Snow Comes to Hawk's Folly

by J. Kathleen Cheney

  Shaking her head, Imogen headed back to where her buggy waited. She only hoped Guaire would have news for her when she reached home.

  ***

  Guaire followed the trail left behind in the snow, picking along the stream and down toward the tracks of the Saratoga Lake Railway. His hooves squelched in damp ground. The layer of snow had begun to melt off. The trail he followed would be gone in a few hours, he knew.

  In the last hour he'd begun to find bits of fabric scattered along the way. Not torn, he decided. Only after finding more than a dozen did he understand what they were--squares and diamonds of old fabric, not ripped, but un-sewn. They were bits of the quilt the false nursemaid had stolen, the thread in them unraveled by his son's gift. Patrick was likely only doing it for amusement, but he was also leaving a clear trail for his father to follow.

  As Guaire approached the railroad tracks, he caught a scent in the air that smelled odd to him--not right for foxes. He cast an eye on the rails, only a stone's throw away, and wondered if foxes pulling a sleigh could get it over them. But the question didn't matter, because the trail abruptly disappeared a few lengths short of the steel rails.

  Guaire twisted his head about to peer down at the trail. Even in the slushy snow that was left, he couldn't make out what had happened. He turned about to look at it with his other eye, but didn't get any better picture. Frustrated, he cantered a short distance away, and let go of horse form.

  The change let loose a hot wind in all directions. The snow at his feet melted away. He would be quite warm for a while, so he padded back over on bare human feet to look at the trail with human eyes.

  The tracks ended abruptly, almost as if the sleigh and the creatures that drew it had flown up into the air or sunk under the earth. Or as if they had walked through a portal into the fairy realm, gone between one stride and the next. Guaire knelt in the snow on one bare knee, and snatched up a diamond of sodden pink cotton that had been abandoned next to the tracks.

  Only a true fairy could open a portal into Faery; one of the Lesser Folk shouldn't have had the power to do so. Guaire puzzled at that realization. None of the Fair Folk had any cause to act against him or Imogen, so Finn must be the at the heart of this after all, the theft of his grandson intended as punishment…or blackmail. And even as Guaire thought that, he heard a whicker behind him.

  Guaire rose to face Finn, his sudden anger making him want to pull things apart, only he hadn't a stitch of clothing or a single piece of tack on him.

  Neither did his nemesis. In horse form, Finn was a magnificent creature, a liver chestnut with ivory-pale mane and tail. And while Guaire made a smallish horse, barely fifteen hands, Finn was much larger, well over seventeen.

  "This is your fault," Guaire yelled at Imogen's father. "Who have you called down on us?"

  Finn stamped one hoof on the slushy ground. "Go home," he rumbled in a deep voice.

  Guaire stepped closer to the stallion. "Who took my son?"

  Finn tossed his pale mane and stepped delicately closer. "Go home."

  Guaire wouldn't back down. Finn could hurt him badly in this form, but he wasn't going to simply walk away. "Who took my son?"

  Finn just shook his mane again.

  Guaire heard an odd sound then, halfway between the chirping of a bird and the bark of a dog. Huddled amidst some stones half-covered by snow, he spotted a bundle of white fur with narrow black eyes and a dark spot of a nose. The creature stood and shook itself, revealing that it was, indeed, a fox, only all in white. It regarded him with its tiny ears pricked forward, as if waiting.

  For a second, none of them moved.

  Then the white fox chirped at them once more and began trotting toward the spot where the tracks disappeared. Finn spun back on his hindquarters as if preparing to give chase, and Guaire heard him say, "Trot home to your wife. Guaire Michael O'Donnell, trot home."

  The change came over him suddenly, Finn's command forcing him into horse form in order to trot. And even as he tried to fight it, circling this way and that on hooves in the ruined snow, Guaire saw the other stallion follow the fox into a white hole in the fabric of the air and earth. And then they both were gone.

  PART 5

  Imogen sat in her office, trying to keep herself calm. She wasn't certain how long it would take Mother Hawkes to drive the motor car to Albany, much less to find whoever she was hunting. She wanted her son back, now.

  Jack had come up to the farmhouse to tell them about Guaire's plan to follow some odd tracks. His report that the fake nursemaid had waited out the snow at the cottage while they'd all been frantically searching the house stung. And the news that the woman had apparently walked away from the cottage barefooted in the snow worried Imogen. There weren't too many explanations for behavior like that, other than insanity. Jack's story of foxes pulling a sleigh made Imogen wonder if madness was catching.

  She chewed on her lower lip. Paddy came and sat with her after a time, looking tired from his night's work. She had him to thank for the safe delivery of Mary's daughter, yet another thing in the long list of things that he'd done for her.

  He patted her knee and said, "Everything that can be done is being done. We'll find your son."

  "I shouldn't have let Finn come here," she said. "Mother Hawkes didn't say so, but she doesn't think that human magic was involved. That leaves my father. If I hadn't let him come into my house, Patrick would still be here."

  Paddy sat back in his chair. "Why did you let him in?"

  "Well, he was already in the house before I found out who he was," Imogen waffled.

  "I mean the second time. Why let him into your home? Into your life?"

  "I know that I'm fortunate," she admitted. "You and Mother Hawkes are better parents to me than my own ever were, and all the people who live on the farm--the Sanders, and Mrs. Dougherty and Jack and Tommy--we're like a bigger family. We take care of each other. But somewhere in the back of my mind, no matter how many bad things my mother said of him, I always wanted my father to care about me."

  Paddy nodded. "Are you thinking, then, that he's responsible?"

  "He has to be. He swore to me that he didn't do it, but he must have been able to twist his words around to escape the oath." Paddy understood that concept--he'd been around her entire life and had seen her struggle with oaths and promises before.

  "Exactly what did he swear?" Paddy asked.

  Imogen closed her eyes and thought back on her father's oath. "He said he didn't do it, that he didn't have someone do it for him, and that he didn't know who did it."

  "Sounds like he didn't do it, then," Paddy said with a shrug.

  Imogen shook her head. "No, there's some way he got out of a proper oath. He left as soon as my back was turned so I couldn't ask him anything else."

  After a moment of cogitation, Paddy said, "Of course, he might not know who did it, but I wonder now if he had a good idea, and didn't say that."

  Imogen regarded the polished surface of the table. Her father could consider the word 'know' an absolute, and therefore have escaped giving her the truth. She closed her eyes and wished that she had answers.

  The telephone rang in the hallway, and Imogen followed Paddy out there. He plucked the earpiece off its hook, and after a moment of wrangling with the exchange operator, he finally seemed to be talking to his wife. Shaking his head, he yelled into the receiver. "We don't need one."

  Imogen threw a quizzical look at him.

  He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said, "She wants to buy that motor car from your father."

  Imogen rolled her eyes. "What did she find out?"

  "What did you find out?" he shouted into the mouthpiece. His head nodded as he listened. "Let me tell her." He turned back to Imogen and said, "She's pretty sure Wells isn't involved, because he's still peddling the same type of wares he was three years ago. She doesn't think he could manage anything as clean as what was used on that girl."

  Imogen sighed and brushed a loose strand of
pale hair back from her eyes. "I suppose I'm not surprised."

  Paddy turned back to the telephone with a whistle, and then listened for a while longer. "No, we haven't found out anything else here. Now come on home, or Angus Reid is going to fire that boy you connived into going with you."

  Imogen drifted back to her office. She sat on the arm of the sofa and chewed on a nail for a moment, trying to decide what she should do now. She'd only been there a moment when Beryl appeared at the doorway, nervously twisting her apron. "Um, missus?"

  Imogen glanced up. "Yes, Beryl?"

  "There's a horse tryin' to get into the kitchen, like. Honest, missus."

  Imogen dashed toward the back of the house. Through the small pane of glass in the kitchen door she glimpsed a horse trotting in a tight circle outside--a chestnut stallion with compact lines and a dark mane. It was Guaire, for some reason unable to get out of horse form. "Beryl, go get me a blanket," she called back as she opened the door and jogged down the stairs.

  Guaire's sides were lathered, something he rarely did to himself. When she reached the bottom of the steps, he came to her and laid his muzzle against his chest. "What happened to you?" she asked.

  He shuddered, but didn't change back into his normal form. Imogen glanced back and saw that Beryl stood at the top of the stairs, a quilt clutched in her arms and her eyes worried. At Imogen's gesture, she handed over the quilt and went back inside.

  Guaire backed up a few steps as Imogen unfolded the quilt. Then he changed, the customary wave of hot air flowing out all around him, a strange side effect that Imogen never had understood. His body steamed in the chilly air.

  She wrapped the quilt about him, more to protect their employee's modesty than his--Guaire didn't have any. "Did you find anything?"

  He nodded, looking grim. "Let's go inside."

  ***

  Once Guaire had gotten himself dressed, Paddy joined him and Imogen in the office so that Guaire wouldn't have to repeat his story.

  "White foxes?" Imogen repeated when Guaire told her of the creature her father had followed. "Foxes aren't white."

  "Up in the far north parts of Canada," Paddy inserted, "there are white ones in the winter."

  "This isn't the far north," Imogen said irritably. "And it isn't winter. It's September."

  Guaire shook his head. "They weren't foxes in the first place, Ginny, so if they wanted to be pink or green, they could."

  Her lips pressed together. "What were they, then?"

  "Hobs, I think. They smelled more like hobgoblins."

  Her shoulders slumped, and she laid one hand over her mouth. Paddy scowled and settled back in his chair.

  "One of them was waiting for Finn," Guaire added. "It led him through to the other side. That's when he sent me packing."

  "Sent you packing?" Imogen rose, her dark eyes alight with anger. "He used your true name on you? After all these years I can't believe he remembers it!"

  It had been thirteen years since her father had used Guaire's true name to force his compliance while a human farrier put iron shoes on his hooves. Finn hadn't resorted to that name this time.

  "He must have gotten a hold of our marriage lines," Guaire said with a shrug. "The name on that piece of paper has the same effect."

  "But you have a true name, Guaire," she protested. "He has to use that one."

  "No, he doesn't." He took one of her hands. "And I don't think he's forgotten my true name. He was testing me, don't you see? If the name on our marriage lines isn't as valid as my true name, then our wedding vows don't mean anything. So he used that to see if it bound me the same."

  She laid her forehead against his, and for a moment simply let him hold her. He suspected she was trying to calm herself to keep from tearing things apart. Her father was in for a rough greeting the next time she laid eyes on him. "I wish I understood why he's doing this to us," she whispered.

  Guaire held her away far enough that he could look into her eyes. "I don't think he's doing it to us. I think he's trying to help."

  Paddy snorted.

  Imogen shook her head. "Who, then?"

  "I don't know. But I had a lot of time to think about it while I was trotting back here. Whoever she was, she wanted to be followed. She waited until after the snow had stopped so she would leave tracks. Patrick was unraveling the quilt along the way and left bits in the snow; she didn't stop that. And she left one of her creatures behind to make certain."

  Imogen's eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together. Guaire could almost see the wheels of her clever mind turning. "And my father went through to the other side instead of you?"

  "I think your father was meant to do the following," he said. "I don't know that I could go through. I've never been on the other side."

  Some creatures of fairy blood lived their whole lives in the human world, happy to be away from the pretenses and faded glories of the fairy courts. Being part human, Guaire had never considered visiting. He would be seen as inferior there. Nor did he know of any way to open a portal, or even access one created by another.

  Imogen frowned. "So Patrick is merely bait to draw out my father?"

  "That did occur to me."

  "Will Patrick be safe then, if my father went?"

  Guaire wanted to tell her that Patrick would be fine. He wanted her not to worry any longer, to hear her laugh. But he always told her the truth. "If your father is being baited by a fairy, then there's no knowing what that creature might do."

  "Bread." Paddy's voice startled him. The old man rose and headed for the door. "After talking to her friends in Albany, that's the only suggestion Victoria had," he said. "I'll ask Mrs. Dougherty to start baking some."

  ***

  Imogen paced the office floor. She'd visited with Mary in the guest bedroom, and taken a turn holding tiny Elizabeth Sanders. She'd read the race results out of Sheepshead Bay again. She'd tidied all her paperwork and straightened the clothes in her dressing room. Mother Hawkes hadn't returned yet, and Paddy had gone to set the stable boys to work while Guaire returned to that spot near the tracks to see if he could figure out anything more.

  They had all left her alone to fret and, fearing for the structure of the house, she couldn't even do that properly. There was nothing she could do but wait. She had to wait and hope that her father would somehow retrieve her son--a father she'd never really known or had any reason to trust.

  Other than his promise; he'd said he would help.

  Trust was not one of her virtues. All her life, her mother had trained her to trust no one. It had been hard for her to trust Guaire at first. She wasn't certain she could extend that to include her father. So she paced the office, counting the steps to keep herself calm.

  "Ginny!" Guaire's voice split the quiet in the house, and she ran for the front parlor, hoping he'd found Patrick.

  Instead, he supported Finn in his arms. A livid burn crossed her father's face at an angle, the width of her hand. The skin had blistered and reddened, and one eye had swollen shut. On that side his eyebrow had burned away. She ran to his side and helped Guaire settle him on the couch. The hunched way her father sat suggested that he had other injuries, more painful ones.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  "I found him on the railroad tracks," Guaire said softly. "On the rail. I had to drag him off by one foot."

  Imogen looked down at her father in horror. That wide, reddened stripe across his face was a burn left behind by contact with the steel rail. In dragging him off of it, Guaire would have exposed the rest of her father's body to the steel, which meant burns everywhere.

  "It'll heal," her father said through clenched teeth.

  "What about Patrick?" she asked. "Where is he?"

  "On the other side," Finn managed.

  She set her hands on her hips. "And how do I get him back?"

  He looked up at her with his one good eye. "You can't go there."

  "I will," she said. "We'll find a way."

  "She won't negot
iate with you," Finn said. "I'll go back. I just need to rest a bit."

  Guaire folded his arms over his chest. "How did you get through to the other side in the first place?"

  "Who is she?" Imogen demanded.

  Her father sagged back against the sofa, as if too weary to stay awake. "Snow," he said in a worn voice, and closed his good eye. "Snow."

  "Yes, I know there's snow," Imogen snapped. "Who has my son?"

  She felt Guaire's hand wrap around her elbow. He drew her out into the hallway, and said softly, "I think he answered you, Ginny."

  "What do you mean?"

  "One of them--the Lady of the Snow. He must mean her."

  She stepped back. "Do you know her?"

  He shook his head. "No, of course not. One of them wouldn't have anything to do with the likes of me. She must have found a way to make a foothold on this side of the ocean, something named for her or someone setting up a shrine for her."

  "Something named for her?" Imogen tried to imagine why anyone would name something for a fairy, and then decided that it didn't matter. "So will she give me Patrick back?"

  "Ginny, we have no way to get to her. She traveled through Faery. I can't even begin to guess where she might actually be, other than on this side of the ocean. "

  Imogen turned back to consider her father's slumped form. He looked unconscious. The burn across his face seemed less red, though, which made her wonder how quickly he would heal. "I'll bet he can."

  She headed into the parlor to shake him back to wakefulness, but Guaire stopped her with a gentle hand. "Not yet, Ginny," he said, "We need his cooperation. Go back to your office and wait for me. I have an idea."

  ***