Actually, I thought that the worst-case scenario was that they wouldn’t leave, but I figured we’d worry about plan B when the time came. We strategized over soup, and that turned into chatting, and before I knew it, I was carrying on a conversation—and liking it. Was this what friendships were like? It wasn’t like what I’d experienced growing up, when I just got picked on for being good at math and sat alone in the cafeteria. I felt safe and warm. My face hurt from smiling so much, and I was in no rush to go home and be alone. When I did leave, I found myself looking forward to the next time we got together.
That Saturday, Beth came over to help me take down all my Christmas decorations. “Normally, people have tree-trimming parties, not tree-dismantling parties,” she said with a laugh as we worked. We hid the decorations in my bedroom before setting up a line of luminarias on my front walk. Then all we could do was wait.
At midnight, the fairies emerged from their rock. They milled about, as though looking for the Christmas tree and other decorations. That was my cue to fling open the front door. They saw the candlelight outside and followed the line of lights. I ran ahead of them, setting out and lighting more candles to lead them down the block and across the street. Beth came after them, holding the rock. She settled the rock on the vacant lot, under a shrub that probably would be bulldozed when construction began.
The fairies moved around the lot, as though trying to figure it out. While they were occupied, Beth and I ran back to my house, snatching up the candles as we went, so they wouldn’t be able to find their way back. “Do you think it worked?” I asked once we were inside.
“You’ll find out in the morning,” she replied. “And then we’ll see what happens about that building.”
“Maybe they’ll make it a park, instead.”
After Beth went home, I set out my shoes and a newspaper on the floor before I went to bed, and they were still there in the morning. The house was also untouched on Monday morning. When I got to work, I headed to Beth’s office. “I think it worked,” I said.
“Awesome! So, do you need help putting your decorations back up? I’ve got some friends who might be up for pitching in. We could make it a party.”
My first instinct was to decline, but then I thought, why not? I’d had fun with Beth, so maybe more people would be even more fun. And then there were other things I wanted to explore. “Sounds great,” I said. “And if you don’t have plans for Christmas Eve, I was thinking about staying up and investigating Santa. You’re welcome to join me. I’ll make the cocoa.”
— OLD TWELVEY NIGHT —
by Gwendolyn N. Nix
She had hands again.
A jolt of joy suffused through her, like the sudden spread of heat lightning, at the slow collapse of the earth. Pale roots twined between her fingers, and she ripped them away with a muted pop, clawing out of the tree’s cradle and angling toward the surface. Mud filled her mouth, but she was kept breathless in different ways.
It happened the same way each time. Exhilaration. Sudden wakefulness compounded by the desire to rise.
It happened the same way each time. Exaltation. Wishes smoldered between her ribs. Please, this time—this time—she’d be fast enough.
Anticipation. The loam crust broke and a thin ice layer shattered. Wrenching out of the cold tomb of the soil, she blinked blindly against the white sunbeams of a late afternoon. She bit the apple-heart of her hope—but it kept happening the same way each time—and her hope curdled into browned pulp, and oh, she simply wanted to see a sky full of bird song.
Disappointment nearly crushed her. The quiet grove expanded before her, sleeping within the blanket season of frozen water, of wend. Winter. Pitch-dark trees reached toward the gray sky. Wind whistled through the wide spaces between the trees, stirring up crusty chunks of snow aged to tan from muck and sod. Beyond, slush covered the humped meadow in patchworks of brown and white.
The roots waving around the hole she’d just emerged from lunged, winding into a tight chain around her wrists, dragging her back into the radius of the winter-blackened tree. Don’t go past the root system, they vibrated against her skin. We’re sorry we couldn’t have brought you back faster. But don’t go past the roots.
Yet the apple tree spirit didn’t cry or scream from frustration, because it wasn’t happening the same way, and lingering at the tip of a spindly branch withered a bud. Hibernating and small, but lined with a stripe of green framed by a lace of frost.
Snow floated over the grove, the flakes soft like cotton, collecting in the barren arms of the boughs. The apple-spirit cooed to the green nub on her tree as it crumbled and hardened into a wrinkled shell over the following days. “I’m Datura,” she whispered, her rosy lips spreading over broad white teeth. “I stole the word from a bunch of human children who threw rocks at my tree once. They said I only produced thorn-apples, that I should be cut down because I was nothing but a forsaken blasted datura flower.” She paused, anxious for a response. Under her long feet, the fluff of new snowfall soaked up the sound, leaving a stillness to the air.
Datura reached up to stroke the blackened shell. Poor thing. It had held out for so long, yet it had fallen asleep, just like the apple tree she’d been sworn to, dormant like the field of apple trees surrounding her, all tended by their own spirits.
She thought of her own short life cycle and frowned. When the season turned again, she’d become the blackened husk to be dragged underground. She’d be cradled in her own sleep, encaged by roots that never saw the light, as the tree ate from her bones until winter came again. Awakened once more, sent to tend to the grounds of her tree and protect it from mischief-things—those unsworn creatures who liked to lurk and linger and whisper.
“You’re the first alive thing I’ve seen,” she told the bud. “The first green thing.”
Oh, she saw other apple-spirits and humans and mischief-things, too, but nothing grown and anchored in the soil. Nothing of the treasured gold of red fruit, plucked and enjoyed. Of the white blossoms dusted with burnished pollen. She only saw the puny leftovers of autumns past, and as her fellow apple-spirits raked the earth around their trees until the dark rich health of it mingled around the roots, Datura daydreamed about green-colored days and warm summer nights. As her good fellow apple-spirits pulled the shrouds of old weeds clear and scraped the budding fuzz of fungus from the bark, Datura imagined what it would be like to arise under the spread of leaf-heavy branches, of the sweet taste of pulp spilling across her tongue, of soft gold dusks peppered with firefly light.
“The other apple-spirits don’t like me much,” she admitted to the bud as it detached at her gentle touch, tumbling into her palm. She bit her lip. All of her apples simply fell, never picked for pies or cider, if the wrinkled leftovers meant anything. “Between you and me, they say it’s no surprise my apples have worms in them. And they’re right.”
Clean the rot out, they tsked at her, their noses wrinkled at the fruit putrefaction covering her tree stand. Leave your dreams for your sleep. It’s a dangerous thing, leaving such sweets to rot black. Might attract bugs. Might attract mischief.
The cluster of children scampered throughout the copse under a purple sky with big whoops and cheers.
Datura scrambled to her apple tree, her hands wrapped around the hilt of the sword embedded in the trunk, prepared to hoist the blade from its sheath. Was it time, already? Had Old Twelvey Night arrived so soon?
Her heart thundered in her chest with the instinct to protect, but the sword was too big for her—she wasn’t yet mature enough to hold it. Another holler caused her to whip around, waiting to see if the other apple-spirits would shuck their pastoral forms in favor of one fit for warriors.
No, they simply milled and toiled and puttered.
The roots encircling her wrists cooed against her skin, Not yet, not yet. The cold does not have bite to it, the first omens have not shown. Be still. Be at peace, guardian.
No mischief-things lurked and lingered and whispe
red, either. Datura stroked the root-chain, felt the answering thrum of the orchard against her skin. We are still strong.
The children galloped past her tree. Coins weighed down their palms, copper and silver flashing in the moonlight. Whiffs of tangy-sour fermentation floated on their breaths. Datura smiled in relief, and with a final caress of the sword’s hilt, she bounded to the edge of her root-circle to watch the children. She knew where they were headed. Oh, how she wished she could go, too!
She drew in a deep breath and strained forward, as far as she could go. The tree’s root system had always been a radiating ring that she could not cross. The roots around her wrists, worried smooth from her anxious touches, tensed as she tested their limits.
A human girl smacked her lips against a boy’s, and then she brandished a penny in the air. “I wish to kiss you again!” She laughed and pushed her coin into the bark of the old wish tree.
The tall tree wasn’t the oldest, but it had been chosen by the grove’s visitors, who year after year, slotted their round metal into the bark and spoke their dreams to the cold air. The wish tree’s spirit had given up on tending to apples or gardening, had taken to polishing the wishes instead, keeping them bright in the winter days.
“I want to make a wish,” Datura called out, patting her mud-spattered clothes for money, wringing her garden-soiled hands. The humans couldn’t hear her. They never could. “Can I borrow a coin?”
“I can lend you a coin.”
Datura spun around, her eyes narrowed, and she crouched, ready to spring on the new voice cutting through the revelers’ shouts. Defend. Just outside the radius of her roots, a hand shot straight out of the dirt and waved, the shine of a gold piece held between two fingers. Datura inched closer—the roots around her wrists strained to pull her back—and the long-fingered hand disappeared into its hole. Datura peered down into the opening and was met with a gap-toothed grin, yellow eyes burnished like the coin, a face sprinkled with rich earth. “Here you go,” the creature said, flourishing the coin—ancient with the profile worn smooth—at her. “On the house.”
Mischief-thing.
“I can’t take that,” Datura said softly and eased back into the safety of her ring. Caution warred with a striking, sudden need. The other apple-spirits always scoffed at her meandering conversation and wild wishes, waved their hands for her to get on with it.
The mischief-thing levered both hands out of the hole, wriggling herself up and out. She shook her head, sending dirt cascading from her short black hair. “There’s no rule against accepting a gift,” she said.
Datura shook her head, and watched the mischief-thing slide up to the edge of the tree’s root system, perched as if at the edge of a precipice. Where Datura was apple-round, this mischief-thing was long-legged and reed-slender. “I’m not supposed to talk to things like you,” Datura answered. “You’re only here to cause chaos and ruin the orchard.”
“Who says you can’t talk to me?” The mischief-thing raised an eyebrow.
“That’s not the point.”
“Feels like a pretty big point to me.”
“The orchard god,” Datura sighed. “The Apple Tree Man.”
“Oh, that old moaning thing?” The mischief-thing propped up on her knees and held her arms out stiffly, her face twisted into a parody of agony. “What’s he gonna do, chase you out? This is just as much your home as it is his. You bloomed from your apple-tree seed, just like he did.” She learned forward and peered at Datura’s tree. “I like what you’ve done here. Smells sweet. Lots of interesting things. Not all desolate and cleared out like those other trees. Is that an old dandelion patch? It must be huge in the spring!”
“Stop causing trouble,” Datura huffed, trying to ignore the idea of her, Datura, blooming like a tulip. Of a dandelion patch, thriving in her space.
“I’m not! I did the nice thing—I came with an offer of a wish.”
“You’re trying to poison the grove with your mischief.”
“Not me, not old Tibb. I like the orchard. It’s beautiful in the summer, lots of shade. I like to lay in the sun and listen to the crickets.”
Datura paused, ran her fingers through the muddy ground. “You’ve seen it in the summer?”
“Spring, summer, fall, you name it, I’ve seen it.”
“That’s my wish,” Datura said softly. “To see the orchard in the seasons. To see green life.”
Tibb rolled the coin between her hands, flipped it until it turned over her knuckles. “Done,” she said. “I’ll make the wish for you.” She scampered across the grove. slinking like a cat, and waved at Datura from the foot of the wish tree until Datura gifted her with a small smile. Tibb pushed the coin into the bark and Datura’s smile transformed into something blinding and genuine as the wish tree’s spirit chased old Tibb away. Tibb ran back to Datura, hands on her knees, thin ribs heaving, shooting her a look that pulled at Datura’s heartstrings and plucked out the tune of recklessness, wildness, foolhardy.
And Datura’s special sparkle of gold gleamed amongst the silver and copper, and it was something that hadn’t happened in the same way, not once. Something that had never happened before.
The cold transformed into a bone-deep freeze that chilled even the clouds. Frost sparkled on Datura’s skin like a layer of reflected diamond light. It hadn’t snowed in days. The approach of Old Twelvey Night came closer with each turn of the moon and Datura had become foolish in her loneliness, had invited Tibb to rest under her tree. Tibb shivered beneath a blanket stolen from the new crowd of drunken humans, cider sloshing from their wooden cups to wet the roots. Flower masks covered their eyes, crowns slipped from their foreheads, and Datura studied them in marvel: the long romantic ferns, the delicate white blooms, small fragile purples buds like stars.
“They’re still dead, you know,” Tibb said, sliding closer and leaning her head on Datura’s shoulder. “All pretty and colorful, sure, but those flower crowns might last a couple days at most. What a waste.”
“Are you saying you won’t want yours, then?” Datura asked. She broke the stems off black thistles, weaving their spiked tops among hollow grasses, tied them with wet and stringy brown leaves to make a crown of her own. She placed it on her head.
“Didn’t say that,” Tibb grumbled.
“Thought so,” Datura finished and wove tan and beige stalks together, used white branches pockmarked with knots like eyes to craft a halo headpiece and wiggled it down on Tibb’s head.
The troublesome creature grinned and batted her eyes. “All we need now is a drink and a song.” Her smile faltered. “That means it’s getting closer, doesn’t it?”
“What’s getting closer?” Datura asked, but she knew. They both knew. Her sharp sword still nestled at the foot of the apple tree, worn smooth and rusted from countless slayings on Old Twelvey Night, when the grove was weakest and the mischief-things the strongest. The night when she would shuck her apple-soft body and emerge as a defender of the orchard, her instinct baying to protect and drive out evil.
“The waeshaeil.”
Datura bit her lip, felt the sharp cut of Tibb’s cheek nestled back against her shoulder, and tried to unknot the deep-sea net that pulled in dread like the catch of the day. Her hand snuck to hold Tibb’s, and Tibb turned her palm, her fingers lingering on the chain of roots tight on Datura’s wrists.
Datura wrapped her arms around Tibb with a thrill of disobedience and a blush hot on her cheeks. Tibb sank into her apple round curves—a crow huddled next to a well-fed sparrow—but the mischief-thing could never let things lie. “Will you fight for the grove?” she asked oddly, her head still down. “I’ve survived it before, you know. Been driven from my share of orchards.”
“Then why linger here?” Datura asked as Tibb shivered. “Why not go somewhere warm? Somewhere safer?”
Tibb shrugged. “I like the taste of apples. The smell of cider. I like it here.” Her eyes flickered to Datura.
Gold replaced the blacks in Dat
ura’s life, her days brimming full of the luster from Tibb’s eyes, to the disc of the auric sun, to the wink of her buffed coin glimmering in the distance. She closed her eyes tight, and her mind threw up glimpses of a possible future: straight-up-and-down Tibb, her hand outspread to stop Datura’s blade from driving her out for good, fear as a patina in her gold stare.
“Tell me what it’s like in spring then, when the apple-spirits aren’t here,” Datura said, feeling the scrape of Tibb’s crown brushing her face. “Maybe next resurrection cycle, I’ll rise with enough time to see the fruit ripen.”
“It’s our blood that makes the trees grow apples,” Tibb said, like a dog with a bone. “You apple-spirits rattle your swords and bash our brains in and chase us away and our blood soaks the earth. Without us, nothing would be here.”
“But what about spring, Tibb?”
“Who cares about the spring? I want to know if you’re going to stab me in the stomach. Maybe I should cut my loses now, get out while I still can.”
“Maybe you should,” Datura said, and fought the sting of tears. Her heart knew evil leeched from Tibb, but Tibb had promised not to poison the copse, swore up and down she’d never make Datura sick. Right now, the orchard was strong enough to withstand it. Already, other mischief things wandered the orchard, lured in like moths to a flame. Their sharp claws raked across bark, their fangs gnawed at the soil. A few times, the creatures had pointed and laughed at Datura when she pulled the stolen blanket over Tibb’s shoulders as she dozed. It never failed to send chills down Datura’s spine, make her hang her head and feel the fool.
And she promised her apple tree that this would be the last time. When Tibb woke, Datura would throw her out, would never give her shelter again—but then Tibb would tease with that smile, would tell her a story about dragonflies, and Datura couldn’t break Tibb’s spell. It happened the same way every time.
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