Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Row!” Owen shouted. Well, it was his boat and his pond. I gave the oars another good pull toward his voice, wondering if he would get me into trouble with Gram over this.

  The oars stuck upright in the water. They refused to move. I heard both Owen and Undine shouting behind me. And then I was shouting, too, at the oars, which seemed to have gotten stuck in cement, at the head in the water, telling her to go, get away, escape, even if I didn’t know anymore who I was yelling at, Undine behind me on the shore, or Undine in the water, pulling me into the night.

  The boat tilted suddenly, prow lowering down into the water and down until it broke the surface and all that dark and moonlight spilled in around my feet. I tried to scramble out; the boat was moving too fast. I couldn’t go anywhere but down.

  So down I went. I was never so surprised in my entire life.

  9

  Sylvia

  I couldn’t find my way out of the woods. There were trees everywhere, enormous, blocking the sky. Even in spiked heels, I could barely see over the gigantic ridges of their roots. An acorn as big as my head hit the ground near me with a ponderous thud. Its cap split off. Tyler’s voice came out of it, calling: Syl. I picked it up, looked inside for him, but it was full of water. I dropped it and the water gushed out, a silvery stream that surged between the trees to pour down a dark opening within the rootwork of an immense oak. Water flowed without stopping, bright as moonlight, swift and strong, so strong that it seemed to pull taut as it ran, thin and quivering with movement, like a thread somebody was tightening into a stitch between worlds.

  Gram! I shouted in my dream, suddenly terrified that she was sewing a boundary through the wood, and that she would trap me without knowing on the wrong side of her seam. I tried to leap over the narrow stream. One heel caught in the fierce current; I lost my balance and fell in.

  As the water pulled me under I woke up.

  I lay tangled in sheets, hot morning light pouring mercilessly over me. I heard Gram’s kitchen noises and turned my face into my pillow. I didn’t want to face her. I just wanted to get dressed, pack, and drive away as fast as possible. Scraps of memory from the previous evening mingled with images from my dream: women in a circle, intent on their work, water flowing like thread, Tyler and Judith running away from each other in the moonlight, the secret in Dorian’s voice.

  I rolled onto my back then, blinking in the light. Something she wouldn’t talk about in front of Gram, something about Owen. I saw his face again, shadowed and unsmiling, through the nodding hydrangea heads. I lay there looking at it a moment, this face out of my childhood, trying to remember if he had always exuded that mysterious darkness, as though he ate secrets for breakfast.

  I could give him another secret…

  I sat up abruptly, feeling the prickle of inspiration. I could tell him, I thought dazedly. What was it Dorian had said? He was supposed to serve and protect Lynn Hall, its heirs. I could tell him that I was half-fay, and he could tell me what I should do. He could make Gram believe that I couldn’t possibly stay, and that the safest place for me was as far away as I could get from Lynn Hall. I had promised to visit Dorian that day; I would find Owen while I was there, give him my oldest secret.

  As I went down the hall to take a shower, I saw Tyler through his open door, bundled in sheets with a pillow over his head. Earphones to his pocket CD player trailed out from under the pillow. He could inherit Lynn Hall, I decided with relief. The only thing fay about him was his age. He could marry someone who belonged to the Fiber Guild, the way Grandpa Liam had; she could take Gram’s place as the resident witch. Nothing would change, fall apart, or come to an end if I left. Lynn Hall would continue as always, and I would become just one more bit of weird family lore.

  I could face Gram now. I found her after I dressed, in the kitchen, washing plates and cups from the gathering. I watched her a moment before she saw me. Standing at the sink, waving a scrub brush at cookie crumbs and veggie dip, she didn’t look like someone who believed you could trap a fairy within a baby bootie. It was only when she turned, and I saw her eyes, remote and black as the eyes of an old raven going its way, that I could believe she held woods and fields and entire rivers in her head beneath her milkweed hair.

  “Where’s Tyler?” she asked abruptly, without even saying good morning.

  “Asleep.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I nodded, pouring coffee. “Unless there’s somebody else in his bed.” I sat down at the table, pulling the morning paper under my nose out of habit. A picture of someone named Tarrant Coyle, grinning fatuously under a hard hat at some ritual groundbreaking, made me push it away again. “Gram,” I said, and stuck, remembering my dream, she drawing the thread between us, separating us without realizing it. In the dream, in the Otherworld, she hadn’t heard me call. I didn’t know what words to use that would find their way past her thread.

  But she mistook my silence, put her own words into it. “It’s all right, Sylvia. Things found by moonlight always look different in the light of day. Don’t decide yet what’s true, what’s not; just wait and watch, and keep an open mind, until the next gathering. Meanwhile, it would help if you got started making something.” I wouldn’t be staying even long enough to start, but I didn’t bother to get into it, then. “Anybody can sew a few scraps together,” she added. “There’s all kinds of fabric around. Your old clothes, since when you were a baby. Make a patchwork quilt out of them.”

  I stared at her. “You kept all my clothes?”

  She turned back to the dishes abruptly. “I never could bear to throw anything away that belonged to you or Morgana,” she said, and changed the subject. “Are you going into the village today?”

  “I could. What do you need?”

  “This and that.”

  She made a list while I ate cereal and finished my coffee. Sudden pounding made us both glance at the ceiling. “Hurley’s probably up there putting a skyhook through the sky-light,” Gram said dryly. I thought that would get Tyler out of bed, but he was still motionless in a cocoon of sheets when I passed his room later to get my purse.

  Instead of driving straight to the village, I took the turn in the road just beyond the hall that ran between fields toward Owen Avery’s house.

  I knew that place like I knew Lynn Hall, attic to cellar. I had run across those fields from one house to the other, and to all the secret places in between, as many times as there were stars on a midsummer night above the open fields. Dorian and I would sneak out on those nights, meet in Gram’s wood, or at the stream that bordered the fields to listen to peepers and watch the fireflies, and, later, to practice smoking, and gossip about who was going with whom. By moonlight, we swam in her father’s pond, followed the glinting path of the old train tracks, wandered down dirt roads that had No Trespassing signs nailed to every seventh tree.

  I thought we had told each other then as much as could be told.

  I found her in the long greenhouse between the house and the pond. The familiar smells—damp humus, sundrenched leaves, water dripping onto the floor—made me forget for an instant that we had ever grown up and away. Dorian, barefoot and wearing a sundress so old it might have seen life in a settler’s wagon, was shifting plants with plumes of lavender flowers from small pots into bigger ones.

  I hazarded a guess. “Lavender?”

  “Heather, city girl.” She put down her trowel and gave me a quizzical glance out of her odd, speckled eyes. “So. How does it look today?”

  I didn’t have to ask what she meant. I shrugged slightly. “I’m willing to go along with it for now. Until it gets too kinky.”

  She smiled. But I saw the shadow in her eyes, just before she looked away. She turned a pot upside down, gave it a couple of taps with the trowel; the plant slid out into her hand. She started to speak, stopped.

  I said, “I need to talk to your father.” Her brows went up questioningly; I added vaguely, “Something to do with Gram. Is he around?”

 
She nodded. “He’s out inspecting the baby trees, should be easy to spot…” Her voice trailed, and I remembered what she’d hinted the previous evening.

  “You were going to tell me something about him.”

  “It’s kinky,” she warned me.

  “Really?” I turned over a wooden planter box, sat down on it. “ And you never told me?”

  “I didn’t know until you went to the city. Then I found out things—about my father—” She paused; I watched her tuck the plant into its new pot, prod some dank-looking soil out of a bag around it. She sighed finally, brushed her forehead with her fingers, leaving a streak of dirt behind. “He’s— he’s in love with someone.”

  I waited. “Is that the kinky part?”

  “One of Them.”

  “A Rowan?” I guessed, flailing. “So are you.”

  She sighed, said baldly, “Not human. Wood folk. He’s been meeting her secretly for years. It hasn’t been easy for him. Iris keeps the boundaries sewed up so tight, guarding them, that almost nothing can cross into this world. My father makes a path for his lover with his music on nights when the boundaries are fluid, when the moon is full, when the owls speak in the wood, when water rises in its beds. Iris is always there, one stitch on either side of them, he says. But his music can be stronger than the guild’s spells, and on those nights she comes to him. So they keep meeting, and the guild keeps sewing, and I’m beginning to wonder if he isn’t spellbound by the Fairy Queen herself, because he can’t seem to free himself from her grip and turn to human love instead.” She turned another pot upside down and whacked it so hard the plant fell headfirst onto the potting table. “I don’t know what to do for him. I’ve wanted to tell you this for years, but you weren’t here and you wouldn’t have understood before last night.”

  My mouth was hanging open, I realized, just like in novels. I waited for something to come out; nothing coherent did. “Dorian—” I started, and stuck again.

  “I told you it was kinky.”

  “How could—how does—”

  “Oh, Syl,” she pleaded, “just pretend it’s true. Just do that much for me, just this minute. Okay? You felt it last night—I know you did—when we all came together in the weave, when all our thoughts overlapped. What did you see when you sewed that hem? Tell me.”

  “I saw water,” I said, piecing the memories together for her sake. “A stream flowing under my needle. I blocked it with my stitches. I slowed it until it wouldn’t go anywhere, it had to stop.”

  “You see,” Dorian whispered.

  “Oh, yes.” My voice shook. “I see.”

  She sighed, her shoulders slumping with relief. “My father has learned to hide so well. He’s an Avery, bound by tradition to protect Lynn Hall in whatever ways he can. And he does. He doesn’t see that this—possession—might interfere with his judgment. It doesn’t seem terrible to him, dangerous or crazed. He says the guild doesn’t see all that needs to be seen, that not everything fay is wicked. He’s always very careful; I live with him, and I can only tell when he sees her by the way he plays. His life seems an open book around here. People just think he got so hurt and grew so bitter when my mother left him that he’s incapable of falling in love again. He hoped for years that I would be invited into the guild. Just so that I could try, in whatever way I can, to undo what it does.”

  “Do you?” I asked, stunned.

  She shook her head, reaching for another pot. “I have no idea,” she answered grimly. “I really don’t. The gathering is so… persuasive. I think I get as easily tangled in their thoughts as you did. But I try. He is under a spell. I want to free him. It makes us both feel less hopeless, for me to be part of the guild.”

  I shook my head, too, trying to rattle my thoughts into order. The world seemed to be turning itself inside out; boundaries were shifting everywhere. “What do you want me to do?”

  She moved abruptly to crouch beside me, put her arms around me. “Oh, Syl, I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t know how much either of us can do. But if you could help me instead of the guild, help me open a passage somewhere instead of closing it, just for a little while, just long enough to convince my father that he has a chance to see for himself that he’s lost in a delusion of love.”

  He wouldn’t be the first, I thought dazedly. “I’ll see what I can do.” I held her tightly a moment, then stood up, brushing potting soil off my jeans. “I’d better go talk to him. Gram’s making a stew; she’s waiting for a few things from the supermarket.”

  “You won’t tell him I told you. He never told anyone but me, and only because I suspected he was in love. He can’t hide everything from me.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  She smiled at me crookedly. “When you walk out that door into the familiar world, you’ll remember what I told you but you won’t remember that you believed me.”

  “You’d be surprised how much willing suspension of disbelief my mind can hold. Have you told Leith any of this?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “I’ve never been able to tell anyone. I’d have to reveal the secrets of the Fiber Guild, and anyway, anyone else around here would think the local kindergarten teacher was inhaling too many paste fumes. Leith… I love him, Syl, but you know how Rowans are. They’ve been living in those mountains for forever, and they think there’s nothing they don’t know about them. If they haven’t seen it, it isn’t there. Leith just thinks—like everyone else—that my father never got over my mother disappearing like that. Three years and five months of marriage, one child, he plays the fiddle, she plays the flute, they love each other— and she vanishes one day off the face of the earth.”

  “Stolen away?” I suggested.

  “Or—” Dorian hesitated. “She was one of them, all along. That’s what Iris suspected at first. But my father got around her suspicions. She has always trusted him with everything. She must have decided that he would have more sense than to love a loveless dream out of the wood.”

  “He just loved a loveless human woman who ran off with another lover? Or who ran away to find her freedom? Is that what your father thinks? What do you think?”

  “Oh, Syl, I don’t know. It was so long ago, and I hardly knew her. I only know that this secret love of my father’s, that he thinks is so vital to him, terrifies me. I want to help him. I’ll do anything, believe anything I must to help him.”

  “Then I will, too,” I said staunchly, completely confused. “It won’t be the first time I’ve followed you into trouble.”

  “Thank you, Syl.”

  I heard the greenhouse door close behind me as I left. So I knew she didn’t see what I saw: her father, standing at the edge of the pond, staring into the water. He turned his head, gestured to me. I wondered if he had already seen what I was and wanted to tell me that he knew. It would make things immeasurably easier. I joined him, hearing frogs plop into the water as I rounded the bank. I didn’t see what he was looking at until I reached him. A little rowboat floated upside down in the middle of the pond, the oars drifting idly nearby.

  He asked abruptly, “Have you seen Tyler this morning?”

  I stammered, alarmed. “He was—I saw him asleep—Did he do this?”

  “I hope so,” Owen said heavily, and held my eyes in his heavy, brooding gaze that saw past boundaries, into other worlds. “I think you should wake him and ask.”

  I didn’t know what Tyler had done to cause Owen’s mysterious forebodings, but I decided that my own problem could wait an hour. I went through the supermarket in a dazed rush, greeting old friends as I tossed Gram’s groceries into my cart, trying to get back as soon as possible to check on Tyler.

  Someone followed me home. I had noticed the truck pulling out of the parking lot behind me only because of the ornate gold lettering on the door of an otherwise unremarkable black pickup. That and the hearty backfire that came out of it as it turned behind me. Then I forgot about it. Winding out of town, the road met the river, ran beside it for a little. Water glitte
red through the trees, flowed into my thoughts, transformed itself into Owen’s pond, the empty, overturned boat. Then the river took a turn away from the road to cross the fields, lose itself in a distant wood.

  I turned into the hall drive, and the black pickup followed me.

  I parked. It pulled up beside me and I read the lettering on the door: Titus Quest Company. The man who got out was beefy and sweating. He pulled off a baseball cap with TQ stamped on it and tossed it on the seat. He wore slacks and a tie; he looked as though he would have been far more comfortable in jeans belted low under his belly and a T-shirt that said: GONE FISHING.

  “Miz Lynn?” he said, puffing a little and running a hand through his thick, graying hair. “I overheard your name in the supermarket. I’m Tarrant Coyle.”

  “Titus Quest Company,” I said, at a loss, and his face brightened a little.

  “Oh, you recognized me.”

  “No. That’s what your truck says.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well.” He stuck, glanced at the hall, then at the wood, and lowered his voice for some reason. “Titus Quest Company was very sorry to hear about Liam Lynn’s death. We sent that horseshoe of red roses, yesterday.”

  “Oh.”

  “Rumor has it that you’re the heir to Lynn Hall.”

  I blinked. Rumor was getting awesomely efficient, even for that forgotten part of the world. “What exactly does your company do?”

  “Development,” he answered briskly. “A little of this and that. We put together the Hartford Mall project up the road a ways—you might have heard. Which is why I stopped. To give you my card.” He searched a couple of pockets, then finally pulled one out of his wallet. It said pretty much what his pickup did. “In case you’re interested.”

  “In what?”

  “In selling.”

  I shook my head quickly and took the easiest way out.

  “You should talk to my grandmother. She’ll be living here as long as she wants.”

  “I have suggested it to her,” he said carefully. “More than once.”