Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She sat among the reeds so quietly the frogs were singing their love song around her. I heard them plop into the water as I walked along the bank. I hadn’t realized how much I wanted her until I saw her. And then I didn’t care that I was middle-aged and dour, and she was fay. I wanted to kick off my boots, fill my hands with wildflowers, find a toad with a jewel in its eye, and scatter my gifts into her lap.

  She grew more substantial under the moonlight as she recognized me. She smiled up at me. I knelt beside her, took her hand, brought it to my mouth, so moved that she’d come to me that I couldn’t find words. I couldn’t grieve, it seemed, until she laid her hand upon my heart. Then I felt it crack open like an egg. Then I felt the pain and love and sorrow kindle and sear; then I felt the tears. Inhuman as she was, she was the lifeline I needed to cling to while I admitted grief.

  “What are these?” she murmured, taking one on her finger. “Owen?”

  I loved to hear her say my name; it sounded ancient, when she spoke it, as though I heard it echo through countless centuries.

  “Tears,” I said, closing her hand around it. “Treasure it. I don’t make them often, and look, they’re almost already gone.”

  She kissed my eyes, tasting delicately. “Salt,” she murmured. “Water. I have kin, I’m told, who live in one enormous tear.”

  I smiled, and was instantly grateful again, that I could laugh and weep in the same moment while I was with her. “Ocean, we call it,” I told her. “And it does taste like tears.”

  She had me pick a flower name for her, so I called her Rue, for her yellow hair. And for the day I would rue when she faded from my life, or we were discovered. In over a decade, neither of those things happened. She would never tell me her true name. If I said it aloud in the wrong place or time in the wood, someone might hear; she would be in trouble, and I would be in danger. Ten years to her were nothing; only her expressions had changed in all that time, growing wise and more complex. Her eyes were dark as sloe berries, her smile ancient and eternally bewitching. Her long, light bones and silky skin seemed to change constantly, sometimes as strong and tensile as a sapling tree, sometimes melting like a dream in my hold, as though, like the name I gave her, even what I saw was false.

  Maybe. I didn’t care. Who would?

  “What makes the tears?” she asked.

  “Grief. When someone whom we love has died.”

  “Ah,” she said softly. “We felt that. Wind from your world has been blowing into ours; water runs backward. It was easy for me to come to you; you opened the earth today, and passages stood open everywhere, unguarded. Even a few that have been closed so long we had forgotten them.”

  “Where?” I asked her immediately, but she only gave me her sidelong smile.

  “So you can tell?” she asked me. “And have the witch in the great hall guard them more closely?”

  “Of course. That is my solemn duty.”

  She touched my lips with the flowering end of a stalk of wild grass. “You do it so well,” she murmured, and I felt her hair brush across my lips, and then I felt her lips. I sank back on the bank, amid the reeds and wildflowers, the dark water and the frogs. She opened my shirt, slid her slender hands into my sleeves, along my naked arms, held them out wide, and stretched herself over me. Heedless and exposed as any animal, me grunting with the frogs while she sang like a katydid, and the fireflies swarmed around us like an enchanted mist. At those times I couldn’t think about who might wander by, even at high noon, while she stopped time with her body and drew my soul out between my teeth. But she hid us somehow; no one ever saw.

  Afterward, I was alone. What I thought was the blur of her face turned into the moon, angled curiously toward me. I lay for a while without a thought in my head, until I heard a distant door open and close. A light went on in the house: another eye. It didn’t touch me, but I felt exposed again, and slightly foolish, lying there with my clothes open like a teenager gaffed by hormones.

  But the light went out almost immediately; doors opened and closed again. I heard Dorian’s truck start, and knew, by the direction she turned out of the driveway, that she had gone in search of her own consolation.

  And then I felt the touch of Rue again, and smiled.

  “You’re still here.”

  “I heard her coming. I thought you might want to leave me.”

  I shook my head, shifting to a slightly more dignified position and closing a couple of buttons. “She’s gone to find her own love.” I felt my voice tighten in spite of myself; then I had to laugh again. “Listen to me. I fret about Leith Rowan, and here I am with you.”

  “Here you are,” she echoed contentedly, leaning against me, her hair green-gold in the moonlight. Then she murmured, “Leith Rowan.”

  “Do you know him?” I asked abruptly, feeling a sudden, raw pang of worry.

  “We know some Rowans. I don’t know which.”

  They might have been long dead, I knew; some Rowan a century or two ago had met a woman in the wood with her hair the color of flowering rue. Memory didn’t fade in her world, nor did she really understand our habit of dying. It seemed more a matter of choice to her; she wouldn’t assume that a two-hundred-year-old Rowan wouldn’t find his way eventually back into her company.

  Still, I asked with anxious precision, “What do you mean ‘know’?”

  She laughed at my finicky need for detail, and answered lightly, taking my breath away, “Rowans don’t guard their boundaries. They have never been afraid of us. The ones who know of us.”

  “Some don’t?” My voice sounded harsh to me, but she only shook her head tranquilly.

  “Seeing is believing. Isn’t that what you say? The Rowans who can see us, or who are aware of us, don’t fear us. Those who can’t, don’t believe in us. Either way, we live along our boundaries in peace.”

  “And Leith—”

  She took my face in her hands then, looked into my eyes. “I don’t know their names,” she said again, gently. “Only that Rowan name, which is as old as any around here. It was old when Lynn Hall was a cottage in a clearing surrounded by the wood.”

  I had to be content with that. My daughter’s lover had, after all, been to college and held a day job; a certain taciturnity and disinclination for noise and crowds didn’t necessarily mark him kin to the Fair Folk. His interest in the wild life of the mountains might. But Liam Lynn had rambled all his life among the wild things and never wandered farther than he should have.

  Until now, I remembered numbly, and reached out again, to close the little distance there was between our hearts.

  “How strange,” I breathed, “how strange… that day so long ago… I went into the wood, looking for Liam Lynn and I found you instead.”

  “Beside the honeysuckle growing up the old elm tree. But it wasn’t so long ago. Was it?”

  “A dozen years? Thirteen?”

  “That’s nothing.”

  “To you, a year is a day—”

  “And a day is forever.”

  She smelled of wild grasses, sunlight, violets. When I closed my eyes, I wondered what I truly held in my arms: a fairy lover, or the life-giving earth itself, taking a shape I could touch and love, even if I couldn’t understand it.

  “Come tomorrow,” I whispered. “And the next night. Every night. The moon finds a way; why shouldn’t you?”

  “I will try… It’s not always easy. Your Iris twists the paths; it’s like finding my way through bindweed and bramble. Or through water between our worlds that has stopped flowing; it takes me nowhere.” She hesitated a breath; I stirred to look at her.

  “What is it?”

  “She would take you, if she could. If she knew.”

  “She—”

  “Sh.” She laid a finger on my lips. A face flashed across my thoughts, an imaginary vision left from one of Iris’s tales when I was young, or from Rois Melior’s papers: the winter queen with her heart of ice and in her face the haunting beauty of every season. “Don’t speak
of her. Just be careful. Never look for me; your heart may summon her instead. Always let me come to you.”

  I didn’t tell her that of course I had wandered in search of her, many times. How could I not, especially in the early years? I had never found her by looking for her, but no one else had found me, either. Perhaps I had Iris to thank for that, though she’d hardly be grateful to me if she knew what I hid from her.

  I saw her face then: strong, delicate with age, her shrewd, fearless, vulnerable eyes that watched over our world, and held that peculiar blind spot only when she looked at me. Then I saw both their faces: ancient sorcerers guarding their realms, putting up warning signs everywhere along their marches: Do Not Trespass.

  And my gentle Rue, slipping past them both to come to me on a night when I needed her to take my mind off dying.

  “I do not know what you are,” I heard myself murmur, or think, or my heart tell her, “but I love you.”

  I sat with her for a long time until my arms held only moonlight, and even the frogs were still.

  6

  Iris

  The circle was complete by eight-fifteen the next night, everyone came promptly to have a closer look at Sylvia. Dorian was last as always, flurried and windblown, though there was no wind, just the private little whirlwind she always travels in.

  “Sorry, sorry,” she said, though there was no need. She put a tray of stuffed mushrooms on the sideboard and gave me a hug, leaving a crochet hook dangling in my hair from the sewing bag in her hand. “Oh—sorry!” She looked preoccupied; I wondered grimly if she had decided to marry the Rowan boy. She turned to give Sylvia a bear hug, which made everyone smile: they had been running in and out of one another’s lives since they were born.

  A baker’s dozen turned out, counting Sylvia. The Starr twins and Penelope had come at a quarter to eight on the dot, Lacey and Miranda in pastel crepe and their usual pearls and gold, as though they were going to a wedding or a funeral. These days it’s hard to tell, with everyone wearing black to both, until they bring the bride or the body out. The twins sat on the velveteen couch together and took out their work, while Penelope added a huge rhubarb pie to my plate of cherry-chocolate cookies on the sideboard. Penelope wore jeans and high-top sneakers with glitter all over them. Her hair glittered oddly, too, in the lamplight; so did her eyelids. Well, even at her age, she was still a child compared to me at my age, and with her round sweet face she could get away with a lot more than most. She sat down, the quilt she was stitching by hand tumbling out of the bag at her feet.

  Genevieve Macintosh and Hillary Cross had come down the mountain together; they took turns driving each month. Hillary, with her big fierce eyes and short spiky hair, looked like an owl. She hated to cook; she brought a big bottle of white or red that always got emptied by the end of the evening. That night, most likely considering the occasion, she brought both. She wore holey jeans and muddy garden clogs that she kicked off at the door. She unrolled one of what she called her fabric paintings: a concoction of scraps and buttons, beads and trim she pieced together until for some reason she declared it done and framed it. They were pretty things, made of velvet and brocade, satin, watered silk, fabric she wouldn’t be caught dead wearing.

  Genevieve tended bar at the Village Grill, though she didn’t look old enough to drink, which she didn’t anyway, except for herbal teas. She was very tall and willowy, the way they grow these days, with long straight blond hair and calm, gray eyes. She wore boots and a cowboy hat, a sweater that almost hid the garnet stud in her navel, but not quite. She put a mountain of peanut butter—chocolate chip cookies on the sideboard and pulled out the booties she was knitting for her sister’s baby.

  The principal’s wife, Charlotte Henley, brought wool from her own sheep; she was crocheting an afghan for her teenage daughter. As always, she had made her cocktail meatballs, which never tasted the same twice. She made the sauce out of whatever she had in the back of the refrigerator— marmalade one month, peach jam the next—along with a healthy dollop of soy sauce and enough garlic to stun a vampire. A slight woman with a no-nonsense jaw and manner, she wore her platinum hair cut just so to her chin and parted on the right. In the nine years she’d been coming to the meetings, I never saw a hair’s worth of change in it.

  Jane Sloan, the village historian, came in with her embroidery bag dangling from her walker. She had seen as much local history as I had, and kept track of it for the historical society over in Highland. She had published a history of Lynnwood years earlier, and was working on another, secret history, about which she consulted me to niggle over points of memory. We had known one another since before the invention of the diaper pin. She moved slowly across the room with her walker, dressed to the nines in a suit and a hat with a couple of pheasant feathers curling down the brim. She reminded me of Liam’s mother Meredith: the same beady magpie eyes looking for the chip in the cup, the dust on the whatnot shelf, the same pursed mouth, out of which dropped lemons and sour grapes more often than not. But there wasn’t much those sharp eyes missed, and what Jane spoke stayed spoken.

  She took her usual place beside me on the tapestry couch, leaving her daughter Agatha, with her big eyes and big, placid body, turning vaguely in the middle of the room, looking for a place to sit. Sylvia waved her over to an empty chair beside her, and Agatha’s face brightened. She seemed bovine, even at third glance, the ox-boned, slow-moving country woman living behind her uncertain girl’s face most of her life. But she worked magic with her hands. Her quilts hung in craft museums; her spiced pears made you want to lead a better life. She was kind to her difficult mother; she understood without being told what monsters lurked in an old woman’s bedroom in the dark of the night. She put a plate of her savory mushroom turnovers on the sideboard before she sat, causing a moment of respectful silence as we acknowledged them.

  “You probably don’t remember me,” I heard her say to Sylvia. “Your mama and I were in and out of each other’s houses all the time when we were growing up.”

  I saw Sylvia’s eyes widen; she said something that I missed under Jane’s grumble.

  “It’s too bad what young women think they have to do with their hair these days.” She was staring at Hillary’s pale, choppy hair. Her voice wavered suddenly. “Is that a tattoo on her scalp?”

  I inhaled a laugh; it came out as a snort. Jane’s cold eyes swiveled toward me. “Something caught in your throat, Iris?”

  “Nothing I can’t swallow. Who’s missing?”

  “The farmers’ wives,” Jane said, pulling out her embroidery. “They’re always late. And Dorian.”

  Bet Harvey and Jenny Crane came in as she spoke: two sisters who drove together from the next valley. The older, Bet, was tall and rangy, with long black hair in a clip; Jenny, shorter, stouter, kept her short gingerbread hair in the pin curls fashionable half a century ago. They had been born on a farm; they married local farmers, raised children and crops indiscriminately, it seemed. They drove big old station wagons that disgorged endless quantities of dogs, bedding plants, soccer teams, balls, bats, rackets, groceries, canning pots, school play decorations, and slumber parties on their way to or from wherever. They both carried overstuffed knitting bags; they were always halfway through a ski sweater or a baby afghan for somebody. Bet put a veggie tray with dip onto the sideboard; Jenny added a fruit tray with dip. Then they turned simultaneously, smiled at me, turned again, and had a hard look at Sylvia. Then they sat in a couple of high-backed oak chairs, unpacking their knitting and whispering together.

  And at last Dorian came. Jane cleared her throat; it was a signal to me to get things going.

  “Welcome,” I said. “For those who didn’t introduce themselves at the funeral, this is my granddaughter Sylvia, Morgana’s child, the heir to Lynn Hall. She has done a little bit of required reading, but of more than that, she is as ignorant as a barn owl. And from what I can tell, she couldn’t string two stitches together with any kind of needle to save her life. But her he
art is good, and her instincts are every bit as sound as Morgana’s. I propose her for initiation and education.” I glanced at Sylvia. She was bolt upright in her chair now, gripping the arms and staring at me out of those golden hazelnut eyes. “You can stay or leave now,” I told her. “Will you stay?”

  Her instincts, as I said, were sound. She didn’t throw up a flurry of protests and questions; she realized she already had the information she needed. She just swallowed, then said tautly, “I’ll stay.”

  “We each get one question,” I went on. “That’s your initiation. I’ve already asked mine. You don’t have to answer. We consider what you conceal as significant as what you reveal. You might consider it none of our business.”

  I glanced around the circle. Everyone had their projects out by now: yarn, embroidery, sewing and quilting threads, fine gold thread for Hilary, needles of all kinds. Sylvia was looking at us as though she’d fallen into the bear pit at the zoo, and she didn’t know whether or not we’d been fed.

  Jane took up the questioning, after spearing a nice little French knot into the middle of the violet she was embroidering on a linen napkin. “Did you ever find out who your father was?” she asked.

  I saw Sylvia’s slender throat shift in another swallow. She answered simply, “No.”

  “Pity.”

  Jane went back to work; Bet looked up from another of her endless knitted sweaters, this one lime-pie green out of what looked like angora. Bet had startling eyes you seldom saw; they usually focused on canning, or uprooting bulbs for winter storage, or any of a hundred daily chores. A gray like the sheen on a gun barrel. “Do you have any idea what this gathering does?”

  Sylvia hesitated. Sew, she might have answered two minutes ago; now she just said again, “No.”