The Cats of Tanglewood Forest (15 page)

When darkness fell she collapsed onto the pallet Mother Manan had provided in a small windowless room beside the pantry. She always knew when morning had come because at dawn Mother Manan would pound on the floor with her staff, summoning Lillian to another day’s labor.

But she had her small rebellions.

The bear people, she discovered, hoarded food and resented sharing beyond their own clan, so she took great pleasure in throwing extra seeds to the wild birds when she was feeding Mother Manan’s chickens in the nearby communal barn. After she cleaned the coop and collected the eggs, she’d milk the cows and put out saucers for the cats that lived in the barn or came soft-stepping from the forest. These cats twined around her legs and butted up against her—like the cats back on Aunt’s farm once had.

Every morning she brought a biscuit and left it under what appeared to be the most gnarled and ancient tree in the orchard. “That’s for you, Mr. Apple Tree Man,” she’d say before returning to her endless circle of chores.

The biscuits were always gone the next day. Lillian pretended that the Apple Tree Man stepped out of his tree to eat them until the day she spied a fox darting out of the orchard with a biscuit in its mouth. That made her smile.

“You enjoy that, Mr. Fox!” she called after the thief, but the next day she put out another biscuit all the same.

The only chore that she found herself truly enjoying
came late in the afternoon, when she was sent out to the berry patches to fill a bucket. Whenever she was outside, she dawdled, taking time to talk to the birds and appreciate the beauties of the valley and LaOursville, all of which seemed so at odds with how the townsfolk lived their lives, mostly indoors with all the windows shuttered against… well, Lillian didn’t know what. And when she went berry-picking, she went so slow that snails could have raced her to the patch and won.

At the beginning of her third week in LaOursville, Lillian started her day as always, making her way to Mother Manan’s bedroom with a tray of biscuits smothered in honey and a steaming-hot mug of tea. She set it down on the night table and opened the heavy curtains. She stood there for a moment, still able to appreciate the beautiful view, before turning back to the foot of the bed to await Mother Manan’s orders for the day.

The bear woman sat up and leaned back against the headboard. Her gaze held Lillian’s, measuring and dark.

“You’re doing better than I expected,” she finally
said. “You work well, and without a word of complaint.”

Lillian shrugged. “We made an agreement. I expect you’ll soon be wanting to hear about my dream.”

“Not yet. Joen tells me the barn needs cleaning. When you’ve finished dusting in the parlor, see to it.”

What about your side of our bargain? Lillian wanted to demand, but she knew that part of the bargain was for her to work without complaint.

She left the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her. It was all she could do to not slam it in frustration.

She’d begun to suspect that the bear people were taking out on her the bitterness they felt toward Aunt Nancy. Maybe Aunt Nancy really
had
eaten some of their kind when she was a little girl. Not like in John’s story, but the way folks in the hills would shoot game for their dinner.

Because stars were stars—not holes left in some magic blanket of the night from when a bunch of spider spirits came dropping down on their silky threads to rescue a little girl. Though the bear people did appear to have a powerful fear of spiders and their webs. She’d often seen one of them shriek and jump out of
the way of a spider spied on a step, or hanging from the roof of a porch.

She couldn’t fathom why the spirits had told Aunt Nancy to send her here. She knew how in stories a body could be tested with all kinds of things, but this working like a slave didn’t make a lick of sense.

Unless Mother Manan had never had any intention of helping her at all. Unless she was just a slave that the bear people were going to use until…

John’s story about how the bears had planned to eat the little girl they’d put in the bottom of the well popped back into her head. Maybe they were just going to work her until she couldn’t do any more.
Then
they’d probably eat her.

Maybe it was time she got herself out of this place.

It didn’t take her long to tidy up the parlor since she’d just cleaned the whole room the day before. Taking a mop and a bucket, she filled the bucket at the well and walked down to the barn. Before she entered, she leaned on the mop and looked up into the hills surrounding LaOursville.

“I know that look.”

She turned around when Joen spoke. There was that belligerent glower he always wore.

“What look is that?” she asked, hoping she didn’t look as guilty as she felt.

“You’re thinking of taking off into the hills.”

“I’m thinking no such thing. I’m just admiring the trees and all their fancy colors.”

Joen nodded. “Sure you are. But make no mistake, girl. If you run, I’ll be right behind you. I’ll chase you from one end of these hills to the other until I run you down. Don’t think I won’t.”

“I’m not running anywhere,” she told him. “I’ve got too much work to do. Wasn’t it
you
who told Mother Manan that the barn needs cleaning?”

Then she picked up the bucket and mop and went into the barn. She could feel his gaze on her back, but he didn’t follow. She let out a breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding.

That afternoon while she was cleaning out the cold storage—because Mother Manan was convinced she’d seen a spider scurry under its door—Lillian found a tray of small tincture bottles. The tray was on the
top shelf and had been pushed all the way to the back. Lillian would never have noticed it at all if she hadn’t been chasing that errant spider.

The tray had clearly been untouched and forgotten for a very long time. Each little bottle
had a label on it, but they were too covered in dust to read. When she blew the dust away she still couldn’t read the labels because they weren’t written in English. The only thing she could tell was that they all seemed to say the same thing. She felt she’d seen a bottle like this somewhere else in Mother Manan’s house, but she couldn’t remember where.

It wasn’t until after dinner, when she was turning down Mother Manan’s bed, that she remembered where she’d seen the tincture bottle. She stood with her back to the bed and looked at the long tapestry that ran from one end of the wall to the other.

It told a story, but she didn’t understand what the story was.

But there was the tincture bottle. On the left side
of the tapestry, a bear, standing upright, was looking at a man dressed in what looked like Kickaha hunting leathers. In the next section he was giving the man a small brown bottle. In the last section the man stood in a meadow with his arms held out straight from his sides. Birds were sitting on his head and all along his arms, with still more fluttering around him.

Mother Manan came in while she was still looking at it.

“We don’t have stories like this,” Lillian said. “Not back where I’m from.”

“Why would you? To your kind the animal people are only good for their fur and their meat.”

Lillian didn’t bother to correct her, but she knew hunting and farming weren’t so black and white for everybody. And didn’t the bear people keep chickens and pigs and cows?

“So what’s happening in the story?” Lillian asked.

For a moment she didn’t think Mother Manan would answer.

“That happened a long time ago,” she finally said. “At the beginning of time, all the people could talk to each other—animals, and even people like you. But the years went by and your people forgot the old
language and started hunting the animal people. There was a long war in these hills between the bears and the Kickaha that didn’t end until one of my ancestors made a potion, which he gave to the medicine man you see in the tapestry. Once he tasted the potion the growls of the bear became words that he could understand. He could understand the language of every animal. That was when he finally began to respect animals and animal people. He took his knowledge back to the chiefs of his tribe, and the war came to an end.”

She looked away from the tapestry to scowl at Lillian.

“But
your
people still hunt us,” she said.

Lillian shook her head. “I don’t. Aunt and I never hunted anything.”

Mother Manan’s eyes narrowed further. “Your Aunt Nancy is another matter altogether.”

“She’s not my aunt,” Lillian said. “My aunt’s name was Fran Kindred. We never hurt anybody.”

“Then maybe that’s why you’re still alive, girl.”

Lillian lay awake for a long time that night, thinking of Mother Manan’s story and the tray of ancient tincture bottles she’d found in the cold storage.

T
he next morning, when Lillian was putting the eggs in the cold storage, she paused in the doorway and listened hard. She could hear Mother Manan in the parlor with her friend Sebastian—not what they were saying, exactly, but the steady ebb and flow of conversation.

Stepping into the cold storage, she set the basket of eggs on a shelf, then stood on a stool and reached way back to the tray of tincture bottles. Were they really a magic potion that would let a body understand the language of the animals?