Chapter One #3
As for the woodsman, he disappeared shortly thereafter and was never seen again.
My grandmother suspected foul play was involved in his disappearance, but I thought it far more likely that he wasn’t prepared to be mixed up in all my mother’s craziness.
I remember him making the sign against evil with his crossed fingers over and over after he wrestled the athame from her hands and then picked me up to run with me.
My last sight of her was over his shoulder, as she stood with her arms outstretched and her back to the river, my heart’s blood staining the front of her dress.
I was sent to live with my grandmother, who had eventually told me my mother’s entire story.
She said that when she first saw me again, she suspected my mother’s wild tales about the Faeries might actually be at least partially true because of the extraordinary beauty of my face and form, and she strongly suspected I indeed had Otherworldly blood.
It was a hard story to believe because of how ordinary I looked now.
After all, grandmothers often thought their grandchildren were prettier than they really were.
My grandmother claimed to have taken me to an old wise woman who lived in the woods.
Most people called the woman a witch. This person, whoever she was, gave me a bitter tasting potion to drink.
I remember trying to spit it out, but the old woman put her hand over my mouth and nose and almost choked me half to death to get me to swallow it.
It burned my tongue and my throat, and it had made me terribly ill.
That was about the extent of my memories of that experience, but again, I’d been very young at the time.
And so, I grew up, and if I had any kind of Faery magic, it never made itself known to me or anyone else.
I was certainly not beautiful in any kind of way, as Faeries were said to be, but my grandmother said it was because of the potion I’d been deliberately given “to protect me,” she said.
She had, by this time, also invented a soldier husband for her daughter, and a father for me, who had also “died tragically,” in some battle or other, leaving my grandmother to raise me.
I doubt the other villagers ever truly believed her, but they did leave me mostly alone, which was how I liked it.
I heard a scratching noise at the door, startling me out of my dream by the fire and ran over to fling it wide, thinking that Leofric had come home at last, so I wouldn’t have to venture out in the freezing cold to look for him after all.
However, there was no one there at all, and I wondered if I’d dreamed the noise as I dozed there by the fire.
I leaned out to look up and down the lane, feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck, as if something was watching me, awaiting its chance to spring at me out of the shadows.
I know now that it must have been an atavistic response, a vestigial reflex or inheritance from my ancestors.
One that had perhaps been triggered by a fear for their lives so abject and traumatizing that it had somehow been passed down in their blood and their bones to their offspring.
It had been the Faeries, of course.
A cold breeze brought me the smell of them floating on the air, something oddly floral that I didn’t recognize, though it probably wasn’t anything good.
A feeling of dread and despair came over me, along with a prickling down my spine.
I literally braced for impact, but when I whirled around to look behind me, there was nothing there at all—just shadows like the ones lining the road now.
Or were there perhaps even more of them there now than there had been before?
I touched the dagger I wore in a sheath on my belt and clutched the beaded rosary that I’d hung around my neck, pulling it out from under my wool shirt. I wasn’t a Christian, or at least I’d never been baptized, though my other relatives had tried to convince my grandmother that I should be.
She had refused because every time I entered the church, I became deathly ill.
As a result, I was appallingly ignorant about the Christian religion, and its symbols held little meaning for me.
I still wore the rosary around my neck when I was traveling, because my grandmother insisted that was the right way to ensure protection, and because at the time I believed the legend that said holy Christian objects were the best weapons against supernatural creatures.
Back in those days, I was very superstitious.
It was as I turned to go back inside that I saw the long shadows suddenly detaching themselves from the walls and stepping out from the alley.
They seemed to be the forms of tall men, and there were a lot of them, but I couldn’t make out their faces.
I took a quick step back through the doorway, but before I could slam the door and lock it behind me, they were on me with alarming speed, shoving their way in, taking hold of me and pulling me outside in the frigid air to push me roughly to my knees.
The one who had taken me shoved a rag in my mouth to quiet me, as someone else pulled my hands behind me to tie them securely.
I was pulled to my feet and had a hemp sack that smelled of onions shoved down over my head.
All the while, I was struggling wildly, trying to shout through the gag in my mouth, when suddenly I felt a sickening crash on the back of my head, and my legs gave out, making me sink back to the ground.
I’d barely hit my knees, though, when rough hands took hold of me again, and I was pulled up and thrown over someone’s shoulder like a sack of grain. Blood rushed to my head, and this finally proved to be the final insult, as I fainted dead away.