Moonheart

by Charles de Lint

  “He never knew,” Grandmother Toad said. “He could not tell you, because he never knew. He did not know what Mal’ek’a had grown to be‌—if he had he would never have let you go on your own to confront him. He thought it was a test like the one he faced when he was a youth, when he faced his greatest danger, and that danger was himself. If one failed that test, one didn’t die. It only meant that one did not know oneself well enough and so must delve the deeper and attempt it again.”

  In a way, Sara thought, that was exactly what had happened to her. “But‌—”

  “And Lorcalon was never a gift,” Grandmother Toad said. “You were already a moonheart, my daughter. He but woke it in you. His only gift to you was his love.”

  “Do you think I should go back to him?”

  “You cannot go back to him.”

  “Why not?”

  Grandmother Toad sighed. “The past is closed. The past already is. It has been. Three times you went to him, twice as a ghost. That much is written in the Tale of Time. But there will be no fourth time.”

  “But that means‌—”

  “That he drums in the Place of Dreaming Thunder. Yes.”

  Sara shook her head. “I don’t understand. Why is he there? Why not in . . . in his own afterworld? Like Thomas Hengwr. Why isn’t Taliesin in the Summer Country?”

  “I did not say that the druid went to the Summer Country, though for his sake, for all that he suffered, I can only hope that he has indeed found that final peace.”

  “I did this for Taliesin,” Sara said softly. “For us. This stupid test. I never knew what was going on. What Mal’ek’a was. What was the point of it? All that’s come out of it is Jamie’s dead. Jamie and the others. . . .”

  “And the worlds were rid of a great evil. Did you expect a reward?”

  “No . . . that is . . .” Sara sighed. “I suppose I did. I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I guess I did expect to be with Taliesin when it was all over. I thought we’d be together. But I guess I don’t even know if we’d get along.”

  No, she thought. That was another lie. She’d been uncertain once, but she knew now. She looked at Grandmother Toad, met the woman’s solemn gaze for a long moment, then looked away.

  “I don’t know why I’m saying all this,” she said. “I’m just looking for something to hold onto, I suppose. Even if I was with Taliesin, that wouldn’t bring Jamie or the others back.”

  “You cannot go to Taliesin Redhair,” Grandmother Toad said. “But you can still call him to you.”

  It didn’t register at first. Then the words sank in and Sara looked up with hope in her eyes. “It’s true? I can call him to me? But how?”

  Pukwudji touched the pocket that held the pouch with the tuning key to Taliesin’s harp in it.

  “Ring and key,” he said.

  Sara glanced at him. The honochen’o’keh grinned. “And your love makes three, hey?” he finished.

  Sara looked from the little man to Grandmother Toad. The tall woman rose from her place in the grass and nodded.

  “There is strength in threes,” she said. “But he will not come to you unless you truly want him to.”

  “But. . . .”

  “We must go now,” Grandmother Toad said.

  “I know the way to the World Beyond,” Pukwudji said as he rose to go. “Perhaps I’ll come and play a trick or two with you, hey?”

  He leaned close and his dry lips brushed her cheek. Sara held him close for a moment, then slowly let him go.

  “Be well, daughter of my heart,” Grandmother Toad said. “Remember us in the World Beyond, remember the mysteries great and small, for we diminish without your love.”

  “Who is that woman?” Kieran asked, looking down into the garden from the tower.

  “What woman?”

  “That one . . . coming out of the garden with that strange little man that was at the quin’on’a lodge.”

  Ha’kan’ta crossed to the window to have a look for herself. Her eyes widened slightly and she nodded, knowing who it was and who Sara had been speaking with. This was what Sara and Blue needed to draw them out of their despair. She turned to Kieran, but he no longer needed to know the woman’s name.

  Across the distance that separated them, he met Grandmother Toad’s gaze and felt the last pain inside him withdraw. Like Sara, he’d felt betrayed. Intellectually, he knew that the old man who’d been his mentor was not the same being that they’d fought two nights past in the tower. But his heart could not separate the two.

  Remember what was good, the woman’s eyes seemed to say to him, and he did.

  “Grandmother Toad,” he said softly, turning to Ha’kan’ta.

  He looked out the window, meaning to thank the strange woman for what she had eased inside him, but both she and Pukwudji were gone.

  Ha’kan’ta smiled. “I think you have severed your last bond with the World Beyond,” she said.

  Kieran nodded, then asked: “Did you ever think I wouldn’t stay?”

  Ha’kan’ta kissed him for her reply.

  As Blue got up from the bench, Sara stared at the graves. A stillness settled over her. She’d wanted to ask Grandmother Toad one last question: If she could call Taliesin back, then why not Jamie? Why not all of them?

  A quiet drumming spoke to her. There are some whose final resting place the Dreaming Thunder is, it said.

  But who decided that?

  There was no reply.

  She looked down at the ring on her finger, thought she saw Taliesin’s features reflected in miniature in the glint of the gold. She turned her finger and the image was gone. A trick of the light. She drew Pukwudji’s pouch from her pocket and took out Taliesin’s tuning key. Ring and key. And her love. What if it wasn’t enough?

  She reached inside for the silence deep within her, reached for her taw; but it was still shaken and weak from her ordeal with Mal’ek’a. Grandmother Toad might have brought some small measure of comfort with her, but it could only heal so much. It could not touch the guilt that she was alive while others were dead, or the lonely aching.

  “I’d call you, Taliesin,” she said softly, “but I don’t know how.”

  She twisted the harp’s tuning key in her fingers, tapped it against her ring.

  “I want to come back,” she said, “but they say I can’t. They say the past is closed to me now‌—except in my memory. I need more than that right now. I’m sorry that you had to wait so long. Wait for nothing. Ha’kan’ta told me about . . . about how sad you were. She knew you. I wouldn’t have left the tower if I’d known, but I thought I had to. I thought that was what you wanted me to do. I did it for us. But now . . .”

  Oh, she loved him. She knew that now. But . . . She stared at the tuning key, at her ring, not knowing what to do.

  “I need you so badly,” she said. “But I don’t . . . know how to call you. . . .”

  She bowed her head. Her throat constricted, dry as sandpaper. She turned to the fountain to get a drink, dipped her hand in and paused with it halfway to her mouth. The water trickled from her fingers when she heard it. A spray of harp notes . . . a spill of music, flowing like water.

  Lorcalon. The moonheart tune.

  It rose in her. Her taw drummed with it.

  She looked up beyond the fountain and saw a familiar figure standing there. He was wavery, like a mirage. Almost transparent. But the sun lifted highlights from his red hair, his green eyes were deep with sadness as he shared her sorrow, and he smiled for love of her. He let his fingers fall from the harp strings, drew the strap from his shoulder and set the instrument on the grass beside him.

  “Taliesin?” Sara asked hesitantly.

  She was afraid it was another trick of the light. If she moved, he would waver and be gone. She hadn’t called him. She didn’t know how.

  “Please don’t go,” she said.

  The moonheart tune thrummed inside her and she willed him to be real, to stay. She gripped the tuning key with white k
nuckles. It was warm in her hand‌—almost hot. She held it tighter.

  “I never knew,” he said. His voice had a slight echo to it, a distance, as though he spoke to her from a long distance away. “I never knew what he had planned for you‌—my grandsire Gwydion. If I had, I would never have let you go alone. That was a horror we should have faced together.” He seemed to grow more transparent as he spoke, fading.

  “But we did face him together!” Sara cried. “The tune you gave me was all that kept me safe in the end.”

  “I did not give it to you. It was always there.”

  He was almost gone‌—just a gossamer shape, a ghostly outline. She could see the trees through him.

  “I failed you,” he said.

  His voice was sad. Fainter.

  Sara wouldn’t listen anymore. She ran around the fountain and reached for him. It was like touching mist.

  “You didn’t fail me,” she said. “You gave me the moonheart tune. You were with me!”

  Was the mist more solid? The music inside her leaped through her fingers to reach for him, to draw him to her. She heard the sound of drumming all around them. One moment they were in the garden, the next on a high flat rock atop a mountain, with rocky crags stretching for leagues in all directions. There were dark clouds in the sky. They had faces. Like bears . . . ravens . . . deer . . . otters . . . cranes. Animal heads on human bodies. Dark cloud bodies that played ceremonial drums.

  “Don’t go,” she said fiercely. “I love you, Taliesin.”

  There was a swirl and a spinning underfoot. She lost her balance as the ground shifted under her.

  “I love you,” she said again.

  Arms caught her from falling. She blinked and the mountainscape was gone, the sound of drumming diminished, fading, gone. Only the moonheart tune remained, moving to the rhythm of her heartbeat, of her breathing. She felt Taliesin’s arms around her and buried her face against his shoulder. For the first time since her ordeal, she wanted to live again.

  She leaned back to look up into his face. His eyes glistened. There were lifetimes in those eyes. Mysteries. Wisdom and folly. But most of all there was her love returned.

  They held each other for a long time. Taliesin looked over her shoulder at the line of graves.

  “I wish I had known him,” he said softly. “Your uncle.”

  Sara swallowed, nodding. “He’d’ve liked you, Taliesin. I know Jamie would’ve liked you.”

  As though the words were a signal, they stepped apart. There was a moment’s awkwardness.

  “What . . . what happens now?” Sara asked.

  “I think you should return to your own world, Sara.”

  “And . . . and you?”

  “I would like to come with you‌—if you’ll have me.”

  “If I’ll . . .” She stepped close again and drew her arms tightly around him. Taliesin returned the embrace.

  “How’re you feeling, Inspector?” Blue asked.

  “A hell of a lot better than you look. What’s up?”

  “The quin’on’a are ready to ship us back.”

  “Yeah?”

  Blue nodded.

  “What’s on your mind, Blue?” Tucker asked.

  The biker looked from Maggie and Sally to the Inspector, then sighed.

  “I want to know how we’re going to play this,” he said.

  “You give it any thought?”

  “No. I’m just starting to get my head tied on a bit straighter, to tell you the truth.”

  “I know the feeling.” Tucker glanced at Maggie. “I think we should play it like it never happened.”

  “What?”

  Tucker shrugged. “What else can we do? Hengwr’s gone. Foy’s staying. I’m sure as hell not going to ask Sara to do a demo for the boys in the PRB labs‌—she’d probably fry me, if you didn’t get to me first.”

  “I’d’ve thought . . .” Blue began, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll go tell ’em we’re ready.”

  “One thing, Blue.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What Gannon told us . . . about Walters. It goes no further than us. Got it?”

  Blue frowned. “You’re not going to cover up for him, are you? Shit, ninety percent of this has got to do with him. If he hadn’t been hounding Hengwr. . . .”

  “Ease up, Blue. I don’t want Walters touched because he’s mine. Plain and simple.”

  Blue studied the Inspector for a long moment, then shrugged. “I can handle that,” he said.

  When he and Sally left, Maggie regarded Tucker with a certain amount of alarm. “You can’t mean that,” she said.

  “It’s got to be that way, Maggie. We’ll never pin anything on him. I believe in the law‌—without it we’re in deep shit. But you know as well as I do that we can’t touch him. And he’s just going to start this crap all over again and screw up some more lives. He didn’t get where he is by kissing ass. He got there by breaking it.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I’m going to carry on.”

  “Like nothing ever happened?”

  Tucker sighed heavily. “No. Like everything happened.”

  “I’m not going back with you,” Kieran said to Sara.

  They stood alone on the field outside her tower, sharing a last cigarette.

  “I know,” she said.

  Kieran looked past her to where Taliesin and Ha’kan’ta stood just inside the door. “I still can’t face him,” he said.

  “He understands why you thought the way you did.”

  Kieran fiddled with the whistle Ha’kan’ta had given him‌—Taliesin’s whistle. He started to pull it out of his belt, but Sara stopped him with her hand.

  “Keep it,” she said. “To remember him. To remember us both. Kieran. I’m sorry I was such a shit to you.”

  “You and me both. But it all worked out.”

  “We’ll be back,” Sara said. “Taliesin and I. We’ll want to see you and Kanta again. Sooner or later you’ll have to talk to him.”

  “Lord lifting Jesus, Sara, you make it hard. We’ll wait until then, d’accord?”

  “Sure.”

  She stepped forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “See ya, Kieran.”

  He caught Ha’kan’ta’s eye. As the rathe’wen’a came to where he stood with Sara, a low drumming started up.

  “That’s the quin’on’a,” he said. “We’ve got to run. Salut, Sara.”

  Ha’kan’ta embraced her.

  “If you see Pukwudji,” Sara said, “tell him I’ll be showing up to play a few tricks on him.”

  Ha’kan’ta smiled. “I will tell him, Little-Otter. Be well.”

  Sara watched the two of them walk to where Sins’amin and her people were gathered. She stood for a long moment, staring up into the skies of the Otherworld. Then she ground her cigarette underfoot and went in to where Taliesin and the others were waiting.

  3:15, Sunday afternoon.

  Madison and Collins were doing the rounds of the guards watching the House.

  “I don’t know what you’re expecting, Wally.”

  “Something’s got to give. Sooner or later, we’re going to get in, or something’s going to come out.”

  “After what you told me you found in there, I don’t know if I want anything to come out‌—if you know what I mean.” He stopped to light a cigarette, but never had a chance to bring his lighter up. “Wally?”

  “I hear it, Dan. Shit! We’ve got to get more men down here, pronto!”

  “Too late.”

  The drumming seemed to come from all around them. They stood and watched as the black sheen faded from the House. It lost its dead look. Sunlight that had simply disappeared when it touched the House now glinted on windows and set off the highlights on its sills and eaves. Slowly the drums died away. Madison and Collins moved closer. There was a door opening on one side of the building. Uniformed city police and plainclothes RCMP officers came at a run, drawing their weapons. Madison pulled his own .38, tr
ansferring his cane to his left hand.

  Jean-Paul joined the pair of them as he reached the cluster of policemen. The door opened wide and twelve fingers tightened on their triggers.

  “Tucker!” Madison roared as the first figure stepped into the light. “Put away those guns. Jesus H. Christ‌—Tucker! You made it!”

  Tucker grinned, albeit wanly.

  Jean-Paul stood to one side watching the people emerge. When the last of them had come out of the House and there was still no sign of Kieran, he began to turn, stopped when Tucker called out his name. Slowly he joined the others that crowded around the survivors.

  “Were you looking for Kieran?” Tucker asked.

  Jean-Paul nodded.

  “We found him. He’s okay, but he won’t be coming back. To Ottawa at any rate.”

  “Where is he, John?”

  Tucker turned to look at the House.

  “In an Otherworld, Jean-Paul,” he said. “In the Otherworld.” As Jean-Paul nodded and started to leave again, Tucker caught his arm. “I told Kieran what went down‌—between you and me.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “He sends his love, Jean-Paul.”

  Epilogue

  In mid-December, when the streets were cold enough for snow but the snow had yet to come, there were two items of interest in The Citizen. The first was on the front page, and the headline read:

  J. HUGH WALTERS SLAIN BY BURGLAR

  The body of the article went on to describe how the business magnate had been slain by a burglar who had ransacked his house late the previous evening. Police had no suspects as yet.

  The second was in the entertainment section. There was a photograph of four rather scruffy-looking individuals, under which it said:

  THIS WEEK AT FACES:

  MUSIC IN THE CELTIC TRADITION FEATURING:

  Cobbley Grey

  Under that was a small symbol of a quarter moon with two antlers rising up from behind it. Beneath the symbol it read:

  WITH A SPECIAL OPENING SET FROM

  Tal Gwion & Sara Kendell

  on Welsh Harp and Guitar