Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Jenny, putting an edging on a baby blanket with hearts and rainbows stitched all over it, took up the thread of questions. “What have you read?”

  Most of a bookstore, Sylvia might have said. But she knew what Jenny was asking, which was why she was there.

  “My great—Rois Melior’s account of how she met Corbett Lynn. Gram asked me to read it.” Her eyes flickered to me as she said that; she realized that I had set her up for this. I first read those pages myself decades ago, when my eyesight was so clear I could see where one world ended and the Other began.

  Across from her, Hillary raised her cropped head. Sometimes our words flowed around in a circle; other times we passed words back and forth, making patterns of angles and stars between us. She asked in her blunt way, as she fastened tiny crystal beads onto her pattern, “Did you believe it?”

  “I’m here,” Sylvia answered tersely, reminding me vividly of Morgana, getting to the meat of something so cleanly that it was only when the skin fell whole to the ground that you saw the knife. Her hands still clenched on the arms of her chair; her whole body was tense, as though she were on some wild carousel ride. Dorian, who had curled up in a chair on the other side of the lamp they shared, touched her hand lightly. Sylvia turned toward her, still set like an unsprung trap, and gave her an intense, wide-eyed stare, as though she were trying to recognize her oldest friend.

  On the other side of her, Agatha asked placidly, as she threaded a needle, “Your mother never mentioned these things?”

  Sylvia shook her head once. “Not to me. Never.”

  “You left this place where you were born just about as soon as you could,” Lacey said. She was hooking the ugliest throw rug I had ever seen, all browns and grays and yellows, maybe to keep under her composter. “Why?”

  “I—” She hesitated for some reason, and touched a strand of gilded hair. “I left to go to college, and then I moved across country to finish my degree. I used the money my mother left me to open my bookstore. I intended to stay there. I still do,” she added stubbornly, just like her mother. “I only came back because of Grandpa Liam. And to help Gram.”

  “Do you plan to sell this place?” Miranda asked, crocheting a doily the silvery gray of her hair.

  Sylvia’s feet shifted, wanting her out from under the question. But she answered it honestly. “Yes. When Gram doesn’t need it any longer.” She looked at me. “I’ve already made that clear.”

  I couldn’t say anything; she had no idea what had really drawn her back. I just nodded, and Genevieve picked up the thread, pulling stitches out of her baby booty, looking for the one she had dropped.

  “If you chose a needle, which would it be?”

  A practical question. Sylvia looked vaguely surprised. “I could thread a needle, maybe. Sew a simple stitch. Nothing more complicated.”

  “Needle and thread,” Penelope murmured, and picked out both from her quilting basket. She sent it down the circle along with a square of linen. “Do you know how to tie a knot?”

  “I think so.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” Sylvia said, after a moment or two, doing the basic wrap-around-the-finger and snarl at the end of the thread.

  “That was two questions,” the principal’s wife murmured.

  “It was the same one twice,” I said firmly. “Go ahead, Charlotte.”

  “Do you recognize what we’re making?” she asked Sylvia, who was gazing bemusedly down at the needle and cloth in her hands. She raised her head, glanced around at us, opening her mouth to answer. But she didn’t. Sweater, her eyes told her. Rug, baby bootie, quilt, doily, pillow slip… Then I felt her catch our thoughts, like the first tremble of a moth-step onto a web. Threads, she saw. Stitches. Patterns. Stitches to hold fast. Patterns to make boundaries, to cover, to shape. To mimic. Bindings to hold them there. Threads to create. Knots to bind.

  She whispered, “Three for eyes to see. Four to shut the door.”

  Charlotte came as close to smiling as she ever did.

  “Good enough,” she said. A web was growing out of her hands, out of the soft ivory wools of her sheep. An afghan, anyone would have seen, a pretty, lacy thing for an early-fall day. But try to walk her patterns, and you’d find yourself in a perpetual twilight between here and there, and no telling which was where.

  Dorian was last. She was making a patchwork scarf out of rich, bright squares and triangles of satin and black velvet. Pinning gold rickrack into place around one triangle, she asked Sylvia gently, “Do you have any questions for us?”

  Sylvia eased back into her chair finally, giving us a haunted look. As well as could be expected, when the local sewing circle turns into a coven around you. I gave her back a smile, but her eyes just skittered off it nervously. She nodded finally, and lifted the square of linen, from which the needle was dangling ineffectually. “Could somebody show me what to do next?”

  7

  Sylvia

  Dorian taught me how to stitch a hem. For a while I couldn’t talk; I didn’t dare. I slid the needle in and out of my little square, pulled thread taut, pushed the needle through again, wishing with every bone in me that I had caught the next flight out after the funeral instead of staying to be trapped there like a fly in a web, hardly daring to think. The eerie stillness of the gathering had broken; women chattered easily as they took up their threads and fabrics. I couldn’t look at anyone, not even Dorian, above all, not Gram. What if they recognized something less than human in my eyes? What if they found the last thing they expected among them? I just kept my head down, tucked the edges of my cloth down with uneven stitches and tried to keep my fingers out of the way while Dorian watched me and murmured encouragement.

  I risked a look at her finally, when I stopped feeling curious eyes staring my way, and the volume in the room had ratcheted up a notch. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Oh, forever,” she answered calmly. “Iris said that she was a child when her own mother brought her into the circle, at the Sloans’ farmhouse in Crabapple Hollow.”

  “My mother never told me about this. I don’t even know if she could sew. Was she part of the circle, too?” If she had been, if she could lie to them about my father and her halfling child, and still sit here and sew, then maybe they wouldn’t see me, either, hiding inside myself.

  Dorian glanced at Gram, her brows crooking. She lowered her voice as though we were children again and Gram might hear us under the din. “I don’t know. Your mother died long before I was told about this. Iris might have kept the guild secret from her because of your father.”

  “What about my father?” I asked sharply, alarmed. “Do you know something else I don’t?”

  “That’s the point. Nobody knew who—or what—he was.”

  I closed my eyes tightly, opened them again, trying to believe I had heard what I had. “You mean, whether or not he was—”

  “Fay.” She said the word as though she were discussing the state of his finances, and I drove my needle into my thumb.

  “Ouch!”

  She tutted sympathetically, then caught my eyes, held them in a clear, disconcerting gaze. “You never wondered that?” she asked.

  “No,” I answered tersely. I’d never had to wonder. I gathered courage, raised my head a little to eye the busy, vociferous group. “They don’t seem worried tonight.”

  “Oh, you don’t show any signs of it, Syl. You’re hardly haunting these hills, and you’ve never wanted Lynn Hall. According to Rois Melior’s tale, the hall itself is one of the most powerful passages between worlds. But you left it as soon as you could,” she reminded me ruefully. “You couldn’t wait to get out of the woods into civilization. Besides, you and I talked about everything while we were growing up. You wouldn’t have kept something like that from me.”

  I was silent, trying to miter a corner. I had done exactly that, kept something like that secret from her. Getting out of here as quickly as possible had seemed the only way to keep it secret. I too
k a couple of pins from Dorian’s pincushion, stabbed the folds into submission, then dropped the linen into my lap and looked across the room at Gram. She was listening absently to Jane and counting stitches as she chained them off her crochet hook. I wondered uneasily what she was making.

  “And you,” I asked Dorian softly, “how long did you know about this and not tell me?”

  She shook her head, ducking for some reason into her hair. “Not as long as you might think. After you left for college. It was easier for me to keep quiet about it, with you away so much.” She pieced a triangle of tangerine satin onto her scarf and pinned it, then added, “They weren’t sure of me because of my mother.”

  “What?”

  “The way she vanished like that, when I was so little. Some thought she might have been taken, or was part fay herself, or something.”

  “But she was born here. Everyone knew her parents.”

  Dorian nodded. “And everyone knew my father: how close he’s always been to Iris and Liam. He’s an Avery, born to serve and protect Lynn Hall and the family.” My brows went up at that disquieting detail. “No one could seriously believe he would have been so blind as to fall in love with one of Them.”

  Now her eyes were hidden behind her hair; there was an edge to her voice I couldn’t interpret. I opened my mouth to ask. But Gram was standing over us suddenly, studying my handiwork: an uneven shirttail hem on two sides of a square of linen held in place by stitches like the tracks of a drunken bug. She picked it up, looked more closely.

  “There’s blood on it.”

  “Does it matter?” I asked incredulously.

  “It does in fairy tales.” She dropped it back into my lap. “You’ll have to be more careful.”

  “Okay,” I said unsteadily, and tried to think where I would begin, what I would ask, if I thought she had all the answers. “What are you making, Gram?”

  “A sweater-vest for Liam.” She closed her eyes briefly. “For Hurley, now. That’s what I would say, and he would see, if he asked me. Since you asked, it’s a binding spell to protect the attic. I started it when Hurley began finding odd things in the wood with his telescope.”

  I sorted through this: Hurley seeing apparitions, Gram combating magical forces invading the hall with a crochet hook… At some moment the entire Fiber Guild had moved across an unseen boundary between not knowing and knowing, though I wasn’t entirely sure yet what it was they knew. I smoothed the linen on my knee, touched my stitches. Unskillful as they were, they formed a pattern, I realized; they bound one thing to another; they changed the shape of a tiny piece of the world.

  “What can this do? It’s so simple.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Gram answered. “Your great-aunt Maggie could set a binding around an entire field, every stream and gate along its boundaries, just by hemming a handkerchief. Some wood-folk were probably lost for years in the lace edgings she used to crochet around them.”

  “Wood-folk.”

  “They’re called different things. No one speaks of them directly; you never know who might be listening.” She reached down to stroke the velvet in Dorian’s scarf. “Pretty. Look at that edging.” She traced the zigzag path of the gold rickrack between the bright and dark patches. “Not easy to find your way out of that. Or so we hope. As I said, you never know… The Others, they’re sometimes called in old writings. Them.”

  “There are other writings? Besides Rois Melior’s?”

  “You should see what Jane has dug up in letters, diaries, even account books. Payments to what were put down as dowsers, looking for underground water. Not everybody wanted to tap those springs. Some wanted to cap them. That’s where the Fiber Guild comes in. Jane tracks down every reference to the guild in old papers. That way we can keep track of places that were suspect, watched.”

  “This house.”

  She nodded, her dark eyes distant, narrowed, as though she were looking through the walls of the house for suspect behavior. “Always this house. Every water-bearing pipe, every door, every window and chimney. The first thing I did when I married Liam and moved here was to make a quilt with a different wheel of crocheted stitches—like a web— fastened over every square. Each web makes a pattern guarding a different room in the hall. I put it away somewhere safe. Remind me to show it to you.”

  “Iris,” Jane, the historian, called. She had a wizened, walnut face, and a body that looked frailer than the feathers in her hat. But her voice went through the din like a twang from an amped guitar. “Is she ready to continue?”

  “Are you?” Gram asked, turning her remote, appraising look on me.

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, you’re still here, aren’t you?” She patted my hand. “Now we’ll show you how to connect your stitches with ours. Don’t worry.”

  I was beyond worry.

  The room went silent again. Heads bowed over work. Sewing needles and crochet hooks flashed and dove; knitting needles clicked gently. No one said a word. Lowered eyes focused on threads, yarns, fabrics. So I did, too, sneaking a glance now and then between stitches to see what would happen next.

  Nothing happened. We stitched in silence. At least we stitched without words. Having nothing else to listen to, I began to hear needle points puncturing cloth, threads drawn through, again and again, as rhythmically as breathing. Our breaths mingled with the sound, as though breath became thread, air became fabric. I stitched another corner carefully, thinking of other corners: in doorways, at field gates, walls joining at the edges of a house. My stitches pulling them together, reinforcing them… knowing how it was done, whatever it was they were doing, would be knowing how it could be undone…

  I heard water.

  It was very faint, a distant stream, an underground rill hidden by moss and stones, water trickling between, around, over things in its path. A stitch to stop it here would send it angling over there, or maybe drive it into earth. I tracked it with my stitches, dammed it, made a knot out of its flow so that it ran perpetually around itself. It whispered to itself, searching for freedom. I lifted it out of its bed, threaded my needle with it, stitched water in and out of earth, made it follow my pattern instead of its own wild, unpredictable path. Here, and here, I told it. Stitch and stitch. I bound the little rill, working it in and out of earth until it slowed and slowed and, as I joined my last stitch with my first, it scarcely moved, standing sullen in the moonlight, a powerless seam of water that had nowhere left to go.

  I stopped, studied my hemmed square, my guarded field.

  I heard our silence again, the creak of a rocker, the busy click of needles. I looked up, found Gram’s eye on me. I didn’t look away; I challenged her to see me. For a moment, I heard the sounds of other secret places in the world: the trembling waters of hidden springs, leaves chattering at the sudden passing of wind on a windless night, the heartbeat of steps across an empty meadow. Walls of stitches rose against the wind; labyrinths of stitches trapped the footsteps.

  So they kept their worlds separate, themselves safe. I sat within Gram’s threads at every door and window, guarding against fears as old as night. Her eyes, beginning to question me, found their answer as I understood what was done, how it was done. Our gazes joined like stitches across the dreaming silence; she only saw enough to smile at me.

  Dorian dropped one of her bright triangles into my lap. I changed the color of my thread to saffron and began again.

  Slowly time began again. Someone leaned back and sighed. Somewhere a stitch dropped. Genevieve dug a tissue out of her tight jeans and blew her nose. On the other side of Dorian, Agatha cleared her throat. I heard a yawn. Then a clock chimed, and all over the room women knotted threads, brought a row to a finish, cut their yarns, folded their fabrics.

  Jane spoke first. She caught my attention with a hard, insistent gaze. When I met her eyes, she said simply, in her nasal boom, “Good, Sylvia.” She turned to Gram. “She takes after you, no matter who she came from.”

  I heard Doria
n snort. Gram shot Jane a narrow, dark glance. But Jane just snipped her embroidery thread with the beak of a strange little pair of scissors that looked like a stork’s head and said imperviously, “Agatha, put this away and bring me a cup of tea. Just a couple of dips; you know how weak I have to take it this time of night.”

  Agatha got up. Everyone moved then, stretching, milling toward the bathrooms, the feast on the long oak sideboard. In her chair, Dorian curled her legs up and leaned toward me, the way she used to do when we were young, sharing secrets while the grown-ups partied.

  “Be sure to snag one of Charlotte’s meatballs,” she said. “They’re awesome.”

  Suddenly curious, I asked her, “Does Leith know what happens here?”

  She shook her head quickly. “Why would he?” Then she was looking straight at me with her flecked-agate eyes, and I saw the trouble in them. “My father does.”

  “Well, Gram tells him everything, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, but—” She stopped, holding her secret on a breath. I thought bewilderedly of Owen Avery, who had been like everyone else’s father when we were growing up: a sort of random force in the world, with no clear set of motivations, able to take us places when he chose, granting or withholding time, money, patience, permission. He hadn’t seemed any more or less predictable than other adults. He wore ties more than most around here, but he went to turkey shoots and took Dorian and me fishing now and then; in memory at least he behaved like an ordinary adult.

  “But?”

  Dorian let out her breath. I saw Jane watching us, then, and Charlotte, her eyes cold and pale as fog. Dorian shifted. “Not here,” she murmured, and stood up.

  “When, then?”

  “Tomorrow.” She leaned down to bundle her patchwork into her bag. “I’ll be working in the greenhouse, repotting seedlings to sell. Come there.”

  “Okay,” I said, completely mystified, and drifted after her toward the table. I felt an arm slide around me, and looked into Gram’s smiling eyes.

  “You did well, Sylvia.”