinking the world owes them whatever they like. Another reason it might be good to have a man other than Jack about the place.
"I can only pay bed and board," she says. "That's all I get myself. We share, and I eat the same as the others and sleep just as they do. And I sleep with the child and other woman beside me and the dogs beside them; be told." At the word dogs Grip and Bale tilt their pointed muzzles to her, knowing when they're being spoken of; they're massive things, looking more like wolves than dogs and of her uncle's breeding, and Bale with puppies coming soon enough to sell and so more fearsome than ever.
He finds this funny in the same way he found the question about his captain funny; he says, "They'll be bored damn dogs." And he hasn't gone away now that she's told him her terms. In the end, Sarah nods.
"Come in then," she says. "I'll show you where you can put what's yours and where you'll sleep. I go to the forest in a day or so, so you'll have some time to look about and settle in."
She gets up as he comes in the gate and then adds, "You'll have to go to the pub for your drink; I don't brew anything stronger than thick ale."
#
Little Rose always wakes them, each and every morning. The girl sleeps and rises with the sun as natural as anything, and the soldiers took their cockerel the last time they came through. As far as Sarah's concerned, it's no great loss.
When Rose wakes, the dogs wake and they're better than a cockerel; after them comes the grunts from May and the grumbles from Jack and then this morning something new - the curses from Eric.
That's the name he gave her; Sarah's by no means sure it's his real one, but she doesn't blame a man if he wants to start his life over now and doesn't question it. And his morning curses are milder than she might have expected, as is the way he shoves Grip's curious nose out of his face.
At the sound of his voice, May's up in a flash and out to the privy. There's nothing Sarah can do for her terror of a new man about; it'll be Eric's lookout to convince the silent woman he's not a threat, if he cares to. Otherwise, May'll just keep her brother between them. Jack's watching the man, waiting for him to step wrong, and Rose does as she always does with someone new: stares at him wide-eyed from under Sarah's arm.
"Go," she says to the child, "get, go and find the eggs, Rosie," and the girl darts out with the dogs yelping happily at her heels. When she's done in the privy May will scrub herself and then milk the cow and Jack's wandered out to see to feeding and watering and cutting wood and everything else as might be needed.
"Y'can help Jack, if you know how," Sarah says, unbraiding her hair to braid it up again and moving from the alcove where the shared bed nestles to the jug of water and basin beside the hearth and the bread-oven where she'll make today's food. And Eric does get up and goes, for all he has the look of the badly hung-over to him.
The day has the welcome dullness of familiar, productive toil. The sun that comes out is pale and wan, but it's sunshine all the same; after her duties with the hens, little Rose plays with her dolls of twig and straw by Sarah's feet while Sarah does the work of the day and May scrubs everything clean after her. Jack's as sour as ever he could be to the new man of the place, but Eric with his sore head doesn't seem to mind and Jack doesn't come to Sarah with concern after.
Sarah watches Eric through the hours of work and times of rest, and decides he'll do, as long as he doesn't come back in a temper from drink. And if he does, well, Jack can handle any man that drunk and there's enough other men in the village grateful enough for what Sarah brings back out of the forest to run off a stranger for her. They might not stand between her and the queensmen, but a stranger . . . that's another matter altogether.
He leaves his axe by the door but wears his knives as a matter of course; he hangs his money-belt on the axe, almost like a challenge. But Jack's more honest than a saint and neither May nor little Rose have any use for money; little Rose might not even remember what coins mean, she sees them so seldom. Eric moves about the farm like a man who knows what he's about, even if he's yet to learn the little quirks of this farm, in this place, at this time.
By the end of the day May still hides from him, but it might be that May always will.
Next morning wakes to a downpour, the kind to keep anyone with sense indoors. As the day of mending and make-work drags on, the newcomer's face grows more and more dour; that night, Sarah learns, she thinks, how he started on the road down into drink and its concomitant Hells.
His cries aren't loud, but his flailing is bad enough that Bale yips and whines at him, then barks loud enough that Sarah fears the household will wake and gets up to shush her. Rose sleeps on, and May; Sarah'd woken with the first noise from her new man, and Jack did the same - though once he sees Sarah awake and Bale calming, he stays abed and closes his eyes.
Eric stares at the thatch of the roof for a spell after Sarah shakes him awake by the shoulder, clearly working to bring his breath under his mastery. Sarah kneels on the packed earth of the floor, sleep-braid slithering over her shoulder and falling across the neck of her shift. It's chill outside the blankets and she wraps her arms around herself until Eric sits up; then she pulls away, startled by the movement.
"Sorry," Eric mutters, scrubbing at his face as if he could scrub away the dream. In this moment, there's something less guarded about him than there has been and Sarah knows how dangerous that can be.
"Everyone has bad dreams," Sarah says, waving that away. "You well enough t'sleep again?" She can't help but yawn. Eric glances at her and then waves her away.
"I'm well enough," he says. "Go back to sleep."
Sarah hesitates a moment, but in the end she pushes herself to her feet and curls back under her own quilts and woven blankets with May and Rose sleeping beside her.
She doesn't think Eric gets any more sleep at all.
The next morning, Eric asks her if she still means to go to the forest today. Sarah shakes her head.
"Ground can be treacherous enough dry," she says. "It'll still be soaked from yesterday's pour; I'll wait until tomorrow at least." The pale sun doesn't dry anything fast these days - even berries and fruits are better dried carefully in a bread oven.
"Forest doesn't need any help t'try t'kill you," Jack mutters as if to himself. "It'll try hard enough by its lonesome."
"I've no fear of the forest," Sarah says, as she always does, and he grunts his disbelief as he always does. "But I've no mind to break my neck on mud-slick hills either. We'll go tomorrow."
Eric nods, and then splits everything in the wood-pile in half the time it would take Jack to do it. Then he leaves, stamping down the lane towards the village heart and pub with his axe at his hip and his money-belt on.
He's not back by sunset, or by the time Sarah blows out her one stub of candle and curls up to share the heat of the other two women and sleep. The dogs at the foot of her bed don't bark in the night and no sound wakes her, and so when Sarah opens her eyes the next morning she wonders if she'll see Eric again.
There's something in her that's surprised when she finds him sleeping up against her gate; then again, there's something in her that isn't, and thinks less of the surprised part, come to that. When she leans down to shake his shoulder, he wakes with a start and a snort and a waving arm that almost knocks her over; she steps back and tilts her head at him.
There's a flicker of a thought she can't read that passes over his face before it closes into the surly anger of a man who drank too much last night and has no drink to ease the morning after, looking forward only to hard work. "I didn't want to be attacked by the God-damned dogs," he says, abruptly. He uses the gate to pull himself to his feet, a little worse for wear. "Are we going, then?"
Sarah just nods. "D'you need anything from inside?" she asks, for courtesy sake; Eric shakes his head.
"Show me this dread forest of yours, woman," he says. "I'm sure I've seen worse."
#
Sarah leaves the dogs for Jack and May. When Bale's had her pups it may well be that Sarah will take some of them in tow to the forest along with their mother, as part of their training, but not yet. She wraps her cloak around her tight and uses a length of soft old rope to tie it at her waist, with her small pack strapped across her shoulders. From beside the gate she takes up her stick to walk with and sets out.
Eric's a dour and sullen walking companion, but he's no worse than solitude and Sarah simply decides not to bother saying much. The sun's brighter than it was yesterday but it's early still and the dawn chill nowhere near gone. Some of the late nightjars and early daybirds are flitting here and there amongst the clumps of brush and grass; every now and then there's the rustling sound of some small creature fleeing before the sound of human feet.
"Y'don't trap here?" Eric asks at last, breaking the silence as they make their way up the roll of a hill that'll bring them in sight of the forest. Sarah shakes her head.
"No point," she says, "and poorer than I am scrape for the last edible creatures here. Even the rabbits are perishing few."
"Y'can die, eating only rabbit," Eric says, and Sarah turns to give him a thin smile.
"I know," she says. "I've seen it happen."
They crest the hill and Sarah pauses to lean on her stick, knowing that the sight will stop the man she's with, because it always does. And does this time, too, bringing his halt halfway through a step as if he met a fence she can't see. Sarah watches his face take in what lies before them for a moment, and then glances over it herself.
They say it used to be called the Tree-Guard, or something else even further back in years. Some of the tales say it used to be green and growing all the way to the edge, though never any more welcoming, not really. Just the difference between a healthy dog growling at you and one that's skin and bones and spectral eyes: you wouldn't want to cross either. But whether it was once or no, these days it's black and clawing and at the edges looks dead, although the trees stand year after year and put out thin, diseased-looking leaves that drink the sun and then fall and die.
"That's a forest," Eric says, disbelief in every echo. "Looks like a bloody bonfire nobody's set a torch to yet."
Sarah smiled the same thin smile. "Yes," she says. "The queen sent men to burn it once. Some of the villagers even helped them, because nobody really likes the forest."
In the pause meant to draw out the question, to draw him out, Eric asks, "What happened to them, then?" in a tone, Sarah thinks, meant to tell her he knows her trick of silence and doesn't like it - but can't quite resist the wish to know.
"We don't know," she says, calmly, "but their horses weren't too badly torn about and the meat was good - it fed the village for a while."
"And now you're the only one brave enough to go near it," Eric says, shrewd, returning a prod for her draw. She shrugs.
"I'm the one who knows what needs knowing not to be afraid of it," she says.
"Y'don't tell anyone else," he returns and she shakes her head.
"The first thing is to keep a reverence and an awe for the forest itself," she says, "and there aren't many these days who are good at that. Besides," she adds, starting forward again, "if too many people know it, the Forest might change its ways."
"The way y'say that makes it sound as if it thinks," Eric points out, a little more interest and a little less sullen in his tone. Sarah glances at him.
"I've never seen anything t'make me think otherwise," she replies. Then she glances at the axe at his belt and says, "Don't cut any living tree in this wood, Eric. Not even if it means freezing to death. Most places, there's plenty fallen wood and dead lichen to make fire from, but have a watch to make sure it doesn't spread. The Forest doesn't give any benefit of doubt, and it holds grudges a very long time."
They walk for a while in silence. The air changes, the closer they get to the trees. It grows stiller and thicker, wet and dusty at the same time, as if you opened an old attic full of dust while it poured rain outside. As they pass a few ravaged trucks and creaking branches, the sun starts to seem more dim, more distant, and she catches Eric looking up towards the sky, face growing drawn.
He breaks the silence again, to ask, "You trap here."
"Yes," she says, "and gather some things. Hunt, when I can, though I'm no great huntress."
"In a forest where y'don't dare cut a bough for a fire?" he demands, and Sarah has to stop herself from laughing. The wood pulls in around her, too, familiar and frightening at once. Sometimes she thinks it draws at her thoughts, makes her something else while she's here; she has to remember that he doesn't know, doesn't even know the stories every child in these parts grows up knowing.
"There's much more to fear from the trees here than anything that bears flesh," she tells him, looking over her shoulder to watch his face. "The trees and their scions, creeping plants and poisonous ones. My grandfather said they were put here to guard something, and every other living thing is only food to them."
"Like a dead fish planted at the roots," Eric says. He's trying to sound unconcerned, but the forest bothers him - but then, the forest bothers everyone. She smiles.
"Yes," she says. "What do they care if I take a deer? I leave them offal and blood, it feeds them well enough. I gather some plants here, too, but never more than can be spared."
"If it's such a force as y'say," Eric demands, following her as she ducks beneath one vast branch in the midst of her path, "why hasn't it taken the dead fields? The abandoned ones? I've never met a forest wouldn't take any open space back to itself, given half a chance."
Sarah shakes her head, glancing ahead and paying care to see whether something had shifted her trail. She'd lied, a little: the trees are the thing to fear most, of course, but there are other things that lived under the trees' shadows, and many of them like the mischief of changing paths and leading men and women astray. Most of them are weak - no bears here, no wolves - but that didn't matter if they led you into a bog and drowned you. Then you would be so much meat to them. She'll tell him about them later, when she's surer of him. If she is.
"It never has," she says absently. "Not even in the days of the old king, or even before that when my grandfather said it was green - it never grows beyond the boundaries it sets, and trying to cut tree and root out stump to turn the forest into fields - "
"Ends with your body feeding tree-roots," Eric finishes and when she looks at him this time there's something closed in his face she can't make sense of. She nods.
"Yes," she says. Then, when he pauses but says nothing, she goes on, "Come, I'll show you how to tell if the water is safe to drink."
They don't go far in; Sarah doesn't intend to stay the night. She checks the nearest traps and snares and watches to see that her would-be huntsman didn't lie at her gate. In the end she's satisfied enough by that, and if he's quiet and winces at the light when they get glimmers through branches, he's not poor company and seems to remember what she tells him.
She's not lying when she says she doesn't fear the forest, but still: on the return, when she hears the dogs barking and sees the square of firelight where Jack's opened the door in answer, she's glad of it.
Eric's feet take him to the village again; when he comes back he smells of cheap ale, but he's neither too late nor loud and only snores a little when he wraps himself up in his blankets and falls asleep.
Sarah's dreams are mostly of her grandfather, but that's to be expected.
#
The new rhythm of days and nights comes quickly, as it always does. That's the nature of the world, Sarah often thinks. Men and women learn to make things familiar and ordinary as fast as they can, because the strange and disordered is so unpleasant.
So frightening.
The weather clears, a little. Spring leans toward summer, though there's little enough difference. Sarah's neighbours make hopeful sounds about being able to get a harvest in without any of it rotting or being blown to garbage by the windstorms or rain. Jack ventures no opinion. Sarah has long believed he thinks God listens, or perhaps that some devil in particular does, and turns his hopes against him if he's ever fool enough to voice them. Maybe it's true. Too early to tell, at any rate. Hopeful springs have led to empty bellies come autumn before now.
They plough by hand, because horses cost too much to feed and to keep. There are times it's almost too much to feed and keep a cow, or to pay Berd's stud fee to keep her useful, but a cow at least turns about and feeds the household through the winter. You can't get food off a horse if you still want it to work.
And so for all that Sarah said to him she needed no extra help with the farm itself, she can't deny Eric's presence makes this part easier. And that's work he can do drunk or sober or any unpleasant state in between. Unlike hunting.
The first time Eric doesn't bother to stop drinking or to sleep over the night, Sarah finds him leaning against the cottage wall with Grip's head in his lap and a mead-skin in his hand. When he goes to get up, she shakes her head, pressing her lips together. She's told him most of what she knows, by now, and she'd almost thought he think on it, wouldn't be this stupid.
"I'll not take a man into the forest without his wits about him," she says, flat. "You drink, you stay here and I'm better without you."
And in the forest that day her grandfather's form flickers at the corner of her eyes, for all she knows enough to ignore it. When she comes home Eric's not there and she's glad not to see him.
Little Rose grows with the corn and the grass, and favours May, her mother, like a reflection through a mirror of years. Sarah shows May how to patch clothes together for the child, and that much May does with a willing hand. She leaves it to Jack or Sarah to give them over, though, and looks straight ahead with her hands clenched in her lap when Rose hugs her.
Sarah can never tell if the little girl notices, or whether it's something that's beyond her understanding, that she'll only understand when she's a woman and can look back and comprehend what she remembers. Rose seems happy enough, at least. Wondering at anything else might be borrowing trouble.
One of the days that she goes into the village with the things she's brought out of the forest to sell rather than to use, she trades a headache cure for a band of bright red ribbon. It's long enough to wind into Rose's hair in a braid, and that's what she does, to Rose's delight. The girl hugs Sarah and goes to show off to her uncle, who summons up a smile for her and a pat on the cheek while he sharpens the axe. She shows off to Eric, who's sober and cheerful enough to tell her she looks pretty.
May smiles a thin smile and then gets up; Sarah knows the cowshed is where the younger woman hides, but she doesn't interfere. There's only so much May can take, sometimes, before her mind turns a violent enemy and overwhelms her for days. If a bit of hiding is what needs to keep her from that then, Sarah thinks, let her hide.
Jack takes Rose to help him repair the fence. Sarah sits on her own front stoop, shelling the peas she's managed to harvest off sad-looking vines.
She's not surprised at the question when Eric asks it, almost surprised it's taken him so long; still, she sighs when he asks, "Who's the father?"
There's many as would lie; Sarah knows that. She knows there's some in the village as thinks she should do, or at least find a sweeter way to tell the truth, because everyone is someone's son or brother here. But she never will, and without looking up she replies, "My late husband." She splits open a pod. "He meant to make certain it was my fault we had no children, not his."
When Eric asks, "'Late'. Was that what brought his end, then?" she looks up sharply, but can't read his face. It's this moment, she knows, that he might well say something she'll throw him off her farm for, even if there's no sense to that at all. Some things still leave their sores around her heart, and this is one.
But she can't read what she sees in the man sitting on one of her crude stools, and he doesn't say any more, so after the silence she says, "No. Queen's wars did that. My grandfather threw him out, so he went for a soldier when some of the other men were dragged off. Thom, with the wooden leg, brought back news when he died at Torval."
When she opens this pod, the peas scatter and she has to lean over to gather them up and try not to gather too much dirt with them. She makes herself open the next with a little less force, but it's hard.
"Is that why she doesn't talk?" Eric asks, and Sarah looks up again, and still sees the same thing she can't read. Or maybe, if she's honest with herself, she can but doesn't want to - not wanting to understand, to take in anyone else's thoughts or pain, when these are fresh in her mind.
"Worse," she says, crisply. She focuses on her work. "She came here that way, she and Jack. He says the queensmen did it. That man chose her because she didn't talk, so who could she tell?" She snaps open this pod, but does it over the bowl. "As if I needed words to tell me," she adds, and then wishes she hadn't. With some effort she brings her voice back to normal, finishes with, "Little Rose was born nine months later. We could coax May to nurse her. Grandfather lived long enough to see her walking. She's happy and she has warm clothes, a place to sleep and food. Many children these days have less."
"I didn't say anything," Eric says in a voice so mild it's almost its own protest, its own cast defense.
"I know," Sarah says, and then stands up. The peas aren't done, not quite, but she doesn't want to sit here anymore. "When we're closer to midsummer," she says, to change the subject, "we'll stay in the forest through the night."
"Shortest nights y'can ask for," Eric observes, and Sarah smiles thinly.
"I told y'that the first trick of surviving the Forest is to respect it," she says, and goes into the cottage.