Page 26 of Wench

And she hates him for that most of all.

When he finally speaks, it’s without strain and the sound carries like wind.

‘In every age,’ he starts, ‘the forest chooses one to remember for it. One who is tasked to keep the reckoning. To listen when the forest cannot speak for itself, to bend when the winds insist, to stand when axes make a case for ruin. When creatures forget the old bargains, the Verdant Guardian does not. When iron sings louder than birds, the Verdant Guardian hears the wrongness and answers.’ His gaze moves over the assembly, then lowers to the ring of roots at his feet. He turns his palms downward and a pulse ripples through the earth.

Faint veins of green slide under the surface with a quiver that moves outward, under the crowd and into the surrounding trees. Marian feels the vibration climb the trunk beneath her. She presses deeper into the corner of the sill, willing her body to stillness.

‘The Verdant’s charge does not pass by bloodline or petition,’ he says. ‘It comes when Sherwood requires a particular shape of strength.’

The moss at his feet darkens, then brightens, as if a hidden moon has risen beneath the soil. A ring of new growth pushes up through packed earth, tender and green, only to fold back into itself the instant his fingers close. The movement is small enough to miss unless you are looking for it, and Marian cannot look away.

‘I was not the cleverest among my kin,’ he continues with a soft chuckle. ‘I was not the most patient, nor the most beloved. But I was the one who stood longest when a storm, meant to uproot us, rose from the south. Sherwood’s selection is not a reward.’

Marian watches in awe as the thrumming shifts from low earth to high canopy. Leaves shiver in unison, releasing a soft rain of scent: resin and the bitter breath of old bark. It climbs her throat and settles behind her eyes. She presses her lips together until they sting.

‘The Hollowing is our remembering,’ Lox says. ‘We empty our bellies to remind our bodies that they can be filled with more than meat and heat. We empty our hands so that they can learn the weight of vows. We empty our pride so that it cannot blind us to the work that still needs doing. This is not a fast for hunger’s sake. It is a clearing. A making of space.A choosing.’

He lowers his arms and spreads his fingers over the ring at his feet. The roots answer, thickening in place, not with violence, but with a deliberate confidence, as if they have decided to exist a little more. The clearing’s edge ripples as saplings lean, then right themselves.

A hush strokes the clearing. The Elders lift their torches and tilt the flames toward him. Green, gold, and a vein of black answer in the wick. Lox steps into their light. It crawls up his throat, across the cut of his mouth, along the arch of his cheek. Antlers catch a net of gleam and shadow. The lines of his shoulders find the glow and hold it.

Lox turns his head. Not much, but enough that green and gold sweep the line of the platforms toward higher nests. Marian knows she is buried in darkness. Still, his gaze lands on her.

Heat shoots through her limbs so fast that she rattles the windowpane. A quiver runs through her belly and settles low, embarrassment arriving a half-beat later.

‘Tonight,’ he breathes, looking back to the collective, ‘we let go of the grief in our bodies so that it does not rot unspoken in the ground. We ask Shéruel and Wodenna to remember us while we remember them. We set aside our disputes, our jealousies. We make our hearts hollow enough to be honest so nothing festers. We name these things and give back what we cannot carry.’

A ripple of nervousness moves through the crowd.

‘Begin with the secrets left to moulder in the dark,’ Lox says, voice steady as an oath. ‘The tenderness we denied ourselves. The wanting we hid behind duty. Bring them forward. Let them stand in air and light. Let the body remember it was made to feel without the lash of shame.’

Voices rise, one at a time. A woman from a raised platform speaks first. ‘I envy the potter’s palms,’ she confesses, words tumbling fast, as if speed will make them less dangerous. ‘I bring her cracked bowls to fix so I can watch her thumb the seam and dream of being clay moulded by her hands.’

Fire licks up Marian’s neck. A low, appreciative sound weaves through the crowd. Lox’s head tips once, nothing more, and a thread of light climbs from the ring of roots, travels to the potter’s stall, and settles there. When it fades, the hairs along Marian’s arms lie smooth again. The magic is not a blast. It is recognition, an answering that binds the admission to the place it belongs.

One with a scar across his nose admits he sings to the river where no one can hear. A weaver reveals he takes the longest path home so he can pass the apothecary’s window and breathe the scent of rosemary. A pair of older wives laugh as they confess they trade rings when they wake, each wearing the other’s promise for a day so their love tastes newly minted. Every confession loosens the air by a notch. With each one, something subtle pours out of the ground and returns, as if the forest is a bellows and their words pump it.

Lox does not smile. He listens. When nervous laughter spikes, his torch dips and the room quiets without scolding. When a throat locks and silence stumbles, he waits. The waiting is its own magic.

A hunter with ash on his boots speaks of grief. He says he still sets a third plate each night for the son whose body fed the wolves last winter. He says he eats the bread on that plate after, not because he is hungry but because the boy must not be hungry alone. Lox bows his head. The ring brightens, a quiet pulse that seems to kneel with him. The hunter’s shoulders drop. He wipes his face with the back of his wrist, and a child from the crowd crosses the space to take his hand without being told.

Marian’s fingers ache where they grip the sill. She can feel the ceremony stroking the inside of her skin like velvet.

‘Shame is a poor shepherd,’ Lox says after a while, his voice carrying to the highest platforms. ‘It drives flocks into thorns. Tonight, we open the gate and lead what we hid back into the field. You were not born to starve yourselves.’ He steps through the ring and the roots inch wider to meet his heels. ‘If the wanting is a danger to the village, we will name it and set it free.’

Magic creeps into the stitches of what they are saying and finishes the seam. A voice breaks where no one expects it. Rían of Willowbend confesses he loves the smell of seed oil on a blacksmith’s skin and has for sixty years. Some days he imagines what it would be like to have the smithy lather it over him. The crowd murmurs with laughter and Marian’s mouth curves before she can stop it.

‘Truth is not a cage,’ Lox continues. ‘It is a door with a latch you can lift. Once unburdened, the body can remember pleasure without fear. Want without punishment. The hunger that nourishes rather than gnaws. If what you desire does no harm, let yourself name it tonight. There is room for it here.’

A woman with braids down to her hips steps forward, lays her palm against another woman’s throat, and breathes in like she has been holding that breath for months. The skyborn on the highest spar unfasten their harnesses and let their wings fall from rigid readiness to ease. A tailor with ink-stained fingers asks a baker if he may watch her knead, because the rhythm makes his hands want to sing.

None of it is lewd and yet all of it is intimate. Marian’s pulse stammers. Heat pools, humiliating in its clarity. She presses her knees together, angry at her own skin for answering this call. It is a public ritual, yet it feels like a hand sliding beneath her ribs and inching lower by the second.

Lox lowers his head. ‘What was said belongs to the roots now. They will keep it better than we can.’ He lifts a hand and a slow hush settles. ‘Return to your plain fare. Let emptiness be the bowl that makes room for tomorrow.’

The Elders step back in pairs. People begin to break apart, touching shoulders as they go, some wiping eyes, some smiling like a door inside them has been opened and is letting air through again. Music does not start. The silence after the telling is a kind of song by itself.

Marian pulls away from the window at last. Her legs tingle as the blood slowly returns, her feet stumbling over one another. She crosses to the bed and sits, unable to shake the feeling that something has shifted by a degree too small to measure and too large to ignore.