It was by way of the latter that Sara meant to return to Tamson House. She left the camp, unattended by her usual covey of children, and made her way back to the riverbank where her exercises had been so uncannily interrupted earlier that morning. She felt a little lonesome without the children following her and already missed Tal. When she reached the old stone, its mica freckles were hidden in shadow, for the sun had already traveled too far across the sky for its light to reach the stone anymore.
She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, then immediately set about raising her taw, hurrying as much to stop herself from summoning up regrets as to get the journey begun. She was sufficiently versed in the exercise that her taw responded quickly to her call. It began as a tiny spark in her mind, then slowly grew into a warmth that spread through both spirit and body, centering in a spot just behind her solar plexus.
Calling it was easy. But focusing it... that was still hard for her. For that she used “Lorcalon”—the moonheart air that had been Tal’s first gift to her. She let its measures fill her until the tune resonated with the rhythm of her taw and her heartbeat. Now the focusing of her will came more easily.
She concentrated on the garden enclosed by Tamson House—the Mondream Wood of her childhood. Once she had names for all the trees in it. There was Merlin’s Oak. The Penny Trees, so called because of their rounded, silvery leaves. Jocky’s Home—the chestnut under which her little terrier had been buried when it died. The Scary Darks—a stand of birches that Jamie had so named to tease her, but the name stuck. And of course, there was the Apple Tree Man, the oldest apple tree in the small orchard on the west side of the garden.
The orchard had grown wild—a tangle of briar and thorn and apple trees that Fred had left alone because, as he’d told her, “It’s gone wild and wants to stay that way.” Since Fred’s death, no one else had touched it either.
It was to that orchard that Tal always took them when they returned to the House, a route that included a number of other stops through sites that were set in worlds progressively closer to it as one traveled through the Otherworld.
It was on the Apple Tree Man that Sara concentrated now, planning to go directly to the orchard rather than by the more circuitous route that Tal would choose. That was how Pukwudji would do it and since her abilities were more closely aligned to those of the honochen’o’keh than Tal’s, that was how she would do it.
She was eager to reach the House, do whatever needed to be done, and then return to the camp—hopefully in time for the ceremony. The less time her journey took, the sooner she could return.
So she called up the Apple Tree Man in her mind. Against the rhythm and flow of the moonheart air, she focused on him, remembering his scruffy bark and the tangle of his boughs, half his trunk embraced by a tall thorn tree, the thick grass that crouched over his roots, the sharp taste of his bounty when she bit into an apple....
When she had the whole of him firmly ensconced in her thoughts—not just the tree’s physical presence, but his personality, the inner sense of him—she let her taw reach across the distance to him, stretching between the worlds, and then she took a step and let herself go. There was a moment when it felt as though she were pressed up against a gauze curtain that was held tight at every corner so that its cloth stretched to her body’s contours. Her vision went gray. Silence hung in the air.
And then she was through, the border crossed, and she was stepping through grass that lay thick underfoot....
Did it, she thought, pleased with herself, until she took in her surroundings.
Sudden panic rose as she looked around herself.
This wasn’t the orchard in the Mondream Wood. This wasn’t any place she’d ever been before.
She was in a glade, the sky overhung with clouds above her. Tall, brooding trees ringed the open ground, underbrush growing up around their trunks so thickly that she could see no place she could push through. She stepped closer to the umbra of the forest, peering into its darkness, to find that while the undergrowth waned a half-dozen or so yards in, beyond that was a riot of fallen boughs and rotting trees, creating a barrier far more daunting than that of the vegetation closer at hand.
She made a slow circuit of the edge of the glade to find that it was an island in a forested sea and she was stranded on its shores.
“Quick’s not always best,” she could remember Jamie telling her more than once. “You’re too impatient, Sairey.”
She should have gone by Tal’s route. Slower, yes. But safer. She could be anywhere at the moment, in any of a hundred hundred layers of the Otherworld.
Go back to the camp and start again, she told herself.
She was tempted to try to go on, to call up the Apple Tree Man once more, this time being absolutely certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that she had him firmly focused in her mind, but reason overruled impatience this time. She’d go back.
She called up her taw once more, trying to focus on the meadow by the riverbank, the old stone with its mica freckles, the stand of birches so near at hand....
And could only find a fog in her mind.
This is stupid, she thought.
Her initial panic hadn’t returned yet, but she felt decidedly uneasy.
She tried, failed again. Not even the moonheart air could dispel the fog that lay heavy in her mind. Overhead, the clouds had thickened, making the light worse in the glade. When she looked at the forest, it seemed to hold far more shadows than it had just a few moments ago. Unbidden, an image of the hooded man returned to her. Cloak and hood holding a man’s shape, with a man’s voice issuing from under the hood, but there was no man inside. Nothing inside.
You must return to the Wood.
She had the sudden feeling that he—it, whatever—had been the cause of her failure to reach the orchard. He’d brought her here.
“But this is the wrong wood,” she said, pitching her voice to carry into the forest. “I’ve never been here before, so I can’t return to it.”
But someone had told her once that all forests were echoes of the first forest, just as all music was an echo of the first music that ever the world heard. By that reckoning, she had been here before.
“Are you there?” she cried. “Is anybody there?”
She waited for an answer, but none came. Called out again, but received no more of a reply than she had the first time. Tried to raise her taw, only to find that fog still clouding her mind.
She studied the undergrowth, the brooding trees that overhung it.
“I’m not going in there,” she said.
Not and chance being lost forever. Wherever this glade was, for her to have reached it, it had to have some magic, some connection to the routes that could be taken through the Otherworlds. Once she left it...
“I’m not!” she cried again, cupping her hands around her mouth so that her words rang deep between the trees.
No reply.
“Shit.”
She backed away from the forest’s edge and settled down on the grass in the center of the glade, sitting cross-legged, scowling. She ran a hand through her hair, told herself to calm down and did a few breathing exercises. They helped, as did the soothing influence of the moonheart air when she called it up again. Feeling more able, more in control, she closed her eyes and concentrated on raising her taw, on cutting through the fog that beclouded her mind. Riding the moonheart air’s rhythm, she called to her taw’s secret strength. She didn’t demand, but didn’t beg it either.
Breathing evenly, she simply let her need speak for her, sent it spiraling into the mists that choked her thoughts, and waited for a response.
10
This hadn’t been an earthquake, Blue thought.
It wasn’t a particularly inspired realization, not when he could see, right there smack in front of him, that huge mother of a tree that had pushed its way up through the floor of Sara’s Tower, shattering and splintering the hardwood floorboards on its way up into the ceiling. The room was clouded
with plaster dust.
The tree wasn’t the only piece of vegetation in the room either, though it was the largest. Near the walls, thickets of briar and hawthorn had grown from the worktable and other wooden furnishings. The carpet underfoot, where it hadn’t been torn apart by the tree’s passage, was covered with a thick moss. The windowsills, doorjambs, baseboards and other woodwork had all sprouted leafy twigs and branches.
Blue didn’t want to think about what this mess meant for the House. Was it even structurally sound anymore? The lights had flickered earlier, then died, only coming back when the House’s own generators had kicked in. That meant that they’d lost their hydro, probably the phone lines as well. He just hoped that was the least of the damage.
Around him, the others were picking themselves up from where they’d fallen, brushing dirt and dust from their clothing. Their faces were all pale with shock—all except for Emma’s. She stood near the trunk of the tree, miraculously untouched by its violent passage through floor and ceiling, one hand laid against its bark. There was a distant look in her eyes.
What had she said, just as all this was starting?
The forest... it’s coming back....
As he started toward her, Judy caught hold of his arm.
“Blue, just what—”
“Not now,” he said, shaking off her grip.
He called Emma’s name as he reached her side. When there was no response, he touched her shoulder, then slowly turned her around to face him. She looked at him, but he could tell that she wasn’t really focusing on him.
“Emma... ?” he tried again.
She blinked, suddenly aware of his presence.
“You can cut it down,” she said. “You can tear out its roots. But the forest’s never really gone.”
The others had gathered behind Blue.
“Say what?” Tim said.
Emma gave him a long considering look, then turned her gaze to where Esmeralda and Ohn stood shoulder to shoulder.
“You understand,” she said. “Don’t you? You know about the first forest?”
Ohn nodded slowly.
“But it stood at the dawn of time,” he said.
“And now it’s come back,” Emma said.
“What’s that mean?” Blue asked.
Her gaze was becoming more distant again as she turned to look at him.
“Not everything has to mean something,” she said. “Some things just are.”
She lifted a hand to touch his cheek.
“I have to go now,” she said.
“Go? Go where?”
Blue felt like a straight man in some existential vaudeville routine.
“Just to think,” Emma replied.
She brushed by him and started for the door. Blue turned to Esmeralda. Her long hair seemed to stir in a breeze that he couldn’t feel.
“Help me with this, would you?” he said.
Esmeralda shook her head. “She’ll be fine. Where can she go?”
“I...”
He watched Emma walk out through the door. When she turned down a hall and was lost to his view, he felt as though he’d lost something inside himself. A piece of his heart.
“We’ve got more important things to worry about right now,” Esmeralda went on. “We have to assess the damage to the House, see if everyone’s okay—does anyone know exactly how many people we’ve got staying here at the moment?”
“At least thirty,” Tim said. “Maybe forty.”
“All right. If you and Ohn will start checking on them, then the rest of us can—”
“Will someone please tell me just what the hell’s going on here?” Judy said.
“Try to answer that very question,” Esmeralda finished. “Why don’t you go with Tim and Ohn? Work your way down to the east side of the House by the north hall. Blue and I’ll start on the Library, then head down the south hall. We’ll meet at”—she glanced at Blue, then Ohn—“the ballroom, say?”
Both men nodded in agreement.
“Let’s go,” Tim said.
Judy seemed to about to argue, but then she looked at the tree again, that enormous oak growing out of the middle of the floor and disappearing up into the ceiling, growing where no tree should be, where no tree had been just a few minutes ago. She swallowed once, then nodded.
“Sure,” she said. “No problem. Let’s just check things out.”
It was obvious from her tone of voice that she was still having trouble just accepting that the tree was there where it was, but she trooped on out of the room with Tim and Ohn, leaving Blue and Esmeralda to take up the rear.
Outside the Tower, the damage didn’t seem as bad as it had been inside. Pictures hung askew on the walls, ornaments and vases had tumbled from side tables, but there was no jungle of vegetation. No moss, no branches growing from the woodwork. No giant trees.
“See you in the ballroom,” Tim said as he led the other two off down the north hall.
Blue nodded, then turned right with Esmeralda, heading for the Library.
“Why did it happen just in Sara’s Tower?” he asked. He wasn’t really expecting an answer, more just thinking aloud.
“We don’t know that yet,” Esmeralda said.
She paused at the first room they came to and opened its door. Inside, the furnishings had shifted some and a few knickknacks had fallen to the floor, but otherwise the room was in much the same condition as the hall—untouched by the forest. Again a breeze appeared to stir her hair, this time also rustling some fallen paper that lay near her feet.
It was weird, Blue thought, noting the movement. You get one strange occurrence, and then everything starts to feel like it’s coming unglued right at the place where it was attached to normal reality. He started to ask Esmeralda about it, then remembered how Ohn often referred to her as a spirit of the West Wind and decided that he didn’t want to know.
“Any ideas on what’s going on?” Blue asked instead as they moved on to the next room.
“It’s too early to tell.”
“Try a guess.”
Esmeralda shook her head. “It wouldn’t serve any purpose. All we’ve got to go on is what happened back in the Tower.”
“What about Tim’s hanged kids? Or that mess on the wall?”
“That was Ogham.”
“Whatever.”
The next couple of rooms were in much the same state as the first.
“Emma told us that the forest is coming back,” Esmeralda said as they continued down the hall toward the Library. “The first forest, which I assume is the forest primeval that legend says once covered the whole world—everything except for the seas. What that means, why it’s happening... it’s anybody’s guess.”
“What about Emma?”
Esmeralda paused. She turned to Blue.
“I’m worried about her as well,” she said. “She’s never quite accepted any of what’s happened to her. Not in here”—Esmeralda laid a closed hand between her breasts—“where it counts. I thought when we came back from the Otherworld that last time that she’d finally understood.”
“Understood what?”
“If it could be put into words, I’d’ve done it for her years ago,” Esmeralda said. “But the Autumn Gift... it’s a matter of spirit, of harmony and wholeness and a responsibility to the land and those who walk it that can only be furthered by the one so gifted. They’re the ones—they alone—who have to accept the charge given them and make the commitment to that responsibility. No one can do it for them. And until they do so, they can’t know peace.
“Emma’s problem is that this time around she doesn’t really remember who she is, why she’s here.”
Blue focused on the phrase, this time around.
“You can remember past lives?” he asked.
Esmeralda smiled. “You can’t?”
“No. I mean, not really. I’ve had flashes of déjà vu maybe, but nothing solid.”
“Does the idea bother you?”
“Smacks a
little too much of the Pagan Party—you know, with their grimoires and midnight chants and everything.”
“And yet,” Esmeralda said, “you’ve spent time with Native American shaman.”
She started to walk down the hall again. Blue fell in step beside her.
“That’s different,” he said. “The mystic stuff’s a part of their lives—you can’t separate the one from the other. The pagans I see around here seem to just be playing at it; it doesn’t really come out of a solid tradition. It’s more like they’re making it up as they go along.”
Esmeralda shrugged. “They have to—not quite ’make up,’ let’s say ’rediscover’—some things, but that doesn’t invalidate what they do. And there is a strong Western mystery tradition; it’s just been suppressed for a very long time.” She gave him a half smile. “And still is.”
“Point made. And now that you mention it, there’s some—like Jools, say. I take her seriously. I can respect what she’s trying to do. But most of them—”
“Are just looking for some meaning in an increasingly confused world. At least they don’t hurt anybody and like your shaman, they’re generally concerned with the state of the world—the health of the planet itself, rather than their own little corner of it. That can’t be bad, can it?”
“But Emma,” Blue began, trying to return to what they’d started discussing in the first place.
“Has got what many of your Pagan Party have been searching for,” Esmeralda said, “except she doesn’t know what to do with it. I’m not sure if she was always born with the gift, or if it came to her, but she has it now.”
They’d reached the door of the Library then, and further conversation died as they took in the severity of what the Library had suffered. Here the returning forest had struck with a vengeance. Everywhere they looked there was a jungle of brambles and briars, thorn trees, oaks, vines, apple trees and hanging moss. For long moments they could only stare at the jumble of books and paper that was caught up in the thicket of vegetation.