Of Bramble and Bone

Vivienne

I would like to say I gave myself to the god in the Bramblewood for love.

I would like to say I was selfless. The only person left who had ever loved me was dying in a cottage with yellow curtains; Grandmother was years in the ground. I was the healer, the one who was supposed to be able to fix it, and I could not. So I went to the edge of the wood and bargained with the trees: take me, spare her.

For Grace I would have done anything. I stood at the edge of a forest I had dreamed of every night I could remember and had never mentioned to a living soul, and I offered it my life for hers, and under the offer, the entire time, ran the bitter ache of wanting an end to the life I had.

I burned for more.

In the village they said I burned steadily. Like a candle under glass, they said, and they meant it kindly. They took the tincture out of my hand and set the coins on the table instead of into my palm, and they stood angled toward the door the whole time they thanked me. The only one of my patients who ever stayed was the tanner’s wife, who did not need me at all but who was lonely. I had a gift for the work. I could put my ear to a child’s back and know that a cough outlasting the autumn is a cough that has set its teeth into the lung. But I healed too well. My hands closed on the right jar before my mind had named the ailment, and I could not have told anyone where the knowing came from. That last year my hands got ahead of me so often that I had begun to watch them the way you watch a dog that has taken to wandering.

Of the time before the village I had almost nothing, if I was honest. A name, which I gave the old healer when she asked for it. An age, nineteen, which I more or less guessed on the day I came. The village had counted twenty-one springs since, so by its count I was forty that autumn. A fever I could not remember the start of, and a road coming into the village at the end of it. Nothing behind the road. I had learned not to be honest about that, because the not-remembering had edges, and the edges cut when I reached for them.

So I kept my head down and stepped aside on paths wide enough for two. I said sorry more than any one person should have to say it, and meant it every time, and hated myself a little for meaning it.

***

Grace had known me since my first week in the village. She came to the old healer’s kitchen, looked me over like a horse she was thinking of buying, went home, and came back with soup. She did not really stop coming after that. The old healer was the one the whole village called Grandmother, and I called her that too, because she answered to nothing else. She watched my hands at her own work-board before she trusted them with a patient, and all told she worked me ten years at her elbow, and when she died she left me her trade and, by a paper three neighbors witnessed, her cottage. The first week I had a door of my own, Grace arrived with a blackberry pie still warm in both hands and an immediate grievance regarding my curtains.

“They’re depressing,” she had said, pushing past me into the cottage before I could decide whether to let her in. Fifty-three that year, iron-gray hair, the posture of a woman who had been told once to sit up straight and had taken it as a dare she intended to win for the rest of her life. “Nobody needs curtains that color. What is that? Dishwater?”

“It’s undyed linen.”

“It’s a cry for help.” She set the pie on my table and took in the cottage in one sweep: the drying racks, the old woman’s jars already in my own ruthless order. She nodded like a general over a field already taken. “Ten years I’ve had to share you with that old woman’s kitchen. Now you’ve a door of your own. Don’t think that means you’ve got rid of me.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“You were thinking about it. You think about it every spring.” She carved two generous wedges and shoved one into my hand. “Everyone in this village is polite and helpful and dull as a wet Tuesday. Except you. You’re polite and helpful and sad. Ten years, and it’s still the most interesting thing about you.”

I had a speech worn smooth from use: I’m fine on my own, the distance is by design. She had heard it a dozen times. It had not worked on her yet. I opened my mouth to give it again. Instead I ate the pie.

She made me new curtains, eventually: sky blue. There, she said when she had hung them. Now the room knows it’s allowed to be happy. They hang there still.

Now she was dying.

I had given her yarrow for the fever, elderflower for the cough, steam thick with pine resin until the windows wept, and poultices that dyed my palms dark green for days without drawing out an ounce of heat. I had read every book in my cottage twice and brewed tinctures from every recipe in Grandmother’s hand.

The lung-lock crept through her chest like frost spidering across cold glass, a half-inch farther every dawn. I pressed my ear to her back each day and listened to the crackle, the wet rattle of air dragging through tissue that no longer wanted to let it pass—louder the next morning, and louder the one after.

I had tallied the body’s ledger in sickbeds every working day since I arrived, and Grace’s gave her a week, perhaps less. The evidence had been in front of me since April. She sat down twice in one visit, and I called it a hard season. Grace had never complained in all the decades I had known her, so I had mistaken her exhaustion for mere stubborn endurance.

“You should rest,” Grace said. Her voice had gone thin as the paper my recipes were written on. “You look worse than I do.”

“Impossible.” I made my mouth smile. “You look like death warmed over.”

“Flatterer.” She wheezed a laugh, and the laugh turned, the way everything turned now, into the cough. I held her hand through it. The bones felt like a fledgling's wing, hollow and fragile enough to snap under slight pressure.

There’s nothing more I can do. It was the sentence you kept behind your teeth until the room had quieted enough to bear it. I had it ready.

I could not say it to Grace. I sat there holding it, and Grace looked at my face and heard it anyway.

“You’re going to do something stupid,” she said.

***

“Don’t,” she said, when I started to argue. She lifted one hand. “I’ve known you twenty-one years, Viv. I know that look. You’re going to march into the Bramblewood and offer yourself to whatever lives in there, and you’ve decided that makes it noble.”

“It’s the only option left.”

“It isn’t.” Her voice cracked and steadied. “The other option is you stay. You hold my hand. You let me go with the ones who love me, not alone in a cottage while you’re off in the dark being a hero for an audience of trees.”

“Grace.”

“I’m not finished.” She had to stop for breath, and she made the stopping look like a choice. “Pull that chair up where I can see you. Read me the almanac and lie about the weather. Tell me who’s walking out with whom behind the long barn, because I know you know, you hear everything through people’s backs. Hold my hand when it’s bad. That’s what I want from you, Viv. Not a miracle. You.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again.

“I’m dying, Vivienne.” Her tone softened into the quiet cadence she reserved for hard truths I refused to face. “Nothing in that forest changes that. And if you get yourself unmade going after it —” She broke off. Coughed. I held her until it passed. “Promise me you won’t lose yourself doing it. Whatever you do. Promise me that much.”

I looked down at our clasped hands: hers frail as dried leaf-skeletons, mine calloused from pestle and bandages, yet utterly useless.

I could not promise. We both knew it.

So I pressed a kiss to her dry, burning forehead—the fever that refused to yield—and fled before she could witness my undoing.

***

That night I sat in the darkened kitchen with Grace’s counsel spread before me like a bitter decoction I had no stomach to swallow. I could see all of it. The chair drawn up. The almanac, and the weather lied about. Her hand in mine when it was bad, and the long quiet when it was worse, and at the end of it the thing I had done beside other people’s mothers and husbands more times than I could count, which was to sit, and keep sitting, until the breathing stopped. It was the right thing. It was what she had asked me for, and she almost never asked me for anything.

I sat with it until the lamp guttered. I could not make myself pick it up. I could not bear to sit in that chair as the healer with nothing left in her bag.

My own way, then, even if it led into the dark. Especially if it did.

***

Everyone in the village knew the rules about the Bramblewood. Children there learned them before their letters. I learned them my first week, from Grace, over the soup, in the tone she might have used to tell me where the well was.

Don’t enter after dark. Don’t speak your true name within earshot of the trees. Don’t ask the wood a question: the thing in it cannot lie inside its own trees, and nobody in the village has ever wanted a true answer that badly. Never answer a knock at your door in a hard frost, because the cold has its own court and its own hungers, and they do not stop at trees. Every autumn the elders left payment at the treeline: bread and salt and a lock of hair from the youngest child born that year. By morning the bread was always gone. The salt remained untouched where they had left it, merely crusted where the morning dew had dampened the grains. The hair was never recovered, neither upon the flat offering stone nor snagged in the surrounding brush, as though the loam itself had swallowed it whole between dusk and dawn.

And above all the rest: don’t go in alone. The last to break that rule was Petter the charcoal-burner, who walked in twenty years ago, at sixty, after a dropped axe, and came out the same evening with his hair gone white and no memory of anything after forty. He sits in the tavern still, watching the treeline, and now and then he speaks softly to people no one else can see. We don’t talk about Petter.

Everyone watches the forest, though, when they think no one is looking, and I watched it more than most. Some evenings I stood at my window and looked at the dark line of the trees until the light failed, and that autumn there had been more of those evenings than I could account for. The dreams had changed too. For as long as I could remember they had stopped at the treeline. Now, night after night, they went in, and I woke with the smell of wet bark in my throat and the turn of paths I had never walked still in my feet. I knew the pull at the glass. It seized me whenever I searched backward toward the blank years before the road and brushed against their serrated edges.

I knew the wood as surely as I knew a name I could not pronounce. In the black pane my reflection appeared borrowed, the gaze startlingly gold, far brighter than the tallow wick could warrant, framed by tangled dark hair that refused every comb.

Grace had caught me at the window once. You feel it too, she had said. That the forest is watching back. I had not answered. She had read my face and, being Grace, left the locked door alone.

***

I went in at the gray hour before dawn, when the village was asleep and the cold lay close to the ground. At the top of my lane I passed the well, where a man I had known twenty-one years was hauling the first bucket. He startled when he saw me, as people did, and I was too tired and too far past the edge of myself to soften it as I always softened myself, so I only said, low and level, “Let me by,” as you would say it to anyone. A chill went across the backs of my hands as I said it, well-water cold, and I put it down to the hour.

He stepped back so fast the bucket slopped over his boots. “Course,” he said. “Course, of course,” and he went on saying it, pressing himself flat against the well-stones to make a gap I did not need, his face gone slack, a man who could not have told you why his feet had already moved. I was past him before it registered, and by then I had a forest to walk into.

The Bramblewood loomed ahead, iron-black against the dawn mist, paying the woman at its boundary no heed. Its roots went down, people said, to where the world’s bones were still warm. I had nothing to offer a thing like that: no gold, no power. I had a hollow where the years before the village should have been, and a pair of hands that could not save the one person who had ever called me interesting. I would have to do.

“I know you’re listening,” I said to the dark between the trees. My voice came out steadier than I was. “I know you take things. People. Whole years out of a man’s head. I know the stories. All of them.”

The forest breathed, long and slow. It stirred the upper canopy and sent dry leaves scraping across the frozen rime to lodge against my boots.

“My friend is dying. I can’t reach what’s killing her. Everything I’ve tried has failed me, and I am out of everything but this.” I stepped to the very edge, where the frosted grass of the world gave way to the black loam of the wood, the thin rime breaking under my boot, the earth beneath it red-brown and warmer than the ground I stood on. “So I’ve come to bargain. You want payment? Take me. Take all of it. Just spare her.”

Why?

Nothing said it aloud. But the white flowers along the boundary turned their faces to follow me, and the question was in that, and in the gray stones set at intervals down the treeline. Each stood shoulder-high and rough as unglazed pottery, holding the last of the dark in its pitted face while the grass around it had already gone silver with the coming light.

“Because I want to know what it feels like to be wanted enough to be taken,” I said.

The earth trembled. A crack opened in the ground at my feet, hair-thin and then wider, and light poured up out of it. Out of the fissure a path unfurled into the timber, the moss pulsing a vivid green beneath my stride a heartbeat before each step fell.

The bramble path knew my feet. The thorns that should have torn me drew back as I passed, every one of them, folding away to let me through untouched.

I stepped across the threshold into the wet-bark cold of the wood, and the trees leaned in over me.

I liked it. It settled over the nape of my neck like a heavy, living hand, pressing down until my collar felt tight. For twenty-one years the people of the valley had taken their jars and leaned their bodies toward the nearest latch, careful never to look too long at a woman whose history ended at the road. But this—this was weight without flinching. It traced every hollow above my collarbone, every hitch in my ribs, tasting my cadence as if I were a tribute long promised and finally delivered. The pull of it was sweet and sickening, the way thirst turns sweet right before you choke on cold water. The shame came a breath later, hot behind my ears.

I went deeper, the light failing behind me, until I could hear my own boots and nothing else.

Far down the path, something exhaled—a low, leisurely draw of breath, like a creature that has waited centuries outside a locked door and finally hears the latch lift.

And somewhere in it, so low I could have been wrong, I heard my own name.