“Jesus,” Blue said; then he forced his way in, calling for Ginny.
Esmeralda followed in his wake, arms upraised to keep the branches that Blue pushed aside from snapping back against her face.
“Over here!” they heard Ginny call back.
They followed the sound of her voice to find her sitting at the strange gnarled and branched growth that had once been her desk, light from the computer screen giving her features a ghostly glow. Her face and forearms had sustained dozens of tiny scratches and her usually neat clothing was all torn and disarrayed.
“Are you all right?” Esmeralda asked.
Ginny nodded. “I won’t say I wasn’t frightened when it started, but... I’m not sure. I know everything’s in a terrible confusion, but somehow it all feels right at the same time—do you know what I mean?”
Blue and Esmeralda just shook their heads, but Ginny was no longer looking at them. She’d turned her attention back to the screen.
“All except for this,” she added, nodding at the screen.
Blue and Esmeralda made their way through the thicker clutter of growth around what had once been the desk to look at the screen. All that was on it was a flickering image that they both recognized as coming from one of the Weirdin bones that Sara had discovered so long ago.
“I looked it up in that folio that Sara brought back from Cornwall last year,” Ginny said. “It’s Secondary, Second Rank. The Forest.”
Of course, Blue thought. What else could it be?
“And Jamie?” Esmeralda asked, beating Blue by a half second to the question he was about to ask himself. “Have you talked to him?”
Leaves stirred about the transformed desk as she spoke. Energy seemed to radiate from her.
Ginny shook her head.
“This is all that’ll come up. I’ve tried rebooting, but no matter what I do, I can only get this image.”
Soul of the Machine
The Owl—wisdom, darkness, death
—Weirdin disc; Tertiary: Mobile, 57.b
Coyote wind howls through
a star-jawed night
Sky-gaped high lonesome
and wild.
Maybe the last buffalo—
Maybe the last buffalo soldier
Talking to his campfire late one night
Heard from the ember-eyed darkness
Something was not right.
—Ron Nance “Jackalope Blues”
1
Sara gave it her best, but the fog wouldn’t clear from her mind. The warm secret strength of her taw remained just a memory, its presence clouded from her approach no matter how desperately she tried to call it up. The harder she tried, the less success she had until finally even the moonheart air was lost to her.
To make matters worse, tendrils of mist had drifted into the glade as well. Unlike the fog in her mind, these were a very real physical presence that made her clothing damp and her hair frizz even more than its natural curliness. She pulled a jacket out of her pack and put it on, but still shivered, feeling cold, wet and miserable. The mist thickened into a soupy fog that grew so dense she could no longer even see the trees that surrounded the glade.
Wonderful, she thought as she got to her feet. As if she wasn’t feeling wretched enough being stuck here in the first place.
She walked back and forth, the collar of her jacket turned up, hands stuck in her pockets against the chill, peering into the shadowy undergrowth that choked every approach into the forest. She wasn’t sure if it was just her imagination, or her poor memory, but the brambly bushes and thorn thickets under the trees seemed to be more dense than she remembered them from when she first arrived. Earlier it had seemed possible, if a daunting prospect, to force her way through them. No longer. The undergrowth, not to mention the trees and the fog that assailed both her physical senses and her mind, were all conspiring to hem her in.
She hated this feeling of imprisonment and helplessness.
There had to be a way out.
Pausing in front of the forest—she wasn’t sure which way she was facing; there didn’t seem to a sense of direction in this place—she studied the tangle of branch, thorn and briar. The growth was so thick she wondered if she couldn’t just clamber over the top of it like a mountain climber scaling some brambly equivalent of a range of foothills.
She was half-minded to try—things couldn’t get any worse just waiting here for God knew what, could they?—when she heard a sound.
A rustle of cloth against thorn.
A footstep.
The sounds came from behind her, their source hidden in the fog. She turned, uneasy with the forest at her back, and tried to look through the fog to see who—or what—was approaching. Opening and closing her hands, she wished she’d had the foresight to bring along some kind of a weapon. Even a club would feel just dandy, right now. But she hadn’t brought a thing, and there was nothing close at hand that she could use, while the footsteps just kept coming closer.
A knot twisted into life in the pit of her stomach. She was torn between the desire to hide—only where?—or shout out a challenge at whoever it was that was approaching. Panic shivered up through her nerves, effectively dispelling the fog in her mind, but that didn’t help much now. At this particular moment she was too anxious to try to call up her taw.
She backed up until the thorns behind her were pressed uncomfortably against the seat of her jeans. There was no place to run, nothing to use as a weapon.
Why had she never learned karate or something equally useful for a situation just like this? Better yet, why had she allowed herself to get into a situation like this in the first place? She should have taken Tal up on his offer to accompany her, or at least brought the wolves along. Who cared how memorable her arrival might be in her homeworld? Right now she’d settle just to arrive, thank you very much.
She began to sidle away along the edge of the forest, moving to her right as quietly as possible. Maybe she could get around the mysterious intruder and... and what? Escape? Not bloody likely. Jump him? She could use her backpack as a weapon, maybe, and—
She shrieked as a hand came out of the mist to touch her arm. Falling back into the briars, she flailed out with her hands as a figure took shape behind the arm, reaching down for her. Thorns pierced through her jeans, puncturing her skin in a dozen places. Her hair got entangled in the briars until she couldn’t move her head. Effectively trussed and helpless, she could only watch as the figure took on recognizable characteristics.
All her energy ran from her and she lay limply back in her thorny prison, heedless for the moment of the pricking thorns.
“I don’t believe this,” she said.
If she’d been standing, he’d come up to about the middle of her chest. He was a small, roundheaded individual who seemed all eyes and grin, his broad features framed by two dozen or more Rastaman dreadlocks. Stuck into his belt was a small applewood flute.
“Hey, Sara,” Pukwudji said.
“What are you doing here?”
The big saucer eyes went sad as a fawn’s, which immediately made Sara feel like a heel.
“Don’t you like me anymore?” the little honochen’o’keh asked.
“Of course I do. It’s just—would you help me out of here?”
It took a few moments to untangle her hair, and a few more to get her free of the bushes whose thorny branches clung to her clothes like snagged fishhooks, but finally she was free of their uncomfortable embrace and standing in the glade once more. Gingerly, she explored the backs of her legs and her rump, wincing at all the little punctures.
“Why were you lying in the bushes?” Pukwudji asked.
She looked down into his face, the broad features turned up to her, an eager-to-please smile in his eyes. Try though she might, it was next to impossible to stay angry with him. She was too relieved just to be in his familiar company.
She sat down so that she wouldn’t be towering above him and he immediately lowered himself to the gr
ass across from her. Nothing seemed quite so grim now—it was hard for anything to seem grim around his infectious good humor.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“I heard the call of your music—in here, hey?” He tapped his head. “And so I followed the sound of it.” He looked around at the befogged glade. “Why did you come here?”
“I didn’t mean to come here. It just sort of... happened.”
Pukwudji nodded wisely as though it was an everyday occurrence. Maybe among his own people it was.
“Where is here, anyway?” Sara added.
“It’s hard to tell,” Pukwudji replied. “The forest is full of voices all talking at once.”
“Voices?”
“The trees. Talking. All of them at once.”
Sara sighed. “Great. The Kendell luck’s running about par for the course.”
“But if I don’t know where we are,” Pukwudji added, “I do know what this place is.”
“You do?”
He nodded, dreadlocks shaking around his head like so many furry snakes.
“This isn’t a forest that is or was,” he said. “It’s one that might have been, hey?”
Sara blinked. “Could you run that by me again?”
Now it was Pukwudji’s turn to look confused.
“Where did you say we were?” Sara tried.
“In a might-be place that is,” he said.
“That doesn’t make much sense. How can a place that only might exist still be real?”
“It’s made from a mind—just like worldwalking, hey?”
“We’re in somebody’s mind?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “Someone’s called the forest that might have been to the place where it would have stood—had it existed.”
But it’s here, Sara wanted to say. Growing all around us. So it does exist. But instead she just asked, “Who called it?”
“Don’t know. Could be something’s called it, hey?”
“This is getting too spacey for me,” Sara complained. “Can we get out of here?”
“Where do you want to go?” Pukwudji asked.
“To Tamson House—to the garden.”
“Okay,” the honochen’o’keh said. He’d picked the expression up from Kieran and it always sounded strange to Sara, coming from him. “I’ll look for it.”
He closed his eyes, features scrunching up comically as he concentrated, and then he laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Sara asked him.
“Where you want to go,” he managed before a new fit of giggles came over him.
“I don’t get the joke. What’s so funny about my wanting to go to Tamson House?”
“But that’s where we are. In its garden.”
Sara looked carefully through the fog. If she squinted, she could just make out the towering shapes of the trees standing closest to them. The House’s garden—her Mondream Wood—might seem at times to be larger than it really was, but there was nothing even remotely like this forest in its acreage.
She shook her head.
“No way,” she said. “I’ve been gone a year, but there’s no way the garden’s going to get this overgrown in that time. Trees like that’d take a hundred years or more to get that big.”
“But it’s true,” Pukwudji said as she turned back to look at him. “I would never lie to you. You’re my friend, remember?”
“Of course we’re friends.”
“So you see, it’s true.”
“But...”
Her voice trailed off.
You must return to the Wood.
That’s what he’d said, the hooded man who’d come to her as a ghost. She’d just assumed that by wood he’d meant her name for the garden that lay enclosed by Tamson House. She’d just assumed that everything would be the same. But if there was—to use the kind of description Blue would—a great big mother of a forest in the middle of the garden, then things weren’t the same at all, were they? Things could be very wrong indeed.
She wondered if she should go back for help. If Pukwudji could take her...
“Do you want to see the House?” he asked.
“You can get us through all of that?” Sara replied, waving a hand toward the closest part of the forest.
The little man nodded.
It wouldn’t hurt to have a look, would it? Just to scout out the situation before she went running back to Tal and the others like some little bimbo from one of those mushy romance books who was always looking for the heroes to rescue her?
“How do we get through?” she asked.
Pukwudji leapt to his feet, his grin so wide it seemed to split his face in two.
“We ask for passage, hey!”
Sara didn’t rise from the ground quite so enthusiastically.
“We ask,” she said.
Pukwudji nodded.
“That’s it,” Sara said. “It’s that simple.”
“What would you do?” Pukwudji asked.
“Ask, of course,” Sara said.
She followed him to the edge of the trees. The undergrowth seemed, if anything, even more densely overgrown than before.
“Ask who?” she added.
“The forest,” her companion said.
He laid his hands lightly on the nearest bush, his palms barely touching the tips of its branches, and closed his eyes. A moment later, the brush began to move aside, revealing a twisting narrow passage that led off under the trees. Sara took a step back.
“I don’t like this much,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” Pukwudji said. “The forest likes me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it told me so, hey!”
He stepped onto the path and looked expectantly over his shoulder at her.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Sara told him. “I don’t like it, but I’m coming.”
She shivered as she stepped under the first trees, expecting something to fall upon her at any moment. But all that happened was that the path continued to open up through the jumble of brush and fallen trees ahead of them—and closed up behind them.
I hope I don’t regret this, Sara thought, but then she had to laugh at herself. What was she talking about? She’d regretted it from the moment she’d found herself stranded in the glade. Brave and heroic, she wasn’t. But she decided that naiveté and foolishness—that she carried around with her in quantities far exceeding a normal person’s allotment.
2
Julianne Trelawny had never been overly fond of her hourglass figure. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the way she looked so much as that how she looked got in the way of her relationships with both men and women. Men tended to focus solely on her amplitude, while women were either irritated by the attention that her figure brought her, or dismissed her as a bimbo. None of which was fair, but fair in this world, where everything was judged by its packaging, was just the first third of fairy tale. She’d learned long ago not to expect fairness.
But it was hard.
Blue, for all his machismo image, was one of the few men she knew who actually looked her in the face when he talked to her; who right from the very start had treated her as a person rather than a centerfold, which was probably why she let him get away with calling her Jools—a name that came as dangerously close to sounding like prime bimbo material as she’d ever heard. Occasionally she found herself wishing he wasn’t already involved with someone, but so far she’d managed to keep that line of thinking as just stray thoughts. A homewrecker she wasn’t—no matter how many women prejudged her that way.
Still, Blue was the exception. Most guys fell into two camps—those who lusted and those who pretended that they didn’t—which made the hope of finding a good relationship just that: a hope. And Julianne had as much faith in hope as she did in fairness. She was a doer; she preferred to just carry on, rather than wait for the world to change to suit her needs.
It was the same with her pagan beliefs. She didn’t pretend to be wha
t she wasn’t; she didn’t hide the fact that she was Wicca, but she was sick to death at how that was just one more thing that let people prejudge a person. She tried to explain why she followed the Goddess to those people who seemed genuinely interested in hearing what she had to say, but she couldn’t offer them proof in the validity of what she believed any more than a Christian or Muslim could offer it up to authenticate their own faiths.
All she knew was that there was more to the world than what could be perceived with the five senses and that she couldn’t accept that Mystery as having its source in some power-hungry god whose church’s creeds were based on denial of all secular matters, as though the beauty of this world was not a thing to be cherished for its own sake, but was rather a testing ground for how one would or would not be rewarded in the afterlife.
There was magic in a forest, on a mountaintop or seashore; in the heart of a desert and, yes, even on a city street. There was beauty in humankind and the creatures with which they shared this world; and there was mystery, too. If the Goddess and her followers smacked too much of the supernatural for people, that was just too bad for them. She wasn’t on a crusade. She’d campaign for environmental concerns, for disarmament, for human rights, but not for the Goddess. That was private, between the Goddess and her and those other few souls who were similarly inclined.
Everybody else wanted proof. They wanted miracles. She couldn’t give them either. She’d never experienced either—just the simple truth that the world itself was a great mystery worthy of devotion.
Until now.
Like Cal, she’d initially been frightened when the tree came crashing up through the floorboards—its monstrous size, the cacophony of its passage, the sheer impossibility of its presence, appearing here in the middle of a house, in the middle of a city. It stripped away all her conceptions of the world and how it worked.
But only for a moment. Long enough for Cal to rescue her from the sweeping branches and find them both sanctuary behind the battered sofa. Yet that first mind-numbing scream of panic that knifed through her gave way to an astonishing calm. While Cal was still hugging her close, muttering, “We’re going to die, we’re going to die,” she pulled herself free from his embrace to look over the edge of the sofa and watch the tree’s final upward movement.
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