This short story was published in the Winter 2024 volume of Pathos Literary Magazine and is also included in one of my zines.

Jacques led his girls through thickets and past knotted tangles of trees, keeping a steady but slow pace so that the two-legged creatures could follow more easily. He kept his nose pressed to the ground, snuffling through the damp earth and rotting leaves for traces of blood and of a current of softly humming energy that he did not understand but knew he was meant to follow. He bypassed deer scat, fox fur, and rabbit dens, fighting against his instincts every step of the way. Although the delicate strings of sound that the girls emitted meant nothing to him, their desperation clung to them in the form of sweat and salty tears, and Jacques understood where it was that they wanted to go. He was not here to hunt, as he usually desired to do. Instead, he was to repay years of hearty meals, games of catch-and-chase, and loving head scratches by leading his girls to safety. They were not far off, now.

Marie followed Jacques’ soft, russet body with utmost trust. She, in turn, led her little cousin Bella behind her, her firm, calloused fingers wrapping around the younger girl’s thin, frail hand. Marie carried their meager supplies– flint and iron, a frayed quilt, a half-empty waterskin– in a burlap rucksack pulled tight against her broad back. The sack’s leather straps dug into her shoulders and had, over the past four days of perpetual walking, turned her muscles into tensely coiled ropes beneath her flesh. The pain grew so immense that her spirit fled her body, instead devoting a single-minded focus to the path ahead, the destination that must, at some point, emerge.

Despite the pain, Marie never gave Bella so much as a pouch to carry. Their travels were already hard enough on the girl’s weak body, with its always-pale skin and feverishly glazed eyes. This was all to protect the girl, and if she collapsed before they completed their journey, Marie would have caused all this pain for nothing and nobody. Anyway, this plan was Marie’s, not Bella’s. She and Jacques should, and would, carry the weight of this journey for her.

“How do you feel?” Marie asked Bella, as she did regularly through each day, always with a tense worry stored up inside that the child would not make it to her own salvation.

“Still fine,” Bella said, breathless but managing well enough.

Marie never quite explained it to her in full, but Bella understood why they shambled their way through the thickest of forests, with only the nose of a dog to guide them– though she was not so sure about their ultimate destination. Five days ago, Bella’s parents promised her hand in marriage to the son of a neighboring farmer who had far more land than they. And four nights ago, Marie appeared at Bella’s window and whisked her away into the night, promising deliverance from this terrible fate. Marie had kept saying, “Bella, you’ve only seen 13 winters. That man has seen 27, and he has not met them well.”

Marie’s concern was a source of warmth for Bella, who always felt a little cold, even in the middle of summer. Her own father had told her, overflowing with pride, that Bella had earned him a dowry of ten sheep and a healthy milking cow. He said it in the same way he reported on favorable bargains he got at the market. A vast loneliness engulfed Bella, though she didn’t cry, as she’d long expected this to happen, as weak and unhelpful as she was on the farm. The best she could hope for to bring fortune upon her family– the ultimate duty of all children– was to marry into a family with more resources or wealth than they could gain on their own. She had only wished that perhaps it could be to a boy her age, someone she liked well enough, maybe with downy hair the color of spun gold and a charming smile, like the devoted princes in the tales her mother told when Bella was bedridden. Her mother, however, had also told her that an old and homely man could also be charming and noble, and not to judge her suitor by his appearances. It was Marie who had cried, tears of bitter anger, making Bella wonder if one must have a certain amount of imagination, the ability to see a different possibility, in order to cry over your lot in life. Walking in the light of the vibrant love of her cousin seemed preferable to moving in with a strange new family, so once again, Bella surrendered herself to someone else’s plan, someone else’s hopes.

“I’m sorry, little Bella. I promise we will get there soon,” Marie said, unsure if she was telling the truth or not. She shouldered the burden of performing certainty the same way she shouldered their provisions.

“I know. It’s okay,” Bella said. She wondered, again, where there was, but didn’t ask.

Marie agonized again, as she agonized every day, over the question of whether she was doing right by Bella. She could not stand the idea of the girl being sold off to that terror of a man, who drank himself into monstrous anger at the tavern every evening and always took it out on the first person to look him in the eye. Bella was sickly, this much was true, and would probably live better as a housewife than a worker, but only if the husband were a gentle and quiet man, someone who wouldn’t cause Bella’s heart to beat too fast, who wouldn’t be likely to kill her, with fists or with fear.

Marie’s aunt and uncle would not listen to reason, and Marie had no place to hide Bella, herself. Only a faint shadow of an option revealed itself to Marie, something she’d only ever heard spoken in whispers in dark corners, during nights with no moons: rumors of ruins, spirits, blood offerings, and divine protection for those who had no other place to go. Marie had, thus, brought Bella to these woods on the promise of a superstition. She could only hope that Jacques, in his animal way, would track down this legend for her. She watched him carefully, always wondering where he was leading them, if he was just tracking a stag this entire time, if he had no clue what Marie was asking him for. As she watched him, she noticed his tail perk up, whereas it had been held straight behind him up until this point. What has he caught wind of, now?

Jacques could smell the dried blood of countless pact-makers on the soft breeze that whispered down the valley. He’d never been to this place before and had only heard talk of it from the crows and rabbits, who were always such big gossips and liable to weave tall tales out of nothing. Even so, he knew the meaning of the smell, and he knew what it meant when his fur suddenly stood on end, bristling at the stillness and silence that spread forth from the rocky outcropping that they approached, which protruded from the top of a gently sloping hill. An energy, something he couldn’t see or smell or even hear, ran like trickling creeks under his paws, and traveled up through his body, making him shiver. This place was not normal, not normal at all.

Marie, also, could tell once they’d reached the place. She recognized among the dense blanket of caterpillar-bitten ragwort, purple-blossomed willowherb, and fuzzy-leafed cat’s ear the ruined foundations of a stone cottage or hut. At the same time, an ominous feeling of a power shifting and moving beneath her aching feet gave her pause. She knew better than to be excited or relieved, for she was not yet sure what price she– or what price Bella– would have to pay in this exchange.

“This is the place, Bella,” Marie said. “I’m going to do something here that will keep you safe, but I don’t want you to watch.” She didn’t think the sight of blood would agree with Bella’s sensibilities.

Bella, always perceptive, saw a flickering shadow of grief in Marie’s eyes, which cast a fear over her that she hadn’t had before. She did not know what Marie had planned, but she trusted that she would not put herself through such sadness if she did not think it was right.

“Okay,” Bella agreed. Marie wrapped her in a tight, protective embrace; Bella had always liked the way Marie’s thick arms enfolded her, which felt like the way her mother held her before Bella got sick for the first time and was deemed to be much too fragile for such things.

Once she pulled away, Bella sat on one of the foundation stones, facing away from Marie, and vowing not to turn her head to look. She would accept things as they came. Jacques trotted over to her and sat his warm body on her feet. She contented herself with scratching his long, silky ears as he rested his forlorn head on her lap and looked up at her with his drooping, heavy-lidded eyes.

In the center of what was once a cottage, Marie knelt on the ground where the knees of all of the supplicants before her had worn the earth bald. She clasped her hands together in prayer, knowing no other way to ask favors from the divine.

“Please keep my little Bella safe. Make it so that she does not have to marry that terrible man, or any terrible man. Don’t let anyone hurt her. Please hide her so that she can be happy and free,” Marie whispered, and the land listened. She withdrew a hunting knife from her belt, and brought the sharp edge down on her palm, slashing through it from the nook where her thumb started, down to the other side of her hand. She bit back a cry of pain so Bella wouldn’t hear, and squeezed the blood out over the dirt, to join the blood of so many other sufferers.

Jacques could only watch as his girl, the little one, doubled over in a fit of pain, contorted in a way unlike anything he’d seen her do before, even in the throes of her worst fevers. He could only watch as her neck lengthened, as silver-blue feathers pushed through her flesh to cover her body, as her eyes shrank and her arms remolded themselves into wings, as her toes lengthened into pointed talons that broke out of her ground-beaten boots. He could only watch as she transformed into a slender-beaked heron and flew away. He could only nudge his head into the side of the girl-left-behind as she mourned.

The heron caught the wind under its wide, outstretched wings, trusting the draught to carry her toward water. She had only a vague sense of a long-gone illness and a newly absent pain. All sensations were brand new, and the sky was hers, and the world below was hers, and she knew no fear