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I nodded, and Torr squeezed my hands. “Now we tell you of how you came to be.”
Chapter Eleven
“Many hundreds of years ago,the Wood was the home of the Fee, the small folk.”
I nodded, settling back comfortably in Draven’s arms for the story. The large gray Beast kept his arms around me, and I saw that all of the Beasts around the fire were listening to Torr. Some of them stared into the flames, and a few nodded, as though they remembered the time when the Fee still existed.
For me, the Fee were only a fairy tale.
“They created the Father Tree on the far side of the mountain. Then came the Mother Tree, and the Arbor that is now our home.” Torr extended a hand towards the mind-numbingly massive tree with its many knotholes. “This all belonged to them, and the Beasts were their protectors.”
“Then men rose up, and decided to claim the moors and mountains, so we could no longer wander. They pushed us further and further into the Wood, creeping into our borders, and sometimes they met the Fee themselves.”
Torr stared up at the Mother Tree. “Many men were lost to the Fee, so men retaliated in kind. They came with iron and silver and fire, all things anathema to the Fee, and the Beasts died by the score to protect the small folk. But we have always been like them: a race slow to repopulate.
“When they had been driven back to the Mother and Father, the Fee decided it was enough. They did not wish to live in a world where they were hunted with iron. The Beasts did all they could to defend their home, and in the end, this Wood is all we have left.”
I felt Draven’s heart thumping against my back, the tension in his arms, and tried to put it in perspective.
For me, this was all ancient history.
For them, this might as well have been yesterday. I couldn’t imagine my home dwindling in front of my eyes, taken by people like the Father and his flock.
I couldn’t blame the Fee for leaving.
“Before the Fee opened a door to another realm, they gave us a gift. The wise ones scraped mud from the deepest river bottoms and mined stone from the heart of the mountain, and the crones cleaned the bones of a doe. They took the blood of a Beast and the wings of a dead Fee.
“They molded these raw materials into the shape of a woman, with amber from the tallest pines for her eyes and cobwebs for her hair, and the eldest of the Fee crones breathed essence into her, giving her true life and flesh. She was the woman of stone and bone, formed of the earth and gifted with Fee magic, more beautiful than the moon itself. If she loved us, the crone said, we would repopulate the Wood and keep it for all of time.”
Draven ran his claws through my hair.
Hair as white as the full moon. Eyes as golden as amber. I suddenly felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with the icy air.
“She did love her mate.” Sadness crept into his eyes. “She bore more Beasts, and slowly but surely we pushed the humans out. When she died, she had passed on her essence to her daughters, and they spread through the Wood, taking mates of their own.
“But then a new man arrived in the Wood, determined to tame it according to what he saw as divine. He brought men armed with iron spears, and they cut down the trees to build what is now Vostok. One of his hunters crept into the Wood, and he caught sight of one of these daughters of the woman of stone and bone. He desired her for himself.
“So he took her. Some of the others fled, but when they left, the magic gifted by the Fee went with them. We who chose to stay decided we would do whatever was in our power to retake the daughter, but she lived long enough to bear a human child of her own, and was killed.”
I was clutching Draven’s arm so hard my fingers ached. None of this had ever been told to us.
“Without magic, we were weakened against the men and their blessings, and they knew this. We could take them if they were in the Wood, but they chose to hide behind their barriers. The last Alpha of this dwindling pack did everything in his power to regain the daughter who should have been promised to him.
“She was already with child when she came into the Wood, but she recognized the wildness in him for the wildness in herself, and knew she was meant to be there. She tried to run, but the men of Vostok came for her. They caught them, and after you were born, both he and your mother were burned to death in the Wood outside Vostok.”
Torr turned fierce crimson eyes on me. “You are of the bloodline that was born of stone and bone and Fee blood. The men of Vostok know that without you, we are greatly weakened. They knew that to keep you caged was to keep you away from your birthright, and as long as a woman of stone and bone remained in their possession, they would be able to fight back against the Wood and encroach further on our territory.”
From the corner of my eye, I watched as Ash silently rose and vanished into the shadows where the Wood grew around the Arbor.
"If… if I’m descended from this woman, why does he despise me so much?” I asked quietly.
It all seemed far too fantastical to be real, and yet… it completely made sense.
Of course the Vostokians would see a woman living happily in the Wood and feel the need to tear her away from that peace and freedom. They did to all of their own women; why not a Fee one as well?
And I truly did believe Torr far more than I believed Father Borodin. I believed my mother had found a Beast of her own, and had been punished with death for it.
“Ash lost his brother to the Vostokians many years ago.” Torr looked at where the gray Beast had been sitting. The spot had been left empty by the others. “He swore an oath of vengeance, and has not relented since.”
