Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
The next few days pass in a blur. Marian rises with the mist each morning. Her hands are raw from steam and lye by midday, but her mind is sharpened by every detail she collects.
As a laundress, her tasks are simple but ceaseless.
Wash. Rinse. Beat the grime or blood from someone’s tunic with river stones.
Mend a hem, fold a shift, carry fresh linens up spiralling stairs that snake through ancient oaks.
In between washes, she trails Allen around the village like a shadow, learning which bridges creak, which ropes have too much give, and how long it takes to climb from the western canopy where her own cabin is to the seamstresses’ platform on the farthest bough.
Marian hasn’t seen Lox since the ceremony, yet his presence has refused to leave her.
The feel of him settles on her skin, catches in her lungs, and threads through her thoughts when she least expects it.
She feels him in the silence between tasks, in the hush that hangs before dawn, in the sharp bite of memory whenever she catches herself remembering the weight of his grip on her chin.
Marian loathes it. Loathes that he has carved out any corner of her mind, that her pulse still betrays her when she recalls the way his eyes found her in the dark.
In between her shifts at the river, she’s managed to scrounge up enough small things to keep herself from collapsing: tart berries off a passing bush, the bark of birch that leaves her teeth aching, shoots of wild onion that burn the tongue.
None of it fills her. None of it satisfies.
The gnawing has settled into her stomach with a hunger she carries from dawn to dusk.
At night she lies on her narrow cot, jaw sore from chewing tough greens.
She dreams of bread so soft it caves beneath her teeth, of roasted meat glistening with fat, of cream spooned straight from the churn.
Still, she endures.
Today, the river has been mercifully low, its bed of stone glinting clear as glass in the morning light.
Marian has already scrubbed a dozen tunics.
Now she stands near a line strung between two ash poles, watching shirts and skirts flap in the breeze.
The scent of lye clings to her fingers. She wipes them against her borrowed clothes, smudges spreading where the fabric wrinkles.
Marian says little and listens much. Allen talks enough for both of them.
It’s a small mercy that he proves to be more guide than captor.
Whether out of kindness or command, she cannot tell.
He spins stories of bark-skinned tricksters, of harvest moons that hum with magic, of lovers who stitched their souls together with ivy vines.
But his presence is constant, always at the edge of each chore like a persistent tune.
‘Are you sure that charcoal is the best medium to capture the handsomeness of my features?’ Allen calls out.
He sits a short distance away, back propped against a boulder, lute balanced across his knees.
He plucks at the strings idly, not a song so much as a wandering of notes, the sound threading with the rustle of drying cloth.
Marian keeps her head bent over the sketchpad. It rests warm against the crook of her elbow, the paper growing crowded with his likeness. Her hand moves fast, sketching the line of a jaw, the slant of brows perpetually half-raised in mischief, the tug of lips caught mid-smirk.
‘It would take an arsenal of paint in every colour imaginable to properly render your vanity,’ she mutters, dark lines scratching swiftly across the page. ‘But for now, charcoal will have to do.’
‘How dare you!’ Allen gasps in mock offence, one hand splaying dramatically across his chest. The lute nearly tumbles from his lap. ‘This face is beloved in seven fae villages and by countless lovers that I’ve left squandered in heartbreak. You’re sketching history, not just my jawline, Mare.’
She shakes her head, the corner of her mouth twitching upward.
Truthfully, she can’t remember the last time she sketched anyone like this – fast and free, lines piling on lines until the likeness emerges.
For a breath, she forgets the sting of lye on her fingers, the gnaw of hunger. For a breath, she is herself again.
But the moment doesn’t last.
A shimmer at the corner of her vision stills her hand.
Across the riverbank, two young fae stand barefoot in the shallows, a basket of wet fabric between them.
One hovers a palm over the collection and water surges upward like a fountain.
Threads of liquid bend unnaturally before collapsing back into the river.
The other fae swirls her hands in a circle, wrings the basket’s load mid-air, and the cloth stirs as if caught in a gust. One by one, the garments rise before folding neatly and drifting back into the now empty basket.
Allen notices where Marian’s gaze has snagged. ‘Does it bother you?’ he asks, watching her shoulders tense. ‘The way we use it?’
Marian tears her eyes from the spectacle.
Her fingers smudge the line she was working, a dark streak dragging across Allen’s cheek in the sketch.
‘It isn’t natural,’ she grumbles. ‘Work should be done with hands. Sweat. Tools. Not . . .’ She gestures vaguely toward the fae, still wringing out scarves with a flick of their fingers.
‘Magic?’ Allen finishes. ‘It isn’t some profane word or curse.’
Her charcoal skitters as Allen names it plainly. The word itself feels dangerous. She glances toward the two fae women again. Their power weaves effortlessly through the river, coaxing water from cloth and heat from wind without a sound of command or strain.
‘It’s unnatural, is what it is,’ she mutters.
‘Magic is as natural as your heartbeat.’
She grips the sketchpad harder, her knuckles whitening.
‘Where I come from, we’re taught that magic is a corruption.
A twisting of the order meant to bind the world.
It cheats from men the toil they were born to seek.
’ The stick of charcoal snaps between her rigid fingers.
‘They told us it hollows you from within, makes you hunger for power until you can’t tell need from want. ’
Allen’s laugh softens into something like pity. ‘You were told twisted tales; not because magic will eat you alive, but because those in power feared what you might build if you learned to wield it.’
Silence blooms between them, filled only by the slap of linen in the breeze and the soft gurgle of the river. The broken, black grit of the charcoal works into the whorls of her skin. ‘That isn’t true.’
‘We fae are taught that mortals steal what they can’t grow, and burn what they can’t break.
That your kind takes and takes, only to call it survival.
Doesn’t make it true.’ He sighs and leans back, basking in the beams that break through the clouds.
‘You mortals are always so afraid someone else might taste joy without permission.’
‘Fae powers cheat what should be earned. Work should take effort, not tricks that flout it.’ She gestures sharply toward the pile of clothes in the basket.
‘Magic isn’t a trick.’ Allen sets the lute aside and props his chin on his fist. His eyes soften, but the tease never quite leaves them.
‘It isn’t coin stolen from a shop or bread swiped from a market.
It’s thread spun from what’s already there.
It’s a way of listening so closely to the world that it listens back.
What you call a trick is only what happens when the river and the child remember they were made of the same thing. ’
The water laps against the stone, murmuring secrets in a tongue older than either of them. Marian doesn’t answer. Instead, she watches as a trio of boys with loam-coloured skin and bright green eyes skip smooth stones that leap across the water.
‘If magic is as natural as you say,’ she eventually asks, ‘then why don’t all fae use it? Why not join together and sweep over the mortal kingdoms? You could rule the world if you wanted to.’
Allen lets out a low whistle, tossing his head back against the boulder.
‘Once, long ago, you’d have been right. Every child born beneath Sherwood’s boughs was touched by magic.
Fire in their veins, water in their bones, the forest in their lungs.
But something’s changed.’ He scrubs a hand down his face as if debating how much he should say.
Eventually, he sits forward, elbows braced against his knees, his grin absent for once.
His eyes – green, lit through with amber – narrow as though he’s staring at something only he can see.
‘With every generation, fewer of us are born who can hear the song. It’s as if the fae ore in our blood has forgotten how to answer the call of the wild. ’
Marian blinks. She almost laughs at the absurdity of it. Fae ore is jagged veins of mineral her father’s men dig up and smelt into weapons. It is cold, unfeeling rock, not something that sings. But Allen’s expression isn’t playful.
It unsettles her more than any tale of magic.
Sadness coils in the hollow of her ribs before she can shove it away.
She wants to tell him she doesn’t care and they are the enemy.
Yet the image of those boys by the river, bright-eyed, laughing, and unaware of what might be stolen from them before they’re grown, lodges in her chest.
‘What could be causing it to dwindle?’ she manages.
Allen only shrugs, though the motion is heavy.
‘Some say it’s punishment from Shéruel for our arrogance.
Several believe it’s just time; all things wane, even us.
’ His gaze flicks back to her, a rueful twist at the corner of his mouth.
‘You expected us to be all-powerful tyrants, didn’t you?
Monsters sharpening our claws for the day we conquer mortal kingdoms? ’