by Lee Carroll
“Are you saying there is a chance for me?” With an impetuous rustling of leaves, she took a few strides toward him.
“As an immortal, I would revisit all the decisions in my life,” Will said coyly.
“That’s not a lover speaking, that’s not even a poet,” Sylvianne said harshly. “That’s a clerk.” She flung her right hand at him, and it came dangerously close to slapping his face.
Will knew a decisive moment had arrived. A dryad was a supernatural creature, so he could not question Sylvianne’s knowledge of immortality, but he doubted she would make him an immortal in exchange for mere words. “As an immortal, I know I would be strongly drawn to you.”
“You’re not now?!” With a gigantic rippling in her leaves, she began to stalk off. Will gasped with disappointment; his one hope was leaving!
But then he had a positively luminescent intuition. Maybe Sylvianne herself was the purpose of Marguerite’s directing him, through Madame La Pieuvre’s agency, to Fontainebleau. That seemed to contradict Marguerite’s love for him, but, maybe this was all the help she could render him.
Will raced toward a wild embrace of Sylvianne. He flung himself at her as if she were Marguerite, utterly persuaded that Sylvianne was the gateway to his true love. And indeed the dryad’s leaves about him quickly became silken and sweet. He could hear her moaning softly, well above, almost in the sky. Her greenery wrapped around him as if in a whirlwind, and he felt as if he were in a merge of inner vision and outer ecstasy, at other moments making love to a voluptuous, black-haired woman whom his senses told him was Marguerite—but he couldn’t see her face—at still other times feeling as if he were a tree, sap in his veins on fire, woods whirling around him, a returned sun dazzling with summer heat, Sylvianne kissing the back of his neck while whispering, “I love you.” It was all confusing and fragmented, yet ecstatic and sun-bright.
At the end Will found himself lying across the same rock where his adventure had begun, gasping and spent. He didn’t feel any more immortal than he had an hour before, shaking his arms and legs to make sure. No. Not that he had any idea what immortality felt like. But he didn’t feel anything but the spent afterglow of love.
Sylvianne had gone back across the road where he had first seen her, staring down at him somewhat critically. “Do you love me now?”
Will smiled as sweetly as he could. “Yes. As I have always loved you. As I will always love you. You are mine, Sylvianne. You are mine!”
Sylvianne’s look changed to lascivious. Her eyes took Will in greedily; she made him feel uncomfortable, and cheap, and disloyal to Marguerite. But the main thing was, now he was either immortal or about to become that—hadn’t Sylvianne promised? He gave her a penetrating gaze. “I don’t feel any different.”
“Yes, you do. You feel the exhilaration of having loved me!”
“Yes, that, of course. But I don’t quite feel … immortal. I thought I would know it when I felt it. I don’t.”
Sylvianne cluck-clucked sympathetically, as if to a child. “Come here, Sad Boy.”
With a sigh, Will got up, crossed the road, and tentatively approached Sylvianne. He felt none of the erotic rush of before, but he did feel a serene, pleasing sensation at coming so closely into her presence. The next thing he knew, it was as if he were swinging in a hammock, supported by two of Sylvianne’s lower limbs rocking him, and she was planting a sap-rich kiss on his forehead. She reached up to her scalp, snapped off a branch, and laid it in Will’s lap. It was gold, and glimmered in the renewed afternoon sunshine as if a piece of the sun had fallen there.
“Will, you take this gold branch with you to the pool at Paimpont and stand on its western bank at sunset. Hold the branch up so that it can summon the sun’s rays to it like a magnet. That is the key to entering the Summer Country, where immortality is the rule. Morgane will see the glittering key and take you across, and you can return here as you please as Will Hughes, immortal. I will be waiting for you, darling. We can marry, for you are the grandest mortal I have ever beheld. As an immortal, you may well be my equal!” Sylvianne swooped down with a whoosh and planted another gummy kiss on Will’s forehead. Then her voice turned to ice.
“But if I find out that you have tricked me, Will Hughes, and gotten me to give you this immortal key because of your obsession with that scarlet trash, I and my multitudinous legions will track you down to whatever corner of the earth you hide in and impale you on one of the earth’s cracked bones. There you can hang for all eternity, instead of being held safely in my arms, an object lesson for the winds and birds, for humanity, to see. And even at that your fate will be a much too kind one.”
Will, disappointed to learn he wasn’t already immortal, found himself shivering at the scale of her threat. It almost made him reconsider even his love for Marguerite. But Sylvianne was simply overwrought at the depth of her love for him, he reassured himself. That could change. She might encounter someone else she really loved. He’d just have to take his chances.
Will grasped the gold branch firmly in his right hand and struggled down from her hammocklike embrace. As he stood again, he was surprised to find himself directly facing Sylvianne’s features; at a glance down he saw that her trunk legs were splayed out at right angles beneath her. She was kneeling to be on the same level as him!
“Thank you for this gift,” he told her, “which I pledge to use to ensure our union.”
Sylvianne smiled, and her eyes teared up once more.
Will suspected that she still didn’t trust him, but she did seem prepared to let him go now, at least for a trip to Paimpont and back. None of her moods, good or bad, seemed to last long anyway. He should take advantage of this one. He hugged her trunk and kissed her lips, which flooded his mind with memories of the fantastical interlude they had shared and flooded his mind even more with recollections of his black-haired vision-lover. Then he left, striding briskly down the path toward the town, where he could book passage on the stagecoach to Paimpont.
All Will heard from behind was a sigh. Perhaps a lament.
All he saw in front of him was Marguerite, her beautiful face in his memory. She blotted out the woods, the gardens, the château, even the wind-caressed sun.
Because she was the sun.
22
The Reeds
I didn’t sleep well that night. The room was musty, but when I opened the windows to let in fresh air, loud voices and music wafted up from the restaurant. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw Will’s face carved in stone. His ancestor’s, I’d gathered from the inscription on the sarcophagus base: Guillem de Hughes—but still, seeing his features like that made him, my present Will Hughes, seem dead.p>
As well he might be. Octavia had told me what Morgane did to some of her supplicants. If Will had made his way here months ago and been successful in gaining his mortality back, wouldn’t he have come to find me by now? Or had Morgane granted him his mortality only to take his life away in his first mortal breath in four hundred years?
By the time I went downstairs to meet Octavia at breakfast, I felt as though I were made of stone. She, however, looked fresh and plump as the just-shucked oysters she’d consumed last night.
“Oh my,” she exclaimed through a mouthful of brioche, “have some coffee. We have a hard day ahead of us.”
She was dressed as if for a safari through the Kalahari Desert, in khaki shorts that showed off her shapely legs and a safari jacket that hid her many arms. As I had my café au lait and croissant, she showed me the contents of our matching rucksacks: water canteen, chocolate bars, bread and cheese, flashlight, first-aid kit, compass, rope, waterproof matches, a Swiss army knife, and a cotton Liberty-print scarf that matched the one tied jauntily around Octavia’s slim neck.
“This looks like we’re going on a weeklong expedition.”
Octavia’s forehead creased with worry. “Just a week? You’re right; we should bring more food.” She went back up to the buffet and, after making sure we were alone in the
dining room, used all her hands to gather up prepackaged cheeses, packets of Nutella, rolls, fruit, and hard-boiled eggs. When she got back to the table, she divided the supplies between our two packs.
“There’s no telling how long it might take to find our way into the Summer Country or whether we’ll be able to stay together. The Valley of No Return is set with snares for the faithless lover—and to Morgane a faithless lover is one who loses faith for even a moment. Once lost there, we could wander for centuries with no sense of direction and no sense of time. There is no direction there, nor time as we know it.” Octavia surveyed the heavily loaded packs, her forehead undulating with concern. I’d once seen a YouTube video of an octopus squeezing through the neck of a Coca-Cola bottle. Octavia looked as though she were considering diving into my backpack and concealing herself wetly in the water canteen. “But this will just have to do. If we get lost up there, starving will be the least of our problems.”
* * *
The trailhead to the Val sans Retour was a half hour’s drive away, in the village of Tréhorenteuc. There was a car park, a souvenir shop, and a café advertising Galettes de Bretagne and local cider. The trail was carefully marked along with a list of popular sites: the Mirror of the Fairies, the Rock of False Lovers, and the Tomb of Morgane. We passed half a dozen hikers in the first mile: a family with toddlers in tow, teenagers in flimsy footwear giggling and mooning over the Miroir des Fées, and a man outfitted in olive-green cargo pants, anorak, wide-brimmed hat, and wraparound, gogglelike sunglasses who looked as if he were kitted out for a hike up Mt. Everest. We passed a young British couple standing in front of the sign explaining the legend of the valley, the woman teasing her husband that if he got lost, she’d know itst mcause he “fancied that slag down the pub.” The atmosphere was so carefree and ordinary that it was hard to imagine we were embarking on a quest to find a monster.
“Isn’t it dangerous for these people to be here?” I asked Octavia when she paused to take a sip from her canteen. “Why don’t they stray into the Summer Country?”
“They haven’t followed the path you’ve tread,” she answered, wiping her mouth, “and they’re not trying to get to the Summer Country. But”—she paused, glancing into the deep woods—“some do stray into the Summer Country. Every year we hear of disappearances in these woods. Some come back disoriented, dehydrated, confused about what has happened to them, and some”—she took another long swallow of water—“some never come back.”
She screwed the top back on her canteen and set off again at an even faster pace. I followed, glancing left and right into the woods on either side of the path. It was pretty here, much more wild than Fontainebleau. These trees had never been pollarded or arranged in allées. I recognized oak and beech among the occasional slim limbs of poplars, which reminded me uneasily of Sylvianne. Ferns and wildflowers grew beneath the trees. It was hard to imagine anything malevolent in these woods, but still I quickened my pace to keep up with Octavia, which became easier as the trail became steeper and she slowed down, losing some of her original steam. As the trail climbed out of the hardwood forest of beech and oak and into scrub pine and gorse, the sun fell heavier on our heads and she also stopped more frequently for drinks of water.
“Are you okay?” I asked when I found her sitting on a rock fanning herself with all her hands at once.
“It’s just so exposed up here,” she replied, gesturing toward a field of tall grass and purple gorse. “I’d forgotten. I came here once with … une amie … before I knew Adele, you understand. We were on a sketching tour of Brittany … she was an artist, a student at the École des Beaux-Arts before she met Paul Gauguin and that crowd and came to work at Pont-Aven along the coast not far from here.” Octavia smiled wanly. Her skin, I noticed, was turning a pale blue, like skimmed milk. I untied her scarf from around her neck, soaked it in water from my own canteen, and pressed it against her forehead. I could feel the heat of her skin through the damp cloth.
“I think we should get you in the shade,” I said, scanning the hilltop for a cool spot. A sign pointed farther down the path toward the HÔTEL DE VIVIANNE, which I gathered from the guidebook was a Neolithic stone circle. But the sign said it was still a kilometer away. The trees here were all too stunted and prickly to offer shade under the noonday sun. Across the field of grass I spied a broad rock protruding from the ground like the spine of some ancient reptile. Perhaps on the other side of it there would be some shade.
“Come on,” I said, “I think I see a good spot.”
Octavia shook her head. “I just need to rest a moment. You go on…” She raised her large, liquid eyes to mine. They seemed to swim in her pale face like swollen raisins bobbing in vanilla pudding.
“I’ll just go see if there’s shade over there,” I said, alarmed at her appearance. The last time I’d seen someone look this bad was Melusine when she melted into a pile of goo. “I’ll be right back.”
“Be careful not to get lost,” she said, her eyes drooping. “Use your compass.”
“Okay.” I took the compass out of my backpack. I didn’t really need it, of course. I had the compass stone embedded in my hand, but I thought it would reassure her to see me pointing it at the rock and reading off coordinates. “Fifteen degrees northwest,” I said aloud, slipping the chain of the compass over my head for good measure, where it bumped against my watch chain. When I looked down, though, I saw that Octavia had already closed her eyes and slumped down to the ground with her back against the rock. Her eyes twitched beneath her eyelids as though she had fallen asleep and was dreaming … of whom? I wondered. Adele? Or the amie she’d come here with in the late-nineteenth century? As I followed a narrow path across the waist-high grass, I wondered if thinking about her old lover would qualify Octavia as a “faithless lover.” Could she be trapped in this valley for such a small indiscretion? It didn’t seem fair, especially for an immortal creature who had lived for centuries. How could she help but have loved others before she met Adele—maybe dozens of others? How many women might Will have loved over the centuries? He’d told me when we first met that he’d loved the original Marguerite, but that he’d avoided her descendants. That last part hadn’t turned out to be true.
In a vision granted me by a brooch I’d found in John Dee’s antiques shop, I’d relived the memory of one Marguerite Dufay, who’d had an affair with Will in the eighteenth century. Then I’d watched them dance at Versailles, Will’s eyes gleaming behind his masquerade mask. I’d watched Marguerite try to save Will from a gang of street thugs and die in the attempt—her last sight Will’s face above her. She had certainly loved him. Had he loved her? I found myself hoping so even though the thought gave me a pang of jealousy. If he hadn’t, it might mean he was a terribly shallow man—as vain and shallow a young man as he had conceded himself to be when he’d fallen for the first Marguerite.
I’d reached the large rock outcropping now and saw that it formed a ridge above a gorse-filled glen. The wind was cool here and smelled sweet from the purple gorse, but there was no shade. Below in the glen, though, was a circle of standing stones—dolmens and menhirs that had once been the site of some sort of prehistoric worship. Perhaps it was the Tomb of Morgane advertised in the guidebook and the path through the grass was a shortcut. It looked as if it could be a tomb. Two stones leaned together to form an arch in front of a shadowy passage into a raised mound. I couldn’t tell from here how far the passage went into the mound—and the thought of entering a Neolithic tomb made me shiver—but at least the archway would give Octavia a respite from the sun.
I turned around to cross the field, but I couldn’t find the path I’d taken. The wind had picked up, whipping the tall grass into a choppy sea. That was why I couldn’t see the path, but it didn’t really matter, I knew that the rock where I’d left Octavia was fifteen degrees southeast from where I stood. I didn’t need to look at the compass because I had one embedded in my hand. I could feel the right way to go. Besides it was only a ten-m
inute walk away.
It wasn’t so easy to stay on course, though. The grass thrashed against me, pushing me left, then right. I’d strayed into an area where it was taller—above my head in places—and thicker. It was no longer grass, really, but some bamboolike reeds that were hollow and whistled as the wind blew through them. The sound was hypnotic—a flutey whispering that took on the shape of words.
Do you love him? the reeds sang. Does he love you? Do you love him? Does he love you?
I do love him, I answered angrily, pushing my way through the reeds. And he loves me.
The reeds chuckled, their dry stalks tickling my ankles and elbows as if trying to get me to join in on the joke.
Does anyone ever really love anyone else? they asked.
Stupid question. My father and mother had loved each other—
Had they? Wasn’t your mother planning to leave your father when he died? Hadn’t your father betrayed her by gambling and losing all their money—your college fund included?
It’s complicated, I answered, thinking back on all I had recently learned about that last year of my mother’s life. She had been planning to leave us when her car crashed on our way back from a college visit to the Rhode Island School of Design, but that was because she knew John Dee had found her and would try to hurt my father and me unless she drew him away from us. She was trying to protect us because she loved us. My father’s misguided business ventures had come out of the same well-intentioned instincts to keep us safe.
Or to make himself feel important. He gambled your college fund away not for your sake, but for his. Your mother wanted to leave for years but was only waiting for an excuse. That’s what false lovers do—they find excuses for their selfish behavior. But all they’re ever doing is looking out for themselves. You think Will took the box because he wanted to make himself mortal to be with you?
