You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,49
my youth in constant worry. I hated being separated from her, never truly let out my breath as I went through my days, but I knew Pepper-Man cared for her, and that they spoke of me often in the mound. I knew that Harriet fed her blood and cakes, knew Gwen taught her how to shoot with bow and arrows. Francis took good care of her too, teaching her how to play the violin.
Her education then was vast but unconventional, made her fit for the mound but nowhere else. She could survive and thrive as a faerie, though she could never live with me. When we found a bird’s nest full of screaming pink fledglings, she put them in her mouth and chewed until the screaming stopped. When we came across a rabbit who was hurt, my daughter brought out her bone knife and slit its throat, watched calmly until it was dead. She never sought out pain, but she didn’t shy from it either. She didn’t share my empathy, had never felt vulnerable and soft, had always been hard, quick and able. Fit for the woods, but not for suburbia—or so I thought at the time.
Now I rather think she’d be a good match: a tiger hiding in the buzz from the wasp nest; a raven among the crows. We could have cleaned her up and groomed her hair, put her in a pink dress and sent her to ballet. Pretended she was a tangerine-marzipan girl, not a hard and red-fleshed poison fruit at all. It would have worked just fine, too, for a while.
But then, we had danced in the woods, Mara and I, while Francis played the flute. We sent boatloads of caged dragonflies down the brook for the water girls to find. We played with shimmering balls of nothing, sending them across the sky. I was a child too, you know, barely sixteen then. She was my dream doll: all mine and beautiful, and growing up so fast. Her white teeth shining, thick hair cascading down her back. And she was always happy too, back when she was little. Her hoarse laughter filled the woods and sent birds flying from the treetops, foxes fleeing the burrows. When she was just weaned from my milk, Mara bonded with a hawk she’d seen, sitting in a grove of pines. Pepper-Man was utterly proud of her then, when she called the bird in herself. He was a gorgeous creature, huge and brown. She fed from him for years; flew with him high in the sky. When he was old and couldn’t sustain her, she found herself another one, just as big and gorgeous as the first.
My Mara is very partial to hawks.
She has a temper, though, just like her mother. As she grew older, it grew too. The tantrums of childhood were gone and it their place came searing fire.
“She is a warrior, that one,” said Gwen.
“But who will she be fighting?” I asked.
Gwen shrugged, golden eyes gleaming. “It will come to her, just you see. Strife will always follow the one who knows how to fight.”
I remember feeling uncomfortable from what she said. I never envisioned my girl having to fight, since she had already fought so hard to be born. Like all mothers, I wished for her days to be light and bright, wanted her to smile far more than she cried. Wished for marzipan, not bitter wine.
Of course, we have very little control of such things; our children are who they are, for better or for worse. My daughter flew with hawks and held a warrior’s soul, and there was nothing I could do to change that. My measly attempt to tempt her from that path was merely to teach her how to read. I figured it would do her good to learn a little more about people and the world, that there were other ways to think and act. She loved reading from the start, but it only made her brighter, not more compassionate or soft.
It’s what you get from letting your child be raised by faeries; they don’t become tame, any of them. They yield to the drums and the pipes; hallow the moon and the night. All life is sacred because they must have it. Blood, birch, and bone. Water, roots, and stones. No sympathy can grow from those things.
Love, though. Love can still grow.
* * *
Lately, we have been talking a lot about those times, Pepper-Man and I. Those happy days at