Widdershins

by Charles de Lint

  “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” I tell him.

  Jack nods. “But just for the record, I want you to know that Joe’s normally an easygoing guy. You look up patience in the dictionary and there’s his mug, grinning up at you. And he’s not one for getting all messy and physical, either—that usually falls to me. But there’s certain things you don’t do to him and messing with his family’s the big one. That’s when the promise in those crazy eyes gets real.”

  “I got that,” I tell him.

  “So what’s with this Odawa guy? He really so powerful?”

  “Hard to say. You know the story of the first salmon? The one that sleeps in a pool at the beginning of the world and how when he wakes the world will end?”

  “Aw, come on. Don’t tell me this is him.”

  I shake my head. “No, but they’re kin. They share the same gifts of knowledge and . . . I was going to say wisdom, but that’s something Odawa lost along the way.”

  “Maybe it’s got something to do with you plucking his eyes out.”

  I can tell from the tone of his voice that Jack’s just trying to get a rise out of me, but I answer him seriously.

  “Maybe,” I say. “But remember, I thought he was dead at the time, frozen half in, half out of the water. The thing you need to keep in mind with Odawa is that he’s got a one-track mind and an indomitable will. That combination’s hard to make peace with.”

  “Hard to fight, too,” Jack says.

  “Hard to fight,” I agree, “and impossible to reason with.” I wait a beat, then add, “Look, if this is really about me, I should just stop trying to avoid the problem because it’s obviously not going to go away, and I don’t want anybody else to be hurt because of me. Let me track him down and we can finish this once and for all, just the two of us.”

  “How’s his helping bogans hunt cerva supposed to hurt you?” Jack asks.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The point is,” Jack says, “this isn’t just about you and him anymore. He’s crossed the line and needs to be taken down.”

  “I said I’d do it.”

  Jack nods. “But he’s old and powerful—you said so yourself. And if he’s in bed with bogans, who knows what else he’s been up to. You could go face him on your own, only to find he’s got an army and you don’t even have one person to cover your back.”

  I shrug. “That’s the chance I’ll have to take. Anyway, if they kill me, it’ll still be over.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jack says. “This has gotten too big for that now. You think Tatiana would be so concerned if it was just some little skirmish between a few bogans and cousins? You can bet that somewhere out there in the bush cerva are mustering.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were at the blessing ceremony—you saw the buffalo soldiers there.”

  “Do you really think they would break the truce?”

  Jack shrugs. “Anwatan’s not the first cousin to be killed by aganesha in the past few months. And the buffalo have a new leader—a hard-line warrior type. You know the kind.”

  I do. The buffalo lost more than most of us when the aganesha landed on our shores to start their long, bloody march inland.

  “The funny thing is,” Jack adds, “I’m not sure I want to stop them.”

  I know exactly what he means. I don’t want to pretend that everything was perfect before the aganesha’s arrival, but things only seem to have gone downhill since then. Maybe what this world needs is a good cleansing.

  “But see,” Jack says, “that’s where we’d be wrong. We’d be letting our personal feelings get in the way of what’s really important, which is that we take care of each other and this messy old world we’re living in. Because that’s why Nokomis put us here, right?”

  I give a slow nod.

  “Even,” he goes on, “when we feel we could really do without some of the people who are making the mess.”

  I nod again, more reluctantly this time.

  “So that’s why we need to get this business of Joe’s settled, because we need Joe on this. But he’s not going to be worth a damn while he’s worrying about Jilly.”

  “And if we’re too late to help Jilly?”

  Jack shakes his head. “Then we’re screwed because you don’t want to see the hurt that’ll go down if Joe loses it.”

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “He’s not one of the original People. He’s not like Cody or Raven. He’s not even of one blood.”

  “Canid and corbae,” Jack agrees. “But he’s got something old and dark in him. Some piece of the long ago that Raven didn’t use when he made the world. Don’t know what it is, and I doubt Joe does either—that’s even saying he’d admit it’s there—but if he gets turned around and goes all hard and looking for payback, that piece of the dark’s going to come roaring up through his soul, and we won’t have Joe to deal with anymore. We’ll have something new and a hundred times more dangerous.”

  I give Jack a long, considering look.

  “And this is who we need to make peace?” I finally ask.

  Jack grins. “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Whatever that old power he’s got sleeping inside him is, if it wakes for a just cause, it’s going to be shining the light instead of bringing on the dark.”

  “You ever heard the term ‘playing with fire’?”

  “Sure. But none of that’s got to happen. We get him working on this—with his mind free of other worries—and nothing needs to wake up. It’s as simple as that. Joe’s got big-time peacemaking skills. Who do you think negotiated the last truce between us and the fairy courts?”

  “I thought that got worked out between Tatiana and Raven.”

  Jack nods. “And who do you think kept them talking?”

  I glance over at Mother Crone and her pair of treekin. They’re pretending not to care what we’re talking about, but who are they trying to kid? I’d be wanting to know if I were in their shoes.

  “So maybe,” I say, “we shouldn’t be taking such a hard line with the aganesha right now.”

  “Maybe. But I want Joe in front of me telling me to back off before I do.”

  “Except—”

  “Yeah, I know.” He glances at the fairies and sighs. “Do you have any tobacco left? I’m a little short.”

  I nod and pass him my pouch. He takes half of what I’ve got left and puts it in his own pouch, then rolls a cigarette one-handedly—showing off for the fairies, I suppose, since it’s sure not going to impress me—and lights it with his Zippo.

  “Obliged,” he says, handing me back my pouch.

  He has a drag, then returns to where we were sitting and offers the cigarette to Mother Crone. She looks as surprised as I am, and maybe she’s pissed off with us, but she knows enough protocol to understand what Jack’s doing. Nodding her thanks, she takes the cigarette from him.

  They smoke it in silence. The little treekin are still glaring at us—or at least the one that looks like a walking shrub does; it’s hard to tell about the one with the spark plug nose—but you can feel the tension leaving the room. I’m not sure where we would have gone from there, but there’s movement in the doorway right then and we all look up.

  It’s Tatiana. And this time she’s only got one guardsman with her. He looks totally worse for the wear—his clothes torn and dirty, face bruised and swollen, and he’s favouring one leg.

  “Where’s Joe?” she asks.

  “He got called away,” Jack tells her. He gives the beat-up guard a pointed look before adding, “What’s up?”

  Tatiana looks the way Mother Crone did earlier, when Joe was grilling her—she really doesn’t want to tell us. But she doesn’t make Mother Crone’s mistake.

  “We’ve got a problem,” she says.

  Jack and I stand up.

  “What kind of a problem?” Jacks asks.

  His voice is mild, but he’s not fooling anybody. He’s alert and ready for trouble now, just as I am. />
  Tatiana glances at her guard.

  “Maybe I should just let Corin tell you,” she says.

  Jilly

  It’s harder than I expect to tell my story, mostly because of the doonie’s reaction to what I have to say. He stares at me in disbelief as I talk about my brother and the priest and all—experiences that are all too common in the world Lizzie and I come from.

  “Humans really do such things to their own children?” Timony asks, unable to hide revulsion.

  And I haven’t even gone into any real detail.

  “That and worse,” I say.

  “I can’t imagine it. Not even trolls or Redcaps would treat their own in such a way.”

  What a great world it would be, to live where the kinds of things that happened to me are impossible to contemplate.

  “Welcome to the real world,” Lizzie says. Then she turns to me and adds, “I knew you had a rough time growing up, but I had no idea it was anything like this.”

  “It’s not important—” I start, but Lizzie cuts me off.

  “How can you say that?”

  “I just mean I’m not telling you about it to make anyone feel sorry for me. But you had to know the background because it’s the reason we’re here. Or at least, it’s the reason this place is here, that it exists.”

  I go on to tell them about Mattie and her teddy bear that can turn into a giant version of the real thing, about the house two fields away and how I came to realize what this world is.

  “I’m not so sure I like magic,” Lizzie says. “All it seems to bring is grief.”

  I shake my head. “Oh, no. This isn’t the fault of magic. It’s us. People. And what we bring to it. Magic . . . the otherworld . . . it all exists as we shape it. And I guess if you’ve got a lot of baggage, it gets messy like this.”

  “So we created the bogans that killed that poor deer girl and have been making my life so miserable?”

  “No, there’s good and bad in the otherworld, same as in ours. And while the bad’s pretty extreme, so’s the good.”

  I’m thinking of some of the experiences I’ve had, especially those in the Greatwood. I’m thinking of Joe and the crow girls and the gemmin, these lovely spirits of a place that collect stories and have the most amazing violet eyes. I’ve had all sorts of wonderful encounters with spirits and magic, but I don’t suppose this is the place to get into it. But I can’t entirely let it go, so I settle for:

  “It can fill you with such joy and awe,” I tell Lizzie, “that it feels like you can’t possibly contain it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind a shot of some of that right about now,” Lizzie says.

  “You’ve seen some of the worst,” Timony tells her. “When we get the chance, I’ll show you the best, as well. But first . . .”

  “First, we have to figure a way out of here,” I say, “and let me tell you, I’m totally open to suggestions.”

  “Well, it’s your world,” Lizzie says. “Can’t you just make it let us go?”

  I shake my head.

  “And there’s nothing I can do, either,” Timony says when he looks at her. “No matter where I push or prod, the way out is closed to me as well.”

  I guess it’s because we’re so into our conversation that we don’t realize that we’re not alone anymore. We don’t know until a sweet child’s voice suddenly says:

  “There they are.”

  We look up to see Mattie pointing at us. Her giant bear is just a raggedy plush toy, held against her chest with her other arm. Beside her . . .

  My heart goes still. I can’t breathe.

  Beside her is Del.

  Del and the priest I caught a glimpse of earlier. Dear old Father Cleary.

  But it’s Del who grabs my gaze, and I can’t look away.

  Raylene told me she cut him with a knife the night she ran away from home, cut him bad enough in the leg that he was still walking with the trace of a limp when she saw him years later. He was also a fat, alcoholic loser, living in a trailer park.

  But that was her Del. The one that lives in the real world.

  Mine’s from before, when all of Tyson County was still his playground and nobody’d dare give him a hard time. Tall and lean, that lick of hair hanging down on his forehead. Dark-eyed and mean, even when he’s smiling. Maybe especially when he’s smiling.

  “You did good,” Del says, and he rubs the top of Mattie’s head, mussing up her hair.

  She beams up at him.

  All the guilt I was feeling, for what I did to her when I was a kid, for making her . . . it all just drains away. But it’s not replaced by anger. There’s only fear.

  No, fear’s too tame a word.

  I’m terrorized.

  “Is that him?” Lizzie asks from beside me.

  But I can’t answer. I can’t move.

  Lizzie and the doonie get to their feet, neither of them quite sure what to do. It’s not like there’s any apparent threat. It’s just a good old boy and a priest and a cute little girl, holding her teddy bear.

  “They’re so old now,” the priest says. “Why does the good Lord let sweet little girls grow up, anyway?”

  Del grins. “What, they’re too old for your tastes? Well, you old perv, like the old saying goes, I may get older, but my girlfriends never will. ‘Cept here we don’t have to go looking for new ones. I can just make ‘em younger.”

  He doesn’t move, doesn’t say a thing, but I feel something happening to me. I can’t tell what until Lizzie speaks.

  “What the fuck?”

  It’s a little girl’s voice. I glance at her and see that she’s small now. Younger. Eight, maybe nine years old. I lift my hands and they’re a child’s hands. I’m still the me I always was, but now I look like a little kid, just as Lizzie does.

  What has Del done to us?

  “Fight this enchantment,” the doonie says. “It’s up to you how you appear in the otherworld—what shape you wear.”

  My gaze goes to him. He’s unaffected by what’s happened to us.

  What enchantment? I want to ask him. Since when did my white trash brother become some kind of wizard?

  But my tongue’s still stuck to the roof of my mouth. Paralyzed with fear, I can’t speak, can’t move.

  “I can’t do a lick with that boy,” Del says. “You wanna give it a try?”

  Father Cleary shakes his head. “He’s just going to want to do dirty things with our little girls.”

  He makes a brushing away motion with his hands and just like that, Timony’s gone.

  They’re both wizards?

  What kind of sick world have I made inside my head?

  At that moment Lizzie rushes forward, but the two men sidestep her rush. Del sticks out a foot, and she goes sprawling in the grass.

  “Somebody needs a good spanking,” the priest says.

  Del laughs, but his gaze is on me.

  “Knock yourself out,” he tells Father Cleary. “Me, I’ve got some unfinished business with little Jillian here.”

  He takes a step closer, and I cringe back against the trunk of the tree.

  “I hear you’ve been telling tales,” he says, “and you know what happens to little girls with big mouths, right?”

  My gaze darts right and left. But there’s no help, no escape—even if I could get my muscles to work.

  I see the priest pick up Lizzie. He laughs as she bats ineffectually at his big hands holding her. Mattie’s watching it all with this small, awful smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

  “Well, toodle-oo,” she says.

  “Don’t you stray too far,” Del tells her.

  She doesn’t answer. She just walks away. He doesn’t turn to see her go. He’s too busy reaching down for me.

  Big Dan

  Big Dan knew he shouldn’t have let his nephew go off with that pluiking green-bree. He didn’t doubt that Rabedy would handle the blind man—not after he’d given his nephew Odawa’s true name. No, that wasn’t the problem at all.
The problem stood beside him, smelling like she hadn’t washed yet this week, although that wasn’t stopping her from leaning in close to speak in his ear with a hoarse whisper.

  “Is this what you have in mind for my boy?”

  Gretha Collins was unattractive even for a bogan—a squat barrel of a woman with a nose like a ski slope, wide-set eyes, and lips so thin they might as well have been nonexistent. Her hair was always greasy, hanging down her back in long untidy braids, and she dressed like a ragpicker who was too fond of her own wares.

  She was also Big Dan’s sister, Rabedy’s mother.

  They were attending the funeral for Gathen Redshanks in an empty lot, deep in the Tombs, with abandoned buildings rising up all around them. It had proved to be a far more sizable gathering than Big Dan had expected. All the Redshanks were in attendance, which was only to be expected, but at least two-thirds of the other local bogan clans had gathered as well, including a sizable showing of Flynns and Burtons, both of whom had been feuding with the Redshanks for about as long as anyone could remember.

  But it had been a long time since a bogan had fallen in battle. At least that was the story Big Dan had told. How they’d been attacked by a pack of canids in the otherworld, how Gathen had fallen in that struggle, but not before he’d driven the canids off through the sheer ferocity of his own assault.

  Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea—not if the ugly murmurs and whispers he’d been hearing among the crowd were any indication. All they’d need was for a gang of pluiking Redshanks and their kin to go looking for revenge against the green-brees. That would bring the whole business right to Tatiana’s attention, and then there’d really be hell to pay.

  But at the moment Big Dan’s main concern was Gretha, worrying over the son she only paid attention to at times like this, when it gave her a chance to rag on Big Dan.

  “Rabedy’s in about as much danger as you are,” he told his sister.