Nuthatches circled invisibly overhead, scattering shadows over the rider’s hands. They blended with the deep amethyst silhouettes of birch tips and pine, tracing the arch of her thumb and forefinger, leaving vanishing stains over the rein leather which lay tight in her grasp.

The firs had hushed their branches. The bracken at their curved roots stilled their wind-dancing as her horse’s hooves parted their hunched backs— flecking the ferns with earth (speckles and riddles, like the shadows on the rider’s hands).

The young bear, on sturdy leg, dropped humbly to all fours. Ghosts of long-slain men held their soundless breath. Fairies and twisted grey goblins peered from their hideaways to watch her pass, with squinted eyes which hardly knew the light of day.

Only the old woodsmen knew who she was.

A queen of some distant region of forest, they said. Of low bent oaks and tangled moss tapestries. She rode by twilight— a will o’ the wisp in woman’s form, drawing wanderers to her kingdom. They never returned.

She had charmed an alliance of sorts out of the sun. If ever she turned her face to a mortal, the sunshine whirled and shifted about her nose and lips, and seemed to sparkle a different color in her deep-set eyes. A terrifyingly beautiful trick of the light, by which she took the form of the perplexed watcher’s sweetheart.

And thus, with their stunned confusion, drawn buckskin-clad huntsmen and dreamy-eyed poets — dashing dragoons, with their flashing silver gorgets — deeper and deeper into the thicket.

She appeared one morning with long plaits of russet hair falling down her back and shadow-formed freckles, like stars, about her nose. By afternoon, sand colored hair was cut short about her shoulders— a noble nose, a dimpled lip. So that the wild things paused when she rode alone through the wood, hoping to bear witness to her true form.

But at such times a velvety sheet of shadow formed an immovable veil over her features. A strange dusk-like shroud, even as warm evening danced in summer loveliness over her fingers and rippled in the gilt girdle at her waist, from which her robe tumbled in worsted green folds.

The stirrup leathers made no sound as they walked at stupor pace.

And only the flecks of mud— like tree shadows on the fern beds— to prove they had ever passed that way. Only the forms of mud on a fern blade to hint the fate of those vanished into the rough margins of a mire, where their footprints suddenly ended.