“Can you tell me nothing more?”
“I have told you all.”
“There is too much uncertainty in this journey, Earth Mother,” the sylph whispered. “I am frightened.”
The Earth Mother sighed, the sound of the wind passing through the trees at eventide. “As I am frightened for you, child.”
“Must I go, then?”
“If you wish your child safely born, you must.”
Willow nodded, resigned. “I do.” She looked away into the trees, as if thinking to see something of what was hidden from her. “How much time do I have to make this journey?”
“I do not know.”
“The baby, then. How much time until the baby is born?”
“I do not know that either. Only the child knows. The child will decide when it is time. You must be ready when that time comes.”
A sudden desperation tightened Willow’s throat. “Can you see where the child is to be born? Can you tell me at least that much?”
“Not even that,” the Earth Mother replied sadly. “The child will decide the place of its birth as well.”
Willow fought back against her despair. “Little is left for me to choose, it seems. All decisions are given to others.” She could not keep the bitterness from her voice. “I am the mother of this child. I am the one who carries it within her body. I am the giver of its life. Yet I have almost nothing to say about its coming into the world.”
The Earth Mother did not speak. They stood facing each other in the silent clearing, the sunlight filtering down from the south where it eased toward day’s end, the waters of the pond between them reflecting their images as if through poorly blown glass. Willow wondered suddenly if her own birth had been so complicated, if the very complexity of it had contributed to her mother’s decision to leave her to her father, to abandon any further involvement, to forgo the pain of raising her when the pain of giving her life had been so intense. There was no way to know, of course. Her mother would never tell her the truth. Willow thought then of how she had left Ben, slipping away without saying good-bye, and she wished now that she had woken him.
She straightened. Well, there were few second chances given in life, and it was best not to dwell on their scarcity.
“Good-bye, Earth Mother,” she said, for there was nothing else to say, no other words to speak. “I will remember what you have said.”
“Good-bye, Willow. Keep strong, child. All will be well.”
It was almost exactly the same thing she had said to Ben. All will be well. The words reached out to mock her. Willow’s smile was bleak and ironic. She turned and walked to the edge of the clearing.
When she looked back again, the Earth Mother had disappeared.
Ensorcelled
When Ben Holiday woke that first morning to find Willow gone, he was not a happy man. She had told him she was leaving, of course, so he was not surprised to discover she wasn’t there. He even understood why she had left without waking him to say good-bye; he probably would have reacted every bit as badly as she had imagined. But none of that made him feel any better about the situation. He simply didn’t like being separated from her, even for the best of reasons—and he wasn’t sure this visit was one. He had listened to her explanation and tried to be fair about what she was doing, but in the end he still didn’t understand any of it. Why did she have to go alone? Why did she have to go now?
Why did the feeling persist, despite his efforts to suppress it, that she was keeping something from him?
He might have sat about stewing for the entire day or even the rest of the week if it hadn’t been for the fact that once again he had scheduled a full day of meetings in his continuing effort to find a way to be a good King. It wasn’t as easy as people might suppose. In the first place, there was a decided clash of cultures at work in his stewardship of Landover. This was a place in which the feudal system had been at work for hundreds of years (according to Abernathy’s carefully maintained histories), while Ben Holiday was a product of what passed in his world for a democracy. Instinctively almost, he found himself from day one looking for ways to implement the kind of government he knew and believed in. The lawyer in him wanted law and order to be the cornerstone of his government and to guarantee justice of, for, and by the people. But you didn’t come into a strange country and simply throw out the system already in place. That was a swift and certain path to anarchy. As they were fond of saying where he came from, you had to work within the system.