The calmness grew in her. She felt a strange sense of peace. She felt—
Validated.
Not that she’d needed proof to bolster her beliefs. But to have it so violently thrust upon her... it was a miracle. If such an impossibility as this could be incontestably standing there before her in the middle of the room, roots hidden by what remained of the floorboards, heights lost beyond the ceiling above... then what else might not be true? What other miracles lay just beyond common sight, only waiting for their veil to be drawn aside?
She rose up on her knees, leaning her arms on the sofa, and just drank in the sight.
“Look at it,” she said.
Cal tried to pull her back down beside him.
“Jesus,” he said. “Would you get down? Who knows what’s going to happen next?”
She shook herself free of his grip and stood up.
“Julianne.”
Her blood was humming at a thundering rhythm through her veins. She was no longer panicked, but the emotions that sang inside her had just as much power to dissolve away everything except for the power of what she was feeling.
“Julianne.”
Drawn by her name, she finally turned to look down at him. For a long moment she saw only a stranger. It took her long moments to realize it was Cal. The reluctant pagan. He belonged to the camp of lusting after her but pretending he didn’t. Usually she was able to ignore that aspect of him, but she wasn’t in the mood to play that game right now. Unfortunately, the thought process that had let her recognize him was enough to dissolve the fey frame of mind she’d found herself in.
That first rush of emotion that had filled her—the awareness of the miracle and all that it meant—slipped away like water running down a hillside. She regretted its departure, but clung to the spark of it that remained inside her as she might have a talisman. Clung to it and stored it securely away so that it would always be a part of her.
Not until she was sure of its safety did she allow herself to consider more practical concerns. For now it was time to slip back into the real world. To put on all the masks and blinders once again. But it wouldn’t be the same. Experiencing what she had, feeling the spark of it nestled deep inside her, she knew that nothing would ever be the same again.
“Come on,” she said, offering him a hand up. “Let’s see if anybody needs help.”
Cal rose to stand shakily beside her, hands gripping the sofa as he stared at the tree.
“Man,” he said softly. “Can you believe that thing?”
Julianne smiled. “Oh, yes,” she said, her own voice dreamy rather than subdued. Then she blinked.
“Come on,” she repeated and began to carefully pick her way across the wreckage of the floor.
Once out in the hallway, Cal felt as though he and Julianne had traveled a distance of far more than just a few steps. From the devastating wreckage of the room that lay just behind them, they stood now in a place that had barely been touched by the violence. Some pictures hung crookedly on the walls. A vase had toppled from a side table to the floor, but it hadn’t broken, only strewn its dry flowers across the carpet. Otherwise the hall had survived virtually unscathed.
Cal looked back into the room.
“It’s weird,” he said. “It’s like it only happened in the Birkentree.”
Julianne nodded, then called out a greeting. Coming to them from the hallway along the right were Tim and a handful of others. Cal recognized Ohn, Blue’s friend Judy and a student from Ireland he only knew as Barry; the rest were strangers.
“You guys okay?” Tim asked.
“A little shook up,” Julianne said.
“A little?” Cal muttered. He stuck his hands in his pockets to keep them from shaking and then raised his voice as the others drew near. “Anybody know what the hell’s going on here?”
Tim shook his head.
“All we know so far,” Ohn said, “is that the only parts of the House affected are those in which somebody was present. If the room was empty, it was untouched.”
“Man, this is spooky,” Cal said. “We were just sitting in the Birkentree when all of...”
His voice trailed off as he realized no one was listening. Turning, he saw what had caught their attention. It was Julianne. She’d moved a little farther down the hall and was staring out the window to the street. She almost seemed to be glowing, she was so entranced with what she looking at.
“What do you see?” he asked, knowing that he didn’t want to hear the answer but unable to stop himself from asking.
“It’s the city,” she said.
She turned to look at them. She was, he realized with a transcendental insight that had him looking past her physical beauty for once, transformed in that moment. Her face seemed to shimmer with a light that came from beneath the skin. Her green eyes were deep with hidden lights. And secrets discovered.
“It’s gone,” she said. “There’s just a forest out there.”
As she turned back to the window, the others pressed forward and Cal’s moment of insight fled. He saw only Julianne there now. She was in no way lessened in his estimation, but there seemed less of her. For one brief instant he felt as though he’d been allowed a glimpse of her soul and that glimpse would forever overshadow the flesh and bone that her spirit wore to walk in this world.
Snatches of conversation rose and fell in his hearing.
“I never thought to look outside—”
“—it’s not possible—”
“—you can say that after—”
“—what are we going—”
But he remained transfixed, staring at her, trying to recapture that glimpse. She seemed to sense the weight of his gaze upon her and turned from the window.
He opened his mouth to speak, to somehow try to capture in words what had just happened to him, but the ability to articulate his thoughts seemed to have just drained out of him.
“What’s wrong, Cal?” she asked.
He shook his head. She was forever transformed for him now.
He’d put her on a pedestal—not her, but the face and body she wore that could be physically recognized as her—and only now understood how he’d let that color his feelings for her. It was what lay inside the physical shell that had been important, but he’d lusted too much after the shell itself. His attentiveness, his not coming on to her, his trying to just be her friend—they had all been moves in a game that, when and if he won it, would result in his acquiring that shell as its prize.
He realized that she’d known it all along. And tried to ignore it. Tried to pretend that he was a friend.
And all the while he was letting her down because he kept the game going. Because while he liked her, what he’d wanted was her body.
She could look like an ape now, he thought, and he’d still love her. But he was no longer worthy of her.
She didn’t say that. Nothing in her stance, her features, her eyes, told him that.
It was what lay inside him that spoke. The spirit that wore his body as a shell.
3
They hadn’t been following the path for that long—though it seemed far longer than it should logically take to reach the House from any part of the garden—when Sara tapped Pukwudji on the shoulder. He turned to face her.
“Look,” she said.
She pointed up to the lower limbs of the trees where ranks of owls were perched, row on row. Their round eyes gazed down at the pair of them, unblinking. Tufts of feathers rose up like horns from their heads. She’d first noticed them a little farther back on the path, spying first one, half-hidden in the branches, then another, then a pair, until now the trees were fairly riddled with the birds.
Pukwudji gazed up at them, his own round eyes blinking twice.
“Owls,” he said.
Sara didn’t know whether to laugh or give him a whack.
“I know they’re owls,” she said. “What I want to know is what they’re all doing here.”
Pukwudji shrug
ged.
“Tal says that owls are corpse birds,” Sara added, wishing she hadn’t thought of that as soon as it came to mind, but she plunged on. “They gather in places where death’s near.” She swallowed dryly, her throat suddenly feeling too thick. “You don’t think...”
Now she really couldn’t finish what she was about to say: What if something had happened at the House? Bad enough the thought had come to mind in the first place; she felt that voicing it might just make it real. Guilt rose in her. It had been so long since she’d visited the House, seen Blue. If anything had happened to him she’d never forgive herself.
“Redhair’s wrong,” Pukwudji told her. “Owls are Grandmother Toad’s friends, wise and filled with the mystery of days to come. They’re manitou—just like us.”
Just like you, Sara thought. But she’d long ago given up on arguing the point with him. Just like Ha’kan’ta, he was convinced that she was, if not a honochen’o’keh herself, then at least a cousin to them.
“They can see into the future?” she asked instead.
That just added weight to Tal’s argument, she felt.
“They live outside of time—or in all time. Only Nokomis knows everything.”
“So they can see into the future? They could gather if something’s wrong?”
Pukwudji nodded. “But seeing them is a very good omen, hey?”
“I suppose.”
“It’s not far now,” Pukwudji added.
He started to turn, but Sara caught his arm.
“How can we be in the House’s garden and somebody’s mind at the same time?” she asked.
“We’re not in someone’s mind,” he explained. “Only in the forest that mind called up. The forest never was; what it might have been intrudes on what is.”
“I’m not sure that makes any sense.”
Pukwudji grinned. “That’s the trouble with herok’a,” he said, using the quin’on’a term to describe anyone without magical abilities. “They think too much. You should forget you ever were one, Sara. Just be—like me, hey?”
Just be? Be what? She couldn’t be anything but what she was and she still hadn’t quite got a handle on what that was—just like ninety-nine percent of the other people in the world.
Pukwudji gave her a poke in the side with a stiff finger to get her attention, then set off once more. Sara trailed along in his wake, all too aware of the dozens of pairs of eyes that watched their progress from the branches above.
Why did things always have to get complicated? She’d been planning to come back to the House soon anyway—sometime after the initiation ceremony. Definitely before winter. Just pop in unannounced the way she and Tal always did, catch up on news, hang around for a few days until the pace of the city, the sheer volume of its people and all the rush and noise, the whine of electricity that was always in the air and the endless traffic and crowding... until it all got to be too much for them again and they fled back into the peace that the Otherworlds hoarded like this world’s people hoarded investments.
She couldn’t stay away forever. She still had some responsibilities here—mostly tied up with the House and her inheritance; there were always meetings with brokers and attorneys, papers that needed signing, never mind how much Esmeralda handled that stuff for her. And then there were her friends.
She always came back. She just didn’t like coming back in these particular circumstances.
Above them, the owls conducted their vigil. Sara pretended not to pay any attention to them, but she couldn’t help giving them sidelong glances about every half-dozen steps or so. Either the entire forest was riddled with them, she decided, or it was just one particular flock that was keeping pace with Pukwudji and her. Whichever, they made her nervous. As did the constant rustling that she could hear coming from the forest just off the path.
Sly movements.
Just animals, she told herself. But no matter how much she peered into the thick growth on either side of the path, she couldn’t see a thing.
Whispering.
Just the wind. Except why did it sound like words?
Stifled giggles.
“Pukwudji,” she began, but he had already stopped.
His head was cocked to one side like a bird’s, listening. If he could figure out what was going on, Sara thought, then—
He turned suddenly.
“Quick, Sara!” he cried. “Can you climb one of these trees?”
She was taken aback with the sharp tension underlying his voice. But then she heard it, too. A crashing sound as something large forced its way through the undergrowth. Something large... and fast.
“I...”
He didn’t wait for her to reply. With that strength that always surprised her, considering his size, he had her hoisted onto his shoulder, head dangling down his back, legs bundled up against his chest, and he was scrambling up the trunk of the nearest pine, finding finger- and toe-holds where she would have seen none. In moments, they were almost ten feet up from the ground, perched high on a branch.
When he set her down, she saw the owls all around them, staring. But not at them. She clutched the trunk of the tree and looked down at what had caught their attention.
On the path where they’d been standing just moments ago, an enormous wild boar had burst from the undergrowth. It circled around, snorting and grunting, sharp hooves tearing up the ground. The coarse bristles of its hide varied from a blackish brown to a light yellow gray. It stood almost three feet high, five feet long and had to weigh close to four hundred pounds.
Sara began to shake as she imagined how long they would have survived if it had caught them on the ground.
“Ha!” Pukwudji called down to it. “Can’t catch us, hey!”
She turned to find the honochen’o’keh sitting on his heels, tiny feet precariously balanced on the branch as he bounced up and down, shaking a finger at the enraged creature below them. That just made Sara hug the trunk more tightly.
“I... I thought you said the forest liked you,” she said finally.
Pukwudji nodded. “It does.”
“But then—”
“That’s not part of the forest,” he said. “It’s an angry thought.”
Sara looked down at the boar. It was butting its head against their tree now, little pig eyes glaring up at them. She could feel the force of its attack vibrating through the tree trunk.
An angry thought. Right.
“Whose angry thought?” she asked.
Pukwudji shrugged. “Don’t know. The forest is filled with a mix of them, some friendly, some not so much so.”
Sara thought about the sounds she’d heard as they’d been following the path. Rustling and whispers and giggles. These were... thoughts?
“He’s going now,” Pukwudji said.
Sara glanced down again. Sure enough, the boar had given up on them and plunged into the undergrowth on the far side of the path. Somehow she’d thought it would have been more tenacious in its pursuit of them. She followed its progress mostly by sound. Her adrenaline rush began to fade as distance swallowed the immediacy of the boar’s passage, leaving her feeling weak and not quite all in her body.
Get hold of yourself, she thought.
Shen.
Gather the spirit inside. Focus.
“Let’s go down now,” Pukwudji added.
Sara hung on to the tree as he reached for her.
“Ah... don’t you think we should, you know, give it a few more minutes? Just in case it decides to come back?”
“He won’t be back,” Pukwudji said. “See, the memegwesi have chased him away.”
Her gaze followed his pointing finger. What looked like three little green-skinned children were dancing and laughing on the path where the boar had been just moments ago. When they spied her looking at them, they all put their hands to their mouths and, stifling giggles, ran off into the undergrowth, following the trail that the boar had forced through the dense vegetation. Unlike the boar, their passage was
silent.
For a long moment Sara just stared at where they’d been.
“The forest’s a lively place tonight,” she said finally, attempting, but not quite succeeding, to keep her tone light.
Maybe too lively, she added to herself.
“The forest is always lively,” Pukwudji agreed.
“But not like this.”
He laughed. “Always like this. You just don’t always choose to see, hey?”
They made their descent back down to the path, this time with Sara clinging to Pukwudji’s back. She didn’t feel a whole lot more dignified, but it was better than being carted around over his shoulder like so much baggage. The ground felt blessedly firm underfoot. The night seemed very still around them, almost silent, Then there was a sound like a sudden wind, but it was only the owls taking flight. They left their perches and flew off in the direction that Pukwudji was leading her.
Another couple of minutes’ walking showed Sara the owls’ new perch—the eaves and gables of Tamson House. She stared at the huge structure, relief flaring in her until she realized that it was much darker than it should be. What lights there were seemed dim. And there was no sound coming from beyond the bulk of the House where the city should be. That was when her troubled gaze settled on the trees—monstrous cousins of the forest through which they’d just come, except their upper branches poked through the roof of the House itself.
“The forest...” she began.
“Has come visiting,” Pukwudji said, not at all alarmed by the sight.
Sara sighed. Naturally he’d view the House as the intruder, rather than the trees. But then she realized that the House was intruding. That was why she couldn’t hear the city, or see the glare of its lights from beyond the roof of the House. The trees hadn’t come to the House; the House had been pulled into the forest—just as it had that time when they were having all the trouble with Tom Hengwr. Except this time the contents of the House hadn’t shifted to another outer shell set in some convenient glade; this time they’d been transported to an outer shell that the forest had reclaimed.
As she glanced to her right, her gaze was caught by the lights of the ballroom that spilled from its leaded-pane windows out onto the transformed garden. She could see the movement of people inside. Hopefully Blue and Esmeralda were there. With answers to make some sense out of all this.