Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  18

  Iris

  When nobody came back by nightfall—not Syle, nor Tyler, not even Owen—I went to war. Those I loved were disappearing around me, and I could feel the thunderheads building in my heart. Bad enough that Liam had left me; at least I knew where the body was. The Starr sisters and Jane had stayed with me throughout the long afternoon; Dorian had joined us later, to tell us that her father was still searching. Another five hours had passed; the full moon was rising to stare into our world. Where is she? I wanted to ask it. You can see. Dorian’s face had grown pale and set. Once or twice she opened her mouth to tell me something, then changed her mind. I waited, but whatever it was stayed unsaid. I sent her into Liam’s study finally to make the calls for the gathering, and I went into the kitchen to work a little common household magic.

  Hurley and the Tyler-thing were safely in the den; I could hear their voices as I passed, laughing at something on TV. The changeling had kept out of my eyesight most of the day since I recognized it, though it didn’t give me any reason to suspect it knew I knew. But I knew exactly where I wanted it now, and I knew how to get it there.

  I heard the click-step of Jane and her walker while I was measuring flour.

  “Genevieve can’t leave the bar,” she announced, muting her customary foghorn because we didn’t know who might be listening. “Penelope has to mind the bed-and-breakfast; Bet and Jenny are at a Rotary Club dinner. Hillary, Charlotte, and Agatha are all on their way. What in Blueberry Hill are you cooking at a time like this? It’s an emergency meeting, not a social event.”

  “They aren’t for you,” I said shortly. “And keep your voice down.”

  She frowned at me. “What is it, Iris? What haven’t you told us?”

  “Later,” I breathed. “Just send Dorian to me, will you? I need her to do something for me.”

  She did, without comment, though she followed Dorian back in, probably breaking the legal speed limit for walkers so she could listen.

  “I want the chairs in a circle,” I told Dorian, who was the only one of us present who had any muscles. “And I want you to go to the end of the driveway and tell everyone to park on the road and walk in. Take the flashlight in Liam’s study.”

  Dorian, her eyes wide, just nodded. She’d been phoning here and there, I knew, trying to find Leith; he seemed to have vanished along with everyone else. Jane’s eyes were narrowed, trying to drill their way into my thoughts.

  She whispered, which I didn’t know she remembered as an option, “Iris, what are you doing?”

  “You’ll see,” I promised, and shoved the bowl under the beaters. “Mix this, please, while I chop. I’m in a hurry, and I can’t talk about it now.”

  I heard the den door open when Jane turned on the mixer. The Tyler-thing poked its head in the kitchen door a moment later, smiling.

  “Cookies?” it said to us. I saw Jane’s sour lemon-drop mouth sweetening a little at its puppy-dog friendliness. She almost cracked a smile in my kitchen, which would no doubt have caused the decorative plates to leap off the wall.

  “Cookies,” I agreed. “What are you and Hurley watching?”

  “Funny family pet videos.”

  “Ah. Well, I’ll let you know when they’re done.”

  “Thank you, Gram.”

  “Such a well-mannered boy,” Jane said after his head disappeared. “A shame about the ring in his eyebrow and the green hair, but really what could you expect with Kathryn marrying so soon after dear Ned was killed?”

  “Exactly what I told myself,” I said, turning the mixer off and scraping the nuts into the bowl. “When Ned died, I just knew that boy would get his eyebrow pierced and there’d be no stopping him.”

  “You know what I mean, Iris.”

  I went after the dried cherries and the chunks of dark chocolate with my chopper. “Of course.”

  “Of course a growing boy needs a father figure, but where on earth did she find Patrick? He looks like an ad for some kind of tooth-whitening product.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Do you know?”

  “What?”

  “Where—How—What she sees in him?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  She gave up picking at me, since I was just using her fuel to stoke a deeper fury. I threw the last ingredients into the bowl, and stirred them unmercifully. “Jane, do something useful and turn on the oven on your way out the door?”

  She sniffed, but I was rattling pans too noisily to hear her, so she just did what I asked. I threw spoonfuls of dough on a cookie sheet, and heard the sticky front door creak open. I froze, unreasonably hoping. But I heard a soft laugh, a gentle phrase upended into a question: women’s voices.

  I slid the cookies into the oven and went to meet them.

  Genevieve was among them, which delighted me.

  “The guy who takes my days off happened to be at the bar,” she said, kissing my cheek. “So he’s subbing for me. Dorian said you have a quilt emergency.”

  “We have several,” I said. She was dressed in a pair of pencil-thin jeans and a black sweater with a deep V-neck, a lovely setting for her long blond hair. Her lipstick was the color of the jewel in her navel, the color of the cherries in my cookies, and the sight of her took an edge of worry off my mind. I turned to greet Agatha, saw Charlotte and Hillary coming up the drive with Dorian. “Good,” I said tightly to no one, and took them all to show them the moldering threads overlaying the quilt still spread over the couch. Miranda and Lacey passed out crochet hooks and hastily sketched patterns and threads of any color I’d been able to find. Dorian had pulled the chairs into a circle with some thought to our frailties; there was enough room to walk between them.

  I waited until everyone was seated. There were nine of us, which seemed to me a satisfying number. I took them through the first emergency: the quilt, and its urgent need for repair. Dorian stared at me incredulously when I asked Jane to teach her how to crochet. Obviously she was wondering how I could rattle on about such mundane matters when her father and her lover and her best friend all seemed to have dissolved into moonlight. But she knew me. She swallowed her doubts and tried to pay attention to Jane. Agatha was teaching Hillary, who was looking with disbelief at the elaborate patterns on the quilt squares and the simple chain stitch running off her hook.

  “How in hell—” I heard her murmur, and Agatha pinched her lips around a smile, glancing at her mother.

  I smelled the cookies.

  The changeling poked its head in wistfully just as I opened the oven door.

  “Not yet,” I lied hastily. “Give them a couple more minutes. They’re too soft.”

  It closed the kitchen door again. I listened for the den door, heard it close, too. Then, as quietly as I could, I took the pan out of the oven and slid the cookies onto a plate. I left the oven door open, the empty pan on the table, and took the cookies into the next room. I put the plate on Genevieve’s lap.

  “Just hold them,” I told her tersely. “And keep your stitches going, ladies. We have another emergency to trap in our threads. Genevieve, I want you to smile your best when it comes in, and offer it cookies. Talk to it, while we weave the net.”

  I heard little shreds of words starting and fraying around the circle. But nobody questioned. This was why we had gathered for over a century, and for those who’d been paying lip service all those years, now was the time for a leap of faith.

  The changeling, sniffing like a dog, came into the room.

  It hesitated when it saw the circle. I saw it shift one foot backward, as though not even my cookies were enough to lure it among us. Then Genevieve, facing it, gave it her warm, cherry-red smile, and lifted the plate.

  “We couldn’t wait,” she said. “They smelled so good. Come and take some before we eat them all.”

  None of us was eating any, I realized then. But Agatha smoothed over the mistake, reaching for one and biting into it. The Tyler-thing, its eyes on Genevieve’s smooth golden
hair, and the creamy V of skin within her black top, brightened. It stepped into our circle, went over to her, and took a handful of cookies.

  Genevieve was used to chattering amiably to customers through difficult situations, and the changeling looked so much like Tyler that she didn’t seem struck by anything amiss, except for whatever was amiss with me. I doubt that anyone else noticed much beyond my own relentlessness: I chained faster than I thought my fingers could move. But no one questioned my eyesight or my sanity; everyone just crocheted quietly along with me. Our chains grew quietly as the changeling talked about funny pet videos and scattered crumbs on the floor, and Genevieve kept its attention, chatting and working her own chain as she balanced the plate on her lap. Slowly our silence and the rhythm of our hooks worked their own magic: our minds began to touch, seep together, link themselves around the changeling. Stitch by stitch, thought by thought, we cast our chains, circling and circling, until it finally realized it stood alone among us, while we circled it with our eyes, our hooks, our chains.

  It made a little sound, spraying crumbs. Then it froze, only its eyes roving, trying to see our faces, or a gap in our web, a place to escape. In its sudden fear, it lost control: thumbs turned visibly into twigs; a cheekbone hardened into bark; its nose flattened, grew knobbed like a burl. Lacey’s face turned so pearly I thought she might faint. Jane, whose eyes were starting out of her head, muttered something to Lacey that caused her spine to snap straight. Hillary, staring at the changeling, looked, with her spiky hair and elfin bones, as though she were turning into one herself. Genevieve, her marvelous social abilities floundering at last, stuffed a cookie into her own mouth, squeaking a little as she bit.

  I said to it, “Tell us who sent you. And why. And what you have done to Tyler.”

  “Witches,” it hissed, spraying crumbs. It spat a few more out, as though tasting poison. “Magic. Wicked magic.”

  “Chain stitch,” I told it. “Elementary. Did you also take Syl?”

  “Syl.”

  “And Owen?”

  “Leith,” Dorian added faintly. It was trembling, shifting, tugging at air, or invisible bonds.

  “I go where I’m sent,” it answered. “Do what I’m told.”

  “Who sends you? Who commands you?”

  It flopped on its knees, looking so like Tyler for an instant that I nearly dropped my hook. Then its hair turned into brambles, and I breathed again. I saw its eyes grow white and luminous as moons, as though they reflected some distant light.

  “She. She commands my heart.”

  “Did she also command you to take Syl?” Jane asked, sensing, as she did sometimes, that I could use somebody’s strength. I flung her a grateful look, and worked my chain, picking up speed again.

  Its face puckered into an unexpectedly human expression. “The cuz Syl? No.”

  “What about Leith?” Dorian asked again. “And Owen?”

  “Not Owen. I don’t know Leith. She didn’t say them.”

  It tugged an arm, an ankle, testing our invisible threads. Apparently they held; it grimaced, making the distorted face that peers at you out of tree bark. “She’ll come for me,” it warned suddenly, loudly. “She’ll take me back.”

  “We might bargain,” I said tersely. “If we choose. We might keep you, trapped here forever in our stitches. Or we’ll unravel you, bramble and twig and leaf, and stitch you into a pattern that not even your queen will recognize.”

  “She’ll see me,” it insisted. But its voice quavered. “She will come.”

  “Easier for you if she gives us back our Tyler. And anyone else she has taken who belongs to us. Then we will give you back to the wood. And then we will find every path and passage, every door between our worlds and stitch them so tightly closed that you’ll forget our world exists.”

  “Whoa,” it said faintly, or maybe, “Woe.”

  And then it shouted, or cried, or wailed, made a sound that blasted through the room, and flung open doors to fill the house. It could have stopped hearts, that sound; it certainly stopped our hands. But it only made us clutch our hooks instead of dropping them, and it failed to break our chains. Then it curled up around itself and turned into what looked like a small tree stump in the middle of my carpet, shooting a few upright leafing twigs out of itself, maybe to signal that it was still alive.

  We sat stunned in the aftermath, staring at it, and waiting for the echo to die down. In its fading, I heard a heavy panting coming from beyond the circle. I jumped, fear skittering on its spider-feet across my neck and down my arms. We all turned, slowly and apprehensively, to see what the changeling’s shout had summoned from the wood.

  It had called up Tarrant Coyle, I saw with amazement. He stood in the hall doorway, hand to his heart, catching his breath and staring at the tree stump.

  “What,” he demanded weakly, “in heck-fire kind of demon was that you ladies conjured up?”

  Miranda answered pointedly, which was fine with me; I couldn’t find a word in my head. “That wasn’t a demon, Tarrant. It was a changeling. You spoke to him, I believe, earlier today. Tyler.”

  His eyes bulged. “That’s Tyler? What’d you do to him?”

  “Tarrant!” Jane snapped. “Pay attention! That’s the kind of magic you think you want to be dealing with in Iris’s wood.”

  “Changeling,” Lacey supplied faintly. “A fairy substitute for a human child.”

  “Looks like a stump,” he muttered, wheezing at it. “Or a weird kind of altar. You sacrificing things now?”

  “We just got rid of Hurley,” I told him irritably. “He knew too much.”

  “Iris,” Charlotte said reprovingly. “Don’t confuse Tarrant; it doesn’t take much, apparently.”

  “I’d like to know what Tarrant is doing here, sneaking around my place as though he thinks he already owns it.”

  “I wasn’t sneaking! I was just walking down the hall—the front door was open—when there was this bloodcurdling yell, and I saw that—that—come to think of it, it did look a bit like Tyler, just before it changed. That green hair…”

  “Tarrant!” I wanted to throw my hook at him. “Just tell us why you’re here?”

  “I can’t find my daughter,” he said fretfully. “I saw the cars parked on the highway, and I hoped she was still here with you.” He crossed the room, flicked a curtain open. “Or spying on you, anyway.”

  “Still here? When was she here before?”

  “She was with me this afternoon, when I came to talk to you. She didn’t want to come home with me. She was mad at me. So I left her—” He paused. His eyes widened, moved reluctantly to the twiggy thing in the middle of the floor. “I left her in the wood,” he said to it dazedly. “With Tyler.”

  The phone rang.

  I nearly leaped out of my chair, remembered in the nick of time what I was holding. I handed my hook and chain carefully to Miranda, who knew enough not to set it down, to keep it suspended between worlds.

  “It has to be Owen or Syl,” I told them tightly, and banged the kitchen door open so hard it hit the cookie sheet on the stove and sent it clattering to the floor. I snatched up the receiver, gripping it so tightly it was a wonder it could speak at all, and demanded, “Yes?”

  A man’s voice asked hesitantly, “Is this Iris?”

  “Yes!” I bellowed.

  “Wow,” he said, awed. “My name is Madison. I’m a friend of Syl’s—well, more than a friend. Between you and me, I’m trying to persuade her to marry me—and I’d really like to talk to her. If that’s possible?”

  I tried to say something civilized, gave up finally, and told him the truth. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  I hung up and crept back to my chair to anchor my wobbly knees before I sat down on the floor.

  19

  Syl

  Leith led me along an invisible path, an underground stream, through the wood to a circle of birch trees. I don’t know how long we waited. Standing there, listening to the lightly chattering leaves,
feeling the sunlight inch across my hair, my hands, I felt all sense of time drift out of me. There seemed so much else to consider besides my fears. The stunning threads of gold in Leith’s red hair; the wedges of flame on his cheeks as he lowered his eyelids: butterfly wings of fire. He leaned against one tree, arm around its trunk, cheek against its milky bark, such a still, intimate pose that it made me wonder how well he knew that tree, if their silence was another form of language. Once he glanced at me: the deep flash of blue in his dark eyes made my breath stop. He gave me a little, crooked smile. The trees swayed and breathed around us, though I hadn’t noticed any wind at all before. In our private wood, our little endless moment, such things didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, not Gram, or Lynn Hall, or Tyler, just the sunlight moving slowly across my eyes, into my heart.

  I stood in a dream of light. It was so lovely, this warm cascade, that I wanted to slip out of my body, become an indistinguishable part of it. Now and then, like bits of another dream, I glimpsed Leith, sitting among the tree roots, his face upturned to watch me; I saw the green wood, oddly shadowy now, beyond the ring of white birch. Once I heard him say a word. See, it sounded like. Or Sigh. Syl. I didn’t know what he was trying to say. I didn’t care.

  Then I dissolved into the light. I felt it transform my bones, fill my head until there was no more room for thought, pool in my eyes until I could see nothing but that gentle, dazzling stream of gold.

  My heart spoke one last word, an astonished, expanding O! before it burst into light.

  I stood in front of Lynn Hall.

  As I recognized it, I recognized myself again: my mortal body, all my human fears for other mortals, the part of me that could never live in such beauty. I had glimpsed what I could not have, and I felt a terrible grief at the loss. Light had spilled me out of itself onto this ragged lawn, among those straggly roses with their speckled leaves and their buds withering before they could open. The pear tree, under which Grandpa Liam had breathed his last, held only a few leaves and tiny, blackened swellings of new pears. Beyond the dying garden, the wood was so overgrown with vine and bramble that I would have needed a scythe to enter it.