Deep Water (58 page)

“Greetings,” I whispered.

The figure bent and picked up the bark cup I had torn from the tree. It cradled the cup in its — were they hands, or something
else? I couldn’t see, couldn’t quite make it out. It hissed, a strange sound like wind through leaves.

I was certain that this was the spirit of the birch tree, come to punish me for stealing the bark.

“I’m sorry, truly, truly,” I stammered. “But the baby needed to be fed and I was so thirsty, I acted without thinking.”

The figure reached a hand toward Snow and I jumped up and pulled him away. As soon as I stood it disappeared from my sight,
but not from hearing. The hissing continued.

“It’s not his fault!” I cried. “It’s mine!”

I lowered my head to look at the ground and I could see it, faintly, before me, its hand stretched toward Snow, but stopped,
considering. Its head turned up and I realized it was smaller than I was, but its arms were much longer and, perhaps, there
were more of them. I couldn’t see, and not being able to see frightened me more than I would have thought. To have the threat
to my son disappear when I raised my head… It could be anywhere, go anywhere, spring out from anywhere… I kept my
head down and watched it as close as I could.

It looked at me and the hissing increased, until it sounded like a forest in a gale, an ocean of trees tossing in the wind.
The hissing came in waves and, although I cannot understand the gods, I understood this. This was not the spirit of one tree,
but the guardian of many. And it wanted retribution.

“It was my fault,” I said, “and I will pay the cost. But not now, I beg of you.” My voice broke on the words and I bit back
a sob. I didn’t think this thing would understand tears.

“Let me get my son to safety, let me raise him, and then I will pay.”

The spirit hissed more softly, but still not pleased.

“What are a few years to you? Just a few seasons, that’s all. Then I will pay the forfeit.”

I stared at the ground as if it were my beloved’s face, praying to all the gods that were. The hissing dropped away to a faint
shushing noise. It understood, I felt. It accepted. Then it reached one threatening hand to my son and poised its long fingers
over his throat. The meaning was clear. If I did not pay, Snow would.

“I understand,” I whispered. “When he is grown, I will come.”

But it was not satisfied. It wanted something else. I thought frantically, and remembered the old stories, about bargains
between humans and spirits. There were certain words that were always used. I had thought it was just a storyteller’s trick,
but perhaps it wasn’t.

“I am Dila, daughter of Sarni. I swear by my blood that I will return to pay the forfeit.”

The spirit fell silent, accepting the bargain. Then it disappeared into the earth, sank into it as one sinks into a bog, but
the earth was firm where it had stood.

I went from that place as fast as I could, and I made it to the Valuer’s Plantation the next day. They took us in, just as
Lidi had said they would, in those winter nights when we’d planned this trip together. They gathered us in like lost lambs,
and I felt a bit like a lost lamb, I was so shaken by my meeting with the tree spirit.

But then there was just life — working in the dairy was my main job, milking and cheese-making, although I helped with the
sowing and the harvesting, like everyone else. And like everyone else I voted for the council members and said my say in the
open meetings, which was one thing I would not have had in a free town, where only people who own property can vote. We had
some fights in those meetings, I can tell you! Everyone helped me build a little cabin and I planted a circle of rowan trees
around it to safeguard Snow while we slept, and under-planted them with larkspur, which protects from illusion. But nothing
happened, except winter turning to summer and back again.

Until the evening of Snow’s fifteenth birthday, when I had to pay the forfeit.

I had known it was coming. Every new moon I marked his height on the back of the cabin door, and it was three months since
that mark had changed. He’d reached his full growth. I had promised to return when he was grown, and that was now. How I wished
I’d said it some other way: when he was an adult, when he was settled in a home of his own — anything but this, which had
come so soon.

For the last three days, every time I had walked outside the wind had risen, whipping my cheeks and tearing my hair out of
its plait. Even the rowan trees seemed to hiss at me. When I walked out to empty the evening slop pail in the pig trough and
the larkspurs were laid flat under the rowans by the wind, I knew in my gut it was time to go.

I’d never told Snow about the forfeit. No need to grow up knowing a thing like that. He was a happy soul, a lot like his father,
and the Plantation was the safest place in the Domains — maybe in the world — so he’d grown free and wild like children should;
grown up to look everyone in the eye and respect only those who’d earned it. He was best friends with a much bigger family — four
boys and three girls — who lived a stone’s throw from our cottage. He spent more time there than with me, and I knew they’d
take him in, if he wanted it, and cherish him as I would. So early the next morning I went to talk to Cherry, the mother and
a good friend of mine, and told her the story.

“I have to go tomorrow,” I concluded. “Or the forfeit will fall on Snow.”

Well, she was troubled and a bit disbelieving, but I’m not one for fancies or telling tall tales, so she took me at my word
after the first surprise.

“Do you think you’ll be coming back?” she asked, looking down and pleating her skirt with her fingers so she didn’t have to
meet my eyes.

“I doubt it.”

“That’s a high price to pay for a bark cup!” she said indignantly. “We could get the men and go and chop those trees down!
That would sort it out.”

I laughed. It was so like her, to fire up in defense of someone she thought was being hard done by. Cherry was the loudest
voice for justice in our meetings, and I loved her for it. “More likely sort us out. No. I made a bargain, Cherry, and it
was a good one. I got to raise my Snow, didn’t I?” My voice broke a little on that, and she hugged me. I hugged back, glad
of the comfort.

“I’ll look after him,” she said.

“I know.” I collected my thoughts and smoothed my skirt. “I’m not going to tell him where I’m going,” I said. “Just in case
I do come back. No need to worry him. It’s a hard thing to ask, but will you tell him, if I’m not back in a day or so?”

She made a face, but she nodded. “He can come and stay with us while you’re gone,” she said.

“You’re cramped for space here,” I said, looking around the small house as I stood up to leave. “After I… afterward,
why not let the two eldest move in with Snow? They could still come back for meals, but they’d be out from under your feet.”

“Time enough to think of that later,” she said quietly. “Gods go with you, Apple.”

Apple was the new name they had given me, my Valuer name, taken to show my connection to all living things and my respect
for the people of the old blood and their ways. It was a good name. Homely, ordinary, but useful and sweet on occasion. I
had liked the idea of being Apple, and I liked it still.

I kissed her cheek, which was not a thing we did, normally, and went to find Snow.

It was hard to pretend that I was just going on a trading trip to Oakmere, when what I wanted to do was grab him and cry over
him and make him promise to be a good man, a man like his father, and promise to look after himself and eat properly and clean
up after himself and to choose a kind, sweet girl to marry — oh, and all the rest of the things a mother worries about. But
I just hugged him and kissed his brow, as I had done other times, when I went trading, and he noticed nothing, because what
fifteen-year-old boy notices anything about his mother?

Somehow that was comforting, that he was so — workaday. So unknowing that danger could lurk unseen in the wild. That he was
safe here.

Then I went. I took just enough food and drink to get me there, because I didn’t expect to come back. I didn’t take Lidi’s
backpack, just a potato sack. I wanted Snow to have the backpack.

I was surprised by how much I remembered about the way, considering how upset I had been fifteen years ago. I slept under
the same holly bush I had sheltered under then, and next morning found the trail easily enough, but though I had worked hard
and was still strong I wasn’t as young as I had been then, and the climb was hard. I was breathless when I reached the ridge
that rimmed the little valley where I had seen the tree spirit, and I paused a moment. It was mid-morning, with the sun gilding
the young leaves and the birch trunks shining brightly in the shade, almost glowing, it seemed, with the stream chuckling
between ferns as though it laughed.

I thought then, and I still think, that it was a place worth protecting. That if I were a tree spirit, I would act, too, to
save it from desecration.

I went down the slope and stood by the stream, where I had seen the spirit before, and put my sack on the ground.

“I have come to pay my forfeit,” I said. Nothing happened. No figure, no change of sound, nothing. Then I remembered, and
looked at the ground.

There it was, waiting. Silent. It raised its arms, the long fingers wavering as it shimmered in the sun, looking both real
and unreal at the same time.

In the old stories, the words had to be said again, almost the same as when the bargain was made. So I took a breath and said,
“I am —” and then I stopped, because I did not know what to say. I had made the bargain as Dila, but now I was Apple, and
glad of it. I stared at the figure in confusion, and of course it vanished as soon as I lifted my head.

I looked back down at the ground. “I don’t know what my name is,” I said. I must have sounded daft, but it was the truth,
and maybe it could hear the truth in my voice, because it hissed — to my surprise — in laughter, like a spring breeze playing
in the branches. That gave me confidence.

“I was Dila when I made your bargain. But now I am Apple.”

The spirit hissed again, and this time it was like the wind that rises before a storm.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I’m here to pay whatever forfeit I have to, to keep my son safe. But I can’t say
to you, ‘I am Dila,’ because I’m not, anymore.”

It tilted its head, considering, and I considered, too. Was there nothing of Dila in me? Just my love for Lidi, I thought.

Its hissing increased, and now it was a question.

“There’s a little part of me that is still Dila,” I confessed. Should I tell it what? It was growing impatient, I could tell.
The wind was rising around us, the trees beginning to shake and the stream had small white waves. “My love for my husband.
He’s dead. He died while I was still Dila, so that part of me is her.”

It was a poor explanation, and sounded sentimental to me, but the thing paused and the wind died. For a moment, the glade
was silent, waiting. The back of my neck was getting sore from staring down for so long. Then the spirit reached out a hand
and placed it on my chest. I thought, goodbye Snow, and I hoped — I remember hoping — that Lidi had waited for me so we could
be reborn together.

Then I felt… Oh, I can’t explain. A kind of tearing, in my heart, in my mind, all through my body. There was blood flowing,
but not from any wound, just out of my skin, out of my eyes, out of my ears. It hurt. But not unbearably. The pain was not
as bad as giving birth, not nearly as bad. The strangest thing was that the blood did not sink into my clothes. It flowed
over my skin and down into the ground, disappearing as the spirit had disappeared the first time I had met it.

The spirit took its hand away.

There I stood, whole, unmarked, the blood leaving not a trace on my hands or anywhere that I could see, the pain fading, and
me still alive.

The spirit hissed with satisfaction, and disappeared. That was it.

I stood there stupidly for a while, expecting something else to happen, but nothing did. The golden day went on around me
and the stream chuckled its way along its bed, and I stood like a booby on the grass with tears running down my cheeks, because
I had expected to die and now I was alive.

I climbed back out of the valley slowly, relishing every moment, and it wasn’t until I had reached the ridge and was looking
back at the valley that I thought of Snow, and how now I would be able to tell him the story, and I thought of Lidi, who would
have to wait for me a bit longer. Then I realized what the spirit had taken. The last bit of Dila. The part that loved Lidi.

I could remember him. I could remember loving him. I could remember my grief when I lost him. But the feeling itself was gone.
The part of my heart that had been full since the first day he kissed me was empty. He was just a memory, as though I’d heard
about him in a story.

I felt the empty part of my heart every day, as I went about my milking and my sowing and my cooking. I felt both lighter
and less solid, as though I had been hollowed out like a gourd. I had no grief, but nothing came to take its place, and I
did not think anything ever would, because that was the nature of the forfeit, that that part of me should die.

It was a fair bargain. Blood and love and pain, for the life of my son. I would pay it again. But this was the thing: I knew
that Dila badly wanted for Lidi to wait for her, so they could be reborn together. I knew that Dila, that
I
, thought that it was more likely he would wait for her because she continued to love him so much. So I wondered: I was Apple,
wholly Apple, and Apple did not love him. So would he wait? Did I want him to?

I didn’t care. It seemed to me that I would greet him after death merely as someone I once knew, with no more feeling than
I have for the weaver in Oakmere who made my cheesecloths. But perhaps the part of me that had died already, the part that
was Dila, will come back when it is time for me to go onto rebirth, and make me whole in death as I was not in life. Perhaps
I will love him again, and greet him with joy.