Nettleskin

There is a place in the forest where the trees are more ancient than the land is. Each has a shape and a name and a presence of its own, like the letters of a sentence, though the secrets they spell are written for far older and stranger things than I. The gloom beneath the branches is perpetual and deep. Here, the mushrooms grow in rings, chill mists form at noon and midnight and bodiless voices murmur in the shadows. It is no place for a mortal to linger.

Teary-eyed, rosy-cheeked and snot-nosed, the tiny girl is all alone in the shadow of an elder oak. Her scruffy coat engulfs her and she clutches a naked plastic doll in one chubby fist. Her pigtails are coming loose; the whispers of the trees catch her hair so it halos around her head like dandelion fluff. She looks distraught in the way all extremely lost little children do; her earnest sobs are tangled with hiccups. Her doll is muddied where she has dragged it along the ground, and she hugs it tightly to her.

Now, my sentiments towards the mortals are not particularly neighbourly. I especially dislike the small ones. Invariably, they are snotty or dribbly and this little stray is both. That said, if I were coming across her anywhere else, even my chilly heart might have been moved to pity at the wretched state of her. Here and now, however, there is not a moment to spare for pity.

A throbbing growl of hunger, like an engine rumbling, causes the tot to glance round; she does not see me standing there, because she is staring instead into the thickets of bramble bushes. Her sobs morph into a needle-sharp shriek. A pair of venomous orange eyes are peering out from the thorny depths and they are fixed on her with deadly intensity.

“Orion, no!”

My shout of refusal is almost a spell solely because of the urgency that fuels it. It holds him back, but barely, and I race towards them so fast that my bones rattle in their sockets. The girl turns to flee and trips over herself, tumbling into a tiny wailing heap. The thicket is shivering like it’s being devoured from within; Orion is putting up a vicious fight. The instant before he slips loose from my clumsy casting, I swoop in and snatch up the child like an eagle swiping a baby rabbit. She squirms just like one. I barely get a hand free to throw a spell at the bramble thicket.

“Stay!” I demand, and the bushes fall still. There is the hot amber glow of dying embers as the dragon opens his maw, but then he thinks better of it. A sulky snort scatters sparks towards us and he slips away into the deeper undergrowth like a crocodile sliding into still waters.

The child is writhing like a sack of snakes and the moment I drop her she scarpers away into the trees. I almost let her go - I’m winded from my flight to stop Orion from pouncing on her, after all, and I have no inclination to chase after the sorry little ingrate. Yet, if I do not, the forest will keep her. She will wander lost in its eternal gloaming until either the dragon finds her again or something worse does.

Upon the belt of ivy at my waist is a drawstring pouch of woven spider silk. From within it, I draw my glamour. It is a worn and threadbare thing gone fragile with age, delicate as shed snakeskin. With the gentleness of the midsummer breeze, I shake it loose so it comes unfolded and sweep it around my shoulders. It clings like the shimmering scales of a butterfly wing and cocoons me in magical disguise.

The girl is surprisingly fast. She is close to the edge of the deep forest when I catch up and grab her by the arm. She screams like a banshee and tries to wrench free. “It’s all right, it’s okay.” Her eyes are wide with fear but she looks at me and sees a kindly, middle-aged woman wearing fleece and walking boots, and carrying a dog leash. She stops fighting. “Where did you come from? Where is your family?”

“Monsters!” the little girl chokes. I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

“That was Orion. Do you think he was a doggy? Woof woof.” The glamour winds my words into her, soothing as honey, and coaxes the scent of wildflower meadows to dampen her fears with gentleness. She wants to feel safe so she is easily convinced. In an instant, she flings herself into my embrace. She is small and shivering. I pat her reassuringly on the head.

“There, there. All right, it’s okay, you’re safe now with me,” I say, because that much is true for the moment. I take her by her grubby hand and lead her out of the deep forest.

Around us, the trees become spindly and naive. Dappled sunlight filters through their fluttering leaves, twittering birds dart amongst the branches and we pass a squirrel rustling in a leaf pile. The air is filled with the rush of the river in its bed at the bottom of the valley and the unmistakable stink of iron grows stronger with every step. The ground is choked with litter. The railway line is nearby, beyond that the village and a part of the world that the mortals have remade for themselves. It makes my skin itch.

The girl looks happier until she realises the hand not holding mine is empty. “Dolly!” she yelps. She looks behind us and for a moment she seems to want to go back, but then the memory of what lurks there stops her in her tracks.

“Dolly is lost,” I tell her and pull her onwards, but she dissolves again into noisy tears. A woman’s voice, fraught with panic, echoes through the trees.

“Aneska? Aneska!”

“Mammy!” the little girl cries. She tears loose and pelts in the direction of the voice. I am very pleased to abandon her there for her mother to find. She can babble all she likes about monsters; nobody will believe a word of it until eventually she grows up enough to stop believing it herself. I make to return to the deep forest with the mortals none the wiser.

“Who are you?”

Startled, I turn. There is a tall, gangly girl frowning as though the sight of me makes no sense at all. Her hair, skin and eyes are darker than the little ones’, though they share similarity in the shape of their features. A sister? There is distrust in the shape of her mouth.

I push the first true sunshine of spring into my words so that the pleasant warmth catches her off guard, and wave in the direction that the little one had vanished. “I found the girl lost. I was helping her find her way back.”

The sister only frowns at me. We lock eyes and I see danger there; doubts stir deep beneath her surface and grow deeper, churning, a riptide, and they catch at my glamour and pull. It is like fingers digging into gossamer and tearing it, prying it aside to see my true face beneath. My glamour unravels and I want to scream at the ruin of it. Her cynicism is like cyanide; and my precious second skin is dissolving like spit-soaked candyfloss under the weight of her distrust.

Then she looks away, for there is a crunching of leaves and the little one reappears, clutched high on the hip of a woman who could only be her mother. I stagger back, the ruins of my glamour clasped to my skin, and could have kissed that snotty, dribbly little child for her timely reappearance for she is already convinced, and her mother does not think to doubt the evidence of her own eyes. Their certainty ties a double knot in the threads the girl had been pulling so now they cannot be so easily undone.

When the mother catches sight of us, relief loosens the taught lines of her face. “Oh, Maeve, here she is, thank goodness. Who is this?”

“That’s what I was just asking.” Maeve resumes staring at me as though I am a puzzle to solve. The sting of her regard bothers me like a cloud of horseflies. I gather myself.

“I found…Aneska, is it?...lost in the forest, I was helping her find her way home.”

“Oh, thank you so much! Who knows what could have happened if you hadn’t found her. You are in so much trouble, Aneska, you must never wander off like that again.”

“There was monsters!” Aneska points little fingers into the forest.

“No there wasn't, love. There’s no such thing.”

Aneska continues in her soft-tongued babble. “It in bush, scary eyes! And picked me up!”

This declaration is odd enough to make their mother frown. “What? Do you know what she’s talking about?” she asks me.

It is a simple question with no simple answer, for it is not within my nature to speak a falsehood. “I think she means Orion. He’s back there, somewhere. Huskies have unusual eyes, don’t they?” A dog leash is part of my disguise because it provides a convenient excuse to be wandering the woods alone. I hold it up now with an indulgent smile at the little girl.

Her expression only wobbles for a moment before she returns to me that smile, and I could have laughed with relief. Her mother, of course, doesn’t question it for a moment longer.

“Oh, did you lose your dog? We should help you look.”

“Ness isn’t usually afraid of dogs.” This from the sister, who has yet to stop frowning.

“No need, please don’t worry. I’ll find Orion easily enough. He snuck up on her in the bushes and she got spooked, but he did no harm.” I tip a conspiratorial wink to Aneska as if we are friends and she allows this with a giggle. “You stay safe now, young lady.”

That does the trick. The mother smiles at me, warmly. “All right, then. Say thank you, Aneska.” The child comes over shy and mumbles incoherently before burying her face into the curve of her mother’s throat. The two of them wave farewell.

Maeve lingers for a moment more. “What did you say your name was?” she asks.

“I didn’t,” I respond, perhaps too coldly, for she begins looking at me in that way again, and her whirlpool of doubts begin to tug, gentle but persistent, at the edges of me. I do not linger there, and all but flee into the trees without another word. I curse myself for a fool with every hasty step I take back to the deep forest.

When I am long out of her sight, I gather the tatters of my glamour to return it to its spider silk pouch. It is with the greatest care that I remove it, but it is no use. It comes apart in my hands and scatters to the ground like a flurry of snowflakes. Tears fall from me like raindrops, for the loss of it is terrible. I had returned the child, but at what cost? Perhaps I should have let the forest keep her, for without my glamour to protect me, I am the one who is lost.

Maeve

Have you ever met someone who doesn’t seem to fit their own skin? The lady who found Aneska appeared normal enough, at first glance, but there was something off. Who finds a lost child, brings her back to her family and then tries to slip away into the woods without a word? There was something shifty in the way she talked about her dog. Plus, she had been smiling but there was something hostile behind her eyes…I could see it when her gaze met mine.

Maybe it was because I got the weird sense that…well. It sounds crazy, but it was like looking at one of those pictures that play with your perspective - you see it first one way, then if you squint your eyes and look at it just right, it shifts into something else. A duck, then a rabbit. She was a duck, and I had no real reason to suspect she could ever be anything other than a duck - but I couldn’t shake the feeling that in another moment or two, if I looked in just the right way, I would have figured out the rabbit.

I go back the next day to see if I can find Aneska’s doll. There is a narrow bike trail that leads down from the cycle path, under the railway bridge and into the woods, and this was where we lost track of Ness. I duck off the bike trail and into the trees, and when I get to the place where we had found her with that odd woman, it looks different. Overgrown. I’m glad I’ve worn jeans because there are stinging nettles and brambles everywhere and I don’t want to end up with a rash.

Is it normal for them to grow so fast? There’s a big patch right where we were standing yesterday, and more green stalks had sprung up in an odd pattern leading away into the trees. They are in a line, almost like a trail, and I’m sure it goes in the same direction that the woman had left in. Something sparkly and gauzy is snagged in a cluster of the tallest nettles and it might be a scrap of material from a costume, or a children’s toy maybe, only that seems unlikely and I don’t know what it is.

I have a plastic bag in my coat pocket. With my hand inside it like a glove, I gingerly pull the scrap of strange material free. It’s dry and papery and translucent, but glossy with rainbows that shift as I run it through my fingers, like fish scales or insect wings.

Along the trail of nettles, there are a few more scraps glimmering like wet grass. I gather those too. Inside the bag, the pieces all piled together are the exact same shade of green as the fleece the weird woman had been wearing. I follow the nettle trail into the trees, collecting the strange material as I go.

I haven’t walked around this part of the valley much, which is good because it seems it would be very easy to get lost. The trees seem older the further I walk, and somehow…meaner? Can trees be threatening? They are huge and twisted with age, and an uncomfortable feeling prickles over my skin as I walk amongst them. This must be what it feels like to intrude in someone’s house.

Aneska’s doll must be nearby here. She wasn’t lost for long. I’d be able to see it easily; trees here are wide apart and the ground mostly clear, except for the nettles and the occasional fairy ring of mushrooms. I keep walking until the trail ends at a huge bramble thicket like a lake of thorns that stretches in either direction. Well, Aneska didn't go through there and no sign of the doll yet, either. I head right a little ways to be sure and that’s when I hear the sound of a motorbike idling. Only, a pair of bright orange eyes the size of tennis balls open in the brambles right in front of me and I realise it isn’t a motorbike idling at all. It’s growling.

I am going to run, obviously, but those eyes are the exact orange of fire and they are looking right into mine and I take a stumbling step backwards, then another, and another, before I thud into something right behind me. My palms hit fabric and I smell the air right before it rains, and then before I can turn around to see whoever it is, chilly long-fingered hands press over my eyes.

“You,” someone breathes, and it's the woman from yesterday. I try to fight her off me but she is tall and freakishly strong and she whispers something else into my ear and I don't know what she says but after that, I don’t remember anything else.

Olwen

"Now what?"

I direct the question at Orion, who is curled in a great scaly heap, happily chewing on a disembodied plastic doll's arm. Maeve, blindfolded and bound with brambles to the trunk of a tree, is unconscious.

I pace the forest floor, considering. Where my feet fall, nettles uncurl from the earth and spread dagger-edged leaves. “Perhaps a bargain can be struck. I rescued her sister from being devoured by a dragon, after all. What does it matter if the dragon is mine? She owes me a debt and I know her name to hold her to it. Let us see what that is worth.”

Orion gives a blistering hot sigh of agreement and swallows the arm.

I snap my fingers and a bear's hunger at the break of spring claws Maeve back into the waking world. She starts, yawns enormously, and her stomach rumbles like thunder. “Where am I? Why can’t I see anything?” She begins to struggle against her binds but yelps as the thorns bite.

“Maeve,” I say, and she flinches as though she has been struck.

"Are you going to hurt me?" There is a quiver in her voice. I can give no reassurance because the truth is I am not yet certain. She continues, a gentle plea in her voice. “I just was looking for Aneska’s doll! And I followed the nettles. There was weird stuff caught in them, it’s in a bag in my pocket. Is it yours?”

The nettles - of course. My glamour prevents them from sprouting. Without it, like a fool, I had left a trail right back to our briar. I avoid Orion's simmering gaze as I extract the filmy blue plastic bag from Maeve’s coat pocket and look inside. “It is mine. Fragments of my glamour, what is left of it.”

Indeed I am a fool, for I had not realised parts of it were missing. I weigh the bag in my hand now. “What brought you to our forest?” I ask, for a new hope, fragile as a robin’s egg, is blooming in my heart. Perhaps this is a solution that has been granted to me. Has fate conspired to bring the girl here?

“I told you, I was only looking for the doll. I don't know who you are or what you are, but why don’t you take the stuff in that bag back, and I’ll just go home? Nobody will believe me, and no-one will ever find you again. I’ll never speak a word to anyone, ever. Promise.” She is babbling. Her head turns this way and that, casting about for her bearings.

"I have a bargain in mind," I say, and she tenses, grasping onto the words for dear life. "If you aid me in mending my glamour, I will release you from your binds unharmed. Once my glamour is as new, the debt for your sister’s return to you will be forgiven.”

“Mend it? I don’t know how-”

“I need to gather a thread, made of a single hair from your head, once a day, every day, for a year and a day.”

“A year and a day?” Maeve’s voice is like a small snail curling into its shell.

“The time will pass, regardless. You might as well use it to free your family of debt to me. Do you accept my bargain?”

There is a long silence. Maeve squirms a little in her nest of thorns. Yet eventually she says, shakily, “I do.”

The robin’s egg of hope in my heart has hatched and the baby bird is damp-feathered but already singing. “Very well,” I say, and the brambles fall away from her so that she can scramble to her feet. She puts her hands to her face to remove her blindfold, but Orion lets out a thunderous snarl.

"Your gaze has cost me dearly already," I explain. "It was the ruin of my glamour and it could be a further danger to me. Wear the blindfold when you visit here and I will grant you a boon in exchange."

"If I can't see, and need to visit every day for a year and a day, I need to be able to trust you. I want for you to always answer my questions truthfully, and promise to never hurt me," Maeve says at once.

Of course, I agree. Before she leaves, I pluck one long, glossy hair from the crown of her head.

Maeve

At first, she yanks out the hairs so hard it almost feels spiteful. She has to do it with her own hands, she insists, or the spell will not take. So, every day, I enter the forest with the blindfold on. Orion finds me and nudges my hand with his hard snout. He guides me to the briar with my hand on the warm, sleek scales of his back. I have many questions about him. She answers them all.

I learn that, once, dragons used to grow to be the size of mountains and that Orion is small because all of the iron of the modern world has stunted his growth. That he is over three hundred years old, he loved to play fetch, and that he ate Aneska's doll. Since there are no deer left, she had kept him fed by going to the closest corner shop to buy cat food in her disguise. Otherwise, the neighbourhood pets start to go missing. After she shared that, I started to take bags of cat food into the forest with me.

I badly want to get a good look at him, but I keep my word about the blindfold.

After a week has passed, I ask what her name is.

"Names have power for my kind," she answers. “How about this? I will give you my name when I trust you will not harm me with it.”

“I wouldn’t harm you," I say, and she laughs.

“I never trust a mortal’s word. Not even yours. Not yet, in any case. Your kind are practised liars.”

"You said you would answer my questions," I remind her.

"You will get your answer, one day."

In the meantime, I nickname her Nettles.

Olwen

Days become weeks, then months. Maeve visits every day, and every day I gather a hair for my thread. I sew together my glamour with a needle of hawthorn, each stitch as precise as the last. There can be no mistakes.

She visits late one evening and I share with her my supper, a potch of toadstools and fairy butter. Orion is off chasing rabbits. The leaves have changed, turned to burnt embers by the numbing touch of winter in the air. The wind has teeth in it. Not long now before the real dark comes and the nights get deep and blue-green at the edges, and the shadows are liquid enough to drink.

She asks me why I live all alone and I tell her that there were more of us, once. Our apocalypse happened by inches. It was slow and silent fading; a forgetting. The mortals have remade the world for themselves and our kind retreated too far. Out of sight, out of mind.

“Do you know what the anathema to my kind is, Maeve?” I ask her.

“No, because I don’t know what that word means.”

“The bane of my kind is doubt," I explain. “Magic is only an intention made true. What is true is only defined by our belief in it. We believed we had lost our place in the world, and so it is lost."

"What about you? Why are you still here?" she asks, adjusting her blindfold. It is difficult to eat with it on, but she is trying her best.

"Someone had to look after Orion, and I had my glamour. It is easier to believe you belong in this world when you have a face that does."

I think she understands, then, what it is I have lost. She mulls it over silently for a while, then asks, "Would you believe you belonged, if you had a friend?"

I, too, take my time to answer. Then, "Yes," I say, and she smiles at me before popping another toadstool into her mouth. It is a strange thing, to have a friend. She calls me Nettles, but it used to be white clover, not nettles, that sprouted in my footsteps. That was a long time ago, now. A happier time, when I was not so alone.

The months go by too quickly, after that.

Maeve

Winter goes by, then spring, and soon enough it's summer again. Orion bounds up to me now when I go to the forest, and gallops around me, snorting. Part of me is worried he will accidentally set the forest on fire.

It is a comfortable walk to the briar by now, and I barely need his help even without my eyes. I wonder if soon Nettles will trust me enough to take the blindfold off, or maybe even tell me her real name. It's only fair. I've told her everything there is to know about me, after all.

It's sad to see her - well, not really see her - but to know she is out here on her own like this, with nothing or no-one but a dragon for company. She told me of her kind fading out of the world, with no place left in it to belong to.

I have everything. The whole world. We're so used to having everything we don't even care that we have it.

No wonder she didn't like me when we met. I don't know how I'd feel about all that if I was her. I ask her about it, one afternoon. How can life be so cruel to her kind, when it's been so kind to mine?

Her voice is sad when she tells me it is in the nature of things to be both.

Olwen

A year and a day after our deal is struck, Maeve arrives at the briar on Orion's back. "At last," she calls out, her arms spread wide. "It will finally be finished!"

I do not share in her celebration, for today, my heart is heavy. Maeve notices. She squeezes my hand when I take hers to help her down from the dragon's back. “I’ve been thinking,” she says. “My year and a day are up, and all, but there’s no reason I can’t visit the forest from time to time, right?”

I rest my hand against her cheek and she beams at me like sunshine. Then I gently pull the final hair from her head. Long and dark as earth, it twists around my wrist as if it wants to hold me close. I pull my needle from my pocket and my glamour from my pouch, thread the hair and sew the final stitches of my second skin.

"Is it done?"

"Almost." The glamour shimmers as vibrantly as Orion’s scales. “Like new,” I say, and hold it against me. It will fit just right.

"Now, I did everything you said, so can you trust me now," Maeve says, laughing. "Can I take the blindfold off?"

"Very well."

Maeve eagerly pulls the cloth from her eyes, and for the first time, looks up and sees my true countenance. The smile slides from her face. Her eyes grow wider and wider and wider, and then she begins to scream.

"Do not run." I pour into it every ounce of persuasion I have; the determination in the hum of a honeybee at work, the eternal consistency of glimmering starlight, the certainty and silence of stone. She is frozen to the forest floor, still staring, the scream curdling in her throat. "You cannot visit this forest, Maeve. You will not be leaving it. My glamour is mended, but I still need a face."

“You said you would not hurt me!” she splutters, rigid and terrified.

“It will not hurt.”

“You said you were my friend!”

“I am.”

I sweep my new glamour around me and become a tall, gangly girl with dark hair. Her eyes, twin to my own, are fixed on me. I brush her hair aside. "Dear, dear friend. You have given me back a place in this world. A second skin, so much stronger than the last. Thank you for allowing me to belong, again."

My magic holds her captive, holds her still. As her skin flushes grey and hard, her hands clench and freeze, her jaw muscles work, but she will move or speak no more.

"My name is Olwen,” I whisper to her. Her eyes are wide as pools and tears trickle from them as they vanish into smooth stone. My own tears fall, splatter across it like the rain.

Wearing her face, I decide to go first to the corner shop and get some more food for Orion. Perhaps I would visit her mother and sister, and see if I could get enough money from them to buy some nice steak. Orion dives through the leaves ahead of me, excited by the prospect.

It is a sad day, but also a hopeful one. For the first time in a very long time, snowwhite heads of clover are blooming in my wake.