Dreamwood

by Heather Mackey

  As for herself, Lucy couldn’t remember when she’d been happier. Her father talked to her of all the things they would do together—without any mention of Miss Bentley’s.

  “You know, you’d better write to me,” Pete told her as they started on the path back to the Knightlys’ home.

  “Of course,” Lucy said happily. She had assured Pete a hundred times that she would write from Kansas City, where they were going to visit her father’s mentor, an elderly scholar of the ghost-clearing world who was in frail health. But she never tired of hearing him ask.

  “We won’t be gone that long, anyway.” She reached out a hand to touch the sun-warmed ferns, feeling strangely closer to the forest now that she was just about to leave.

  “Make sure you’re back by September,” Pete said. “Snow closes the passes after that and you know you can’t come by sea.”

  “I know: The spith are hungry in September,” she said, quoting Niwa. It was surprisingly easy to look back on that night in Governor Arekwoy’s lodge and laugh.

  “You don’t want to end up on Bone Beach,” Pete said with mock gravity.

  “Will you write me?” Lucy asked. She turned to look at him: His snub nose was brushed with gold from the afternoon light. He swept some auburn hair away from his eyes, and a second later it sprang into place again, just as she knew it would. Maybe stranger than her comfort with the forest was just how comfortable she’d grown around him.

  “I don’t know,” he said, as if considering whether or not he would have the time. “Nibs and me have a lot of fishing to catch up on.” He grinned at her angry expression. “Course I’ll write you. I’ll do you one better. I’ll whittle you something. A keepsake so you can look at it and think of me and wonder, Why haven’t I bitten off anyone’s head lately? Oh, right, it’s because Pete isn’t around.”

  This deserved a punch in the arm, which Pete happily accepted.

  She thought back to the moment when they’d first met, his fierce concentration as he whittled. Even then she’d known she wanted him to pay attention to her.

  Pete helped her jump over a downed log, but when they were on the far side of it, as if by some mutual agreement Lucy hadn’t realized existed until this moment, they stood still holding hands, their faces close together.

  Lucy’s heart was thumping rapidly. The trees closed around them like a curtain, and there was a green mulch smell that Lucy would forever associate with Saarthe.

  Pete took a deep breath, like someone about to jump into a lake.

  She closed her eyes and felt his lips touch her cheek.

  There was a tiny shock, like a soap bubble bursting on her skin.

  After a second they broke apart, grinning.

  That had been easy, like falling off a log. Maybe it was easier to like someone and be liked back than she’d realized. She’d always thought it must be terribly hard, almost impossible—at least for her.

  But she was starting to get used to the idea that it might be nice sometimes to be proved wrong.

  They started to walk again, shooting contented glances at each other all the way home.

  • • •

  The next day Lucy stood with her father outside the Pentland train station. It was uncharacteristically crowded at the station, and Old Wundt was busy selling tickets at the ticket window. Aside from being awake, the stationmaster looked exactly the same as he had on the day when Lucy first arrived. He wore the same ragged cardigan, and his pipe was clamped firmly in his mouth. But the rows of Wanted posters behind him had thinned significantly since her arrival. With Rust disappearing from the forest, there was more timber work to go around, and Saarthe was producing fewer outlaws.

  Even though their train would be boarding soon, Lucy lingered outside the station, wanting to soak in every last minute she could of Saarthe. Pete and her father had gone inside, and for a moment Lucy was alone with Able Dodd.

  “Good-bye,” she told Whitsun and Snickers, holding out sugar lumps on her palms. Looking up from the horses she noticed the handyman brooding near the wagon. He was dressed in his usual black duster and somber clothes. Lucy had barely spoken to Able Dodd since she’d returned from the Thumb. But she realized she did have unfinished business with him.

  She took a deep breath—the Knightlys’ handyman still intimidated her. “I wanted to thank you before I left,” she said. “You gave me good advice.”

  Perhaps Able Dodd was unused to being thanked. He raised his shoulders as if some rare sensation tickled him. His good brown eye turned a melted butterscotch with warmth, while his wrathful dead eye was at peace for once. What’s more, Lucy was shocked to see the beginnings of a bashful smile on his rough-hewn face.

  But Lucy couldn’t leave well enough alone. Tugging on her braid, she squinted up at him. “I just don’t understand how you knew.”

  His smile—quite possibly the rarest thing she’d seen yet in Saarthe—faded, its place taken by something soft and yearning. He looked into the distance as if looking years into the past. “My grandmother was from there, you know.”

  Just behind them the station swarmed with people; wagons and buggies passed by on the road leading into town. But Lucy felt for the moment that the world had shrunk to just the two of them.

  “Your grandmother?” she asked, stunned. “She was from the lost settlement?”

  Able Dodd bowed his massive head and sighed. “She grew up on the Thumb. When . . . it happened she was in Pentland, visiting relatives. She used to tell me stories about His-sey-ak. And the forest there.” He trailed off.

  Lucy put a hand on Snickers’s bridle. “What happened to her?”

  “She married someone in town,” he said. His stern face softened at the memory. “But she missed the Thumb. She always wanted to go back. Said it was a magical place.”

  “It is,” she said softly. On impulse she reached out and took hold of his hand.

  And now he smiled for a second time: a kind, grandfatherly smile that made her wonder how she’d ever been afraid of him.

  “What will you do with the wood?” he asked. He put his other hand on Whitsun’s neck, somehow implying that the horses, too, were interested in her answer.

  Once again, Lucy had to wonder how Able Dodd knew the things he did. “What do you mean?” she asked. Only a handful of people knew what she’d brought back from the Thumb.

  Able Dodd chuckled: a gravelly sound that was actually pleasant . . . once Lucy realized he was laughing. “You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t passed his tests and won his favor. Either you came back with dreamwood, or you didn’t come back.”

  Lucy nodded: that made sense. “The truth is, I’m not sure what to do with it.”

  She’d given Pete half of the long branch that His-sey-ak had given her. He sold a tiny piece of that, using the proceeds to pay off the Knightlys’ debts with enough left over to buy himself a new saddle and fishing rod.

  But he’d shown little interest in acquiring a fortune with it. “I wish I didn’t have it, honestly,” he’d told Lucy before pleading with her to take his share back. She wouldn’t have it. In the end, he’d bundled the wood into a bit of spare carpet and stuffed it behind a table in her old third-floor bedroom.

  The Lupines wouldn’t hear of taking any, because His-sey-ak had given it to her, and that gift was sacred.

  She donated a small amount of the wood to the hospital in Pentland to help in healing patients. But the doctors in charge had begged her not to give any more, for they didn’t want to attract the notice of thieves and robbers.

  So she found herself the owner of a fortune’s worth of dreamwood, but with no interest in trading it for money. Such a thing felt wrong.

  “You’ll find a use for it,” Able Dodd said. He stroked the horses’ forelocks as they whinnied softly in agreement. A few last-minute travelers scurried past them, hurrying to buy their tickets
for the last train of the day.

  Lucy touched the fine cotton voile dress she’d recently bought. Angus Murrain’s estate paid her the reward for Rust’s cure. She had plenty of money—more than she knew what to do with. “Maybe I’ll return it to him someday.”

  Able Dodd took the reins and climbed up into the wagon. “Maybe you will. Though I’ll wager it will be many years before you do.”

  Lucy never liked to be told by others what she was going to do. But in this case she had to admit the handyman was probably right.

  Pete was hurrying toward her. “Come on, Lucy. They’re getting ready to board, and Niwa’s here.”

  Her heart hiccupped at the sight of him. For a moment—but just for a moment, Lucy wished she wasn’t going with her father after all.

  There on the platform stood Niwa in her Lupine huntress clothes. She grinned at Lucy and pointed to the sky, where a raven circled overhead. The bird cawed once.

  “It says, good journey,” Niwa translated for it. Lucy laughed.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “Good-bye,” she told the Lupine girl, holding up her palm to hers, and then quickly embracing her, smelling once again the perfume of wild sage that would forever mean Niwa to her.

  “What about me?” Pete asked in mock alarm.

  “Oh, I don’t know . . .” She pretended to think about it, then flew into his arms, where she hugged him, trying to imagine that this moment wouldn’t ever stop.

  “Remember to write,” he said softly in her ear. “I’ll miss you.”

  They broke apart. Lucy swallowed and grinned and wiped her eyes; like everything in Saarthe, her feelings seemed to have become bigger and wilder than they were anyplace else.

  “Ah, Lucy, there you are.” Her father came striding down the platform, patting his pockets as if searching for something. He looked fresh and dapper once again: his straw-colored hair and beard neatly trimmed, his clothes pressed, his glasses, as usual, slipping dangerously low on his long Darrington nose.

  Oh no. Had he mislaid the tickets?

  She had been so busy making her good-byes, she’d forgotten to make her usual checks before a rail journey.

  “Do you have the tickets?” She looked nervously at the train, which people had already begun to board.

  “Tickets? Yes, in fact I have them right here.” Her father produced them with a faint look of surprise, as if he didn’t quite believe that he’d remembered them.

  “Oh, well, that’s good.” She gave him a congratulatory smile. Usually any discussion of tickets was followed automatically by her father saying “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  She supposed a tiny part of her missed hearing that.

  But now William Darrington appeared to have remembered what it was that had preoccupied him as he’d made his way across the platform to her.

  “I was just thinking you should start keeping your own notebook,” he said. “I don’t think A History of Ghost Clearing in the American States would be complete without a chapter on how you managed to get through that ghost wall. I was doing some research, and I don’t think there’s ever been a documented encounter in which ghosts formed a kind of collective spiritual organism—”

  “Sir,” the porter interrupted, “we’re leaving now. Please board the train.”

  “Yes, of course,” her father said absentmindedly, as he went up the steps. “Anyway . . .”

  She stepped onto the train, not quite listening as her father continued. She turned a moment to stand in the doorway. As it had on the evening of her arrival, the crowd on the platform had rapidly thinned, but with a few crucial differences: There were Niwa and Pete waving at her—she was leaving good friends behind. And she had her father beside her.

  “So what do you say, Lucy?” he asked. “Do you think you’d like to try your hand at writing that?”

  She’d answer in a moment. Right now she was waving to her friends.

  The final whistle sounded and a cloud of steam streaked by. Viewed from a certain angle, one could almost imagine it as a ghost.

  In a box of old papers of mine from grade school there is a story I wrote decades ago about a mysterious tree whose golden sap gives a girl the ability to fly. So perhaps I have been writing Dreamwood almost as long as I have known how to write. For my family, my friends, who watched me work on this book for years, I’m sure it feels that way—it’s been a long haul. Thank you for sticking with me.

  I am grateful to Tim Travaglini for seeing something in a random manuscript critique. And I’m grateful to the ninja duo of Tracey and Josh Adams, agents of warmth, acumen, and unflagging support. My extraordinary editor Arianne Lewin asked things of me I did not think I could do. Thank you for believing I could develop abilities I certainly did not have when I started. And thanks to everyone at Putnam for making this book so much better. Katherine Perkins and Paula Sadler, I’m especially grateful for your help.

  To the people who have saved me on many occasions, whether with fish tacos or a well-timed phone call, thank you. Writer friends Cynthia Jaynes Omololu, who has been with me since this thing started, and Kim Liggett, who came in as it was ending, deserve special thanks. Nicky Ovitt, for the use of a key name, thank you. Juana Rodriguez, thank you for listening to reports of my often-slow progress. The largest debt is the hardest to express. To my parents, Eric, Kris, Grant, Jules, and Simone—there would be no reason to write without you. Nothing without you.

  There is no Lupine Nation or Federation of First Peoples. And I would not want my poor inventions to be confused with any group of real people nor be seen as representing the customs, beliefs, or concerns of real people. But I have exercised the authorial power of “what if” to imagine an America where—in some places, perhaps—there was a different outcome to the wars and policies that have shaped the history of indigenous peoples on this continent.