Free Two and Twenty Dark Tales by Georgia McBride Page A

breathed her last; you covered her skin with letters that faded in the morning sun.”
    I nod. Yes, I think, studying his dark locks, the old woman was so like him. Yet I—who remember every tale I traced on every root and heart—cannot recall the stories I sewed into his foremother’s skin, nor if my visit to his house was yesterday or a thousand yesterdays ago. It is as if I have caught the forgetting sickness of the living in my desire for this one of them.
    “I have been searching for you ever since.”
    I nod again, but pull myself from his gaze enough to look around the sleeping forest. I should not be letting him talk to me. I am no temptress Calypso, no Circe of the sun and sea. But like those enchantresses of another time, my wanting is so great. My wanting to be seen. My wanting to be heard. My wanting to keep him here with me, in the forest of storied trees.
    “What is your name?” he asks, and this seals his fate. No one has ever asked me this question.
    I flap my lips again and again, willing something to come, from where I know not—that infinite stream of stories begun on mountain high? But my tongue cannot work without my needle and I feel myself wither and fade in frustration.
    “Wait!” He reaches for me but I evade his grasp. There is nothing here for him to touch, and I cannot bear it.
    I wrap myself in the thick fog, cloaking myself from the Boy’s attention.
    “Wait.” He thrusts his arm—bared now, his shirt high over amber skin—through the mist.
    “Can you mark me as you marked her?”
    What does he say?
    No. No. No. This is not the ancient way. We come to the living as they sleep.
    What is he asking of me? The trees whisper and moan, and I feel my essence shiver, as if I, too, was mortal-made.
    “Can you mark me, Maiden? Can you?”
    He is so near now that I can smell his flesh. That pungent smell of living warmth; skin and bone, muscle, hair, sinew. There is blood pumping, an ocean of life-waters beneath that placid surface.
    He is not mine, to touch and to mark. He is only Boy, Boy with his arrows and horn, his runaway charges, his forgotten home and duty.
    “Please.”
    The word, a doorway, hangs between us. There is something like a snaking arm of fire that pulls me through, out of the darkness and toward him.
    My needle, of its own accord, quivers. It wants to sing its song on his flesh.
    But awake? With eyes of coal boring into mine?
    I grasp my story-needle and feel myself become more real, more present in time and space. I am in the story forest, I think, with a Boy who has lost his charges even as I have lost my way.
    I begin. The first pierce makes him wince and his eyes widen, a bride on her wedding night.
    This thought makes me laugh, and it is the first sound he hears of me, and for this I am glad. My tongue is loose now that my needle flows, fast and fierce with its blue-black tales. His skin is warm and firm beneath my touch and I am drunk with the story-making. I sing him the ancient songs that run deep within me and now, through him.
    “I want,” he says, his voice faint at first.
    “You want?” The moss and stones prompt him.
    I dare say nothing, but wait. I am a clock with frozen hands. A whisper out of time.
    “I want to hear your story,” he finally says. “I want to hear you sing your name.”
    A beat. A pause. A breath. A cry. Then, with his witness, I name myself, crying out like a new mother as I give birth to the she that I am.
    “Blue,” I weep and sing. “My name is Blue and I am the world’s seamstress.”
    There is blood and ink flowing between us now, and I cannot stop the telling. We are Blue and Boy, we are the marker and the marked, we are the shepherd and the sheep, we are the story and the song.
    My markings change, new runes I have not made before rush like rivers. I tell of my duties, and of my loneliness. I tell of my home in the trees, of the stone that is my magic place. I tell him of the secrets and the darkness.
    I tell him of all