He was supposed to be helping Judy work on Hacker’s bike—his old Norton that seemed to be in the shop more often than it was out, not the new Kawasaki Hacker drove around town. When Judy got evicted from her place earlier that year, Blue had turned over a spare garage to her to be her workshop and she’d moved her personal gear into one of the empty rooms on the south side of the House. He liked having her around, usually liked working with her, but not tonight. Fed up with his antsy mood, she’d finally sent him off a half hour ago.
“Look,” she said, “if you’re not going to help, at least make yourself useful and get us a couple of brews.”
He’d started for the Silkwater Kitchen, but ended up in Sara’s Tower.
Tamson House had three towers. There were two of them on the east side of the building, one on the south corner, near the ballroom, the other on the north. The observatory was in the latter, complete with telescope, star maps lining the walls and a nineteenth-century English orrery that still worked. Sara’s was in the northwest corner of the house and it was the one place, along with Jamie’s study, that was off limits to the houseguests.
Unlocking the door, he’d gone in and sat down on the fat sofa in Sara’s downstairs room. There he slouched against the cushions and stared moodily at the poster on the wall across from him. It dated back to when Sara and Tal were still gigging around town, before Tal got too wired on modern life and had taken off into the Otherworld with Sara in tow. The poster had a picture of the two of them—high-contrast, sepia ink on a kind of ivory parchment background, her holding her guitar, Tal with his harp. Above the picture were their names; below it were the words “Welsh harp and guitar” and the date of the gig.
Been a long time since they played a gig, Blue thought. Unless that was what they were doing wherever they were now.
Wherever they were now.
He ran a hand through his long black hair, combing it with his fingers.
Jesus, he missed her.
He found it hard to describe their relationship to people who didn’t know her. It was sort of father/daughter, brother/ sister, maybe most important, friend/friend. He’d watched her grow up, hung out with her; taught her, learned from her; protected her-
Missed her.
You’re being an asshole, he told himself. She’s got her own life to live. It’s nobody’s fault that it doesn’t happen to connect with your own right now. She’ll be back.
Sure. Someday. But he hadn’t seen her since her last visit—which was, like, over a year ago now—and maybe he was being maudlin, but he’d sure like to have her walk in through that door right now.
He sat on the sofa for a while longer, his big frame slouching deeper into its cushions, and continued to stare at the poster, as though, if he looked at it hard enough and wished—really wished—he might be able to call Sara back from wherever she’d gone. Not forever. Just for a visit. Just so he could know that she was still okay.
Needless to say, he remained the sole occupant of the room.
Finally he got up and started to walk around, looking at pictures, fingering knickknacks, remembering. He smiled at the painting of the fox he’d done for her—Jesus, hadn’t she been surprised when he’d given it to her? He paused longer in front of the small photo of her and Jamie. Look at her. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen at the time.
He drifted from there into her workroom, gaze taking in the collage of old photos that were thumbtacked on the wall above the long worktable, before it caught and held on the opposite wall.
What the—?
When he caught the sonovabitch who’d snuck in here to make this mess...
He walked slowly across the room and stared at the marks that had been smeared on the wall. There was an order to them—they weren’t just random smears, but a kind of graffiti, or maybe ideographs, though what they meant he couldn’t begin to guess. They had a familiar look about them, like an elusive word that lay on the tip of one’s tongue, but he couldn’t place where he’d seen this particular kind of marks before.
What he did know was that someone had gotten in here—how, he’d like to know, seeing as how he had the only key to the tower—and went spray-can crazy. Except...
He took a closer look at the markings. No, this had been brushed on. In fact—a vague chill started up in the base of his spine—this looked a whole lot like dried blood.
Oh, man. What the hell was going on now?
Maybe Esmeralda would know, he thought as he backed out of the room, gaze still locked on what he thought of as a desecration of Sara’s private space.
3
She had an audience of copper-skinned children, watching her go through the slow, deliberate postures of her morning ritual.
Ch’i.
Exciting the breath.
Shen.
Gathered the spirit inside.
Focus. Focus.
The children had followed her from the camp, out past the birches to where the sun sought and found the freckles of mica in the old stone by the river. It was warm, here in the morning sun. She was stripped down to just a T-shirt and shorts, her long curly hair tied back with a ribbon. Drops of perspiration beaded her brow. Her muscles shivered with tremors, although to the casual observer she seemed to be doing very little.
The children sat in the shade of the birches and watched.
She was used to their scrutiny. They were like a pack of unruly manitou, teasing little mysteries, forever following her about, asking questions, laying tricks, meeting her accusing looks with their guileless open gazes. Only in the morning, when she danced the song of the thirteen postures—
Moving, yet still.
Like a mountain.
Like a great river.
—were they quiet, content to observe. A covey of slender forms, dark-haired, darker-eyed, poised motionless like quail before they stormed into motion again. She could put them from her mind and concentrate solely on contemplation of her taw, the heart of her own mystery, that place of inner stillness from which strength was gained and where magic was borne.
But not from a vacuum.
Cause and effect.
There was no gain, without conscientious effort expended. Concentration was required. Focusing. Attachment without attachments. To become nothing and so become all.
It was a long journey and after years, she was still not so far from the beginning of the road, but she was patient. And she felt no sense of hurry. Already the years had provided her with ample rewards.
In the court of the body, mind and breath ruled. Spirit. What the children’s elders called Beauty. But each required the support of the other.
Chin.
Internal strength, stored up within like a drawn bow.
Focus. Focus.
Fa chin.
The energy released. Like an arrow. The body relaxes, the mind so awake, so aware, that each blade of each stem of grass can be differentiated, one from the other.
She began the slow dance into another posture, her taw growing warm and strong deep inside her, waking. Awareness spreading so that while she looked ahead, she could see behind. Could sense... could sense...
A vague anxiety touched her, like a rumor making the rounds of her body’s court, and it woke a ripple of uneasiness that spread through her, making her lose her concentration. It came from the children.
She turned slowly to look at them, not angry, more disappointed that they should intrude upon her morning ritual, but then saw that they themselves were not the cause, but an effect.
A stranger stood by the birches, closer to the children than to her. A tall form in a hooded cloak. A hooded man. Sleeves joined in front of him, hands invisible in their folds. The cloak stretching to the ground, its hem damp with dew.
She let her arms fall to her sides and waited as he approached her. He seemed to almost float above the grass, rather than walk upon it.
“I am sorry to intrude,” he said.
His voice was deep, resonating. And unfamiliar.
She peered under the hood, trying to make out his features, but the shadows lay deep there. Too deep. Then, with the clarity of sight that her taw brought to her, she realized that there were only shadows under the hood. The man had no face.
She shivered, her perspiration clinging cold to her skin though the sun was still warm.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Better yet, she added to herself, what are you?
“It is time,” was his reply.
“Time... ?”
She glanced at the children, half-minded that this was some new trick of theirs, but they were watching the encounter with wide eyes, untouched by any personal association to the hooded man’s presence. All she could see in their features was the same confusion she felt herself. And the finger of fear that tapped nervously against the base of her spine.
“You must return to the Wood,” the hooded man said. “To the Heart of the Wood where once you trod. There is a need.”
She felt an odd sense of dissociation from the moment, as though she were with the children, one of them, watching and listening under the shelter of the birches, not standing here on her own in the glade, the sole object of the stranger’s riddling words.
She cleared her throat.
“You’re going to have to, ah, be a little more clear,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There is a need,” the hooded man said again.
The way he repeated the words made her think of a phonograph record, stuck on a groove. It was the exact same phrasing, same intonation.
“Yeah. But—”
She broke off, her own eyes widening, as the hooded cloak suddenly fell in upon itself and crumpled to a heap on the ground. Startled, she took a step back. By the birches, the children exploded into motion like the covey of quail they’d reminded her of earlier. In moments, they were gone, running barefoot back to the camp. Their retreat was oddly silent.
They left her alone by the old stone, the sun still warm, though she now had a chill that cut deep inside her all the way to the marrow of her bone. She tracked their retreat, then looked down at the empty cloak that lay puddled in the grass by her feet.
“I hate it when this kind of thing happens,” she said softly.
She was trying to lighten her mood, to ease the sudden tenseness that had her muscles all in knots.
But it didn’t help.
4
“You know what I don’t like?” Emma said. “It’s when you’re reading a book and just nothing happens in it.”
Fifty pages into the new Caitlin Midhir novel, she put it aside and stared into the fire. The Templehouse Room was cozy, deep with shadows except for the pools of light cast by their reading lamps and the warm glow from the hearth. It was late in the year for a fire, but the night had gathered a chill to its bosom, and they both liked how the coals made the room seem more intimate.
“Not really,” Esmeralda said. “It depends on what sort of a book I’m reading. Some books don’t need things to be happening to have things happen.”
Emma took a moment to digest that.
“I guess I’m just bored,” she said finally.
“Where’s Blue?” Esmeralda asked. “I thought you two were going into the finals of the World’s Ping-Pong Championships tonight.”
“That’s later—first he’s doing biker stuff with Judy down in her workshop.”
Esmeralda set her own book aside—a study of the totemic influence of birds by the Cornish occultist Peter Goninan that Emma knew, if she was reading it, would have her falling asleep halfway through the first page.
“What’s the matter?” Esmeralda asked. “Are things not working out between you and Blue?”
Emma shook her head. “No. Everything’s fine. It’s just—I’m not jealous or anything. I mean, I know he just happens to have friends that are women and I like Judy...”
“But,” Esmeralda prompted after Emma’s voice trailed off.
“I just wonder about us,” Emma said finally. “That’s all. I love Blue—at least I think I do—but sometimes I worry that the reason I like being with him is not so much for what we have, but because he’s such an interesting contrast. You know, it’s like I’m enamored with the idea of a guy with his image and basically macho interests, still having the kind of sensitivity that he does. That it’s the idea itself that I’m in love with...”
She sighed and plucked at a loose thread on the hem of her sweatshirt.
“Does that make any sense?” she added.
“Some,” Esmeralda said.
“And then there’s this place,” Emma went on. “It’s like, everybody here does something. You and Blue and... well, just everybody. You’re the kind of people that make things happen while I’m the kind of person that things happen to. I never really felt that before I moved in here.”
“You do things,” Esmeralda began.
“Oh, sure. But only after somebody else comes up with the idea. I used to be really... I don’t know... independent, Ez. I was sure of myself; I used to do things. Now I just feel like a hanger-on.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Maybe not. But it feels like it is. I had a career, but I gave it up. I mean, why be an architect in somebody else’s firm when I could live here and do my own art and not have to worry about paying the mortgage and that kind of thing? But I haven’t picked up a brush all spring. I don’t see my old friends anymore—not because Blue’s uncomfortable with them. I don’t think he’s uncomfortable in any situation. I’m the one who feels uncomfortable. They ask me what I’ve been doing and I can’t tell them anything because I don’t do anything.”
“Yes, but—”
“And then there’s this other stuff,” Emma went on. “You know.”
She gave her friend an expectant look.
Esmeralda nodded. “The Autumn Gift,” she said. “The tree magic it whispers to you.”
“It still spooks me,” Emma said.
“It shouldn’t scare you.”
“But it does. It just sits inside me, making me feel things I can’t understand. It’s different for you. You know who you are, what you’re doing here. I’m still waiting for someone to explain it all to me.”
“You’re the only person who can—”
Emma cut Esmeralda off with a wave of her hand. If she’d heard it once, she’d heard it a hundred times. She had to connect with the spirit that spoke inside her. Only she could decide her own destiny. Except what if you just couldn’t connect with that kind of thing?
She believed now—in the magic, in that whole Otherworld that lay just beyond the here and now that was its source. After what had happened to her over the past couple of years, how could she not? And she could also accept and recognize that some spirit moved inside her, spoke to her, connected her to all that spooky stuff. But she didn’t know why it had chosen her. And she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with its gift.
“Nothing’s clear anymore,” she said finally.
“So what’s the solution?” Esmeralda said.
“Now you sound like Blue,” Emma replied, returning to focus their conversation on one small part of the problem, rather than the more mysterious whole of magic and spirits in which her life was entangled. “Everything’s got a solution. But I don’t know if there is one to this. I feel like I’ve got to go away, but I don’t want to. I feel like Blue and I are some middle-aged couple who’ve been married for years—you know, like we’ve just settled into all these routines—and it bothers me, but then I don’t want to change it because I’ve never been in a relationship this solid before.”
She lifted her gaze from the fire to look at Esmeralda.
“Jesus, Ez. I feel like I’m having a mid-life crisis and I’m barely thirty. I just wish something would happen.”
She felt a tinge of uneasiness as soon as she spoke those words. What was it she’d read somewhere? Something about being careful what you wish for, because you jus
t might get it.
“Well, nothing serious,” she added quickly. “Just, you know, some kind of a change....”
She broke off as the door opened and Blue stepped into the Templehouse Room. There was an odd look in his eyes that went beyond his recent moodiness—a kind of edginess that she couldn’t help but feel was an immediate effect of her own current state of mind. Naturally that just added guilt to everything else she was feeling these days.
Be careful what you wish for....
“Are you all right?” Esmeralda asked Blue when neither he nor Emma spoke.
Blue shook his head. “I think we’ve got a problem.”
...because you just might get it.
I take it back, Emma thought.
But of course it was too late for that now.
5
She didn’t want to go.
This was the week of the initiation ceremonies, when Mother Bear’s drummers-to-be were welcomed into the lodges of the rath’wen’a—no longer initiates, but true Drummers-of-the-Bear themselves. For those initiates, it was a time of fasting and purifying the body in sweat lodges, of totem dreams and visions, and later, of ceremonial dancing and festivity. They were about their final business with expressions so serious behind their painted cheeks and brows that the children would dance about and pull grotesque faces in front of them, trying to make them laugh.
Yet if the initiates were serious, the camp itself was a hubbub of excitement. Their family and friends understood, and respected, the solemnity, but didn’t partake of it themselves. Between the birchbark lodges and deerhide tents, their voices rang with laughter and song as they set about their own preparations. Quillwork and beadwork was mended on shirts, vests, breechclouts, dresses, armbands, collars, moccasins, legbands and garters; silver buckles and brooches were polished; claw and bead and cowrie shell necklaces were restrung in new patterns. All about the camp, carved festive staves had been planted with feather and shell ornamentation dangling from their heads. Roasts of venison, beaver and rabbit sizzled on spits; cookpots simmered one every fire, filling the air with their savory scents.
As Sara Kendell returned to the camp in the wake of the children, the hooded cloak now folded over one arm, she could see the preparations for the ceremony going on all around her and her regret at having to leave grew deeper.