The Maiden of Moonfane Forge

*

A bold slash of ruby drew Lily’s gaze upon waking. The strange bird, with its long plume of a tail, sat on its perch in an open cage in one corner of the room like a bloody red heart in a ribcage. There was no mistaking that this was the very same bird Lily had seen directly after her confrontation with the forest cat. Indeed, it was a charge-beast. She could sense its presence and recognized how the magic she felt coming from it was of a kind with the magic she had sensed in her first days in the woods, and again when she had camped by the pond. As Lily stared at it, it met her gaze with obsidian black eyes.

The door of the bedroom opened and Hayleigh entered the room looking chipper and refreshed from her night in Slumber. She was dressed in a simple shirt and kirtle of homespun, but had taken pains to braid her hair into an intricate plait. She swept past Lily and went to stir a pot hanging over the fire. Only then did Lily realize that the fire was burning strongly and that Hayleigh must have already been awake to stoke it up and prepare breakfast around Lily as she slept. She didn’t like that the woman had been moving about without her knowing, but she couldn’t place a finger on why. And, besides, she was the guest here, not the other way around. Why should she be bothered at having been allowed to sleep?

“There you are, my ruby boy!” exclaimed Hayleigh, as if she had somehow missed the presence of the strikingly bright bird in the otherwise drab room until that moment. “Come here, come here,” she said.

The bird hopped to the open door of its cage before using it hooked black beak and feet to climb its way up the outer wicker bars to stand atop it. From there, the bird launched itself and in two and a half wing beats landed upon Hayleigh’s shoulder. She cooed to it and stroked the bird’s neck plumage.

“You have a charge-beast,” Lily said in wonder. She pushed herself up to a sitting position on her bedding and felt immediately the stiffness in her body from sleeping on the floorboards before the fire. “I’ve seen that bird before. Days ago, in the forest.”

Hayleigh tasted the porridge bubbling in the pot, then used a hook to lift the hot vessel from the fire and move it to the table. “My Scarlet ranges where he pleases,” she said matter-of-factly. As she moved about her home, setting the table with bowls and utensils, the bird rode her shoulder like a sailor rides the deck of a ship. “He probably sensed you out there and wanted a closer look.” She smiled at Lily in her fashion, cheeks encroaching on her eyes. “Come sit down to breakfast. You do look as if you hadn’t eaten well out on the forest road. Travelers make that mistake sometimes. They think to take a shortcut through the woods and assume they’ll find an inn or market along the way.” She barked a single, loud laugh. “Not likely!”

Lily had slept in her clothes, the same borrowed dress she had been wearing since departing from Moonfane Forge. It was cleaner now after being washed in the pond, but that wasn’t saying much. Its material hung lank and stretched and wrinkled, and Lily felt she was somehow imposing on even a simple breakfast board.

“Sit,” Hayleigh repeated. “Vetch will join you soon. He was only just waking before you did. Let him know we’ll continue his healing midday.”

Without offering any explanation of where she was going, Hayleigh took a basket from a hook on the wall and left by the back door of the cottage, taking her bird with her. In short order, Vetch appeared. He strode into the room dressed but with his hair messy from sleep, and Lily was reminded of how he had always looked when they were children.

He smiled at her and said, “Good morning.”

“Morning,” she mumbled softly. She couldn’t help smiling. Even with the emerging beard that only accentuated his masculine jaw and chin, she still saw in him the smiling boy, with messy hair and bare feet, that she’d run through the pastures and streets with as a child. He sat down at the table and went straight to spooning steaming porridge into a bowl, and set that bowl in front of Lily’s place at the table. Lily sat. “Thank you,” she said. Even the unease she still felt about Hayleigh’s abode could not dash her hunger. She fell to as Vetch filled a bowl for himself.

“Where did Hayleigh go?” he asked, lifting a first spoonful and blowing on it.

Lily shook her head. “She didn’t say. Vetch, did you know she has a charge-beast?”

He knit his brows momentarily, then, “Her bird? Is it? I’ve never seen a bird like that before. I thought it must have come from some foreign land.”

Lily watched him return to eating. He looked so much better this morning than he had the night before. She knew, of course, that the ghastly sword wounds were still there underneath his shirt, but his color was much better and he looked and sounded clear-headed once more. She nodded.

“It’s a charge-beast. Sometimes, I feel it strongly. Other times, it’s like it’s not there.” She paused and reflected, stopping short of mentioning to Vetch that at present, she once again felt the mild yet all-encompassing magic that had characterized the forest for her from the first day she’d entered it.

Vetch peered at her through his hair, and his eyes on her was like a balm. “You came all this way,” he said. The way he mentioned it, it was as if she had given him more compliment in that action than he could possibly deserve. Lily’s cheeks colored.

“To catch up with you and help save Marigold, however I might,” she confirmed.

The expression on his face became troubled. He set his spoon down in the bowl and looked at the table, saying quietly, “I have fouled up everything, Lily. I failed as a soldier. I had always wanted to be one, so much so that I spurned my family’s trade to do it. And what did it lead to? I couldn’t protect anyone at Moonfane, and then I couldn’t protect the few who came with me to get revenge. My orders led them to their deaths. I’m only relieved you didn’t catch up to us sooner. I wouldn’t have been able to protect you, either.”

“You speak as if you’re not a soldier anymore.” Lily’s voice was barely above a whisper. The encouragement she’d felt at Vetch speaking like his normal self again was stifled as the bleakness of his words cut her.

He closed his eyes momentarily. When he opened them again, the light she was used to seeing there seemed shuttered away. “If ever I was,” he said bitterly. “All I’ve left now is to see that you return safely home.”

“What home? There’s no home to return to. Vetch, Marigold is still a prisoner of those people. I have to at least find her. Is there nothing we can do?”

Vetch turned to stare into the fire and she saw him working through possibilities. “Not without an army,” he said at last. “Because they have one, Lily. And a mage leading them.”

“I know,” she said. “I met this mage and she tried to kill me. But she didn’t succeed. And she didn’t kill Marigold, either, she took her. She took her when she was at her most vulnerable, in Slumber, when a mage trusts that their apprentice will protect them. There is nothing I could do against that other Barrier-Caster,” she added softly. “But I still have to find Marigold. She’s probably woken from Slumber by now. With her and I and you, maybe ...” She let the words hang and was discouraged when Vetch didn’t pick them up.

A strong breeze stole down the chimney, whipping the flames about in the hearth. They settled again. The logs burned steadily. Vetch lifted his shoulders in a shrug and let them drop. “I’d rather not see you go into danger. Neither can I stop you.”

His words were so very unlike him. Confused, Lily watched him. Was it fear or self-doubt in his eyes? She could understand if it was fear. She herself had not been free of fear’s clutches since leaving Moonfane Forge. But self-doubt? Giving up on himself? That was not Vetch. Perhaps he really wasn’t back to his normal self yet like she had thought.

“But then what will you do?” she asked, fearing to hear his answer.

She didn’t get to. The back door of the cottage opened and Hayleigh returned with Scarlet on her shoulder and her basket brimming with duck eggs. Perpetual smile on her face, she set the basket down on the kitchen board while her bird launched from her shoulder and returned to its cage.

“He wakes,” she commented, upon seeing Vetch at the breakfast table. As if she were witnessing some odd dream play out, Lily watched as the woman went to Vetch, bent over him, and kissed his cheek. And he smiled up at the woman as she did it. “Shirt off, handsome,” Hayleigh commanded. “I’ll work on your wounds again while you eat.”

Lily sensed the initial thrumming of a spell being cast when Hayleigh set her hands to Vetch’s bared torso. He shivered once at her cool touch and Lily felt something clutch in her heart. Her appetite gone, she stood.

“I must go see to Fae,” she excused herself. Neither Hayleigh nor Vetch voiced a response. Vetch merely smiled at her with a dreamy, drunken expression.

Inside his cage, Scarlet twittered a strange little song before using his beak and feet to climb out and up to the top of it. As Lily retrieved a bag of fodder from her saddlebags and went out the door, the bird hopped up to a ceiling rafter and squeezed itself through a flap beneath the roof thatch. She stood on the threshold and watched the bird wing away into the woods, a red flame weaving through brown and green. Lily felt a brief burst of magic from it, and then it was gone, replaced by her awareness of the strange spell being worked upon Vetch inside the cottage.

The rain had cleared in the night and left the morning air cool and clean. The stream before the cottage flowed fuller and faster. The ground was still wet and Lily could smell the soil and all the greenery of her surroundings. Fae grunted her usual greeting at Lily and trotted up to her to push his heavy head into her arms. She chuckled, despite herself.

“Are you greeting me or the bag of food I have?”

Fae answered her question by first licking Lily’s face, then nosing at the fodder bag she protected in the crook of her arm so the great beast wouldn’t tear it open trying to get at the food.

“Back up, back up, back up,” Lily chided. She held the fodder bag over her head out of Fae’s reach until she could walk over to an open patch of grass by the stream and upend the bag for her panthegrunn. Fae fell straight upon the food, making happy panthegrunn noises as she munched away. Lily folded the empty bag. She had only one more bag in her supplies and it was not a full one either.

She sighed. Through the cottage window, she watched Hayleigh casting her healing magic. Vetch was speaking, saying words to her that did not reach Lily’s ears outside. Whatever it was, it made Hayleigh laugh and she lightly cuffed Vetch’s shoulder before resuming her Casting.

“I think we should leave here soon.” Lily spoke softly, as if afraid someone besides Fae would hear her and know her foolishness. What right had she to expect Vetch to join his quest to hers, after all he had been through? He had watched his fellow soldiers die and only barely escaped the same fate himself. Lily was heartbroken to know that so many from Moonfane Forge’s garrison had died, and she was hardly acquainted with any of them. But for years, Vetch had spent his every waking moment with those people. And then he had seen their violent deaths. With the garrison all but vanquished, who would know better than he that bringing his one sword against the raiders now would never win Marigold back? The shambles that were their lives now would not be mended by that suicidal act.

Instead, he had found himself here—safe, healed, cared for—all while believing Lily dead. Was it such a betrayal that he could enjoy the attentions of an attractive woman who had saved him? What right did Lily have to whisk him away from happiness? He and she were never pledged to one another, were they? She had always wanted to be in his company, more so with every year as they grew into adulthood, and Vetch had always seemed to want to share that company, as well, had he not? But they had never pledged anything to one another. Lily found her previous view of things wavering. What had their brief conversations and plans to spend time together truly been? Had she only presumed there was more meaning behind those moments than truly there was? His clear joy at discovering her survival had reinvigorated her with all those strong feelings, but since then, he had seemed mostly indifferent to her presence, happy she was alive, yet reserving his attentions for the forest woman.

Lily thought back and wondered how she had been so mistaken. Could it be he only ever thought of her as his childhood friend—the lanky girl who had used to hang her arms over the fence of his parents’s tannery trading jokes with him—and deigned to treat her to a day in the markets only because he had always been kind to her like that? Why would he not prefer someone like Hayleigh, a woman who appeared to have experience and ease of speech with men, as Lily did not, and was vibrant and buxom and attractive ...

Without having noticed their appearance, Lily found that her cheeks were wet with tears. How could she have been so foolish? Vetch was never hers. She had never expressed her true desire to him as she should have, as Marigold had advised her to do time and time again. She couldn’t stop him from pursuing a new life of his own after their town’s destruction, any more than he would stop her from continuing on her quest to find Marigold, the one person remaining to her that could tie her to her old life.

Brushing the fodder dust off her hands, Lily stared forlornly through the window. Vetch was pulling on his shirt as Hayleigh, with eyes faraway after a difficult Casting, said something to him and returned to her bedroom to Slumber. Lily thought of how any other time she would have been excited to meet another mage. She should have been happy with her fortune at finding Vetch, even as the news of the other soldiers’s deaths marred their reunion. And she had been, but now she felt only like she was an interloper, like she had stepped into a strange couple’s household and witnessed intimacies not meant for her eyes. Only, Vetch was not a stranger. He was her oldest friend, the boy she had played with when they were children, who had grown into the man that she felt ... no, not simply affection for, but love. They had been apart for only days, yet something had change between the raid on Moonfane Forge and now. Or maybe it hadn’t changed at all, and it was only that Lily comprehended the truth now. Either way, this woman—this strange and isolated, yet gregarious and forward woman—had already captured Vetch in Lily’s absence. If a few days was all it took, then she couldn’t have ever been as important to him as he was to her. He had made his choice; who was she to fight it?

“We should leave here soon,” she said again, this time to herself alone, her voice coming out in a trembling whisper. “I am only in their way here.”

Almost, it took more courage than she could muster to put on a neutral face and go back inside. Vetch, lounging before the fire, turned a drunken smile upon her.

“How is Fae?” he asked inanely.

Lily swallowed down a shuddering breath. “We ... I need to be leaving.”

“Back to Moonfane Forge?”

Lily shook her head. Some locks of her hair had come free from her loose ponytail. She brushed them out of her eyes. “I need to go find Marigold. I wish ...” she hesitated. “Vetch, I am sorry about your friends from the garrison. I know there’s nothing more you can do. Maybe nothing more I can do, either. I still have to go.”

The soldier knit his brow as he looked up at her. She saw a struggle in the lines of his face that she didn’t understand. She was struck by his beauty. Even with his sun-ruddy face and unruly hair and the patchy beard, he was beautiful. Beautiful and yet troubled.

“There is a town south of here, out of the forest,” he said, and his words were delivered in the stark cadence of a soldier informing his men. “Pasanhal, it’s called. I think that is where Marigold is being taken. To a castle of black stone, surrounded by wheatfields. Please be safe, Lily, if you must go after her. Though I would prefer you returned to Moonfane.” He returned to staring at the fire.

Lily anxiously stroked the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other. She didn’t understand him. Why could he not speak to her as he always had, before the raid had happened? Did he hope to make their parting easier by not injecting too much emotion into it?

“Pasanhal,” she repeated, and shivered. Having the name of the town made real the hornet’s nest she planned to go into. And she would have to do it alone. No band of soldiers. Not even Vetch by himself. Lily cast her eyes about the cottage. “Then ... I go to make ready. Your healing ... I hope it continues well, that you recover. If I can get Marigold back somehow ...” She trailed off, not knowing what else she meant to say. He only nodded.

In truth, there was little to make ready. Lily had only to gather her bedding from the floor and stuff it back into a saddlebag. Vetch did not even rise from his chair to help her with saddling Fae. It was strange how such as miniscule inaction could say so much about how their relationship had changed in the course of a few days. As she tightened the straps of Fae’s saddle and checked once more that the saddlebags and her rucksack were secure, she wished she could go back in time and have her duel with the Barrier-Caster who had taken Marigold to do over again. Would that she could she have been more skilled in her own Casting, and woken hours later rather than days and been able to go with Vetch and his soldiers when they departed. Would that have changed things? Perhaps, if she had been at his side all along, that would have kept things as they were.

“No,” Lily whispered. She knew it wouldn’t have. She sniffled and mounted her panthegrunn.

The door of the cottage opened and Vetch stood there, barefoot still, a small, almost regretful smile on his handsome face. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and lifted that same hand to wave to her. It was a simple gesture of parting, but to her it may as well have been a dismissal. She put a smile on her own face, telling herself she was doing what was right for him and required for her, as she lifted her hand in kind. Then, so as not to have to look into his eyes a moment more, and be reminded that the light from them no longer shined on her, she turned Fae toward the little path and nudged her flanks.

“Let’s go, girl.”

As Fae carried her across the footbridge arching over the stream, she heard the cottage door close. From there, they followed the little path that took them away from the cottage and into the dense and shadowed forest once more.