Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Solstice Wood

  Patricia A. McKillip

  Contents

  1 • Sylvia

  2 • Tyler

  3 • Syl

  4 • Iris

  5 • Owen

  6 • Iris

  7 • Sylvia

  8 • Tyler

  9 • Sylvia

  10 • Relyt

  11 • Iris

  12 • Sylvia

  13 • Tyler

  14 • Iris

  15 • Relyt

  16 • Owen

  17 • Tyler

  18 • Iris

  19 • Syl

  20 • Iris

  21 • Owen

  22 • Syl

  Ace Books by Patricia A. McKillip

  THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD

  THE SORCERESS AND THE CYGNET

  THE CYGNET AND THE FIREBIRD

  THE BOOK OF ATRIX WOLFE

  WINTER ROSE

  SONG FOR THE BASILISK

  RIDDLE-MASTER: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY

  THE TOWER AT STONY WOOD

  OMBRIA IN SHADOW

  IN THE FORESTS OF SERRE

  ALPHABET OF THORN

  OD MAGIC

  SOLSTICE WOOD

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2006 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  Text by Kristin del Rosario.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. ACE is an imprint of The Berkley Publishing Group. ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First edition: February 2006

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  Solstice wood / Patricia A. McKillip.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-441-01366-X

  1. Young women-—Fiction. 2. Grandmothers—Fiction. 3. Women—Societies and clubs— Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.C38S65 2006

  813'.54—dc22

  2005054719

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For Kate, my other sister

  And every turn led us here.

  Back into these small rooms.

  — Winter Rose

  1

  Sylvia

  Gram called at five in the morning. She never remembered the time difference. I was already up, sitting at the table in my bathrobe, about to take my first sip of coffee. The phone rang; my hands jerked. Coffee shot into the air, rained down on my hair and the cat, who yowled indignantly and fled. I stared at the phone as it rang again, not wanting to pick up, not wanting to know whatever it was Gram wanted me to know.

  At the second ring, I heard Madison stir on my couch-bed.

  “Syl?”

  “I’m not answering that.”

  He unburied his face, squinted at me. “Why not? You having a clandestine affair?”

  “It’s Gram.”

  His head hit the pillow again on the third ring. “Is not,” he mumbled. “Tell him to leave a message and come back to bed.”

  “I can’t,” I said firmly, though his naked body was exerting some serious magnetic pull. “I have to go to the store and unpack a dozen boxes of books.”

  “Come back for five minutes. Please? She’ll leave a message.”

  “She won’t.” It rang again. “Only the weak-minded babble their business to inanimate objects.”

  “Hah?”

  “She says.”

  It rang for the fifth time; I glowered at it, still not moving. I could have shown her any number of fairy tales in which important secrets imparted to a stone, to the moon, to a hole in the ground, had rescued the runaway princess, or the youngest brother, or the children lost in the wood. But Gram believed in fairies, not fairy tales, and in her world magic and machines were equally suspect.

  I picked up at the sixth ring. She would have hung up at the seventh, before the machine started talking. So, in those strange moments, thousands of miles apart, we had been locked in silent argument, counting rings together.

  “Sylvia,” she said, before I could say hello. “I need you to come home.”

  She had needed me to come home for seven years. But I heard an odd hollowness, a fragility in her foghorn voice that kept me from offering her whatever was the most likely on my list of excuses: can’t leave my bookstore now, everyone on vacation, am apartment-sitting, dog-sitting, fish-sitting, too busy this week, am leaving the country this month, just signed a lease for another year, I’m sorry, Gram, I’m not coming back.

  “What is it? Gram?”

  “It’s your grandfather,” she said, with that unfamiliar wobble in her deep, husky, imperious voice. “He’s dead, Sylvia.”

  My throat closed. I had to push to get a word out. “How?”

  “He wandered out in the middle of the night and fell asleep under the pear tree. I always knew he had a streak of Melior in him—roaming through hill and dale and whatnot at any hour of day or night. He didn’t wake up. Hurley found him this morning lying on the grass in his nightshirt.”

  “I’m sorry, Gram,” I whispered. I heard Madison shift again, pull himself upright to listen.

  “So you’ll come home.”

  Even then, I knew to bargain. “Of course I’ll come for the funeral, but—”

  “Good,” she interrupted with a more familiar briskness, having heard as much as she wanted to hear.

  “I won’t be able to stay much longer.”

  “Just come.” She’d figure out the rest of my life later. “As soon as you can. Today. I’ll expect you for supper.”

  “I’ll make my arrangements, Gram, and let you know when—”

  But she had already hung up.

  I sat there, staring numbly at the phone again, feeling that slow, painful prickling begin behind my eyes, the swell of tears that never fell. Memories swept like leaves through my head: Lynn Hall, the low, ancient mountains I’d grown up in, the fields and small villages, the endless woods. Grandpa Liam was all I knew, all I ever had, of a father. He had taught me how to tie m
y shoes, how to bait a hook; he knew the names of every tree and wildflower and weed in the woods. He alone knew how to change Gram’s expression from determined to uncertain. His gentle voice, his calm strength, had grown around me like a vine, bindweed, still with me after all the years away.

  “Syl?” Madison said behind me. I felt his long fingers on my shoulders; he bent to peer at my flushed face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Dry fire,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Grandpa Liam died. This is as close as I could ever get to crying.”

  He drew me to him; I sat still another moment as he rocked me, feeling his bones against my face under the sweet, taut skin. Then I pulled away, stood up restively.

  “I have to pack. Find a flight. Will you feed my cat while I’m gone?”

  “Syl, I can come with you,” he said steadily, reminding me, despite his long black hair, the violet stone in his ear matching his eyes, of Grandpa Liam.

  “No.”

  “I’d like to meet your mysterious grandmother.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Yes, I would. I’d like to see where you grew up.”

  I felt like throwing something, then; I wished I could burst into tears. I went to the closet instead, picked my black suit off the hanger, and pulled a wheeled bag off the shelf to pack it in. He followed me to the closet, and then to the antique steamer trunk I used as a dresser.

  “Syl—”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I told him, pulling clothes out of the fabric-covered drawers, piling them efficiently into the bag: jeans, two sweaters, underwear. Socks. “I have to call the bookstore. Jo will cover for me; she went on vacation just down the coast, with an armload of mysteries. I’ll give her an extra week off for this.” I thought a moment, then took off my bathrobe, wrinkle-free polyester, folded that and a pajama top into the bag.

  “Can I at least take you to the airport?”

  Madison taught music fundamentals at the community college; his summer course hadn’t started yet. It was like Grandpa Liam to die sleeping out under the stars, I thought; he’d probably been waiting for the summer solstice.

  “Okay. What else do I need?”

  “Toothbrush. All that.”

  “Got it.” I showed him the little airline bag of bathroom supplies I’d acquired once when my luggage spent the night somewhere. “Oh.” I went to the refrigerator, examined my collection of nail polish I kept in the egg bin to prevent streaking. Black? White? Plum? My mind went blank. Then I saw Grandpa Liam again, his rangy body hunkered down over a patch of tiny wildflowers growing along a stream bank. They were as lightly blue as his eyes. Sun fell on his hair, turning it into smooth ivory. He smiled at me, and said, “Forget-me-not.” I felt the blotchy swelling under my eyes again. I grabbed a bottle without seeing it, zipped it into a side-pocket along with my travel alarm.

  “What else? Oh. I need to book a flight.”

  “Syl.” Madison put his arms around me again. Over his shoulder, I saw the sky lightening, revealing, out of my high, uncurtained window, block upon block, mile upon mile of stone and cement and winding tarmac, flowing everywhere around me, hills covered with buildings instead of trees, everything blocked, gridded, measured, planned, the earth so buried that nothing could bloom in secret, unseen in the light of day.

  “What have I forgotten?” I asked him, soothed by the sight. I would come back to those predictable streets as soon as possible; not even Gram could stop me.

  “You could get dressed,” Madison suggested gently. I pulled away from him, looking bewilderedly down at my naked self. He kissed my ear. “I’ll find you a flight while you shower.”

  ———

  So I made my arrangements with almost annoying ease, until there I was, just where Gram wanted me, driving a Popsicle-red rental car from the airport at twilight through the village where I was born, and hungry on top of it.

  The ancient village I’d left for good seven years earlier hadn’t changed much. A pizza parlor had opened up where Andie Blair had had her diner for fifty-two years. The new owners had kept the thick, bottle-blue windows and the stone shed in the back for storing bodies in winter when, a couple of centuries before, the place had been the village apothecary shop. The creaky inn with its meandering halls and narrow stairways had a new ramp for the handicapped zigzagging from the slate steps. It was a bed-and-breakfast in this century, owned by the Starr sisters and their dead brother’s widow. I saw the twins’ heads in the lounge window as I drove past, both covered with the same tight gray snail-shell curls, their pleated faces tinted purple in the reflected light from the VACANCY sign.

  Time had slowed in the fields along the road between the village and Lynn Hall. So little had changed, I might have been driving back into my own past. A barn roof that had been sagging for years had finally dropped a beam. The crusty old harrow still decorated the Thorntons’ cornfield like a piece of sculpture. Lynn Hall, a solid rectangle of pale stone looming unexpectedly over the fields, looked oddly bigger than I remembered. It should have been smaller, I thought uneasily. Things grow in memory, in the dark; they shrink, lose their power, in reality. As I pulled into the drive, I saw the wood behind the hall, which had dwindled, as I had grown, from a boundless, tangled mystery into a tranquil patch of trees. Now it seemed to dwarf Lynn Hall, an immense, dark, frozen wave about to break over it. I nearly hit the brakes, backed out in a flurry of gravel to head for the airport again. Some of the dark, I realized slowly, was just that: the night I wasn’t used to any longer, flowing over hill and field, no city lights to push it back, only stars, and the rising moon, and the occasional porch light in the crook of a mountain road to tell me where I was.

  I parked at the end of the drive near the carport, where Gram’s burgundy sedan the size of a cruise ship, and my great-uncle Hurley’s pickup, so old it was held together by duct tape and rust, spent their declining years. As I picked my way across the grass, a luna moth went ahead of me, a fluttering wisp of moonlight. The front door was locked, and the doorbell made no sound when I pushed it. By which I could have concluded, if I wasn’t sure, that Hurley, who liked to tinker with things, was still alive and kicking.

  The thick door groaned as I tried the doorbell again. I pushed; someone pulled. The door squealed against its warped, swollen posts and sprang open. A lanky, twiggy troll and I stared at each other across the threshold. Then the troll touched his glasses into place, and I recognized those green eyes. They belonged to my aunt Kathryn’s son Tyler, who had barely cleared my shoulder the last I saw of him.

  “Syl?” he said uncertainly, and I remembered that I’d changed, too.

  I reached up, saved by my thick-soled boots from having to stand on tiptoe. “Me,” I agreed, breathing a kiss on his cheek. “Hi, cuz.”

  “What—where’s the rest of your hair? And your glasses? How’d you get so—so grown-up?”

  “City living, I guess.”

  “I guess,” he echoed, still staring. This Tyler had a volcanic complexion, a ring in his left eyebrow, and spiky hair with mossy green highlights in it. His brows were still black.

  Thirteen years separated us, along with the distance I had to look up to see his face. “Is there, like, a name for the color of your hair?”

  I had to think. “Sahara Sunrise this month. Yours?”

  He smiled, showing a dimple I remembered. “Mom calls it Froggy Bottom.”

  “Where’s Gram?”

  “She’s in the kitchen with my mom. I was watching TV with Grunc. I saw your car lights on my way to the bathroom.”

  “Grunc?”

  The dimple reappeared. “Great-uncle Hurley. Gram and Grandpa and Grunc.” It faded; he stood blinking at the floor, then amended softly, “Gram and Grunc.”

  I nodded tiredly, feeling the painful heat fan briefly beneath my eyes. “When is the funeral?”

  “I don’t know. Gram and my mom have been on the phone all afternoon, making arrangements. Where’s y
our stuff?”

  “In the car.”

  He wandered out with me, picked my bag out of the trunk, and wheeled it over the threshold in front of him like an antique plow. I planted a boot on the ponderous door to shut it. Chandeliers tinkled above us, but nothing fell. The long hallway was dusty; shadows flickered as bulbs buzzed and sputtered in their sockets. All the doors along the hallway were closed, as though Gram no longer used the rooms. Dust balls drifted; paint blistered on the sills; cobwebs trailed down from the dusty prisms. It looked as though everyone had gone to sleep for a hundred years. I wondered idly who needed rescuing.

  Tyler, maybe. His shadow stretching down the worn flagstones seemed to take on a life of its own; there were too many arms under the crosshatch of lights, another head, other Tylers trying to emerge from the gangling, awkward sprite. His thin, dirty feet slapped the stones, the threadbare carpets. He cast a forlorn glance at me, looking even more otherworldly, a changeling child patched together out of this and that, trying to pretend that its cobbled face belonged to the stolen human child.

  I pulled my eyes off Tyler’s shadow, my thoughts back across the ambiguous boundaries they had crossed. Aunt Kathryn lived well out of those time-warped mountains, but only by a couple of hours’ drive, and Gram, refusing to let me forget my past, plied me relentlessly with gossip.

  I tried to be tactful, gave up, and asked baldly, “Did Aunt Kathryn’s boyfriend come up with you?”

  Tyler hesitated, pushed his thumb against the bridge of his glasses, and mumbled to the floor, “Stepfather.”

  I stopped dead. “No.”

  “Yeah. They got married last week.”

  “What did Gram say?”

  His shoulders hunched a little. “I don’t know. I’ve spent most of the time watching TV with Grunc. It seemed safest.” I nodded wordlessly. Tyler’s father, my uncle Ned, whom we had all loved, had spun across a patch of black ice into a tree a couple of years before. “Anyway,” Tyler continued, “he didn’t come with us. My mom was planning to leave me here anyway, while they go sailing around some islands.” He scratched his brow, near the silver ring, then sighed. “At least Grandpa Liam died in his sleep under the stars. Gram keeps saying he’s a throwback to the Melior side of the family. Who were they?”