The three burdens of Nest Wynne

Issue five: a short story by Angela Slatter

In Issue four, we featured an interview with award-winning Australian author Angela Slatter. For Issue five, we are welcoming her back with a reprint of a delightfully dark tale brimming with family secrets, unfulfilled dreams, and Welsh myth. ‘The three burdens of Nest Wynne’ originally appeared in Strange Tales: Tartarus Press at 30, edited by Rosalie Parker (Tartarus Press 2020).

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Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), The needlewoman (c 1640-49), oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art.

The three burdens of Nest Wynne

by Angela Slatter

‘Your mother,’ Nest’s father would say, ‘was stolen away by the fairies.’

He’d tell her Aderyn had gone looking for mushrooms perhaps too early one morning or too late one afternoon. Owain wasn’t entirely clear, only certain that his wife had been taken through either daylight or twilight gate. Taken to dance in halls beneath the earth, or serve there at great feasts, or as a bride for some prince with pointed ears and a sharp nose; any range of fates. There were also the days, admittedly few and far between, when his mood darkened with drink and he said something entirely different. That Aderyn, true to her name, had become a bird. An owl, like Blodeuwedd before her, faithless and fatal, she’d grown feathers and taken to the sky. But sure as sun followed moon, he’d deny having said it in the morning; after a while he stopped drinking and Nest sometimes wonders if it was because even in his state of decay he knew he couldn’t trust his own tongue.

For a while Nest had collected owl’s feathers, wrapped them with a ribbon and kept them in the pretty box Aunt Ceridwen had given her. On moonlit nights, she lay the feathers out on her bed, ordering them and re-ordering as if she might remake her mother this way. After a few years she lost faith. At almost twenty, there are few things she believes in.

Any road, by the time Nest was old enough to question her father more closely—more insistently without the risk of being sent to bed for being too bold—Owain himself was gone. Not physically, but mentally. He wandered in his thoughts, so that he didn’t spend many hours in the cottage nestled into the crook of the hill. ‘It’s cold out here on the mountainside,’ he’d tell his daughter, even while she could see him in front of her, firmly settled in the worn old armchair by the hearth that was his favourite spot. The telly had broken several years ago and they’d not bothered to replace it; Nest preferred books, and Owain spent time in his head.

It started in small ways, absentminded ways. He’d not take his lunch when going to the mill. Forget his tools. Forget that his sister had died some years before. It got worse and he’d stay in his pyjamas if left to his own devices, forget to go to work entirely, forget to feed himself. Nowadays, he’d obediently eat whatever Nest puts in front of him, but it wouldn’t occur to him to help himself; when he gets hungry he simply mewls until his daughter drops whatever she’s doing.

One thing he never forgets, however, is that Aderyn’s gone.

On occasion he did leave the house, slip out the door and wander the valleys and peaks. Once, Owain disappeared for six whole frozen days. Nest all but lost belief in finding him again, but she couldn’t deny that spark of relief at the idea of being freed of her watch. Love didn’t enter into it: she loved him, of course she did, but she was worn down to the bones of her being with looking after him and trying to make enough to keep two bodies and souls together. She’d started taking in mending and ironing when she was thirteen (still going to school, still with hope) the year Aunt Ceridwen died and Owain’s slide grew faster. She’d held onto her dreams of going away to university for as long as she could, but nothing good grows in shadow and they withered after a time.

But then off Owain went that morning and it seemed he’d stay gone. Didn’t she just get the tiniest flame of anticipation inside her of becoming something more? She dared to think how she might manage her leaving, selling the tiny cottage; she even sent away for prospectuses from three universities.

Then, on the morning of the seventh day, Daffyd Morgan found her father, didn’t he? She couldn’t help but curse him a little. Daffyd brought him home again, said he’d seen the older man (who was barely over forty) wandering around the fields by the mine that had been worked out fifty years ago. Owain, for once, was strangely silent about where he’d been.

After that Nest began to take in spinning on top of the mending and ironing for extra money, thinking she’d need to set it aside for his care at some point. Some days she loses hours, her eyes on the filaments as if she can see through time, forward and back, as if she’s searching for a way out. All her wishes turn into skeins, and she might as well try to spin gold from straw for all the good they do her.

But Aderyn. Aderyn was gone before Nest had anything more than cloudy memories of a narrow pretty face, dark eyes, blacker than black hair, and a red birthmark running up the side of a slender throat; that last doesn’t show in photos of her but then she’s always facing away. When Nest started school, the other children would tease her, say her mam was a ghost, that everyone had seen her whenever something went wrong somewhere. Owain, when he still had the wit to do so, told his daughter not to listen. He swore black and blue that his wife had been taken by the fairies and that any other explanation was sheer idiocy (bird transformations included, apparently): her mother was not a ghost.

The talk continued but Nest’s soul was that of a cynic even early in life. There was a lack of consistency in the accounts and wasn’t there always something someone wanted to cover up whenever they made mention of Aderyn? Wherever fault might lie, it could be easily shifted by shaking the spectre of the pale woman in people’s faces.

This afternoon Nest’s in the tiny sitting room, spinning, when she hears the car coming. Owain’s lying down in his bedroom. It takes a few moments for her to return from wherever her mind’s been, then she goes to open the door; she waits. She does so because the sound of the engine is different. She knows the calls of all her neighbours’ vehicles. She can even recognise the little clockwork chugging of those most tourists drive (not too many of them for there’s very little by way of ruined castles or blue plaques, seaside vistas, or anything else of interest to be honest).

It’s a Mercedes, dark blue, new and shiny. The windows are tinted so Nest can’t see inside, but it slows past the gate, seeming to take her in as she leans against the doorframe. The wind picks at her black, black hair as if it could be made even messier; there’s a storm in it, the breeze, Nest can smell it, feel it in the pricking of her skin. Then the Merc speeds up and continues on, taking the left turn onto a private road that leads to a metal gate in a high stone wall. Only Pugh House down there, big and mostly empty since the owners died. One month apart, pneumonia both, less a tragedy and more to be expected: they were old and poorly and unpleasant, not given to charity or any great kindness at all. Neither Lord nor Lady but moneyed, and that made them better than everyone else. The fact they’d rather pay someone a pittance to mend their linen and clothes than buy new things was a sign of how miserly they were. Nest knew she shouldn’t complain as that tendency had helped keep her and Owain in food.

No one seemed to know—not even the housekeeper, who was sister to Nest’s neighbour, Mrs Parry—whether it was being sold. Not on the open market, certainly not, but perhaps in that mysterious way the rich pass things between themselves, money in exchange for goods and services without anyone having seen the sleight of hand required. But perhaps this expensive car is a sign of someone coming to look at the place where only a housekeeper has been left on guard for the past six months. Or a sign, perhaps, of someone coming home, for the old people had a son who’d gone off to university (and didn’t that fill Nest with envy the colour of the hills in spring?). Or a sign, more simply, of someone getting lost and taking the wrong road.

Nest supposed she’d find out soon enough. She had mending to drop up to the house. Perhaps she’d do it today, rather than tomorrow.

Mrs Parry saw the Mercedes, attracted just as Nest had been by the unaccustomed engine purr. She’d seen Nest, too, standing in the doorway across the road, hair so dark and long and looking too much like Aderyn for anyone’s good. So Mrs Parry isn’t surprised when there’s a knock at her door a while later, and the girl’s on the doorstep, a wicker basket wedged at her hip. The tresses are marginally tidier but not much because the girl, for all her seemingly calm acceptance of her lot in life, always looks a little wild.

‘Eirys, would you mind sitting with Da for a bit?’ Nest asks. ‘He’s sleeping and I don’t want him to wake alone.’

Mrs Parry juts her chin towards the basket, says unnecessarily, ‘Taking up the mending then, cariad?’

Nest nods, expression neutral.

‘Looks like it might rain.’

Nest pulls at the collar of her weatherproof jacket with her free hand. ‘I’ll not be long.’

‘You look very like your mother, Nest.’

The girl doesn’t answer, merely turns and walks off.

Mrs Parry watches her go, keeps watching until she disappears around the bend in the road and into the palisade of trees that line it. The woman can’t help but feel the pressure of the lowering sky pressing down. She wishes she could have kept Nest back. But some things will come to pass whether you want them to or not.

Eirys Parry, who’s given to reading a lot of mythology (too much according to her far less fanciful sister Elin), once said the girl reminded her of a Norn with her thread and shears, looking for a place to cut the line of someone’s life. That some days, the girl looked like she’d be happy to do harm. Not that she could blame Nest, what with all her desires being whisked away before she could even taste them. That girl might have been born in the valley but she wasn’t meant to stay in it; forcing her to do so would only make her bitter and strong.

Eirys sighs and closes the door behind her, heads across to the other cottage where a man lies sleeping.

Nest knocks at the door of the big house and hates that it sounds so tentative. She’s been here plenty before, when the old people were still alive and haunting the place like dead folk who’d not yet lain themselves down. She knocks again, louder, more aggressively. She hurts her knuckles. There’s no sign of the navy Mercedes in the drive, but there’s a garage around the side.

Elen Lewis, Mrs Parry’s sister, answers. She’s thinner, not so kind, but she’s kept Nest in mending work for the past few years, made sure she’s been paid on time, and passed her name on to anyone who’s looking for a dab hand with invisible patches and neat stitching. There are different forms of kindness, Nest reminds herself. Mrs Lewis stands aside as if she’s been expecting the visit—and honestly, she has—and Nest steps into the foyer. When the old people died she got bolder, started coming to the front instead of the kitchen entry. Mrs Lewis has never said anything, though her eyes narrowed the first few times; the girl persisted and the older woman simply gave up.

‘Come through, Nest,’ she says, then closes the door and walks towards the kitchen.

The basket is beginning to weigh on Nest, filled as it is with heavy cambric sheets and pillowcases. She puts the burden down on the kitchen table (clean as a whistle, as always). Elen proceeds to inspect the work, one piece at a time. It might be five minutes or ten until she finds the repair, but the longer it takes the more satisfied she appears. Nest’s Aunt Ceridwen taught her how to mend and how to spin, told her when she was little all the tales that might go with those tasks to make them seem magical, interesting. For a while it worked, but most things when taken up as employment become less enchanting with each passing second. On days like this Mrs Lewis reminds her of her aunt, but Nest is confident in her skills.

‘Good,’ says Elen Lewis at last and goes into the pantry where she keeps the household funds in an old tea tin that Nest’s only ever looked into once but never taken anything from—she’s no thief—then returns with the paper notes.

Nest cannot help herself; she unfolds the money and checks the amount. Not because of a lack of trust on her part, but because Elen Lewis should know better than to check her work by now. The housekeeper waits for the little show to be over, then begins the trek from the kitchen to the front door.

A man is waiting in the entry foyer, presumably the driver of the Mercedes.

He wears dark blue jeans and a green sweater with a white collared shirt beneath; expensive-looking boots that no one in their right mind would think are for hiking. He has thinning red hair and pale blue eyes, high cheekbones; early forties, perhaps, maybe a bit younger. Almost as tall as Owain but much more slender, his shoulders wide but insubstantial as a wire coat-hanger. Thin wrists and long hands stick out a little too far beyond the ends of his sleeves. He’s staring at her, but Mrs Lewis doesn’t seem inclined to introduce them and Nest finds that she’s not especially curious because he’s staring at her as if he’s seen a ghost.

All Nest feels is the urge to run, because this is the way her father sometimes looks at her when he’s just woken from one of his frequent naps. Because it means he’s not really seeing her.

‘Hello.’ The man’s standing at the bottom of the polished stairs, one hand resting on the newel post that’s carved like an owl (for the first time in years, Nest thinks of her collection of feathers, how the magic of them never worked), one foot raised as if he was just about to ascend. His voice is soft and Nest barely hears it because there’s a clap of thunder; she wonders if she can get away with ignoring him. Mrs Lewis opens the front door and the rain’s coming down in sheets. The wind pushes it sideways and it lashes into the foyer. Then lightning strikes the ground in the garden outside and Mrs Lewis shrieks.

‘You can’t go home in that, Nest Wynne. Come back to the kitchen and wait.’ Elin fights to close the door against the tempest.

‘Wynne?’ says the man, again so softly that Nest’s not sure she’s hearing it. But she looks at him, nods curtly.

‘Is your mother Aderyn?’

‘She was.’

‘Was?’ He goes even paler, if that’s possible.

‘Who are you?’ she asks bluntly.

‘Rhys,’ he says, seeming to swallow as he says it. ‘Rhys Pugh.’

So, the son of the house.

‘I knew your mother,’ he says somewhat unnecessarily. ‘And your father. He’s well?’

‘Well enough,’ she says, unwilling to offer more.

‘Please stay?’ he asks.

She looks at him, then at the still-open door Mrs Lewis is battling.

Nest flies over the threshold and out into the weather like a stormbird.

The stories about Aderyn began soon after she’d gone (although there’d been whispers before). There was blame to be laid for ever so many things. Hari Llewellyn lost his way one night, only to find himself teetering on the edge of a cliff, just barely saving himself by the grace of God. Betrys Jones’ youngest son went a’wandering one afternoon and was found drowned in a well not three hours later. And when Rhoswen Price’s best milker dried up overnight there was simply no explanation for it.

Yet when Hari told his story he didn’t mention how much he’d had to drink in the pub that very same evening (for his wife had warned him to stay sober), but said he’d been lured off the path by a pale woman. When Betrys’ audience began to drift away from her weeping, her husband’s attention wavering from sympathy to angry grief, and the woman who’d wrapped the corpse for burial began to ask why there were marks around the tiny throat, Betrys claimed she too had seen that pale woman in the moment before little Dai disappeared. And when it seemed Rhoswen’s oldest daughter might have let the cows wander into a field where belladonna grew while she was otherwise occupied with the butcher’s boy, why then she too remembered the sight of a pale woman roaming the mists who suddenly sprang up from nowhere on a perfectly clear day.

A slim, pale woman with black as black hair who looked terribly like the disappeared Aderyn Wynne.

But Nest’s never seen her mother’s ghost, and she doesn’t see it now as she runs home in the storm. Her head’s down and the wind’s so powerful—spiteful—it keeps reefing the hood of her weatherproof away, so her hair’s soaked and icy rivulets of water run down her neck. She’s concentrating on the ground that’s so quickly soaked, trying to make sure she doesn’t slip and slide. Her eyes are pinned on the rushing streams, on the sudden mud, on the pebbles that might prove treacherous at any moment. So she doesn’t see the slim figure keeping step with her, perhaps three metres to her left, the substance of its body being whipped away by the gusts, reforming, almost as grey as the rain.

Ghosts are stirred when folk walk over their graves, when the living come back to disturb them, when there’s something amiss needing to be put right. When they’re sad or lonely or angry.

Nest doesn’t see at all.

Mrs Parry fusses when Nest gets home. She’s not only wet, but frozen with cold and the latent fear that she’d be struck by lightning. Owain’s awake, sitting in his chair by the fire; she’s irked that her father is so comfy, so toasty, so undisturbed, when she’s shaking so hard she can fair hear her bones rattle. Mrs Parry has kindly set the dinner table (for three) and Nest can smell a pot of stew on the stove. She knows it wasn’t anything from her pantry, so Eirys has brought it over from her own.

‘Da, I met someone today, said he knows you,’ Nest says as Mrs Parry rubs at her hair with an enthusiasm that feels like it might take Nest’s head off. She doesn’t truly know why she tells him, because she sensed even in the foyer that afternoon that this wasn’t someone her father would like. He looked too soft, as if he wouldn’t get his hands dirty for love or money; Owain, having made his living either hitting things or carving them, would have no interest in such a man. Perhaps it’s just a spirit of mischief, light malice, a need to make something move. Shift. But tell him she does. ‘Rhys Pugh.’

Nothing from the chair.

Above Owain’s head she can see the wedding photo on the mantle, the one her aunt would point to: Owain looking too big for his suit (borrowed for the occasion), sheepish but proud, and Aderyn, the waist of her cream guipure lace wedding dress just pushing out too far. ‘That’s you,’ Ceridwen used to say. ‘You’re the reason for the wedding, you kept her here. She’d have been gone but for you. She was going up to London to be a model, she was, and she was so lovely. But you’re why she stayed.’

When Nest had said, that one and only time, ‘But she didn’t stay’ she got a good slap for her trouble. For almost a year she’d sneak into the corner shop and surreptitiously flip through the fashion magazines to see if her mother might be in their pages, just a glimpse of that peerless face. But she gave that up, too. She doesn’t look at any magazines anymore, not even in the doctor’s surgery when she takes Owain in for his checkups.

She goes on: ‘Son of the big house, it seems.’

Still nothing. Mrs Parry eases up, whispers Nest, steps away to go to the kitchen and check on the stew they can all hear bubbling. Nest glances at Owain and he’s so very still. Perhaps he’s stopped breathing, there in his comfy chair. ‘Says he knew Mam, too.’

And still nothing, so she repeats the man’s name, louder, and Owain rockets up. Normally, when he’s upset, it’s a messy kind of thing, like an explosion, directionless and scattergun, but not this time. He’s propelled forward, straight at her, and before she knows it he’s got her sprawled on the little square table, his big hands (they’re soft-skinned nowadays) are hard and efficient around her throat. He used to fight, bare-knuckle, stripped to the waist, for prize money; that’s where Aderyn first saw him Aunt Ceridwen once said.

But here.

Now.

With the feeling of a dinner plate being crushed beneath her shoulder blades.

Her father’s grip means she’s having trouble breathing, she can’t cry out, can’t say Dadi, which would surely stop him. From the corner of her eye she can see Mrs Parry reaching from the kitchen, feet frozen, too far away, as if she’s a woman made of salt who cannot move. Nest finds what she can: one of the heavy glass tumblers that used to belong to one grandmother or other, and she slams it into the side of Owain’s head.

The thing stays intact but it does break his skin and he reels away. Nest doesn’t watch him fall, however, because over by the fireplace, in front of the wedding photo, is a woman. She’s willowy and tall, with pale skin and dark eyes and long black hair that moves as if there’s a breeze shifting the still air of the cottage.

But the thing that really gets Nest’s attention is the woman’s slender neck. There’s no birthmark, not like the one Nest remembers. But there’s a deep gash, and from it flows a river of blood. Aderyn’s hands are clasped in front of her heart as she stares wide-eyed at her daughter.

Then she’s gone in a blink.

‘Dadi?’ croaks Nest. ‘Dadi, did you see her?’

But Owain doesn’t answer.

Five stitches in Owain’s cheek, interminable questions, a cream for the bruises around Nest’s throat, and the doctor said it might be time for Owain to be re-housed.

‘Like he’s an old dog who’s bitten the hand that feeds him!’ Mrs Parry said with great offence, but Nest thinks that’s sort of how it is. They leave him in the hospital overnight for observation, and Mrs Parry, who’d driven them into town because Nest couldn’t stop shaking, takes them home again. She insists the girl eat something and ladles stew into a bowl, but Nest says it hurts to swallow.

‘You take a couple of those sleeping pills the doctor gave you. I’ll stay so you’re not alone.’

‘Eirys, who’s Rhys Pugh?’ Nest asks as she pushes away the meal.

‘Why, he’s the son of the old folk. Worked all over the world, he has.’ Mrs Parry gets up to bustle off the unwanted dish. ‘On second thought, perhaps I’ll go home to mine. I’m tired after all the excitement.’

‘He said he knew my parents.’

‘That he did.’ She’s turned, leaning over the sink. ‘I’ll be on my way then.’

‘Eirys.’ Nest’s tone is borderline unfriendly.

Mrs Parry sits back down. She rubs her hands through her grey hair before she meets Nest’s gaze. ‘There was talk about him and your mother, though she was already married and had you.’

‘What sort of talk?’

Mrs Parry just blinks, as if there could be more than one kind of talk in such a situation. Instead she says, ‘He left the night your mother disappeared, cariad.’

Nest doesn’t tell Mrs Parry about the sight of Aderyn by the fireplace, hands clasped, sliced neck, the sight overwriting every blurred memory she had of her mother’s birthmark. She doesn’t tell her how Rhys looked at her.

In the morning, Nest goes back to the big house.

The landscape looks washed clean after the storm, bright and intensely green, dew and raindrops (indistinguishable from one another) glitter on everything like gems. It shouldn’t be this pretty, Nest thinks, and she doesn’t really know what she’s going to do. Only knows that she woke from a dreamless sleep with a conviction that she needed to come here as soon as she could.

She’s about to step into the grounds proper of Pugh House when she sees the new owner wandering through the garden, coming towards her. He moves slowly, carefully, his long limbs giving him the appearance of a stick insect and she can barely imagine her mother finding this man attractive. Then again, she reminds herself, she didn’t know her mother enough to pick her tastes; only that Aderyn was with Owain because Nest was making her belly bulge all unsightly.

She darts away as the thin man gets closer, then hides behind the trees by the roadside. He exits the gate and turns to his left, picking his way along the stone wall for a while before heading up the hard-to-discern path into the hills. They walk for almost an hour, she hanging back, he never looking over his shoulder, only occasionally sagging down to sit on a rock or fallen tree when weariness takes him. She wonders if he’s ill or simply soft and out of shape. She wonders what he does for a living, what he studied.

At last, he stops in front of a tiny grey stone hut, slate tiles on the roof, two smallish windows, the whole thing leaning to one side but mostly intact; its door is hanging on one hinge. Feet planted wide apart, palms against his lower back, he arches. His head moves left and right but she can’t see his expression. Her fingers in the jacket pocket touch the handle of the shears she grabbed from the basket before she left, the ones she uses to snip skeins, to cut threads when she’s done sewing something together. As Nest watches he puts a hand to the door, which falls to the ground with a crash.

After a moment, Rhys steps inside.

After a moment more, Nest follows.

She stands in the doorway for a few seconds, sees he’s got a torch and is shining it around the single room although the light that comes in through the dirty windows is almost enough on its own. There’s a bed, two chairs, a table, that’s all; everything covered in dust and mould.

‘How long?’ she asks and he jumps, gives a small shriek. He turns to look at her and his face is a pale moon in the dimness. ‘How long?’

‘What?’

‘How long were you seeing her? Aderyn.’ Nest knows she’s assuming a lot and she’s not giving her mother much credit for taste. Except she can’t help think that Aderyn suffered the same sense of being trapped, of having all her chances taken away by someone else. By the weight of a child in her belly and the thin gold band that wrapped around her finger like a chain. And that this man escaped with no consequences at all.

His expression gives him away. ‘Not long. Six months. You were very small. She’d bring you here, sometimes, when the aunt wouldn’t watch you.’

Nest blinks. Searches her memory for this place, comes up empty. She was three when Aderyn went, surely she could recall something. But there is nothing there, not quite a blank but a blackness perhaps. Like something covered over. She pulls the shears from her pocket without really knowing she’s doing it. His eyes grow wide as if he’s trying to see more in the gloom, but she can see a sweat break out on his brow even though it’s so very cool here.

‘She was married. She had me. She had Owain.’

‘She was beautiful and she was better than him.’

‘You weren’t.’ Nest takes a step further into the room.

‘She was supposed to come with me.’

‘When?’

‘That night. The night I left for university.’ He swallows, realises he’s said something wrong, and in a second Nest realises it too.

‘She was going to leave me behind.’

He doesn’t shake his head or nod, just carries on as if she might forget what he’s let loose. ‘But she didn’t. She didn’t come to meet me. I waited as long as I could ...’

‘And you went without checking on her.’

‘I thought she’d chosen him. You might have been mine,’ he says, then amends, ‘if I’d met her sooner. You’d be living in a big house, not some hovel.’

Nest bristles. The cottage is small, but it’s clean and neat and comfortable. He’s doing himself no favours with his casual contempt. She takes five steps into the cottage and kicks his right knee with her proper hiking boots. Hears the crunch, sees his expression, hears the hiss of air as he collapses and tries not to land on the injured leg.

‘You could have been my daughter.’ He gets this out between clenched teeth as she stands over him.

But Nest knows it’s not true. Because she’d never be on her knees like this, weeping and begging. He’d never have forced anyone to sob like this. That’s why she’s Owain’s child. Not this snivelling thing her mother was foolish enough to love. More than that, she thinks about his expression when he realised Aderyn was gone. He’d not known. And because she’s Owain’s child, she knows now what her father did.

She thinks about sticking the shears into this thin man. About unpicking him at his edges until the stuffing slides out. Part of her says No, but the other part is leaking where he tore a hole in her with his words. Aderyn would have left her behind. Aderyn would have gone if something else hadn’t stopped her. Aderyn left, but it had been easier to bear when it had only seemed against her will.

Nest lifts the shears, brings them down with force.

Nest’s a bit late picking Owain up from the hospital because she had to go home and shower, burn the weatherproof jacket and jeans. No one will ask about them. She doesn’t go into town enough and no one pays sufficient attention to comment on her wardrobe. Her father’s quiet when she collects him, and the nurses say he’s been good all night. That he’s still got a lot of the sedatives in him and she must make sure he keeps getting his dose with meals. Nest nods and takes the bottles from them along with the prescriptions. She holds her father’s arm tenderly when she helps him into the car. His balance isn’t what it used to be. She holds him as if she still cares and supposes that perhaps she does.

He doesn’t say anything, not even Hello. Doesn’t say anything until she fails to take the turn-off to their out-of-town holding. He mumbles, ‘Where we go?’ He sounds like a drunkard though she knows he’s not.

‘Just a nice drive, Da. Get some fresh air.’

The mine closed half a century ago, there’s just the vertical shaft now where once a metal cage plied its way up and down carrying men and ore. The machinery’s long gone, and the planks they nailed over the hole to stop anyone falling in are old and rotten, splintered and swollen from the elements above and below. Rain, sleet, snow, baking sun are regular and to be expected, but from beneath? Sometimes a stink will rise up from below ground and seep out between the cracks in the wood. So corrosive that any passing rabbit or fox, or bird flying low enough, might get a whiff and swoon.

Nest thinks of Rhys’s expression when he heard her mother had disappeared. When he’d seen her, Nest, in the doorway of the cottage had he thought it was Aderyn, unchanged? Ah, too late to ask now.

She thinks about Owain, how he cared for her as long as he could until whatever was eating him away inside got the better of him. He’d never hurt her until last night when she’d pushed. Aderyn must have pushed, too, seeing Rhys Pugh behind her husband’s back. Ever since Nest saw her mother by the hearth all she can taste is that flood of red as if it’s pouring down her own throat instead of Aderyn’s. It doesn’t matter how much mouthwash she swills about, there’s just the slick on her tongue of hot wet iron.

No, Owain never hurt his daughter. He kept her here, though. In this fucking valley with its mountains like walls and locked doors. He lost his mind, didn’t he, and with it the key to her escape. Another life, put beyond her reach because she was his child and she loved him and so she stayed.

She pulls over by the side of the road. There’s no fence around the defunct mine because it’s so far out and closed so long ago that no rules said there needed to be one. She helps Owain out of the car, steadies him. There were other ways she could have done this, she knows, but sometimes there’s really only one that will satisfy.

‘Did you go looking for her, Da? When you went wandering? All those days?’

But Owain says nothing.

‘Ah, you knew where you put her once, didn’t you? Did you forget though? Sometimes?’

Still no answer.

Nest walks slowly to match her father’s stuttering gait. He’s smaller now, still tall even with the stoop, but he’s lighter, so much less on his bones. Whatever he took from Aderyn he took from himself, as well; only his life seeped away far more slowly.

There’s a malodorous whiff on the breeze as they get closer to the boarded-up maw. Nest coughs. She makes out a mist above the platform, thinks it’s the end of one of the mine’s fetid exhalations. But then Owain takes in a sharp breath and she sees what he does.

Her mother waits, hovering above the splintered planks that to Nest’s eyes look little more than toothpicks. Aderyn doesn’t talk. Even ghostly, she’s not managed to mesh her severed windpipe together. She’s just watching, eyes gentle, smile sweet. And Owain doesn’t stop walking, if anything his pace picks up, though it doesn’t become any surer.

Nest wonders if he remembers what he did. If he believes the lies he told his daughter, about daylight and twilight gates, about faeries and kidnappings, and faithless women who turn into owls. If he’s moving forward because of whatever kind of love he has left for his wife, or because he knows he deserves what’s coming. When they reach the spot where the planks have lifted a little at the edges, he hesitates. But Aderyn lies beyond it, two feet, three, four, and there’s no other way for him to get to her what with the brambles grown up either side; he doesn’t want to be torn to shreds, no matter what else might happen. No little pains, not for this.

‘Go on, Da.’ She nods when he looks at her. ‘She’s waiting for you.’

And so she is. Aderyn smiles and Owain takes a step forward, the tip of his shoe knocking against a bit of rotten wood. He lifts the foot higher, brings it tentatively down. Nest lets his arm go. He brings the left foot up and forward to rest beside the right. The planks protest beneath him but do not break. Heartened, Owain takes another step, then another, and suddenly he’s halfway across the covering and Nest thinks He might just fucking make it!

But then there’s a groaning, a creaking, and a splitting and splintering. The boards break apart as if they’re trying not to but really have no choice. And her father doesn’t look at her as if she’s a traitor, he doesn’t look at her at all, but at his wife whose neck is bright red once again with her own blood because that’s what happens when a murderer comes near his victim after she’s dead; the blood runs once more to tell the world what he’s done.

But there’s only Nest to watch and witness, and perhaps she’s the only one who needs to be there. Owain is gone in a second that seems longer than it should be. He doesn’t cry out. Aderyn waits and Nest thinks it must be all those moments that it takes for her father’s body to reach the bottom of the shaft. Aderyn floats over to the hole her husband left; she inclines her head at her daughter, then descends like a discarded feather into the depths and darkness of the abandoned mineshaft.

Strangely, Nest is pleased Owain won’t be alone.

She’s on her knees weeping when a gust of gas billows up. It burns her lungs and she can’t rise. But something else happens: she feels a thousand tiny pins prick her skin, she feels new bones burst from her back like spears. She feels herself shrink and shrivel, her eyes going round, her nose and mouth scrinching up and in, tightening. Her feet claw and her hands disappear, shorten.

In the seconds before her mind changes entirely Nest understands, at last, that women don’t become birds when they’re faithless, but when they’re released from burdens they never asked for.

Nest stretches her wings and rises.

Angela Slatter is the author of seven novels, including All the murmuring bones, The path of thorns and The briar book of the dead, The crimson road as well as twelve short story collections, including The bitterwood bible and The tallow-wife and other tales. She's won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Shirley Jackson, a Ditmar, a Premier Ignotus Award, three Australian Shadows Awards, and eight Aurealis Awards; her work has been translated into multiple languages. She has an MA and a PhD in creative writing, and occasionally teaches creative writing. She’s collaborated with Mike Mignola on a new series from Dark Horse Comics, Castle Full of Blackbirds, set in the Hellboy Universe. You can find her online at angelaslatter.com.