Falling In (5 page)

“I’ll walk you to the camps.” Isabelle stood and pointed south. “For a loaf of bread, and any blueberries you might have on you.”

“I’ve not got blueberries, miss, they’re not in season. But to my bread you’re welcome.” The girl gave Isabelle a worried glance. “Though shouldn’t we start out the other way, miss?”

Isabelle touched the girl on the shoulder. “I know a shortcut,” she lied.

The girl pulled a loaf of bread from her pouch and handed it to Isabelle. Isabelle broke off a piece for her young companion before shoving some into her own mouth. The pain between her eyes receded. The two of them began to walk.

The girl’s name was Hen, and she was useful.

At first she couldn’t stop worrying aloud about when the path would split and she and Isabelle would begin to make their way north. “We’ve been south-bound for some time now, miss,” she’d noted after they’d been walking for more than an hour. “Isn’t it time we broke from the path and changed direction?”

“If we keep going south, sooner or later we’ll be going north,” Isabelle pointed out. “One way always becomes the other if you give it time.”

She could tell this bit of navigational wisdom didn’t ease Hen’s mind and decided to take a different approach. “Would you like me to tell you a story while we walk?”

Looking interested, the girl nodded.

“Do you know about changelings?”

Hen nodded again. “Of course, miss.”

Now it was Isabelle’s turn to be interested. She’d never met anyone before who knew about changelings. The kids she went to school with knew about aliens and they knew about murderers and kidnappers. They knew a little about monsters, though nothing useful, and a touch of vampire lore. But when it came to fairies, elves, changelings, and boggarts, no one Isabelle knew had the slightest idea. It seemed the most interesting things in the world were currently out of fashion.

Isabelle peered at Hen with more curiosity than she’d possessed a moment ago. “So, what exactly do you know?”

The girl laughed. “Why, all there is to know, I suppose, miss. The three Teague boys, all of them were changelings, now, weren’t they? Beautiful babes their mother had each time, and then the jealous fairies stole them, and look what she got in their stead—them barrel-faced boys thumping and
clumping around, no sense in ’em. Changelings, every one.”

So instead of Isabelle telling stories to the girl—Hen, she said her name was, not short for anything, just Hen—the girl told stories to Isabelle, and in this way they walked for another hour, before Hen noticed that the sky was beginning to darken.

“It won’t do to keep traveling, miss,” she said, moving off the path and crouching beside a tree, hands on her knees. “Dark falls fast in these woods.”

Isabelle hadn’t thought about night coming on. In the same way that she hadn’t worried about food until she got hungry, it hadn’t occurred to her that she would need to sleep until nighttime crept into view. She guessed it made sense that she would, but how do you sleep if you don’t have a bed? No sleeping bag? No pillow, no blanket, not the thinnest of quilts to come between you and the ground? And, come to think of it, no ceiling to come between you and the clouds?

Hen seemed to sense Isabelle’s concern. “Not to
worry, miss. I’ll make us a comfortable sleeping spot. I’m not good at much, but I’m good at setting up camp. If you’ll help me gather a thing or two before evening comes, we’ll get a good night’s sleep, save the witch don’t get us.”

They entered the woods through a thin stand of trees. Hen told Isabelle to gather leaves while she went in search of vines and fallen branches. “You’ll need more than that, miss, if you want to have a good night,” Hen had chided her the first time Isabelle appeared with her arms only half full. Isabelle dumped the leaves where Hen told her to and went back for more. Soon there was a hump-backed mound at the edge of the woods. “We’ll make us a bed fit for queens out of that, miss,” Hen said, and Isabelle felt oddly pleased.

While Isabelle collected more leaves, Hen built a lean-to out of sticks and vines against the trunk of a chestnut tree. She showed Isabelle how to pull live branches from young maples and sycamores, leaves still firmly attached, and lay them on top of the lean-to to make a roof. “It’ll be snug in there, you’ll
see, miss,” Hen assured her. “And them leaves will make a good, green blanket.”

Only a thin strip of light still lay on the horizon. “We should get water from the creek before we eat our bread rather than after,” Hen said. “In five minutes, there’ll be no light left for us to find our way back to camp.”

Isabelle marveled at the girl. That Hen! So practical! So full of good ideas! She followed Hen to the creek and dipped her hands into the cold water. She gulped it greedily. How long had they walked? She’d been on the path at least two hours before meeting Hen, and they’d walked a good two hours after that. Four hours of walking. Isabelle smiled. Not bad for a girl who routinely got a cramp in her side after one lap around the track in PE.

The bread they ate for dinner tasted twice as delicious as it had at lunch. “I guess we should save some for morning, shouldn’t we?” Isabelle asked regretfully. She could have eaten her portion and Hen’s and four more loaves besides.

“I’d say so, miss,” Hen replied, sweeping the
crumbs from her lap. “I don’t know how far we are from the camps, but the journey will seem twice as long if we don’t start off with a bit of something to eat.”

“Hen?” Isabelle leaned toward the girl. “Would it surprise you to know I don’t know what the camps are—or why the camps are?”

Hen smiled a rueful smile. “It wouldn’t surprise me if you didn’t know
where
the camps are, that’s the truth of it.”

Isabelle lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. “I’m not from here, Hen, and that’s the truth of it too.”

It was as if Isabelle had just realized this very fact herself, as if the thought—
I’m not from here
—had only now occurred to her. She’d felt at home all day, wandering down the path that split the woods, all sorts of nice smells and sounds popping up everywhere, pine and lilac and cedar and honeysuckle; birds chirping, water splashing over rocks. She felt as though she’d been sent on the best field trip in the world. Maybe not her world—or maybe it was her world?

Isabelle looked around and wondered again,
Where am I? And where is everyone else? Has Charley Bender gone back to PE? Is she at home in bed thinking over the day, explaining to herself again and again what happened? Are the authorities involved? Has my mother submitted a missing person’s report?

Isabelle found that the more she let her thoughts wander in this direction, the fuzzier her immediate surroundings became. Two thoughts about her mom phoning the police and Hen became unfocused around the edges. A little snippet of worry about Charley Bender in the principal’s office trying to explain what had happened, and the shadows beneath the trees deepened into an inky black. Could she worry herself into nothingness?

It was decided, then. She wouldn’t worry. Because Isabelle liked to think things happened for a reason, she decided there must be a reason she was here at the edge of this green and sweet-smelling forest chatting with the interesting and somewhat unusual Hen. She’d learn more, she was sure, as the days went by, about where she was and why. Maybe a
bird would whisper the news in her left ear. Anything was possible, or at least that’s what Isabelle hoped.

Hen stretched, then propped herself on her elbows. “I guessed as much that you wasn’t from here, miss. Just by your clothes. If you don’t mind me saying so, they’re a bit odd for these parts. Are ya from Aghadoc? I’ve heard tell that folks from Aghadoc go about things different.”

“I’m from somewhere else,” Isabelle said. “If we could just leave it at that.”

Hen nodded. “Everybody’s from somewhere else these days, seems like. Me too, I suppose.” She took a quick swipe at her eyes with the back of her arm. “I couldn’t believe it when the signs came. Ignored them at first, we did. And then last night, a shadow crossed the moon, and Mam pushed me and the little ones out the door.”

“And the other kids in your village got pushed out of their doors too?”

“It’s our season, ya see,” Hen said. “The witch’s season. She’s come to us now, to eat all the babies
and hang the children from nets in the trees around her house, starving ’em until they’re nothing but bones clattering in the night when the wind blows.”

The night air fell around Isabelle’s shoulders, and she pulled her hands inside the sleeves of her sweater to keep them warm. “Why does she do it?”

“Some children killed her baby,” Hen answered, and gave a great shiver before she continued. “Years and years ago, when they used to have the summer festival, and all the five villages gathered. The witch lived in the woods outside of Drumanoo then, and folks left her alone. But then word came she’d had a baby, and that it was the devil’s child. A group of ’em—one child from each village—snuck into the woods that night to see Satan’s spawn for themselves. It was out there in the yard—in the middle of the night!—sleeping in a sling tied between two trees. One boy threw a rock at it, and then the others did, and the baby bled something fierce—”

“And it died,” Isabelle finished, her voice barely
a whisper. “That’s a terrible story. That’s the worst story I ever heard.”

Hen shook her head violently. “No! What’s worse is now. She chases us from our villages. She eats our babies! She won’t ever stop seeking revenge, and it’s been near fifty years! I didn’t kill her baby. I’d nothing to do with it.”

Isabelle leaned her head back and stared up at a sky carpeted with stars. A metallic taste filled her mouth. This story—Hen’s story—was taking her somewhere she didn’t want to go. It had a witch, and Isabelle had always loved stories with witches in them, would check out any book from the library that had the barest hint of a witch in it. But the story also held a baby close to its heart, and Isabelle couldn’t bear that baby. She couldn’t bear it! Because she could see it as it had been, its little chest rising and falling as its sling swung in the night breeze, the moonlit air warm on its skin. And then—awful, awful—she could see what it became when it was no longer a baby but had become a small, lifeless body, bruises like
black flowers across its arms and legs and forehead.

Hen had been right: Out of the leaves, they had made a bed fit for queens. But that night, Isabelle tossed and turned and didn’t sleep until the singing of the birds lifted up the sun.

Let me pause here for a moment. There’s a boy there in the third row, halfway back, who’s had his hand in the air for the last ten minutes. I guess some of you have never heard about keeping your hands down until the person telling the story is done. Not that it’s distracting to have someone waving wildly at you while you’re trying to remember exact details, the order of events, what this person said to that person. Oh, no, not distracting
at all.

You want to know what the lamps are? Oh, the
camps.
You want to know what the camps are. Haven’t I explained the camps yet? I thought I had.

Here’s what I know. Back in the time of the witch, in the County of the Five Villages, each
village had its season, and the children of that village had to leave until the witch had moved on. (The order of the villages went Greenan, Aghadoc, Corrin, Stoneybatter, and Drumanoo.) If you lived in Corrin, you ran to the woods north of Greenan. Aghadoc—the woods south of Stoneybatter. And so on.

I don’t know much about the camps, to tell you the truth. I guess if it was spring or summer the children foraged for berries, fished in the creek, threw rocks at squirrels (
not
nice, I know, but they were hungry, and it’s not as if there was a grocery store half a mile down the road). Did they tell one another stories at night? Weave potholders out of long grasses? Make boats out of twigs? I don’t know. Somebody else will have to tell that story. Maybe you could do it. Some of those children are still around. Oh, they’re grown up now, but believe me, they haven’t forgotten. Go ask them yourselves. All you have to do is find the door.