I was crushing peppercorns with a mortar and pestle when she said to me, “You must be careful with my lady.”
“I won’t hurt her,” I promised after sorting through several replies. Had Haida noticed how I looked at her sometimes? There was nothing that could come of it. I was a monster, and beyond that a simple village herbalist, and she a fairy princess. But a man could look and dream, couldn’t he?
She made a chiding sound. “Of course you will. Everyone hurts everyone—it is a part of living. But I don’t mean careful that way. She has a beast inside her.”
“So do I,” I told her, and as if that acknowledgment awakened it, the wolf inside me surfaced.
“Your heart beats with a wolf’s rhythm,” Haida said prosaically. “But it is not a monster. Not the way my lady’s is—or your da’s is, for that matter.”
“My da is the same as I,” I protested. “And Ariana is . . .” Words failed me for a moment. “Ariana is strong and true as a good oak tree.”
Haida set her wooden spoon to rest on a small table and turned to look at me. “No,” she said, heavily. “No, she is not. Once, she was lovely and sweet and, it hurts me to confess, spoiled. Beloved daughter. But immortality is more curse than blessing. All things pass away. Love may live for a month or a year, but sooner or later, it leaves.”
I stopped working with the mortar. “No,” I told her, because my heart knew better. “That is not true.”
“Have you lived so long as I?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I have lived long enough to know that love doesn’t die.” I might not remember my wife’s face or her name, but I remembered her smell, the touch of her hand, and the sound of her laughter. Not even the witch’s magic could steal that from me. I loved my wife still, and the pain of her loss burned in my heart. “Not if you cherish it. Love, like any other living thing, needs to be fed. Only if you starve it will it die.”
Haida blinked a little and leaned against the table where she had been working.
“But you were talking about Ariana,” I said. “And not of love.”
She nodded. “And not of love. Ariana’s father ruined her. If you hurt her or scare her, the beast will attack. It is dangerous.”
“So am I,” I told her.
“It was afraid of her father and could not disobey him,” she said. “But her father is no more, and it will do anything to protect her. Anything. And nothing you are is sufficient to protect yourself from it.”
She meant it. I could smell her fear of the beast inside her lady.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said gently. “I am only here for a day or two more. As soon as I’m certain that she doesn’t need me, I have to go to my da.” And I would die. I might tell myself differently, but I had been with the witch for too long to believe in any other end.
Until then, I would continue to play human, to remember the man I had once been, even if I could not remember my family or my life, except in bits and pieces. I would take what I could, then do my best to save my da and to save me.
That night, as I turned wool into yarn as Ariana wove, she turned her head away from me with uncharacteristic shyness. “Do you really think love lives forever?”
“I think that you listen in doorways,” I said lightly.
Her mouth curved up, but she still didn’t look at me, her eyes paying closer attention to sliding her weft through the warp yarn in her loom. “I think that Underhill lets me hear what it chooses, even when I am tucked away and half-asleep. Answer my question.”
I raised an eyebrow at the imperious demand.
She looked at me, laughed, and said, “Please?”
“I can only speak for myself,” I said. “But there are none that I have ever loved who I no longer love. Wife, children, and parents, I love them still, though they have, with the exception of my father, been gone for a very long time.”
She worked for a long time without speaking. Then she said, very quietly. “You worry about your father?”
“Yes,” I said. “I will leave tomorrow to go to him.”
We didn’t speak again until she asked me to sing.
The next morning, I left Ariana sleeping and ventured into the kitchen. Haida was there before me, as she always was. She handed me a bowl of cooked grain sweetened with honey, her face stormy.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You will leave us,” she said.
“The witch holds my da.” I sat on a stool and started eating.
“They will come back for her,” she said in a low voice, with an anxious glance toward the room where Ariana still slept. “The hounds spent three years with her as their prey, not allowed the kill. When they know that the forest lord is dead, they will come back and kill her.”
“I will return, as fast as I am able,” I told her. “But my father needs me.”
She smiled, but she didn’t mean it. “I know you will. And maybe they won’t come. But I didn’t worry about them until I knew you were going.”
I finished the food and touched her hand. “I trust you to keep her safe.”
It didn’t take long for me to ready myself to go. I did not need a pack, just boots and a good woolen cloak. I should have changed forms because the wolf would have made the journey quicker. But I had only just regained my humanity and was loath to lose it. I stepped outside to put on my boots so the dirt on the soles wouldn’t drop on the floor. The door opened again behind me.
“Samuel? You are leaving?”
I turned and saw her. The winter-morning sun lit her face and hair until she glowed the silver of her name. Like as not, she was centuries older than I, but she looked no more than a maiden.
“I told you I must,” I said. “Da is still in thrall to the witch. I don’t know what she did to him for our disobedience.”
“Take this,” she said, and she gave me a silver chain, long enough to wrap twice around my neck. “My home can be difficult to find. If you are wearing this chain in my father’s . . . in this forest and say my name three times, you’ll find yourself on my doorstep without delay.”
The silver burned my hand, and I dropped it with a hiss. She picked it up.
“Silver burns evil,” I told her.
“Nonsense,” she said. “My father wore silver, and it never burned him.” She ran the chain through her fingers once. “I don’t have much magic left, but silver loves me. Try it now.”