He took a deep breath. “There was someone else, Willow — someone who truly belonged to me and I to her. Her name was Annie. She was my wife, and I loved her very much. She was not as beautiful to look at as you, but she was pretty and she was… special. She died two years ago in an accident and I… I haven’t been able to forget her or to quit loving her or or to love anyone else.”
His voice broke. He hadn’t realized it would be so difficult talking about Annie after all this time.
“You have not told me why are you afraid, Ben,” Willow pressed, her voice gentle, but insistent.
“I don’t know why I’m afraid!” He shook his head, confused, “I don’t know. I think it’s because when Annie died I lost something of myself — something so precious that I’m not sure I’ll ever get it back again. Sometimes I think I can’t feel anymore. I just seem to pretend…”
There were sudden tears in her eyes, and he was shocked. “Please don’t cry,” he asked her.
Willow smiled bitterly. “I think you are afraid to let yourself love me, because I am so different from what she was,” the sylph said softly. “I think you are afraid that if you let yourself love me, you will somehow lose her. I wouldn’t want that. I want what you were and are and will be — all that is you. But I cannot have that because you are afraid of me.”
He started to deny it, then stopped. She was right when she said that he was frightened of her. He saw her in his mind as she danced in the clearing of aged pines at midnight, changing from sylph to willow tree, rooting in the soil that her mother had danced upon. The transformation repelled him still. She was not human; she was something beyond and apart from that.
How could he ever love a creature so different from Annie…?
Her fingers brushed at the tears that were slipping now from his own eyes. “I am life of the magic and subject to its will, Ben. So must you be; so will you be. Earth mother and heaven father made us both, and the land binds us.” She bent forward and kissed him on his check. “You will lose your fear of me and one day you will love me. I believe that.” Her breath was soft against his face. “I will wait for as long as that takes, Ben, but I will not leave you — not if you beg me, not if you command me. I belong to you. I belong with you. I will stay with you, though the risk is ten times as great as it is now. I will stay, though my own life be given up for yours!”
She rose, a rustle of long hair and clothing in the mid-morning stillness. “Do not ever ask me to leave you again,” she told him.
Then she walked quickly away. He stared after her wordlessly and knew that he would not.
The little company arrived at the Deep Fell shortly before midday. The rain had passed and the day brightened, though clouds still screened the whole of the sky. The smell of damp hung thick in the air, and the morning chill had sharpened.
Ben stood with his companions at the edge of the Deep Fell and stared downward. All but the rim of the bowl was screened away by a blanket of mist. The mist hung over everything, swirling sluggishly across a scattering of tree tops and ridges that poked through the haze like jagged bones from a broken corpse. Scrub choked the rim and upper slopes of the hollows, brambles and thickets that were wintry and stunted. Nothing moved in the pit. No sound came out of it. It was an open grave that waited for an occupant.
Ben eyed it uneasily. It was frightening to look upon, the more so from its edge than from the safety of the Landsview. It appeared monstrous to him, a sprawling, misshapen chasm carved from the earth and left to gather rot. He glanced momentarily at a stand of Bonnie Blues that grew close to the rim. They were blackened and withered.