Page 93 of Wench

‘Good,’ Shéruel says at last, and Marian almost laughs at the indecency of the word in such a place. ‘Hearts that believe themselves above saving curdle into idols. Hearts that believe themselves beneath saving calcify into wounds. A heart must know it can break and still be worthy.’

‘Worth is not the price a life can fetch,’ Wodenna adds, and something in the air eases, slackening by a hair. ‘It is the weight of what a life can carry and how strong it can beat while shouldering it.’

‘You will do well as Sherwood’s new heart.’ Their united voices rumble through the cavern.

The mass suspended above them pulses once more, slow, heavy, and solemn. The cavern shivers. Marian feels the beat crawling behind her eyes, a hammer tapping an iron bar that runs through her skull.

Marian staggers as the force shudders through her. She feels it in her sternum, in the vine-mark seared into her chest, as if her body were a drum for the forest’s beat.

‘M-m-me?’ she stammers. ‘No, I’m not?—’

‘A shield is nothing without the heart it guards.’ Shéruel steps closer, his antlers glinting. ‘Your gift is not given lightly, nor is it to be ignored.’

‘Gift?’ Marian baulks. ‘What gift?’

Wodenna’s eyes find her, dark pools rimmed in green fire. ‘Do you know what it means to hear the forest’s cry where others hear only silence?’ Marian shakes her head, but the motion feels fragile, as if the cavern itself weighs against it. ‘What you’re hearing,’ she continues, ‘is the connective tissue of Sherwood. You hear where the land frays from the lives it shelters, where the beat skews, where the rhythm goes ragged. That is your gift, Marian. To sense imbalance and draw things back into time with each other. To lend your pulse when another falters.’

Marian’s stomach drops. She thinks of the Fellhart caged in iron, with feathers and antlers, and eyes too many. How its gratitude thrummed through her like a struck chord. Of the decimated ridge or the burning copse – the scream only she could hear braided through the flames until she smothered the fire. She never thought of those moments as a gift. They felt more like a curse of sensitivity that made the world bruise her too easily.

‘A shield teaches a forest to endure,’ Shéruel says. ‘But a heart teaches it how to remember itself. A Guardian is the oak in a storm – rooted, resolute, teeth bared against axes and drought.’

Wodenna’s gaze slips to the suspended mass above them. ‘While the heart binds. It threads the living to the land so tightly that taking one harms the other. When rot whispers, the heart teaches the forest which parts to relinquish and which to knit again.’

‘Fae ore,’ Shéruel adds almost fondly, as if speaking of a child that grew into its teeth. ‘The dark glittering veins that run through the marrow of hill and hollow answer to the heart. Left to themselves they drift, weaken, forget their own true north beneath the pull of men’s greed. But given a pulse, they thicken, braid and harden against the bite of human iron. Ore bolsters beasts and boughs and bodies alike, travelling in small bright filaments through sap and sinew.’

Marian swallows, and the sound seems indecently loud. The wordoresinks into her. She sees her father’s forge, the gleam of slag in the crucible’s throat, the way he chewed the inside of his cheek when ore ran thin and his debt ran thick. She remembers the net that seared Lox’s shoulder, the stink of iron-ore braided with human malice, and bile rises hot in her throat.

‘You would make me responsible for that?’ she whispers. ‘For solidifying the veins that men want to carve up? For shepherding the very thing the Sheriff lusts after?’

Wodenna’s mouth curves with the ghost of patience. ‘You confuse sight with consent. Men will carve, whether you sleep or wake. With a heart, Sherwood does not merely endure their teeth; it grows hard in the right places, and soft around the right roots.’

Marian presses a shaking hand to the vine marked above her sternum. Beneath skin and bone, she can feel the thready tug of things unseen: a lattice of attention stretching from this hall to places her feet have never touched. A brook she’s never crossed gurgles; a badger shifts in doze; a rot-thread in a coppiced ash knits slower, then steadier, as if reassured by something she has not meant to say. The overwhelm of it threatens to split her sternum.

‘How is one person expected to hold all of that,’ she whispers, ‘and not split apart?’

‘A forest is not kept by one spine,’ Wodenna replies. ‘There were always meant to be two – pulse and protector, shield and song – until men taught us to choose one way of keeping over another. They have gone by many names. Robin of Loxleigh chose Rootkeeper.’ Her eyes flick with a heat that is not wholly kind.

‘In older tongues,’ Shéruel continues, ‘the role you are stepping toward has had many titles.Pulsebearer. Heartwarden. Earthmother. Choose what fits in your mouth. A name should be a path, not a chain.’

The cavern spins and Marian feels unmoored. ‘I don’t understand,’ she murmurs to herself. ‘Why is this happening?’

‘This was not always meant to be your mantle to carry,’ Wodenna sighs, and though she doesn’t move, Marian swears she can feel her hand brush at the tear on her cheek. ‘Had your mother offered herself to the hollow instead of fleeing from her birthright, this inheritance would have fallen to her.’

Marian staggers at the words as if they have struck her wound instead of her ears. ‘My mother . . .’ The name Thornvale pulses against her ribs, an ache sharper than the soldier’s blade. ‘No, she hated Sherwood. She told me never to set foot beneath its canopy. She would scold me if she even caught dirt on my hems.’

‘Because she feared what she was,’ Shéruel replies, his tone stripped bare of judgment. ‘She longed for the ease of a mortal life. She believed if she buried her roots beneath marble and docility, she could inter the wild within her.’

Wodenna’s gaze softens, but the truth does not. ‘And so she starved it. The draught she brewed for herself, and later pressed on you, was no simple cordial. It salted the spring.’

Marian’s breath hitches. ‘The tonic.’

Wodenna nods. ‘Herbs, iron filings ground to dust, and sap from her village’s heart tree. It clotted the pathways our ore uses to move through fae flesh. At first it looks like relief: the fever quiets, the flare of magic softens.’ Her eyes dim, remembering. ‘Then the withering begins. Joints crumble. Lungs tire. Wounds refuse to mend. It’s as if the light within our blood dulls. Hearts like hers – likeyours– need the ore’s hymn the way a hawk needs wind. Starved long enough, the psalm forgets you back.’

Shéruel’s antlers catch the ember-glow overhead. ‘Isadora refused the song until it could no longer find her. Each day she woke smaller than the last. By the end, even our roots could not reach what she had tied off.’

Marian’s throat burns. She sees her mother’s face, not in fae majesty but in domestic shadow: lips pressed tight while sewing, hands raw from washing, eyes shuttered whenever the name Sherwood was whispered. All her life Marian thought it disdain. Now she wonders if it had been fear.

‘She rejected you?’