Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “And Judith,” Tarrant added heavily.

  “Judith?” Sylvia repeated, her brows going up again. “Your daughter? How—”

  “We think the thing there took her, too. I left her with it. Looked just like Tyler, anyway. You didn’t see her there?”

  “No. I didn’t see either of them. I couldn’t get into the wood to find them. Those stitches are like a wall of brambles around the trees.”

  “How do we know that, Sylvia?” Charlotte asked practically. “That the brambles weren’t put there to trick you, and force us to destroy our work?”

  “I agree,” Miranda said gently, but implacably. “There’s no telling what would come out of that wood if we take out the stitches around it.”

  “Whose pattern is that?” Agatha asked at a tangent. “We need to know where the stitches are if we decide to take them out.”

  “It’s one of mine,” Lacy answered. “I gave it to Iris years ago: a long linen runner crocheted all around the sides.”

  “I remember,” I told her, which was a minor miracle. “It’s in my bedroom, on the dresser.”

  “We’re not,” Jane boomed adamantly, “cutting a single stitch. There must be another way to rescue the children. Sylvia could go back and try again.”

  “Absolutely not,” I snapped. “They might decide to keep her, too.”

  “Or she might decide to stay?” Charlotte said coolly, always the one to pinpoint the unpleasant angle.

  “Thank you, Charlotte, for bringing that out into the open.”

  “I think it’s obvious. Half the one, half the other, and heir to Lynn Hall, the most powerful passageway in these mountains. She’s kept that from us, all these years. So how do we know what else she’s keeping from us? How do we know if anything she tells us is true?” She looked around the circle as we gazed at her silently, and added, without a blink, “Someone had to say it. It’s there.”

  Hillary said in her blunt little voice, startling us, “It’s there, if you look at it through the Fiber Guild’s suspicious eyes. Maybe Syl has a different way of looking at it.”

  “I think—” Sylvia said.

  “What other way is there of looking at it?” Charlotte asked reasonably. “We’ve all read Rois Melior’s manuscript. She had the clearest view of things. They’re a cold, loveless, dangerous people; they steal humans, trick them, even kill them. What clearer record do we have of them than hers?”

  “Then why,” Dorian said sharply, color running all through her face, “has my father found one worth loving for over a dozen years?”

  You could have heard a pin drop. Leaves, like little ears, were trembling all over the changeling-stump. I could hear my heart beat, like a drip of water into an empty bucket. Time slowed for a little, or I just stopped thinking about things, went somewhere else that was peaceful and simple.

  Then I blinked, and found Sylvia crouched beside me, holding my hand. “Gram,” she whispered, looking up into my face. “Are you all right?”

  I touched her face, with all its fay and human beauty. “Yes. I’m still breathing. Owen in love, all these years…” Around us the circle was silent again; everyone might have vanished, for all I knew. “Do you know what, Sylvia?”

  “What?”

  “It would be such a relief not to have to carry all this secrecy, this fear, these rules, these worries, all these threads and patterns around all the time. Especially at my age.” Owen’s dark, brooding face came into my head then. The one I trusted more than anyone except Liam had lied to me, too, all these years. “Like Morgana,” I murmured. “Like you… concealing, not daring to tell me… Was it love, too, with Morgana?”

  “I think so. He loved her.”

  “Really?” I said, surprised. “All these years… Maybe we were wrong?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe.”

  I smiled, brushed her cheek again. “Where is Owen?”

  “I don’t know, Gram.”

  “He went looking for Leith,” Dorian said, breaking the hush around us, the little bubble of timelessness. “He said he knew where he was going.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “So do I,” Jane muttered. “I’d like to know what he thinks he’s been doing, an Avery hiding something like that from a Lynn all those years.”

  I ignored her. “What should we do?” I asked Sylvia. “What do we need to do to get Tyler and Judith back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But she did know; I saw it in her steady, conjecturing gaze. Was I strong enough? Wise enough? Brave enough to do the obvious? I wasn’t certain either. It went against centuries of common lore, local history, family tradition. And at my age…

  “All right,” I told her grimly, as the faceless, ancient figure took shape in my imagination, her spiky crown spearing moonlight on its way through the trees. “How do I find her?”

  Of course that caused explosions around the circle, from Jane and Charlotte especially. After an extraordinary glimpse of Lacey shaking her crochet hook in Charlotte’s face, I got up, breaking the circle, which was an unprecedented thing to do in the middle of a spell. I went to my bedroom, found the runner under the jewel box on my dresser. It was a long oblong of white linen, with a delicate scattering of embroidered violets at either end; its sides were completely hedged in with some seriously intricate crocheted spirals and chains.

  I took my nail scissors to it.

  Then, because the front door was still open, and I didn’t want to go back into the storm, I walked out into the night instead. I thought of all the times Liam had done just that: stepped out of the door into that glittering swarm of stars and fireflies, leaving all the noise and artificial brightness behind him, along with his wife, who was busy making her complex patterns out of the fields and trees he wandered through. I went around the house to the back, where trees caught stars in their leaves, and the fireflies flashed their tiny, fairy lights in the shadows.

  I dropped my handful of shredded threads at the edge of the wood and waited.

  21

  Owen

  We waited interminably, decades and centuries, it seemed, for Sylvia to return to the circle of trees. Time flowed oddly, shifting in huge, unpredictable segments. Now the air was smoky with dusk. Now it was black, brilliant with the brief, impassioned language of fireflies. Now, in a swift jump forward, the full moon hung overhead in a sky so laden with stars they seemed about to fall to earth like ripe fruit. The taciturn Leith, inspired by moonlight, told me stories of his childhood: how no Rowan’s door was ever locked, in case someone needed to borrow something, how he knew every tangled road and who lived on it, as well as the denizens, two-legged and four, along every branch and brook and stream in Rowan territory. He told me how he had raised a fawn that had gotten separated from its mother when he was little older than the fawn. That had led to helping other creatures: an owl with a missing claw, a crippled rabbit he refused to yield to the stewpot, even a lost bear cub he had tracked through a fall of late-spring snow.

  He even told me the truth about the scar under his cheekbone.

  “I slipped on ice one winter morning and banged my face on the corner of the outhouse. I didn’t want to talk about it. All the other kids had indoor plumbing.” He paused. “Now you’ll have to become part of the family. You know my secret.”

  “You mean besides the secret that you’re part fay?”

  “Naw. You can’t blackmail me with that one. I know your secret.”

  I was silent, wishing beyond hope that it were still true. My ears caught every rustle in the dark. But it was never Rue, and, anyway, she didn’t rustle; she came to me as silently as starlight.

  “I wish…”

  “Anything could happen,” Leith reminded me. “Maybe Syl will—”

  “Sylvia can’t rescue us all. If she brings herself and Tyler out safely, I’ll be content.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I’ll have to be.”

  Sometime later, flicking away
a stone my tailbone found, I had an idea. “I have a flashlight at one end of a ballpoint pen in my pocket. You could find your way out with that. Tell Dorian you’re safe and and see if Sylvia has returned.”

  “I already told you: I’m not going anywhere near Lynn Hall tonight. Anyway, I’m a Rowan; I don’t need a flashlight. I could smell my way back to the mill road. You go.”

  “To face Iris and tell her that the heir to Lynn Hall found her way into fairyland without a map? No, thank you.”

  Later, I talked about my wife. I couldn’t see Leith’s face; we both seemed caught in some endless, enchanted night within the circle; it seemed safe to talk about anything there.

  “Her name was Frederica. She’d been called Fred all her life, and she made me promise, before she would agree to marry me, that I would never shorten her name. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why she left me. I got careless and accidentally called her by the name she hated. It seems as likely as any other reason I can come up with, why she ran away from me.”

  “She didn’t leave a note?”

  “Not a word, not a note…” I slid down the tree roots, stared back at the moon above our heads. It seemed very close; it could have seen through my skin, into the memories and the pain of being abandoned, which had been dead embers, I thought, until Rue was taken from me. “I thought she was happy. She started the nursery; she loved to garden. Dorian and I adored her. We played music together, cooked together. Dorian looks like her: that curly hair, cinnamon, nutmeg, strands of pepper and cardamom, those eyes…”

  “River eyes,” Leith murmured. “Speckled like a trout.”

  “Frederica’s were more amber, with flecks of gold and gray in them.”

  “Maybe she was fay. She had to leave her mortal shape after three years and three days or something. When did you meet her?”

  “When we were two.”

  “Oh.”

  “Her father was a friend of my uncle’s, from the city. He and his wife came to visit; they fell in love with the mountains and decided to live here. Maybe that was the mistake we made. She’d lived here all her life, married a man she grew up with; she wanted change. Adventure.”

  “Could be,” Leith said. I couldn’t see him anymore; I only heard his slow, thoughtful voice. “Things like that happen. Or maybe it’s not so simple at all… Maybe she went for a walk in the wood and found this place. This circle of trees. She fell asleep here, and woke up in a different world entirely. She’ll come back someday, thinking she’s only been gone an afternoon, and find that a hundred years have passed in the world she accidentally left.”

  “She’ll find my grave and drop a tear on it,” I said dryly.

  “She’ll see Dorian’s children’s children, and recognize them by their speckled eyes.”

  I was silent again, oddly comforted by that tale. Frederica hadn’t meant to leave us. She had fallen into an enchanted sleep, during which she had some lovely and unusual dreams… She woke to see the sun setting, the woods growing shadowy around her. She stepped out of the circle and found, as she walked home, that during her dreams her world had changed beyond imagination…

  “Maybe.”

  “Listen,” Leith said abruptly, urgently, and I did. At first I heard nothing, but I didn’t have his Rowan ears, which must have heard the trees sough on the other side of the hill.

  All around us the birch began to chatter. Wind out of nowhere flowed over us like a tidal wave. As quickly as we could push to our feet against it, it ebbed; the wood was suddenly, utterly still. The fireflies had gone, probably blown clear into the next hollow.

  “What is it?” Leith breathed, still clinging for balance and trying to see into the dark.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t like it.”

  I took the penlight out of my pocket but didn’t turn it on. There was another strange sigh of wind through the trees around the circle; twigs, dry leaves, needles crackled and snapped, as though something enormous, dark, and swift traveled through the bracken. More quickly than I could blink, a puff of red glowed among the trees, a little ball of fire that was gone the moment I saw it.

  “I really don’t like this…”

  I heard Leith shift, but he didn’t answer. Then we heard what sounded like the high, light ring of a thousand tiny bells.

  And then a horn’s clear, sweet call swept from ridge to ridge across the valleys, echoes overlapping endlessly without losing their purity. We listened for a long time, it seemed, before they began to fade.

  “The Wild Hunt,” Leith said dreamily. For an instant, in our enchanted circle, he seemed about to answer its summons.

  Then he stiffened, and I flicked the penlight on. We stared at one another. Then we both began to run.

  It wasn’t easy, floundering over rocks and tree roots at that hour of night. But the direction of the wind and the flow of riders through the trees had been toward Lynn Hall; we had no time to think. Leith, ahead of me, followed the meager, dancing pinpoint of light I trained ahead of him. I followed his steps, trying to keep up, and listening, my nape-hairs prickling, for hooves and bells and wicked laughter at our backs.

  We had no hope of getting to Lynn Hall before them, but just getting there, as fast as possible, seemed imperative.

  “What’s Iris been up to tonight?” Leith wondered raggedly, as we finally reached the fallen boundary tree and flung ourselves over it.

  “No idea,” I managed. I hadn’t run so far so fast in years, and we still had the mill road to travel before we reached my car. A sudden gust of wind behind us, strong enough to set the old hemlocks creaking, made me find my second wind. The rugged road, with its dips and ruts and sections worn down to bare root and stone, was difficult enough to walk in daylight. By night, even under that moon, it was treacherous. But a moment’s glimpse, across the brook, of a horse whose breath seemed a cloud of mist and white fire, a rider wearing what looked like horns the color of bleached bone, inspired me to a mindless burst of strength and energy that lasted until we reached the end of the mill road and my car.

  The keys were still in my pocket, and the car hadn’t morphed into a pile of rust during our sojourn in the circle of trees. We tumbled into it; I peeled away to take the turn down the long road between the Trasks’ pasture and Iris’s hayfield.

  We saw them clearly then: riders streaming out of trees, down roads and ridges, even following the path of water, some with owls on their heads, or great racks of burning horns, horses breathing fire or stars, all of them headed toward and vanishing into the wood behind Lynn Hall. I heard Leith’s incredulous gasp. I floored the gas pedal, careened around the turn into the highway so fast I felt the back end still trying to go straight. Other cars were parked near Iris’s driveway. I didn’t wonder why they were out along the road; I was just relieved that she wasn’t alone. I sprayed gravel turning into the drive, and again when I braked, opening my door at the same time.

  The front door was open. Lights were on in the living room and the kitchen. There was a tree stump on Iris’s carpet. No one was in the house. So I thought, anyway, until I bumped into Hurley in the kitchen.

  “Owen,” he said. He seemed shaken, his face slack, his eyebrows working. “There is something happening in the wood. I was watching it through my telescope. So I came down to tell Iris, and I saw it out the window with my own two eyes. I’ve never seen it with my eyes before.”

  “I haven’t, either.”

  “Are you going out there?”

  “Yes,” I said, moving fast out the other kitchen door toward the back porch.

  “Then I’ll come with you.”

  I went out onto the porch and stopped dead. Most of the Fiber Guild, including my daughter, stood scattered among the roses. For some peculiar reason, Tarrant Coyle was among them. Under the bright moonlight, I could see Iris at the boundary between lawn and wood. There was a taller, slender figure beside her; light cast by the windows burnished her sleek hair the same elusive cobweb shade as Iris’s.

  �
��That’s Syl,” Leith breathed. “How did she get here?”

  Her head lifted slightly as though she had heard her name, but she didn’t turn. Facing them both, ranged among the trees, was the mass of riders we had seen coming. Some looked nearly human; others began with a semblance of normality that trailed off into leafy branches or flowering wood. Faces in the shadows were amorphous, indecipherable. Moonlight glinted off metal and jewel, odd bits of harness. Small bells sang. A horse’s eye, predawn black, reflected a tiny, cold moon the perfect circle of the moon above the wood.

  The rider directly in front of Iris wore a crown of what looked like silver and moonlight. Tall and graceful, she at least assumed a human shape; her long pale hair flowed like a cloak over the dark, shimmering robes she wore. Fireflies, flickering constantly around her, blurred her and her dark mount; a human eye, casting a casual glance into the shadow, would not have recognized what it saw.

  She and Iris seemed to take the measure of one another silently: two ancient warrior-queens, guarding their boundaries.

  The woodland queen spoke finally. “You called me.”

  “It’s her,” Hurley said surprisedly. “The one in my telescope.”

  I don’t know which surprised me more: Hurley’s seeing eye, or the implication that Iris herself had flung open the door between worlds and roused this army massed against her.

  “You have some children of ours,” Iris answered.

  I blinked. That would explain Tarrant’s presence, I realized.

  “And you have one who is mine.”

  She had a lovely, fluting voice; it could have blended easily into the light rill of branch water, or a dove’s coo. Iris’s voice held all the untuned, timeworn notes of her mortality. But it held steady; I heard no fear in it, just her usual, reassuring brusqueness.

  “What do you want,” she asked the queen, “in return for my grandson and his friend?”

  “What will you give me?”

  “The one who is yours,” Iris answered.