Page 58 of Knight of Staria
The Harvest Mother laughed, and it sounded like the creak of tree branches in a high wind. “You sound worried. There is already something more than just you and I here. Don’t pretend you don’t see it, fox-man.” She touched his chin, turning it toward his left.
Eli was dancing with a young man a few paces away, looking anxiously over his shoulder at Rey every few steps. He was lovely in the torchlight, but as Rey watched him, he noticed somethingflicker near Eli’s legs. For a second, he almost thought it was a firefly—but that wasn’t right. It was too cold for them now. There was something odd about the way he held himself, as though he were older, a little more worn.
“He is becoming,” the Harvest Mother said, and Rey remembered the man in the field of fireflies, his strange, indistinct features and rigid posture. He had said the same thing—becoming.A chill ran through Rey’s body, and the Harvest Mother stroked his cheek. “Yes. He is on the cusp of it. A mortal man, yet he straddles our realms. The King of the Hunt once did the same, and so did you. Soon, very soon, he must make a decision. To become one of us, like you did, or to turn his back on the spirits of Staria and return to his life as a mortal man.”
“If he does the latter, will he still be able to see us?”
The Harvest Mother sighed. “Oh, my fox-man. There’s so much of your mortal self in you, but even when you were just a fox, you were too fond of humans. If he stays a man, you will have to let him go. Seasons end. We burn and die, and new life comes from the ashes in the spring.”
“I don’t want that.” Rey wanted to break free of the Harvest Mother and take Eli’s hands, pull him away from the field, from Staria, from all of it. “I want him to stay.”
“There can be joy in an ending,” the Harvest Mother said. “In partings. When he makes his choice, you will know. It will not be the same. But I will give you this, fox-man, something to sustain you—the truth.” She leaned in close, mouth tickling his ear. “Of all of us, you have the power to shape the threads of Story. Even if the end of your knight’s story is a parting, you, more than me or the Green Man or the King of the Hunt, can influence it. That is my gift to you—a choice. Reach into my heart, fox-man.”
Her form shifted, becoming closer to her true self, the fickle, unfettered spirit of the harvest, cruel and loving at a whim, shaped by humans but utterly inhuman at her core. The wheatstalks rustled as Rey reached in, and he felt something slipping about amid the twigs and rushes of her chest. He pulled it free and balked at the slick touch of the beaded necklace the King of the Hunt had given him. It swung slowly, as though the beads were heavier than before.
“Why would you give this back to me?” he asked. “I made my choice. I threw it away.”
“Shape your story as you will,” the Harvest Mother said, backing into the crowd. The dancers closed around her, their movements wild, eyes vague, bodies moving not as mortal beings but as grass tossed in the wind.
When the HarvestMother came to Eli, she wasn’t the pale green, nymph-like woman who’d danced away with Rey.
She was the figure on the podium now, ancient and new, woven that morning and destined to burn. When she took his hands, she engulfed them in wheat and grass stalks, and when she twisted him in a giddy, stumbling dance, her body bent and swayed as though it would break apart.
“You know me better than most, my knight,” she said, dragging him through the crowd of dancers. “These people, most of them see me as sweet, kind, maternal. After all, doesn’t every mother love her children?”
The Harvest Mother’s laughter ran like a cold breeze over his skin.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice sounded fuller, now, more human, and something about it made Eli’s hair stand on edge. “You know. I could see it on you. You’ve felt the bitter winter of a mother’s disinterest. Why, in the end, do mothers owe anything to their children? Why can’t we take as well as give? Whyshouldn’t we let you wither and starve if we’re all doomed to burn anyway?”
“If a parent doesn’t love us, they should leave,” Eli said.
“And who left you, sweet?” Eli drew back, wrenching his hands free of the Harvest Mother. He knew that voice. It had followed him for sixteen years, needling him, chiding him for everything he couldn’t be.
It was Aline de Valois’ voice.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “She’s dead.”
“Not in you,” the Harvest Mother said, still in Aline’s voice. Eli’s stomach twisted. He staggered back, but the Harvest Mother glided toward him, growing taller, broader, fat with wheat and grass and willow. “There’s a piece of her in you, isn’t there? Little habits you can’t break. The way you look after your nails, the number of strokes you brush your hair, the little voice that tells you that you aren’t doing enough—that if you’d been enough, maybe she would have loved you. Maybe you would have beaten Isiodore de Mortain. Maybe you won’t die in the mud like your ancestor when the King of the Hunt comes.”
“I said she’s dead!” Eli threw up an arm to block the Harvest Mother’s approach, and her body shoved up against it, swallowing it. She moved closer, and Eli could smell the dead green things that made up her body as it consumed him, closing over him like fog over the fields.
“Poor, lost creature,” the Harvest Mother said, in her own voice. Eli tried to claw through the grass and wheat, and twigs scratched at his arms and stung his cheek as they passed. “So human, and yet already bigger than yourself. It’s a heavy burden for a soul to carry. What are you missing? What do you need?”
“Rey,” Eli said. He spat grass out of his mouth. “Just let me get to Rey.”
“He is not what you’re missing, my knight. Hold out your hand.” The Harvest Mother’s laugh rippled around him like awind whirling through the rushes of a quiet pond. “I will give you what you need to sustain you.”
Slowly, Eli lifted his left hand.
Someone took it.
“Rey,” he said. He gripped the hand tight. “Rey, pull me out.”
“I can’t see you,” a voice said. It was a man’s voice, but it was hard to tell much else through the rising rush of the Harvest Mother’s laughter. “Where are we? There was a field—people dancing?—”
“Pull me out,” Eli shouted, and the hand tightened around his. Slowly, as the man strained and groaned through the mass of greenery, Eli pushed himself out of the Harvest Mother’s body. He gasped for breath, unaware until that moment that he’d been breathless at all, and panted as he twisted round to see the Harvest Mother taking the arm of a massive man in a leaf-strewn cloak. Eli drew back, still holding onto the hand of the man who’d pulled him out.
“Thank you,” he said. “I think I was drowning in there and I didn’t know.” He turned and froze.
