It was still dark when Ivy woke. She lay still for a long moment, listening to the pre-dawn silence. Through the shadows, the dark lifted a little as emerald eyes glimmered behind her windowpanes as two bright jewels. Memories of last night's dreams, of the woman standing silent at her bedside, silent, were revived, even as the eyes disappeared. It was then she noticed the window had been opened a crack, the curtains alive with the moist night breeze.
It made perfect sense to her when she climbed up to the sill, pushing the shutters open wider with a slight struggle, and slid down a strong vine to the ground. Ivy needed no guide in white this time, for she knew the way by heart now. She had traversed it many times in her mind since yesterday.
The tower seemed to welcome her, if ever lifeless stone could. She sighed as the slow, steady rhythm of the tower once more pulsed through her, warming her even as she shivered in the chilly moonlight. She leaned against its solid mass, letting it support her suddenly weak limbs. She was so tired. Why shouldn't she leave all care, all effort, to solid stone? Living flesh was so much weaker.
Ivy started as the first shade of pink touched the sky. Dawn. Home. It was time for her to be gone. She ran out of the glade, frightened by her previous thoughts.
Ivy reached her bedroom window shortly before the sun completely showed its face, and she had little trouble climbing the vine up the short distance to the sill. She closed the shutters as tight as her clumsy baby fingers would allow, not yet acquainted with such things as locks. As the window was shut behind her, the vine that had aided her escape and return was drawn silently back into the damp earth, leaving the brick once more free, rosy in the dawning light.
She climbed in her short bed, clutching her eyes shut tight as if that would stop the sluggish pulsation stemming from the center of the forest that reached out to her even in sleep. She slept with it as her lullaby.
Ivy's father woke her with his smile. Carrying her to his and Geneviene's room, he sat her in the lap of her mother, sitting upright beneath the sunny sheets. Ivy looked up into her still-pale face, but Geneviene's eyes were not wide anymore with pain or delusions. They looked down at her calmly, seeing her for what she was, and a similarly pale hand lifted from its resting position to stroke Ivy's flaxen hair. Ronan, looking on pleased, frowned and caught that hand as the bandage loosened and he saw the state of the wound underneath. The slice from wrist to elbow was bleeding again, the lips of the cut green and ill looking. Geneviene snatched it away from him, hugging it protectively.
"Love, I need to clean that wound now," he said softly, pointing to a basin of soap and water and a jar of salve on a nearby stool.
"It's fine, it's fine. Now, if you please…" she gestured toward Ivy, saying the rest with her eyes.
"I won't be staying then. You're better at it, anyways." He hesitated for a moment, looking at her limp arm, but tugged a loose hat around his ears and heavy gloves around his callused hands, leaving for the garden.
Geneviene patted Ivy's head again, this time with the other arm, as if afraid still of Ronan's concerned watch of her wound. Ivy's eyes drifted shut with sleepy somnolence as the quiet was undisturbed for many minutes. Geneviene was drowned in thought, her eyes on her child but her mind away elsewhere. Through the open window wet grass smells wafted in, and nodding flowers poked their cheerful heads inside at the silent pair. Ivy's eyelids drifted farther shut.
"Edana," her mother said suddenly, and a drooping Ivy straightened up at the word, her sunlight fingered eyelashes fluttering open. She sighed, still half asleep, as a hazy image of blonde-haired woman little older than her mother drifted into her mind. The image called up another, Edana forgotten, of white white gowns and black black hair.
"Pretty lady…"
"Well, yes, I suppose she's pretty."
"No." Ivy nodded with vehemence, unaware of its inappropriateness. "The pretty lady. Where's the pretty lady?" Ivy's mother stared at her suspiciously for a moment, a new thought taking shape. An unruly zephyr smelling of the Wood sped into the room by way of the window, banging the wooden shudders loudly as it passed. Geneviene, startled, dropped the thought, and Ivy returned to thinking of the yellow-haired woman, seeing again Edana's smiling, sunny face leaning over her cradle.
"Your aunt," Geneviene continued after a moment. "You met your aunt once. Do you remember her? Edana."
"Edana. Edana." Ivy nodded, repeating with the word with a slight lisp. Geneviene smiled, an artificial one that was little more than a stretching of lips.
"Yes, Edana. You see, Ivy, that's where I went yesterday. Your aunt needed me very badly yesterday, because she had a hurt like mine." She stroked the cut, staring out the window.
"Snake? Tower?" Ivy nodded again as she said this, trying out the newly acquired movement.
"No!" Geneviene said, more harshly than she intended. Of their own will, her eyes strayed again out the window, to the Wildwood, sitting just beyond their fields. "No," she repeated again, softer. "She has. Had. She had a hurt on the inside." She stopped, choosing her next words carefully, her eyes wide again and her stare unfocused. "Remember your tummy ache after you ate those bad berries? Your aunt was sick like that, only she didn't hurt." Ivy brightened, remembering a word her mother had used when she discovered Ivy eating the plump red berries off of the ivy plant.
"Poison!"
Geneviene's apathy dissipated as her daughter spoke that word, and she looked thoughtful, speaking more to herself now.
"I never thought of that. Could it have been?"
"Could have been!" Ivy all but crowed, smiling winningly up at her mother. Geneviene frowned.
"Listen dear…Edana got sick, but she didn't get better. And after awhile it was so bad she went to a place where she didn't have to be sick." Her frown deepened, her eyebrows arched together with the effort, but she kept the wet back. She would not, dare not cry in front of Ivy.
"Can we go, too?" asked Ivy, all seriousness. Maybe in that other place the heartbeat wouldn't bother her. Did the heartbeat bother her mother, too? Was the heartbeat why her aunt left for that other place?
"No, no, we can't go. Not yet. Not for a long while. She went to a place called Death."
Ivy digested this for a while.
"Death? That's where the kitty went?"
"Exactly. Edana went to the same place Kitty went when he got tired of hunting mice." Geneviene's forehead smoothed as she said this, relieved that the old grey cat had picked such an opportunistic time to die as a week ago. Ivy curled up in her lap, satisfied with the explanation, breathing rhythmically in sleep. Geneviene, envying her daughter's easy descent into sleep and stroking the greening skin of her cut, watched the green sea of leaves whisper in the Wood. Funny how they were the same color. What were they saying? They were saying something. But leaves didn't talk.
