by Leigh Evans
Quiet from the center of the branch barricade. A listening sort of stillness.
There was no entrance that I could see. I walked around it until I found a peephole in the fence, and took a peek.
Well, hell. The last thing I expected to see was a teenager reclining on a silk divan, plucking a mandolin. She had an arresting face, much like the girl in the art book Bob had never been able to flip. I’d spent a lot of time studying that image, caught by the thought that the girl looked somewhat like Lou. And here it was again, another version of that the same autocratic face; long nose, shapely chin, eyes made compelling by the measuring look under their half-mast lids. Except this girl was far younger—in her late teens—and her hair wasn’t dark like Lou’s but blond, so pale it was almost silver. It fell past her shoulders and rippled down her back. Her dress was gentian blue, the vaguely medieval bodice and waist fitted to her slender body. The rest was long and predictably flowing. Fairy-tale fashion by way of Disney. The robe was a little too overdone in the embellishments, I thought, not much liking the embroidered silver flower design that ran up her sleeves.
Mum had been a prettier Fae.
Her eyes slanted toward me. Brown, not blue. She played a few more chords on her mandolin, and then asked me something in—ah, for crap’s sake—Merenwynian.
“I don’t speak Merenwynian,” I said glumly. That response prompted another stream of lilting gibberish from the girl on the divan. “Like I said, I don’t speak Merenwyian,” I repeated very slowly, in that same earnest manner foreign-born people repeat things to us Canadians, as if saying the same thing louder and at a snail’s pace would somehow improve our comprehension.
The musician’s fingers kept moving over the mandolin strings, but she spared me a hooded, annoyed glance from under her lashes.
“Goddess,” I said in exasperation, turning to glance back at the black walnut and the dark ominous gray behind it. “You don’t know how much I wish that you spoke English or that I spoke your language.” I forced myself to tear my glance from the ominous canvas. Gave her a rueful smile through the fence. “It would make my trip to la-la land so much easier, because if there was ever a time I needed a spirit guide, this would be it. You see, I…”
My words petered out.
By all the stars in earth’s heaven, I’d just spoken the last sentence in my mother’s tongue. I opened my mouth to test this sudden skill—
“It’s near dawn in Merenwyn. He is taking a chance sending you so late,” she said in English. She softly played a few opening bars of what sounded like a Baroque piece. “Or did he think that you’d find me already sleeping?” She frowned at her long fingers on the neck of the mandolin and then carefully put the instrument down, so that its base rested on a rough rag rug that seemed mostly to be made of duns, browns, and bits of blue, and its short neck rested on a hideously ornate gilt table.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The blonde drew up her legs and clasped her arms around her knees. We exchanged a wordless moment through the crack in the makeshift fence. If I’d met her in earth’s realm, on first glance she’d pass for human, just like Mum and Lou had. Her face was set in Lou’s calculating coldness, and yet, I fancied that I caught that distinguishing otherworld quality; some of that river-old sadness Mum’s face sometimes wore when she looked out our kitchen window.
“What is your message?” she asked eventually.
A trifle snappishly, I replied in my mother’s tongue, “I don’t have a message.”
It seemed to me her chin sharpened. She released a knee and placed a hand on the fissured gray bark of the old beech beside her, but the movement looked odd to me; done in the same manner one half of a couple might do to catch their mate’s attention. Uneasily, I squinted up into the foliage. Green ovate leaves, lots of twisted branches, and nothing else I could see except the obligatory ball of light. It was the hue of an overripe mango: orange bleeding into crimson.
“We have a challenger,” the girl said.
I did a quick left/right with my eyes. The space inside the ring of branches wasn’t that large; really, just enough space for the person contained within its circle of debris to pace in a figure eight around the two pieces of furniture and the massive tree’s trunk, providing they were careful not to stumble over the twisted worm pile of its partially exposed root system. As far as I could tell, she was the sole occupant. I looked over my shoulder and surveyed the clearing and its parameters behind me. Nada in the open field around me. Though now that my gee-this-ain’t-right instincts were roused, the surrounding woods appeared a trifle more mysterious, the cliff face a fraction more massive and impassive, and the blue-fogged hulk of the black walnut down at the other goal area even more horribly creepy. As for that long dark flannel screen behind it … Don’t stare at it. Don’t beckon the things in that gloom to come into the light.
I cleared my throat. “I’m not here to challenge anyone.”
“What shall we do?” asked the girl of the tree. A pause during which I heard nothing except my breathing—there was just so little ambient noise in this world—as she waited for an answer. “Yes, we have been bored. And the other one hasn’t spoken in such a long time.” Above her, deep in the foliage, the light ball in her beech friend flashed; dash, dot, dash. She frowned at me in a appraising manner. “She’s older than we have seen before, and has not as pleasing a countenance as our last guest.” She pursed her lips. “No, she is not unappealing. Her hair is neither sun nor shadow, though her eyes are the green of the Chiron House. And she is…” She tilted her head back to get a bigger picture of me through her viewing hole. “Well shaped.”
Unbelievable. I was standing on an astral plane, getting Joan Rivered by a fae nut-job.
“DeLoren.” My tone was stiff. “My eye color comes from the house of DeLoren.”
I think Loony Tunes heard me, because she gave a light huff, but she didn’t lift her head from her communion with the Almighty Tree Spirit.
She’s as mad as the proverbial hatter.
Mad-one nodded once or twice as she listened, and then she patted the trunk, obviously in agreement with the game plan.
Then her unfocused eyes sharpened, and pinned me.
“Are you a mystwalker?” I asked bluntly.
“We are disappointed.” She sniffed. “Return to your mage.” A little pause, in which I was probably supposed to genuflect and then disappear. When I didn’t, she emphasized her point with a grand “away, beggar” wave before adding, “Inform him that you are not worthy of our time.”
I raised both brows. “Just in the interests of clarity, who’s ‘he’?”
That question made her chew on the inside corner of her lip. Then she tucked her chin in and said sotto voce, “She pretends not to know of whom we speak. I said as you instructed, but she is still here.”
“Hey, tree.” I waggled my fingers at the beech.
Mad-one turned her head very slowly in my direction and studied me briefly, her hand still flattened on the fissured bark, before she smiled. As smirks go, it was akin to the wolfish appreciation a Were pays to a tray of thick juicy steaks—a mental tabulation of what was going to taste best as it went down.
“It is possible I’ll have to deal with this one,” she said.
“You know what? I’m good,” I said. “I know what I’m looking for. You just stay there, and talk to your tree pal, while I wander around.” I gave her a Starbucks smile through the crack in the barricade. “Won’t take more than five minutes, tops.”
Her brow had creased as I’d begun speaking, but that had cleared somewhere in the middle of my dialogue. Now, her head tilted to one side, she examined me like I was someone very dim. As she did, her fingers continued to stroke the rough bark.
“I will have to deal with this one,” she told the tree. The interior of the ball caught in the old beech’s thick branches flickered, more orange than yellow. “You are safe,” she said softly, though I took that to mean the old beech was s
afe, and me, not so much. “I won’t stray far. It will not take long to attend to this problem.” Her gaze was upward, directed at the ball of light over her head. “I will be safe,” she said, a lover’s smile on her face, both rueful and affectionate. “Do not worry. We’ll be together when daylight comes.”
Oh … It clicked. Bats-in-the-belfry wasn’t talking to the tree, she was conversing with the lightbulb nested in its leafy arms. I’d thought of the glowing orbs as simply pretty lights, set there by the Mystwalker to keep the dark away. But now, as I let my gaze wander over the sea of bright balls glowing in the deep purple sky, I remembered something. “They say a part of every Fae lives in Threall, the dreaming portion of us,” Mum had told me that late winter afternoon a decade ago.
But not as bodies, Mum, I thought. Not as people in corporeal form. The souls of hundreds of dreaming Faes were all around me. Indeed, Threall’s night was gleaming with the glorious illumination from their soul-lights.
Like most things, simple once you understood. Each tree carried a soul. And to talk with one, all you had to do was touch its trunk.
Yes, so freakin’ simple.
All I had to do to find Lexi and Lou was touch a few hundred trees. It hurt my head just thinking about it. I rubbed my temple. It would take forever.
A scrunch of fabric, as Mad-one left her silk divan, and then, suddenly, she was right on the other side of the divide, staring at me through the crack in the fence. Not a single blemish or wrinkle marred her petal-soft skin. Despite that, an absolute conviction came to me suddenly that she was as old as her gnarled beech. Tired too, I thought. And what? Sad? Weighted? Bound?
Her forehead creased. Whatever weakness had been exposed during my study was wiped out by the sudden anger that tightened the soft skin around her eyes.
I stepped back sharply, as did she, though neither of us broke our stare fest—maybe dominance through eye contact is something understood by all predators, not just Weres. Her slumberous eyes narrowed to slits. Then she lifted her chin and clapped her hands into a prayer position. With a small wait-till-you-see-this smile, she opened them. As her palms spread wide, the topmost branch of the barricade rose, and moved aside. The one below that followed, and then all of them shifted, so quickly that the movement was a visual blur, lifted up and away. Their branches hung in the air, trembling slightly above the arched doorway she’d created.
She stood one hip cocked to the side, her head tilted to the other, possibly considering what to do next. In my experience, churning minds usually herald bad things to come, so I put a few feet between us, and kept a keen eye on her hands. As she passed the threshold, the arch of branches trembled against each other, chittering like bones rubbing together in a grave robber’s satchel.
Spooky, but not half as chilling as what was happening down at ground level. Mad-one didn’t walk, she glided above the clearing’s floor.
She kept coming and I kept backpedaling. I spared a quick glance behind me and realized the bitch was herding me toward the seething dark end of the clearing. Screw that. I altered my course to take me back toward the hedgerow.
“You know, I think there’s been some confusion.” I did a backward jog around a tree stump. “I’m not a challenger. I’m here strictly to find someone, and then I’m gone.”
Mad-one replied in a perfectly pleasant voice—almost normal, considering she was moving over the ground like a wraith as she followed my retreat. “Then perhaps you wish to learn from me? I can teach you many things. How to breathe a whisper of doubt so softly they don’t even know it’s from your lips. How to change a dream from sweet to sour. How to plant a seed of craving that they cannot quench. You can stay and be my new chosen companion. We can be friends.”
What happened to her last one?
“Who is it that you seek?” she asked, gliding closer.
As if.
She must have read my mutinous mug like I’d read her mad-ass, crazy face, because she made a lunge for me. Happily for me, it was evident she’d never had a twin. Her fingers harmlessly raked the air where I’d stood a second before. Child’s play. I’d been ducking incoming G.I. Joes since Lexi’s hands were large enough to hold a toy.
She was going to have to be faster than that.
As Mad-one recovered her balance—aha! She’s not impervious to gravity—I cut loose and hauled ass, looking for a gap in the line of hawthorns. There! I surged through the first hole large enough to accommodate me. A thorn dug a furrow along my spine as I tunneled through. I felt a tug on one shoe, and let Mad-one have it—why the hell am I always losing my shoes?—scooting on hands and knees through the short passage as fast as a fox with a trail of starving hounds behind it.
I emerged and kept going, my steering still set for a full-speed-ahead crawl, not stopping until I was well past the border of shrubs and could go no farther, stymied by a minigrove of sumacs. I scrambled to my feet. This side of the clearing’s woods wasn’t civilized and cultivated, like the forest of ancient elms beyond the other row of hawthorns. It felt … wild. Blue fog silently snaked through the tall trees and saplings. Multihued jewel-toned lights glittered above. No pearly peaches or primroses in this misted sky.
I breathed through my mouth, waiting for Mad-one to come shooting through the same tunnel from which I’d just crawled. But she didn’t. Once again, we stared at each other through a chink in a barricade.
She beckoned. “Come to me.”
Why didn’t she scoot through the tunnel? Or glide over the top of it? What was holding her back? Obviously she didn’t have to worry about gravity. When I didn’t emerge from the tunnel, she rose in the air, until her face hovered ghostlike above the line of hawthorns.
“Did the Black Mage tell you nothing of the things in these woods?” she asked. Her tone was bland, but her eyes were sharp as they calculated the risks of the thorns and the narrow gap between a nearby maple’s low-hanging branches and the hedgerow top.
She’s afraid—no, leery—of the hedgerow, I thought.
Wondering how much time I had before she overcame her distaste for some overgrown shrubs, I searched the area around me for a stone or a broken branch, but all I could turn up was a shred of old parchment—just a brush of my fingers, and someone’s broken memory streaked through my being—and a handful of moss. “I told you before, I don’t know what mage you’re talking about.”
Mad-one exhaled through her nose sharply and then she did something I hadn’t anticipated. Her hands flattened into a prayer position again, but this time, when they parted a fireball erupted between them. I ducked behind a tree. I should have just let her hover there, holding her fiery handful of snap, crackle, pop, until her skin turned black. But curiosity got the better of me, and so I peeked. She’d been waiting for just that and she threw. Not at me, or at the spruce whose protection I was leaning away from, but at the section of hedge in front of us. The fireball tore a wide, burning path through the shrubbery, but didn’t cut a trail completely through the thick vegetation. Instead, it got lodged three-quarters through, caught in the forked branch of an elderly hawthorn, where it smoldered a few inches from the overgrown shrub’s soul-light.
No, don’t. My hand crept to my mouth in horror.
The stubby branches cradling the hedges’ spirit-ball burst into flame. I watched, sickened, as tongues of heat delicately licked at the parchment. With a sudden whoosh, it was consumed, and the soul was left naked—a glittering light burning too bright for my eyes to look directly at it. I covered them and watched through my slitted fingers, as it danced an agonized jig in the heated air. Beneath my bare foot, the rough earth trembled. The soul-light flared once. Then with a pop, it was gone.
The hawthorn’s roots wept as the rest of the shrub burst into flames.
Run. She’ll be through the gap in the hedge in a moment or two.
While the fire devoured its meal, I slipped deeper into the woods the Mad-one seemed so reluctant to enter. It’s dark in here. Focus, you’ve got a witch on
your heels. I flitted through the trees, searching for a place to hide, and found it. There, I thought. She won’t like their light. I dashed to where the two pines grew side by side, so close that their separate trunks had almost merged into one. Their brilliant glow dispelled the shadows. Behind them, the forest was tangle-thick, shrouded in mist.
Time for a last stand. I stood under the lights of their soul-balls, half frightened, half resolute as Mad-one glided our way.
“You murdered that soul,” I said, when she came close.
“It was its time,” she replied with an indifferent shrug.
“But you chose its time.”
“I am the Mystwalker,” she replied coolly. “It is my duty to guard this realm. Life or death, terrifying dreams or naught—it is to me that those decisions fall in Threall.”
“It was a living soul.” I shook my head. “No one has the right to make those choices.”
“‘It’ was nothing more than a guard, who could not keep you from these woods.” Her voice grew hard. “The punishment for that failure is death.”
“And you’re the executioner.”
“Killing one to protect many is not a difficult choice. A mystwalker’s first duty is to protect the Royal House from those who wish it harm. You seem lacking in that training.” She cocked her head, her brows furrowed. Then, decision made, she said, “Wind.”
No hand gestures this time to give me warning.
The resulting blast of air hit me square in the belly. Even as her Fae-invoked chinook pushed me backward into the trees, my mind was spinning—she can harness the wind? How’d she do that? Could I do that?—and then my leg hit the bark of the smaller of the pines, and suddenly … oh Goddess. Sensation shimmered up my shin. Pleasure. Sweeter than maple syrup, more exciting than boosting a shiny silver ring.
