She glanced down at her scuffed, work-worn clogs. Shoes, she thought with sudden longing. And so the next day she went to the river’s edge and then took the path downriver to the scholar’s cottage.
She’d known the ancient woman who had died there the year before. The cottage needed care; flowers and moss sprouted from its thatch; the old garden was a tangle of vegetables, herbs and weeds. The cottage stood in a little clearing surrounded by great oak and ash, near the river and not far from the road that ran from one end of the wood to the other. The scholar met her at the door as though he expected her.
He was a slight, bony young man with pale thinning hair and gray eyes that seemed to look at her, through her and beyond her, all at the same time. He reminded Leta of something newly hatched, awkward, its down still damp and all askew. He smiled vaguely, opened the door wider, inviting her in even before she explained herself, as though he already knew.
“Dylan sent me,” she said, then gazed with astonishment at the pillars and piles of books, scrolls, papers everywhere, even in the rafters. The cauldron hanging over the cold grate was filthy. She could see a half-eaten loaf on a shelf in the open cupboard; a mouse was busily dealing with the other half. There were cobwebs everywhere, and unwashed cups, odd implements she could not name tossed on the colorful, wrinkled puddles of clothes on the floor. As she stood gaping, an old, wizened sausage tumbled out of the rafters, fell at her feet.
She jumped. The scholar picked up the sausage. “I was wondering what to have for breakfast.” He put it into his pocket. “You’d be Leta, then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can call me Ansley. My great-grandmother left me this cottage when she died. Did you know her?”
“Oh, yes. Everyone did.”
“I’ve been away in the city, studying. I decided to bring my studies here, where I can think without distractions. I want to be a great mage.”
“Oh?”
“It is an arduous endeavor, which is why I’ll have no time for—” He gestured.
She nodded. “I suppose when you’ve become a mage, all you’ll have to do is snap your fingers or something.”
His brows rose; clearly, he had never considered the use of magic for housework. “Or something,” he agreed doubtfully. “You can see for yourself what I need you for.”
“Oh, yes.”
He indicated the vast, beautifully carved table in a corner under a circular window from which the sunny river could be seen. Or could have been seen, but for the teetering pile of books blocking the view. Ansley must have brought the table with him. She wondered how he had gotten the massive thing through the door. Magic, maybe; it must be good for something.
“You can clear up any clutter in the place but that,” he told her. “That must never be disturbed.”
“What about the moldy rind of cheese on top of the books?”
He drew breath, held it. “No,” he said finally, decisively. “Nothing on the table must be touched. I expect to be there most of the time anyway, learning spells and translating the ancient secrets in manuscripts. When,” he asked a trifle anxiously, “can you start?”
She considered the various needs of her own husband and house, then yielded to his pleading eyes. “Now,” she said. “I suppose you want some food in the place.”
He nodded eagerly, reaching for his purse. “All I ask,” he told her, shaking coins into her hand, “is not to be bothered. I’ll pay whatever you ask for that. My father did well with the tavern he owned; I did even better when I sold it after he died. Just come and go and do whatever needs to be done. Can you manage that?”
“Of course,” she said stolidly, pocketing the coins for a trip to the market in the village at the edge of the woods. “I do it all the time.”
She spent long days at the cottage, for the scholar paid scant attention to time and often kept his nose in his books past sunset despite the wonderful smells coming out of his pots. Dylan grumbled, but the scholar paid very well, and didn’t mind Leta taking leave in the late afternoons to fix Dylan’s supper and tend for an hour to her own house before she went back to work. She cooked, scrubbed, weeded and washed, got a cat for the mice and fed it too, swept and mended, and even wiped the grime off the windows, though the scholar never bothered looking out. Dylan worked hard, as well, building cupboards and bedsteads for the villagers, chopping trees into cartloads of wood to sell in the market for winter. Some days, she heard his ax from dawn to dusk. On market days, when he lingered in the village tavern, she rarely saw his face until one or the other of them crawled wearily into bed late at night.
“We never talk anymore,” she murmured once, surprisedly, to the dark when the warm, sweaty, grunting shape that was Dylan pushed under the bedclothes beside her. “We just work and sleep, work and sleep.”
He mumbled something that sounded like “What else is there?” Then he rolled away from her and began to snore.
One day when Ansley had gone down to the river to hunt for the details of some spell, Leta made a few furtive passes with her broom at the dust under his worktable. Her eye fell upon a spiral of gold on a page in an open book. She stopped sweeping, studied it. A golden letter, it looked like, surrounded by swirls of gold in a frame of crimson. All that richness, she marveled, for a letter. All that beauty. How could a simple letter, this undistinguished one that also began her name, be so cherished, given such loving attention?
“One little letter,” she whispered, and her thoughts strayed to earlier times, when Dylan gave her wildflowers and sweets from the market. She sighed. They were always so tired now, and she was growing thinner from so much work. They had more money, it was true. But she had no time to spend it, even on shoes, and Dylan never thought of bringing her home a ribbon or a bit of lace when he went to the village. And here was this letter, doing nothing more than being the first in a line of them, adorned in red and gold for no other reason than that it was itself—
She touched her eyes, laughed ruefully at herself, thinking, I’m jealous of a letter.
Someone knocked at the door.
She opened it, expecting Dylan, or a neighbor, or a tinker—anyone except the man who stood there.
She felt herself gaping, but could not stop. She could only think crazily of the letter again: how this man too must have come from some place where people as well as words carried such beauty about them. The young man wore a tunic of shimmering links of pure silver over black leather trousers and a pair of fine, supple boots. His cloak was deep blue-black, the color of his eyes. His crisp dark curls shone like blackbirds’ wings. He was young, but something, perhaps the long, jeweled sword he wore, made both Dylan and Ansley seem much younger. His lean, grave face hinted of a world beyond the wood that not even the scholar had seen.
“I beg your pardon,” he said gently, “for troubling you.” Leta closed her mouth. “I’m looking for a certain palace of which I’ve heard rumors all my life. It is surrounded by a deadly ring of thorns, and many men have lost their lives attempting to break through that ensorceled circle to rescue the sleeping princess within. Have you heard of it?”
“I—” Leta said, and stuck there, slack-jawed again. “I—I—”
Behind the man, his followers, rugged and plainly dressed, glanced at one another. That look, less courteous than the young man’s, cleared Leta’s head a bit.
“I haven’t,” she brought out finally. “But the man I work for is a—is trying to be—a mage; he knows a thousand things I don’t.”
“Then may I speak with him?”
“He’s out—” She gestured, saw the broom still in her hand and hid it hastily behind her. “Down by the river, catching toads.”
“Toads.”
“For his—his magic.”
She heard the faint snort. One of the followers pretended to be watching a crow fly; the other breathed, “My lord, perhaps we should ask farther down the road.”
“We’ll ride to the river,” the young lord said, and turned t
o mount his horse again. He bowed graciously to Leta from his saddle. “Thank you. We are grateful.”
Blinking at the light spangling off his harness and jewels, she watched him ride through the trees and toward the water. Then, slowly, she sat down, stunned and witless with wonder, until she heard Ansley’s voice as he walked through the doorway and around her.
“I found five,” he announced excitedly, putting a muddy bucket on his table. “One of them is pure white!”
“Did you see—?” Her voice didn’t come. She was sitting on the floor, she realized then, with the broom across her knees. “Did you see the—? Them?”
“Who?” he asked absently, picking toads out of the bucket and setting them on his papers.
“The traveler. I sent him to talk to you.” She hesitated, finally said the word. “I think he is a prince. He is looking for a palace surrounded by thorns, with a sleeping princess inside.”
“Oh, him. No. I mean yes, but no I couldn’t help him. I had no idea what he was talking about. Come here and look at this white one. You can do so many things with the white toads.”
She had to wait a long time before Dylan came home, but she stayed awake so that she could tell him. As he clambered into bed, breathing a gust of beer at her, she said breathlessly, “I saw a prince today. On his way to rescue a princess.”
He laughed and hiccuped at the same time. “And I saw the Queen of the Fairies. Did you happen to spot my knife too? I set it down yesterday when I was whittling, and it must have strolled away.”
“Dylan—”
He kissed her temple. “You’re dreaming, love. No princes here.”
The days lengthened. Hawthorn blossoms blew everywhere like snow, leaving green behind. The massive oaks covered their tangled boughs with leaves. An early summer storm thundered through the woods one afternoon. Leta, who had just spread Ansley’s washing to dry on the hawthorn bushes around the cottage, heard the sudden snarl of wind, felt a cold, hard drop of rain on her mouth. She sighed. The clothes were wet anyway; but for the wild wind that might steal them, she could have left them out. She began to gather them back into her basket.
She heard voices.
They sounded like wind at first, one high, pure, one pitched low, rumbling. They didn’t seem human, which made Leta duck warily behind a bush. But their words were human enough, which made her strain her ears to listen. It was, she thought bewilderedly, like hearing what the winds had to say for themselves.
“Come into my arms and sleep, my lord,” the higher voice crooned. “You have lived a long and adventurous life; you may rest now for a while.”
“No,” the deeper voice protested, half-laughing, half-longing, Leta thought. “It’s not time for me to sleep, yet. There are things I still must teach you.”
“What things, my heart?”
“How to understand the language of beetles, how to spin with spindrift, what lies hidden in the deepest place in the ocean and how to bring it up to light.”
“Sleep a little. Teach me when you wake again.”
“No, not yet.”
“Sleep.”
Leta crept closer to the voices. The rain pattered down now, great, fat drops the trees could not stop. Through the blur of rain and soughing winds stirring up the bracken, she saw two figures beneath an oak. They seemed completely unaware of the storm, as if they belonged to some enchanted world. The woman’s long, fiery, rippling hair did not notice the wind, nor did the man’s gray-white beard. He sat cradled in the oak roots, leaning back against the trunk. His face looked as harsh and weathered, as ancient and enduring as the wood. The woman stood over him, close enough for him to touch, which he did now and then, his hand caressing the back of her knee, coaxing it to bend. They were both richly dressed, he in a long, silvery robe flecked with tiny jewels like points of light along the sleeves, the hem. She wore silk the deepest green of summer, the secret green of trees who have taken in all the light they can hold, and feel, somewhere within them, summer’s end. His eyes were half-closed. Hers were very wide as she stared down at him: pale amber encircling vivid points of black.
Leta froze. She did not dare move, lest those terrible eyes lift from his and search her out behind the bush with Ansley’s trousers flapping on it.
“Sleep,” the woman murmured again, her voice like a lightly dancing brook, like the sough of wind in reeds. “Sleep.”
His hand dropped from her knee. He made an effort, half lifting his eyelids. His eyes were silver, metallic like a knife blade.
“Not yet, my sweet Nimue. Not yet.”
“Sleep.”
He closed his eyes.
There was a crack as though the world had been torn apart. Then came the thunder. Leta screamed as she felt it roll over her, through her, and down beneath her into the earth. The ancient oak, split through its heart, trailing limbs like shattered bone, loosed sudden, dancing streams of fire. Rain fell then in vast sheets as silvery as the sleeper’s eyes. Leta couldn’t see anything; she was drenched in a moment and sinking rapidly into a puddle. Rising, she glimpsed the light shining from the cottage windows. She stumbled out of the mysterious world toward it; wind blew her back through the scholar’s door, then slammed the door behind her.
“I saw—I saw—” she panted.
But she did not know what she saw. Ansley, his attention caught at last by something outside his books—the thunder, maybe, or the lake she was making on his floor—looked a little pale in the gloom.
“You saw what?”
But she had only pieces to give him, nothing whole, nothing coherent. “I saw his eyes close. And then lightning struck the oak.”
Ansley moved then. “Oh, I hope it won’t topple onto my roof.”
“His eyes closed—they were like metal—she put him to sleep with her eyes—”
“Show me the tree.”
She led him eagerly through the rain. It had slowed a little; the storm was moving on. Somewhere else in the wood strange things were happening; the magic here had come and gone.
They stood looking at the broken heart of the oak, its wood still smoldering, its snapped boughs sagging, shifting dangerously in the wind. Only a stand of gnarled trunk was left, where the sleeper had been sitting.
“Come away,” Ansley said uneasily. “Those limbs may still fall.”
“But I saw two people—”
“They had sense enough to run, it seems; there are no bodies here. Just,” he added, “a lot of wet clothes among the bushes. What exactly were those two doing?”
“They’re your clothes.”
“Oh.”
She lingered, trying to find some shred of mystery left in the rain, some magic smoldering with the wood. “He closed his eyes,” she whispered, “and lightning struck the oak.”
“Well, he must have opened them fast enough then,” Ansley said. “Come back into the house. Leave the laundry; you can finish all that later.” His voice brightened as he wandered back through the dripping trees. “This will send the toads out to sun....”
She did not even try to tell Dylan, for if the young scholar with all his books saw no magic, how could he?
Days passed, one very like the next. She cooked, washed, weeded in the garden. Flowers she had rescued from wild vines bloomed and faded; she picked herbs and beans and summer squashes. The scholar studied. One day the house was full of bats, the next full of crows. Another day he made everything disappear, including himself. Leta stepped, startled, into an empty cottage. Not a thing in it, not even a stray spider. Then she saw the scholar’s sheepish smile forming in the air; the rest of his possessions followed slowly. She stared at him, speechless. He cleared his throat.
“I must have mistranslated a word or two in that spell.”
“You might have translated some of the clutter out of the door while you were at it,” she said. What had reappeared was as chaotic as ever. She could not imagine what he did at nights while she was at home. Invented whirlwinds, or made his pots and clothes dan
ce in midair until they dropped, it looked like.
“Think of magic as an untamed creature,” he suggested, opening a book while he rained crumbs on the floor chewing a crust he had found on his table. “I am learning ways to impose my will upon it, while it fights me with all its cunning for its freedom.”
“It sounds like your garden,” she murmured, tracking down her gardening basket, which was not on the peg where she hung it, but, for some reason, on a shelf, in the frying pan. The scholar made an absent noise, not really hearing her; she had gotten used to that. She went outside to pull up onions for soup. She listened for Dylan’s ax while she dug; he had said he was cutting wood that day. But she didn’t hear it, just the river and the birds and the breeze among the leaves.
He must have gone deeper than usual into the woods, she thought. But she felt the little frown between her brows growing tighter and tighter at his silence. For no reason her throat grew tight too, hurt her suddenly. Maybe she had misunderstood; maybe he had gone into the village to sell wood instead. That made the ache in her throat sharper. His eyes and voice were absent, those days. He looked at her, but hardly saw her; he kissed her now and then, brief, chuckling kisses that you’d give to a child. He had never gone to the village so often without her before; he had never wanted to go without her, before...
She asked him tentatively that night, as he rolled into bed in a cloud of beer fumes and wood smoke, “Will you take me with you, next time?”
He patted her shoulder, his eyes already closed. “You need your rest, working so hard for two houses. Anyway, it’s nothing; I just have a quick drink and a listen to the fiddling, then I’m home to you.”
“But it’s so late.”
He gave her another pat. “Is it? Then best get to sleep.”
He snored; she stared, wide-eyed, back at the night.
She scarcely noticed when the leaves first began to turn. Suddenly there were mushrooms and berries and nuts to gather, and apples all over the little twisty apple tree in her own garden. The days were growing shorter, even while there seemed so much more to do. She pulled out winter garments to mend where the moths had chewed; she replenished supplies of soap and candles. Her hands were always red; her hair, it seemed, always slightly damp with steam from something. The leaves grew gold, began to fall, crackle underfoot as she walked from one house to the other and back again. She scarcely saw the two men: the scholar hunched over a book with his back to her, her husband always calling good-bye as he went to chop or sell or build. Well, they scarcely saw her either, she thought tiredly; that was the way of it.
Wonders of the Invisible World Page 3