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“Mother,” I whispered.

“Aspen,” she answered. “There you are.”

“Here I am.”

“My timber girl. Why are the bells tolling?”

“I don’t know.”

Because I didn’t. Not for certain.

Her eyes wobbled with drowsy fear, her mind taking her someplace that I couldn’t reach. “I dreamed of the woods. The trees crushed me with their branches,” she confided. “It’s a message, I know it. I’m to be punished.”

“Mother, the trees don’t want to punish you. They’re not evil, remember?” I crossed my arms over the mattress, rested my chin atop my wrists, and murmured, “I’ve got something for you.”

Her face relaxed. She curled up on her side and hugged her pillow, her cheek pressed into the down. “What is it?”

The answer grazed my woodskin thigh, tucked within the garter.

“Later,” I shared. “It’s a surprise.”

And I’m going to use it to fix you.

8

Honesty

She had been here. Somehow, and in some way, and by some measure, I knew she had been here. She had invaded the training yard, at least in spirit, haunting me yet again. To what purpose, and to what end, I knew not.

While brushing my horse into a tranquil state, I had sensed the lumber maiden’s presence and endured that same uncomfortable prickle from the birch cemetery. Yet as the bells called for my attention, I flew across the citadel, leaving the essence of her behind. All the while, she continued to hound me, an omnipresence in my head.

In the graveyard, I had dreamed of her.

The girl had appeared, wrought to life by some unknown scheme, paying tribute to the memory of that puppet I’d beheaded. She had risen from the ashes of that morning in the training yard.

The figment had been defiling my wife’s grave when I discovered her. The atrocious act had blackened my feelings, overthrowing all thoughts of fairness or mercy. Such disrespect, such a disruption of my beloved’s eternal rest!

It had made the girl an immediate enemy of mine.

Upon seeing her face, and then upon hearing her denial of witchcraft, and then upon hearing her ridiculous story about chasing that woodpecker, I’d taken pains to justify her. Perchance she was some horrid but wondrous Winter invention, or a lark smuggled across the border from Spring. The latter Season made no secret its penchant for frolics and escapades.

Granted, neither scenario sat right, the laws regarding border crossings aside. Thereupon, the turbulence of her existence confounded me further.

I had not anticipated her girlishness, nor her boldness. She had a rogue mouth to rival the Court Jester’s; moreover, her audacious gaze and the touch of her hand had discomforted me. Making that brief contact with her had prompted a disturbing physical reaction, an offensive rush of blood and a bitter loss of air, not short of astonishing.

Never before had I disregarded my honor, my integrity, with such speed, as to wish her harm before seeking the facts.

She had brandished a set of diminutive weaponry, lovely in creation and altogether foreign to my eyes. One of those axes had bested my sword despite an inequality of size.

Afterward, she’d accidentally dropped that stick key, a possession of castle security, a privilege that she couldn’t possibly have had license to.

To deem the whole encounter inauthentic, a mere dream, had been effortless and a relief, among many other sentiments.

But when had it begun? When had my visit to the grave swayed into a falsehood? When had I fallen asleep?

Why her? Why this girl, this apparition? Why this flight of imagination?

Should I blame grief? Had it claimed my sanity at last, damning me to foolishness? Why condemn me to this lumber maiden instead of my wife’s ghost? The second possibility would have at least brought me comfort.