The Silent Strength of Stones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “Mmm.” Evan asked a question in the other language, and the dirt said yes to him. He pressed against Father Boulder, embracing rock with his arms as wide as they could go.

  “Do you understand what just happened? Is this all right?”

  “It’s more than all right, little brother. You amaze me. Can I—?” He kissed the rock, stepped out of Pop’s overalls, and lay on the ground, and a misty minute later he sprang up as his wolf self. “Ruh!” he said. He leapt up onto the rock and sat beside me.

  I raised my arm to put it around him, but then thought, no, I’ll get him all dirty. He nudged me with his head. I hugged him anyway.

  “Ruf,” he said. He licked my cheek and sneezed.

  I let him go. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know if I ever get to take a shower again.”

  “How did you—” He cocked his head. I was so happy I could understand him even though I was no longer his fetch that I hugged him again. “How the heck did you ever come up with this plan? How could you?”

  “Father Boulder gave me a dream.”

  “Wow.”

  “I think…I died in my dream.”

  He stared at me with wide yellow eyes. He sniffed me. “Wuff,” he said. “Hard to tell. Lift your hand.”

  I raised my dirt-encrusted hand, and he waved his paw above it. Instead of the gas-blue ring of flame I’d seen there the first two times he and Willow had tried this, there was a glowing red liquid mountain, its base just the size of my palm.

  “Oh, Nick,” he whispered as the mountain faded. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

  “This means something, huh.”

  “You’ve changed alignments. I’ve never heard of that before.”

  “I like the way it sounds.” I flattened my hands against Father Boulder. “The dirt was great,” I said. “Can I take it off now?”

  Lick your hand, he said.

  “Eww!”

  Lick your hand.

  I closed my eyes for a second. I had done everything Father Boulder had told me, and he had kept all his promises. Some of what he had told me to do hurt, but he had kept his promises. I sighed. I lifted my hand to my mouth and licked dirt off the back of it, wondering what, in the greater scheme of things, this meant. I was getting tired of everybody else having greater schemes.

  The dirt tasted gritty and dusty, with a faint overtone of sweet. It was not about to become my taste treat of choice. Water would have helped. After I had licked a couple inches of skin clean, Father Boulder said, Enough.

  I swallowed a few more times and almost managed to work up some spit. My stomach felt prickly. “Whoa,” I said. I felt like a sparkler was shooting out sparks inside me. It was strange but not unpleasant.

  That’s all I need for now, said Father Boulder. You may drop the cloak.

  “Thanks,” I said. I knew everything had changed, just as he had said it would, but I couldn’t figure out how, or what it might mean to me. There would probably be plenty of time for questions—the rest of my life.

  I looked at the sky. The sun was somewhere between ten and eleven. “I have to go home.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Evan.

  “Good.”

  On the way back to the store I took off my clothes and jumped in the lake with them. The water embraced me. I floated for a while, just feeling the water all around me, warm against my skin—that couldn’t be true, it was still morning, and the sun hadn’t had time to warm the top layer of lake water—but I felt comfortable, much more comfortable than I had felt submerged in mud in my dream. For a while I rested, floating, with my eyes closed.

  Then I dived down, still hanging onto my clothes, and scrubbed myself and my clothes as well as I could. I stayed under for a while. I opened my eyes and stared at a dim green world that went on away from me in all directions. I stared up at water-warped sky.

  This was a safe place.

  I left most of the dirt in the water.

  “Any explanation at all?” Pop asked, lowering his Hitchcock’s. His voice was calm, even friendly.

  “I had to save a life,” I said.

  “I like that one. You fall in the lake?”

  “Yep.”

  “Somebody was drowning, I take it?”

  “Pretty much. Did Granddad get his cereal?”

  “Of course.” He looked at Evan the wolf, who stood beside me. “So where’s the other Evan?”

  “Uh,” I said I looked down at Evan too. I wondered if he would ever return to human form again. Maybe he would know it was safe now that his uncle didn’t have the snow crystal. Maybe he had never wanted anything but to be a wolf. Maybe that was his idea of enough. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “He said he was going to come up to the motel this morning with me. He unreliable too?”

  That stung. “Pop…I’ve been reliable for years, haven’t I? These last few days haven’t exactly been typical.”

  He ran a hand over his head and said, “You’re right. I didn’t mean to say that. I been expecting a lot from you, and getting it, too. I been sitting here giving it some thought You know, I might be able to run this place without you after all.”

  My first feeling was a rush of hurt. For five years I’d been doing a lot of everything around this place, and not even for money. This was the thanks he gave me? The relief didn’t even have time to show up before he said, “Maybe for a little while, anyway, sometimes. I guess you probably have a few summer things to do. I’m glad you got your dog back.”

  “I am too,” I said.

  “What happened to your friend? Explain it to me even if it is hard.”

  I looked down at Evan, who stared up at me. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, Pop, but Granddad understands it. This Evan and the other Evan—”

  “No, Nick.”

  “They’re the same.”

  “No, Nick. You gotta stop telling these whoppers.”

  “Pop…”

  He shook his head.

  “Should I prove it to him?” Evan asked.

  “No,” I said. “Maybe later.”

  “I take it you’re having a conversation with him now,” Pop said.

  I looked at him and bit my lower lip. After a minute I said, “Pop, did you know Mom was weird when you married her?”

  “What!”

  “You must have figured it out at some point.”

  “What does your mother have to do with any of this?”

  “Well, she was my mother.”

  He frowned out the door. Presently he said, “Yep, I knew she was weird when I married her.”

  I sighed and said, “So, I can talk to Evan.”

  He drummed his fingers on the counter, staring beyond me. “Okay,” he said at last. “Give me time. I forgot how to think about this stuff and stay sane. Gotta work my way back up to it.”

  “Okay.”

  “You ready to come back to work? I’ve got people to check out at the motel.”

  “I need a hot shower and something to eat.”

  “Customers can find their way in here, I guess. I left them a note.”

  “I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

  He nodded and lifted his magazine again. I hesitated a moment, then walked past him and into the hallway to our part of the building. I paused just before I lost sight of Pop, and glanced back at him. He was staring at me. We both looked away.

  I dug my fingernails into the soap; it was the only way I ever cleaned them, but it wasn’t working on this particular type of dirt. I’d have to use one of the manicure tools in the store, I thought. Then I thought, what the hell am I thinking about? Did I or did I not just have the most intense experience of my life? Had I really died in my dream? Had I really faced all those sorcerous people and turned into mud and back, freed the captive prince and princess, and come out of it almost unscathed? Lord Calardane would be proud of me.

  The shower still smelled like mildew, and work was still waiting for me. In a weird way I found that co
mforting.

  Even though I washed my hair twice, sandy dirt stuck to the comb after the shower. It didn’t seem too visible in my hair in the steam-fogged mirror. I ignored it and got dressed, thinking I would have to do laundry tonight up at the motel.

  It occurred to me as I tied the laces on my old tennis shoes that I really, actually could load up a backpack, take Evan, and head for the hills. Everything I knew about camping I had read in books and magazines, but we had a lot of outdoors magazines in the store; I had been mentally practicing camping for years. The Venture Inn store sold most of what a person needed to spend a night or two in the wilderness. If we ran into any trouble, I had the feeling Evan could come up with some unorthodox way to handle it. Or maybe I could. Dirt was everywhere. I looked out the bathroom window at the forest and the sky and thought, yes.

  Megan and Kristen were in the store when I had finished my cereal in the kitchen and Evan and I pushed past the curtain. Pop closed his magazine, and headed for the motel without even one scold.

  “Oh,” Megan said, squatting and holding out a hand to Evan. He went to her and smelled it. “You’re okay! I’m so glad. And…I’m so sorry,” she said. She raised her hand and tentatively stroked his head. He let her. “I feel like such a chicken.”

  “They’re really scary people,” I said. “They’re the scariest people I ever met.”

  Evan said, “Tell her you fixed their wagon.”

  Megan looked up at me, waiting, her hands snagged in Evan’s ruff.

  “He says I fixed their wagon.”

  “You did? How could you, when that creepy man could just stare at you and make you do stuff?”

  I gazed over her head. A line of cobweb hung from the ceiling. I would have to get a broom. “Evan got in worse trouble. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about asking Pop to help me.” I looked at her. “I even thought about asking you to help me. Finally I thought of this other friend I have, and he helped me.”

  “Does that mean we can relax?”

  I wondered. What more could the Keyes do to me? If I had seen me being dirt, I would have been scared of me, “I think so.”

  “Maybe start over?” she asked Evan. He licked her nose. She hugged him. “This is sooo weird.”

  “It’s a really, really good trick,” Kristen said, drifting closer and staring at Evan. She sounded a little lost. “Nick, is this the strangest summer ever? I keep wanting to sleep through it.”

  “Where’s Ian?”

  “He’s boring.” She put a Cosmo on the counter and handed me money.

  “Stay awake and keep looking around.” I gave her change.

  She looked at Megan and Evan. She glanced at me, licked her lip, focused on Megan again, and said, “Megan, do you really want a boyfriend who’s a dog?”

  “I guess I do,” said Megan, rising. “Or a wolf, anyway.” Evan sat watching her, tail curled around his feet, his mouth hanging open in a panting grin.

  Kristen frowned. She stared at me. “Changed my mind; Don’t want to sleep through it. Okay?”

  “Good,” I said.

  She rolled her Cosmo up and tucked it under her arm, gave me a smile, then shook her head, frowning down at Evan.

  “Next time let’s swim in the lake,” Megan said to Evan, “some place far from Lacey’s.”

  “Ruh!”

  “Like, today?”

  “Tell her to wait,” Evan told me. “Ask her to leave her number. I’m not sure you and I are finished with everything.”

  I got out a piece of scratch paper. “He’ll call you,” I said, handing Megan a pen. Kristen shook her head again while Megan wrote. She smiled, though.

  Willow came by just as I was closing the store. I was running out the register tape for Pop, watching the strings of numbers in their categories, thinking that if I paid attention to this stuff I would figure out how the business was doing and whether it was reasonable for me to ask Pop for enough credit to buy camping gear, when she leaned across the counter and grabbed me and kissed me. She smelled like evergreens and tasted like clover.

  “Hey,” I said, when I could.

  She climbed across the counter, let her legs down behind it, grabbed me, and kissed me again. Then she let me go and rubbed tears out of her eyes.

  “What?” I whispered. I lifted my arms and put them around her just to see what it felt like.

  “It was so awful. It was just terrible. I have never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life as I was when you came walking in that door like a big old dirt pile. They don’t understand Evan at all. They couldn’t even see they were killing him. They wouldn’t listen to me. I kept trying to make them stop. I used to think I was so hot, but Elissa’s a lot stronger than I am. Plus they really know how to act in concert, those Keyes. Rory gathers them all together and they turn on a spigot, and whoosh, power.” She leaned against me a moment, then straightened and stroked her hand through my hair. She frowned and studied her palm. Her eyebrows rose. She showed me what she was looking at. Grit clung to her skin.

  “I have the feeling it’ll never all wash out,” I said.

  She smiled, her eyes golden. “It was beautiful.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “It was enough you, and it wouldn’t have happened without you.”

  I touched the dirt on her hand. “Why do you want to stay with them when dirt would have let you out of it?”

  She sighed and said, “They’re my family. Your family is your family, even when they’re acting like idiots. And who knows, maybe they’ll listen to me and I can tell them what they need to change, once they stop telling me what I need to change.”

  Your family is your family…

  I thought about Mom’s address and phone number, hidden in my bottom dresser drawer.

  Willow frowned. “You know, you could still pretend to be a fetch, and I could take you home to the Hollow, and we could figure out about my baby brother…”

  “I’ll have to ask Pop if I can have some time off.” I had no clue how I could solve a case ten years old, but it was the first time anybody had asked me to detect anything.

  Willow was still kissing me when Pop came to pull the tape off the register. He walked back through the curtain, shaking his head.

  “What the heck did they want with Granddad’s creel, anyway?” I asked Evan that night when I was getting ready for bed.

  “Why do you keep asking me questions like that?” he said, rolling around on his back on the rug. He looked at me from upside down, his mouth open in a grin, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. I glared at him. He rolled over and sat up. “It’s some complicated thing about the—the spirit of a thing that’s been used for years. They needed something local and human-touched to use in the summoning. Uncle Bennet can find stuff like that; he’s a kind of walking dowser. So he decided that thing was what he needed. Are you satisfied now?”

  I brushed my teeth and wondered.

  The second time I saw Willow disappear, she knew I was watching her. I sat on the edge of the lake as the sky lightened in the east, deep night blue bleaching toward dawn white. My feet were in the cold water, my toes dug into the mud and feeling as if they could root there. I knew the mud should be freezing, but somehow it felt comfortable. Other things had changed since I had changed alignments; Evan had helped me test it. I had lost the super-salesman voice—couldn’t remember how to make it come out of my mouth. I had decided not to tell Pop yet.

  I could still see through most false or acquired images, though. I asked Evan why he had looked like a wolf to me, when Mom had still looked like Mom even when she thought she was disguised. “Think about it,” he had said.

  The only reason I came up with was that somewhere deep inside, he really had the soul of a wolf. I remembered the flicker of him I had seen when Rory did the spell that made everyone look different and me look like a volcano. Wolf.

  Willow stood a little distance from the bank. She was wearing her orange leotard​/​swimsuit this time
. “I’m a fire sign, but I can do this water prayer anyway,” she said. “I’ll teach you, if you like.”

  Then the sun edged up above the ridge and cast light across the lake. Willow lifted handfuls of water and held them toward the sun, singing. Her voice was beautiful—how could I not have noticed last time?—and I could almost understand what she was saying. It was about how water was in everything, and light was in everything, and earth, and sky, and she thanked everything that all things mingled to make a world where so many wonderful things happened. The water slid down her arms in slow motion, catching light against her skin, and then she was the song, everything together, sun, water, air, earth, sound, motion, and stillness; and she turned transparent; she became the prayer.

  My breath caught inside me. I pressed my hands to the ground. I was conscious of earth under my feet, under my body, sun touching my face, water around my legs, air waiting to enter me. I let air in and repeated the only phrase I could remember from Willow’s song, the words foreign and not quite right as they crossed my tongue, but close enough, because everything flickered, and for an instant I felt all of everything flowing into and out of me and through me, as though my heart pumped earth and my lungs breathed fire, my bones carried water and my skin kissed air.

  Then I settled back out of it, feeling heavy and cold as clay. The sun was pulling free of the treetops, and so bright I couldn’t stare at it anymore. Willow dropped back into sight, too, and turned to smile at me. “Not so hard,” she said.

  I sat for a while just breathing deep, until I felt alive again.

  “You okay, Nick?” She waded over and sat beside me, splashing water up with her feet.

  “I’m okay. Evan said it was a woman’s mystery.”

  “That’s because he’s too lazy to do proper devotions.”

  I wiggled my toes in the muck. “If you can do that, why do you need to do anything else? It was fantastic.”

  “You can’t stay there all the time,” she said, splashing harder. She kicked water at me and giggled. “Unless you’re some kind of religious fanatic or something, and just want to dissolve. I’d rather kiss you.”

  We ended up in the water—under it some of the time. A moment came when we were just floating, our hands clasped. I stared up at the sky, indelible burning blue in the center, paler toward the edges; and at the hills rising from the lake, under cloaks of pointed pines that caught sun in the pale new green tips that ended their branches. Above us an eagle soared like a spinning thought, edging up and away, and my heart rose as though trying to fly, and then broke. This was as perfect a place and a moment as I could remember. If I could be here, why did I ever need to be anywhere else?