Oak for Her Bones, Alder for Her Limbs

by Anne Leonard

The other girls in the village had only to smile at a boy for their wombs to quicken, it seemed, but I conceived no children no matter how many lovers I took to my bed. At first this was a relief, but as I grew older it was a loneliness. So I decided to fashion my own daughter.

I left home and studied for years with all the witches and spellcasters I could. In huts hidden by mazes, in palace towers with locked doors, in deep dungeons, on wild moors and in lonely hollows, I found these women, and I asked and studied and learned. And then, finally, I was ready.

From the seven trees I made her: oak for her bones, alder for her limbs, apple for her fingers. Her hair was lush elder, her heart ash, her head carved from yew. Bark of a hazel became her skin. I said the spell, and she came to life, and she was beautiful. I called her Rose.

I raised her far away from the village where I had lived, and no one knew that she had sprung to life without a father. She grew, and we loved each other, and when she was twenty she married a kind young man whose eyes were the color of summer leaves and whose hair gleamed red-gold in the sun.

But she was made of wood, and she bore no children.

When Rose had been married several years, she came to me and said, “Mother, help me have a child.”

What was I to tell her? That she was a tree?

I should have spoken then. I should have spoken earlier. But a secret long held becomes a lock.

So I gave her the spells and herbs that I knew were for fertility, hoping that one magic might counter another, and sent her home. A year later she returned, still barren, and this time I could only give her words of comfort. They were no comfort to her.

A third time she came. This time her brown eyes showed no yielding. She spoke, and I could tell she had planned the words carefully, to stab like thorns and prove that I had blood.

She said, “Mother, do I have no children because I have no father?”

The question saddened me. I wondered if in giving her life I had given her absence and emptiness. I put my hands over my face, then lowered them. Her expression showed sympathy but not surrender.

I said, “I made you out of wood.”

She was still. I had not surprised her. “Help me make a child. Please.”

We worked for seven days and seven nights. She chose the parts. We made a skeleton of strong and supple willow, a heart of red clay, lungs of mossy earth, and a womb of a snail shell. We used sturdy linen for the skin and filled the body with sawdust. I carved the head from wood as I had carved Rose’s head years ago. Quartz for the eyes, tangled mistletoe for her hair.

We finished our work at night under a full moon. The quartz glittered in the silver light.

I said, “If you come home with a child, your husband will know it is not his.”

“He knows what I am. He told me what to ask.”

I wondered what magic belonged to him. The night held no answer.

“Should I say the spell now?” I asked. “Or should I teach it to you to say yourself, later? Children are hard to travel with.”

“Teach me, and I can say it with him,” she said, which made me glad.

She stayed another day, learning the spell, and in the evening prepared to go home. When everything was ready, waiting for dawn, the child-form wrapped up and packed like a doll, we sat by the fire and talked. Rose’s face was beautiful and calm.

Then she looked at me and said, “What are you made from?”

My heart thumped and thumped but did not manage to bring enough blood to my head. I clutched my chair while the world ebbed in and out of darkness and wind rushed by my ears.

Slowly, thought returned, but it did not fill the sudden ache in my whole being. Discovery had scraped away everything I thought I knew.

My mother had died when I was small, and I had been raised by my father’s sister. It had never occurred to me that I was not a natural child, not even in the most tangled moments of my spellcraft. Now the magic that gave me life danced and echoed in my unnatural bones.

Was my mother also made? My grandmother? How far back did it go?

I imagined it, generation after generation of children made from wood or clay or straw and fabric. Eyes painted on, carved, stitched. The secret shared, or not. Rediscovered and rediscovered. Were there thousands of such lineages, all ending in daughters who did not want children and never asked?

“You didn’t know,” Rose said.

“No.”

She got up from the stool she was sitting on and came to my side, bent over and kissed my cheek. She smelled of bark and newly split green wood.

In the morning, she left. I stood watching long after she was out of sight. The sun cascaded over the plants, and the bees hummed in the rosebush. I raised my hand to my nose and smelled beeswax and straw.

Whatever my mother had used to make my heart, she had not stinted on it. And I had not stinted Rose. Ash, clay, flesh, they did not matter so long as there was love.

Anne Leonard is a novelist (Moth and Spark) and short story writer. Her short fiction has most recently appeared in F&SF and Translunar Travelers Lounge. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two cats. Her hobbies include hiking and photography.