The Rowan Doll

           The taste of the village was always thickest before a storm. Copper, cold fat, and the wet, sour wool of three hundred people pressed shoulder to shoulder in the square.

           I sat in the fork of the ancient hornbeam, where the bark was smooth and smelled of deep moss. To the flat-foot humans below, I was nothing but a flicker of green leaf-shade, a trick of the noon sun shifting through the canopy. They could not see the double-membrane of my wings, folded tight against my spine like wet birch leaf husks, nor the vertical gold of my pupils. To them, the world was a flat, dull thing, made only of things they could chop, burn, or eat.

           But I could see the threads.

           I saw the heavy, purple grease of their collective anger rising from the crowd, a greasy fog that clung to the chimneys and the church steeple. It was an ugly, hot colour, the shade of bruised plums left to rot in the grass.

           In the centre of the square, where the cobblestones had been swept clean of horse dung and cabbage leaves, they had built the high nest. It was made of dry ash rounds and bundles of birch gorse, packed tight with tallow-soaked straw at the base. At the centre of the nest stood a thick pillar of green oak, dragged down from the high ridge three days ago.

           Tied to the oak was Martha.

           I called her Mother, though she had no wings and her eyes were the colour of muddy ditch-water. She was large and soft, smelling always of damp flour, woodsmoke, and the sharp, clean bite of thyme. She was a flat-foot, yes, but she was different from the others who lived in the stone boxes. She knew where the chanterelles hid under the beech-mast. She knew the exact day the swallows would return to the eaves of the tithe barn, and she always left a shallow crock of sheep’s milk on the well-stone during the dark of the moon.

           I had thought she was one of my kind, once. A great shaper who had chosen, for some sweet fairy whim, to wear the heavy skin of the flat-foots and walk on two clumsy legs.

           Below me, the crowd began to sway. The sound of them was like the dry rattle of gravel in a sluice box.

           “Witch,” they muttered, the word passing from mouth to mouth like a greasy coin. “Witch! Milk Spoiler! Well Poisoner!”

           I giggled, a sound no louder than a cricket’s leg scraping against its wing. The flat-foots were so beautifully simple. They thought a witch was someone who whispered to cows or made the butter turn sour. They did not know that the butter had gone sour because I had played hide-and-seek in the dairy, my warm breath curdling the cream as I laughed. They did not know that the well had gone brackish because I had dropped a handful of glowing marsh bulbs down the shaft to see how deep the light would sink before the dark swallowed it.

           I looked down at Martha. Her head was bowed, her grey-streaked hair hanging in tangled hanks over her face. Her linen shift was torn at the shoulder, revealing the pale, freckled curve of her neck.

           I wondered when she would begin the game.

           She was very good at games. When the grey-coated men with the iron tipped pikes had burst through our cottage door three nights ago, she had not even flinched. They had found the rowan-twig doll under my moss bed—the one with the dragonfly wings I had bound to its shoulders with silver spider silk. The men had held it up, their faces turning the colour of curdled lard, screaming about images and devils.

           I had been sitting on the chimney mantel, invisible in the soot shadows, waiting for Mother to turn them into hedgehogs or make their boots fill with stinging nettles. It would have been so easy. She had only to wave her hand, as she always did when the hearth fire grew lazy and needed a spark to leap.

           Instead, Mother had looked up. Not at the men, but at the dark corner of the mantel where I sat. Her eyes—usually soft, like wet earth—had gone hard and bright as flint.

Be still, her eyes had commanded. Be small. Do not breathe.

           So, I had stayed still. I had watched them drag her out into the muddy lane. I had followed them at a distance, hopping from branch to branch, waiting for her to end the play. Even when they locked her in the cold stone cellar beneath the church, I had squeezed through the iron gate to sit on her knee. She hadn’t spoken—the walls had ears, she always said—but she had smoothed my hair with her rough, calloused thumb and fed me the crust of dry bread they had left for her.

           “It’s a long game, Mother?” I had whispered into her ear, my voice like the rustle of the dry grass.

           She had only kissed my forehead, her lips dry and hot, and whispered, “The longest, my little blossom. But you must stay in the leaves. Whatever you see, you must stay in the leaves and keep your wings tucked.”

           “Will you fly up to join me?” I had asked, imagining her bursting into a thousand blue butterflies, leaving the grey men to gape at an empty heap of clothes.

           “I will fly,” she had murmured. “In my own way.”

           Now, the sun was at its highest, a flat brass plate in the white sky. The village priest—a man named Father Thomas, whose spirit colour was a thin, yellow streak like chicken fat—stepped forward. He held a heavy iron cross before him, his voice booming over the rattle of the crowd.

           “Martha Gideon,” he shouted, his breath puffing white even in the January heat, so great was the coldness in his marrow. “Do you renounce the prince of darkness? Do you confess to the blighting of the rye, the wasting of the miller’s babe, and the gathering of devil’s toys in the forest?”

           Mother did not lift her head. “I have no master but the Lord,” she said. Her voice was thin, but it carried across the cobblestones, catching on the corners of the stone houses.

           A stone flew from the crowd. It struck her cheek, leaving a smear of dark red on her pale skin.

           I frowned. The red was wrong. It was the colour of fresh iron, of wet clay. It was human blood. Why was she wearing such realistic blood? The game was becoming vulgar. I reached out with my mind, catching the next stone mid-air—just a tiny tilt of the wind—so that it drifted wide and struck the oak pillar instead.

           “Let her burn!” a woman screamed from the front row. It was Sarah Miller, whose babe had died of the croup back in the spring. Her spirit colour was a jagged, grey wedge of grief, sharp as broken glass. I remembered that babe. It had been a weak, blue-lipped thing from its first breath. I had tried to give it a draft of wild-thyme dew to make it laugh, but its spirit had already been sliding away, slippery as an eel in a mud pool. Sarah Miller had found me sitting on the cradle rail, though she had only seen a ‘monstrous green toad’ and had beaten at me with her broom. Mother had run in, snatched me up, and claimed she had been ‘milking the toad’ for her drafts.

           Mother had taken the broom blows on her own shoulders that day, too.

           A young man with broad, grease stained hands stepped toward the pyre. He held a birch torch, its tip licking the air with a bright, oily tongue of orange. He looked at Father Thomas, who nodded once.

           The young man pressed the torch into the tallow-soaked straw at the base of the wood.

           Ffft.

           The flame took, with a sound like a great beast drawing a sudden breath. A thick, greasy column of black smoke rose toward the hornbeam, smelling of sheep fat and old tar. It made my eyes water, and I had to blink away the grey film to keep Mother in sight.

           The heat came next. It was a physical thing, a great, invisible hand pushing against my face, drying the moisture from my skin. My wings twitched under my smock, the delicate veins within them throbbing with a sudden, instinctive panic. Fire was the oldest enemy. The forest knew it; the mountains knew it.

           Still, I did not move. I waited for the transformation.

           “Now, Mother,” I whispered into the leaves. “Now. Turn the woods to water. Make the flames into ladybirds. Fly.”

           But the fire did not turn into ladybirds.

           The orange tongues climbed the ash rounds, tasting them, turning the dry bark black and flaky. They reached the straw. They began to lick at the hem of Mother’s shift.

           And then, she screamed.

           It was not a magical sound. It was not the high, clear whistle of a wind spirit or the deep rumble of an earth shaper. It was a thin, ragged, wet sound—the sound of a rabbit caught in a weasel’s teeth. It was a sound of pure, unmitigated, flat-foot agony.

           I leaned forward, my fingers clawing into the rough bark of the hornbeam. “Mother?” I called, but the wind of the fire swallowed my voice.

           The orange tongues had caught her skirt now. The linen was turning black, curling away in glowing flakes to reveal the skin beneath. And her skin—that soft, flour smelling skin that had held me when the winter frost cracked the window panes—was blistering. It was turning the colour of boiled pork, weeping clear fluid that hissed as it hit the coals.

           “No,” I whispered. “No, no, no.”

           This was not the game.

           I gathered my breath. The small, wild spark of magic that lived in the centre of my chest, the one that made the dandelions grow tall and the mice dance in the barn. I blew.

           I blew with all the strength in my small lungs. A wind tore through the square, sudden and cold, ripping the hats from the flat-foots and scattering the horses at the back of the crowd. The flames on the pyre flattened, leaning away from Mother for a heartbeat, their orange tips turning blue and sickly.

           The crowd gasped, a hundred faces turning up toward the sky.

           “A sign!” Father Thomas bellowed, holding his iron cross high. “The devil protects his own! More wood! Bring the pitch!”

           My wind was too small. The fire was too hungry. The moment the wind died, the flames leaped back with double fury, roaring up her legs, swallowing her thighs.

           Mother’s screams had changed now. They were no longer words, just a dry, rattling wheeze, like an old bellows drawing in dust.

           Through the thick, rolling curtain of grease smoke, her head lifted.

           Her hair was gone now, smelling of burnt wool and sweet fat. Her face was a mask of red and black, her eyelids charred away. But her eyes—those dull, muddy, flat-foot eyes—found me.

           She looked up into the green leaves of the hornbeam.

           She did not look with anger. She did not look with the grey, jagged grief of Sarah Miller.

           She looked at me with a desperate, burning terror. Not for herself, but for me.

           She shook her head. It was a tiny movement, barely a twitch of her neck against the oak pillar, but I saw it.

          Stay, her eyes screamed through the smoke. Do not let them see you. Stay in the leaves.

And in that single, terrible heartbeat, the world shifted. The flat, dull tapestry of the flat-foots split open, and I saw the truth of the threads.

           I looked at my own hands. Small, translucent, green veined, pulsing with the wild, cold light of the forest.

           I looked at the rowan doll they had found under my bed.

           I remembered the hearth fire leaping to life when I laughed.

           I remembered the winter strawberries in the cellar. I had wanted them so badly, their sweet, red juice, that I had coaxed them from the frozen earth with my bare fingers while Mother slept. I had thought she had done it. I had thought her soft hands had the power to warm the soil.

           But Mother had no magic.

           She had never had magic. She could not turn the wood to water. She could not fly. She was just a flat-foot, made of fragile bone and wet clay, destined to live eighty short years, and then rot in the churchyard.

           The magic had always been mine.

           I was the one who had blighted the rye with my sour moods. I was the one who had drawn the ‘devil’s toys’ in the dirt. I was the one who had brought the cold wind into the dairy.

           And she had known.

           She had known what I was from the night she found me wailing in the briars, a green skinned changeling with leaf thin ears. She had taken me to her cottage, wrapped me in her apron, and spent seven years hiding my light under her bushel. She had taken the blame for every unseasonable flower, every floating spoon, every cured fever that my childish tantrums had wrought upon the parish.

           She had let them call her ‘witch’ so they would never think to look for the monster in her rafters.

           She had walked into the iron tipped pikes, she had sat in the cold stone cellar, she had stood upon this mountain of dry ash—all of it, every step, to keep the grey men from looking too closely at the green shade of the hornbeam.

           She was burning so that I could hide.

           “Mother,” I whispered, and this time, the magic did not come. It had curdled in my chest, heavy and cold as lead.

           The flat-foots cheered.

           They cheered, their yellow and grey spirit colours flaring with a terrible, triumphant light. They hugged one another, their sour wool rubbing together, congratulating themselves on having purged the world of great evil. They had destroyed the darkness. They had saved their souls.

           They did not see me.

           I sat in the hornbeam, my wings folded so tight, they bled green sap against my ribs. I watched them throw more wood on the embers. I watched them gather the white bone ash in leather bags to scatter in the river, so that ‘the witch’ could never rise again.

           They had burned a mortal woman to destroy a fairy.

           And the fairy sat five feet above their heads, her heart turning to cold, grey stone, realising the most terrible truth of all: The flat-foots were right to fear the wild. For as I looked down at their stupid, cheering faces, their small, round heads, their soft, unprotected throats, I did not feel the gentle, thymy love of the woman who had died for me.

           I felt the magic in my blood, no longer green and playful, but dark and sharp as obsidian.

           They wanted a monster.

           I tucked my wings, drew the green shadow around me like a cloak, and began to wait for the night.