Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  I looked at the hall, which seemed entirely overgrown with ivy; tendrils drifted up from the chimney pots like smoke. The back screen door was sagging off its hinges. The inner door was open. I had come for Tyler, I remembered grimly; he couldn’t stay here, either. I shook away the lingering, timeless light in my head, the lovely memories of enchantment, and went to find him.

  I entered the hall cautiously, but I didn’t hear anyone, or see so much as a shadow move. I could only find a couple of rooms open. The kitchen held little more than an open fireplace, a battered table, and a sink with a few tin pots in it. A doorway with a faded tapestry hung across it to separate it from the kitchen led me into another room. This held a bed cobbled out of stripped saplings, a thin, lumpy mattress, a sheepskin, none too clean, on the flagstones, and a clay bowl on a rickety table with a withered apple and a couple of walnuts in it.

  A movement on the sheepskin caught my eye. I looked more closely, and found a little toad making its way clumsily across the wool. I picked it up and opened a window, which whined and splintered paint on the way up. I had let the toad fall into the cool shadow of the hall before the fairy-tale implications reverberated through my thoughts: all those damp, unlovely, imperiled creatures belonging both to air and water, in need and rescued by good-hearted strangers passing by. I tried to go farther into the hall; other doors were nailed shut.

  That, too, reverberated uncomfortably: it seemed one reincarnation of the hall in my great-great-great-grandmother’s manuscript. I didn’t want to think about it. I just wanted to find Tyler and get back to the Lynn Hall we both knew. I went outside again, walked around to the front of the hall to look out over the neglected field. Weeds had grown so high they blocked my view of anything that, in my own world, I might have recognized. I was not surprised.

  This didn’t look like any fairy world I would have imagined. It looked more like Lynn Hall under a curse. I went up the low slate steps leading to the front door and turned the doorknob. As I expected, the door was swollen shut, and couldn’t even rattle in its frame. I kicked at it a couple of times with my bootheel, then gave up. I sat down on the bottom step, dropped my chin in my hands, and brooded at the baffling scene.

  Tyler’s voice, somewhere near my right foot, said, “Thanks.”

  I stared down, saw the little toad making its way along the wall.

  “Tyler?” I asked incredulously. It didn’t say anything else; it disappeared into a hole under the steps.

  But it had spoken a word in Tyler’s voice. So he had been here, in this place, maybe in that drab bedroom before he found his own way out.

  Three with eyes to see…

  I had no idea why that little scrap of nursery rhyme flitted through my head. But it made me remember that I did have eyes to see; I was part wood-folk myself, and maybe this bleak house, this unkempt, parched landscape were only a memory of truth. I had taken a magical path to get there; surely not all the magic lay in the journey. Where was the enchantment here? The poetry? The beauty that lured mortals into the land beyond time?

  “Where indeed?” a breeze whispered in my ear. I started. Then I stood up, searching through narrowed eyes, trying to see into thin air.

  “Tyler!” I shouted abruptly. “Tyler!”

  Not even a bird answered.

  The whole landscape was a riddle, I thought bemusedly. A puzzle. A trick. Hiding something, maybe, or trying to reveal something; I hadn’t a clue which. What could a weedy field or a dying rose tree say? Or a great house with all the life in it forced into two mean rooms? What had happened to all its grace and loveliness, all its tales and memories?

  The wood, great swathes of ivy and brambles hanging from the trees, looked no more inviting and far less accessible than the weed-choked field. But things happen in a wood. Children get lost and found; princesses are abandoned and rescued there; lovers meet, get separated, meet again. All I had found and rescued in the house was a toad that hadn’t hung around to chat.

  I went across the stiff, brown grass to the edge of the wood. The brambles clinging to the trees sent tendrils snaking into other trees, making a wall of thorn and flowers— little wild roses, blackberry and raspberry blossoms—between me and whatever was hidden inside. I found a dead branch and beat at them, feeling like the prince in the fairy tale on a rescue mission. How had he gotten in? He had gotten lucky, I remembered. Other princes had failed and died, impaled on thorns; he had come, through no virtue or skill or worth of his own, on the right day. The briars parted, and he strolled in.

  Evidently today was not the right day for me, but I wasn’t going to wait a hundred years. I battled with the brambles until I was breathless and sweating, but it was like poking at a snail. They drew thicker and tighter, the more I smacked them. I flung down my weapon finally and yelled at whoever had stolen Tyler and shown me the ruins of Lynn Hall.

  “What do you want? What is it you want from me? I’ve come to take Tyler home, and I’m not leaving without him!”

  “What makes you think you can find your way back?” someone asked behind me.

  I whirled. The voice was a woman’s, but I couldn’t see anyone among the ragged rose trees. Not even anything, like the toad, that in a fairy tale might have spoken. It was a good question, I admitted. But I decided not to think about it yet.

  Kitchens, was what I did think, then. Kitchens are full of sharp implements. Even the poorest kitchen had a knife to skin the stolen hare with. Or to cut the brambles in your path. I went back into the hall, rummaged through the rickety drawers, one after the other, and found nothing but useless oddments: a mousetrap without a spring, a spoon without a handle, a fork with two tines bent one way, the middle tine bent the other, one blade of a very dull pair of scissors, a tarnished silver candle-snuffer. I reached for the last unopened drawer with exasperation, and realized, as my fingers closed around the drawer pull, that my mother had put it on.

  Frozen, I stared at the drawers. All of them had the same drawer pulls my mother had chosen to replace the broken wooden knobs in Gram’s kitchen drawers. They were small, round glass prisms of different colors; multifaceted, they caught light from every direction and refracted it back in every hue of the rainbow, casting little streaks of color unexpectedly throughout the kitchen. They had seemed to me an extravagant choice for my mother, who preferred things functional and elegantly simple. But, in the end, scant weeks before she had died, she had filled Gram’s kitchen with these butterfly lights.

  I couldn’t move. I didn’t know where I was anymore, what I was seeing around me, whose house this really was. I opened my fingers, looked at the pale green prism on my palm, and it blurred and swam in the sudden, burning tears that welled and overflowed and fell, for the first time in my life. I caught them in my fingers, stared at them, astonished that I had to come all the way to fairyland to learn how to cry.

  “I never knew what happened to her.”

  I whirled, the tears shaken down my face. A man watched me from the kitchen doorway. A rainbow from one of the knobs quivered on his cheekbone. His hair was dark and curly, his eyes golden brown as hazelnuts. He stood there quietly as I stared at him, wondering why that coloring, that tapered jaw, those dark brows, peaked with a touch of uncertainty, looked in any way familiar.

  Then I swallowed, and pushed back hard against the cupboard so that my knees wouldn’t give way and drop me on the floor.

  I forced myself to answer. He had a right to know. “She died some years ago. Mortal years.” My voice hurt, coming out. “Did you—did you love her?”

  He nodded. “She didn’t believe me, though,” he said softly. “She didn’t trust me. She said—my kind don’t love. Our blood runs cold; our hearts are empty. We trick mortals into loving and then abandon them.” He let one hand rest on the cupboard beside him, his fingers open to catch the rainbow there. “So she abandoned me.”

  I blinked away tears again. “She was just—She was taught that.”

  “I know. We know.”

&
nbsp; “Is it true?”

  He shrugged a little, his face calm, thoughtful. He looked scarcely older than I, but in another world, he might have been as old as the flagstones under our feet. “Sometimes. Not always. As it is in your world.”

  “Yes.” I took a breath, my mother’s face vivid in my head, lovely and fierce and desperate. “She loved me so much,” I whispered, “that I don’t see how she could not have loved you.”

  He bowed his head, hiding his eyes; his hand closed around the rainbow, but it eluded him, dancing on his fingers. “I always hoped to see her again. But she never called to me.”

  “She was afraid,” I guessed. “Maybe of you, maybe of Gram… Who knows? Maybe she knew she didn’t have the time, or the strength to fight for you, if Gram found out.”

  He raised his eyes again—my eyes—and I saw the question in them: Do you?

  Maybe, I thought. You could be a trick, and your whole world a beautiful, empty lie, as Gram believes. But if you are a heartless illusion of love and beauty, come to trick me into challenging the entire Fiber Guild because I am your child as well as Morgana’s, then I have to believe that I am a heartless illusion of a human, incapable of loving, too, and if that’s true, then what am I doing here in the first place?

  “Maybe,” I breathed. “Maybe not. But maybe. Where is Tyler?”

  “In the wood.”

  “How do I get in there? The thorns won’t let me in.”

  He gave me a look of very human surprise. “We thought you would know. They’re your threads.”

  I felt my blood run cold then, as cold as fairy blood. “Oh, no,” I whispered through my fingers. “Oh. No.” Then I shouted wildly, “Gram!” as though she were in the next room. “Whose house is this, anyway?” I asked him raggedly. “In what world did Lynn Hall ever look like this?”

  “It is what Iris sees when she envisions us reclaiming Lynn Hall, using it for our door between worlds.”

  I looked around me, shivering, stunned. “Gram thinks we’re so terrible?”

  “We,” he answered pointedly. “Not you.”

  “Not yet.” I pushed cold hands against my forehead, trying to think. “I can’t lie to her forever. Threads. A thread has a beginning and an end; people follow them through labyrinths and dark forests.”

  “Here they lead nowhere,” he said a trifle bitterly. “Except to the knot at either end.”

  “Threads can be cut. Stitches can be undone.”

  “There’s great power in her threads. A magic born of fear and hatred as old as this house seeped into the wood and field and water around it. How can we fight such power except with the same ancient forces?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him breathlessly. “Nobody ever asked me that. Nobody ever came to me to say the things you’re saying to me.”

  “You belong to both worlds; you are one of them and one of us. You must pass back and forth between your worlds with every thought, every breath. How do you reconcile them?”

  “I never have.”

  “Try,” my father pleaded. “For all of us.”

  I nodded, gazing at his so familiar, unfamiliar face that my mother must have loved so much she ran, terrified, from love. “I don’t even know how to get back to Gram to tell her what she’s done,” I told him ruefully. “I came through a dream, I think. Gram hasn’t been able to shut the passage through light.”

  He smiled a little, a rainbow trembling at the corner of his mouth. “You came that way? That’s the oldest, and simplest, and most difficult way…”

  “She’d need to thread her needle with the sun.” I turned restlessly, wondering if I could travel a rainbow’s arch between worlds. “Up the chimney?” I guessed, looking dubiously at the blackened hearth. “Magic goes up and down chimneys in tales. Or maybe I can find a passage in the attic, if I can get the hall door open.”

  He nodded toward my ankle at the drawer behind it. “There’s the one you haven’t opened.”

  “There’s nothing in those drawers.”

  “There’s everything before they are opened: gold, hope, a good knife blade…”

  I bent to open the drawer with the green prism pull. It had already given me so much, I realized, and I’d barely touched it. At first glance the drawer looked as though I’d emptied it.

  “What’s in it?” my father asked.

  “Nothing.” Then I looked closer. “A bit of thread.”

  “Three with eyes to see,” he said, and at the third glance I recognized it: the way out.

  I picked up the inch or two of thread that was caught between cracks in the wood, as though someone, reaching for something, had snagged a sleeve and pulled a thread loose.

  It kept coming. I pulled out a foot or more, and then I pulled the drawer out, and saw where the thread went: under the cupboard, out the back, and underneath the tapestry hung between the rooms.

  I turned to my father before I followed the thread into the next room; he smiled at me, a rainbow in one golden eye. I walked behind the ancient, faded hanging

  and into the circle of the Fiber Guild.

  20

  Iris

  That was the loveliest thing I ever saw.

  Before I recognized her, before my eyes finished seeing what they saw, and my head put a name to it, that’s what my heart thought. A slender, golden-haired woman stepped out of air into light and shadow, one of our threads arching gracefully from her fingers to the end of my hook. She had unraveled my chain, I realized, and wonder changed to mortal terror, just that fast. Then I knew her and, for the third or fourth time that evening, I nearly jumped out of my chair.

  “Sylvia!” My voice croaked like an old raven with shock. Tarrant, sitting apart from us, gave a brief bark of astonishment. Nobody else said anything, or moved. Mouths hung open all around the circle; no words came; nobody could even blink. For that moment, she held them all spellbound.

  Then I heard a throat-clearing rumble from Jane, and her support hose snag together as she shifted. Miranda’s teeth clicked together as she closed her mouth; she murmured succinctly between them, “Shit.”

  “Is that you?” Dorian asked faintly, her voice trembling. “Or another changeling?”

  Sylvia looked at her. “Me. I just met my father.” She turned to me again, her eyes wide, distant, a stranger’s regard, which at that moment she pretty much was. “That’s who I look like.”

  “Oh, my,” Lacey whispered.

  I tried to summon up something more coherent. “Is that where you’ve been?” was all I could manage.

  She nodded. “I went looking for Tyler. Leith took me to a place in the woods. A passageway he knew.”

  “Leith,” Dorian said, straightening abruptly in her chair as though she’d sat on a pin. “He doesn’t know—Syl, what are you saying?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Where is he?” Dorian pleaded. “Where’s my father?”

  “I’m not sure… Leith watched me when I crossed into the Otherworld, but I don’t know if he came, too. I never saw Owen.”

  Dorian put her hands over her mouth, said through them, “What are you saying, Syl? About Leith?”

  “He’s part fay,” Sylvia said simply. “Like me. We’ve known that about each other since we were kids. That’s why I left these mountains as soon as I could.” She gave me that stranger’s glance again, the one that told me that I couldn’t hurt her, or that she was afraid I could. “I didn’t want you to find out that I’m what you all fear most.”

  Well, there she gave it to me in a nutshell: the tangled mystery of Morgana’s love, the knot of all my loves and hates. What, her cool eyes asked me, are you going to do with me?

  I felt old suddenly, a hundred years older than I’d been five minutes before, and frail, and useless, and completely confused. Something hung by a thread between us: from the beginning stitch still looped around my crochet hook to the end of the strand between her fingers. Love, I guessed it was, or life, maybe just truth at last, considering where she had
found the end of my thread to follow it.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I demanded of her, of everybody silently listening. “Stop loving you? Just like that? When did you stop loving me?”

  I saw her swallow; the thread trembled between us.

  “Oh, Gram,” she whispered. “Never.”

  “Then why should I be the one to stop?”

  “I thought—you’ve always hated—”

  “Well, nobody—not a Lynn or an Avery, not even Morgana, and certainly none of the wood-folk—ever gave me a reason not to. Is that why she never told me? Because she was afraid I would have hated you?”

  “I think—I think probably, Gram. She never told me, either.”

  I pulled my crochet hook through the thread and threw it on the floor. It hit the little tree stump; a twiglet rustled. Sylvia seemed to notice it finally; she looked down, and her brows went up.

  “It’s the Tyler-thing,” I said impatiently, before she could ask.

  “So I see. You scared it.”

  “It scared me.”

  “How did you recognize it?” she asked hopefully.

  “Not with your eyes,” I told her bluntly. “I saw its shadow. Where is Tyler? You didn’t bring him back with you.”

  She shook her head. “I tried. Gram, he’s trapped in your wood behind your stitches. You will have to let him out.”

  I was the only one speechless, then; everyone else found something to say about that, including Tarrant.

  “You mean your sewing circle really works?” I heard him exclaim, and then Jane’s bullhorn overrode the clamor.

  “We didn’t steal him away,” she protested to Sylvia. “We didn’t send a changeling to take his place. Whoever wants it back, let them bring Tyler to us.”