Angel in the Woods Read online

  Nora smiled. “They always do in stories,” she said.

  Satisfied, the little girl let go of Nora and ran after the end of the long-haired procession, legs pumping under her lacy pink nightgown.

  The fire near me was beginning to die down. I picked up a poker and stirred it up again.

  Nora looked up to a small ledge that surrounded the walls of the room. “I have been saving the candles we made last summer,” she said. “Tomorrow night we’ll bring them in and line them up all around the room and light them all at once. Do you remember, Pixie? You and I talked about it. You said it would look like a choir of angels had come into the room to hear the Christmas story with us.”

  The Pixie didn’t meet Nora’s eyes. She looked down and rubbed the back of her neck, drew a deep breath, and looked up at the Giant. “It will look beautiful,” she said, “but I won’t be here tomorrow night.”

  Every eye in the room turned to the Pixie in shock, save mine. I was still poking at the fire.

  “What do you mean?” Nora asked.

  The Pixie tossed her head. “There is a ball at the Brawnlyn House,” she said. “Lady Brawnlyn has asked me to attend, and I am going.”

  Nora could hardly find words. “Lady—?”

  “I’ve been there several times,” the Pixie said. “Lady Brawnlyn and her daughter are very kind to me. They treat me like one of their own.”

  “But you are one of us,” Nora said.

  The Giant spoke for the first time. “It is better that you stay here,” he said.

  I felt my hackles rise. Lady Brawnlyn and Genevieve seemed to me just what the Pixie needed to grow past this place. She would look like royalty at the ball. Perhaps, after all, she was. What sort of life had the Giant prevented the Pixie from living? And why should he stubbornly continue to prevent her now?

  All of a sudden there were eyes on me. Nora’s eyes. “This has something to do with you, doesn’t it?” she demanded. “Sparrowhawk, what have you done?”

  I stood and turned to face her and the Giant. “I have introduced her to the nobles of the land… of this land. What is wrong with that?”

  “We have no friendship with the outside world,” the Giant said.

  “You may not,” I shot back. “I do. And so does the Pixie.”

  The Giant looked up at me. His eyes were full of quiet wrath. I was glad he was seated, for I was at eye-level with him. Had he towered over me, I did not know if I could have been so bold.

  “You do not understand,” he said.

  “I understand that you are making this place into a prison,” I answered. Nora’s eyes blazed back at me, but she said nothing.

  The Pixie looked at the floor, but she stood her ground. “Angel,” she said, “I want to go.”

  The Giant stood without warning and left the room. His absence left the air full of unsettled emotion. Nora followed him without a word. Illyrica stood and made her way out a moment later, her needlework limp in her hand. There was no anger on her sensitive face, only sadness.

  I replaced the poker by the fireplace and turned to the last remaining figure in the room. “Pixie—” I began.

  She turned on her heel and left the room without a word.

  No one spoke another word to me that night.

  Chapter 16

  brought low

  Lights shone from every window of Brawnlyn House as we approached it through the wintry night. It seemed an aristocratic beacon in the darkness: shining the light of luxury and costly extravagance over the shadowy landscape. The Pixie caught her breath at the sight of it, and I turned to look at her. She wore a fur-trimmed cloak of deep red over a simple dress of wood-pine green trimmed with lace. Nora had made the dress, and Illyrica the lace, and there was as much love in it as there was frost in the air. The dress made the Pixie’s green eyes shine. She looked more like an innocent fairy fallen from some other, simpler world than she ever had before.

  She looked at me, her eyes alight with the wonder of the house. “How can you look so dull?” she asked, with her old teasing smile made glorious by the rapture she felt. “Look at it! We’re standing on the doorstep of heaven, Hawk.”

  She turned and tripped her way down the path toward the glowing house. I watched her go with the slightest of smiles. The unpleasant scene at the Castle was behind us now. The Pixie was right. Lit up as it was, Brawnlyn House looked like a celestial palace. Pride made me warm within. Through my own merits this place had become another home to me and to those who followed me.

  They would be glad to see that we had come. The Pixie would be transformed—of course she could not wear the homespun dress to such an affair. Genevieve had promised to set aside one of her own gowns for her. The thought pleased me. I had for some time harboured a suspicion that the Pixie’s descent was from some royal line. The Brawnlyns’ treatment of her seemed almost to make this a fact; and tonight she would look every inch a queen.

  Music greeted our ears as we approached the great doors. They stood open, spilling light and warmth out onto the stone drive and creating strange shadows in the gardens. I fell in step with the tune as I mounted the steps, and I smiled as the Pixie was spirited away from behind me by three of Genevieve’s personal maids. She would not make her appearance at the ball until she was ready.

  I swept my cloak from my shoulders and stepped boldly into the hall, head high, chest swollen. Handsome couples fell back from my approach in the whirl of the dance, and I heard the doorman announce my name: my real name, with all its accompanying titles. And to the end of it he attached this: “The Lord Hawk, captain of the realm!”

  All around me the honourable lords and ladies of the surrounding lands danced, laughed, and spun conversation; ornate as moving paintings, elite like the wine that flowed freely. The Lady Brawnlyn herself stood most grand and imposing of all in a black dress of silk. Her eyes lit on me as I entered the room, and she called to me with a slight movement of her head. Carried along by the lights and the music, I reached her side quickly. A few friends had refrained from the dance to speak with her: she placed them in waiting as she turned to me and, in a low voice, acquainted me with those young men in the room who would certainly compete with me for Genevieve’s attention in the festivities. I understood her well. She meant me to prevail in all such competitions.

  “Acquit yourself well here,” the Widow said. “You are among your own.”

  I bowed my head, smiling slightly. “Thank you, my lady.”

  She brushed close to me and said, in a voice lower still, “You shall not leave until the night is well spent, I hope. I have a matter of great importance to discuss with you.”

  “I will not leave until we have spoken to your satisfaction,” I answered. She nodded and sent me away with a flick of her fan.

  Genevieve was not just then in the room. I guessed, correctly, that she was with the Pixie. But she appeared within ten minutes, and her presence stirred the room. As ever, her face was unreadable. Her dark hair fell in gorgeous curls around her white neck and shoulders. She entered into the celebration with practiced ease, speaking but rarely, commanding attention nevertheless with her beauty and bearing. When she spoke it was in low tones; when she danced it was with perfect grace; when she turned her grey eyes on me, my heart nearly stopped with the feeling that in their depths was a lowering sky about to break.

  I took her hand and led her into a waltz. As we danced I tried to talk with her.

  “You look lovely,” I told her as the room whirled past, but she did not respond. “Have you seen the Pixie?” I asked.

  “I was with her a few moments ago,” Genevieve answered.

  “Is she coming?” I asked—feeling stupid, for the answer to that was obvious.

  “Soon,” Genevieve said, her lips curling up in what was almost a smile. “She is nearly presentable.”

  “I have promised to speak with your mother again tonight,” I said. “I believe she has more work for me.”

  Genevieve laughed, a laugh
that was without colour: grey and white and edged with bitterness. “Work for the Lord Hawk,” she said. “I am sure you will prove yourself worthy yet again.”

  The music ended. She pulled away from me, turning to face the entrance of the ballroom. The Pixie had arrived.

  I had once thought the Pixie too much a child to fall in love with. I knew that she was still. But dressed in the opulence of Genevieve Brawnlyn, with her hair entwined with gold and swept up off her neck, with every eye in the room fastened on her, the Pixie was the better of any grand lady in the room.

  She looked like a queen.

  Genevieve moved to greet her. The young men Lady Brawnlyn had pointed out to me also moved her way, but I was stricken and could not move. I had brought the Pixie into the eye of the world of the nobility, and something deep within me whispered that I ought not to have done it.

  I shook the feeling off as best I could and tried to get to her, but I could not reach her in time. She was caught up in the dance, courted by the men, admired by the ladies: she was beautiful, glorious, at the height of her bewitching powers. When she laughed gaily it brought the whole room to her feet.

  The night grew long. The attendants began to leave, one by one, two by two. I tried to keep up my attentions to Genevieve while fending off those with similar intentions, aware all the time that Lady Brawnlyn was watching me. I still felt guilty when I looked at the Pixie, and so I tried to ignore her. I drank wine and danced and compared stories with the men, and just as it struck me that I could not see the Pixie anywhere, Widow Brawnlyn beckoned me to her drawing room. I looked around wildly for the Pixie, torn between my need to answer the Widow’s summons and my growing panic at my charge’s absence. But the Widow was insistent. I withdrew to the drawing room to attend upon her in firelit solitude.

  She looked up at me with greater solemnity than I had ever seen before. After the festivities of the night, I was taken aback.

  She wasted no time in getting to her subject. “It is late,” she said. “I will spare you lengthy introductions. How much do you know about the place you currently call home, Hawk?”

  “It is a pleasant haven,” I said. “But secretive. I know its inner workings but little about its history.”

  “Sit down,” the Widow said. I obliged.

  “Not long ago, I became acquainted with a man whose story, in any other locality, would have seemed too wild to be believed,” she told me. “Indeed, I was inclined to doubt him. But he introduced me to his whole family, and they echoed his report in every particular. I think it is true.”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, wondering again where the Pixie had gone to. But the Widow’s next words chased every thought of her from my mind.

  “They told me that many years ago, while they were passing through this country on business, their middle child—a daughter—was stolen from them in the dead of night. They sought her out in vain, even spreading word that they would give every penny they owned for her return. Perhaps because of the family’s relative poverty, the thief was not tempted. They never saw their child again. The nature of their business forced them to leave this land or starve, and ever since they have been trying to return. At last they have come back.”

  I closed my eyes. Desperately I tried to erase the image that came unbidden to mind—that of the Giant taking a child from her home and family. But it could not be.

  “There is no need to look so stricken,” the Widow said. “I am simply asking you to find the child if you can. I have reason to believe she may still be here in my lands.”

  “How am I to find her?” I asked. “There are hundreds—”

  “Not hundreds like this one,” the Widow said. “She should not be hard to recognize. The family, you see, had a specially strong attachment to her because she is afflicted—a mute, with a scar across her throat.”

  If I had not been seated, the sick feeling in my stomach might have knocked me off balance. I knew who she was describing.

  Illyrica.

  Had the mystery of the Castle’s origins been solved for me by the Widow Brawnlyn? Could the Giant truly be a kidnapper—a thief, stealing children in the night as the rumours I’d once heard claimed?

  I staggered out of the Widow’s drawing room, having made no commitments nor uttered a word of my suspicions. I knew that if it was true—if Illyrica had been taken by force from her family—then I had to return her to them. No other choice could even be entertained.

  The celebration was nearly over. I followed the directions of a few servants and took myself to the kitchens, where at last I found the Pixie. She was sitting on an old crate, her red cloak wrapped tightly around her, fingering an old sack. She looked up at me with the saddest smile I have ever seen.

  “Look, Hawk,” she said. “I found my royal seal.”

  I took the sack from her, hardly knowing what I was looking at. And then I saw it, stitched into the material: the words R.S. Flour Co. The lettering was just the same as in the Pixie’s precious scrap of cloth.

  She stood and dusted herself off, folding the sack. She was still wearing Genevieve’s gown, but she had taken her hair down. She pulled her hood over it. “Let’s go home,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  We tramped through the snow and the darkness together, our thoughts holding us in separate worlds.

  Finally the Pixie spoke. “I suppose there is some romance in being found in a flour sack,” she said.

  I mumbled my reply. “Not so much as in Illyrica’s beginning.”

  “True,” the Pixie said. “Kidnapping is very romantic.”

  She looked at me curiously, but I did not say another word.

  Chapter 17

  illyrica

  It was not a happy Christmas. It almost seemed as though someone had died. The Pixie was moody and quiet. She took up her customary place among the daughters of the castle and led the celebrations dutifully, but all the heart had gone out of her. Both Nora and the Giant tried to act as though nothing was wrong, but I doubt that even the youngest child among us believed them. Once, for a moment, Nora let her guard down. She had just presented Isabelle with a beautiful handmade book of stories in Nora’s own exquisite handwriting, and the child threw her arms around Nora’s neck with the words, “I’ll read it every night! I know it’s full of happy endings!” I looked up at Nora’s face and saw that she was about to cry. She regained control of herself, but I could not look at her again.

  As for me: I was tormented. I could not look on the Giant. I avoided Nora. The Pixie avoided me. The children taunted me without trying to. I could not see a smiling, pink little face without picturing some bereaved mother weeping in the dark of the night; without picturing a family torn apart. Illyrica, silent, smiling, and ghostly as ever, conjured up horrible visions that I could not vanquish. And through it all I was nearly overpowered by what I tried to deny was guilt.

  The gift-giving was not yet finished when I rose and left the room, looking behind me briefly. I felt, rather than saw, that the Giant watched me leave—still studiously avoiding him, I could not have seen his eyes on me. I fled the Castle and the wood. I fled to the Widow Brawnlyn.

  She might have been expecting me, so little surprised was she to see me. I was admitted into her drawing room, breathless and flushed. “She is there,” I said without preamble. “The kidnapped girl, the mute you told me about. She lives in the house in the darkwood north of here.”

  The Widow nodded. “Thank you, Hawk,” she said. “What you are doing is right.”

  I closed my eyes against her condescending expression. Genevieve sat in a dark corner, taking in the exchange. I hoped—desperately—that she saw something heroic in my actions. I did not know what else to do. The man whose hospitality I had accepted all these months was nothing more than a villain, and I had to do what I could to restore Illyrica to her family. Yet I felt as if I had taken hands with the devil.

  “Hawk!” the Widow said sharply. “Look at me.”

  I obeyed. Her fac
e seemed softened, more understanding than it had ever been. “What you are doing is right,” she repeated. “I can see that this is hard for you. But the girl’s family had nearly given up hope. You have restored it.”

  I had restored it. I had given a destitute family hope. Slowly I felt some of my burden melt away. Yes. I had done what was right. I knew that I had to respond to the Widow, though words were beyond me. I nodded, feeling my spirit relax. “Thank you,” I said.

  Genevieve stood and abruptly left the room.

  The Widow looked after her daughter with some displeasure. “Sit, Hawk,” she said. “Have tea with me.”

  I shook my head. “No, my lady,” I said. “If you please, it is Christmas. I should go… home.”

  “To the darkwood?” Widow Brawnlyn asked.

  I hesitated. “Illyrica should be returned to her family,” I said. “But… in many ways, the darkwood is a good home. Perhaps…” I turned away. I did not know what I meant or what I wanted to say. The Widow nodded as if she understood everything.

  The sky was overcast. Dusk came early. I trudged back to the Castle, my footprints in the snow seeming deeper or lighter depending on my mood: lighter as I meditated on the Widow’s reassurances, deeper as I thought of the place I was returning to.

  Lights were bobbing in the Castle windows as I drew near. When I pushed open the heavy wooden doors, I was greeted by little girls in long nightgowns, holding small candles and bouncing eagerly on their toes. I smiled absently at them as they all chattered at me at once, something about a journey and looking for shelter. Then Nora’s voice rose above them all. My weary eyes went to her face, and I was surprised to see compassion there. Her voice brought sense out of the babble.

  “We do this every Christmas,” she explained. “All together we journey through the house, knocking on every door. Looking for shelter, as the Christ child did long ago. And there is never a door opened to us. So all together we sleep in the soft room—”