Page 42 of Wench

The admission unsettles her; the words sit too bare between them.

‘I long for the ease with which you and your people move through joy without apology.’ She blows a curl off her cheek. ‘I was taught to kneel, to hide want until it starved. To pull beauty apart until it became usefulness.’ The words leave her before prudence can catch them. ‘I drew a blossom once and my father called it a waste of charcoal, unless it could be hammered into a blade.’

Lox studies her, his expression unreadable. ‘He sounds like a man who mistakes control for safety.’

‘He is a man who keeps his head by bending his neck.’ Silence folds between them. Marian chooses each step, feet testing before committing, her breath a measured count. Lox moves behind, sure as water finding a channel. A root heaves under her sole at the last instant. She pitches forward, a gasp breaking loose as the ground tilts. His hand catches the back of her vest and the other clamps around her forearm, as he spins her around and pulls. She collides with him, palms braced against his chest, breath knocked crooked.

For a stunned heartbeat they are joined at too many points – her forearm to his grip, her hip to his thigh, the shallow rise and fall of both their breaths trapped in the narrow space between. His skin is warm through linen. The scent of resin, smoke, rain-drenched pine rushes at her in a dizzying flood. She stares at the laces of his shirt because she can’t bear his eyes; looking at the small notch at the base of his throat is already too much.

‘Careful,’ he murmurs.

‘I had it,’ she lies, pride clawing up her spine.

‘Of course,’ he says mildly, as if he hadn’t just hauled her out of the earth’s mouth. His fingers linger a fraction too long before he releases her, and they keep moving.

A gust of wind threads the branches and carries with it a faint, high sound at the edge of hearing. Marian frowns. It’s too thin for birdsong, too steady for branch-squeak. It needles the hollow behind her ear and disappears. At first, she takes it for insects, a summer whine. But it sharpens as they climb, turning metallic, a pressure more felt than heard, sliding under her skin and sawing at her nerves.

‘Do you hear that?’ she breathes.

‘The ridge is old.’ He doesn’t slow, but his antlers tilt as if testing the air. ‘It speaks in many ways.’

The sound comes again, higher now, as if a wire has been plucked. The hairs along her forearms lift. ‘This is something different.’ She hates the urgency in her voice. ‘It’s like . . . a cry.’

He glances back, quickly, a question flickering over his face. ‘Stay close.’

The note threads itself through her teeth, a pressure that makes her breath catch in her throat. Each step higher turns the keening half a note sharper, until it is a filament running from the soles of her feet to the back of her skull. The forest grows wrong. Birds fall quiet. The air thins, stripped of the green sweetness she’d come to know.

Lox moves faster. The path steepens into a spine of rock. They scramble the last few yards, hands and boots digging for purchase. She follows his footprints exactly, her breath counting steps. The sound crescendoes in pressure until her skull feels too small. When she crests the last lip, the ridge breaks like a wave, curling away to reveal the bowl beyond.

Marian’s lungs seize at the view.

ChapterThirteen

The hilltop is shaved to raw earth, ribs of stone exposed like a carcass left to rot. Trees lie gutted where they fell, rings split wide and gaping. The spring is a pit, its water gone sallow, rimmed in orange where the soil has bled rust. Iron spikes crater the ground, black-smeared, still stinking faintly of pitch. A grindstone sits lopsided, its handle broken. A mortal-made shovel leans abandoned against a pile of slag that glitters with glassy veins.

Fae ore.

The keening pours from the exposed seam in a relentless cry that turns Marian’s stomach. Her hand flies to her mouth. Something inside her goes cold and then hot, nausea rising.

Lox goes very still. For a breath he is a statue, antlers black against the morning. Then the muscles along his jaw jump once, hard. He steps forward, boots sinking slightly in the churned mud, and crouches. His fingers dig into the ravaged ground like a man listening for a pulse, only to be met with disappointing silence.

‘There were nests here,’ he says quietly, his voice thin and sharp as glass. ‘Hollow-bellied deer that gave birth beneath the larkspur. Fox kits and small-fanged martens. Mushrooms with caps like lanterns. Trees that flowered once every ten years and wept sap sweeter than honey. The earth used to sing here.’ His hand curls deeper into the dirt, knuckles going white.

Marian stands apart, her breath thick with the metallic reek rising off the slag heaps.

This is her father’s doing.

The thought crashes through Marian. Her father had told her once that fae ore had to be mined where the wild still touched the earth. This destruction is by his hand, his order, his mark. Her father’s world grafted violently onto this one.

And the Sheriff’s shadow looms over every cut. She hears his voice at her ear, whispering about how iron tames the wild, and with enough of it, the forest itself will kneel.

Her lungs lock. For so long, she has told herself she was merely a daughter caught in her father’s snare. But here, standing in the ruin her family helped carve, she cannot deny the blood of it in her veins. The keening sinks deeper, as if the earth itself knows the legacy she carries in her bones.

Lox kneels. His cloak pools dark behind him, his palms sunk wrist-deep into the dirt as if he could dig deep enough to find breath again. His antlers dip with the weight of sorrow. The sight claws at her chest.

Marian moves along the lip of the pit. Every step kicks up stale dust. She drags her sleeve over her mouth, but the tang of metal creeps in, settling on her tongue, her teeth, the back of her throat.

Half of Nottingham would cheer to see what she sees: a vein ready for the taking, a fortune in the ground. Her father would call it providence. The Sheriff would call it order. Marian calls it ruin. But she also calls it familiar. The recognition floods her with shame so sharp that she thinks she might be sick.