((A.N.: Just a wee note before I let you continue on with the story—for those of you who read Chapter Four anytime before the 21st of December, you might want to consider going back and reading it again, as some major changes have been wrought in it. I'd appreciate it also if you dropped a little note—a.k.a. review—informing me whether you thought it improved or not. For all you that read Chapter Four after the 21st, pretend this author's note was never here.))

   Ivy paced the garden, from the peas to the cabbage to the melons. Although their green-striped rinds jostled positions to tempt her tummy, she ignored them all, intent on her feet as they jabbed impatiently into the earth.

   A couple more paces, and she was at the fence, staring out thoughtfully into the silent forest, a silence that seemed to reproach her. She folded into sitting position, resting a pale chin on pale hands as she resisted the urge to clamber over the fence and run off barefoot into the forest's depths, resisted the urge to pluck at the wooden planks like a caged bird at its bars.

   Ronan, knee-deep in the herb patch with a burlap sack in one hand, looked on the detainee with a grim satisfaction. He had finally found a way to keep his little bird from fluttering away to whatever-it-was in the forest. He worked on.

   Hours passed. Ivy had finally given up, and lay curled, slumbering in a patch of weeds her father had somehow managed to miss. Ronan was ready to stir her awake and head in to begin their last meal of the day, when a soft voice hailed him from the window.

   "Ronan . . . come in here, quick!"

   He raised his head from his plants enough to view the face of colorless Geneviene in their window, and he spared just a glance at the sleeping Ivy before rushing inside to see what was the matter.

   Once Ronan had disappeared inside, two things happened at once: Ivy's eyes snapped open, and small smile of triumph crept up Geneviene's face. She flung the shutters out the rest of the way, swinging her light body over the ledge and running to the spot where Ivy was standing, staring in consternation at the mother of hers who looked like a moth as she fluttered towards Ivy in her white nightgown. A moth, or a ghost. A ghost-moth.

   Without an explanation, Geneviene captured Ivy's little hand. She pulled her over the fence after her and winged off into the rapidly darkening forest just as Ronan stuck his head out the open window and yelled after them in fear and frustration.

   In the forest, Geneviene did not abate her pace. Instead, she seemed to increase it, and Ivy nearly flew as she was tugged along after her feather-footed mother. Indeed, Ivy wondered at her mother's strength, she who before had been so sick and lifeless. But that was not all Ivy wondered. As she was whipped along at a breakneck pace through the forest, she also wondered with a certain uncomfortable feeling why they seemed to be heading directly towards the tower.

   At their pace, it was little time at all before they reached it. As Geneviene broke into the clearing, Ivy fell into a startling illusion: Geneviene was no longer Geneviene. Instead, she was the mysterious woman of the forest, her white raiment making Geneviene's finest nightgown look soiled. Mother and lady firmly separated, however, when Geneviene rushed at the tower and began to beat at it with her bare fists.

   Ivy was startled—she ran towards her mother screaming, but was drowned out. Geneviene's "She's mine! Mine. You cannot have her!" was followed by a gritty silence, as she single-handedly took on the menace that she had deemed the cause of her sickness over her past many years of brooding. She beat at it and beat at it, until her fists cracked and bruised and bled, until Ivy, clinging to her legs and beating at them in turn with her own little fists, resorted to a confused sobbing.

   She beat at it until her skirt turned red.

   Her nightgown had long ago ceased to be the pure white of snow: now it was the scarlet-flooded white of snow on which an arrowed deer lay dying. And when she finally crumpled into the bleeding grass like the same, her silence was still dogged and her arms beat instead at the ground. Mud mixed with blood. Ivy, who still clung to her mother's legs, was trapped underneath, and she lay there in the thick, innocent silence of the clearing only broken by Geneviene's frayed breaths. Geneviene's blows to the earth beneath her weakened.

   Stopped.

   It was cold. It was so cold.

   Ivy wrapped her arms around herself, shivering, not daring to go near her stony-faced father. A face so stony, it seemed to reflect the diminutive headstone at the edge of their garden, a headstone that marked the freshly turned earth of mother and wife's grave.

   It was a silent ceremony, with only two other attendees. Edana's husband stood beside them, the lines of grief from the death of his wife, Geneviene's sister, still fresh on his face. Edana's raven-haired son stood alongside him. He was nearly a man now at the age of fourteen, and his shy looks toward his cousin around the two men's bulks caused Ivy to grip her late mother's gift, the sprig of ivy, possessively. Her strength.

   When the two men reached an unspoken agreement to depart, Edana's husband left for where he had stabled his horse, and Ronan walked off with no other sign of life than the lifting up and putting down of foot, the bending and unbending of knee. Either he assumed Ivy would follow or had forgotten her altogether in his misery, for he neither called her nor looked back to see if she trailed him back to their empty cottage.

   And she did not; something had caught her interest, something on the gravestone. A tiny engraved ivy leaf decorated the very top of the stone, and when Ivy held up her leaf duet the right one fit it perfectly. It belonged there.

   In Ivy's mind, there was only one thing to do. And she did it. She carefully plucked the right leaf away from the other and scratched a little hole in the earth in front of the stone with her finger. She patted dirt back over it firmly after placing the ivy leaf in it, and stood up, satisfied. Now just one half of the heart shape was left. Now just one half of Ivy's heart was left. She stared at the grave of both her mother and her leaf for a few moments in silence before spinning around and running off after her father.

   In the earth where the ivy leaf slept, something moved.