Today's Reading
Dobrawa Radost—'Mama'—sits across from Father Pawel, picking mint leaves off a stem and laying them out for drying. With her rigid bearing and hoarfrost- cold eyes, she has always reminded Liska of Szklana Góra, the glass mountain from the stories that no knight could conquer. And like that mountain, she is neither kind nor cruel. She is simply indomitable, a trait required of her as Stodola's folk healer.
"She is of age," Father Pawel replies. "And a well-behaved, proper girl. You could have her married off, apprenticed& or better yet, sent to a convent. God does not turn anyone away, and His presence will keep her from being tempted by those unholy powers."
Dobrawa sighs. "I have considered all those things, Father, but is it truly a good idea to send her off alone? I fear what she may become without guidance." She throws down a naked mint stem. "Ah, Bogdan would have known what to do with her. He was the only one who truly knew."
"You are doing the right thing," Father Pawel assures her. "It is not a condemnation, only a precaution. For her own safety, and&"
'And for ours.' Those last words went unspoken, but Liska knows what the priest wanted to say: that Liska is dangerous, that she has been corrupted by magic, like an orchard by blight.
"I will change that," she promises the stars above. "I will make it right."
She will do anything to prove that she is not dangerous, that she belongs—to the village and her people. Even if it means putting her faith in childhood fairy tales.
She steps forward, farther, closer, until she is looking up at the Driada's trees.
Dread clutches her throat, but she swallows it back. "God preserve me," she whispers.
Within the wood, something shrieks in response. The wind? No, it is too uneven.
A howl.
Or perhaps laughter.
Holding up her lantern, Liska Radost stares down the path she has chosen, no more than trampled underbrush between whispering nettles and cruel briars parted like jaws. In the flickering firelight, it all seems a mirage, the threshold to a palace of darkness. Waiting. Watching.
The laughter sounds once more, and this time she forces herself to smile back. Then she steps between the trees.
Nothing is a certainty in the night in the wood.
In a windless dark shuttered from the world, a tree is not a tree but a disfigured body with crooked limbs; its bark not bark but a grotesque face with cracking skin; the brambles beneath not brambles at all, but wicked talons snatching and tearing at clothes. Nettles sting Liska's exposed ankles, but the pain is nothing to the prickling at the back of her neck, the acute feeling that she is being 'watched'.
Liska finds she is less afraid than she should be. Perhaps it is because this wood, just like her, is something unnatural, something 'other'. By appearance alone, she fits more in the earthen weald than she ever did in the village—hair the color of freshly turned soil, skin olive and cheeks marked with freckles sucked out by the sun. For Kupala, she has worn festive strój: a crimson skirt patterned in pale flowers and an embroidered gorset over a lacy white blouse, her wild curls tamed into braids. Around her neck hangs a string of beads in rowanberry red, both a festive accessory and a ward against demons. When it catches on a branch and tears free with a snap, it feels like irony.
She does not stop to pick it up.
The forest deepens. Sourceless lights flash in the distance, too large to be fireflies. Something rustles in the thicket to Liska's right; she could swear she sees a bowlegged 'thing' lurking in the fog, but it crawls out of sight before her lantern's light can seize it. The next time she steps forward, something crunches underfoot. 'A branch,' she tells herself.
Even if it feels more like bone.
She keeps going. This is her only chance, and desperation far outweighs her fear. In her mind, she can already see it—returning home to Mama and telling her she has nothing more to worry about, that Liska's magic will not trouble them again. No more pottery shattering without a touch, no more fires flaring in her presence, no more birds gathering at her window every morning, as if they want to tell her a secret she cannot understand.
What will life be like when she no longer has to keep her head down and pretend that the disasters trailing in her wake are mere coincidences? When she no longer has to rein in every emotion, lest it trigger her magic?
She had thought, really thought, that she'd finally had it under control. Until Marysienka.
...
