Iylaine does not find

The branches of the willow shook before her face and stroked her arms with their fingery leaves. The many branches hung from the canopy like a curtain, but their many hands beckoned her inside.

She dropped first to her knees.

For months she had been too big to make the walk, and for over a month after Maud’s birth she had not been able to escape. She had come to the willow for the last time in March, perhaps, and now the summer was nearly run out. Much growing had gone on.

She brushed the long stems aside and raked her fingers through the matted leaves beneath. She dug down to the earth, and she dug farther still, ripping through the mesh of threading roots, startling centipedes, down until her fingernails reached the denser clay and the woody roots of the willow. That was far enough.

She brushed the loose dirt from her hands and rested for a moment, breathing deeply the odor of disturbed earth, almost smiling in relief. He could have come a hundred times since she had last kneeled here, but her fear had been that he had not come at all.

She laid her unscarred palm against the crevassed bark of the trunk and pushed herself to her feet. She would not wash her hands in the brook yet: months had passed, time enough for a thick layer of litter to have accumulated in the hollow.

She reached up and began to dig. There was a deeper pile inside than she had expected; perhaps he had always tasked himself with clearing it out when he came.

She dug through the damp and shaggy litter, at first only stirring it around, but finally pulling it out in clumps and shredding it between her hands. Dozens of bronzed beetles, ants, and long-​​legged spiders scurried over her fingers and out onto the tree, fleeing the cataclysm. She dug and dug, until her fingernails were gouging up blood-​​black shreds of rotten wood from the tree itself, and down farther until they were scraping against the living trunk.

At last she laid her scarred palm against the bark and pushed herself away.

The hem of her gown was submerged beneath a pile of leaves and litter, and the entire mass seemed alive and squirming as her body swayed inside her dress.

Indeed, the pile was full of hundreds of living things: more beetles, more ants, more spiders, and many blind, groping grubs who had lacked the legs to flee. This was all he had left for her.

She let her legs fold, let her body crumple, and she fell in a heap upon the heap.

He had thrown their stone away; he had decided for her that the game was over.

She told herself she would sit here until he came. She would sit here until she died.

She told herself that she would leave her body here at the foot of the willow for him to find. Perhaps he would not come for so long that there would remain only her bones, like a pile of white stones.

She told herself all this, and it was some aching comfort, like pressing on a pain to ease the pain. But she knew she would not stay long. Already her breasts were prickling, reminding her that she had a hungry baby at home. She had a husband at home, who would find her within hours if she did not come.

Any large animal could have made the mess she would leave behind: perhaps a vixen hunting out a nest, as he had once imagined. She would get up and go away again, and he would never know that she had come. She knew that willows never whispered the secrets they were told.