Iylaine finds the stone

Iylaine ran, cursing the flapping bulk of her skirts, cursing the mud that sucked at her slippers in the hollows, cursing destiny for making her a girl. She galloped over the delicate mosses, pitilessly stomped through the patches of curling fern-​​heads that lay in her path, and beat her way through stands of brush that she could not afford to go round, spitting like a furious cat as she went.

She had to run as fast as she could, for Bertie was right behind, and Bertie could run faster than any boy she knew. She rarely attempted to run from Bertie, usually preferring to evade Dunstan, who did not run quickly at all, or Eadwyn, who did not have the stubborn pride that sent Bertie chasing after her as fast as he could run. But the same cruel destiny that had made her a girl had also seen fit to assign Bertie as her walking companion on this, the first day after her birthday that it did not rain.

Since her father’s elf mistress had been killed, Iylaine herself was not allowed to go out of the castle alone. The three boys were assigned to take her out for her daily walk in turns, their swords at their sides, and she knew that the penalty for running away from them was a week without any walks at all.

Still, she dared it from time to time, because she had to go alone to the willow tree beside the brook and see whether the black stone was in the hollow or on the ground where she had last left it. She had never been disappointed; it had always been in the hollow. She only hoped that her cousin was not disappointed that she came so rarely to move it now.

But on this day, Bertie notwithstanding, she would have to go to the tree. Her birthday – the birthday she shared with her cousin – had already passed. If there was one day of the year when she thought she might have a chance of seeing him, it was that day.

But it had rained. Oh, how it had rained that month! It had rained every day for six days before, and it had rained for two days after. On the first day of spring, she had tried so desperately to escape the castle that she had finally obliged the Duke to confine her behind a locked door. Indeed, she had been sorely tempted to burn the door down and flee in the resulting confusion, but she loved him and the other residents of the castle too much to risk that.

Fortunately, he and her father had only believed that she had been desperate to get out due to her six days of captivity, and they had not punished her for it. Now, three days later, she was finally free, and her great hope and her great fear was that she would find a pink stone in the hollow, and learn that he had wanted to see her and that she had missed him.

So she ran, and slipped many times, and got up and ran again. When at last she reached the brook, she leapt it in a graceful, elfin bound, and when she landed on the other side, she stumbled and fell in a tangle of damp skirts, like any girl.

But the tree was in sight now and, growling under her breath like a furious cat, she pulled herself to her feet on the slender trunk of a birch and stumbled up the bank to the willow. Oh! She had met him here once, under that very tree! How tall and how old he had seemed to her then!

But she had felt very different then, dark and miserable and filthy, and today she felt as fresh and bright as spring, despite her muddy dress and despite the sodden ugliness of the season so far this year.

And she was thirteen now, verily a young woman. She did not think she would find him quite so old, quite so tall, quite so inscrutable this year. If only…

She reached the willow and stared down at its roots with blazing eyes. The stone was not there! She reached up into the hollow and groped around hungrily. All the rain had turned the dead leaves and other debris within into a soggy, crumbling mess almost like soil, but she quickly found the cold stone nestling upon it.

She closed her eyes and for a moment only held it, panting from her run and from her hunger. She would kiss it, she told herself, despite the dirt clinging to it and despite the absurdity of such a gesture. She would clean it in the brook and then put it–

No! She would take it with her. She would find another pink stone to leave for him. This one she would treasure as a sort of birthday present.

She smiled to herself and lifted her face to the canopy of bare, whiplike branches, as if she expected to be kissed. But she had to hurry! She could hear Bertie crashing towards her in the distance.

She lifted out the stone and opened her eyes. Her hand was grubby with the damp black litter of the hollow, but blacker than her hand was the stone. It was a black stone. It was an ordinary black stone, such as he had left a hundred times before.

He did not want to see her. Oh! After all, it was an easy thing to go past a certain tree on one’s way to visit one’s cousins. It took no time at all: only stop an instant to look for a stone, and then one was on one’s way to the singing and the story-​​telling and the dancing with the girls.

She would not leave the stone at the base of the tree. She would not leave it meekly there for him to find.

She hurled it at the stream with all her strength and snarled like a furious cat.