Alayla knew one thing: if they couldn't find her, they couldn't make her wear a dress. She'd slipped from her bed before the sun's light had reached the windows of her home. Her sisters Avara and Amallea were still asleep, and would be until the twins came to wake them for breakfast. Alayla reached under her bed for her pack, snapped it around her shoulders, and slid her weatherproof cloak out from between the mattress and the bed's frame. She tip-toed past the younger girls in their beds to reach the window, held the glass steady with one hand as she undid the latch and pushed with the other. The window gave one resisting creak, then swung open. She looked back, but the girls didn't stir. Alayla smiled, crawled onto the sill, and disappeared over the edge.
The vine of emberblooms that grew up the side of the house held Alayla's weight easily. Her mother hadn't yet caught on to her latest escape route from her bedroom, because Alayla had only tried it once before. Last winter she'd been caught sliding down the steep slope of the roof only to land safely in a snowdrift piled at the corner of the house. Papa had dug away the snow from around the house's perimeter that afternoon, and Alayla had been confined to her room for a whole week. It took her that long to figure out she could use the sheets of her bed to make a knotted rope. It wasn't long enough to reach the ground, but she didn't need it to. As soon as she was free she'd knicked a hook from Papa's barn. With the hook securely fastened at the end, she'd tossed her makeshift rope in the direction of the young oak tree by her window. She caught a bough on the first try, which was lucky because if she'd missed the hook would have most likely crashed through the kitchen window below her. Using the knots as handles, she'd traversed the open air between her window and the tree, then shimmied down. But her luck ran out when Alayla came back that morning. She couldn't reach the lowest branch to climb back up. Mother found her pinch-faced and defiant sitting at the bottom of the tree, the evidence of her escape swinging above her.
"What am I going to do with you?" Mother asked, but she'd said it with just the trace of a smile. "The woods again, I take it?"
Alayla had only nodded. She stood when her mother beckoned, and followed her quietly into the house. Her mother had dipped a cloth in the kettle on the fire, then slowly cleaned Alayla's face. "You slept out there?" Alayla had said nothing, but she curled into her mother's lap. She felt her mother's thin, strong fingers picking leaves and twigs from her long, tangled hair. They'd sat like that, in the blue light of morning before dawn, without saying anything. When she was finished combing out the forest debris, her mother had turned Alayla around to face her. "Your papa says the woods are dangerous, my wild daughter."
"Papa is wrong," Alayla responded. "Elves have always lived in the woods."
Her mother had sighed, kissed her forehead, and said, "We gave up the forest long ago. Now go upstairs and sneak back into your room."
Alayla had done as she was told, but not before muttering under her breath, "I did not give up the forest. I will never give up the forest."
And now it was the Summer Festival, and Papa had declared that now that Alayla was fourteen, she had to go as a young lady of his family, a young lady of the village of Sindel. That meant a dress, flowers in her braids, and worst of all, dancing. Alayla had no choice: she had to run away. She would live as a wilderelf; she would return to the forest forever.
She stared at her family's home, for a moment, dimly illuminated on one side by the soft glow of the emberbloom flowers. She would miss them--her older sisters, the beautiful twins Arlynn and Aislynn, and Avara, who followed her around in the daytime like a second shadow, and Amallea, who was only just starting to talk now and pronounced her name "Awaya." And Papa. He was a sylelf; but he couldn't help that. He'd been born in the fine cities of men, had been raised to believe that an elf's place was in the politics of men, ruling over them. He wasn't a bad father, he just didn't understand Alayla. She was too much a wilderelf, too much her mother.
Her mother. She would miss her mother most of all. Alayla closed her eyes and imagined her mother's walnut-brown skin, her hair the color of falling leaves, her eyes the green of spring buds. The way she moved through the house, silent and graceful and quick. She wore the dresses Papa bought for her, she danced the steps he asked her to, and she smiled as the wife of a village councilman should smile, but she didn't fool Alayla. She hadn't given up the forest. How could she? She was the forest; it lived in her breath and her blood.
Alayla opened her eyes, wiped at a threatening tear, then ran silently away from her home and up into the dark woods that bordered Sindel.
