Tomorrow I Become a Woman

The Eve Before

Chapter 5: The Eve Before

By morning the mark had crept up past her wrist toward her elbow, and Wren had stopped trying to hide it. There didn't seem to be much point. She wore short sleeves to breakfast for the first time in a week, and when Ivy showed up at the door uninvited, wooden spoon still in hand like she'd walked straight out of the bakery mid-task, she took one look at Wren's arm and burst into tears before she'd even said good morning.

"I'm not dying today, Ivy."

"I know that," Ivy said thickly, wiping her face with her apron, leaving a streak of flour across one cheek. "I'm allowed to cry about it anyway. I told you, I contain multitudes." She sat down hard at the kitchen table, uninvited, the way she'd been doing since they were four years old, and looked at Delia with an expression that was somehow both furious and pleading. "Mrs. Ashworth. Please tell me there's a plan. Please tell me it's a good one. I will personally set fire to something if it isn't."

"There's a plan," Delia said. "It's not a guarantee. I want to be honest with you about that, because I wasn't honest with Wren for seventeen years and I've decided I'm done with that particular failure."

"Fine. A not-guaranteed plan. I'll take it. What do you need?"

It turned out what they needed was Ivy, specifically — because Ivy had spent her whole life half-listening to her grandmother's stories about the old Rite language, the kind of stories everyone in the village heard as children and mostly forgot, dismissed as bedtime dressing rather than instruction. Between Delia's memory of her own night, Bastian's mother's notebook, and Ivy sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor frowning hard and reciting half-remembered fragments her grandmother used to sing while kneading bread, they spent the whole day at that table building something that was not quite a plan and not quite a prayer.

Tam sat under the table for most of it, playing some private game with the rabbit and a set of wooden spoons, occasionally piping up with a question so oddly precise — does it have to be a bargain, or can it just be an argument — that the adults would stop talking entirely and stare at him.

"Out of the mouths of ten-year-olds," Bastian muttered, the third time it happened, and wrote something down.

By afternoon, Delia was on her third pot of tea and had, at some point without anyone noticing, started humming — badly, off-key, an old harvest tune Wren remembered from childhood — the way she always did when her hands needed something to do and her mind was too full to spare the attention for singing properly. It was such an ordinary sound, so unbearably her mother, that Wren had to leave the room for a minute so no one would see her cry over something as small as bad humming.

She found Bastian out by the fence instead, the one that traced the border between orchard and field, close enough to Hollow Wood that Wren's stomach still dropped a little just standing there, though the sickness had faded to something more like the flutter before stepping onto a stage. He was staring at the tree line, arms crossed, and didn't turn when she came up beside him.

"You don't have to come tonight," Wren said. "Whatever happens. Nobody would blame you for staying back."

"I know I don't have to." He glanced at her sideways. "I'm not staying back because I want to, and not because of some grand promise to my mother either, if I'm honest. I'm staying because I like you. Specifically. Not the story of you, not the last Ashworth daughter, not a wrong I get to right on Corinne's behalf. You. The girl who burns toast and let her little brother negotiate his own inheritance in the middle of a crisis."

Wren felt her face go warm despite everything. "That's a strange thing to fall for."

"I've always had strange taste." He finally looked at her fully, and there was nothing careful in his expression now, none of the arithmetic she'd first seen him doing behind his eyes. "I don't know what happens tonight. I meant what I said — I don't have a guarantee. But whatever it is, I'd rather be standing next to you when it happens than anywhere else, and I wanted you to know that before the whole village turns it into a spectacle."

She kissed him first, which surprised them both a little — quick and unpracticed and slightly off-center, the kind of kiss that comes from two exhausted people who've run out of better ways to say the thing they mean. He laughed against her mouth, startled, and kissed her back properly the second time, and for one entire minute Wren forgot to be afraid of anything at all.

The sun went down fast, the way it always did in autumn, gold light draining out of the sky faster than felt fair. Delia packed a small bag of things Wren didn't fully understand the purpose of — salt, a lock of Tam's hair, a button from Corinne's old coat that Bastian produced without explanation. Ivy hugged her twice, hard, and made her promise, absurdly, to come find her the second it was over "even if it's the middle of the night, I don't care, I will not be sleeping."

Tam hugged her last, arms tight around her waist, rabbit crushed between them. "You can still have the room even if you come back," he said into her shirt, muffled. "I decided. It's yours either way."

"That's very generous of you."

"I know." He pulled back, serious. "Argue with it. Not the bargain. The whole thing. Like you argue with Mother about the toast."

Wren laughed, wet and sudden, and hugged him one more time before her mother gently pulled him back.

As the bell began to ring the hour from the chapel tower, ordinary and unbothered as it had rung every hour of her life, Wren stood at the edge of the orchard with her mother on one side, Bastian on the other, and Hollow Wood dark and patient ahead of her — closer, somehow, than it had ever looked before, as if it too could feel how little daylight was left.

The mark on her arm had gone still an hour ago, settled, certain of its claim. Tomorrow the village believed she would come back quiet and changed, the way Hollow Bend had always understood the word woman — marked, accepting, done asking questions.

Wren had every intention of arguing about it instead.