Content WarningChild abuse.

  [colpse]

  Now

  Quick cuts kept his hands from shaking. A chunk of hair, long and dark and flecked with early white, floated away from him, following the curves of the river where he was kneeling. Gamel pulled another lock out and lined up the knife, cutting it loose with another fast tug.

  He’d spent all morning sharpening the knife, hours with the whetstone to hone the edge. If he didn’t cut it right now, that morning, his hair would end up as ragged as Nesta’s, with no way to properly take care of it. Braiding it had been a disaster. It was easy to do, but the weight of the hair on his back, and the woman who looked back at him from the water’s surface, was untenable. He’d been hiding behind the hair. The Lady had left it long, grown past his chest, and with it surrounding his face he could almost ignore what had happened to him.

  The nuns had applied a sweet smelling beeswax mixture to their hair, and the dies in the courts preferred herbal oils that needed to be reapplied often. The tter was decorative, not practical, and the former he refused to imitate, even if he could get the supplies. No, Gamel’s hair had to be returned to its original length. It was the one thing left about his body he was in control of.

  Another pull, and more hair joined the rest, drifting away from him. This had been days coming.

  Head nearly shorn, uneven cuts leaving just a few inches, it almost resembled the haircut he’d had before. Not quite. The woman— who was still looking back at him from within his reflection, despite his efforts— dropped the knife. It spshed into the water, breaking his view of her and scattering the sunlight all around him in a burst of glittering brilliance. The grove was always beautiful, it was required to be. He'd been made apiece for it.

  She regathered herself from the broken shards in the ripples, and her hair was a short mess, and she was still not Gamel. Her eyes were a different color, for fuck’s sake!

  His grimace, something which Ade’s father liked to joke was permanently etched onto his face, looked wrong on her. He was wrong for this body. It went deeper than the physical, the total reshaping of him, this was a woman who should have been happy. A body that should have been a gift, one given to Ade, who could love it.

  Instead, she— whoever she was— had been burdened with his mind, and Ade had undoubtedly been returned to her father. Nesta hadn’t seen any signs of people around them for days now. Just the witch, who she spent most of her time fending off, keeping away from the magical heart of the grove. While he’d been stuck, healing and mourning over his changes.

  Time to move on. He wasn’t bedbound. Witches could be reasoned with, and Ade needed him now more than ever before. He was more indebted to her than ever.

  He’d plead with her, the Lady, to give his gift to Ade. Nesta had told him the usual way— how the transformation took years, the same as any girl child grew into a woman— but he didn’t want that for her. Not when she’d hate him for getting it right away. He knew how Nesta looked at him, when she thought he couldn’t see. Naked envy. And that was kind! She should have hated him. All of them, the women who came here and took the waters. They would all have such a reason to hate him. He wasn’t one of them, hadn’t fought for this, hadn’t been looking for it until Ade.

  Some of the people he’d spoken to while searching for the grove had looked at him with terrible, mispced kindness. Knowing smiles from beautiful women so unlike him. It hurt to take their sympathy then, but the pain ran deeper now. He’d taken their wildest dreams, had made them reality, and he didn’t deserve it.

  Every time he looked at himself, or moved too carefree in this new body, and forgot that the ease he was feeling was stolen, those looks came back to him. They were stolen too. At least then, he’d had somewhere to put their mispced warmth. This gift, too, must be able to go to her.

  Ade would deserve it. There was no reward that could make the wrath her father would visit upon her worth it, but Gamel’s gift would be a start, at the least.

  Rupert had so many designs for his son, and Ade would be shorn away until she fit the shape he designed for her.

  But, there had to be a way forward. Even though Gamel had failed, he had the opportunity to try again. His reflection in the water, still not his, could be another step in the journey.

  He’d go to her heart, the holiest pce. People this far in the north of Harduza still believed that pces could become divine, that nations could birth gods, and what was the grove if not a hidden nation, one that had birthed a goddess?

  The rolling moss clearing and root-girded pond didn’t hide itself from him. The waters, the transforming eternal spring that gave the girls who needed it their rebirth, was as still as gss. This wasn’t the first time he’d been back, as Nesta visited in the evenings and drank from the spring, either cupping her hands or sticking her head in entirely, and Gamel had come with her twice, to see the magic at work— all he saw was Nesta soak her clothes and almost fall in. The pce that had saved his life appeared as ordinary as any other in the grove. Impossible and beautiful, but no more special than the stream where he’d cut his hair.

  But he’d grown up in a holy pce. Had, like Nesta, been a child in spaces meant for God and gods. Spirituality was what you brought to the divine in equal measure to what the divine gave back to you. So he knelt at the edge of the pond and looked into the well of transformation.

  It was deep, twisting back farther than he could see, and the water, no matter its crity, was hard to see into, like a green-blue wine. The pond had pushed up from under its roots, or the tree had grown around the pond. In another setting he’d have called the wood gnarled, but that kind of thinking wouldn’t do for this tree, surrounding this pond, in this grove. It was sculpted. Each twist and shape was made with intention. He wouldn't say it looked like a woman, not in the way some men could find a woman’s figure in any vague shape when they cked an actual subject to harass and jeer at. No, the tree looked feminine. It cradled the pond like a mother, and its turns and roots were elegant. It was an image he could focus on for the next step.

  He pced one hand into the water, cold and warm in the same moment, and brought some to his lips. It was not sweet, or revetory. It did not go down easy. He remained as he ever was, unchanged, and closed his eyes.

  When they opened again the pond had stopped dead, and the ripples caused by his drink were unmoving. The air and the leaves fluttering to the ground were frozen. Birds hung suspended in mid-flight.

  Suddenly, a thrum of noise.

  Wind and water and insects all returning to animation for one pulse that rippled across the grove, followed by silence.

  Then again.

  Again.

  In perfect time with Gamel’s heartbeat.

  Matching every beat, a swarm of fish gathered under where he was kneeling. They came from far below, from beyond the edges of sight. Tiny things, fshing and twirling. They filled in the space around his distorted reflection, a shimmering halo.

  Under the world shaking sound of his heart, suddenly thrust into time with the forest, Gamel heard a voice. It came from nowhere, out of the spaces between sounds. Words strung together out of the dissonance.

  “Fiends take purchase and sour the fruit, fallow the soil,” the voice hissed. Clouds passed overhead, blocking the sun. His heart raced, and the world juddered with it, staccato animation. In the shadows, the voice grew louder. “They shall take her, force abandonment and broker sanctity!”

  Gamel’s vision blurred and he saw her, the woman in his reflection, in multitudes, from the eyes of the fish swarming around him. His spine shuddered and he felt it in the soil and boughs around him. He tried to stand and fish leapt from the water, deer looked to the sky, and insects— their perceptions like terrible needles of instinct and drive, pinpricks on the edge of his awareness— rose upon spindle legs, while his body slumped over itself, useless and dull.

  He’d been in a small room his whole life, and the walls had colpsed around him to reveal the world. The Lady, in whatever way she was communicating with him, was so massive as to leave his mind floating around inside of her, expanding to fit the new space. The body she had saved and transformed was useless to him— he could no longer fit within it.

  “A frost rests on the horizon, and unripe fruit feeds where bitten vessels only rot.”

  The voice chased through their shared space, spiraling away into dark recesses of distance and subconsciousness. Was this how Nesta always spoke to the Lady? To face this, with decades fewer collections of thoughts and memories to cling to, must have taken a mental fortitude that Gamel could not imagine. Already he could feel the boundary between them eroding, her blending in with him.

  This was her. The whole of her. The Lady of the grove, come to speak to the man she had shoved inside the woman.

  Gamel followed, without any sense of motion, where the voice led and found himself amidst foreign thoughts.

  The Lady’s memories were galleries and caves that Gamel could have fallen into and lost himself to if he had been anything less than utterly careful. A decade of blooming marigolds nestled the memory of an eruption that Gamel had read of in histories.

  He tried to scream, to push at her the idea of Ade, to beg and plead for her to take his shape and give it to her.

  She returned with an image of her own, imposing on him the shores of a distant ocean which she bled her waters into, and upon the surf was the floating wooden memory of Nesta. The Lady held her apart, a swirling sphere of life, and on the surface, with an oily sheen of recency, was a memory which had pushed Nesta to the edges of the Lady’s sight and, then, beyond it.

  Even if she didn’t know her face— or understand her in any way Gamel could have articuted before being a part of the same awareness— she’d taken such care to know Nesta. She was a measure, a weight to the scale, a vital organ. Her first and third fingers, mother and daughter.

  The idea mingled with the image of her in Gamel’s mind. It looped and fed back into itself, pying off of his own memories.

  The first time he’d found Ade after Rupert had hit her. A pile of limbs in the hallway to her rooms, alone because everyone else was too afraid of her father to help her. They tried to rationalize it away. The father knew best for the son. He had to shape the boy to lead, and that allowed no room for weakness.

  A tattered and bruised girl, and they were always girls, wandering the forest without protection or food. A track of blisters running up and down the mountain, another girl there to fulfill a dream. The hatred of them was a storm, spinning itself into being for generations, to come crashing down on the existential canopy of life and culture, spilling out consequence after consequence, and all ending in too many scared and hurt children falling at her feet for a chance at seclusion.

  Looming tall above her and offering salvation. Offering a pce that can heal her. Asking for trust and giving as reward safety and comfort and change. This one no more or less remarkable than all the others that couldn’t be saved, except for her clear headed determination to look the forest, look him, in the eyes.

  “We made the choice, and now we see the consequence,” she said, this time with his voice but not his cadence.

  Nesta ran above the trees, a dog’s teeth biting down on her. Her face bled into Ade’s, then faded into the distance. Into darkness, spear and ax to follow.

  There were echoes, patterns in the waves, of other years when the Lady had been able to extend herself beyond her grove, but this day, and for this girl, she could not.

  A promise, like a seed, was about to burst the surface and tear through the grove. An invasive species whose pnting she should never have allowed and whose erstwhile farmer was come to collect his harvest. The corpse twister hidden in his knife.

  It would take all of her attention to escape him. Nesta could not expect a rescue, unless…

  “If I save her, you’ll give this gift to Ade? Change her instead of me?”

  Water rose to meet him, a swell of confusion, thrashing and dark. She couldn’t understand.

  A second knot of wood bobbed next to the first. Ade, all his human understanding of her in a pce that had never been human. Nesta, too, was changing. Overpping herself in recent times, doubling with his own memories.

  Gamel had bled into her, too. He reached for his own mind, and found when he thought of his earliest childhood, there were sensations of roots breaking tough soil, and a slow gathering of self, like unto like. Her memories mingled with his and he hadn’t even noticed it happening. With seconds stretched into impossible hours of searching, he found them in their shared mental space, a tumble of creek water over rounding stones and his baby teeth as pebbles along the shore. He’d lost them all in a week, with determination and too many sticky treats saved from some te summer holiday.

  His first kiss brushed treetops and her memory of finding women for the first time, before she was even fully formed. They danced and ughed and took refuge in the pretty grove with greenery even so early in the season and he swore that he’d bloom them forever for the creatures whose ughter wound itself so deep in her mind. Her hands brushed awkwardly on Rotrude’s skirt as she stood to get closer to him. He’d been too distracted by the camping women, their shadows in the mplight of her mother’s workshop where they’d talked and touched and enjoyed each other’s company and she felt an interloper in her own body. Rotrude took his hands and pced them on her cheeks, flushed from the liquor they’d grabbed while no one was looking. He’d been drinking too, and she was giddy, both of them eted to be in their presence, and both removed from it as well, a fact only highlighted by the melding of their pasts. Her lips were hot against his. They kept their fire and small conversation burning te into the night. When they were asleep, she studied them, and he found that she was too close and too real. Their camp was packed by the time the sun was over the high hills, and he'd snuck out the back of the workshop when Rotrude had gone looking for another bottle, promises of too much more on her lips.

  He hadn’t seen her again, had moved on to another vilge, where he’d learned to ride and she’d learned to change the body.

  It was too much. He had no sensation, thought was all that remained. He’d found important memories, but where was the feeling of his fingers, his hands wet with the water where he’d left himself kneeling? Where was the present? The real, the physical, was gone.

  Except— in the clouds and on the wings of sparrows and in the eyes of ravens, was a woman kneeling over a swarm of fish, running hands over her face and blinking wet eyes. Catching the raven was nothing, it was his as much as that body was, and maybe if he let his mind hang above himself, a part of but no longer contained by the flesh, he could stand. Like holding a sword or swinging a hammer, he knew it by feel and instinct. His mind wanted to be human, to have a recognizable body.

  He took up his crutch and set out to find the witches. Or, rather, he tried to. Everything took so much effort. His awareness spun through space while his body tried to move through her fingers.

  Worse yet, she’d started talking again.

  “Arriving soon, and I’ll leave for your hands her blessings and contraption, those emotional senses I cannot countenance, and the nitrous bulb I may to keep from these blessed limbs.” She was mumbling through his mouth. The words, unfortunately, made more and more sense the longer she had his shape of words. There was something bad coming, that he understood. The corpse twister from her memory.

  “If she’s gone, then I’ll find her. You deal with the… whatever that is.” Had he said that with his mouth, or with the wind?

  “Her face was a facet, a gem that I’d not understood without amulet or ring to adorn it with context. The merest suggestion of chlorophyll dusting the eyes of bright daughters past.” She tried to throw his mind back into the past, searching for something he could find with his eyes that she couldn't see in stranger's faces.

  “Fuck, stop.” He was going to vomit. “I have to control it again, please. My body. I need it.” That he said with the chittering of small animals he had no names for. He’d never cared to distinguish different kinds of mice, but she cared for the minutiae. “We can’t be so caught in each other when I find the witches, and you can’t be drunk on me to deal with the demon coming for you.” Demon rang through her vast mind. That was something he’d guessed right, then.

  “Withdraw? Strings and fingers are the instrument, are they the music?”

  “Stop stealing my memories of pying the harp and start borrowing my sentence structures.” His own tongue this time. That was progress, she’d understood.

  Gamel walked, and the Lady strung together a division between their minds. It was a flimsy barrier, but it kept her from accidentally using his mouth, and it kept his mind from wandering into hers. He had a sense of what belonged to him and what was hers, but if he wanted to, Gamel could fell berries and fly birds. It was like being silent, after he had learned how to speak. An active decision. A new limb.

  “This won’t undo so easily, will it?” This wasn’t a transformation of his body. This was a joining. If anything, his body was a side effect.

  “The choice will transform you utterly. There is no returning from this path.” She echoed the words he’d heard in his dream of the Abbey, when the Lady had saved him from death. “Not germinated but grafted on to, tied and bound to. To be not my fruit but my boughs.”

  This was not something he could exchange like a token, and give to another. The transformation was the crown. It signified the king, but did not alone make him royal. It ran deeper. Into the blood and soul.

  The Lady pulled at one of his memories, this time with gentleness, and he remembered Roesia tutting at him and his “unwavering faith in lineage. Too many stories of old kings and brave princes.”

  In return, he tossed stones in the canopy of her mind, and shook loose leaves of the names she had been given. “Goddess.” “Will of the Forest.” “Queen of Women.” “Font of Femininity.” She redrew the boundary where they had smudged it.

  They went to their separate tasks as one.