Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The wood spoke a word again, this time with a little less thunder. Rue’s hand slipped out of mine. She began to drift away from me. I caught at her; I might as well have tried to grasp my own shadow. She pulled at my heart; she winched it out of me with each flickering, dissipating movement; she seemed to melt away as I watched.

  “Rue…” I whispered, and tasted the bitter word, felt it burn my throat.

  One final word flew out of the trees, this like a swift, hard blow, as though invisible lightning had cracked through the air between us. I flinched, and felt the pain a moment later. It was, I realized, exactly as if I had been struck by something heavy, weighted with metal, and obscurely familiar.

  Then the magic was gone; there was only the wood in the twilight, growing dim and cool. The pain I had felt as Rue left me had only just begun: already my skin longed for her, my eyes, my stunned heart, my numb and remorseful brain.

  “Now what?” Leith demanded.

  I had no idea. “We wait,” I suggested wearily, “until we find something better to do.”

  He stared at me as I sat down within the ring. “Your face… It looks like something hit you.”

  “That last word.”

  “What?”

  “I think she flung a gauntlet at me. We’ve been challenged.”

  17

  Tyler

  For a long time nobody came. I think I fell asleep, curled up on the sheepskin; even in my sleep I tried not to let myself touch anything but that. Like I was floating in dangerous waters, full of hungry sharks, killer whales, gigantic squid, and if I let a hand or a foot drift off my life raft, they would bite it off. They would get me, then. Whoever they were.

  My waking thoughts ran into my dreams; they were all about my father. Jumbled memories, maybe not all of them true, since I was dreaming; some of them were probably wishes. Like learning to ski, which he’d always promised we would do together someday. In my dreams, he finally took me to the slopes, where we didn’t even need lessons. We were all geared up, bright clothes and caps, and flying down a trail together, ski poles tucked under our arms, snow fanning out behind us, while we laughed and shouted, and a misty-blue world of distant mountains and forests spread out everywhere around us. We were brilliant. Awesome. My dad was so fast he disappeared inside his own private snow cloud. I was trying to keep up, and cheering him on, when I started feeling funny. I couldn’t see him anymore, inside the blur of snow. He had somehow skied even faster than the snow he kicked up, like sound traveling so fast it can’t be heard until it catches up with itself. He had traveled so fast that all that was left of him was a memory of motion.

  I woke up, feeling so alone that I didn’t know how I could keep living inside myself.

  The Undine-thing was back, sitting on the floor with its back against the bed. I glanced at it, and groaned, and closed my eyes again, just wanting to burrow somewhere lightless and dank and silent, where I didn’t have to think.

  It poked me, and whispered, “Tyler.”

  There was something funny about its voice. It leaned over me then, put its lips very close to my ear. “Tyler.” The word fluttered in my ear like a tiny hummingbird. My eyes opened really wide. I smelled a mix of sweet berry shampoo, grass, dirt, sweat. My head came up then, and I saw her own true eyes.

  “Judith?” My voice squeaked. I was never so happy to see anyone in my entire life.

  She put her finger to her lips. She didn’t look very happy. Her face was dirty; her hair was tangled, with little bits caught in it of leaf and crumbled wood, lichens, spiderweb, and even a dead roly-poly bug. She looked like she’d crawled through a hollowed-out log. “Where are we?”

  “You don’t have to whisper. It’s not like they don’t know we’re here. How did you get here, anyway?”

  She scowled. “That thing brought me. That Tyler-thing.”

  “What Ty—?” I stopped. I sat up all the way, then, remembering for the first time that there was still a normal world out there, with Gram, and Grunc, and Syl in it, and they’d be wondering where I’d gone. Or maybe not. “There’s something wearing my face around Lynn Hall?”

  “I thought it was you. It tricked me into going into one of the passageways between worlds, so here I am.”

  My mouth was hanging. “It’s that much like me?”

  “Well.” Her face got a little less pinched for a moment. “Almost. It took a bubble bath.”

  I snorted a laugh. “And they still think it’s me? Why did it take you?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t say. But we have to get back there and warn people before it steals somebody else.”

  She got to her feet restlessly, moved around a little, looking at things. She made a face at the bowl of candied fruit, then picked up a mirror framed in gold and made another face at herself. She rubbed a streak of dirt off her cheek, picked the bug and a few twigs out of her hair.

  I made a brilliant deduction. “You didn’t come through water.”

  “No. I took the Tyler-thing to a big old hollow tree. It said it didn’t understand how I could possibly see that as a passageway to anywhere. So I finally stepped inside the tree, which I’ve done at least a couple dozen times before, trying to see if it would really work. This time, it did.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was like there was no inside… I just fell into the ground. I rattled down through tree roots and dirt and bracken, and finally slid out here. And there you were, snoring on the sheepskin, with dried pond scum in your hair. So I knew it was really you. But where are we? Whose house is this?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. People came in a while ago; they kept trying to get me to eat.” I paused, remembering. “One was so beautiful. Not like superstar beautiful. Like something ageless and changeless, that everyone still keeps falling in love with. Like the moon. I think she is the queen of everything. She said she made this place for me. She wanted me to eat and drink. Sleep in the bed, wash in the pool… Before her, another one came that they tried to make like you. But its eyes were all wrong. It kept trying to get me to eat, too. I don’t know why.”

  Judith’s eyes were narrowed, looking at something far, far away. “That sounds familiar… Why does that sound familiar? Did you eat or drink anything?”

  “No. I almost took a gold cup full of water from the queen. She made it sound so good. And then I remembered the water I’d fallen through, fish-tank water, turtle-pond water, and it didn’t sound so good anymore.”

  “Glamour…”

  “What?”

  “That’s what it’s called. Fairy magic. When they make something, like these hangings on the bed, look like they’re woven out of gold and silk, but really they’re just made of cobweb and straw. Or when you trick a fairy by moonlight out of its pot of gold, and in the morning all you have is a tin bucket with some dead leaves in it.”

  I thought about that. “So she’s not really that beautiful?”

  That made Judith grin for some reason. “She might be. She always is in stories. I’m just saying that’s how they work their spells over humans, sometimes. They make us think we see what we want to see. Maybe they trick us so that we can never see them clearly, never come too close, never learn too much about them.”

  She was wandering around while she talked, picking things up, opening little drawers in tables, lifting the corners of rugs with her foot. She went to a window, raised a curtain an inch, and peeked out.

  “What’s out there?” I asked.

  “Trees, flowers, a pool… it’s pretty. You haven’t looked?”

  “I haven’t moved off this sheepskin.”

  “Really?” She came back to me, then, knelt in front of me. “Why not? Weren’t you curious?”

  “No.”

  “Were you scared?”

  I thought. “No. I was mostly just—I wanted everyone to stay away and leave me alone. I just wanted to think about my dad.” She didn’t say anything. I went on after a moment. “They kept saying eat, and drink, and
sleep in the soft bed, come swim in the nice pool. But none of it made any sense to me. No one told me why I’m here; they just dropped me in the middle of this fancy resort and told me to have fun. Like I wanted to be here.”

  “Nobody ever said they understood humans very well.”

  “I kept thinking and thinking about my dad. All these memories came back… Maybe part of it was going to Grandpa Liam’s funeral. It reminded me of my father’s. And my mom getting married again, and suddenly having a different—whatever he is. I didn’t think about Syl or Gram wondering where I was, not even about anybody coming for me, or how I’d get out of here. I just started remembering, and I didn’t want to stop. And then you came.”

  “Do you want me to leave you alone, too?”

  “No.” I shook my head, hard. “No.” I reached out, and suddenly her hand was in mine, and I wasn’t embarrassed, and I didn’t want to let go. “I didn’t know how much I wanted to see you until I saw you.”

  She smiled, her face turning pink, and I realized, like something smacked me in the forehead, that she liked me, too. Me. Green hair, geeky glasses, grungy clothes, and I hadn’t taken a bubble bath since I was two.

  “I can’t believe that other Tyler fooled me,” she sighed.

  “You haven’t known me very long. And the last thing you expected was a fake me.”

  “He was too clean. And he tucked in his shirt, and combed his hair, and he smiled so much.”

  I thought then that maybe I should give the bubble-bath idea some attention. “I think I’m hungry now,” I said, surprised again.

  “Don’t eat,” she warned. “Or drink. I can’t remember why. If it’s something they want you to do, you probably shouldn’t do it.”

  “Well, what should we do?”

  “You could get off the sheepskin.”

  I was still sitting on it. For a moment, my fingers tightened on the wool. I wondered if she was trying to trick me, too, into leaving my damp and smelly island where I could be safely miserable. She just held my hand and waited, without laughing at me, or getting impatient. I remembered how happy I’d been to see her, deep in me, beyond the murk and memories. How I said her true name instead of her fairy-tale name, because I knew who she was.

  So I let go of her and stood up and walked off the sheepskin. Just like that. She smiled a little, crooked smile, and got up, too.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  She scratched her head, dislodging a scrap of bark. “I guess we can try to find a passageway back. If we got in, we should be able to get out. If we can find some path that Iris hasn’t guarded.”

  “There should be at least two. Owen’s pond and your hollow tree.”

  “Unless she’s sewn them back up again.”

  “You mean we could be stuck here?” I demanded.

  “Well, that’s what the Fiber Guild is for.”

  That’s when I started to be afraid.

  Judith went to the door and opened it, a simple thing that never crossed my mind to do. She peered out. I looked over her shoulder. The long hallway lined with closed doors, the flagstones and chandeliers, made me blink.

  “It looks like Lynn Hall.”

  Except that the chandeliers were made of gold and had candles in them instead of bulbs. And there were carpets on the flagstones, weavings of white and gold and green that looked like they’d just been made that morning. There wasn’t a smudge or a fleck of dirt on them, not even a stray grass blade.

  Judith breathed into my ear, “Let’s go.”

  The hallway we walked down seemed endless, maybe because I kept expecting one of the doors to pop open, someone to leap out at us, yelling, “Gotcha!” Finally, we saw a little door in the far wall that was different from all the others. It wasn’t painted; it was carved all over with fruit and flowers and vines. The handle was the prong from a deer’s antlers.

  “Weird,” Judith muttered, and played with it carefully until the door opened. We went through it into a little courtyard. Vines and flowers grew up everywhere along the stone walls. Fieldstone, just like Lynn Hall was made of, though I’d never seen a garden in it like that. Stone paths wound under little trees, plots of flowers. In the middle of the courtyard was a fountain. When I heard the water splashing, my mouth remembered that it hadn’t tasted water since I got dumped into the pond. The statue of a woman stood in the center of the fountain. Water poured out of the urn she tilted on her shoulder, and splashed down into the bowl. The statue was barefoot and smiling; she pointed with her free hand at the water, as though she were inviting us to come and drink.

  The water looked clear and fresh as rain. Staring at it, I could almost taste how cold it might be, how sweet, coming from that cheerful statue’s urn. I heard Judith swallow. But as I stepped toward it, she caught my arm.

  “Are you sure?” I asked her helplessly. “Maybe it’s only food we should stay away from. Or everything but water.”

  Her face squinched; I knew she couldn’t really remember. But she only whispered nervously, “I don’t think so. Let’s get out of here. It’s creepy that there’s no one around but this statue.”

  It was hard to turn my back on that water. But I did, and saw another door. This one was more like a gate, made of small birch trunks linked together with rings of gold. It reminded me of old chairs in Grandpa Liam’s study, made of sapling branches, he told me, so supple they could be curved and tied together with strips of bark. The gate didn’t have a latch. I pushed it, wanting to get away from the noisy reminder of water behind me, and it swung open.

  We walked into what looked like a picnic in Gram’s rose garden.

  Every rose tree and bush was in full bloom. Tables spread with lace and gold cloth stood around the grass; all of them held gold and silver platters of huge slabs of meat, whole fish, mounds of fruit so high you could get killed if the pile toppled when you pulled out a pear, great wedges of cheese, bowls of salads, stews, so many kinds of vegetables I didn’t recognize half of them, breads and cakes and pies and roasted nuts. I could smell everything very clearly, not a gross tangle of smells, but little individual breezes blowing under my nose: hot salty beef, then crusty bread pulled straight out of the oven, then garlic, or pepper, or orange when you first break into the peel and the juices spray, and then some kind of intense dessert, a serious chocolate felony, not just a wimpy misdemeanor. And silver pitchers stood everywhere among the food, some beaded with water from the icy liquid inside.

  My stomach felt like it was about to float away. My knees went wobbly. I would have crawled over to that garden of smells and fallen facedown into whatever I reached first, as soon as I’d drained one of the frosty pitchers dry.

  But Judith was pulling at me, and saying my name over and over until it finally made sense. “Tyler.” She was still whispering for some reason. “Tyler. We have to go now.”

  Just one bite of that roast chicken, I wanted to moan. Just one gulp of water.

  But she tugged, and I stumbled after her, not knowing where we were going until all the smells were behind me, and I could see again.

  Trees bordered the rose garden, just like at Lynn Hall. Only these made a thick, dense wood you couldn’t see far into. All the trees looked alike, slender as birch, with a greeny bark and long, pale leaves. They were crowded so close that I didn’t think we’d be able to move through them. But Judith, running now, plunged into them, and so I followed.

  I nearly bumped into her a moment later. She had stopped dead among the trees and she was staring up at them. She took a sudden step back into me, and groped for my hand, making a little whine in her throat.

  I looked up. Leaves and bark were somehow turning into faces, hair, hands, clothes, all around us. Some of the faces were still streaked with the smooth, green-brown bark; if you blinked, they seemed to turn to tree again. Blink again and there was a face, a shadowy arm, a green skirt. The faces were just human enough to show what they were thinking, and it wasn’t very friendly.

  One spoke, and I re
cognized her somehow, in spite of the tendrils of her hair that curved into leaves, and the strange color of her skin. She was still beautiful, the way a mountain is, or a starry night, something like nothing else you’ve ever known, that you’ll never really understand, and that will never ever notice you. But you don’t care; you want to take it away with you in your heart.

  “You haven’t shared our feast,” she said to me softly. “You have refused all my gifts.” Her eyes turned to Judith, whose eyes were so wide I could see the white all around them. “I brought you here hoping that in the company of another human, he might take some interest in what I’ve made for him. But you rejected all my harmless pleasures. You made him run from them.”

  “We don’t—” Judith’s voice still came out in a whisper; she cleared her throat, started again. “We don’t know what you want from us.”

  “Don’t you? I’ve seen you peering into windows at the witches. I’ve watched you in the wood, looking at this and that, studying, learning. I’ve watched you stand at the borders between our worlds, wanting to come in. Now you’re here, and all you can do is run. Have you learned all you wanted from us so quickly? You have come to my great banquet and eaten nothing. You’ve heard the pure water singing in my fountain, and drunk nothing. Is that how you learn as well? Peering in and never entering? Never taking a chance? Always hungry, never eating, thirsty and never daring to take one sip—”

  I was ready. I would have marched back into the rose garden and clambered into the middle of one of her tables and started laying waste. Judith, her eyes narrowed now, the skin of her face as white as ice, answered abruptly, “Gingerbread. The witch’s house. Eat and you get eaten. And the nasty goblins, trapping the sister who eats their fruit, and pinching the one who tries to rescue her. And that other story—the woman who gets snatched out of her world and has to spend half her life in the underworld because she eats six little seeds from a fruit. Fairy tales are full of food and most of the time if you eat, you’re toast.”

  The queen stared down at her, her own eyes wide and unblinking, like a tiger’s before it pounces. Then she spat a word that came out as a hazelnut, and in the next moment there was nothing around us but trees. Everywhere. We walked and walked, but we were in a prison of trees. An entire world of trees. We might have just been going around in circles, but when we couldn’t find any other way out, we fell over, exhausted, among all the trees that ever were, and went to eat and drink in our dreams instead.