April 12, 1501 Lancaut, England
The familiar scents of the forest give way to bright, all-consuming pain, wrenching Beatrix back to herself even as it threatens to slam her into darkness again.
It stabs through her left arm. She sucks in a breath, and it sears through her chest. She squeezes her eyes shut, lies perfectly still on the cold, leaf-littered ground.
The pain settles into her, pulsating through her body.
The hand she can move is sticky with blood.
In the dark, she can’t tell where it’s from. The gash over her eye, maybe.
She grits her teeth, clutches her broken arm against her body, and pushes herself up to sit. She slumps against the fallen tree, panting and nauseated. She’s run home from this place more times than she can count. Now, she’s not sure she can make it home at all.
She’s not sure she wants to.
Did any of them care that she was gone?
Were they worried when she didn’t return for supper?
Are they looking for her?
The sun had been high in the sky when she crept into the forest. Now, the leaves of the ancient oaks are limned silver by the light of the waning moon.
They look like grotesque, looming beasts, reaching for her from the shadows with gnarled limbs: an entire forest of monsters, come for her.
She shivers against the thought. Against the memory.
Her bruised ribs scream in protest, but she bites back her sob. Crying will only make it worse.
“Beatrix? Are you out here? Hello?”
A bolt of fear ricochets through her like lightning.
“Beatrix!”
But she knows that voice.
“I’m here!” The effort brings tears to her eyes. Or maybe it is the sight of William, crashing through the underbrush, dropping to his knees in front of her.
“Are you all right? What happened?” Even in the dark, she can see the worry etched across his brow.
His eyes don’t leave hers. Watching. Waiting.
Her gaze drifts up the massive trunk of the oak behind him, up to the wide branches she can no longer make out in the night.
“I fell,” she says, swallowing against the bile rising in her throat.
“My boots got tangled in the hem of my skirt.” A pang shoots through her chest, something deeper than the dull throbbing over her heart.
William pales. He’s spent his life in these trees, has seen the distant ground from their dizzying heights. “Do you know how lucky you are?” His voice trembles, caught on the edge of relief and horror.
Her stomach turns. She knows exactly how lucky she is.
Impossibly lucky.
“Let’s get you home,” he says. “Can you stand?”
She could manage, maybe, each step an excruciating reminder. But William’s words have turned her legs leaden. “No.”
“I’ll carry you, then,” he says, already bending toward her.
Her eyes burn. “I’m not going back.”
“All right then, where shall I take you?” he asks, as if he’s humoring a child playing pretend. Perhaps he thinks she’s hit her head.
“Nowhere.” She has nowhere else to go. “I’ll stay here.” There’s water, and she can make a shelter. There is plenty of time before the next winter arrives, and she doesn’t eat much. She can forage or—
“You’re hurt,” William points out.
“I don’t care,” Beatrix says. Bruises and cuts heal. So do bones, eventually.
“You’ll die if you stay out here,” he says gently.
“I don’t care.” But tears well in her eyes. He’s right. She’ll die out here, cold and hungry and hurting and alone. She has no choice.
“I care,” William says.
It’s as if the entire forest—the entire world—falls silent at his words.
“You don’t,” Beatrix assures him. He cares for her like he cared for the rabbits he sometimes found suffering in a poorly set snare, a woodsman’s sympathy for a wounded creature. She is injured. She is in his woods. It’s his duty to care.
“You don’t even know me,” she adds. They haven’t spoken a word to each other since the day she fled the forest and left him speechless in her wake. Four years seems forever ago, now.
His eyes meet hers. “I know you’re happiest in this clearing.
Like the trees lift a weight from you every time you pass beneath them.
It’s the only time I see you smile. I know you stare into the Wye for hours, like you can see a hundred futures flowing past, but you go back to Lancaut.
” He swallows, and his throat bobs. “I know you’re always in a hurry.
Always rushing somewhere, even when you have nowhere to be.
Like you’re afraid if you stand still, even for a single moment, the whole world will pass you by.
That everyone else will keep moving forward and you’ll be left behind, rooted to the spot like an oak when everyone else is the river. Until you’re forgotten.”
Beatrix’s breath catches. “How could you know all that?”
“Because I know you,” he says. “Because I’m afraid, too.”
“You are?” It’s like she’s seeing him for the first time. Like she is being seen for the first time.
“I am.” He takes her hand in his. It’s warm and calloused. “I’d live in the woods if I could, too,” he says. “But maybe we should go back to Lancaut… together?”
Together. There is a promise in the word, in the tentative way he holds her hand. She nods.
William bends to her. He smells faintly of dried sweat and wool and the forest. He lifts her gently off the ground, assures her she will be all right when she cries out against the motion. But he doesn’t sound like himself. He sounds uncertain. Afraid.
Beatrix cradles her injured arm against her chest as William carries her slowly toward Lancaut.
She lays her head against his shoulder. He tries to keep her awake.
He tells her of his latest trip to Gloucester with his father, of the wondrous abbey he saw there.
But the adrenaline has faded—the strength to declare she wanted nothing to do with Lancaut ever again, gone. She wants to go home.
Her twisted arm throbs, and her wounded body aches. Exhaustion creeps over her like a blanket of fog, turns her limbs leaden and her mind numb. William’s voice fades into silence.
Beatrix stirs in the dark, her mouth dry, her thoughts too fractured to make whole, caught between waking and dreaming and nothingness. The pain is distant and detached now, as if it belongs to someone else’s body instead of her own.
Hushed voices drift to her ears from her bedside. Mama. Papa. Isabella. Even Alice, come from her new cottage with her new husband. Beatrix can’t make out every word, but she hears enough. Enough to know that the voices are real.
It’s past time we consider…
Perhaps with a larger dowry…
The abbey at Tintern…
The darkness claims Beatrix again, or maybe she sinks willingly into its embrace, her only escape from the whispers.