He gave a little nod, surprising me. “I remember,” he said huskily, “you seeing me through those big lenses. I thought they were magic, too, for a moment. Then I realized I just had never noticed you before—you were one of the little kids. I didn’t really look at you until that moment. After that, I never forgot you.” He paused, gazing down at me from the ledge, balanced to slide down and join me, but not yet. He added, “Must be something drastic going on at Lynn Hall to make you put all this into words. In this part of the wood anything could be listening.”
“Well, what would they hear that they don’t already know?” I demanded. My voice wobbled badly. “Gram, who thinks she knows everything, seems the only one who needs the magic spectacles.”
He slid down then, landing like a cat, lithe and noiseless. “You never told her?”
“How could I? She hates what I am. That’s why I live so far away from her, in the middle of a city, stones under my feet, over my head, and surrounded by books, so nobody is surprised by the odd things I know. Grandpa Liam made me heir to Lynn Hall, and Gram expects me to learn how to keep the doors and passageways protected against—against the likes of me—and the man she trusts more than anyone alive is in love with a wood-nymph, and there’s a changeling living under her roof, and she can’t see!”
Leith’s lips pursed; he gave a slow, liquid whistle. A bird answered. He glanced at it sharply, then took a step closer to me, lowering his voice. “Who got taken?”
“My cousin Tyler. You must have seen him at the funeral; he helped carry the casket.”
“The boy with the green hair.” His brows crinkled; he asked hesitantly, “How can you tell for sure?”
I had to laugh. “He already looks like a changeling, I know. But the other—It shifts back and forth—I see fingers, then twigs, hair, then leaves or moss. Its eyes—sometimes they’re human, sometimes they look like empty sky, or flowing water. He—It took a bath.”
“Tyler doesn’t?”
“A bubble bath. It came out to help me carry groceries. And it cleaned Tyler’s room.”
A corner of his mouth curled up. “Have you thought about keeping it around?”
“But, Leith, what happened to my real cousin? Owen said that Tyler and the Coyle girl had overturned his boat in the middle of his pond in the middle of the night. I saw it floating upside down in the water. I think Tyler was taken then. How much—how close to them are you? How much do you Rowans know? Can you help me get Tyler back?”
He was silent, pondering a moment. Then he touched my wrist lightly. “Let’s sit down.”
He led me around the mill wall to the water’s edge; we sat in a little grassy clearing on the bank. The brook ran deeper there, its voice less quick and frothy. It curled around boulders instead of pebbles. Still, the sound carried our words in the right direction, away from the boundary tree, the pathless wood.
Leith said, surprising me again, “I know about Owen. I’ve seen them in the woods together.”
I sucked in breath. “Really? What—what is she like?”
He smiled a little. “Pretty much what you’d expect.”
“How dangerous is she? Can she—take him, too, the way Tyler was taken?”
He scratched his brow, gazing at the water, where a dragonfly the color of turquoise and as long as my thumb hovered, a dazzle of blue, then skimmed away. “I’ve just seen them. I don’t watch them. It’s private. Mostly they were just talking. I saw him laugh. Another time, I heard her laugh. It sounded like—like bluebells ringing. Or a wind chime made of water. I only saw them once as lovers. And then—only because I have these eyes. It was as if she’d covered him with light. Anyone with normal eyes would never have noticed.”
I blinked, my eyes dry, but burning oddly. “You make it sound beautiful.”
“Well, how else would it be, for them to draw us to them like that?” He paused, flicked a pebble into the brook. “Maybe Iris is right. Maybe they are terrible and dangerous. Maybe Owen is risking life as he knows it, loving one of them. But that’s how it looks to me, when I see them together. Just two people who love each other and are trying to keep it secret to protect themselves.”
“Dorian doesn’t see it that way.”
“I know.”
“She thinks you don’t see it at all.”
His mouth curled again. “I know. She just thinks I’m a hardheaded mountain man with a shy heart. I can gut a fish and skin a deer, sneak up on a rabbit, catch a trout with my hands, and run with the coyotes. And run like a wild thing at the threat of a suit or an office job.”
“What about Owen?” I asked hollowly. “Can he see what you are? Part human and part fay?”
Leith hesitated. “I don’t know. He’s good at hiding things. It’s hard to tell what he thinks. I wouldn’t bet on anything. Except,” he added steadily, “that if he recognizes what I am, he can probably see the same thing in you.”
I was silent. Owen had given me the warning about Tyler; he had seen that coming. I wondered if he might know what to do about it. “Do you have any ideas?” I asked Leith. “About what to do if you find a changeling child under your roof?”
He ran a hand through his hair, red brows quirked. “Don’t they have stories about that? You’re the one with the bookstore.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Bookshelves were littered with changelings; the tales seemed to end well, the true child properly restored, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember how. Whoever had sent the startlingly tidy and polite impostor into Gram’s house had done it for a reason. To talk? “Maybe we bargain,” I guessed. “Or maybe not. Maybe they just wanted to find out who could recognize it. Three with eyes to see…”
“What?”
“It’s from a rhyme Gram taught me. It never had any meaning before. But how can I tell Gram what it is without telling her that?” I asked uneasily. “That I can see better than she can?”
“Ask Owen to tell her about Tyler,” Leith suggested. “He must be used to juggling truths and half-truths with Iris.”
His voice sounded dry. I looked at him. Owen and Leith juggled half-truths around each other all the time, I realized. “You don’t trust him,” I guessed.
“It’s more that he doesn’t trust me. And I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Rowan and might take his daughter away to wear skins and live in a cave. Or if it’s because he thinks I might take her farther away than that.”
“They’re both afraid for each other, Owen and Dorian.”
He nodded, blinking, his eyes suddenly shadowed. “I love her. She’s good-hearted and beautiful and she belongs in these mountains; she never wants to leave them.”
“She never has.”
“Neither do I. We don’t have to explain what we love to each other. It’s all around us; it’s the history in these old mountains. And it’s the way history never really changes them. I think of that, and I think everything between us is safe and uncomplicated. And then I remember.” He threw another pebble into the water with more force. “And I remember what else I am.”
“How did it happen?”
“Who knows? There’s stories. Who can tell if they’re true or not? Rowans keep things close… My grandmother told me a story when I was little, about a man who shot a deer and it ran off, wounded. He followed it, to kill it, because you don’t just leave matters like that, you don’t let animals suffer needlessly. He didn’t see the deer again. But he found a young woman with a bullet in her shoulder. She had hair as red as fire and skin soft and white as apple blossoms. So of course he took her home and married her. She had some kind of speech impediment—didn’t use words much—but they got along fine until a year and a day after her red-haired child was born. Then she turned back into a deer, and that was the last the hunter saw of her. Took me a few years before I realized my grandmother was telling me about my mother. By then, I had another mother, and I could only barely remember a time—more like a dream—when there might have been someone else, and then for a while m
aybe no one… I asked my grandmother about it, but she just said it was a story, maybe it had happened to some Rowan, way back, or maybe not, but nobody knew for certain.”
I was silent, my own mother’s face suddenly vivid in my head. Her tale had died with her, it seemed; not even Gram could guess at it. Who had she loved? For how long? An afternoon? A decade? Did she even know what power had possessed her? Or had it seemed just some sweet-faced stranger with whom she had spent an idle summer’s hour, and forgotten by twilight, except to remember that she hadn’t even asked his name? Had it been that innocent? Or had she been truly possessed, taken, ravished—any of all those storybook words—by some darker mischief in the wood, and left to explain the inexplicable? Raped by a fairy, she might have thought, but never said, not knowing that Gram of all people would have believed her.
Leith was looking at me questioningly. I shook my head. “Not a clue… Gram asked my mother on her deathbed, for my sake, she said, but even then my mother wouldn’t say.”
He grunted softly. “Maybe she didn’t want Iris to know.”
“Maybe… She was pretty hardheaded, too.” I stirred restively, then, remembered that I’d left Gram in the attic while I ran after a Rowan. “I’ve got to get Tyler back before Gram recognizes the changeling—it might threaten her, or something. I’ve got to find out who sent it. Leith, do you know anyone who might know how to get the attention of the wood-folk?”
“Rowan, you mean?” He shook his head. “There are others like me scattered through the mountains. We recognize each other when we meet. But no one talks about it. The others tend to be even shyer than I am; they live on the edges of our world, as close to the wood as animals—or the wood-folk themselves. They aren’t seen often, and they don’t encourage visitors.” He hesitated, looking at me, then added slowly, “There is a place I know… Deeper in the woods, past the fallen tree where the road ends, there’s a circle of trees. Even when I’m hunting, and not paying attention, when I walk into the circle, something changes. Time slows. Stops, maybe. I can almost understand the wind. Color seems richer there, as if you finally see it for the first time, recognize the treasure that it is. Sometimes, when I stand and listen, I can almost hear voices… it seems that someone just beyond eyesight looks at me… But as many times as I’ve waited, no one has ever come. If you want to talk to one of them, and they want to talk to you, maybe you can find each other there. Do you want me to show you? It may not be worth the walk. But maybe…”
Maybe, maybe not. But maybe.
“Yes,” I said recklessly, and he rose. I followed him to the end of the road, past the boundary tree and beyond all the warning signs I recognized from the tales you never take seriously until you’re lost in one and have long forgotten how it ends.
13
Tyler
I was in the most beautiful and the most horrible place I’d ever been in my life. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten dumped out of a boat on a pond into what looked like a room in somebody’s palace. I was crouched on a soft white sheepskin laid on a floor of flagstones and gold. Windows were open all around me; curtains so fine you could see through them, and glinting with tiny jewels and beads, drifted in the breeze like ghosts. I smelled flowers beyond the windows, and something else, something spicy that you might want to eat if you could remember what it was. There were soft chairs, cushions, even a bed under a green velvet canopy. Everything seemed touched with gold: chair legs dipped in it, the canopy edged with gold ribbons, gold thread in the cushions, a tabletop etched with it, and the tray and cups and the bowls on it all made of solid gold. I could have eaten golden pears and nuts and candied fruits, drunk out of a gold cup, then crawled behind the canopy to fall asleep on a blanket that looked woven out of spiderweb and cloud. And gold.
I didn’t want any of it. I didn’t want to move. I was damp and slick, sweating pond water it felt like, and I smelled like an old fish tank. I kept feeling the dark water flow past me as I fell into it, deeper and deeper. It dragged things loose in my head; nothing was secret anymore; nothing was safe. The water seemed to turn into memories, and all of them were of my dad. Me teaching him a game on the computer. Looking up from my homework and finding him watching me with a funny smile on his face. His hand on my head. Sitting beside him on the couch, my legs just long enough to prop on the coffee table next to his. Eating chips and shouting together over a soccer match. Him hounding me outside to mow the lawn or rake the leaves; me whining to him for more allowance, a bicycle, a dog. Me falling out of a Sunfish; him diving in after me; both of us treading lake water and watching the sailboat blow over.
On and on—his floppy hair, his father’s gold wristwatch ticking in my ear; his finger pointing at words as he read me a story. His gold wedding ring. The scar on his chin, the gold cap on his tooth, the little hole in his ear where sometimes he wore one of my mother’s earrings. His voice. His big feet. They made me want to cry. Everything made me want to cry. But I couldn’t; tears wouldn’t come out. It was stuck inside me, this nasty, monsterish feeling, of something so uncomfortable I couldn’t stand it, but I couldn’t get rid of it, either. All I could do was hunker down around it, feeling it grow and grow as memories collected, and feeling myself turn into a troll, something surly and mean and snarling, my dank skin growing burls and warts, hoping nobody would come near me because my voice would flare out of me like a welder’s fire.
That’s when she came in.
I don’t know who she was. She had long smooth white hair and dark blue eyes, and supermodel cheekbones. She moved like air. She picked up a gold cup with fingers so long and delicate they could have wrapped around it twice. She held it out to me. A yellow butterfly fluttered out of her mouth, making a sound like a question.
I just curled closer to myself and told her no. A frog fell out of my mouth, something left from the pond water. I watched it glumly as it hopped across the sheepskin.
She spoke a flower, still waving the cup at me. I shook my head. She insisted, with a pearl. I yelled at her then, to go away; tiny turtles and black beetles came out of my mouth. She tried the candied fruit then, cherries so bright they hurt my eyes, slices of orange and lemon with the peel still on, sugared lumps of things I couldn’t identify. I turned my head away, spat a few more bugs onto the floor.
She stood staring at me; finally she said a tiny blue butterfly. Then she was gone. I stretched out a little on my island of sheepskin and wallowed back into memory as deep as I could go.
After a while somebody else came in. She looked like Undine—she was trying to, anyway. The pale curly hair was right, and so was the fishing vest. But her skin looked slick and blotchy, like a mushroom that had been in the fridge too long, and her eyes were too small, and black instead of green.
She spoke words though, instead of butterflies. “You should eat something, Tyler. You’ll feel better.”
“No,” I said. I never wanted to eat again. Or drink or sleep or even talk. “Just leave me alone.”
“Pepsi?”
I snorted. Like they had a drinks machine down the castle hallway. “Go away.”
She didn’t. She set the bowl of fresh fruit on the floor between us, sat down, and started nibbling on grapes. At least they looked real enough. But she ate the stems, too, as if she couldn’t taste the difference. I watched her a moment, then pushed my eyes against my arm, blocking out the light.
“Don’t you want to know where you are?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why you’re here?”
“No.”
“You’re in the queen’s palace of perpetual summer—”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes.”
“No. I’m at the bottom of the pond. Down in the muck and fish droppings, the slimy roots of water reeds and dead frogs. And I’m staying here. The dead don’t eat, and they don’t drink, and they don’t breathe, and they don’t talk except in worms.”
I clamped my mouth shut. She talked for a while about brigh
t days and warm nights, and breezes scented with newly blooming flowers, as though we were at some tropical resort. I let her voice fade away. I watched my dad in his bathrobe pour his first cup of morning coffee, his hair standing straight up, just like mine did. I watched him tie my shoelaces. Watched him watching me tie my shoelaces. Yell when I cut current events for homework out of the newspaper before he had a chance to read it. His face when I gave him a matte-board frame I’d made in school decorated with tinfoil stars and pieces of painted macaroni. That frame with a picture of me in it, hanging next to his computer.
On and on. Teaching me to ride a bicycle, yelling when I forgot to feed my fish for a week and they went belly-up in the tank. Helping me bury them under a rosebush. Asleep on the couch until I stuck a feather up his nose. Me stumbling down a dark hall in the night to tell him there was a bear in the house, then hearing the bear-noises turn into his snores. Him floating on a blowup mattress in a pool with his eyes closed while I careened toward him in a cannonball dive. Him lying in a strange place with his eyes closed, in a suit and a tie, just like Grandpa Liam. Sleeping, people around me kept saying. He looks just like he’s sleeping.
Well, so was I, and I wasn’t going to wake up until he did.
The other one—the substitute—the changeling. Patrick. He smiled a lot, but his eyes were hidden. Like a house with an open door and a welcome mat, and all the window blinds shut. You couldn’t see in; he couldn’t see out. He’d come into my room while I was at the computer, rubbing his hands and talking like a Scout leader about sports. Didn’t I think I should: a) Get out in the fresh air, b) Get some exercise, c) See what the rest of the world was up to. Wouldn’t I be interested in: a) Swim team, b) Going out for track, c) Soccer, d) Basketball, e) Golf, f) The local gym, g) Anything except sitting on my butt playing computer games on such a bright sunny day. He could barbecue manly stuff, but when he tried a simple thing like waffles on the stove, he’d set the smoke alarms off. He was always asking what band I was listening to, and then asking me to turn it down. He asked once to play a game with me, and then gave up when he lost the first time. He took me running with him once, hiking once, sailing once, after he gave me the rudder and I got us stuck on a mudflat. He tried. Once. Give him time, my mom kept saying. Give him a chance. He’s not your dad. But he’d like to be your friend.
Solstice Wood Page 13