Cedar has the bedroom to herself. Outside the bedroom window, snow has covered the ground in a blanket of white. The grave marker she and Ash made for Badger’s grave rises above the snow. They had taken time to carve his name and add elaborate details into the finest wood they could find. Ash promised to return someday and replace it with a stone marker on the day they had driven it into the near-freezing ground.
Cedar unwraps the stone from her waist, which she has kept close to her since their arrival. Now, this cabin has the security of home. The stone has left a large bruise on her side. She gently lays it in a worn shirt in a drawer.
She leaves the drawer open and throws herself on the bed. She enjoys the give of the mattress as she sprawls back. It is a very different feel from her mattress on the floor at Grandma’s cabin.
She thinks of the cello, and her face stretches with a wide smile. Her dream has come alive here.
How has Grandma taken her departure? Cedar cringes in guilt at the feeling of being free without her. She pushes herself from the bed and walks over to the drawer, but does not pick up the stone. What would she wish for now, if she could take it to the Governor? With a shake of her head, she closes the drawer. She has everything she wants, except the freedom to pursue her dreams without guilt. The stone will not buy her that.
ASH STUDIES A MANUSCRIPT of music notation with the cello nearby.
Cedar emerges from the small bedroom.
“I am afraid you will need a better teacher than me to make sense of this one.” Ash plucks the open C string on the cello and tries to hum a few measures of the music.
Cedar takes the cello from him and lowers herself into the other chair. She tries to copy his humming with the bow on the strings, with no success. She raises her shoulders in a cringe and makes a face. She sets the cello aside and leans forward in her chair, elbows on her knees, and stares at the flickering flames. “Do you ever wish we could stay here like this forever?”
“Yeah. Maybe not exactly like this, but forever does sound nice.” He looks at her pointedly, but she misses his implication.
“I am afraid of it ending. I – it scares me to think of Grandma coming to get me.”
Ash wants to circle back to what he was trying to get at but recognizes in time the vulnerability of her admission.
“She seems like an insistent woman,” he says.
She gives a short huff. “I never told you about Samuel.”
Ash’s body tenses. He is not sure he wants to hear what is going to come next. He breathes out the tension from his shoulders and hands and places the sheet music on the floor beside him. He faces Cedar and imitates her posture.
“When Samuel started coming by our cabin more often, he still went by the name Oak. I didn’t care for his attention. Grandma was enamored with the idea of us being together. I think she saw it as an opportunity to keep me in the north. Grandma started dropping hints that I should encourage his interest.” She shudders. “A boy might be too embarrassed to look you in the face when he touches you. Samuel would always look at me. But not in the way you do.” She shudders again.
Ash disregards the impulse to demand further details. His anger has a place, but not here and not now. He is thankful for the training he had received in his father’s house, tactics he uses now to control his reactions.
Cedar continues. “He approached Grandma about having me. Like I was some sort of property she could trade. The horrible part of it all, is I considered it. Not because I liked Samuel, but because Grandma thought I should. I couldn’t see clearly enough to know for certain that I didn’t want anything to do with him because I was too preoccupied with what Grandma wanted.” Cedar screws up her nose and her eyes narrow. “Our neighbour, Rose, heard that Oak had begun accepting payment from the King for various jobs, and told Grandma. That was unforgivable, even for charming Oak. Grandma put an end to whatever you could call ‘our relationship.’
“Samuel made threats, whenever he came across me alone. I started to question whether I could trust Grandma’s decisions, but I didn’t know how to trust myself either. Then you asked me to come with you, and I found out Grandma was the one who had sold my maps…“
Cedar trails off, but Ash has heard enough to see what her fate could have been. His imagination fills with appalling scenarios.
“I have you to thank for helping me get out of there. I don’t think I would have found a way if you hadn’t come along,” Cedar murmurs.
This prompts words from Ash. “You would have found a way.” He shakes his head. “Besides, if I did anything, it is no less than you would do, have done, for me.”
Cedar seems to know what he means, perhaps by instinct, or maybe experience. “Gratitude can be an ugly thing, can’t it?”
Ash hesitates. “I am beyond grateful to be here with you. But I don’t want either of us indebted to the other.”
Cedar nods. This agreement between them threads invisible strands of something more powerful than repayment for debts.
“I trust you in a way I’ve never trusted anyone, and yet, you’ve never asked me for anything.” She turns to face him.
He is already looking at her but is startled by the bright, warm expression on her face. He thinks of these nights together, immersed in music and stories. He can clearly see what his people have been deprived of, and the thought lodges uncomfortably in his throat.
“Maybe you give me more than you know,” he says, his voice hoarse.
She holds his gaze for a moment longer. Her cheeks color and she looks back to the fire.
“How did Grandma manage to make me into some sort of underling? I don’t know if I could say no to her. I suppose that’s why I left like I did, without saying goodbye. The thought of her coming scares me more than if we were assailed by the King’s men.”
Ash fidgets in his seat, and clears his throat. Cedar does not notice his discomfort and reaches for her cello. She seems more at ease again, having shared so much, and Ash questions his timing. Two difficult conversations in one night is too much. He reaches instead for the discarded sheet music and chooses a short passage to hum aloud to her.
ASH USES COLDER water to quench his restlessness. He waits until after Cedar retires to her room for bed. He hauls in bucket after bucket, straight from the pump house into the tub in the closet space off the kitchen. He no longer bothers to heat any of the water.
He sinks into the water to shoulder level. The cold is breath-sucking, but he welcomes the pins and pricks inflicted on his body. The immediacy of the cold temporarily relieves him of the crushing burden he feels for his country. He is happy here, but his happiness with Cedar does not relieve him of his burden of responsibility. If anything, it amplifies his failures to Danbarrah.
He thinks of Cedar. She is never so happy as when she is playing the cello. She is far from adept, but now and then a melody emerges. Ash would cross mountains to be the reason for the expression on her face, caused instead by those snippets of a song. He chuckles to himself. He is envious of a damn cello.
It seems that lately his thoughts are absorbed either by the person with whom he is sharing a house and a life, if not body and heart, or the responsibilities he wants to pretend do not exist.
Would being with Cedar take him closer to those duties, or give him even more reason to neglect them? She at least deserves to know what she would be committing to if she were to accept, and, he dares to hope, return his feelings.
What does he tell her first? If he reveals himself as a prince, she will close herself off from him. Does he have any right to ask so much? Her strength, though she may not see it herself, is one of the things that draws him to her. Still, he comes with more baggage than is fair.
On the other hand, if he first tries to know and win her heart, he risks breaking it when he reveals his identity.
He thinks back to what she had told him about her grandma. He does not want payment for a debt, or for her to accept him because of her sense of accommodation. He wants to know her, not merely have her.
He is used to charging ahead and messing everything up, as he had when he tried to resist King Marcus’ influence over his country all those years ago. And he is used to waiting. Waiting has not done anything to provide clarity as to how he should act to save his country, and it might not give him Cedar, but he is not sure what the best course of action is, and he will not risk messing this one up.
One thing he is sure of, he cannot be happy having her unless she is as happy to have him. They will be together because they both wish it, and with joy, or he will willingly let her go.
CEDAR AND ASH venture out to tap the maple trees. They take the next few days to reduce the nutrient-rich maple water into syrup. The cold months had flown by, and the late winter is unusually mild. Neither speak of making plans to leave. The canoe needs a final sand and polish. The paddles they built from scratch require more shaping, neglected as the work has been.
As the weather continues to warm, Ash spends most of his time in the gardens. There are three of them at different locations in the yard. He pulls dead weeds in the recently thawed earth. He talks of his gardening aspirations and looks through boxes of seeds he has found in the workshop. He pours over a garden journal, presumably having belonged to Badger. The journal is thoroughly detailed. There are expected and actual yields from prior years, maps of what was planted where, and a plan for crop rotations. Such thorough notes could make a gardener out of almost anyone.
Cedar’s time at the cello shifts from pleasurable experimentation to frustrated elusiveness. She can hear snatches of a story unfolding in the melody. The pauses between the telling of the story and the movement of her fingers remain too choppy for her to grasp how the full melody should sound.
Ash tries to help, but his ability to match his voice with the notes he tries to read on the paper is erratic. Each attempt is a little different from the one that came before.
On one warm spring morning, Cedar and Ash carry the chairs out to the front porch. Ash scribbles garden maps on scraps of paper, pausing now and then to reference the journal. The forest is filled with bird mating calls and the busy activity of their nest building. The air smells faintly of the sweet-musky scent of decomposing leaves, picking up where it left off in the fall before the winter freeze.
Cedar stares at her sheet music. Her brain is not up to the speed she would like it to be for deciphering the no longer foreign, but far from fluent, markings for notes. She slows down, pulls her bow across the strings, and the melody emerges unevenly as she looks from paper to instrument. The quality of sound is clear, and she derives some satisfaction from that. She checks the notes, and though she confirms she is playing the correct ones, the melody remains hidden.
She circles back to the beginning of the passage, repeating it again and again, playing slowly and cautiously. She lets the bow hang to the side and replays the notes in her mind. She tries without her bow, moving her fingers on the frets while humming aloud. She closes her eyes and imagines herself playing, picturing what it would look like. She pays attention to the details of where her fingers are on the strings, the angle of her arm, and the sound of the music. She imagines what story the notes will tell, and how the story would come to life if she could put all these notes together.
Finally, she plays without looking at the paper. She is startled at the emotions the sounds evoke from her. Instinctively, she plays a few more notes. She does not look to see if they are the ones that come next. They somehow make sense. She continues, tolerating a missed note here or there. The music pulls her onward. She stumbles more frequently as she goes further along in the passage, but it is as though the melody has come to life in her mind, if not on the actual cello.
She puts the cello to the side. The melody continues to piece itself together in her mind. She moves her arms, as though riding the rise and fall of sound. All she can hear is the music in her mind. Her feet join in this dance, and she dances down the stairs onto the ground in front of the house.
Ash puts down his papers, and leans on the railing, watching her. She does not feel the slightest bit bashful. The music fills her mind. It cries out to be expressed, to let out its narrative. She cannot yet manage the bow with enough skill to express this melody on a cello, but she has a body and can use that. She throws her head up into the bright blue sky, letting the music flow through her. She raises her hand as though grasping for the sun, and the rhythm and the melody line dictate her footwork. The music in her mind culminates in an energetic spin.
She ends her spin facing Ash, who has come down from the porch and stands on the tender green spring grass in front of her. He takes her hands in his. She stands there, smiling exultantly.
“I have it,” she says, breathless. “I can hear the whole story. I’ll be playing it soon.”
Cedar pulls her hands from his, and slides her arms around his waist, pressing against him. He laughs, rejoicing with her. He holds her securely, and she makes no move to pull away.
ASH RESTS HIS chin on top of her head of thick black hair. Her once-short hair now touches her shoulders. His arms are wrapped around her.
When he glances up, he sees a distant figure emerging from the trees. He stiffens at the sight of another human being. Cedar turns around within the circle of his arms. The three of them stand there, regarding one another.
The man is too far to speak to without shouting, but his clothing sends a flood of remembrance through his mind. Ash lets go of Cedar and takes a few steps closer. The man raises his hand in a familiar salute before he vanishes into the trees.
Ash breaks into a sprint, but by the time he arrives at the place where the man had been standing, it is clear a pursuit is useless. A person can easily disappear in the density of these trees, especially a scout from the King’s well-trained forces. Ash will not chase after him, though he has trained with the best of them.
His solitude, his peace with Cedar, is about to be broken. First by Ash himself, then by whatever comes next.
Ash walks back from the tree line to where Cedar waits, unmoving.
“Who was that?” she asks. She stares pensively at where the man had been.
“One of the King’s men, armed forces,” Ash replies.
“Armed forces? Are they watching this place? Are we in trouble?” Cedar’s voice sounds strangled, and Ash silently curses to himself. She has lived under the fear of the King and his implementation of the ordinances. Now he will be inflicting more of that fear himself, simply because of who he is.
“No. More likely they are here for me.” He attempts to keep a slow, level voice to ease her alarm.
She looks at him, puzzled. He makes his mouth say the words that have long needed to be said.
“My father is King Orion. He has likely been looking for me for months.”