1. A Dark Wood #2
“No!” I shook my head. I didn’t want his comfort or bribes to go ice fishing—something I once viewed as a treat to break up the drudgery of my days. There was only one thing I wanted from him, and he wasn’t giving it to me.
“No! No, I don’t like it here! If you really loved me, you would let me go with Henrik and Meya.”
“Enough.” His ruddy features flushed like he had just come in from the cold.
I recognized the implacable look to him.
There would be no changing his mind. “You’re my daughter.
You stay with me. That is right.” He looked to my brother, his dark eyes glittering, ready to battle, but it would not come to that.
Henrik was a good, obedient son—my father’s favorite.
Henrik would not steal me away, even if I begged it of him.
“You need to make your own path in this life with Meya and without the burden of another. A fresh start is what every husband and wife deserves. That is fair.”
Fair.
The word choked me alongside that other most hated word—burden.
I was a burden.
The burden my father would spare my brother and Meya from assuming. I’d never felt so unwanted . . . so unloved. Da was concerned about fairness. Fairness to Henrik and Meya. But no thought was given to me and what might be fair for me.
Meya stared at me, mouthing the words, I’m sorry.
It was too much. I didn’t want her apology. I wanted to go with her. I wanted my freedom—to leave this cursed village behind. There was no future for me here. Why could Da not see that?
With a strangled cry, I flung open the heavy wood door of our cottage and rushed out into the bitter night, sucking in a shocked breath at the sudden change in temperature.
The last few days had been the coldest of the season—today the coldest yet. Everybody said so. The old ones belabored how they’d never felt a cold like this.
My body felt it, too. My breathing fell shallow, skin instantly contracting, blood thickening, moving sluggishly through my veins like syrup. It was the kind of cold that had people covering every inch of their skin, leaving no extremity bare before braving the elements. Except me.
I foolishly left my heavy coat behind as I fled into the clawing wind. And yet not even this freezing night prompted me to turn back.
Briefly, I considered going to see Linnea.
At this hour, her family would be sitting down to dinner.
They were simple people, eking out a bare-bones existence.
Her father was a potter. He crafted pitchers, bowls, plates, jugs.
As skilled as he was in his trade, he was required to travel, venturing far out to other villages and towns to sell and barter his goods, leaving Linnea and her brother and mother home alone to manage their meager farm.
Here, everyone devoted long hours preparing for the winter and then surviving it when it struck, holding us clamped in its teeth for the better part of a year.
Such was life in the north. Our growing season was short-lived, but we made the best of it, harvesting and preserving our food: drying and pickling vegetables and berries, salting and smoking fish and venison and boar.
I did not wish to impose on Linnea and her family. It would put them in the awkward position of either welcoming me to their meager table or turning me away. Her parents were good people. I would save them that mortification.
Besides, the notion of solitude suited me just fine right now.
My boots pounded out an angry rhythm on the well-trod path of mud and snow that cut down the center of town, carrying me past the brown blur of rough, wood-hewn buildings with their spirals of smoke curling from chimneys.
I should have gone to Linnea, though.
Would that I had turned back and knocked on her door instead of heading into the woods and the fate that awaited me there. I could have relaxed warm and cozy before the welcoming heat of Linnea’s fire and spared myself.
And yet I did not.
I dove into the woods, seeking solace there . . . and found something else instead.
My dress was made of heavy wool, but it offered no real protection, slapping against my stocking-clad legs, letting the frigid air creep beneath my skirts.
Still, I pressed on, running until saliva flooded my mouth and my breath crashed in my ears as I fled into the wild—into cold that sliced sharply at the exposed skin of my face.
I always felt at home in the woods—the bitter cold not so very bitter to me.
My constitution was sturdy. The yeomen who spent so much time in the fields and orchards bore the effects of their time outdoors.
Skin weathered, tough as the hard-skinned husk of a nut, chronically pink and chafed from the wind.
Not me, though. In the clawing press of naked trees and cutting wind and piles of thick, suffocating snow, I felt only marginally chilled.
My father always remarked on it rather proudly—that I was good northern stock, born to withstand the elements better than others, better than most. A sign in his mind, I supposed, that I was meant to be here.
That I was like him. I think that’s secretly what parents wanted—to see themselves in their offspring.
The reflection somehow validating, a sign from nature that they were worth something . . . worth replicating.
Admittedly, his pride in me was something that had always made me feel special—my ability to withstand the chronic winter something that set me apart, above from everyone else. It went to my head. Especially when I overheard Da boasting about me to friends.
Although special was not always good.
Not if it meant unusual.
It was one of those blurred lines you had to be careful about crossing. Be different enough to be special, but not so different they called you a freak. My toes most definitely edged over that line. I grimaced.
My eyes only added to my . . . uniqueness.
One a blue, deep as the magistrate’s cobalt cloak he proudly wore about town, and the other not.
My left eye lacked pigment, glittering a silvery-gray, like the icy landscape after a winter storm.
Another trait that was remarked upon, but not favorably and not by Da.
Indeed, this is where he ceased to boast. He ignored that part of me—a reality he pretended did not exist. As though ignoring it made it not a real thing.
My eyes were a defect. An anomaly. The other children would point and jeer at me and call me ugly names.
The snowballs they tossed at me between invectives especially lacked kindness.
Meya, the closest thing to a mother I had, explained to me that children were cruel, and I could expect better of them in the future .
. . when they grew into adults and developed a heart.
Cold comfort when I was not yet an adult.
Linnea was my only friend in possession of a heart.
She told me I was beautiful and that my eyes were beautiful.
More than what my own wretched brother did for me.
Jens poked fun at me—although less so in recent years.
He had matured enough to stop making gagging sounds when he sat across from me at the table.
When he was younger, his face would scrunch up in disgust at the sight of me across from him each morning over our bowls of porridge.
My eyes marked me as different, and different was not celebrated.
Different was feared and met with disdain.
Another reason I wanted to leave. I felt, if not unsafe, certainly not in the best position as I went about my life here among people who viewed me with misgiving.
At least in someplace bigger, like the Borg, I would not stand out so much.
There would be a sea of people—all manner of people.
I would not draw much attention, strange eyes or not.
I could believe Meya—that the adults in Isstad were better than the children—except last week, a mother on market day took one look at me and flinched before gripping the hand of her child and moving hastily on, giving me a wide berth. As though I was a contagion.
It was a difficult thing to be brought up in a place where your neighbors and friends—even some of your family—never fully accepted you and looked at you with a faintly curled lip.
Meya and Henrik told me to just ignore them, that everything would be fine in time. I no longer believed that.
I’d lived here my whole life. Fourteen years.
How much more time did my neighbors, my community, need?
No. Nothing would ever change here. I was a daughter of the north.
The blacksmith’s daughter with the freakish eyes.
My role was defined. From the day I was born my duty was to my family, to toil alongside my father in the smithy, to help in our garden, to hunt and fish with my brothers.
And I had done all that. I continued to do all that.
One day my duty would transfer to a husband and the children I would produce. That was the expectation, what I had been taught since birth. I would toil and breed and serve my family until the day I died.
That was the pattern. The standard.
I longed to break free.
Why should rejecting this life be so impossible, so very stigmatizing? There were women who took other paths. I’d seen the sword maidens who served the Lord of the Borderlands once, riding into our village after we suffered a raid.
I had been just a girl, but I recalled those women, so strong and splendid atop their mounts as they dragged the bandits they’d captured on ropes behind them, asking us to identify them.
When we confirmed they were the ones who had raided and killed two of our own, justice had been swift.
Those fierce women had executed them on the spot.