The Forest's Son (7 page)

Grace leaves the house again and shucks off her dress, hanging it from one of the branches once she's so deep in the trees that there's little chance the neighbors will spot her. She knows if her son returns early he'll simply roll his eyes, even if he has no memory of the distaste for clothing she never manages to get past. The sky is growing darker, and she can see the stars beginning to twinkle through the tree branches.

The wind whispers through the trees, but she cannot make out the message. Rather than trying harder to listen, she lies down on the leaves carpeting the ground and relaxes her mind. It may not be her message to understand. Perhaps it is for Jakub, instead.

When her son returns, she will tell him everything. She knows now that delaying until she is sure he has reached full maturity is no longer an option, and may be no more than a mother wanting to protect her cub as long as she possibly can. Today has proven she is pushing them all farther than they are willing to go right now, and he is fragile, made more so by what he puts himself through time after time to protect them all, not that he remembers.

He will need time to become strong again, and the sooner he recovers all his memories and can begin, the better. They will make decisions, but she thinks returning and facing their fate, rather than running, tails between legs will be what he wants, what is best. He has only wanted to protect them all until he is able to do everything he can to keep them safe.

She is not sure what he will be capable of once he is unfettered, but it's time they both find out.

~

Bożena goes about her days as if everything is normal. Her thoughts do not stray from her work, from her sisters, from preparations for winter. But there is an undercurrent swelling, and this time, it’s coming from more than just Edyta. There is a faction growing restless, sisters who are not content to wait for whatever will come. And Bożena knows her time of ignoring things, of putting Edyta and her plotting off, is quickly coming to an end.

Soon, she is certain, they will come to her and demand to know what’s to be done about Grażyna and her son. The boy will be coming of age, and he will no longer be a boy. He will be the man they have all been told to fear since their own making.

And Bożena has no idea what she will tell them when the time comes.

Puszcza
: Bożena

Bożena bolts upright from a sound sleep, her eyes wide and alert in the dark. The cloud cover is so heavy it hides the stars, but she doesn't need sight to know each and every one of her sisters, from the oldest to the tiniest babe is wide awake and staring into the pitch black
night just as she is.

“It’s him, sister, isn't it?
”
Edyta asks. Even in the dark, Bożena recognizes her voice as well as the vibration of her body. Edyta is ready to run, to chase, to fight. She would take off now in the dead of night, following the hum, trusting her sisters to follow behind and give chase. Mentally, she understands the need for care and planning, but her body neglects to listen.

“Yes,
”
Bożena says.

She hears the rumble go through the women the moment she confirms what they already know. Most, she knows, had thought him dead. There had been moments she thought he might be.

But Bożena always knew, deep in her bones, that Grażyna is too smart to have died out among the humans that quickly. She is crafty enough to have found a way to hide the whelp and his power, and all the sisters needed to do was wait them out. At some point, they had to come out of hiding, and her patience will have been rewarded, as it is now. Any thought she has other than hunting them is gone in this moment, and she’s reminded that they have laws for a reason, and Grażyna defied them all.

Now, that time is here, and she has to plan. It’s been decades since any but a few of her sisters walked among the humans for longer than it takes to choose a male to rut with or to go and trade at a market. She doesn't think of her nights in Tadeusz's apartment, only of the complications involved in sisters traveling to find Grażyna and the child.

The world is getting more complex, and many of the sisters have been refusing to go out into it at all, leaving the few market interactions required to the younger members of the tribe and choosing to forego sex with men altogether. Most of them are flexible when it comes to which gender to have relations with, unless breeding is the goal, but many are no longer choosing to breed at all. It's a concern, especially as the tribe is smaller than it was before Grażyna's defection, but the younger girls seem more than capable of moving back and forth between the two worlds. Human women have even gotten taller, on average, so the Dziwozony no longer stand out as much as they once did.

Bożena rises and walks away from the rest of the tribe, moving from the chatter toward the peaceful sounds of the lake water brushing against the shore. Even in the dark, her feet are sure on the path. She imagines
Matka
would lead her to the water this way even if she were blind.

She reaches the end of the path and walks into the water at the same steady pace, never hesitating or startling, even at the chill of the water. She walks until the water covers her head entirely, and the sounds of the night are blocked entirely and replaced with the sounds under the water, muted brushes of fish as they swim past her and her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.

This is her favorite place to organize her thoughts. Here, in the peaceful blackness under the lake, she closes her eyes and focuses on the steady pulsing of her heart and the matching thrum of the blood running through her.

They’ve waited so long for this day, and she knows the sisters will look to her, wondering when and how they will move. Every time they’ve been able to track Grażyna and the male, she’s been the one to lead them, sure of her task.

Only when she’s truly alone, which is rare with all these women, she wonders if the old ways are still the right ones. They lose more than they replace with young. The human world changes more and more, with machines doing so many things and the boxes everyone lives in and the clothing becoming stranger every year.

It once took no more than a night run into a settlement and borrowing of clothing from a drying line for the sisters to trade with humans. Now it takes days and even weeks of infiltration for them to discover changes in language and clothing styles and to learn the new types of machines and how they work.

Bożena is beginning to feel old. She thinks her lifespan is too long, perhaps. If the sisters lived as humans do, everything would be forgotten now, and everyone would be dead, and no one would care anymore that once a sister had a boy child she didn’t want to kill and ran off to be his mother instead of his executioner.

Here, in the silence of the lake, Bożena can think of her own males. Four, she thinks, four who had no names. She'd handed them over before they could utter their first cries, letting the others take them for Aniela and her poppies. Some of the sisters attend burials for their male young, but Bożena never had. Is Grażyna weaker than she is ,or had she been stronger when she ran?

Out of air, she rockets upward in the water, toward breath, toward air. She breaks the surface with a loud splash and shakes her long hair over her shoulder, flicking water from her face with her fingers.

She opens her eyes to see her sisters lined up on the shore, all waiting for her.

“When do we leave, sister?
”
Edyta asks. “What is your plan?”

II: Awakening

13: Origin

It's after two in the morning when Vance drives the car back into the garage. Again, without thinking, he reconnects it to the charger, his muscle memory better than that of his mind.

He tries to be quiet re-entering the house. His mother must have gone to sleep long ago, and the last thing he wants to do is wake her, only to have her see him with his hair a mess and his lips swollen from kisses. He isn't certain what he and Donovan are to each other after what transpired in her apartment, but he knows he wants it and has probably wanted it for a long time.

Still thinking of the feel of her in his arms and the way her body fit when it pressed up against his own, like she was not only meant, but designed to be there, he startles to see his mother sitting on the couch in the family room as he makes the turn for the stairs.

“I thought you’d be sleeping,
”
he says.

“I was waiting for you.”

“I can see that, but why didn't you go to sleep? It's late.”

“Because we have things that can't wait until morning to be discussed.”

“Look, can't we —?”

“No, Jakub.”

He steps away from the stairs and sits in one of the chairs. She’s pretty much confirmed now that he has a different name, and she's not going to let him go to sleep without a fight. He may as well speed up the process.

“I assume,” he says, “since that's the second time you've used that name, that Vance isn't my real one.”

She has the good grace to blush before her smirk escapes.

“I think I know it when I remember things, don't I? I recognize it, a little. We aren't … American, either? We’re from somewhere else.”

“You could say that.”

He flexes all ten of his fingers to keep from pulling them into fists. She's the one who wants to have this conversation, but she's being vague and cagey. Mentally, he counts to ten, not trusting himself to open his mouth to ask her anything without letting  angry words free, and he doesn't want to fight with her.

She doesn't let him get all the way to ten.

“I'm sorry. I have imagined this conversation for so long, but now that it's here, I'm unsure of how I'm supposed to begin.”

“How about at the beginning? How long have you been imagining this conversation for, exactly? Considering my memory is pretty much shot at this point?”

“About 200 years, give or take a few. I wasn't keeping track of time by a calendar when I left.”

Of anything he was expecting, this is not it. His mother being insane and thinking she was some kind of immortal is not part of the few pieces he’s managed to put together. Next thing he knows, she’ll probably be telling him they’re vampires.

He all but flies out of the chair and begins to pace the living room. This is crazy. He needs Donovan. He needs the files upstairs on the computer. He needs to know if he's been drugging himself and frying his brain based on the ramblings of a lunatic.

“Sit back down, Jakub. You are going to exhaust yourself with the pacing. I should think before I speak and remember that you know nothing right now. Will it help if I begin with smaller things?”

“Smaller than telling me you've been waiting to tell me something for 200 years? Yeah, I think that might be a good idea.”

He walks to one of the large windows that overlook the porch, his eyes seeking the forest beyond. She leaves her seat on the couch to stand next to him.

“Right now, it is too dark to see anything out there," she says. "But you can feel it anyway, can't you? The presence out there? The trees and the wind and all the things that rely on the forest for life?”

He nods. He knew, even this morning, heading down the long driveway with Donovan, that she didn't feel the same as he did when driving out of the trees. She hadn't looked around to listen, hadn't cracked her window just a touch to hear them better. He'd felt a disconnection when they'd reached the main road, but he'd noticed no change in her.

“We are not like them,
”
she continues. “I come from what can probably be called in this language a tribe — a sisterhood — of women. To some, we exist only as story — as myth — but we live in the forests. We have no need of men but for pleasure and occasional short companionship, and of course, for bearing children.”

“So why did you leave?”

She pauses, closing her eyes, and he can feel, more then see, her pain.

“I left, my Jakub, for you.”

She swallows once, twice, before opening her eyes and staring at him, her eyes dark and wet.

“When I say we have no need of men, I mean at all. No men. Ever. If we bear male, they are to be killed. We do not raise them.

“Human men bring strife to the sisters if they remain longer than it takes to breed with. And our stories tell of a man who would rule over us all. So we prevent that from happening.

“But when you came, I found I could not have you die. So I ran, with you. And we have hidden ever since.”

He has to walk away from her and the window and the trees, which he can hear even through the glass. If what she’s told him is true, he owes her his life, twice over. He doesn’t know how to come to terms with the idea, however, that he is an aberration: something that should never have been allowed to live, a burden his mother has had to live with these 200 years in hiding.

“Yes, 200 years,
”
she says, like she’s reading his thoughts. “Our lives do not have the span of humans. They are far longer. And our young take far longer to mature. We have moved often for more than one reason: to hide from the sisters, as well as to hide our slowed aging.”

It sounds beyond belief, but he can hear the truth in her words, and the confirmation whispered in the trees. Yet it still isn't enough. He want
s
—
need
s
—
more.

“The passwords?
”
he asks. “Do you know them?”

“The username is Staśu, for your stuffed bear. The password I think you can guess, especially after this evening.”

She knows,
he thinks as he races up the stairs to his room. She knows without him saying a word, and he wonders if it’s some form of telepathy or nothing more than the rumpled way he looked when he came home combined with a mother's intuition.

Using her clues, he finds the hidden directory on his hard drive, and files spill open: videos, journals, photos. The ancient machine Donovan had found this — yesterday — morning had actually been procured brand-new from a physician his mother had seduced over a hundred years ago. He's torn between laughing at her cunning and being horrified at the means she'd used to procure it.

The more he reads his own words as well as hers and watches videos and views the photos, memories begin to filter in, and he remembers. He remembers everything. More than the memories, though, he feels the power increasing as it creeps back through his body, moving slowly as tree sap in winter.

He marvels that he was able to move about each day without feeling this, that his weakened self could get out of bed each day and get dressed and make his way in the world.

With each memory restored, he feels the power surge, and he wants to weep at the years lost without it. He recognizes the necessity, acknowledges that being reacquainted with his true self will endanger everyone: himself, his mother, and most of all, Donovan, who doesn’t have any stake in this other than whatever she feels for him.

He thinks of the video he watched yesterday morning, of his voice cracking as he begged himself to continue to forget, to not pursue remembering, to protect her at all costs, and he realizes he has been in love with Donovan for years without admitting it.

But when he made that video, there were two things he wasn’t as sure of as he is now. One is the awe of this power flowing through his veins. The other is that Donovan feels at least something for him. He isn't in this alone. And she deserves to have a choice. He won’t make it for her again.

His mother appears at his door. Whether she’s summoned by the surge of power or simply guessed how long it would take him to work everything through, he isn't sure.

“Do you know what you are going to do now?
”
she asks.

“No,
”
he says. “But I think Donovan deserves to be part of my decision. Don’t you?”

“No classes for you today, then,
”
she says, and disappears from his doorway, the ethereal Earth Mother returned.

He knows now she is both, and has been throughout the ages, as are all her sisters. Her people are peaceful, in tune with the earth, which they call
Matka
, Mother. They know more about herbal lore than any other people on the planet. But when called upon, they can be the fiercest warriors as well, and it's that part of his mother she has called upon all these years to protect him and keep him safe when going against the most basic tenet of her people.

He also knows what she is called, something mentioned only briefly in texts, and even then, only in passing, and completely misunderstood:
Dziwozona
.

14: Unsure

Donovan changes her outfit five times before leaving her apartment, and she's still a good 20 minutes earlier than her usual arrival time when she reaches Vance's house. She steps out of the car hoping that a short black skirt with attached crinoline and a quasi-military-look black hoodie with huge buttons and matching black tights and boots qualifies as an appropriate outfit for picking up your best friend the morning after you've spent three hours kissing the hell out of him.

The truth of it is she has no idea where things stand with them. The define-the-relationship conversation never took place, so this morning, she's in a state of limbo.

Was last night an aberration after the craziness of yesterday? Had he been feeling abandoned, and kissed her because he was worried she wouldn't come back for him this morning?

Will she knock on the door this morning only to find everything back to the way it was? With his memory only a little bit better and the two of them back to a friends-with-no-benefits status?

Donovan knocks, much less enthusiastically than yesterday. She isn't as sure she wants him to come to the door today. Plus, she's way early. Maybe he's still asleep. Maybe she should get back in the car and drive home. Maybe her outfit is wrong. Maybe she should go and get coffee or something to kill some tim
e
—

When the door opens, she’s surprised to see Grace on the other side and not Vance. She doesn't think Grace has ever answered the door in all the time Donovan has been driving him to school. Grace opens the door and gestures for Donovan to come inside, then vanishes off in the direction of her greenhouse. As if Donovan isn't nervous enough coming over this morning, Grace has to go and change things up?

Donovan isn't sure which way to go, so she heads in the direction of the family room. The couch is comfortable, and she figures she can wait there if Vance is still sleeping. She reaches the stairs, though, and can't help but glance up toward his bedroom. He's standing at the top, in the hallway outside his room, his hair still damp from a shower. He's wearing nothing more than a pair of black sweats slung low on his hips, the gray band of his underwear peeking over the top in spots.

“Come on up,
”
he says.

Like she can do anything else. She climbs the stairs without blinking, unable to look anywhere else but at him. She stops a few stairs from the top.

“I'm a little early.”

“It's okay. We aren't going to class today. We have a lot to talk about.”

Her body moves ahead of her brain, and she backs down a step before she even understands what he's saying. Talks are bad things. Talks mean things like “last night was a mistake
”
and “look, I like you a lot, but
”
and “we'll always be friends, but.”

“Where are you going?
”
he asks.

She backs down another step. There’s still a way for her to save face here. She’s sure of it.

“
Chodź tu
,
”
he says.

“That's not English.”

He shakes his head.

“No, it's not. I remember, Dee. I remember. I remember
everything
, and English is not my first language. So if I make a few mistakes today while I get readjusted, please remind me. What I said was, 'Come here.’”

She hesitates.

He walks down the two steps until he's at her level, then takes a small step toward her, backing her against the stone wall. The thin wood railing presses into her back, but she has nowhere else to go but up or down, and he isn't giving her any room to pass him.

“Do you regret last night?
”
he asks.