“Frieda, I am scared,” whispered Maria.
“Me, too,” answered Frieda slowly. “But fear gives us our wits. Now, we needs put the breeze to our backs. It was in our face when we entered the wood.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, quite.” The young woman feigned confidence. “Now, let’s have a good drink from the spring and be off.”
The pair drew ample draughts of water from the spring fast losing its sparkle in the fading light of day. Ready, they peered into the darkening canopy overhead for some sign of rustling leaves. The trees were still. Frieda licked her finger and held it in the air, feeling for the cool side. “There.” She pointed. “The air is coming from there.”
Hurrying across the soft floor of the forest, Frieda and Maria made their way into an ever-deepening thicket of unfamiliar saplings and tangled bushes. Both soon realized that they had not come that way before. They stopped. The sun had now set below the unseen horizon, and cool breezes swirled from each direction. Frieda was perspiring and pale. She dared not display her growing terror to the little girl at her side, but she wanted for all the world to burst into tears.
Maria took her hand. “Listen!” she whispered.
The two became perfectly still.
“There!” answered Frieda. “I think I heard a voice.” The two stared blankly into the thickening blackness of the wood. The muffled trumpeting of a horn faded away.
“Here!” shouted Frieda suddenly. “Here! We are here!” The young woman ran toward the sounds, stumbling and tripping in the increasing darkness. Maria raced behind her, shouting frantically. The two crashed through brush and bramble until finally pausing to listen again.
“Do you hear anything?” whispered Maria.
Unable to hold back her tears, Frieda shook her head.
Maria looked up with imploring, trusting eyes. She took the young woman’s hand in hers and waited.
Frieda stared fearfully at the dark images of trees now rising about her like so many silent creatures of the night. She shivered and spun about. We are lost! she thought. Lost!
“In the morning, then?” asked Maria. “Shall we wait until the morning?”
“I… I… yes, of course. In the morning they’ll surely find us.”
The two said nothing more but felt their way to a clearing they could barely see. All had become shadows and shades, mere hints of blacks and grays with eerie slivers of silver sent from an unfriendly moon. They crouched nervously against a wide trunk and held each other tightly as the sounds of the night stirred about them.
Neither dared to sleep. They had spent many hours at the knees of elders who had told them of the woodland spirits, of the secret kingdoms of wicked gnomes, and of dragon’s lairs. “On the half-moon, sprites go to war with fairies,” Maria whispered.
“Tis a crescent moon tonight, methinks.”
“On crescent moons the spell-casters meet in the hall of the toad queen. They seek the tongues of little girls,” Maria whispered in a tightening voice.
Frieda opened her mouth to answer but suddenly remembered the daughter of her father’s bailiff who was born mute under a crescent moon. “We mustn’t think of these things.”
At that moment, an owl burst from its unseen perch and swooped overhead, flapping its wings violently. The startled girls cried out, then held each other all the more tightly. The curtain of night now hung fully over the wood. The air was heavy, and a silent mist began to gather along the forest floor. Staring into nothingness, the pair trembled. New shadows seemed to appear, then disappear, only to give rise to another here and yet more there. It was as though the woodland was silently taunting them, daring them to move from their place and wander amidst the hauntings.
Maria and Frieda held each and leaned into the smooth bark of a night-blackened beech. The older maiden closed her eyes and sang to the little one her “Maria’s Song.”
Let me take you by the hand, and let us laugh beneath the sun….
The words comforted them both, and Frieda’s confident tone soon filled them with courage to endure the blackness of the forest. When the song was over, the two settled under their black canopy to imagine sunbeams and springtime meadows, rainbows and butterflies—and a splendid valley of wildflowers.
And so they waited until the morning songbirds coaxed the darkness to yield. And yield it did, for despite its stubborn, stiff-necked pride, the forest did not rule the sun; it could command nothing and finally submitted to the insistent sky above.
“Maria! The morning is finally come!”
The little girl nodded wearily, greatly relieved to have survived the ghostly terrors of the night.