Slate and Earth Chapter 6.1

A/N: Gonna be honest, not entirely sure what I'm doing with this chapter. This is just what came out this week. So, do with that what you will.

VI. Esther

On the eve of her seventeenth birthday, Ester made her bargain with Sebastian and crossed through the Veil for the first time. And on the morning of the day she was born, the King of the Forest escorted her to the empty little cottage that Esther would make her home.

The King did not speak to her as Sebastian did - though Esther had determined for herself that he could he simply wouldn’t - but she felt him consider her with a healthy dose of skepticism. It was not an unwise perspective to have. Approaching seventeen, Esther was a girl gone mad. Her hair, thick and blonde, fell over her shoulders in a wild curtain that her mother would wrestle into something becoming of a young lady before a suitor would come to sit beside her in the parlor and bore her with his conversation. She spent her independent time rummaging through boxes in the attic, whispering magic into heirloom salt shakers and sharpening kitchen knives on the edge of her wit. She ran barefoot through the yard and wore her skirts tied up to her knees and kissed her girlfriends in the shadows behind the mill. To her mother, she had become a nuisance. To Esther Keeling, she had become herself.

For most, the forest was a blind spot. A bit of land willfully forgotten. There was no good hunting ground there, bemoaned the men who had to tote their guns and knives up to Washington for some decent sport. It’s just a bunch of trees, sniped the boys who preferred to take their ladies on long day trips to the coast.

But when the young ladies strolled arm in arm down the paved walk along the river, they whispered about magic. The magic that lingered between the trees of an ancient forest. That kissed their windowsills on the perfect autumn evening. It was the magic that lived woven into the muscles of their hearts, and called them out of bed on the night of the equinox when the Veil becomes thin and the forest welcomes guests. Esther felt the forest calling her long before that equinox, but once she stepped inside she never wanted to leave. While the young ladies shed their pretty dresses and tumbled into shallow pools of forest hot springs, Esther laced her boots tighter and set off to make a deal.

She thought it would give her power, but she had ignored that which she already had. All the forest did was bind her.

While the King of the Forest stood outside her door, Esther held Ana beneath her arm and thought about how many times she had done wrong by the women she loved. She had stolen Fanny Price through the Veil and held her while the forest air turned to steel in her lungs. She tried to keep a girl named Hope after the equinox, only to see her dashed upon the rocks beneath the Widow’s Cliff. Fifty years in, Esther met a woman called Carol at the Sunday farmer’s market where she sold her jams and honeys and other bits of domestic magics; she thought, if she loved a girl outside the forest she might have been allowed to keep her. When the cancer came, none of Esther’s magic was enough to bargain for her life.

“What does he want?” Ana whispered.

Esther pressed her back against the cottage door and shifted her arms away from Ana’s body, from her erratic pulse, from the energy of the child growing inside her. He wants to punish me, she thought to herself. But she hadn’t loved this one. She could have thrown her back across the Veil with no concern for her child, but she didn’t love her. All she wanted was to return her to the other side. “He wants you,” she said, instead, and stood.

She reached down with both hands and pulled Ana to her feet. Their arms lingered together and Esther studied the face of the girl she’d brought into her home. The young woman. The expecting mother. She’d brought into her home a symbol from a fairy tale, a stained glass window, a tarot card. But that wasn’t right. While she was sleeping, Esther had allowed herself to forget that the woman who crawled through her window was a person. A person she hardly knew, yet who she now needed to defend.

“You stay here,” Esther instructed her, and moved Ana away from the door. “The house will protect you, but only if you stay inside.”

“Where are you going?” Ana demanded, leaning forward on the balls of her feet but ultimately staying in place.

Esther sighed. “I’m going to talk to the King of the Forest,” she said, and opened the door.

The air outside had gone thin with magic. It unsettled her, made her lightheaded and feel as if she were swimming through clouds rather than walking the scattered stone of her own front path. The King stood squarely past the boundary Esther had been attempting to conjure when Ana stepped outside the house. It was old, simple magic but the right herbs from your own garden would protect you for a simple sacrifice: a bit of blood, lost while shredding basil. Or a moment of pure, hot panic you allow yourself for the pregnant girl who stole her way into your home.

Esther stopped halfway down the path. Her hair draped over her shoulder, falling out of it’s braid. She clasped her hands in front of her and stood straight. The King stepped forward and bowed, his great crowd of antlers enveloping her. Esther reached out and laid her palm flat against the soft, downy fur between the roots of bone set into his head.

Esther’s muscles stiffened, the only thing keeping her knees from buckling, as the forest drew her spirit from her body and into the earth. It alarmed her. She had experienced it before, but each time she found she had forgotten about the pain. The way her eardrums shattered, or so it felt. The way her muscles seized and locked her knees. The way the forest set her skin on fire as it pulled her away from herself.

Once it was done, Esther found that nothing felt as spectacular.