Edvane Stories

By the turn of that winter, folk in Duskdale had stopped speaking of spring as something that truly came. They spoke of it the way others speak of the dead. In the cottages, broth was stretched with onion skins and old bones boiled to mush. Blankets were folded twice over sleeping children, and still the children shivered. There were lambs lost in the byres, two old men were buried before Candlemas and more than one house where the flour crock revealed its belly.

Beyond the last wall of the village, the black orchard stood in its own silence, bearing fruit.

The black trunks looked like they were charred long ago and left living. The limbs were dark against the whitening fields, and in them hung apples too red, too full, too sound for the season. They showed among the branches, bright as sealed hearts. Children were taught not to look at them for too long. Women crossed themselves, and men muttered the old rule. No fruit from the orchard after sunset. In spring, by daylight, what fell might be gathered, and what was given might be eaten. At all other times, it must be left alone.

Most in Duskdale held to the rule because their mothers had done the same, and their mothers before them. Few knew the reason. Some said the orchard had belonged to a witch. Some said it was demon-cursed ground gone bad. Some said only that there was never luck in fruit that fattened under snow.

In the low cottage nearest the churchyard wall, Emmie sat by the hearth with her brother’s carved toy horse in her hands. She turned it by one small leg and listened to Pip breathe.

He had been ill since the first frost. The old women called it the Blight. It took the colour from the child’s face and the strength from his little bones. Pip had not slept well for three nights. His hair was damp at the brow. His lips were dry. When he woke, he asked for water. He was eight, though hunger and sickness had drawn him smaller.

Their mother sat with her sewing fallen still in her lap. Their father stared into the ash at the back of the grate, searching for more warmth. There was still love in the room, but winter had bent it low.

Emmie laid the toy beside Pip and touched his hand beneath the blanket. He had once hidden that little horse in her apron pocket and sworn the saints themselves had put it there. He had laughed when she pretended to believe him. Now his fingers scarcely curled around hers.

When she went out for more coal dust from the shed, she found Grimwick standing just within the churchyard gate. They said he knew the names under every stone and spoke to the ground when no one was near. Children ran from him if he looked toward them. He was a narrow man, long in the face, with a white beard and deep-set eyes.

His gaze passed from Emmie to the orchard beyond her shoulder. “The trees are heavy,” he said.

Emmie lowered her eyes. “Indeed. Yes.”

“So keep your brother from asking after them.” Grimwick’s face was solemn, and something in it troubled her. “Some gifts are not given every time they appear,” he said.

Then he went on among the graves, and Emmie stood in the bitter yard with the coal scuttle in one hand and the cold settling through her shoes. Beyond the wall, the red fruit swelled in the black branches, silent yet speaking.

That night, the cold came down early. By the time the light had gone from the west, the cottage had grown close, and the bitter smell of the steeped herbs had done Pip no good. Their mother had taken to weeping in silence because their father had been out and returned with nothing. Pip lay beneath the patched blankets with his eyes half-open and unfixed, watching something no other could see.

He stirred and whispered Emmie’s name. “I dreamed of apples,” he said.

She closed her eyes. It might have been no more than village talk lodged in a sick child’s head. It might have been hunger putting colour where none was left in his day. Yet when she looked at him, she saw how the skin had drawn fine over his small face. No one said there was a rule. No one said Grimwick’s words in the churchyard. Yet they were in the room as surely as the frost on their breath.

When night fell, Emmie rose from her stool and put on her cloak. She stood a moment by Pip’s bed and looked down at him. He had once run before her through summer grass with his carved horse lifted high in one hand, shouting that it was a king’s mount and swift enough to outrun the moon. Now he scarcely seemed made of the same world.

“Forgive me,” she whispered, though whether she spoke to him, or to something else, she did not know.

Outside, the yard was white and hard beneath her soles. The church tower stood blacker than the night sky. Beyond the graves, the orchard waited. No wind moved in it. No bough creaked. The black trunks rose from the frozen ground like rooted pillars, and among them the apples hung red and full and terribly alive. Their colour troubled the eye, each seeming to keep a drop of summer sealed inside it.

Emmie hesitated at the first tree as Grimwick’s warning echoed in her thoughts, and every old tale she had half-heard at hearths and doorsteps seemed suddenly less foolish than before. Yet behind her, beyond wall and field and frost, Pip lay under blankets with winter already laying claim to him.

She reached up. The apple came away too easily. No resistance. Emmie swore she heard a sigh. It seemed to have been waiting for her hand all along. Then something in the orchard changed. Emmie had the feeling that she was no longer alone in her trespass. She thrust the fruit beneath her cloak and fled home through the dark.

By morning, Pip had colour in his face. It was not the true colour he had worn before the Blight took hold of him, but it was more than the waxen pallor that had lain upon him for so many days. When Emmie bent over him with the cup, he took it in both hands and drank, then looked at her with a clearness she had not seen in weeks.

“I am hungry,” he said.

At that, their mother put her hand to her mouth and turned aside. The room, which had been full of waiting and dread, shifted all at once into a frail and startled hope. A crust was softened for him, which he ate slowly.

Emmie sat very still. The apple’s flesh, when she had cut it in the dark hours before dawn, had been white and sound within, without pith, bruise, or wormhole, and had given off a fresh and sweet scent. She had fed it to Pip in small pieces, her heart beating so hard she thought the others must hear it. For a little while, nothing had happened. Then some small heat had returned to him. Now he sat propped against the blankets with the carved horse in his lap, stroking its worn neck with one finger.

It should have been a mercy. Yet Emmie could not look at him without the orchard rising before her again, black and still. She heard the snap of the apple stalk. She felt again that change which had passed through the trees when the fruit came free, as the orchard marked her.

All that day, the village moved beneath a strange hush. No bell rang. No cry went up. No visible wrong declared itself. Yet now and then, someone stopped in the lane with a small, bewildered look. Old Bryn stood outside the smithy for the space of a full minute with a rabbit in his hand, staring toward the churchyard wall like he had forgotten why he went there. When Emmie greeted him, he started and answered readily enough, but his eyes remained troubled.

Toward noon, her mother sent her with a jar of broth to Tara Salt, who had taken to her bed. Tara lived at the village edge in the cottage where she had once kept three children, though now only one remained to her. The eldest girl had gone into service two years past. The middle child, little Nella, had died in the first winter fever and was buried in the churchyard under a stone her father had cut himself before the drink finished him. Since then, Tara had been a woman worn hollow by work and grief.

She was sitting up when Emmie entered, with the blanket around her shoulders and her grey hair fallen loose. On the table beside her bed stood a chipped cup, a piece of cheese gone hard, and a small knitted cap.

Emmie set down the broth and drew nearer. “Mistress Salt,” she said gently, “I brought this from Mother.”

Tara thanked her and took the jar, but her attention was on the cap, and she frowned at it with a distant, puzzled air.

“I do not know why I kept that thing,” she said.

Emmie glanced at it. “It was Nella’s.”

Tara gave a short, uncertain laugh, the sort one makes when another has spoken oddly. “You are mistaken, child.”

Emmie felt the blood go cold beneath her skin. “You knitted it when she was sick,” she said. “Blue wool. You said the colour might hearten her.”

Tara’s brow furrowed deeper. She turned the little cap over in her hands, searching for some clue that would make it known to her. Nothing came. Emmie saw it happen. Not confusion or common forgetfulness. A blankness where sorrow should have stood, now swept clean.

“I never had a child by that name, Emmie,” Tara said. It was spoken simply, as one states an ordinary fact.

The broth jar slipped from Emmie’s grasp and struck the table, slopping hot liquid over her fingers. She hardly felt it. On the shelf above Tara’s bed, among two plates and a cracked pitcher, stood a little painted bird of clay. Emmie remembered Nella carrying it, tucked beneath her chin, solemn as a queen. Now it was only a bit of dusted colour on a widow’s shelf.

She left the cottage on shaking legs and stood in the lane. Across the village, she could see the gravestones of the churchyard. A man was there, bent over one of them with his cap in his hands. Even from a distance, there was something wrong in the posture, something hesitant and empty. He had come to mourn and found no path left to the grief.

Then Emmie knew.

The orchard had taken the dead first. Not their bones, or their names cut in stone. The cords by which the living held them. It had fed where love clung longest, and where grief had kept watch. Pip had eaten and risen. In return, something had begun to dine upon the village.

She thought of him at home with the carved horse across his knees. She thought of Tara Salt staring at the little cap in her hands. The taste of the orchard seemed to come into Emmie’s mouth, though she had not eaten so much as a slice. She had wanted only to keep one small life from slipping away. Instead, she had opened the door to a hunger with no cry in it, no blood, no teeth, and all the more terror for that.

Emmie did not go straight home. Some part of her longed to run back to the cottage, to Pip’s bed, to his smiling face and the small lift of his hand when he saw her enter. Yet that same longing drove the fear deeper. If she looked upon him now, if she heard him speak, the thing she had done would become harder to deny and harder still to mend. So she turned instead toward the churchyard.

Grimwick was there. He stood at the far end among the poorer markers, where names had faded under weather and lichen. He was clearing dead ivy from the base of a leaning cross, his coat hanging from him like an old crow’s wing. He did not turn when Emmie came through the gate. He had known, from the first sound of her step on the path, who had come and why.

“She forgot,” Emmie said.

He straightened up, and his eyes looked her up and down. “Who?”

“Tara Salt. Her little girl. Nella.” Emmie’s voice caught on the name. “It is gone from her. All of it.”

Grimwick closed his eyes with a weariness so old it seemed to belong to the ground itself.

“I warned you the trees were heavy.”

The words struck her with such force that she stepped back from him. “Then you knew.”

“I knew enough.”

“That is not the same.”

“No,” he said. “It is worse.”

For a moment, neither spoke. Then Grimwick stooped, took up his lantern, and motioned her to follow. He led her to the far edge of the yard, where an older path, lost beneath frost and moss, ran behind the newest graves to a small, walled plot overgrown with briar. There stood a single stone darker than the rest, narrow and tall, with its face half-covered by ivy. Grimwick pulled the leaves aside.

BELCARA
BEQUEATHED IN DEATH WHAT WAS HERS IN LIFE
LET THE TERMS BE KEPT

Emmie stared.

“My sister,” Grimwick said.

Emmie recognised that name. “The witch?”

He rested one hand on the stone. “The orchard was hers. When the hard years came, she left it to Duskdale so the village could have something in spring. Not as charity. As covenant. The fruit was to be taken only in that season, and only in daylight, when the year had turned, and life stood in its proper place. At all other times, it was to be left untouched.”

“And if it was not?”

Grimwick looked toward the black orchard beyond the churchyard wall. “Then it feeds itself. Not on flesh. Belcara would never have made such a gift. On remembrance. On the bonds that bind the living to the dead, and one heart to another. It takes from the places where love has made a dwelling.”

Emmie now understood the full truth of it. “Why after dark?”

“Because night holds the hour of trespass and what is taken then is taken against both season and light. Those were the terms.”

She thought of the apple and of Pip swallowing the white slices from her hand. “Can it be mended?”

“Yes,” Grimwick said. “But the orchard does not release its due for tears or pleading, girl.”

From that hour, Duskdale seemed to Emmie like a place where all the old motions of life continued, and yet something vital had been taken from them. No cry was raised against her. No hand pointed. The village did not know what she had done. It only continued amidst the spreading wrong. A woman drew water and forgot why she had begun to weep. A man stood by his father’s grave and traced the worn letters with his glove, but he was reading the name of a stranger. At dusk, the chapel filled as it always had, but the prayers for the departed came falteringly now, with pauses in the places where sorrow ought to have been.

At home, the change was slower and more cruel. Their mother still tucked the blanket close round Pip’s shoulders. Their father still split kindling and laid the better pieces by the hearth for him. Emmie still cut the bread and set his cup within easy reach. Pip himself sat straighter each day. The hollow look had left his face. He asked for broth, for bread, once even for a bit of cheese, and when Emmie brought it he took it eagerly. Yet there was something in him that had not returned as it ought.

That evening, he held out the carved toy horse as Emmie passed his bed. “Shall we race him on the sill,” he asked, “the way we used to?”

Emmie stopped. The words ought to have opened onto a dozen remembered twilights, whispered competitions and childish boasts. Instead, she saw it all, but with a blur at the edges of her own remembering.

She took the toy from him. “Not tonight,” she said.

Pip’s face fell a little. He was not a child given to complaint, not even before the Blight. “Tomorrow, then.”

Tomorrow. The word settled over her like snow. She went out before full dark and found Grimwick where the churchyard path bent toward Belcara’s stone. He was waiting, though she had sent him no message.

“It is spreading,” she said.

He nodded. “It will not stop of itself.”

“And if it goes on?”

He looked past her toward the cottages, where yellow lamplight glimmered in a few of the windows. “Then the dead will be lost first. After them, the living will keep faith with one another only by habit. Husband to wife. Mother to child. Sister to brother. The forms will remain. The heart within them will wear away.”

Emmie closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Grimwick was staring at her with that grave, pitiless burden in his face.

“There is one way,” he said.

She did not speak. She could not.

“The orchard fed where you opened the way. What it took through you may be answered through you.” He glanced toward Belcara’s stone. “If one memory is made the price of all the rest, the taking may be bound up and turned back. The village may be restored. The dead may be returned to those who keep them. The boy may remain among the living, and in his right place.”

A wind passed across the graves, stirring the dead grass with a dry, whispering sound.

“What memory?” Emmie asked, though even as she said it some part of her had already begun to know.

Grimwick did not spare her. “The truest one,” he said. “The deepest one. The orchard must be paid through the means it values most. If Pip is to remain, and the village is to be made whole again, then every memory you hold of him must be given over. Every hour, every word, every touch of his hand in yours. He will live. Others will know him. But you will not.”

For a moment, the world seemed to stand utterly still.

Emmie looked beyond the graves toward the black orchard, where the red fruit hung in the darkening branches, and she understood that the thing she had done for love had brought her at last to the one price love could scarcely bear to pay.

Emmie did not weep when Grimwick told her. She stood in the churchyard with the carved horse clenched in her hand and looked beyond the wall to the orchard. The black branches held their red fruit against the night, while the village lay hushed behind her. Here and there, a lamp still burned in a cottage window. In one of those cottages, Pip slept beneath the brown blanket, yet not safely, not yet. If she turned away now, if she held on to what was hers of him, then Duskdale would go on emptying itself. The dead would fall from the living first. After them would go kinship, till mother knew child by duty, husband knew wife by custom, and all that made a village more than clustered bodies in winter would be reduced to habit and ash.

“Must it be all?” she asked.

Grimwick did not lie to her. “All.”

“And he will live?”

“He will live.”

She bowed her head, knowing the last argument had come to its end. When she opened her hand, the toy horse lay across her palm, worn smooth at the neck and one flank rubbed pale by years of Pip’s fingers and her own. She remembered him first receiving it from their father’s knife. She remembered him making a king of it, then a pilgrim, then a thief fleeing the moon. She remembered his hand seeking hers in the dark when the wind rose hard around the cottage, and the shutter would not stay latched. She remembered his laughter when she told him saints had no business chasing horses. The memories came as little homely lights, so small and dear they wounded more than grandeur would have done.

Grimwick led her through the churchyard gate and along the wall to the orchard path. The trees stood close, black trunk beside black trunk, and the apples among them seemed to watch. At the orchard’s centre, where the ground dipped slightly, and the oldest branches crossed above like rafters, Grimwick stopped.

“Speak his name,” he said.

“Pip.”

Again, he told her, and again she spoke it. The third time it came harder, the orchard itself already leaning upon it.

Then Grimwick said the old terms as he knew them, with the plain sternness of one reciting law. The gift had been given under season and sun. What had been taken must be answered in remembrance. The breach had been opened by love and could be closed only by love willingly impoverished.

When he had done, there was no blaze of power, no cry from the trees, nor any monstrous sign. Emmie laid the carved horse at the root of the darkest tree and put both hands against the bark. It was not rough as she had expected. It felt smooth in places, almost polished.

She closed her eyes. “I give him back,” she whispered, though she knew even then that the words were not true. She was not giving Pip back. She was taking herself away from him.

That taking began gently.

First went the memory of his hand in hers on the path to chapel when he was too small to step over the frozen ruts. Then the sound of him laughing through a mouthful of broth. Then the sight of his head bent over the toy horse. Each thing loosened and passed from her, all lifted away with terrible care. Emmie swayed but did not cry out because his name had become strange in her own mind. By the time she reached for the toy horse and found it beneath her hand, she no longer knew why it mattered that it was there at all.

A wind moved through the orchard, though none had stirred before. It passed out over Duskdale, over the churchyard and the cottages and the lanes. In the same hour, Tara Salt woke with her dead child’s name breaking from her like a long delayed sob. At other hearths, too, the lost returned. Faces once drawn by blankness quickened with old pain, old tenderness and old grief. The village’s heart, which had been going steadily out, took back its buried embers.

By dawn, the change was complete. The red apples still hung in the black branches, but they looked only like fruit again. Grimwick brought Emmie home in the grey morning and left her at her door without a word. Inside, the room held the worn poverty of the night before, yet something in it had settled back into place. Her mother’s face, though lined with want, was fully a mother’s face again. Her father, stooped over the hearth, turned at the sound of the latch.

Pip sat upright under the blanket with more colour in his cheeks than any morning had shown for weeks. He was still pale beneath it, yet he was alive, plainly and entirely alive.

He smiled when he saw her, and Emmie stopped.

A pain moved through her, swift and hollow. The boy’s face meant something. She felt that with dreadful certainty. Yet she did not know what. In her hand, she still held the little carved horse, and though she could not have said why she had it, she found she could not let it fall.

She crossed the room and set it down on the table.

Outside, the winter morning brightened over Duskdale, pale and merciless. Smoke rose from the chimneys. The church bell rang once for the dead and was answered in hearts that knew who they mourned. Life had been restored to its proper houses. The price had been paid where love ran deepest.

And so it was told in Duskdale thereafter that if you take an apple from the black orchard, payment must be made from love and memory.

I welcome polite comments. If you enjoyed this story then you might also enjoy Gossia’s Garden