The Sparrow King
Despite her usual talent for knowing exactly where she was, Damiana was forced to admit that she was lost. Ansel was forever warning her not to leave the path, but she had done what she always did and ignored him completely.
She came to the forest for respite, after all, and had never lost her way before.
Now the trees were unfamiliar to her, their voices strange.
And no matter where she turned, nothing was as it had been the moment before.
Yes, Damiana was lost. This was no longer a thing she could deny, it simply was.
And so Damiana did the next logical thing: she sat down under one of the whispering pines to eat her lunch.
The villagers, who had always hated her, thought this part of the forest to be haunted by an eldritch being they called Passer Regulus, and so did not venture off the path between their small village and the next for anything.
The creature was said to lead the pure souls of the village into endless sin.
Damiana had no fear of such things, as the same villagers considered everything from her blunt way of speaking to her love of the trees sinful.
Apparently, anything that was beautiful or honest was sinful, and so the forest, being both, was evil.
This made very little sense to Damiana, who enjoyed both beauty and logic.
She had never been afraid to venture into the forest of Ardenne, though she did not deny its inherent dangers.
Its dominion stretched for countless hectares, connected by its immeasurable root system, the trees hiding dangers both storied and unknown.
Beyond the forest lay the mountains, though she did not know their names.
Damiana couldn’t see them from here, but she felt them in her soul.
Felt their secrets, as she did the pines, murmuring to her—warning her not of the dangers of the forest or veering off the path, but the evil of the village.
Damiana agreed with the trees. She knew all too well the dangers of the villages and big towns that dotted the endless Ardenne.
Damiana’s stomach rumbled, empty and gnawing.
It seemed, these days, that her hunger would never cease, never quiet.
There was nothing to do for it. She had a wanton taste for life itself, though she knew that too to be a grave sin according to the pious in the village.
This vulgarity of hers kept her close to home, as the villagers were rather predisposed to unpredictable behavior.
Even Ansel agreed that this was best, despite his desperate need to be liked by them.
Her brother was many things, but never had he been brave or of an independent mind.
In the dappled sunlight of the late summer afternoon, the young woman unpacked a large lunch and sat with her back against the massive trunk of an ancient pine.
As she bit into a thick slice of bread slathered with butter and sprinkled with maple sugar, she listened to the tree whisper to its neighbor, and subsequently what the neighbor had to say in return.
The gossip of the forest was rich on their branches, and it trickled to her below in honeyed kernels of knowledge about the past and future alike, causing her to ponder life and all her various woes in comparison with those of the outer world.
It wasn’t that Ansel was so bad, he wasn’t really.
In many ways she knew she was lucky to live with her brother, rather than a husband who expected her to complete all the drudgery of household labor and raise a terrible brood of slavering children.
Ansel only expected the drudgery, and he would never have children of his own, as he was too curmudgeonly to take a wife.
If only he would stop taking her drawings of the trees.
They were hers and hers alone, or so she tried to tell him.
No matter how she hid them, he would find them, sign his name to them and sell them at market for sums she never saw.
He said she owed it to him, for she’d never paid her way in life.
But as Ansel neither worked a job, nor tended the gardens, the geese or the house, she did not see what he did that was of much value at all.
Damiana was not finished with the fine lunch she’d prepared, but she stopped eating to make a sketch.
She daren’t tell Ansel this, but she wasn’t really drawing the trees at all, but rather their posture as she listened to them.
In a way, she’d been telling the stories of the forest, as she heard them.
She got the figure of the pine across from her just right, and fixed its particular qualities in her mind, before returning to some particularly creamy cheese that she’d traded Briony Larkspur a quarter-dozen goose eggs for.
“You rendered the story about the man Jupiter quite well, I think,” said a low, sonorous voice from somewhere above her head. “You have managed to portray his cruelty with a blunt edge that is accurate to what I witnessed. Terrible thing, that village. All villages, really.”
Damiana froze. The voice was rich as an autumn breeze, sharp and alluring. Damiana imagined the first bite of a tart apple as she closed her eyes. Certainly, being frightened was an option, but as the voice had not menaced her in any way, she chose to close her eyes and wait.
When the soft crunch of pine needles and a rustle of her blanket indicated that the body attached to the voice might have made itself known, she opened them.
Before her, stood a tall figure dressed all in black, wearing a wicked smile on their pale, ethereal face.
Their eyes were reminiscent of a starry night, dark and deep, with a sparkle that called her home.
A tang of fear coated the back of Damiana’s throat. The stranger’s moonstone skin and starry eyes were one thing, but as they crouched down to look at her, she caught sight of their ears. They were sharply pointed, and when they smiled, their teeth were too white. Too sharp.
Damiana blinked several times as the figure titled their head at her, arching one eyebrow in appraisal. Everything about this creature was beautiful, liminal, medial. As they shifted their weight, Damiana took notice of their long, muscular legs, thick and lush with lithe movement.
All the better for chasing, Damiana thought. Again, she was foolish, and allowed the flush of desire to take her over, rather than repressing such feelings immediately, as she’d been told she must.
“Yes, I do think you got it just right.” Damiana’s visitor locked their dark gaze onto her face, curiosity in every elegant line. “How interesting you are. Not quite human, and quite a lot of… something else.”
Damiana’s heart raced. This creature was one to talk.
How obvious it was that they were not human—that they were of eldritch origins that only the trees knew the truth of.
The thought excited her, but she dared not show it.
For the first time in her life, Damiana felt coy.
It was a feeling she’d seen expressed by others, flirtatious villagers, attempting to sway one another to chaste proposals of marriage.
This had always annoyed her, but now… Now she understood.
Damiana’s eyelashes fluttered along with her heart as she scoffed. “Oh certainly I’m human. What else might I be?”
“Isn’t that the question?” the stranger asked, the wicked smile returning to their face.
Damiana’s heart slowed to a dull thump. There was something more than flirtation in this stranger’s words.
It was said the forest spirits—the ones the old tales spoke of as gods—knew things that humans did not.
Did this incredible creature know something about her that she did not?
“If you have an answer I’ll gladly hear it. ”
The stranger’s broad shoulders flexed as they crossed their arms over their chest. There was a tension in their face that betrayed them. Something about Damiana’s answer had disturbed their equilibrium. Perhaps it was unsettling for a lowly human, such as herself not to be afraid.
“My answers come at a price,” they replied, their voice rich and careful. “Do not ask for them unless you are ready to pay.”
Damiana nodded. So the figure was one of the forest spirits the villagers worried about.
She knew the forest beings were said to be alluring, but as Damiana had never once agreed with another woman about who was alluring and who was not, she hadn’t put much stock in the thought.
But now. Now, nothing could stop the blush from rising to her cheeks when the figure sat at the edge of her blanket and smiled that devious smile again.
Was it possible that this was the devious Passer Regulus?
It seemed quite unlikely that a spirit so fabled could even be real, let alone interested in looking at her drawings.
Besides, the Passer Regulus was said to lure good folk off the path.
She was not good, and she’d simply become lost. She’d lured herself off the path.
Like as not, this was simply a curious lesser being, though she would do well to be wary.
Her mother, before her passing, had taught her to be wise amongst those she called “our forest kin.”
Either way, her visitor was lovely to look at, and Damiana was flattered that they were interested in her work.
Her lashes fluttered against her cheeks in a way that made her absurdly flustered and embarrassed.
Of a sudden, she had nowhere for her hands to be that felt natural.
A sharp, cold wind loosened a strand of her bright golden hair.
She sputtered as it flew into her mouth, escaping the haphazard braid she’d plaited that morning.
“Do you need help out of the forest?” asked the stranger, merriment dancing in their dark eyes as Damiana attempted to push the loosened hair behind her ears.