Where the Wild Roses Remember: A Festival of Half Remembered Things

Pumpkins stacked like small orange suns lined the lane that led into Hollowmere, and the smell of cinnamon and woodsmoke curled through the village square. Wren Thistlecrane stood at the edge of the gathering, her hands full of paper that smelled faintly of iron gall and river mud. The map she had carried for two years was spread now across a rough trestle table, pinned at the corners with river stones and a twist of red wool. Beside it, lanterns made by Pip Hollowfen swayed in the breeze, their candle flames tossing shadows across the linen.

Pip had tied a sprig of dried rowan to each handle for luck, and the berries knocked together with a sound like small teeth. He crouched beneath the table, making final adjustments to a stand that listed slightly to the left.

"Hold it steady, Wren," he whispered, his voice pinched with concentration. "If the wind takes my best one, I'll cry."

"You won't cry."

"I might. A little. On the inside."

Wren pressed her palm flat against the map and felt the ridge of old creases beneath her skin. Half the fen was drawn in her own hand, the rest patched together from scraps she had begged, borrowed, and traded across three winters. There were gaps where the marsh had shifted, where new pools had opened like mouths in the peat. She had not finished the work. She had told herself she would never finish it. But the map was laid out now for the market fair, and the villagers were beginning to drift toward it the way water finds a new channel.

The first visitor was a tinker who sold buttons. He looked at the map, grunted, and moved on. The second was a woman with three children clinging to her skirt; she traced the line of the Addermire path and asked if it was safe for little legs.

"Safer than the moor road," Wren said. "Mind the second bridge. The planks are soft."

The woman nodded, her eyes thoughtful. She bought a lantern shaped like a barley sheaf and went on her way.

By midmorning the square was thick with bodies. Musicians struck up a tune on a fiddle and a drum, and the smell of roasted apples drifted from a brazier near the well. Wren watched the crowd over the top of her map, counting faces. She had been gone from Hollowmere for seven years. Most of the people she had known as a girl were strangers now, or nearly so. The village had a way of growing new skin over old wounds.

Pip emerged from beneath the table, brushing dust from his knees. He wore a cap several sizes too large, and the wool came down over his ears in soft brown folds. In the hollow of his throat, a clay whistle hung on a cord. He had made it himself, from clay dug at the edge of the marsh.

"Wren," he said, tugging her sleeve. "Someone's watching your map."

She followed his gaze. A woman stood at the far side of the trestle, half-turned as if she meant to walk past. Her veil was pale gray, almost white, and it covered her from the crown of her head to the soft line of her jaw. Through the weave, the shape of her mouth was just visible, a smudge of deeper shadow. She wore no ornament that Wren could see. No brooch. No ribbon. Only the veil, and a dress the color of weathered oak.

The woman did not speak. Her gloved hand rested on the edge of the table, near a place where Wren had drawn a small grove of wild roses she had not yet visited. The glove was old, soft as suede, but stained at the cuff with something dark.

Pip tilted his head. "Do you know her?"

"No."

"She's been there a while."

"I see that."

"Should we say something?"

Wren said nothing. She watched the woman the way one watches a heron in shallow water, careful not to disturb what she does not yet understand. The fiddle tune ended, and in the gap between notes, the square went briefly quiet. A child laughed somewhere near the well. A horse stamped. The veiled woman turned her head, just slightly, and Wren caught the glint of an eye through the gauze. It was the color of rain on old stone.

The eye held hers for a count of three. Then the woman lifted her gloved hand from the table, pressed her fingers to her lips in a gesture that might have been greeting or might have been warning, and turned away into the crowd. Her dress caught the light as she moved, and for a moment it seemed the color shifted, the way light shifts on the marsh at dusk.

Pip let out a breath. "That was strange."

"Yes."

"Should we tell Elder Marris?"

Wren considered the question. Elder Marris had asked her, only that morning, to be cautious about what she put on display. He had not said why. He had only looked at her with his heavy-lidded eyes and said, "Some things are better half-shown, Wren. The village has a long memory, and not all of it is kind."

She had not pressed him. She had learned, in her years away, that some doors open only when you stop knocking.

"Not yet," she said.

Pip nodded, satisfied for the moment. He ducked under the table again to adjust a lantern whose wick had begun to smoke. Wren smoothed the map with her palm. The wild roses she had drawn from a sketch in her grandmother's journal stared back at her, five-petaled and uncertain, growing in a place she had never been.

The afternoon thickened. Visitors came in clusters. A pair of trappers argued over the location of a good fox den; Wren showed them the western stretch and accepted a brace of rabbit in payment. A girl of perhaps thirteen stared at the map for a long time, then asked, in a voice that barely carried, whether Wren had drawn the marsh from memory or from walking.

"Both," Wren said.

The girl nodded, as if this were a satisfactory answer. She bought no lantern and asked no more questions, but she came back three more times before the day was out, each time standing a little closer.

Near the well, a group of older women sold honey cakes and gossip in equal measure. Their voices rose and fell in the way of women who have known each other since childhood.

"That's the Thistlecrane girl."

"Thought she'd gone for good."

"Back to settle the old woman's things, they say."

"Poor soul. The grandmother was queer these last years."

"Queer is a kind word."

"Still. The house must be seen to."

Wren kept her head down and answered questions about the fen. She did not look toward the well, and the women did not approach her table. The dance between them was older than language.

Pip, who had ears like a fox, caught every word.

"They don't like you," he observed.

"They don't know me."

"They could try."

"They could."

"Do you want them to?"

Wren thought about this. She thought about her grandmother's house at the edge of the village, with its steep roof and its chimney that drew well in any wind. She thought about the tin of dried rosemary on the kitchen shelf and the blue jar of beeswax on the windowsill. She thought about the journal she had found in the root cellar, its pages soft with damp, its ink in her grandmother's careful hand.

"No," she said. "I want them to leave me alone to finish what I came to do."

Pip considered this. "That's fair," he said.

The sun moved west. The square grew longer in shadow. Lanterns along the edge of the fair began to flicker into life, though the light was still thin and gray. Pip's creations looked best at dusk, when their paper sides glowed like the bellies of fish in deep water.

A man with a wooden leg stopped to admire a lantern shaped like a heron. He asked Pip how much.

"Three coppers," Pip said.

"Two."

"Three. And I'll throw in the rowan sprig for luck."

"Your luck or mine?"

"Both."

The man laughed, a rough sound, and paid the three coppers. He walked away with the lantern swinging against his thigh, and Pip watched him go with the quiet pride of someone whose work had been chosen.

Wren's gaze drifted back to the spot where the veiled woman had stood. The crowd pressed in. A fiddler tuned his strings. Somewhere a dog barked, once, and stopped. But the veiled woman did not return.

She was, Wren thought, the kind of visitor who leaves the air colder than she found it. A small disturbance in the pattern of the day, like a stone dropped into still water. The ripples had already begun.

Across the square, near the butter-cross, Elder Marris sat on his usual bench. He did not approach the map. He did not approach the lanterns. He sat, and he watched, and his hands were folded on the head of his walking stick the way a man folds them when he is thinking about a thing he cannot say.

He had been watching since morning. Wren knew this without looking. She had grown up under the weight of his attention, the way the barley grew under the weight of rain.

Pip had noticed too. "He's pretending not to watch," Pip said.

"I know."

"Should we pretend not to notice?"

"Probably."

Pip grinned. He had a gap where his left canine should have been, and the grin made him look, briefly, like a very young wolf. He disappeared under the table again, whistling a tune of his own invention that had no name and would not keep.

Wren lifted her eyes to the far edge of the square, past the brazier and the apple-sellers, past the children running in crooked circles, past the dog that had stopped barking. There was nothing to see. The veiled woman was gone, and the space where she had stood was only space.

But Wren's hand, resting on the map, felt the faint chill that lingered where the gloved fingers had touched. It was the kind of cold that does not come from weather. It was the kind that comes from absence, or from presence that refuses to be named.

She folded her palm over it, and the cold sank into her skin like water into peat.

The festival went on. It did not care that the map had been touched by something outside its own knowing. The music started again from the far side of the square, a fiddle and a drum, and the drummer was the same woman who had been playing at dawn, with the same lost look on her face. Children ran between legs. The brazier crackled and spat a spark onto a child's sleeve, and the mother stamped it out without breaking conversation.

Wren stood very still at the map table. Pip emerged from under it with a leaf in his hair and a question on his mouth.

"Wren."

"Mm."

"The woman. She was real."

"Yes."

"Not a story."

"No."

Pip considered this with the gravity of a child weighing two stones to find the heavier. "Did you know her?" he asked.

"No."

"From the stories?"

"No."

"From Grandmother's stories?"

Wren looked down at him. The wind off the moor had put color in his cheeks and a flicker in his eyes that was older than his years. "Perhaps," she said. "I don't know yet."

He accepted this the way children accept tides. He nodded, and then he reached up and pulled the leaf from his hair, and the leaf was a small green hand that opened and closed in the breeze, and he let it go.

They worked through the afternoon. Wren walked the square once more with the map, and this time she did not stop at the marked houses. She walked the perimeter. She noted the way the wild roses had crept along the lane at the north edge, where the lane narrowed to a path and the path to a sheep track. She noted the well at the southwest, dry for twenty years and dressed now with a wreath of brookmint, because someone in the village still remembered the old ways. She noted the thorn tree behind the mill, a single great limb reaching out over the lane like an arm offering something it would not let go.

She noted, also, that she could not find the exact spot where the veiled woman had stood. She walked past it three times. There was no mark. There was no chill in the air, no sound, no lingering. The space had closed over the absence like water closing over a stone.

When she sat down at the edge of the square to rest her ankle, which had begun to ache from the day's walking, Pip brought her a small paper twist of roasted hazelnuts from a stall he had charmed the owner of. She ate them slowly. They tasted of smoke and of the first frost.

Elder Marris crossed the square at dusk. He did not come to her. He went into the old hall, where the formal part of the festival would begin at moonrise, and the door shut behind him with the sound of a decision made. Pip watched the door, and his face did something complicated.

"He's afraid," Pip said.

"Yes."

"Of her?"

"Of what she means."

"Does he know what she means?"

Wren thought of the woundwort in her satchel. She thought of the map. She thought of the closed door and the man behind it and the years of secrets that had grown like moss between the stones of the village. "I think," she said carefully, "that he knows more than he can say."

"That's not the same as knowing."

"No. It's not."

Pip chewed his lower lip, a habit he had when he was thinking past his age. "Will you ask him?"

"Not tonight."

"Why not?"

"Because tonight is for listening. Tomorrow is for asking."

Pip accepted this, as he had accepted the tide. He had a generous capacity for accepting things. Wren suspected this was how he had survived the marsh and the loss of his parents and the long quiet afterward.

They went back to Grandmother's cottage as the dusk thickened into proper dark. Wren lit a candle. Pip set the table without being asked, two places, because by now it was understood that he ate where she ate. The cottage smelled of tallow and of the herbs still hanging in bundles from the rafters, and beneath those smells, the older smell of stone and sleep.

She unpacked the satchel onto the table. The map she spread flat and weighted at the corners with the smoothed stones she had carried up from the moor. The woundwort she placed beside it, a small brown bundle tied with a thread that had once been red.

She looked at the woundwort for a long time.

Her fingers knew it. They knew the dry rasp of the stem between thumb and forefinger, the way the brittle leaves crumbled at the edges, the way the scent released when she pressed the bundle, faint and green and a little bitter, the way all healing things carry a small bitterness at the heart. Her fingers knew it the way a bird knows the branch it was hatched on.

Her mind did not.

She had a clear image in her memory of a clay jar on a high shelf, a jar with a painted lid, and a label written in a hand she did not recognize as either her mother's or her grandmother's. The label said Woundwort, dried, for the binding of . The rest was gone. She could see the jar. She could not read what came after.

She had a clear image of a woman's hands, older than hers, tying a bundle of the same brown herb with a length of red thread. She could see the hands. She could not see the face. She could not even be certain whose hands they were.

She had a clear image of a voice saying the word woundwort in a way that made the word sound like a name.

That was all.

She sat with it. Pip sat across from her and drew pictures in the condensation his breath made on the table, and did not ask.

At moonrise, the bells in the old hall began to ring, slow and deep, the way bells ring when they are calling people to something they have always come to. Pip's head came up. "It's starting," he said.

"Yes."

"Will you go?"

"Yes."

"Will I go?"

"If you want."

"Will it be frightening?"

Wren looked at him. The candlelight put gold into his eyes and made him look, for a moment, like a child in an old story. "It might be," she said. "But I will be there."

He nodded. He slid off his chair and went to the door and put on his shoes, which were too large for him and stuffed with wool at the toes, and he waited.

Wren looked at the woundwort on the table. She thought of leaving it. She thought of bringing it. She looked at it for a long time, and then she slid it, bundle and all, into the pocket of her coat, where it sat against her hip like a small hard heart.

She took up the map and folded it carefully, along the old creases, and tucked it under her arm. She blew out the candle. The dark came in like water.

They walked to the hall together, Pip's too-large shoes making a small soft sound on the lane, and the bells ahead of them, and the moon above them, and somewhere out on the moor, the sound of something vast and patient turning in its sleep.

The hall was already full when they came up the path. Lanterns hung from the rafters, low and amber, and the windows stood open to the moor so that the smell of wet grass and woodsmoke threaded through the room. Villagers sat on the long benches in loose rows, some with mugs in their hands, some with children on their laps, some alone and very still. At the far end, where the dais used to hold a bride's table, Elder Marris sat in a chair that had been carried down from his own house, its arms worn to pale wood by the hands of his father and his father's father. The gnarled root of the thorn tree lay across his knees, and his hands were folded over it as if it were a sleeping animal he did not wish to wake.

Pip took Wren's hand without asking. His fingers were cold and slightly damp, and she held them back. They found a place on the second bench, near the back, where the shadows were deepest. A woman Wren did not know offered Pip a small honey cake, and he took it with a grave little nod, and ate it slowly, holding it in both hands as if it were a thing to be honored.

The bells stopped. The silence they left behind was not empty. It was the kind of silence that listens.

Elder Marris did not stand. He had no need to. When he spoke, the hall leaned in to hear him the way a field of barley leans into the wind.

"You know why we are here," he said. "You have always known, even those of you who have tried not to. Once a year we sit in this room and we remember what was lost, and we say it out loud so that the moor can hear us and know that we have not forgotten. Tonight I will begin, as I have begun for thirty years. When I am done, others will speak. You do not have to speak. You are not required to. But if there is a thing you have lost that you have never named, this is the night for it."

He paused. He looked out over the room, and his gaze was steady, and there was no impatience in it. "I begin," he said, "with my brother."

Wren felt the room change. It was the same room, the same lanterns, the same smell of smoke and grass, but something in the air had tightened, like a string tuned one notch higher.

"I lost him in the autumn of the bad harvest," Elder Marris said. "He went out to find a ewe that had wandered. He did not come back. We found the ewe at the edge of the stones, but we did not find him. There was a place in the heather where the grass was bent, as if a body had lain there, and there was the smell of roses, which is not a smell that belongs to that part of the moor in any season I have known. I have carried that smell in my nose for forty years. I will carry it until I die. I do not tell you this to frighten you. I tell you because it is mine, and I would like, for once, to set it down."

He set the root of the thorn tree on the floor beside his chair. He placed his hands flat on his knees.

The next speaker was a man Wren half-knew, a shepherd whose name she had forgotten. He spoke of a dog. Then a woman spoke of a ring. Then a child, encouraged by a parent, spoke of a feather she had found and then lost. Each voice was different, and each loss was different, and yet there was a shape to them, a kind of braid, as if all the missing things in the village were threads of a single rope that had been cut and left to fray.

Pip's hand tightened in Wren's. She looked down at him. He was watching the front of the hall with his whole face, his honey cake forgotten in his other hand. She did not know what he was thinking. She suspected he was thinking of his parents, and the marsh, and the way the word lost could be a country one lived in without ever having chosen to go there.

When the gap came, it came like a breath held too long. No one stood. The lanterns flickered in a draft from the open window, and the smell of roses, faint and impossible, threaded through the room. Wren became aware that her own heart was beating in her throat, and that the woundwort in her pocket was warm, as if it had been held over a flame, though she had not touched it.

She did not decide to stand. Her body decided for her. She was on her feet, and Pip's hand was reaching up for hers, and she took it, and she went forward, and the faces on either side of her were blurred and the floor under her feet was the floor of her grandmother's kitchen, and also the floor of the hall, and she was standing in front of Elder Marris, and he was looking at her, and the thorn root on the floor beside his chair was beginning, very softly, to move.

"I have lost three things," Wren said.

Her voice came out in the way she had heard other voices come out, as if it belonged to someone she had only just met. It was steady, though her knees were not. She could feel Pip's hand in her left hand, and the woundwort in her right pocket, and the map under her arm, and the weight of all the things she had carried across the moor to get here.

"The first is a ship in a bottle," she said. "It was my grandmother's. She kept it on a high shelf in her kitchen, and I used to climb up to look at it. The sails were very small and very white, and the hull was dark, and there was a name on it that I could never read because the glass was old and the ink had faded. I asked her once what the name was, and she told me, and I have forgotten it. I have tried to remember. I cannot. I have carried the bottle with me for three years, and I cannot read the name, and I cannot throw it away, and I cannot put it back. I think it is the most important thing I own, and I do not know why."

She paused. The hall was so quiet she could hear the moths at the lanterns.

"The second is a name," she said. "I cannot say it. I am sorry. I have tried, and I cannot. It is not that I have forgotten it. It is that when I try to say it, something in my chest will not let it pass. I think the name is the name of the door, and I think the name is the door, and I think if I say it, the door will open, and I am not ready for what is on the other side. I am telling you this because I want you to know that I am not ready, and that I am here anyway, and that the woman I am describing is not me, and is also me, and I do not know how that can be, and I have stopped trying to make it be otherwise."

Elder Marris had not moved. His hands were still flat on his knees. The thorn root on the floor had gone still again, but its shape was different, the way the shape of a clenched hand is different from the shape of a relaxed one. The smell of roses was stronger. It was not the smell of a flower. It was the smell of a thought that had been carried a long way and was beginning to come home.

"The third," Wren said, "is a door."

She stopped. She had not known she was going to say it. The word came out of her and hung in the air, and the air accepted it, and the lanterns dimmed by a single degree, and in the far corner of the hall, a shadow that had not been there before leaned against the wall and did not move.

"It will not open," Wren said. "I have stood in front of it. I have put my hand on it. I have spoken to it. I have pressed my forehead to the wood. I have asked it, in the way one asks of anything, to let me in. It has not opened. I do not know if I want it to open. I do not know if I have been walking toward it all my life, or if I have been walking away. I only know that it is there, and that it will not open, and that tonight, for the first time, I am not afraid of the not-opening. I am only tired."

She sat down. Pip climbed up onto the bench beside her and put his head against her arm, and she let him, and the honey cake in his hand had gone soft and warm.

No one spoke for a long time.

Then Elder Marris leaned forward, slowly, the way old men lean when they are about to say something they have been saving for a long time. "The door you describe," he said, "is the door we lost when the bargain was made. It is in the side of the hill, where the briars grow thickest. It was not always hidden. Once it was a passage. Once it was a way through."

The hall did not gasp. The hall listened. That was what it was for.

"I will tell you the rest," Elder Marris said, "when the woman in the corner chooses to be seen."

Wren did not turn her head. She did not need to. The shadow in the far corner was no longer a shadow. It was a shape, and the shape was a woman, and the woman was wrapped in a veil the color of old paper, and the veil moved in a wind that did not touch the rest of the room. The smell of roses was everywhere now, sweet and faint and not quite real, the way a memory is faint and not quite real until you step into the place where it happened, and then it is more real than the ground under your feet.

The Veiled Woman did not speak. She inclined her head, a small, courteous motion, as if she were acknowledging the room. Then she turned, and walked toward the back of the hall, and the roses fell from her veil in a slow rain, and where each petal touched the floor, a small mark appeared, as if a thumb had pressed into wet clay. Pip made a sound, soft and wondering, and Wren's hand tightened on his.

Elder Marris lifted the thorn root from the floor and set it across his knees again. "It begins," he said, and his voice was rough, and tired, and, beneath everything, resigned. "It has begun."

The bells did not ring again. The lanterns burned down to their last inch. The villagers stayed where they were, on the benches, in the long hall, with the smell of roses and the sound of their own breathing. The Veiled Woman's footprints led out into the moor. The door, somewhere in the hill, waited.

Wren sat with Pip against her arm, and the woundwort warm in her pocket, and the map under her arm, and the name she could not say sitting behind her teeth like a stone. She did not feel brave. She did not feel ready. She felt only the plain, ordinary fact of being here, in this room, on this night, with these people, at the beginning of something that had been waiting for her a long time. She felt the weight of the lost things in the room, and the weight of her own, and the weight of the door, and she let them all rest where they were, and she did not try to lift them, and she did not try to put them down, and the bells, at last, were quiet, and the moor, beyond the windows, held its breath.