Note: This was an interlude I wrote that I couldn't resist including.
The night before.
Zelena dreamed.
It was night, the moon was only a pale crescent of light, but the forest was lit by a bonfire of autumn leaves. The figure of a woman, cloaked and hooded in velvet black, swirled in a slow dance around the flames. Black hair slipped out of her hood and pale fragments of her face could be glimpsed now and then as she moved. Bone white hands gripped her fiddle and her bow as she played, dancing to the music.
When in the springtime of the year
When the trees are crowned with leaves
When the ash and oak, and the birch and yew
Are dressed in ribbons fair
Zelena saw the leaves—autumn leaves, dried and withered despite the words of the song—in the bonfire and lying beyond beneath the trees. The wind blew, making all of them, burning or not, twirl and tumble in rings. The woman's dance led her away from the fire and into the darkness of the forest as the leaves and sparks, whirling about in circles, skittered around her.
They were sorting themselves, Zelena saw, yew leaves gathering in on spot, ash in another, birch and oak all separate. As she watched, Zelena saw some of them rise and tumble, no longer in rings but in the shapes of things a little like dancing men as leaves blew in and out.
The dancer, no longer having a bonfire, danced and spun through the trees. The leaves and fire danced after her till she passed by a dead tree with an owl's nest on top of it. Dead bones were scattered beneath. The trees stretched and moved in the silent wind, the shadows of their branches reaching across the earth, like long, bony hands. The wind caught up the dead, dried bones and the cast off feathers and dried bits of beak, lifting them up like dust or ashes.
When owls call the breathless moon
In the blue veil of the night,
The shadows of the trees appear
Amidst the lantern light.
The long, bone-fingered shadows crawled after the fiddler and the bones and bits of feathers and beak became another, ghostly dancer. She saw something else. The strange cavalcade seemed to cast off bits and pieces, one after the other, their sheddings forming a ring, a garland passed from one dancer to another, bits of leaf and bone tangled together. Flame, leaves, feather, and bone were all joined in a crown.
We've been rambling all the night
And some time of this day.
Now returning back again
We bring a garland gay.
Who will go down to those shady groves
And summon the shadows there?
And tie a ribbon on those sheltering arms
In the springtime of the year?
The fiddler had reached a grove. Zelena did not recognize it. She could not say from which of the three worlds she had travelled it belonged. Yet, she knew it. Fear choked her as she watched the demon band merrily spin and tumble their way in.
Something in her knew: this was a place of darkness. It was wrong for light to be there. It gave life to things that should never be touched by it.
By the light of the swirling flames, Zelena saw the dead bones of men and women who had died in this place, tattered clothes hanging on skeletons like ribbons. She knew, as if she had seen it, how they had died, tumbling into the shadows and being trapped, unable to find their way out. No one had heard their screams as they faced whatever fears found them. Some ran in circles till exhaustion and hunger took them. Some had been choked to death on their own terror. Some of them had even known what they faced, the darkness of their own souls. It hadn't been enough to save them.
Shadows slithered out between the trees. Not like the bony tree shapes, these were smooth as the surface of a still lake. Odd, pale lights moved among them, difficult to glimpse. They might have been moonlight. They might have been bones.
The songs of birds seem to fill the wood
That when the fiddler plays
All their voices can be heard
Long past their woodland days.
Black crows and white owls flew about them. They moved, now, up a hill and out of the trees towards a light. Zelena could make out the fiddler, now. The hands, long and lean, were bones. The face hidden within the black hair was a grinning skull. Then, Zelena saw where they were. They had reached the field where her house stood.
And so they linked their hands and danced
Round in circles and in rows.
And so the journey of the night descends
When all the shades are gone.
There was an army of them. They formed two circles around her house, one clockwise, one widdershins, weaving in and out among each other as they sped around the farmhouse. The fiddler still stood apart, playing
A garland gay we bring you here
And at your door we stand.
It is a sprout well budded out
The work of Our Lord's hand.
They had kept the garland, passing it from one hand to another through the mad dance. Now, it came back to the fiddler. She put her instrument and bow on the ground and took the wreath, black and burning, in her hands as she went to the door of Zelena's house and hung it there.
Black wreath. In three worlds, that meant a house in mourning, a house where death had touched.
The fiddler stood back taking up her violin again. Before playing, she looked up and, grinning, met Zelena's eyes. She lifted up her the bow, still smiling, and—
Zelena woke, heart pounding. She pulled out the dagger. "Dark One, I summon thee. Dark One, I summon thee!"
Rumplestiltskin appeared. He stiffened slightly, seeing Zelena had summoned him into her bedroom; but she didn't have time for that. "There's something," she told him. "Out there—out in the forest—watching the house—find it!"
His eyes narrowed, studying her, but he obeyed.
Zelena sat shivering. She realized music was still playing and looked over by the side of the bed. The radio was on.
That was it, she told herself. A nightmare from music. She must have turned it on by accident, perhaps reaching out, perhaps a brush of magic in her sleep.
When Rumplestiltskin came back and told her he had found nothing, no watchers in the woods and no signs there had been any, she nodded and accepted it, sending him back to his cage.
She had not asked questions which Rumplestiltskin, ancient wizard that he was, might have answered. She had not asked about the music or the dream and the things she saw dancing in it.
If the wind blew a scrap of rotting cloth, ribbonlike, against the tree outside her window, what of it? It was no more important than the ashes, shadow dark, blowing in the wind and circling her home.
No more important than the white glow of moonlight, mixing with the shadows of the trees, to make an image like a skull, pressed against the window of Zelena's room, watching.
Deep in the forest, polishing a walking staff as Bae checked the meat roasting over the fire, Alix felt the threads she had sent out reaching their target and smiled.
X
Note: The song is Loreena Mckennitt's Mummer's Dance