Page 23 of Wench

The thought of living among a people so unashamed, so brazen, knots something low in Marian’s belly. But that’s not why she baulks.

‘Two hundred and twenty-two?!’

His grin turns sly. ‘Give or take a few summers.’

‘You can’t be serious; you don’t look a day over five and twenty.’ Her voice edges between disbelief and accusation.

He laughs, light and unbothered. ‘Fae age slowly, Mare. The first century feels long, but after that, we start measuring time by seasons as much as by years.’

She stares at him, searching his face for some sign of the centuries he claims: a line, a crease, any mark of wear. But his skin is smooth, his eyes bright, his grin irritatingly boyish. ‘Are you immortal?’

He tilts his head, pretending to consider it. ‘We don’t live forever. Just long enough to regret most of it.’

Marian shakes her head, the absurdity of it twisting her mouth. ‘No one ever believes I’m twenty-four,’ she mutters. ‘My face hasn’t changed since I was fifteen. Every priest and shopkeeper still calls me girl . . . It’s maddening.’

Allen gives a mock-sympathetic wince. ‘You mortals treat youth as if it’s such a burden.’ He nods toward a pair of fae leaning over a nearby railing, bright-eyed and laughing like carefree youths. ‘Those two are barely out of their sapling years. The tall one with the freckles? Sixty-seven. The other? Pushing seventy-three. I’d kill to still be that young.’

‘Oh yes,’ she fires back. ‘You look practically ancient.’

‘The forest’s good at keeping its children fresh-faced. It’s the price of all that magic in our blood – slow to burn, slower still to fade. You mortals get to rush through life and call it urgency. We get centuries and keep making the same mistakes.’

There’s something quiet beneath the jest this time. An echo of weariness that doesn’t belong on a face so young.

Centuries spent in the same skin, watching everything around you wilt and begin again; it’s enough to make her own brief, messy life feel like a boon. She doesn’t know whether to envy him or pity him.

The thought lingers as they walk. Their conversation, the strange ache of it, becomes folded beneath the press of the village around her. She focuses on what she can name instead of what she can’t: a weaver’s loft slung like a hammock between two trunks; a baker’s nook where flatbreads blister against stone; a line of shallow troughs where children set boats made of bark and leaf afloat, shouting wagers as they race.

‘Where are you taking me, anyway?’ Marian asks, desperate for a change in subject.

‘Quartermistress Niamh first,’ Allen says cheerfully, as if she hasn’t just been sentenced. ‘You’ll want some clothes more suited for life in Sherwood than that sodden bridal shroud. Then I’ll take you back to your new quarters. It’s easy enough to get lost until you learn which end of the village is up.’

They descend a switchback stair that curls around a great trunk, its bark furrowed into whorls large enough for her palm to fit cleanly inside. Niamh’s place grows from the trunk itself; a scalloped outgrowth ribbed like a seashell. Nets of vine hang from pegs, threaded with buttons carved of bone and antler, with loops of copper and rings of polished jet. Fabric sways on lines, dull greens and deep browns and rich greys – a forest’s palette rendered in cloth. The air inside smells of beeswax and spun flax, of leather oiled to suppleness.

‘I present Sherwood’s newest patron,’ Allen carols, pushing the reed curtain aside with his elbow. ‘Mare meet Niamh, Quartermistress of Elswyth.’

Niamh looks up with a tangle of vine cord and needles caught in her hair. She is compact and unhurried, the sort of woman whose gaze weighs and measures before the mouth bothers to speak. Her fingertips are stained green at the tips.

‘Come.’ She flicks her fingers at a low platform set before a window.

Marian steps onto it because refusal would only make her smaller. The quartermistress circles once, twice, silent as a hawk. A coil of twine floats from a peg and settles around Marian’s ribs. The twine tightens with a quiet tick as if the knotted ends were conferring with one another. Marian’s body goes rigid.

‘Well fed,’ Niamh murmurs, more to herself than to Marian. ‘Good. Sherwood is no place for hollow bones.’

Another length of twine slides from a hook as if nudged by an unseen hand. It loops Marian’s hips and cinches with a soft click. A pinned seam skims the line of her waist, vanishes, then returns lower to test the fall of a skirt. Her fingers tap against themselves aimlessly as she tries to ignore the way the hairs along her arms have risen.

‘Hold still,’ Niamh commands, already turning toward a bank of shelves. Bolts of cloth seem to breathe when she touches them. A deep green ripples like the surface of a pond when wind skims it. Bark-grey fibres pebble under her palm with the faint pattern of lichen. When she pulls thread, it does not unspool so much as follow, attentive as a trained hound.

‘I am holding still,’ Marian answers, teeth tight.

‘On the outside, perhaps.’ Niamh flicks her wrist; the twine around Marian’s waist hums and slides a finger’s breadth higher of its own accord. ‘Inside, you carry a storm beneath your ribs.’

The twine’s touch isn’t painful, but it is intimate in a way that makes Marian’s skin crawl.

‘I don’t like being measured by invisible hands,’ she grumbles.

Niamh lifts her gaze just enough to take in Marian’s clenched jaw. ‘You don’t have to like it,’ she says. ‘You only have to stand still.’

‘I prefer sharp things I can see.’