A Forest, Darkly

Epigraph

Homes in the Great Forest – in it, around it, even several leagues from its very outer edges – are wont to have protections not found in other regions.

Carvings of tutelary spirits, either one or two, are generally affixed to dwellings, hewn above lintels, around door- and window frames, sometimes into the very doors themselves, even on stoops.

In locations where the populace is particularly superstitious – or particularly experienced with such things – each door and window and chimney has this talisman.

There’s such a cottage at Briga’s Leap, in the west. It’s deserted, now, and a curtain of leaves and vines of brightest green hangs on either side of the front entrance, but the two heads (foliate) carved into the doorframe by he who made this tiny house (himself now dust and forgotten) are not hidden.

In spring, pink and purple flowers (of a variety unknown elsewhere) bloom and the twins are crowned with delicate blossoms. Their features are strikingly similar, but for their expressions: she to the right wears a benign smile and graces the world with a gentle, knowing gaze; her sister to the left presents an astonishingly baleful glare.

Her face is older too, as if she has lived a life, seen too much, given too much, had too much taken from her. Received too little in return.

Above, in the centre of the lintel is a third head, entirely covered by foliage, and seen only if one digs around (as your correspondent did).

A child this one, expression clean, innocent, guileless.

Concealed as she is, her secret remains: that she still bears what the others have either never had, or lost through the workings of curious fingers, rough hands, the elements and years: horns.

On her forehead they sit proudly, budding, but definite.

Although the twins have been called “green women” or “green maids” – conflated perhaps with the myth of the Green Man – they are perhaps nothing to do with him. The horned one above surely is not. She is a hind-girl.

Hind-girls, creatures who reject the roles the world would give them, who will live beneath no roof nor within any walls, who dance along the narrow forest trails.

Sometimes they throw their heads with such abandon that the antlers of one get caught in those of another, but their feet are sure on paths of beaten earth for they know such ways of old.

The twins, however? Perhaps they are indeed green women?

They say that, once, there were many scattered through the Great Forest. Some say she – or they – disappeared, wearied by the ways of the world, or simply that she – or they – hibernates at whim, or when she feels a need, or when things become too dangerous for her to roam her forests.

MOTHER MURIEL’S TALES OF GODS

AND UNEARTHLY THINGS

(UNPUBLISHED, ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT

ACCESSIONED TO THE LIbrARY OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF WHITEBARROW)