My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

The one who had awakened him.

*   *   *

Two things, at the end of the day, in case Neve hadn’t made up her mind.

First, Dame Somnolence held her back when the other girls left. “Here,” she said, thrusting a flower at Neve. “In case you don’t already have one.”

Fumbling to take it, Neve saw that it was dead. She looked up, right in the old woman’s globe-round eyes—too large, too unveiled, the lids never quite seeming up to their job.

“You think I should refuse him, then,” she said.

Dame Somnolence gave a snort. “I think he’s due a nice long tour of that Hell he loves to preach about, that’s what I think. Or maybe he’s been there already, to know so much about it. Take this, Crow Food. Put it on your porch. There’s not a bird in the world that would eat his brides. You think you know bitter now? You’ll taste like ash before he drops you in a grave.”

Neve already had a dead flower. She tried to return the dame’s, but she wouldn’t have it. “Take it,” she said. “I killed it special for whoever got his gift.”

And so Neve did take it, and she was glad to have it when she found the man himself waiting for her just outside of town.

This was the second thing.

He smiled when he saw her coming. His teeth were so white and square they looked chiseled out of walrus ivory. “Good evening, Neve,” he said. This was a liberty. He ought to have called her Miss Ellaquin.

“Sir,” was all she managed, and it was the best she could do to keep her feet moving forward.

Right past him.

He fell into step beside her. “I hope you liked the Bible,” he said. “Which passage did you read first? I always like to know.”

As though she’d sat down on the spot, keen to know more of the Lord’s rules and punishments? “I didn’t read any,” she replied. “The wind carried it off before I even stepped onto the porch.”

Between them, silence twisted, and Neve did not look up to see his eyes with their painted-dot pupils. His shadow, cast ahead, was so much larger than her own. “Excuse me?” he finally said, as though he might have misunderstood her.

“The wind,” she repeated. “I’m sorry. The Bible’s gone.”

He stopped walking, and when she did not stop with him, he reached for her arm and made her. His big fingers splayed from her elbow to her shoulder, and his grip was not gentle. “That was a family heirloom,” he said, and she had no choice but to look at his eyes now. Glassy, she thought, and imagined flames reflecting in them as he scouted the geographies of Hell. “It was precious to me.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have left it on a porch,” she said, trying to pull her arm free. “It wasn’t my doing.”

When he still didn’t release her, she panicked and thrust Dame Somnolence’s flower at him. A rose, and red, it made a more striking display than her dainty thorn lily would have. “Here,” she said, voice shaking. “You honor me, but I don’t mean to marry. My answer is no.”

He didn’t take the flower, and he didn’t let go of her arm, and when Neve met his eyes again, growing more panicked by the second, his look spoke. Some looks do, the way she remembered her mother’s eyes telling her as plain as happiness, in the time before grief, “I love you more than life, my sweet girl.” Or how Ivan’s dying eyes had said his greatest desperation was in leaving her alone.

Spear’s look was eloquent. “I will have you, and I will hold you. I will learn a thousand ways to make you weep. Your tears will be the sugar in my tea, your misery my delight,” he promised, while his lips said, “I wasn’t asking, Neve. I’ve made my choice.” His fist closed on the dry-dead rose and ground it to a dark red dust.

He finally released her arm, and his parting words, before he turned back toward town, were, “When I greet you tomorrow I expect a smile. A blush if you can manage it.”

Neve walked home stumbling-fast, the mud sucking at her boots. Coming into the yard, she spotted Spear’s bootprints among the usual fox tracks, and saw with fresh eyes what a poor sanctuary was this row of shanties. In her shed, she was like a nut meat to cracking teeth. Spear could eat her for breakfast if he wanted. Worse, he could have her for a midnight snack.

This midnight. Any midnight. Who would come if she screamed?

She shivered and barred her meager door. She built a meager fire and cooked a meager meal. Her ears were tuned to the night outside, but she only heard the rain. There was nothing for her fretting but to get out her book, her treasure, her one thing from home: true home, long lost, the Failed Colony. It had had a real name, once, but all those decades of striving and living and building and planting and loving had been reduced in a single season to that wretched word: failed.

The book had eighteen stories in it, and when she read them—aloud, always—it was with her mother’s cadence, which was imprinted on her heart. She turned to the one that suited this night: a maiden, pursued by an ogre, transforms herself into a doe rather than become his wife. Her eyes were tired from a long day squinting at stitches, so she let them flutter shut. But she knew the story by heart and it kept going, into the woods on fleet deer feet and down a mossy slope.

And all of a sudden she was in Nasty Gully. She knew she was dreaming, because her book had nothing to do with Nasty Gully. The spring beetles were there, all glint and shimmer in the ferny half light, but they weren’t flying at her face. They weren’t flying at all. They were motionless in their hundreds, and when Neve stepped in close, she saw that they were jewels. They were beetles made of jewels, and when she took one up it was a ring for her finger. Another, it was a brooch. The gully was quiet and the light was soft, and she sensed that she was not alone.

“Hello?” she whispered, and woke in her chair, no sound besides rain and the pop of the dying fire, but a whisper seemed to follow her out of sleep. It wasn’t that she heard it so much as felt it.

It felt like a breeze through a forests’ worth of leaves.

“I will free you, and I will lift you. I will learn a thousand ways to make you laugh. Your smiles will be the honey in my mead, your enchantment my delight.”

And in her shed by the dying fire, Neve sensed, as she had in the dream, that she was not alone. But it wasn’t a lurking feeling, as a figure in the night. It was the sense that she wasn’t alone in the world, and that was a very different thing.