Season of Wonder

by Paula Guran

  Still breathing hard, Santa knelt at eye-level and placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Eric started, but the powerful grip rested gentle as a child holding a sparrow.

  The light from the warrior’s blade was waning, but before it failed completely, Claus glanced around, and with a wave of his gloved hand, caused the candles on the mantel to emit a soft flame.

  “Better,” he said. “You have seen enough of darkness this night. Enough darkness for a lifetime.”

  At this bit of magic, wonder replaced Eric’s fear. “Are you really Santa? I didn’t think you were real.”

  “Perhaps it were best if you still believed so,” Claus said. “Such horror as you have witnessed is not for little boys. Yes, I am Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, Hoteiosho, Papa Noel—Santa Claus.”

  “Do you have a sleigh, with reindeer and everything? Is there really a Rudolph?”

  “I sometimes use a sleigh pulled by reindeer, but Rudolph is a legend. Reindeer noses cannot glow, you see.” Santa gave him a wink. “I was an ordinary man once, Eric, but was chosen long ago—the why and how need not concern you. When the forces of darkness seek to enter our dimension, it is my task to prevent them. The struggle is fierce and continuous. The moment the elf appeared I knew of him, but he was little more than a phantom until this evening, when he attempted a permanent transition into this world through a blood-sacrifice. I was nearly too late—other powers sought to prevent my coming.”

  “He wanted to hurt Daniel.”

  “Daniel was always the target. In the land mortals call Faerie—though it is far, far more, both darker and brighter—there are rules to such encounters. The elf could only strike through the youngest sibling. He couldn’t have killed you—he deceived you about that. He wanted to destroy both you and Daniel, your brother through death, you through guilt and remorse. Such is the way of these folk. But you resisted, Eric. You were willing to sacrifice your own life for Daniel’s, and that gave me both time to reach you and power to aid you. Your tiny resistance was all I needed to break through. The lit fireplace was but the elf’s foolish attempt to create a further barrier against me.”

  “He said I’d never be as good as Daniel.”

  “The elf spoke many lies, some close to the truth because those are the most deceptive,” Santa said. “I, who am far-sighted, tell you this, Eric, you will not be the high school quarterback, the football star your brother will become. You will not possess his easy athletic ability. Your heart is turned toward books and contemplation. And you will always be the little brother to him, even when you are old, so that sometimes you will long for him to treat you as an equal. But you will be special as he is special, and you will love one another though you have nothing in common save the odd fact of growing up in the same house. And it will have to be enough.”

  Eric looked into the wise, thoughtful eyes. “You’re nothing like the stories.”

  “No, I suppose not. My task is battle. I am the Defender against the darkest of all nights. No doubt it makes me grim.”

  “Do you really bring presents?”

  Santa laughed, a deep, pleasant rumble. “The gifts are a legend from long ago. All year long I gather my strength for this night. But there are more than presents to be had in this world. There is good done to others. And I think we have exchanged presents tonight.”

  “Huh? Oh.” Eric remembered his manners. “Thank you for saving us.”

  “And thank you for what you did for me. Not many children can say they saved the life of Santa Claus.”

  The warrior glanced around the room. “It were best if no evidence remains of this battle.” He waved his hand, and all the scattered objects in the room began to move, inching back to their places. The shattered glass of the door quietly reformed, piece by piece. The coffee table and couch began mending themselves. The Christmas tree slowly rose, and the Christmas angel, head intact, returned to the topmost branches.

  “By morning all will be as it was,” Santa said. “You do understand that no one will ever believe what happened? Best not try to tell them. Especially Daniel.”

  Eric smiled. “He’d really make fun of me.”

  “Good night, Eric. Go back to bed. Tomorrow is Christmas, and I must go. There are other evils to defeat before sunrise. I have to do it all in one night, you know.”

  Santa stepped to the fireplace. He turned, gave Eric a final laugh, and was gone, sliding up the chimney like water.

  Under the vigil of the angel at the top of the tree, Eric watched as the living room gradually returned to normalcy. He picked up the bat, now whole, and studied his brother’s printed inscription.

  Sleigh bells sounded outside. Still clutching the bat, Eric ran to the window. Through the blackness, he caught a glimpse of animals large as bison pulling a mighty wagon into the sky.

  “Merry Christmas,” Santa’s voice rang through the terrible darkness. “Merry Christmas.”

  In The White Goddess (1948), Robert Graves mentions the archetypes of the Holly King and the Oak King, each representing one half of the year and forever pitted against one another as the seasons turn. Von Jocks adroitly brings the myth of their eternal battle into modern times. The deciduous oak tree was sacred to the Celts, and they believed the evergreen native holly repelled evil spirits and lightning. Botanically, as oaks and other deciduous trees lose their leaves with cold weather, holly remains bright in the barren landscape of winter. When the light of longer days returns, the oak starts growing again. In summer, when oaks are in full leaf, the holly is blooming to produce the berries that will turn red in fall and remain so vibrant with its still-green leaves in winter. Thus when each “king” is at “his” strongest, he is, at the same time, destined to be supplanted.

  The Winter Solstice

  Von Jocks

  Darkness surrounded the isolated cabin—in more ways than one.

  “This,” murmured Ivy, watching her breath mist a cold pane of the cabin window, “is not what people mean when they call December a season of magic.”

  Not that the wintery night beyond didn’t have a hushed otherworldliness about it. Snow swirled out of the blackness so quietly, Ivy wasn’t sure if she heard its tiny, gritty impact against the glass with her ears . . . or with less mundane senses. Magic, real magic, worked like that—so subtle it could hardly be differentiated from coincidence, or imagination, or even delusions.

  Chenille-sweatered arms braced against the windowsill, narrow chin pillowed on her arms, Ivy stared at her dark-haired, dark-eyed reflection. Sometimes, even the most devoted of witches found that kind of subtlety frustratingly anticlimactic. Maybe that’s why so few potential magic users stayed with the discipline. Nowadays, people wanted the kind of instant pyrotechnics only movie witches produced.

  Ivy wasn’t looking for laser beams and levitation—but over the last half-year, especially since the Harvest Moon, she’d become so desperate for a little proof, a little reassurance, that she ached for it, dreamed about it. That’s why she’d driven out here, by herself, on a day when her friends were preparing to party as only pagans could.

  “Magical quest, or fool’s errand,” she sighed, and in her breath’s resulting fog she drew a squeaky, five-pointed star with one finger. “ ‘Only my hairdresser knows for sure.’ ”

  As the drawing began to weep from its outermost edges, she turned back to the too-cold room and faced her only companion for the Winter’s Solstice.

  The gray tabby cat stared back, unblinking and unimpressed, from where she lay on the towel Ivy had laid out. She’d darted into the cabin while Ivy carried in her supplies for her night of vigil. Was the cat a visitor from the fairy realm, here to test Ivy’s hospitality? A totem animal, arrived to guide her? Perhaps a future familiar . . .

  Or maybe, just maybe, she was simply a stray cat, mooching for warmth and a handout. One never could tell, with magic . . . unless this night went as Ivy hoped. And she had a long night to get through before she found out.

  In any case, t
he temperatures had been dropping all afternoon. Now that a blizzard had moved in, wind howling in a way that could not sound less joyous, the cat would stay.

  “My dreams couldn’t have arranged for me to do this on the shortest night of the year, huh?” Ivy asked now, returning to her nylon camp chair by the rusty-grated fire. Lord and Lady, but it was cold. The flame’s warmth seemed to extend only as far as its orange glow. Oh, the weather outside is frightful . . .

  The cat boosted herself up with her front legs to curl lithely around and chew at the back of one thigh, spread-toed foot high in the air, supremely unimpressed.

  Once, Ivy would have laughed at so classic a feline brush-off; now she barely managed a smile. A run of bad luck, from finances to health, had slowly disillusioned her, robbed her of her optimism one disappointment at a time. She’d tried to always do the right thing for so long! But now that she’d reached thirty, with little to show for it, she’d begun to question why. And that wasn’t a big leap from questioning all the other intangibles of her life, magic included. Ivy’s doctor diagnosed her as clinically depressed. He prescribed antidepressants, which she began to take, and a tranquilizer, which she hadn’t touched. As if inspired by her efforts at healing herself, her dreams then gave her even more hopeful instructions—for her magic, anyway. Though almost intangible here on the physical realm, magic could appear very dramatic in dreams.

  So here Ivy sat, humming Yuletide carols to a stray cat in a dusty, rented cabin. She’d draped the walls with evergreen garlands, like a good little pagan, to symbolize continued life in the midst of winter’s cold. The wreath she’d woven, as the storm blew in, represented the turning of the Year Wheel. On the rough-hewn mantle of the fireplace, she’d lit two pillar candles, green for the goddess and red for the god of old. Together, they added a perfume of bayberry and cinnamon to the rich scent of wood smoke and fresh pine. And between them, pillowed on silver-gray silk, lay all her hopes for her sanity, her life path—her magic.

  The decorative, double-edged knife had a pewter blade, like a letter opener; it would be used on nothing in this physical realm, and in the astral realm, soft metals worked just fine. Its artist had etched an intricate design of oak-leaves up the blade, to match the carvings of leaves and acorns in its oaken handle. Ivy had never seen so beautiful an athame before buying this one. That she’d dreamed the importance of a ceremonial blade for weeks, with clear instructions for its use, only added to its enchantment. Planning and packing for this witchly version of a vision quest had given her more confidence than she’d felt in months.

  This was Yule, after all, the longest night of the year, an ancient holiday from which so many winter traditions evolved. Per her dreams, Ivy intended to spend the night meditating on the true meaning of the Winter Solstice and its returning light. Then—and this, she felt certain, was key—she would take her athame outside to catch the energy of the first rays of the new sun. Somehow, if she did that—and if her dreams really were instructions from the astral realm and not side-effects from her serotonin reuptake inhibitor—Ivy would finally gain proof that magic existed, that it worked . . . that it made a difference.

  For once and for always, all subtlety aside, she would know.

  “Okay then—the true meaning of Yule,” she said now to the cat, glad to have someone to bounce this off of. “Most of the pagans I know equate it with the rebirth of the sun, but some also talk about the myth of the Oak King, who wages heroic battle against the Holly—”

  Amidst the storm outside, Ivy heard a thump against the door.

  The tabby cat sat up, ready to run. The fire shrank, then stretched. When Ivy turned toward the old cabin’s door, away from the fire, her breath misted in the air and warmed her quilted vest to moistness against her cheek.

  “ . . . King,” she finished faintly.

  For a long moment, she resisted investigating. How could there be anybody out on a night like tonight? But it was too cold to risk being wrong. She stood.

  The door opened on its own, dragged an arc across the floor toward her. Wind sliced in, hurling shards of frozen crystal and sending her chair skittering across the floor. It tormented the writhing fire and filled the cabin with an unnerving, otherworldly screech.

  “I’m a witch,” Ivy reminded herself softly, to maintain calm as she watched the door open further. “A stone in the ancient circle. I can handle whatever this night sends.”

  She would feel more confidence were it not so dark . . . and if she had more faith in magic, of late.

  From the swirling, shadowy white emerged a form of black, tall and broad-shouldered. It filled the doorway for a moment. Then it half-staggered, half-fell through the entrance, crumpling across the cold dirt floor. A glaze of ice that had crusted its heavy coat shattered into dagger-like shards.

  Magic or no magic—this was real.

  Quickly, Ivy waded against the wind to the doorway, past the prone black form. She found temporary shelter behind the door. Bracing on it, she pushed—but Nature pushed back. Her hiking boots slipped from beneath her and she fell to her knees on the frozen floor.

  The cat, peeking out from its new shelter behind the woodpile, gave no help.

  Ivy dragged herself up and, legs straining, puuushed. Slowly the door retreated from her and finally, blessedly, closed against the wind and the worst of the cold . . . and the darkness.

  But not all of it.

  She latched the door, leaned on it for support. The chaos outside seemed almost silent in contrast to the indoors only moments before. Then she looked at the fallen stranger.

  A sense of unseasonable foreboding stilled her—and not because of any extrasensory abilities. Witches watched the news too. Ivy knew the threat that strangers, especially strange men, could pose. But she could ignore a human being’s suffering no more than she could have put the cat out into the cold. She pushed past her hesitance to kneel beside the man.

  He wore all black—a long, black wool coat, a black ski cap, a black scarf that cowled his face to obscurity. As Ivy unwound the wrappings, more ice crackled off and she wondered how, or if, he could breathe. When she unveiled his pale, handsome face, she saw that his breath had frozen into a thin, frosty crust over his mouth and nose.

  She pressed her hands onto the stranger’s high cheeks, leaned forward and breathed on him to melt the frost from his closed eyes and down-turned lips before carefully, tentatively, wiping it away. The cold of his skin repelled her. She checked the pulse in his throat—was it weak? When she pressed cold fingers to her own neck, for a comparison, she decided it was. Desperation shook her hand.

  Was he breathing? Did he have any chance of life at all? The cell phone she’d left in her car would not work this far from a transmitter, even if she risked hiking down the hill for it. And even if she did contact emergency services, could an ambulance get here until the storm broke?

  Could the police?

  “Useless,” Ivy muttered. Never had she been so tempted to simply give up. She felt as though an outer presence were urging her pessimism on.

  It’s the darkness, she thought then. The darkness wants me to stop.

  Darker magic, the kind that dangerous magicians and creatures that weren’t even human practiced, could work in subtle ways too. And this was the darkest night of the year . . . in more ways than one.

  Was that the true meaning of the Winter Solstice?

  Fa la la la la.

  Ivy shook off that possibility and the apathy it engendered. Tipping the man’s head back, she pinched his nose shut. Then she bent and covered his mouth, his cold lips, with hers and breathed for him. In with the good air . . .

  His eyes opened, strong and sad, depthless and dark.

  Ivy drew back, startled.

  Arched eyebrows lowered. The stranger’s now-damp lips moved, producing only a sigh, and his frown grew fiercer.

  Ivy leaned closer, straining.

  “You’re . . . oak,” he whispered, seemingly distressed. Then his eyes fell sh
ut again, dark lashes smudging his high, too-pale cheeks.

  Ivy raised fingers to her throat, this time feeling for the pendant she always wore, a branching tree within a circle. To her, the tree represented Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse mythology, its roots connecting the earth to the underworld and its branches reaching wide into the realm of the spirit. But . . . Yggdrasil was generally thought to be a yew or an ash tree, not an oak.

  Was she hunting for hidden meanings where none existed? Now Ivy couldn’t tell if she shivered from the cold or from this man’s wan vulnerability, from mundane fears about intruders at night or otherworldly fears less easily defined.

  As she’d told the cat, Solstice Night also represented the last stand of the Holly King—the god who, by this time of year, reigned over darkness and even death.

  “Well don’t use this one in your battle,” Ivy hissed from where she crouched over the stranger—hardly a standard holiday prayer. Once again she strained the muscles of her legs, arms and back, this time to drag the prone figure nearer the fire. Since he did not appear to be frostbitten—to her amateur eye, anyway—she chafed his wrists, his face. Trying not to dwell on his dangerously powerful build, she undressed him of his iced, outer layer of clothing so that the fire’s warmth would reach him . . .

  . . . and she saw that he wore around his neck, on a leather thong, a pentagram overlaid with a tiny, two-headed axe. Despite that he wore the star point up, not point down as Satanists or chic Goths might, Ivy shivered again. These were pagan symbols. Mere coincidence? Or . . . magic?

  Her heart drumming louder than a full-moon ritual, she glanced toward the rough fireplace mantle, the fine new athame that must catch the returning sun . . .

  She could meditate on the true meaning of the Solstice while fixing something warm for this man to eat—should he regain consciousness—as easily as she could by sitting still. Reassured by his rough but steady breathing and, to be honest, the safety of his continued unconsciousness, Ivy took time for one thing, first. She re-lit the candles that the wind through the open door had blown out. Then she turned to her supplies and retrieved a can of stew.