Author: Charles de Lint
Date: 1994-02-02 00:00:00+00:00
Description: A young artist returns to her cabin in the deep woods of Canada to concentrate on her work and finds that, somehow, strange and beautiful creatures are creeping into her art. From Booklist This is the first of four romances collectively entitled Brian Froud's Faerielands. Each is to be based on a different painting by artist Brian Froud in response to what that picture evokes in the writer's mind. The other three authors working on the project are Patricia McKillip, Midori Snyder, and Terri Windling; they must certainly be on their mettle to equal de Lint, who's one of the outstanding creators
Publisher: Bantam/Spectra

ABOUT THE BOOK

Enter the realm of Faerie: compelling, enchanting, and filled with perilous beauty. It is a world most of us visit only in dreams. Now it is brought to vivid reality by acclaimed fantasy artist Brian Froud, coauthor of the bestselling Faeries and designer for the films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. In a magnificent quartet of books, Froud and some of the finest writers in the fantasy field explore the wonder and the danger of a world inextricably bound to our own.

They have lived among us for centuries—distant, separate, just out of sight. They fill our myths, our legends, and the stories we tell our children in the dark of night. They come from air, from water, from earth, and from fire. Faeries.

THE WILD WOOD
by Charles de Lint

A young artist returns to her cabin in the deep woods of Canada to concentrate on her illustrations. But somehow, strange and beautiful creatures are slipping into her drawings and sketches. The world of Faerie is reaching out to her for help. She may be the Faerie’s last chance for survival . . . or their doom.

Dedication
for Donna Gordon,
whose artistic talent
is equalled only by
her generous spirit

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Copyright

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapters

Falling

The Hollow Woman

Flight

Dry Wash

Vancouver Airport

Log Cabin Home

Anima

Dreamtime

Chopping Wood

Granny Wis’om

Broceliande

Mask of Leaves

Butterfly Effect

Lia

Plates

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

About the Authors

Back Cover

Copyright

BRIAN FROUD’S FAERIELANDS
THE WILD WOOD
A Bantam Spectra Book / March 1994

SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1994 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.
Text copyright © 1994 by Charles de Lint.
Introduction and artwork copyright © 1994 by Brian Froud.
Book design by Dean Motter
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

De Lint, Charles, 1951-
Brian Froud’s faerielands : the wild wood / Charles de Lint.
p. cm.
Text illustrated by Brian Froud.
“A Byron Preiss book.”
ISBN 0-553-09630-3: $19.95
I. Froud, Brian. II. Title.
PR9199.3.D357B7 1994
813'.54—dc20 93-42271
CIP

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.
Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway,
New York, New York 10036.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

KPH 0987654321

Epigraph

We have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.

—Inscription on a New England tombstone

Animula, vagula, blandula,

Hospes, comesque, corporis;

Quae nunc abibis in loca,

Pallidula, rigida, nudula?

(Sorry-lived, blithe little, flittering sprite,

Comrade and guest in this body of clay,

Whither; ah! whither, departing in flight,

Rigid, half-naked, pale minion, away?),

—Attributed to Emperor Hadrian on his deathbed

Go and wake up your luck.

—Persian proverb

Introduction
by

For years I worked as an illustrator, crafting pictures to other people’s words. But over time the spaces between the words became more and more important to me, for in those spaces my mind and my imagination were set free. In 1976 I moved from London to a small country village in Devon, along with my friend Alan Lee and his family. Walking through the woods and across the hills of Dartmoor, among stone circles and Bronze Age ruins, Alan and I soaked in the spirit of the land, the folklore surrounding us, and created the book Faeries. With that book I began to do more than illustrate other people’s words: I began to record my own vision of the world, and stories without words, in pencil lines and paint.

I still live in the country, in a Dartmoor long-house with a thatched roof, along with my wife, Wendy, a sculptor, and my son. My work continues to be influenced by the beautiful land surrounding me, and I’ve discovered under its influence that communications from faerie are wordless-, first touching the heart and soul, and only later the rational mind. And so for years now I’ve created images that are meant to be evocative rather than illustrative, whispering words and suggesting stories of their own.

I work intuitively, the images appearing before me and demanding attention, their meanings and voices unclear until much later, when the sketch or painting is done. This was the approach I used when I designed two of Jim Henson’s movies: The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. The scripts and the characters developed organically from my sketches and paintings rather than the other way around. And here again, in the Faerielands books, the drawings came first, the words second, as the authors responded to images in the art.

I created the Faerielands art in the summer and autumn of 1991. Later that autumn I met with the four authors who were to write the books, Charles de Lint, Patricia McKillip, Midori Snyder, and Terri Windling, along with the series co-creator Robert Gould and the producer Byron Preiss, and spread out the drawings and paintings I’d completed—over fifty of them in all. The writers divided the images among them, choosing the ones they were most drawn to, and then they each went away to write the story the pictures whispered to them. They had the freedom to write whatever they chose, just as I’d had the freedom to paint what I chose; yet we’d agreed on a central premise: a recognition that faerie, inextricably bound as it is to nature and natural forces, is gravely threatened by the ecological crises that human beings have brought to our world.

Faerie exists at the heart of any land; it is not confined to the woods of England. Thus the stories would not be set in the landscape where the pictures were created, but in the lands the writers knew and loved best: the Canadian woods, the American Pacific coast, midwestern farmland, the Sonoran Desert. The images I’ve drawn show that faerielands are everywhere and anywhere. The insistent impulses of faerie are all around us, expressed first in lines that become a root, that grow into a tree, that transform into a face, that become a magical bird that takes us into another land. Like DNA code, any small fragment of a painting or drawing has the potential to open up into complete inner worlds. The images invite viewers to step into their magical space. They are gateways into the faerie realms.

The Wild Wood

The symbol of The Wild Wood (the first book in the Faerielands series) is the mask, a symbol of secrets. The Queen of Faerie holds up the leaf mask of fire, reminiscent of Green Man faces carved into Gothic churches and cathedrals. She shows the way to see beyond the Green Man to the Red Woman of transformation—inviting us to look through the eyes of the mask to see beyond the surface of nature into the faerie realm.

Faeries deal in paradox. They hide their secrets in order to delight in the act of revelation. I am fascinated by the paradox of the mask, which, in disguising the face and making it secret, seems to reveal even more than it hides by making us rely on other perceptions than our sight. We must open ourselves to intuition and learn to “see” with the heart. For the wearer of the faerie mask, the mask is not a concealment, a denial of the self, but an acknowledgment of the artifice of our everyday persona. The inside of the mask reflects our true inner self back to us, giving us, literally, in-sight—into faerie and into ourselves.

Like the foliate Green Man faces carved in wood and stone by medieval man, faeries are a personification of the vibrant forces of nature. They are spirit, energy, and emotion given visible, luminous form. This energy exists everywhere in nature for those who have eyes to see it. We might look at a leaf and see only a leaf—but if we look again through the Faerie Queen’s mask we shall see, at a deeper level, the green leaves revealing the dynamics of the leaf form shining with an inner flame.

So when I see a mask hanging in a shop window, or a Green Man carving in a village church, or hear a rustle of leaves in the wind, I know they all have messages to give. They all speak of faerie. I listen and I draw. These drawings are the inner voice of the land where I live, but it is a voice recognized by people of other lands and other cultures. All of the authors of the Faerielands books have responded not only to my pictures but to the particular voices that resonate within themselves. The drawings impart their story; the words are written down; and now you, the reader, are the third part of the triskelion, bringing your own story and voice and vision into the faerielands.

ONE

| Falling

. . . like music entangled in a thorny embrace, leaf-sigh, branch-rustle. It has no melody, but the underlying rhythm, the tap-tap-tap of stick against stick against twig against hollow wood, holds a kind of tune. Not one I can hum—can’t hold a tune anyway. But I almost recognize it. It’s the voice of blood, slow sap blood, quick wind blood, underground river, underskin river, all mingled.

It leaves me confused.

I look at my hands and see fur, see scale, see bark, see rough stone, smooth pebble. Shadow. Light. All a part of the music, the melody that has no melody.

I turn, meaning to reach out and part the grass, to look away from the forest that has snared me with its fey music, but the sound is in my underskin river now and I can’t move.

This should be a dream. It has the texture of dream, the impossible quality that belongs to dreams.

But I’m not asleep, abed, adream. I’m afield, bright broad day all around me, dry grass stirring without a wind, music drumming between my temples where my underskin river flows so close to the skin. It pulses in the hollow of my throat, shivers quicksilver echoes up and down my spine until all my nerve ends are trembling with expectation, as though the forest is my lover and I’m anticipating his touch.

I imagine . . .

No. I am . . .

Transformed. Transported.

Not asleep, but not drugged either, except by unknown fable, by unfamiliar myth, by unreasoning waking dream. Held fast in a glamour. Part of the play, but I never auditioned, never read for the part, never wanted it, but have been put on stage all the same.

I see her then, part of the forest, apart from it, like a tree suddenly given motion, taking one step, another, a sidling, indirect, corner-of-the-eye secret movement.

Leaves and burrs and small, pale white flowers in her luxurious Pre-Raphaelite hair, chestnut brown, turned-earth brown, bark and bough and autumn leaf brown.

Dress a rich brocade that’s at once too perfect for forest wear and tattered and thorn-tugged and torn.

One visible eye, hazel-brown and green, swallows light, shines with shadow. Her left hand holds the mask to her face covering the other eye and her features. The mask is friendly and frightening, all at once, maple leaves, autumn red, folded and bound together. I don’t have to touch it to know that it will have the texture of lacquered wood.

Her right hand holds an open book on her lap—book or folds of cloth that are booklike, or book growing from cloth, I can’t tell, turned about so as to show me what lies on its pages—and in the book, a picture of the same masked woman, holding the same book. . . .

Vertigo puts my head between my knees. When the dizziness finally passes, when I finally look up again, nothing has changed, except the book draws my gaze more firmly than before.

It’s old, this book. I know that much. Instinct tells me it’s a found object, lost among roots and moss, once. It smells old, not library musty, but like a long-fallen snag. Cover made of bark or skin or some curious combination of the two, cunningly bound with leaf and leather, feather and thorn, spiderweb and vine. Inlaid in the center of the cover is a triskelion made up of three hares, ingeniously rendered Escherlike so that each of the hares’ right ears makes up the left ear of the one next to it.

The open pages—are they pages? In the book, the picture woman lifts her head from the page and I see that she, too, holds something. Is it a child, a baby?

No, I won’t look. I can’t look at the baby.

My heart constricts with pain and I focus instead on the trees behind her. The picture forest is older and thicker than the woods I know, fat boles and sinewy bough patterns against the sky. There are faces in the shadows and the faces have shapes inside them and more forest and skinny limbs and long fingers that become twigs and branches and within the shadows of the branches are more faces.

The picture in the book has trapped my gaze into ever downwardly spiraling fractals. I know the forest, the faces, the figures, will go on forever. No matter how far my sight takes me, there will be no end to the parade.

I try to tear my gaze from the book, but the book is all there is now. I am inside its pages. I stand on a tipped-in painting and can see where the roots grow from two dimensions into three. They tangle about my feet, pierce the pages of the book, are thick with moss and fungi and deep earth scents and faces, always the half-hidden, fox-thin faces.

I focus on the trunk of the closest tree. The fat, barked bole is enormous, three, four, ten times the girth of anything in my wood. The grain of the bark draws my gaze upward to where the broad spread of the branches grow as do the roots, from painted image, through the pages, up into the sky—

My sky or painted sky?

My ears ring and my nose is blocked, as though the air pressure has suddenly changed. The physical discomfort allows me to drag my gaze away from the sky, down again, along the grain of the bark, faces hidden in the whorls and knotholes, tiny twig lingers reaching for me, tugging like small sharp thorns at my sweater, at my jeans, at the laces of my shoes. . .

“You must remember.”

The woman has spoken. Her voice is husky and melodious, thick with a foreign accent.

I look to her. The child is gone. The book is gone—

You’re inside the book now, I calmly remind myself, as though it were a common, everyday occurrence.

—but the mask remains. She begins to move it aside but I know that I don’t want to see her face because I’m afraid I’ll see my own features looking back at me. I focus instead on the crystal that hangs from a black silk ribbon at the hollow of her throat, but it points downward and my gaze continues in the direction it points, falling into the folds of her brocaded dress where the pages of the book are confused with the thick cloth so that I still can’t tell one from the other, where forest mingles with marsh and seashore, with mountain scarp and deep ocean and desert hill. . . .

She speaks again, but now the words are as foreign as her accent and they make no sense. I only know that I am falling into the flickering worlds that are caught in the folds of her clothing. Twig fingers are helping me along, pulling me into the shift and shiver of the cloth, and I realize I am no longer afraid, eager rather, eager to be taken away. I lift my hands, preparing to dive in, headfirst, down, into the pool of shifting motion, spiraling down into the fractal landscapes that whirl and blur and bleed into one another and—

I feel a sudden sharp pain in my hand. I look to see that in flinging my arms above my head, I’ve snagged the back of my hand on a thorn, pierced the skin, a drop of blood already welling up from the puncture. I put the tiny wound to my mouth and taste the taste of my own underskin river and when I look up I am in my own field, the cabin behind me, and everything is as it was before, unchanged.

Except for me. I know that I am changed, but I don’t know how or why. Or what the change will mean.

TWO

| The Hollow Woman

Eithnie returned to her cabin and carefully shut the door behind her. She leaned against its thick wooden panels for a long moment before she slowly made her way to a chair and lowered herself into it. She spent the rest of the afternoon in a daze, staring out the window, waiting for the quiet, pastoral scene to reawaken with her own private showing of Fantasia. But the fields remained unchanged. No trees danced at the edge of the forest on spindly twig legs; no fox faces watched her from the shadows; no masked woman sat with a leather-bound book upon her lap, folds of brocade waterfalling from her shoulders, across her breasts, her thighs, and pooling at her feet. The tap-tap-tapping sound was only in her mind. Memory. Eventually it faded, leaked out of her mind the way the light left the sky, chasing shadows across the field as it fled.

One of the cats scratched at the door and Eithnie lunged to her feet, looking wildly around the cabin for the broom or the poker or anything she could use as a weapon until she realized what the sound was. Opening the door, her old orange tom Tizzy regarded her from the porch, then stepped daintily inside, giving her leg a perfunctory rub as he went by. She waited the usual count of three and moments later Kate, her white tabby, came bounding up onto the porch and sauntered in as well.

Eithnie went through the mechanical motions of giving them their supper, but she had no appetite herself. She was unable to shake the feeling that the forest had crept closer to her cabin under the cover of the night. She drew the curtains and lowered blinds throughout the cabin until every dark eye was covered.

She forced herself to eat some toast then, washing it down with a soothing herbal tea. But still she couldn’t relax. For the first time since she’d bought the cabin, she regretted the purchase. Suddenly she longed for the comforting intrusion of noisy city streets. She wanted to be surrounded by people, each going about his or her business, the world unchanged.

Tap-tap-tap she heard in her mind, a brief echo of memory that faded and was gone almost before she could focus on it.

Finally she went up to bed. She removed her shoes, then lay down fully clothed, tucked herself in under the comforter, and stared up at the ceiling with the same single-mindedness with which she’d watched the twilight come across the fields earlier in the evening. She was at once tense and unbearably weary, in both body and heart. But when she closed her eyes, she still saw that mask of red maple leaves, the skittering twig and branch shapes with their fox faces. She lay with her eyes open and tracked the small network of cracks in the ceiling plaster, following one line, then another, over and over again.

Emptiness haunted her inner landscape like a gray wash painted across her spirit, so thick in parts it was almost opaque, rendering invisible all the details that defined her, secreting them even from herself. It wasn’t exactly an unfamiliar mood, yet it wasn’t quite the same as the sense of despondency that seemed to be coming over her all too often of late.

It usually happened when she sat down at her drawing table and faced the blank white rectangle of stretched paper taped there, palette, brushes, and water all laid out, sketchbooks full of value studies and preliminary roughs leaning up against the wall within easy reach. She could still draw, she could still paint, but it was rendering, practice, reference, not the evocation of an inner vision. Her finished work had become strictly naturalistic, adhering exactly to what she saw, rather than realistic, capturing the attitude, the expression, the emotion of her subjects.

Inspiration had fled, and gone with it was the inherent mystery that underscored casual inspection, the luminous soul of the world around her, which fueled the need to create her own side of the dialogue shared between observed and observer. Light had become simply a lack of darkness rather than the most expressive definition of shape and form and perspective. Cast shadows no longer held color, were merely an absence of light. She could no longer see spirit, only surface; and surface, for an artist of her predisposition, could never be enough.

She needed that luminosity. Mystery. Communication with something beyond herself. Without it, her paintings meant nothing to her. Her work became only so much pigment laid upon the paper in varying degrees of intensity. Abstract in the most negative sense of the word.

She found she had begun to fear the simple presence of that blank rectangle overshadowing everything else on her drawing board. The paper was so virgin, so unnaturally white, that anything she placed upon it—graphite, ink, watercolor—seemed an intrusion, a desecration. Any line she might draw would seem no better than a child’s crayon marks on a kitchen wall. Or worse, graffiti spray-painted about the nave of a church. A mustache painted onto the perfectly rendered features of the young woman in Winslow Homer’s “The New Novel.” What had once been a magical window into whatever her imagination happened to conceive had dwindled into a mundane, two-dimensional piece of paper taped to her board. She might as well wrap fish in it or stick it in the wood stove to start a lire. At least then it would prove to be of some use.

A contributor to this despondent mood was the fact that while she had many friends, she hadn’t had a lover for even longer than the months it had been since her art had failed her and inspiration fled.

Almost a year and a half now, she thought, tracking a particularly complex webwork of cracks. Could it really have been so long?

Perhaps she was fated to spend her life alone, and that was all there was to it. But even that thought, depressing as it was, didn’t account for the hollow feeling that had hold of her now.

She knew what it was.

Tap-tap-tap.

It was the afternoon lying thick in her memory, the impossibility of what she’d experienced, the weight of the hallucinatory visitation.

She’d once yearned to see spirits in the air, especially when she was much younger, but flighty as she could be at times, living in the world of her imagination as she did, she’d always known the difference between what was real and what was not.

Today the boundary between the two had grown tattered, torn enough for her to see through . . . into what? Another world? Or had eccentricity escalated into madness? It was true she’d been desperate to regain her inspiration, her sense of the wild wood’s spirit, but this afternoon had been too much. Out of control. A hallucinatory frenzy of the senses.

If she trusted her senses as to what she’d seen and heard today, then everything she knew about the world had to be redefined. If she didn’t, then she’d gone off the deep end and that was even worse. As an artist, all she had to depend on were her senses. Without them, she had nothing. If she couldn’t trust her senses, she might as well give up art.

Except perhaps there was nothing left to give up. Perhaps her creative well had run dry, and now it was scraping madness from the dried moss of its stones.

Sighing again, she turned her cheek to the pillow and studied the thin bar of moonlight as it came in between the gap in the curtains. The pattern it made on the wall on the far side of the room caught her attention. The play of shadow and moonglow on the thickly grained wood, the shape it pulled from the dark gold, reminded her of the tattoo her cousin had on her shoulder.

She couldn’t help but smile, thinking of Sharleen. . . .

There was a time Eithnie was ready to write them all off, every part of her family, immediate and extended: Her parents. The bluenosed Gerrows on her father’s side with their endless Byzantine intrigues and the false faces they put on when they had to be in the same room with each other. And the white trash Tuck side, too, with their own weird take on how the world turned, chips on their shoulders while they waited for the handouts they seemed to believe were rightfully theirs.

I’m going to pretend I’m an orphan, she’d decided, until the day she ran into one of her Tuck cousins outside Danielle Lachance’s gallery in the market and found herself agreeing to go have lunch with her.

Sharleen was the same as she’d always been-, cheap looking, peroxided hair hanging down to her shoulders with an inch of black roots showing, her pretty features hidden behind too much makeup. She wore torn jeans that Eithnie swore had to have been painted on, they were so tight; black cowboy boots with red inlay that perfectly matched her lipstick and nails; and a white, sleeveless T-shirt wrapped tight against her skin like a bandage, riding high on her torso so that her midriff was showing and cut low in front to show off the enormous gold cross hanging in the cleavage.

Sharleen was the only one of the Tuck cousins Eithnie knew very well, for they had gone to the same high school until Sharleen dropped out in the eleventh grade to have a baby. While waiting for a table in the open-air cafe tucked away behind Danielle’s gallery, Eithnie remembered going to the hospital and seeing her cousin the day after the baby was born. Sharleen had given the baby up for adoption rather than bring him into her dysfunctional family. When Eithnie came to sit with her, Sharleen had just held on to her hand and cried her heart out—her tears drying, her features going tough as soon as one of her own family came in.

Eithnie had always known that Sharleen wasn’t as loose as everyone thought she was, but Sharleen hadn’t cared what other people thought. “It’s their problem,” she’d say. “Life’s for living, Eithnie. It’s short, so we might as well make it sweet, and who gives a shit what anybody else thinks about us? It’s what we think that’s important.” It had amazed Eithnie that she could be so free-thinking yet at the same time buy so completely and blindly into the subservient role that women played in the Tuck family circles.

Eithnie’s wealthier family and her friends at school never understood why she spent as much time with Sharleen as she did. It wasn’t something she could put into words, but she was fascinated with her Tuck cousin, with how she dealt with life’s unfair hand. Being poor never fazed the girl. Neither did the way “respectable” people looked down on her. Or at least not so’s she had ever let on. . . .

Still thinking about Sharleen, Eithnie sat up and glanced at the clock beside her bed. With the hour just going on to eleven, it was still early enough to call her cousin.

Sharleen would be the one to talk to about what had happened. They only saw each other once or twice a year, but in a situation such as this, Eithnie couldn’t think of a more likely candidate. Ruth would get all fluttery, smothering her with maternal good intentions, while Clara would just worry. Nothing fazed Sharleen, however. She’d accept it all in her matter-of-fact way.

She knew what Sharleen would say. Something along the lines of “Your problem, Eithnie, is that you’ve been out in the woods too long.” And then she’d go on to tell her that she wasn’t crazy, just overworked, or underworked, or suffering from a frustrated libido. But whatever she would say would make plain, practical sense, which was exactly what Eithnie wanted right now.

She had to look up the number in her address book. Once she found it, she wondered if it would still be good. The way her cousin moved around, changing apartments from month to month, she was more gypsy than the one real Rom Eithnie had ever met.

She pulled the phone over to her from the night table, punched in Sharleen’s number, and waited for the connection to be made. She listened through four rings before an answering machine cut in. Eithnie almost hung up midway through Sharleen’s cheery message, but the sound of her cousin’s voice comforted her, even if it was only a recording.

“Sharleen,” she said after the beep. “It’s Eithnie. If you’re there, pick up the phone. I really need to talk to you.”

The only response was dead air, underlaid with a vague electronic crackle and hum—a typical Bouchette-to-Ottawa connection.

“Call me,” Eithnie added, once she realized that Sharleen must really be out.

A panicky feeling started up inside her as she went to cradle the handset. She really needed to talk to her cousin. She needed to talk to someone, needed some human contact.

Instead of hanging up, she put her finger on the plunger and broke the connection. When she got the dial tone again, she punched in another number. This time she got a response on the second ring.

“Mmm?”

He sounded half-asleep, Eithnie thought, though she knew it was just the way he always answered the phone.

“How’re you doing, Joe?” she asked.

“I’m doing fine, Eithnie,” he replied. If he was surprised by this uncharacteristic late-night call, it was typical of him that his voice didn’t betray it. “How about you?”

Her neighbor’s quiet voice reached out to her all the way across the telephone line and she began to relax. How was she doing? Better already, though she couldn’t imagine telling Joe about the afternoon’s visitation any more than she could Ruth or Clara.

“I’m okay. I was just wondering if, um . . .” God, think of some reason to have called him, she told herself. Then she had it. “I was wondering if you’d tracked down that cow moose you were telling me about.”

“Still planning to immortalize her in a painting?”

“Well . . . I’d like to see her.”

Joe chuckled. “What I’d like to see is how you plan to get her to pose for you.”

“I thought I’d get you to handle that part of it for me.”

“You ever try to reason with a full-grown moose?”

“It’d probably be easier than getting a straight answer out of you,” she said. “Did you see her?”

Her tensions continued to slip away the longer they talked, and she began to feel like herself once more.

“I ran across her tracks over in the Crown land," he told her. “She’s lost one of her calves."

“Oh no.”

“Thing is,” Joe went on, “she’ll be skittish. She was heading straight into the deep bush, last I saw of her tracks. If we go after her now, it’ll have to be overnight and even then I can’t guarantee we’ll find her.”

An overnight camping trip? Another flutter of panic went through Eithnie at the thought of going back into the forest, back to the wild places that had seemed so beloved and familiar until recently. But Joe would be there, she reminded herself; she wouldn’t be alone. Although sometimes being with Joe felt like being alone, he could be so quiet and self-possessed.

“So,” Joe said. “Should I assume by your silence that you’re having second thoughts about painting her?”

“No,” Eithnie said. “I’d love to go. When can we leave?”

“Well, I’ve got a job up in Messines tomorrow. How about the day after? I can be by your place at seven.”

“I’ll be ready.”

She could feel his smile again.

“Good night, Eithnie,” he said.

“Good night, Joe,” she answered, wishing she had another excuse to keep him talking.

She held the handset to her ear for a long moment after he’d cut the connection, then slowly cradled it, her thoughts now circling around Joe.

He was the local mystery man, presenting a paradoxical face to the world: part Zen master, part Native-American sensibility, part lumberjack. He spoke English, French, Algonquin, and his native Japanese. He seemed well-read and well-educated, though he never spoke of his past. The story had it that one day in the early sixties he simply showed up in Bouchette, having bought a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre parcel of land on Lac Caya, and he’d stayed there ever since. With only a few cottagers on the lake and the rest of the area being Crown land, the bush remained wild—Joe’s preferred habitat.

He wasn’t easy to get to know. Some days he wouldn’t talk to you at all—you could meet him on a trail in the bush and he’d look at you as though he’d never met you before; other days you couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He’d take up space by your stove, stockinged feet propped up on a log, beer in hand, and he’d stay for hours, just talking, or listening, because like all good conversationalists, he could appreciate a good story as much as tell one. There were no halfway measures when it came to him; people either loved him or hated him.

Privately, Eithnie had always considered him to be an aspect of Trickster.

“You’re probably right,” Clara had said when Eithnie confided her impression of Joe to her. “Part fox, part hare, part snake, and part grumpy bear.”

“Not a lot of snake,” Eithnie had said.

“But it’s there.”

Eithnie thought of the cold look that could come into Joe’s eyes, the utterly dispassionate face he could turn to the world.

“But it’s there,” she agreed.

It just never had been turned towards her. . . .

Eithnie got undressed and slipped back under the covers, both cats nestled beside her. When she finally did fall asleep, it was to dream of the forest that surrounded her cabin. Her sleep was restless, troubled, but she didn’t wake again, not even when a soft tap-tap-tap sounded outside her window.

Tizzy jumped down from the bed and up onto the windowsill, but there was nothing to be seen outside the glass. Just the marsh, lying still in the moonlight, and beyond it the dark green hills of cedar and pine.

Tap- tap-tap.

The orange tom hissed and continued to watch for the source of the sound long into the night.

THREE

| Flight

To her surprise, Eithnie woke up feeling good. Although there was a chill nip in the morning air, she took her sketchpad and paintbox outside after breakfast. She wandered across the field that lay downslope from the cabin, angling her way to where a straggling arm of the forest followed the path of the creek as it cut down into the marsh below. She sat down on an old gray rock, a primordial granite elbow or knee of some sleeping stone behemoth buried under the hill, and looked back at the forest.

Pine tree and birch. Maple and aspen. Living trees and snags that she hadn’t cleared out yet, a carpet of young trees endlessly growing in—some six inches tall, others as high as fifteen feet, all of them waiting for one of the older giants to keel over and make some more canopy space for them. She heard a woodpecker, its machine gun tapping coming from deep in the wood. She picked up a stick and tossed it into the underbrush, startling a chipmunk.

There were no otherworldly creatures hiding there today, or if there were, they were hiding very well. But yesterday . . .

No, she wasn’t going to think about that again.

She poured herself some tea from her thermos and inhaled the steam before taking a sip. The happy sting of lemons and mint cleared the dream from her head.

Enough of this, she told herself. Just get to work.

Eithnie was a traditionalist when it came to art. Her emphasis, even this far into her career, was still on mastering her tools, on repetitive practice and training. The general art community, she thought, put too much accent on striving to be different, as though different were automatically better and craft meant nothing. True inspiration was a gift, not something to which anyone working in a creative field was automatically entitled. What was truly important, Eithnie believed, was to work from the heart.

She had tried something deliberately novel and different for her last show. It had consisted of a series of city street scenes constructed from elements of nature-, the streets, a storefront, vehicles, pedestrians were actually, upon close scrutiny, composed of hundreds of branches and leaves and pine cones and bird wings and mushrooms and the like. The show had gotten a fair amount of good press, but the one review that stuck out in Eithnie’s mind appeared in Macleans “Technically brilliant, yet lacks passion,” was how the reviewer summed it up. And he had been absolutely correct. She had striven for something purposely different and lost the soul of her work in the process.

So now she was back trying to do what she used to do best: capturing what she viewed as it was, distorted only by how it was distilled through her own perception of the subject. Working from the hand and heart, rather than the hand directed solely by mind. At least that’s how she had used to work. She was still trying to recapture that ability. But that last show, with its precision and cleverness in every little stroke, had stolen it away.

She set aside her tea and diluted some ink with water on the mixing area of the paintbox’s little palette, then opened up her sketchpad. Before her, alone in the field except for the cluster of wild apple and thorn trees around its base, stood an old oak tree. It was half-dead, more dead than alive really, but every spring one side unfolded a cloak of green leaves and did its best to pretend that it hadn’t lost its former glory. The leaves were gone now, haphazardly carpeting the tall grass and raspberry bushes around. The tree’s shape was thus revealed, the dead limbs no longer so readily differentiated from the living.

Eithnie laid down a light wash of ink to capture the oak’s essential shape. Waiting for it to dry, she worked on the surrounding undergrowth with a pen, making squiggles and crosshatches that didn’t look like much taken individually, but combined gave the impression of vegetation around the oak. The ink wash dried and she began to detail the tree’s bark and branches with the pen. She started upon a second wash, and then stopped in mid-brushstroke to bend closer to the pad.

For a moment she thought she’d seen a face, a sly wild face staring up at her from the tangle of pen strokes and washes on her paper.

Slowly she moved her head from one side to another, looking at the painting from different angles. Nothing, nothing. Half completed line-and-wash tree on paper, that was all. And then, as though she’d suddenly tuned in to a radio station from dead air, there they were again: the little twig men from yesterday’s crazy vision. But this time they were in her painting, not the one in the masked woman’s book.

She stared at it for a long uncomprehending moment, then tore the page from the pad and let it fall to join the oak leaves underfoot. A virgin sheet lay expectantly before her. She began a second portrait of the oak; then, in quick succession, a half dozen different pieces: the marsh from a distance, a sketch of Joe from memory, a couple of other trees, a close-up study of the seed pod from a milkweed plant. . . . But each of them was similarly haunted. From a certain angle, there they were again: fox faces, twig limbs—in the grass, in hair, in forest, in whatever she tried to draw; from every other angle, nothing.

At last she gave up and set pad and paintbox on the ground.

She stared down the hill at the marsh, her spirits lifting as a blue heron made his graceful descent to the reed-encircled water. But then he was gone and Eithnie’s momentary happiness disappeared with him. She looked at the forest that grew so thick and close to where she was sitting, afraid to see flitting shapes and fox-thin faces, a masked woman, dizzying sights.

She saw only forest, but suddenly that alone was frightening. The dark reaches, the deep woods, seemed to hold every possible fairy-tale terror imaginable.

But that made no sense, she thought. She’d always loved the woods.

When Eithnie was young, she used to take advice from an old pine tree that stood alone in a field behind her parents’ house, much as this oak tree stood here. She would go to this grandmother tree and dream woody wisdom while she sat leaning against the thick trunk, face pressed against the rough, pitchy bark, never caring about the stickiness that came away on her skin and clothes. The education she gained, she supposed, was the ability to be still. She believed then that she belonged to one of the tribes of trees, but to which one, she could never decide. Sometimes she still felt that way, more at ease with her woods than with people.

She knew the dangers of the forest, of getting lost, of being too cocky. Of mistakenly thinking she ruled her wild domain when in fact she was just a clownish vertebrate, put on this world to amuse the other animals as she trundled through the forest, balancing on old fallen snags as though the logs were tightrope wires, humming tunelessly, tree-climbing, hill-climbing, spirit-climbing as high as her imagination could reach, taking pratfalls when some old fallen tree crumbled suddenly underfoot and there was nothing to grab for balance except for handfuls of air. . . .

And she still loved the woodlands: the berries in the sunlight and the mystery in the shadows, the growth and the decay. Living in a forest, she had never been lonely. Understanding her wild neighbor, she had never been really scared either.

But she was scared now. Not of the forest, but of what the forest might hold. Of what might be in there, right now, watching her from its shadows. A masked woman. Fox-faced twig men, mossy-cloaked and thorn-fingered. She remembered the sensation of falling through fractals, ever deeper into darker, denser woods.

You must remember, the masked woman had said.

Remember what?

Was the masked woman speaking to her, or had she merely overheard something meant for another?

No, Eithnie thought. I know that’s not true. She spoke directly to me. She wants something from me.

When she was a child, before Ellen Wentworth’s watercolor illustrations for The Wandering Wood awoke her love for art, Eithnie had never wanted to capture nature—not in oils, nor water-colors, nor graphite. She had just wanted to mingle with it. To be there, among the trees.

Is that what she was supposed to remember? Eithnie wondered. The time before she learned how to catalog what she saw in images caught on paper? Had her subconscious sent her a vision to remind her of her old innocent appreciation of what was there for its own sake? And when did she lose that feeling? Was she appreciating this neighbor of hers or trying to tame it with her art? And if so, then when did wild places become something she felt she needed to tame?

Perhaps some ancient spirit of the wild had come to her to make this point, telling her that it couldn’t be captured, that she shouldn’t even try.

Except Eithnie didn’t believe in spirits. She no longer believed in trees that talked, as she had when she was a child. Yesterday’s vision, then, had come from somewhere inside herself. Her own private hallucinations, riddling and mysterious. Her own needing. And that was even more disturbing.

She didn’t like the idea of not being in control, of her sense of perception leaving reason behind and taking little hikes all on its own. She didn’t like the way these . . . these twig men had appeared in her paintings when she wasn’t conscious of putting them there. She didn’t like—

Tap-tap-tap.

Stick against stick against hollow wood against branch. Not a woodpecker. Too constant. Too rhythmic. Was it even an external sound, or only her own heartbeat, her blood rushing in her ears, underskin river. . .

She collected her things, all a-jumbled, everything bundled up together against her chest. She stumbled back to the cabin. Closed the door. Started to bolt it, but refused to give in to that final unreasoning reaction to her equally unreasonable fear. She dumped everything on the sofa and prowled around, pausing at last before a watercolor that was framed on the wall near her easel. Franz had sent it up to her—an image of the Sonoran Desert illustrating a short poem of Clara’s. It was a card, originally, an invitation to come visit them in the American Southwest, but Eithnie had never gone.

She focused sharply on the foreign landscape that Franz had so effectively brought to life. Desert. Cacti. Dry hills.

The desert, she realized, was a place where you could walk in a straight line—not like the forest where you had to weave back and forth through the undergrowth to find a manageable path. Nothing could sneak up on you in the desert. There were no acres of dark, shadowed forest for her imagination to fill with faces.

Perhaps she needed to be in a place like that right now. A place where she could see without obstruction for miles; a place where she could walk in a straight line forever.

She looked out the window at the field falling down into the marsh. The autumn browns had all turned golden in the sun, but she sensed a shadow lying over it, under it, a root of deep forest shadow, reaching for her, calling to her. . .

Remember, it insisted.

She saw motion at the base of the oak and she pressed her nose against the window. It was only a rabbit, no, bigger, a hare, looking in her direction, bold as brass. Today she took no pleasure in the sight. She remembered instead the triskelion on the masked woman’s book, the hares, rendered so each was a part of the two others; and the book itself, how it had sucked her into its pages, except they weren’t really pages but a doorway into an older, deeper forest than the one that was watching her right now. . . .

The hare sat still, as though it watched her, too.

She turned abruptly from the window and went to the phone, calling a travel agent in Maniwaki to book a flight. By six o’clock she was on the highway, heading south towards Ottawa and the airport.

FOUR

| Dry Wash

Clara had a meeting in downtown Tucson that morning, so Eithnie found herself alone in the battered Bronco truck with Franz, bouncing along a dirt road in the foothills of the Rincon Mountains. The road wound steadily up through the rough scrub and desert that lay between the Rincons and Agua Caliente Hill, part of the Coronado National Forest. Eithnie took great delight in the forest of tall saguaro cacti, so different from her Canadian woods of pine and cedar, oak and maple.

She’d been in Arizona a week, but the landscape still startled her with its strangeness. Her plane had come in late the night she arrived and she hadn’t seen anything of the countryside on the drive from the airport; it wasn’t until she woke in the morning and pulled back the curtains of the Weirs’ guest room that she’d gotten her first amazed sight of the desert.

The calm that had come over her on lifting up from the Ottawa International Airport seemed to have deepened the farther she got from home, and the longer she stayed in the desert. Vegetation no longer hid small feral faces or shifting shapes; instead, for all their sharp thorns and lack of familiar foliage, the plants here seemed . . . friendly. The saguaro exemplified that feeling best of all.

“The Tohono O’odham call the saguaro our aunts and uncles,” Clara had told her. “They believe that if you lead a good life, when you die you’ll come back as a saguaro.”

“And if you lead a bad life?” Eithnie had asked, willing to feed her friend the straight line.

“Then you come back as a human.”

Eithnie smiled now as she looked out at the saguaro that crowded the hills around them. They were so much taller than she’d expected them to be—they could grow up to fifty feet and some seemed even taller. A very friendly plant, prickly thorns and all, Eithnie had decided when she went out behind the Weirs’ house after breakfast to make her acquaintance with them. They made her feel safe. Protected.

Seen now, from the window of the Bronco, she got the pleasant sensation that they were waving to her, welcoming her to the desert. Uncles and aunts, indeed, she thought. Kindly and wise. And venerable, of course. Franz had told her that saguaro needed some sixty years of growth before their first branches would appear, and could live to well over two hundred years. Eithnie could readily understand the Indians’ reverence for them, not only as spiritual guides, but because they had once been a source of sustenance and shelter. Although protected by law now, at one time the saguaro provided food by way of their fruit: The Indians ate the pulp raw or preserved, distilling the juice to make intoxicating drinks, and grinding butter from the seeds. The woody ribs were used to build shelters.

The Weirs had the ribs from an enormous dead saguaro attached to the side of their house, complete with one waving arm. They had brought it back from a trek into the desert that stretched for miles behind their place. The lightning from desert storms killed or injured hundreds of the plants every year.

Coming upon a stricken saguaro, stretched out upon the ground, the waxy green flesh blackening . . . It must be like coming across a dead body, Eithnie decided.

“You shouldn’t let it make you feel sad,” Franz said as she mentioned the thought to him. The truck passed hundreds of saguaro as they climbed the mountainside—some young and strong, others old and half-decayed. “It’s just a part of the wheel turning. I think people would have a lot better perspective of the world and their place in it if they stopped to consider that everybody sitting at the table is eventually going to be a part of the meal.”

That sounded like more Gary Snyder philosophy, Eithnie thought. Franz tended to quote from the California poet’s books of essays these days, having finally, as he put it, “managed to find someone who can articulate the things I feel about our place in the world but never knew how to say myself.”

But being part of some meal?

“I suppose I’m just not mature enough,” Eithnie said, “because I don’t find that at all comforting.”

Franz gave her a quick smile, but said nothing more. He pulled the truck off the road, tires spitting stone, then up a short steep grade into a rough dirt parking lot. Theirs was the only vehicle using the facilities.

Eithnie stepped down from the Bronco’s cab and stretched. Franz pulled a knapsack from behind his seat and joined her in the parking lot. There was a bottle of water in the knapsack, trail mix and a couple of chocolate bars, a sketchbook, pencils, and a small pair of binoculars. Eithnie had watched him pack it before they left, comparing his tidy pack with her own haphazard satchel full of crusted paint tubes, old grocery lists, loose coins, and dog-eared sketches.

Franz and his wife Clara were like characters in a fable for Eithnie. They seemed to live in a black and white world and everything they did, they did with an utter assurance that she envied.

She’d met the Weirs years ago in Ottawa. Franz was a sculptor and a painter, a tall, almost rough-looking man, his strong hands as capable of mending a fence or chopping wood as they were of pulling delicate features from clay or painting a water-color with the smallest sable round brush. He was dark, browned by the desert sun, a study of earth tones and shadows, with black hair and a close-cropped beard peppered with gray. Standing beside him, Clara was like the morning to his night, golden skinned, a rounded Botticelli figure, red-gold hair worn in a waterfall of ringlets, eyes the blue of a summer desert sky—piercing and bright with their own inner light. She worked part-time in the Book Arts Gallery in downtown Tucson; the rest of the time she wrote stories and poems and printed little books herself.

They’d moved to Tucson from Canada only two years ago, but they had a thirst to learn about the area that many longtime residents would find incomprehensible. Their weekends consisted of road trips into the surrounding countryside and long rambles through the desert. They were ready to talk to anyone who had something to tell them-, the teenager who worked part-time with her father at the Desert Museum, the woman at the gas bar where they always got their truck’s gas tank filled before heading out into the desert, the tribal elder they met in the parking lot outside the San Xavier Mission on the Tohono O’odham Reservation.

“So what’s this place you’re taking me to?” Eithnie asked as they crossed the road.

On the far side of the road, an ironwork sign marked the beginning of a trail that led steeply down the slope. Jojoba bushes and smoke trees crowded around the saguaro that oversaw the trail.

“You’ll see,” Franz said.

He led the way, pausing to snag a large plastic bag free from where it had gotten caught up under the green branches of a small palo verde tree. He rolled it up and stuck it in his knapsack. The litter had offended him, Eithnie realized, and in his assured way, he did something about it, rather than merely complaining and walking on by.

“Look,” he said.

He pointed away down the arroyo into which they were descending, towards the strip of the southwestern horizon framed by the steep scarps on either side of the dry wash.

“It’s hard to see because of the haze,” he went on, “but that peak there—can you see it? Just to the left of that saguaro with the broken arm?”

Eithnie squinted. She’d already forgotten the name of the mountains that appeared so tiny in the far distance, although she’d read about them in one of the Weirs’ guidebooks of the area on the second evening of being here. She finally nodded when she made out the peak Franz had indicated.

“That’s Elder Brother,” Franz told her.

“The peak that the Tohono O’odham have to live within sight of?” she asked.

Franz nodded. “All this,” he said, waving an arm in an encompassingly broad sweep, “is their sacred land, even if—by the laws we’ve imposed upon their way of life—it no longer belongs to them.”

The path grew more difficult to navigate as they continued their descent. The loose stone and dirt slipped underfoot and time and again Eithnie found herself about to reach out to grab something for balance, always remembering, just in time, that unlike the hills back home, here everything had a thorn. Some were worse than others. The thorns of the staghorn and teddybear cholla were attracted by body heat and would actually jump from the plant if you got too close to them.

Danger and beauty seemed to walk hand in hand here—far more than it did back home. And yet she was not afraid of this land as she’d begun to be afraid of her own forests back home.

Eithnie looked back up the way they’d come, following the twists and turns of the path as it wound its way through the saguaro and scrub, before turning her gaze towards Elder Brother. The haze on the horizon was like a fine film of magic dusting her gaze. The air tasted clean and sharp in her lungs. The muscles of her calves ached a little from the steep descent, but it was an invigorating ache.

She felt utterly at peace, cradled in a beauty that made her spirit sing.

“Coming?” Franz called from the path below.

“Mmm,” she said, holding the moment close for just a little longer before she finally turned to follow him once more.

It took another ten minutes before they got to the bottom of the arroyo. The broad stream that had carved it from the hills was just a dry wash at this time of year, but there were still a few small pools of water clustered at the foot of what Eithnie realized would be a waterfall after the rainy season. Cottonwood and desert willow grew among the jumble of enormous boulders that stood over the dry sand of the stream-bed. Bunches of stiff browned grass and burrobush grew in unruly tufts about their bases. Their sun-bleached shoulders were encrusted with dried lichen.

“Oh my,” Eithnie said softly, drinking in the scene. It was at once gentle and awe inspiring.

“I wish the water was running,” Franz said. “I’d like for you to have seen it. A waterfall comes rushing down from that ridge up there, forming a deep pool right where we’re standing, and the whole wash is a river. But,” he added, “we had a dry monsoon season this year.” He smiled, still not so native as to be unable to appreciate the paradoxical nature of what he’d just said.

“It’s beautiful just as it is,” Eithnie assured him.

Franz nodded, obviously pleased at her reaction. This, Clara had told her before going into Tucson, was one of their favorite spots. Eithnie could understand why. There were certainly more majestic sights to be found in the mountains that encircled Tucson, but this place had. . . heart. It was like a shared secret, precious for its relative anonymity.

“After the rains,” Franz said, “you can’t hear yourself think with the water roaring down over the rocks.”

Eithnie thought of all the signs she’d seen on roadsides round about Tucson, warning cars not to enter dips in the road when they were flooded. She couldn’t imagine what rain would be like in this arid country, transforming the desert overnight into an utterly different land.

“I like the quiet,” she said. “I like it dry and still.”

Franz shrugged out of the shoulder straps of his knapsack and set it down on one of the broad boulders by the pools. He sat down, then laid on his back, sunglasses turned to the sky. Eithnie explored the streambed, wandering through the tall grass on the far side of the wash until she started to think about snakes and tarantulas. Then she jumped down onto a boulder across from where Franz lay, and sat down herself.

“It wasn’t until we moved here,” Franz said, “that I really began to understand what Snyder meant when he wrote about learning the gossip of where you live. The plants and weather and the land, they all have a story to tell. When you start to understand it, you start to understand your own relationship to the land you live on.”

Eithnie glanced over at him, but he was still just looking up into the sky.

“Start small,” Franz went on. “Learn the spirit of the place where you live and it won’t be long before you understand that you’re a part of a part, that the whole is made of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you’re whole in.”

He sat up and leaned on an elbow to look at her. The sun from behind Eithnie woke two little sparks of light in the center of his sunglasses that moved whenever he moved his head, as though he had eyes of flame.

“It’s odd,” Franz said, “to think of how many people don’t even know the names of the trees in their own backyard, or what the weed is that they’re pulling up from their flowerbed. It’s probably got better business being there than whatever it is that they’ve picked up from the local nursery to replace it.”

“You’ve got a garden,” Eithnie pointed out. “You can’t say that those vegetables and herbs are natural to the desert.”

“That’s true. But it’s a small garden, which doesn’t intrude beyond our house. We have to have shelter; we have to eat. I don’t think the spirits of the desert are displeased with our presence.”

“You know them personally?” Eithnie asked, only half in jest, her heartbeat quickening.

“The Indians say,” Franz replied slowly, “that if people stay somewhere long enough, the spirits will begin to speak to them. They come up from the land. Spirits, old powers . . . perhaps they were never lost. Perhaps people just aren’t staying around long enough anymore.”

Behind the sunglasses Eithnie couldn’t tell if his eyes were teasing or serious.

“Do you really believe that?” she said carefully.

“I don’t know if I really have a choice.”

“Do you believe in faerie, Franz?” Eithnie asked in what she hoped was a casual voice.

He shook his head. “Only in terms of metaphor. Myths, folktales . . . I see them as a way for us to externalize the internal.”

“But real faerie . . .?” she prodded.

“If they were real, their presence would have been documented more scientifically than just in folklore.”

“But you put them in your art,” she persisted.

“Strictly as metaphor. Maybe you should give it a try yourself, Eithnie. It’s amazing how . . . freeing it can be to visualize spirit in anthropomorphic terms.”

I already do, Eithnie thought. The trouble was she didn’t have any control over it.

Eithnie thought about Franz’s current work, the images peopling his canvases and statues that shifted between human and animal forms, that were as much plant and place as human. Faces growing from wood and stone. A woman with the pointed nose and ears of a desert fox, a laughing coyote, a painting of a smoke tree in which the shifting forms of humans and animals appeared to dance. They seemed to eerily echo Eithnie’s own recent experiences. They were at once strange and yet familiar—desert variations on the forest spirits that had begun to appear to her and force their way into her art.

Oddly enough, the idea of spirits haunting the land didn’t frighten her in this sunny place. The spirits Franz called up in his art seemed benevolent somehow . . . unless there were darker images Franz had not chosen to show her.

“Sitting here,” Eithnie said, “I sort of understand what you mean about sacred land.”

“It’s a powerful place,” Franz agreed. “Peaceful for all the right reasons.”

He lay back on the stone again, sunglasses pointed high.

“How come I don’t feel such peace at home?” Eithnie asked. Anymore, she added to herself.

Franz took his time to reply, considering her question carefully.

“Ever since you got here,” he finally said, “you’ve been asking questions. What’s this plant, what’s that sound, where did that name come from?”

“So?” she said.

“Maybe when you’re at home, you aren’t asking the right questions. Maybe you just take everything for granted. I know I did. It took this . . . The Sonora is almost the exact opposite of the cabin in Bouchette. I think it took such an extreme change to wake me up to how much I didn’t know about where I lived.”

A hawk was hovering near the top of the scarp where the path down to the arroyo began. Eithnie could almost hear the music of its flight, the slow spill of notes that twinned its calm spiral, wings utterly motionless, each feather clearly defined in her mind’s eye for all that the bird was just a tiny shape in the far distance. This closeness to the living spirit of the landscape was something she’d lost in her own woods—for how could she look and listen and paint when she’d come to fear what she might see and hear?

Franz shifted, his walking shoes scraping on stone as he pulled first one, then the other up.

“You could stay here with us, Eithnie,” he said. “We miss you.”

Eithnie turned to look at him, thinking about her woods. Could she leave them? Should she leave them? The desert filled her heart with a singing, true, but the song of her own woods was stronger still, which surprised her, considering how desperately she’d needed to flee them just a few days ago.

“I miss you guys, too,” she said. “But if I stayed here I’d miss the woods more.”

“This place would revitalize you,” Franz argued. “It might help you with the problems you’re having with your paintings. Look what it’s done for my work, and Clara’s.”

“I love it here,” Eithnie said. “I really do. It’s beautiful. But I don’t know if it’s the right land for me. Maybe I’ve got to learn the gossip of my own woods before I can fully appreciate what I’m being told here.”

“You always were stubborn.”

“And spacy,” Eithnie added. “Don’t forget spacy.”

Franz grinned. “That, my dear, goes without saying.”

But she could live here, Eithnie realized as they both fell silent again. The spirit of this land had already laid claim to a part of her, worked a sliver of its singing presence deep inside her that she would take back. When she started for home tomorrow, she knew she’d feel a sense of loss, maybe even that she was making a mistake, but she knew she had to go home. Unlike the Weirs, her desert time had not yet come, might never come, because of what called her from her own woods. Something had laid an earlier claim.

Part of the reason she’d come here had been to talk to her friends about her visions, to find out if the forest had called them, too, when they lived in Bouchette and the cabin had belonged to them. But the desert and the cacti and some indefinable need for secrecy had kept her silent throughout the week she’d been reunited with the Weirs.

To come right out and speak of it would feel like breaking a promise. She didn’t know exactly what keeping that promise meant, nor to whom she had made it. It was simply there, an unspoken, undefined covenant between herself and the forest surrounding her cabin, invisible to her friends, secret even to herself, except that she knew it existed.

Though perhaps Franz and Clara were not so unaware. They might have touched upon that secret here, thousands of miles from the forest that spoke to her. Franz might tell himself he painted metaphors, but his art had never before carried such spirituality as it did now—this curious anthropomorphic mix of natural and human elements, blending into each other as though two opposite sides of a coin were visible at the same time. And Clara’s little books and poems . . they, too, were infused with a stronger composite of self and wild places than her work had ever held before.

Lines from Clara’s “Bajada” poem came to her:

For this one moment,

I have coyote eyes
and the blood of the desert
is dry poetry in my veins.

What kind of eyes did she have when she was in her own woods? Eithnie wondered. If there was poetry in her veins, did it belong to her or was it someone else’s blood, mingling with hers? Someone, or something. Something that lived deep in the forest, hidden, secret, calling to her. . .

Eithnie thought of the masked woman and she shivered.

“Someone walk on your grave?” Franz asked.

Eithnie had a sudden vision of herself lying entombed in dark earth, tree roots tangled about her, holding her fast, deep underground, barrowed. She shook her head, as much to rid her mind of the image as in response to Franz’s question.

“I just felt a chill.”

“It’s starting to get on,” he said. The sun had almost dipped below the scarp above them and it was already cooling in the arroyo. “We should get going,” he added. “Clara will be home soon.”

He drew his knapsack across the rock towards him and pulled out the water bottle, offering it Eithnie.

“No, thanks. I’m not really thirsty.”

“Have some anyway,” he insisted. “It’s all too easy to get dehydrated out here.”

So Eithnie took the bottle and had a sip. The water was still cool. It seemed to open up the pores of her skin as it went down her throat, like parched earth swelling in the rain. The fey mood she’d been falling into washed away as she swallowed.

“So what’s for supper?” she asked her companion.

“Depends,” Franz said, “on what you’re planning to make.”

“How we dream. You forget I’m on holiday.”

He rolled his eyes in mock exasperation as they started back up the hill.

After she’d done her bit towards cleaning up the supper dishes, Eithnie went outside to look at the stars. Franz had started work on a new painting. Clara was sharing a pot of tea with Maggie, the Weirs’ neighbor, who made Eithnie uncomfortable for no reason she could put her finger on.

Once her eyes had adjusted to the dimmer light outside, Eithnie walked around to the back, then followed a narrow path that took her up to the top of the ridge behind the Weirs’ house. She regarded the stars through the arms of an enormous saguaro that stood guard at the crest of the hill. Carefully, she ran a finger down the smooth green surface that lay in between its rows of protective thorns.

The night was filled with the hoarse chirping of crickets—a sound that had surprised her when she first heard it. Crickets were so much a part of her own woods that she hadn’t expected to find them in the desert. She was glad to hear them now. They were a familiar rhythm that helped make a strange song not quite so unfamiliar.

She would miss this land, she thought. But she’d also take a part of it home with her to Canada. She considered the forest that awaited her return, the dark mystery that lay hidden in its heart, calling to her, insisting on her presence. She would need these desert memories when she got home, she realized. She would need the memory of sun and light and wide open spaces.

The coyotes started singing then. First one lonesome howl that was met by another’s yip-yip-yip, until the night air was filled with the dissonance of their noisy chorus, a half dozen feral voices that melded into one eerie sound. They sounded closer than the coyotes did in her own hills; more immediate, not just in terms of distance, but in her relationship to them. In Bouchette, they were invisible presences you heard some nights; here they appeared every day, strolling out in front of the Weirs’ house, or surprised in an arroyo, an indescribable look in their features: part feral curiosity, part sharing some unspoken joke.

Their noisy chorus rose again. This time Eithnie threw back her head and howled back at them, joining them in their song.

FIVE

| Vancouver Airport

I didn’t pick up a pencil or brush the whole time I was in Arizona. It wasn’t something I had planned, but I found the abstinence to be a kind of happy accident. Sitting outside a shop, waiting for Clara or Franz to finish their business inside, I had to really pay attention if I wanted to retain anything of what I was experiencing. Without a drawing tool in hand, pad on my knee, I could slouch on the bench, my hands stuck in my pockets, and soak in my surroundings without worrying about perspective or lighting or anything technical at all. I was simply there, in the moment.

It put me back in touch with my more innocent self, the child who gathered memory in her mind, rather than in a sketchbook. This constant use of tools for retention, whether sketches or studies, has made me lazy. I don’t have to use my mind because the tools do the work for me. If I want to remember, all I have to do is flip through my sketchbook. The result is that my mental muscles have grown somewhat flabby over the years. I seem to be able to pay serious attention to where I am only when I’m rendering a scene.

At that moment, when I’m capturing the image on paper, I’m aware of everything, observing into almost infinite detail. Then, when the piece is done, that sharp focus shuts off. Art has taught me how to see more truly; but it has also tricked me into acquiring the habit of too narrow a focus, or of studying a subject only in relation to how I can use it in my work. By doing that perhaps I’m missing the subtler nuances of life going on around me—the gossip, as Franz put it.

Now gossip, by its very definition, is trivial; on the other hand, is there a better way to really understand something than by appreciating all of its various trivialities? We don’t cherish our friends simply because they’re great thinkers, or saintly, or for any such lofty concerns. Rather it’s a combination of all the small, trivial facets that combine to shape the image we carry of them; it’s the complex final pattern, with all its daily shifts and adjustments, that we cherish. Why should nature be any different? Why should anything be any different?

So maybe it’s for the best, then, that I never took my camera out, never cracked my sketchbook, the whole time I was in Tucson. Nothing’s lost. My mind is full to the brim with images of desert and cacti, coyote and the features of my friends seen in that unfamiliar light that paints the Southwest. Only now, waiting between planes in Vancouver, sitting here on a low concrete wall with the Rockies rising like gray mist on the horizon, do I feel the urge to put something on paper once more.

I take out a pencil and this virgin sketchbook. I don’t have anything in mind. I just mean to loosen up my drawing arm, to doodle, nothing more—and find myself drawing this triskelion of three Escher hares.

I’ve been staring at it for a long while, thinking of my faerie visitation. I have to admit that I’m both apprehensive and excited about returning home.

Faerie = Feral = Fear

That’s the cause of my apprehension. My conception of faerie is that they’re dangerous because of their unpredictability. No problem, if they don’t exist. But there’s something in the forest around the cabin. Franz thinks faerie are a metaphor, the internal, externalized. What I’m feeling is something external intruding inside me.

Clara, when I asked her if she believes in them, just smiled and said, “I wish. But no.”

I lean more towards Clara’s response. I’d like to believe in them, but logic won’t let me—never mind the stories Granny Wis’om used to tell Sharleen and me when we were kids, stories told in what always seemed to be such seriousness.

I’ve sketched one of the fox-thin faces I remember from those stories and from my visitation, half flesh, half wood, body a knotty whorl of branch and bark, fingers like twigs, jointed, impossibly long. A quirky, almost Rackhamish figure, except for the slightly feral cast of his features, the light in his eyes. It disturbs me how the pencil figure seems to be regarding me, the realism in the image heightened by memories of what came to me in the field outside the cabin.

The masked woman and her faerie court.

The curious book, guarded by its hare triskelion.

You must remember.

My apprehension hasn’t lessened, I’m still afraid I may just be going crazy, but I find myself becoming attracted to the conceit of faerie living in my woods.

SIX

| Log Cabin Home

It was late when Eithnie finally drove the jeep up the last length of her dirt driveway. She parked under the spreading boughs of an old pine tree that served as a makeshift carport and stepped stiffly down to the ground. The cabin was dark and it would be cold inside. She had only set the thermostat for the baseboard heaters high enough to keep the pipes from freezing.

She could see her breath as she stood there in the dark, listening. It was too cold for crickets. Too cold for cicadas. Maybe too cold for forest spirits as well?

Don’t start, she told herself. Hold to those memories of saguaro and dry hills and walking in the desert. Hold to the peace that Franz and Clara had helped her rescue from the confusion that had sent her south.

For all her calm consideration of the situation, sitting outside the Vancouver airport, she wasn’t ready to court what the forest might hold in wait for her, real or imagined. The quiet night helped fortify her resolve. The only sound she heard was that of a light breeze soughing high in the pines. No eerie tap-tap-tap of spirit drums, no rustlings in the underbrush of little fox-faced twig men. Gone only nine days, she hadn’t lost the knowledge of how the night should sound. All was as it should be.

She reached into the jeep and dragged her bag and carryall from the backseat. Worn as she was from traveling, the few yards to the back door seemed to take forever. She was too tired to make a fire; a hot water bottle would have to do. She wouldn’t even bother unpacking, she’d just go straight to bed. Tomorrow was soon enough to straighten up what needed straightening, collect the cats from Ruth’s if they hadn’t already sensed her arrival and come prowling back on their own, soft-stepping across the stones of the creek, down at the bottom of the small ravine where the water was at its lowest.

She unlocked the back door and shouldered it open, dragging her bags in after her. Her flights hadn’t been particularly long—except for the four and some hours from Vancouver to the Ottawa airport. But there’d been those long waits in L.A. and Vancouver, and then the drive up from Ottawa. She was almost asleep on her feet.

Her fingers fumbled for the light switch, turning on the exterior light as she invariably did while looking for the overhead that serviced the main part of the cabin. She flicked the main light on, switched off the yard light, and closed the door.

Home, she thought.

It was cold enough inside the cabin to see her breath. The air was close and still. Her gaze traveled over her little domain, settling on the small pile of mail that Ruth had stacked up on the stairs that led to the loft. Tomorrow would be soon enough for the mail as well. It’d be mostly bills anyway. She shrugged off her coat and let it fall on top of her bags. She hit another switch and the light for the stairs went on.

She wasn’t even going to bother washing her face, she decided wearily. She was just going straight—

She paused halfway up the stairs, suddenly struck by an odd odor that lay under the cabin’s stale air. She sniffed, trying to place the sweet, rotting smell. It reminded her of the time one of the cats brought in a dead vole and hid it under the sofa where it rotted for a week before she’d found it. A mouse must have gotten inside and died while she was away.

She came back down the stairs and began to search the floor when her gaze was drawn to the front door. Her face went pale as she slowly crossed the cabin’s main room and looked at the tiny body that had been nailed to the wood. Whatever store of peace she’d managed to acquire from the desert bled away.

The nail was wooden. The corpse was that of a weasel, half in its winter coat. There was no blood—neither on the corpse, the nail, the panels of the door, or on the floor directly below.

Trembling, she took a step forward and found that the animal’s dead eyes were, in fact, jet beads; the body was not so much pierced by the wooden nail as hanging from it by a small leather thong. Closer scrutiny proved that the weasel’s body had been sewn back together. It was like a gruesome little bag, hanging there, waiting for her.

So where was the smell coming from?

And then she had to ask herself, what smell? For the scent that had alerted her was gone.

Still moving slowly, fingers trembling, she took the little weasel bag from the door and hefted it. There was something in it. She took the bag over to the table by her easel and emptied the contents on its surface. More beads—red and blue and turquoise. Bits of dried tree root and moss. A clutch of tiny feathers wrapped together with thread. A pinecone, still green and closed. Some kind of tooth.

She stared down at the curious mess on her table for a long time, stared until her sight started getting blurry.

I can’t deal with this, she thought. Not now. Maybe never, but definitely not now.

She turned off the lights and climbed the stairs, barely staying awake long enough to fill a hot-water bottle and drop her clothes on the floor before she crawled under the comforter and fell into a deep sleep.

The morning dawned with a brisk chill in the air. Eithnie could still see her breath when she got out of bed. It was probably warmer outside than inside at this moment, she thought blearily as she went downstairs to lay a fire. She huddled in front of the old cast-iron stove, comforter wrapped around her like an oversized cape, refusing to move until the logs had caught and the cabin began to warm.

Breakfast consisted of coffee without cream, since she hadn’t picked up any on the way home last night. She went through her cupboard and couldn’t face either a bowl of dry cereal or something canned, which was all she had in the cabin, and decided to mooch breakfast from Ruth when she went over to pick up the cats.

She paused by the table on her way upstairs to get dressed, then resolutely turned her gaze away from the strange weaselskin bag and its contents that lay in the morning sun. The bright light coming in through the window stole away most of last night’s creepy feeling, but she still wasn’t ready to deal with either the long, narrow skin pouch or the ragtag spill of found objects and fetishes that had been stored inside it. She wasn’t ready to think about whether it had some connection to the solemn gaze that had regarded her from behind a mask of maple leaves, and the shapes in the surrounding forest.

Once upstairs she took a quick shower, shivering as she toweled herself dry, then pulled on a couple of layers of clothes: tights and a T-shirt and two pairs of socks, jeans and a cozy warm flannel shirt. Welly boots, a jacket, and a tweed cap collected from the hook by the door completed her ensemble.

“You’re just a regular fashion plate, today,” she said, catching a view of herself in the door’s window.

Her stomach grumbled in answer, indicating its disinterest in anything but breakfast. She shut the door and headed off in search of food and company.

This time of year, the summer growth was all gone, leaves fallen, tall grass and weeds browned and bent over by the wind, sumac berries drying on the branch. She could see the Kinsellas’ cabin through the bare-limbed trees where the arm of the forest that divided her property from theirs followed the path of the creek down into the marsh. She left her own fields and followed the narrow track down into the creek’s ravine.

There’d been a frost last night, but the sun had quickly melted it off. By the time Eithnie reached the creek, she might as well have waded across it rather than using the stepping-stones, because above her wellies, her jeans were soaked from melted frost that had collected on the tall grass.

“Don’t you look the country girl?” Ruth said as Eithnie came up the length of field on the far side of the ravine where it sloped up to meet the Kinsellas’ cabin.

Ruth was sitting in a chair beside the remnants of her garden, more bundled up than Eithnie was. Her red hair was completely hidden under a shawl which was pulled so close that it also hid most of her face. She was a buxom woman, her skin very fair, her eyes a wonderful green-blue that Eithnie had yet to capture properly in a portrait. She bore a certain resemblance to Clara and the two women were often mistaken for sisters when the Weirs lived in what was now Eithnie’s cabin.

Eithnie dragged another chair over from where it was lying on its side under an apple tree, righted it, and sat down beside her friend.

“You’re not exactly Vogue material yourself today,” she said.

Ruth gave her a properly mournful look. “Sad, isn’t it?”

“Pathetic, actually.”

They both laughed.

“So how was Arizona?” Ruth asked.

“Stunning. Clara and Franz send their love. They want to know when you’re coming to visit.”

“What, the whole brood?”

“I suppose. Where is the brood?”

Eithnie didn’t think she’d ever been here on a Saturday morning during the school year without getting caught up in a flux of bewildering motion, laughter and shouts and bustle.

“Well, John’s got a job with one of the cottagers,” Ruth said. “He’s building a deck for Gaston Lariviere and decided to put in a little work on it this morning. The girls are off mucking about in the fields with a couple of their friends from town—Paquette’s kids.”

Renaud Paquette owned the grocery in Bouchette where both Eithnie and Ruth shopped for things they hadn’t remembered to pick up at the less-expensive stores in Maniwaki or Messines.

“Is he still going to run for mayor?” Eithnie asked.

“So he says. Did you come to pick up your own brood?”

“Partly. Mostly I wanted to mooch breakfast. I’m like the old woman who lived in a shoe—or was it Mother Hubbard?”

“Eccentric?”

Eithnie stuck out her tongue. “No, my cupboards are bare.”

“I’ve got some leftover pancakes that you can warm up in the microwave.”

“Right now, I’d eat them cold.”

Ruth stood up, gathering the folds of her shawl close.

“I think there might even be some berries left over from dessert last night,” she said as she led the way up to the cabin.

The Kinsellas’ cabin was much like Eithnie’s own—no surprise, really, since Ruth’s husband John had designed them both. They were built as communal affairs, first the Kinsellas’, then the Weirs’ which Eithnie had bought when Franz and Clara moved to Arizona. Eithnie had come up to help out most weekends while construction was going on which gave her a bit more of a sense of real proprietorship than if she’d simply bought her cabin from a stranger. Her own hard work had gone into the raising of the logs, the chinking, the hundred and one other little things that had to be done to make the structure not only habitable, but cozy.

The principal difference between the two buildings lay not in their layout, but in how they’d been decorated. Eithnie’s was half domicile, half studio, with no clear delineation between the two. You could find paint brushes drying in the dish drainer with mixing spoons and forks, a container of turpentine standing on a windowsill beside a line of glass jars waiting to be filled with preserves, gesso stored in an old coffee tin, coffee beans wrapped up in a plastic bag from an arts supply shop.

The Kinsellas’ cabin was furnished in what Ruth liked to call post-child disaster mode. There was a cast-iron stove in the center of the room, hooked throw rugs on the wooden floors, and the furniture was all rustic pine, but what gave it Ruth’s particular appellation was the fine dusting of toys that could be found everywhere: brightly colored Lego blocks and the parts of a number of different Mr. Potato Heads, Dinky toys, plastic pull-toys and every kind of stuffed toy and doll imaginable, including the latest addition to the toy family-. Baby Oh-Oh, acquired because Megan, the youngest, had wanted “a doll that poops” for her birthday.

Ruth had been conscientious when her first child was born, constantly tidying up the unruly detritus dropped haphazardly as one toy was traded for another every thirty seconds, but by the time Megan arrived she’d simply given up. She still made perfunctory forays into tidiness, but it was clearly a losing battle. On the shores of her cabin, the tide of toys was always in.

Eithnie cleared a spot for herself at the table while Ruth started a new pot of coffee and warmed up the pancakes. As soon as Eithnie sat down, her black and white tabby Kate jumped off the rocking chair where she’d been sleeping and made a new nest for herself on Eithnie’s lap.

“The trip was lovely, thanks,” Eithnie told her cat. “And how have you and Tizzy been?”

Kate merely pushed her face against Eithnie’s arm and went back to sleep.

“The berries are all gone,” Ruth announced as she investigated the fridge.

“That’s okay—so long as there’s syrup.”

“I’ve got half a box left from the spring,” Ruth said. “If you’re running out—”

“I’ve still got almost twelve tins myself,” Eithnie broke in before Ruth could finish the offer.

One of the local farmers had a stand of maple that produced some of the best syrup around and somehow both Eithnie and Ruth always seemed to buy more than they could ever possibly get through in a year.

“Makes a lovely gift,” one would invariably say to the other, commiserating over just how many tins they had stuffed away in their cupboards after Albert Briand came by in his old pickup truck every spring and sold them a new supply.

Eithnie looked out the window while she waited for breakfast to be ready. She never got tired of the view of the marsh, with the wooded hills and fields running down into it. It didn’t matter whether she was looking out on it from her own cabin, from Ruth’s, or from walking up the dirt road that ran by her place on its way to Lac Caya and Joe’s cabin. Until lately, it had always filled her with a sense of peace.

Now she spied movement down in the alders that covered the slope leading down into the marsh. There were shapes moving in among the bushes and trees, too small to be men or women.

No, she thought. I don’t need this. I don’t want this. Not right now. Not before breakfast.

She was torn between looking and playing ostrich—if she couldn’t see them, then they didn’t exist. Looking won out. She leaned closer to the window and then the tightness in her chest loosened and she had to laugh. Those weren’t faerie creatures making their way up from the edge of the marsh, but Ruth’s girls and their friends.

All three of the Kinsella girls had their mother’s distinctive looks and coloring. Kelly, at ten, was the oldest, colt-thin and gangly, red hair flying loose about her face. Two years younger was Amanda, her own bright hair tamed into a braid that hung halfway down her back. Megan, at six, was the youngest, her hair pulled to either side of her head in pigtails. All three girls were in jeans; their welly boots and ski jackets were bright pastel colors that, for some reason that Eithnie couldn’t quite put a finger on, didn’t clash with their fiery red hair.

Tagging along with them were Raymond and Marie Paquette, both dark-haired and dark-complexioned like their own parents. The five made up a rowdy pack of pint-sized ragamuffins as they tore about the field, through the dead garden, madly chasing each other about like gamboling puppies let out of the kennel. Their shouts and laughter rang clearly, even through the thick log walls of the cabin and the double glass window panes.

Eithnie watched until they vanished in among the trees that lay on the far side of the cabin. A moment after they disappeared, her own orange tom, Tizzy, came stalking from out of the alders and followed the children into the wood.

In some way children were like faerie, Eithnie found herself thinking. Wild and skittish and somewhat amoral the way that all children can be. Here one moment and gone the next.

“Breakfast is served, Mademoiselle Gerrow,” Ruth said.

Eithnie turned from the window to find a plate of pancakes and a steaming mug of coffee set out in front of her. Her stomach grumbled in appreciation at the smell of the pancakes.

“You’re a lifesaver, Ruth,” she said.

Ruth nodded. She sat down across the table and took a sip from her own coffee.

“How many hours of baby-sitting do you think it’s worth?” she asked as she set her mug down.

Eithnie pointedly ignored her and concentrated on mollifying her stomach’s complaints.

“Weeks’ worth,” she said when she was finally full. “Definitely.”

Ruth’s eyebrows rose expectantly.

“Well, one week’s worth, anyway,” Eithnie said. “Or at least an afternoon. When did you have in mind?”

“No time in particular,” Ruth told her. “I’m just saving up promises for when I need them.”

“As if I’d ever turn you down.”

Eithnie sat back in her chair, content now with a full stomach, cat on her lap, coffee at hand, friend to talk to. Her gaze drifted about the room and was held by a picture that hung from the squared log support beam just a few feet over from the table. It was a reproduction of a Wentworth goblin from one of the books the painter had gone on to illustrate after Eithnie’s favorite, The Wandering Wood.

“Do you believe in faerie, Ruth?” Eithnie asked her friend.

It was becoming a familiar question. If she kept it up and her friends began to compare notes, she was going to get a decidedly odd reputation.

She glanced at Ruth, trying to gauge her reaction, but Ruth didn’t seem to think the question was in the least bit strange.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “The whole idea of them being real scares me.”

No kidding, Eithnie thought. She leaned forward and asked, “Why?”

“I think because it would mean that the world was no longer safe—I mean, really not safe. I don’t think of faerie as just those fluttery pink little Victorian pretend-sprites. They wouldn’t be dear little things at all. They’d be more like . . .”

Ruth frowned as she looked for an analogy. “Like the Pied Piper, I suppose,” she said. “He was really a faerie. Tootled on his flute and took all those children away into a hill and they were never seen again. Faerie are always stealing children, or leading travelers into swamps, or tempting you with a bit of magic or music that you can’t possibly resist and the next thing you know you’ve lost twenty years of your life. You’re lying old and alone outside of a fairy hill and all you can hear is them laughing inside.

“I always thought fairyland would be a dangerous place and I’d be too much of a chicken to ever set foot in it if it did exist.”

Eithnie couldn’t stop a shiver. “But you don’t believe in them?” she persisted.

Her voice sounded small and frail to her ears, but Ruth didn’t seem to notice.

“I don’t know what I believe,” Ruth said. “There’s funny things running around in the woods—everybody knows that.”

Eithnie’s uneasiness deepened. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear this, but she had to know. “Like what?”

Ruth shrugged. “Oh, you know. You just hear stories. Half of them are made up, I don’t doubt, but there’s always one or two that make me think. Demon fiddlers and lutins and the chasse galerie that John claims he saw one night.”

Eithnie nodded. She couldn’t count how many times Ruth’s husband had hauled out that story of the flying canoe.

“Lutins,” she said. “They’re like goblins, aren’t they?”

“Supposedly. You should ask John. Or better yet, ask Joe about some of the things that are supposed to live in the woods and marsh around here. Of all of us, he’s been living here the longest.”

Eithnie smiled. “Enough so that even the locals think of him as a local.”

“Exactly. Which reminds me, he was by looking for you a couple of days after you left. Something about going moose hunting?”

“I forgot to tell him I was going to Arizona,” Eithnie said, embarrassed.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. You know Joe. If you go to apologize to him, he just shrugs like it wasn’t important.”

“I still should’ve told him. Maybe I’ll take a run by his place after I get some groceries.”

“I wouldn’t bother,” Ruth told her. “He’s off somewhere in the bush now. When John stopped by his cabin to see if he wanted to help out with that job at Lariviere’s cottage, he was just heading out with a backpack and his bow. Knowing him, he’ll be out there for at least another week.”

Eithnie nodded. Joe was in the bush more often than he wasn’t.

The first time Eithnie met Joe Ikeda was the summer she’d spent helping to build Clara and Franz’s cabin. It was a hot July afternoon and Eithnie had taken a break around three and headed down to the lake for a swim. Joe was helping with the cabin, but he was never around when anyone else was working. He was like the little fairy cobblers in the old fairy tale; one Sunday night the others left for the city, leaving half the logs still to be peeled, and when they came back the logs were all done. Another Friday night they’d driven up to find most of the floor laid in.

Eithnie had heard a lot about him and seen him once or twice—across a field, his truck going by on the road when she was at Clara and Franz’s cabin—but she’d never actually met him. From the way everybody talked about him, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Fie sounded like a confused mixture of good ol’ boy and a back-to-the-earth type and very full of himself.

She wasn’t thinking about him as she went down the lake. All she wanted to do was die, or at least cool off. When she reached the shore, she threw herself into the water and then laid around in the shallows like a beached fish, letting the quiet sink into her. It was the middle of the week so there was no one at the cottages—no one anywhere for a million miles, it seemed. Just her and the bullfrogs and cicadas, the crickets and a pair of loons floating out in the middle of the lake.

Then she heard the sound.

At first she didn’t know what it was. The eerie soughing seemed to come down from the hills, a windy sound such as she’d never heard before, breathy and airy and resonant. Then she realized it was some kind of flute. She lay there listening to it for a while longer, but curiosity finally got the better of her. She climbed back on shore and toweled herself dry, put on her cotton dress and her sneakers. She wasn’t tired anymore, or hot, just cat-thinking, ears and nose twitching with curiosity.

The sound was coming from high up, in the hills somewhere. She struck off into the woods, a thick carpet of fine pine needles cushioning her feet as she made her way up the sharp incline, following the flute playing as though she had invisible whiskers, her own special antenna leading the quickest and easiest way towards the sound. She’d never had an easier time making her way through the bush.

Then suddenly she pushed out of the woods into a little clearing. She wished she had something to draw with, to capture the scene forever. Memory would soften its edges, its clarity would eventually fade; but in pen and ink, in washes of color, the moment would be frozen and always immediate.

He sat on a low outcrop, wearing jeans and moccasins. His bare chest was a wonder of musculature and she longed to draw its lines. His long dark hair was tied back in a ponytail, his cheeks were smooth, his brow high; his eyes were closed but Eithnie knew they would be almond-shaped and a dark, dark brown, almost black. The flute he was playing was like nothing she had ever seen before. It was a big fat length of bamboo, almost two feet long, bound with what looked to be fishing cord. It had only a few fingerholes and no mouthpiece at all. To get the amazing sounds he did, he had his lips in a tight smile, the flute at a forty-five degree angle, and he blew across the top.

He was aware of Eithnie but he never opened his eyes; never looked at her, just played, so she sat down in the tall grass and listened. When the music finally stopped, she was still following its echoes, not aware for long moments that he’d taken the flute away from his lips and laid it across his knees.

“You’ll be Eithnie,” he said.

His voice was warm, resonant like his flute, and very present. Later she found that this defined him. Eithnie herself had never been able to find a place to call home, but Joe belonged wherever he was.

“And you’ll be Joe,” she said to him. He smiled and Eithnie took that as a sign that it was okay to come sit with him on the outcrop. “What kind of music was that?”

“Kinko-ryu Honkyoku,” he told her. “Music from the Kinko school of the shakuhachi.”

Shakuhachi was the name of the instrument he’d been playing; the Kinko school was based on the notation and style of playing that came from the school’s founder, Kinko Kurosawa. Loose pages of paper lying on the stone in front of Joe were filled with tight lines of ideographs.

“It’s the sheet music for the piece I was playing,” he told Eithnie when she asked about it.

The calligraphy was beautiful, but it didn’t look like any sheet music she’d ever seen.

“Here in the west,” Joe explained, “you think of music as melody, a progression of notes and phrases that combine into a song. The melody is composed of units—the smallest of which are the individual notes. The value of each note is determined by its location within a phrase, and the value of each sound is determined by its context in the overall piece.

“In Honkyoku, however, no one sound is more important than another. Its beauty grows from the quality of each sound and the silence between them. There is no development or progression, so the shakuhachi player doesn’t consider getting to the end of a piece. The best description might be, Ichi On Jo Butsu, which means ‘In one single sound there is the quality of enlightenment, or Buddha-nature.’ ”

“So it’s like meditating,” Eithnie said.

He nodded. “It’s breathing and being drawn deep into the particularity of sound and silence.”

And people tell me I’m spacy, Eithnie thought.

“No one ever told me you were a musician,” she said.

He just shrugged. For Joe, she’d learn later, a shrug was a catchall response. He was the only person Eithnie had ever met who could shrug without moving a muscle. But that afternoon she wasn’t interested in delving into his psyche; she just wanted to enjoy the tranquility of his company.

Despite her strong friendships, Eithnie had never been able to get really close to people. There was always this protective layer surrounding her, a fine, onionskin wall that always held something back. It wasn’t something she intended. It was just the way she was—a loner, needing her privacy and a great deal of time to herself. Robert, an old boyfriend of hers, said it was because she gave herself to her art; all her intimacies were concentrated in the color and lines that she rendered, and so she had nothing left over for people. Sometimes Eithnie feared he was right.

Yet Joe was the first person she’d ever met whom she could be with and still feel as though she was alone. Not in a negative sense; not as though he ignored her. But he was like her favorite trees in the forest—a steady, companionable presence, yet somehow removed from the human world, as wild as the bush he loved.

She had never been able to understand how he could be so present in any particular moment and yet not be able to figure out what went on in other people’s heads. There wasn’t an animal in the forest around him of which he wasn’t aware, but when it came to human relationships, it was all a mystery to him. If he was in the mood for company, he was incredibly easy to get along with; otherwise one might as well not be there, even people he genuinely cared about. Eithnie had heard him described as a sociopath—but only by people he made nervous. And of course Clara thought he was an aspect of Trickster, complete with all of Trickster’s dichotomies-, a part of everything, but detached as well; a hunter who cherishes wildlife for its own sake as well as for the food and clothing it provides; capable of being both coolly remote and goofy as a puppy chasing its tail.

But Eithnie didn’t know any of this the first time they met. She just accepted him the way he was. She felt so close to him so fast it would have been frightening if it hadn’t seemed so natural. They met in an odd, innocent sort of way, as two children might; and that seemed to have defined their relationship.

Joe put away his shakuhachi and the two of them went walking, a long ramble through the woods. He didn’t say much, but somehow he communicated a piece of what he knew to Eithnie so that, for that afternoon at least, she saw the forest through his eyes. He lived as though every day was the first day he’d been alive; as though every time he saw something, or somebody—no matter how familiar—it was for the first time. By the time Eithnie got back to where the Weirs’ cabin was being raised, she felt as though she’d spent the afternoon high on some kind of drug; the hours had blurred into a timeless moment, held in her mind with the memory of one of Joe’s shrugs. She felt refreshed. She wasn’t tired. The heat didn’t bother her.

She got right into working, helping John and Franz set the roofbeams in place, and she still wasn’t tired when it finally got too dark to work anymore and they all went back to the Kinsellas for dinner. But that whole evening, while she worked, as she’d crossed the creek to the Kinsellas’ cabin, as she ate dinner, she found herself listening to see if, beyond the sound of the crickets and the frogs down in the marsh, she could hear a bamboo flute exploring the particularities of sound and silence.

SEVEN

| Anima

Eithnie fell back into her usual routines in the week following her return from Tucson. As the days passed, it was as though the visitation that had sent her scurrying to Arizona had never occurred; as though the experience hadn’t been her own, but rather something she’d merely read about in a book. Joe was still out in the bush, so she hadn’t been able to apologize to him for breaking their moose-hunting date. She tried calling Sharleen, but when she only got the answering machine again she wasn’t upset; the need to talk things over with her cousin didn’t seem so urgent anymore.

She went grocery shopping in Messines with Ruth, looked after the Kinsella girls another afternoon, taking them down to a place in the field where wild grapevines grew. There she showed them how to make wreaths and hares and ducks from the old vines. Otherwise she kept herself busy readying the cabin and her garden for the winter and working at her drawing table.

The peering faces, the twig-thin bodies of the stickmen and the other manifestations of otherworldly presences no longer appeared in her art. In fact, looking back on the work she’d done on that afternoon when it seemed as though the whole world had tilted halfway into an Andrew Lang book, she couldn’t find one untoward element in any of them. There were just her own pen and brush strokes, rendering the landscape down the hill from her cabin.

The fetish bag didn’t seem quite so mysterious anymore either. Knowing that Joe would have stopped by the morning after she’d left, looking for her, she was certain that he was the one who had left it hanging on her door. There was no puzzle as to how he would have gotten into the cabin; he had a spare key. Why he’d left the fetish bag she wouldn’t find out until the next time she saw him, so she stuffed all the little bits of feather and bone and whatnot back into the skin bag and put it away in a drawer and tried to forget about it.

Refreshed by her trip, and reassured by her normal routines in Bouchette, her confidence returned and she fell back into her work, losing herself in a new series of landscapes that somehow managed to encom pass both the intimacy of the local forest and marsh as well as that sense of wide open space she’d left behind in Arizona. That the odd juxtapositioning of these two very different styles actually worked kept her at her drawing board for long hours every day until one afternoon of the following week when she got a call from a gallery in Ottawa, reminding her of a promise to bring in some new work for the Christmas trade.

“Oh God, Danielle. I totally forgot.”

Eithnie sat on the arm of her sofa and looked across to her studio space, trying to peer with an X-ray vision she didn’t have through the art stacked up against the walls by her drawing table. She couldn’t remember what she had, if any of it was even worth matting and framing and then hauling down to Ottawa.

“How soon do you need it?” she added.

“At the end of last month. It’s mid-November, Eithnie.”

Which meant she was two weeks late on the promise she’d made early in the fall. Danielle wasn’t coming right out and saying she was disappointed, but she didn’t have to.

“I’ll get right to it,” Eithnie said into the phone. “Honestly. And I’ll have it down to you by the weekend.”

“If it’s a problem . . .”

“No, no. End of the week. I promise.”

God knows, what with her jaunt to Tucson, she could use the money.

“Okay,” Danielle said. “I’ll save you some wall space.”

Eithnie cradled the receiver after some more small talk and then walked glumly over to her studio space, which also served as a haphazard storage area for completed work. Matted pieces leaned against the very limited free wall space, there were stacks of pen and ink drawings, watercolors, and pencil studies heaped up in another corner with all the careful concern of a pile of old newspapers; in a folder somewhere she had a series of spring nature studies that she’d done in watercolors and inks. Somewhere she also had a series of oil paintings she’d done, thinning the opaque medium down with turpentine so that she could use it in thin washes to give it somewhat of the same luminosity as watercolor.

She had no idea where to begin, so she sat down at her drawing board. Its surface was littered with reference photos and value sketches—some specific to her current work-in-progress, some left over from a previous piece she’d been working on, some just kept taped to the board or tacked on the wall behind it for their inspirational value. As she leaned closer, she found herself reaching for a brush—she’d just add a few more strokes, a couple here to complete that faint line of trees, and then over there to . . .

No, she told herself. If she started back on the painting, even just for a couple of minutes, she’d be at it for the rest of the afternoon and Danielle would kill her. First she’d see what she had that could go down to the gallery and get it ready, then she’d finish the piece she’d been working on.

Only where to begin?

Eithnie sighed, considering the task. She always meant to organize her work better, but somehow the new work on her drawing table was always more interesting than what had already come off it. She stole a last glance at the piece she’d been working on before the phone rang, then resolutely turned away and began to go through her completed art.

It was late in the evening, with a full moon sitting above the hilltop above the marsh, when she finally called it quits. The weather had turned bitterly cold over the last few days, but the snow had held off. Looking out the window, Eithnie realized that the marsh and the beaver pond beyond it would all be frozen. Their gleaming surfaces called to her, irresistible in the moonlight. She turned to regard the disorder that had overtaken her cabin.

Freed now from the studio area, her art had spread everywhere. She had tide pools of sketches and studies and completed works puddled from one end of the cabin to the other, a view as chaotic as anything Ruth’s daughters could create with their toys. The only port of calm was the far too small stack of matted and framed work that was heaped on the landing going upstairs to her loft.

She really should keep at it. Yes, and perhaps she should have become a lawyer like her father had wanted her to, or at least a secretary as her mother had insisted—“to have something to fall back on”—and then she wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

“Sod it,” she said. She’d get back to it tomorrow. A person could only do so much in one day.

She got up and stretched her cramped muscles, then put on a ski jacket and muffler, stuffed a pair of woolen mittens in her pocket and her feet in her boots. Grabbing her skates from where they hung by the door, she stepped outside into the crisp night air and quickly shut the door on responsibility and the chaos it had brought into her life. Under the bright guidance of the moon’s light, she left the cabin behind and picked her way down through the field to where the frozen waters of the marsh waited for her.

It was so still, she thought as she sat on a mound of dried weeds and cattails that had been bent over by the wind to form a most convenient cushion.

Most people thought of the country as quiet and she supposed that, relatively speaking, when compared to urban streets, it was true. But when you lived as close to the forest as she did, you quickly understood that it was never really quiet; there were always frogs trilling, insects cheeping, trees creaking, winds muttering, grass rustling, wolves and coyotes howling, birds chorusing, and a hundred other sounds whispering across the landscape with the same busyness as might be found on a city street.

But in the winter, on a night like this when the wind had fallen off, it was so quiet that the loudest sound that Eithnie could hear was her own heartbeat coming faintly up through the layers of skin and bone, sweater and ski jacket that covered it. She sat for a long time, entranced by the stillness until the cold finally crept in under her clothes and she shivered.

Time to get the old blood moving, she thought.

She left her boots by the bank and skated off, breaking the silence with the whir of her skate blades on the ice and the sound of her clothing when she moved: the rasp of her jeans, one leg against the other, the stiff whisking sound of her ski jacket as she moved her arms for balance. Gliding, there was only the gentle hum of her skates on the smooth surface while around her, all was still.

The marsh had been transformed into a perfect skating rink, utterly clear and brilliantly lit by the full moon. It was easy to skate around obstructions—dead wood rising from the grip of the frozen water, bunched tufts of reed and marsh grass, close stands of alder and willow. She felt like the only living being alive in a ghost world, or like a ghost herself gliding unseen and unheard.

It was an odd, but pleasantly dislocated feeling that seemed to free all the pent-up energy that an afternoon of sorting and cataloging, matting and framing had lodged inside her. She felt as though she were made of air as she pirouetted and threw herself into wide looping patterns with a graceful abandon she would never realize if anyone was watching her. In no time at all the faint light of her cabin was hidden behind islands of trees and she’d crossed the marsh. She stepped up onto the frozen interlocking wood-and-branch-work of the beaver dam, brittle twigs snapping under the sharp blades of her skates.

She sat down on top of the dam for a few moments, massaging her tender calves and the tops of her feet. The first skate of the year always brought home how out-of-shape those particular muscles got over the summer. When the cramps finally eased, she stood up again and moved out onto the beaver pond.

The new skating surface was just a few feet above the old but she felt as though she’d been transported an impossible distance, away from the world of gravity and natural law into a realm where anything was possible.

I should be seeing them now, she thought. The faerie visitors. The twig people. This was a night when they should be abroad, breath misting the air, moonlight gleaming on tores and bracelets and belt buckles, their long gowns made of shadows and moonbeams. But neither stickmen nor masked woman walked here tonight.

Because they weren’t real, she told herself. They didn’t exist except, as Franz put it, as metaphors, as the figures of her internal landscape peopling the exterior landscape in which she lived.

The disappointment she felt surprised her. They had frightened her so badly that she’d fled—not just her cabin, but the country itself. Yet it hadn’t been the beings themselves who had frightened her but what their existence meant, throwing an orderly world into sudden disarray. Without the stabilizing effect of natural laws—this existed, that didn’t—the world had suddenly seemed far too dangerous a place.

But she was disappointed, she realized as she slowly skated around the beaver pond. She knew that if they popped up now, dancing and skittering around her on the ice, she’d probably die of terror, right here on the spot; nonetheless, knowing that her faerie neighbors weren’t real still filled her with a strange, aching loss.

In her current mood, under the moonlight, she thought she understood the anthropomorphic nature of Franz’s new paintings a little better, the need to see beyond the eye’s reach, the yearning that lay between the lines of Clara’s poems. Eithnie had felt that way herself many times, wanting to see into the very heart, the spirit of a landscape, a forest, a stream, a single wildflower.

Artists and writers had created faerie, she decided, agreeing with Franz, but taking his ideas a few steps further. They had to have done so, because the world would be such an emptier place without the idea of faerie. Peopling the world with the spirits of field and hill and tree was a way of recognizing the hidden mystery of life, of imposing not so much an order upon its diversity, as an acknowledgment that the inner worlds people carry inside themselves weren’t necessarily limited to the confines of their own minds. A person’s spirituality could encompass everything with which she shared the planet.

When someone saw into that world, of course it would be startling, even frightening, because what she saw then was a mirror reflecting back the mysterious reaches within her own hidden self. The more imaginative a person was, the more able to suspend her disbelief, the truer the image would seem. The more real. Especially since such moments must spring up out of one’s subconscious; the viewer accepted the reality of the vision because she was never aware of the fact that it was merely a projection of her own subconscious. Which explained the vividness of her own experience a few weeks ago, Eithnie supposed, smiling to herself as she glided across the ice. The one thing she had in overabundance was imagination.

She circled, pirouetted, and thought about the idea of conceptual reality, that things only existed because everyone agreed that they did. If one were the only person present, then it wouldn’t take much of a forum to dictate what was real and what wasn’t. Which was all very Zen, and didn’t explain psychoses at all, except that maybe bag ladies who walked along the street talking to themselves really were talking to Elvis. Perhaps children’s invisible companions really did exist, fading only when the more emphatic adult consensus finally convinced the child that the friend wasn’t—couldn’t—be real. UFOs, tabloid headings, appearances of the Virgin Mary . . . perhaps they could all be explained this way. Perhaps they were all part of faerie and, in their own way, they were all real. Or as real as they had to be.

Eithnie considered this idea of faerie as she made one more lazy circuit around the edge of the beaver pond. It seemed to be such an epiphanous notion that she immediately wanted to share it with someone—only not in conversation, not in words. She wanted to capture its elusiveness in paint, in image, in lines and shape and form, and let each viewer take his or her own understanding from it.

What if faerie were a kind of anima, a projection of one’s subconscious . . .

Well, perhaps it was possible to see another person’s projections, if their imagination was strong enough. And there was no reason—if you believed as Eithnie did that animals had individual spirits—that they couldn’t project their own versions of faerie. Animals dreamed. She had only to watch a dog chasing a rabbit in its sleep, legs churning while it lay in front of the hearth, to know they did. Animals must dream. Moose and beaver, hawks and bluebirds, fox and hare. And what about trees? Or flowers? Was that how Victorian flower fairies had originated? Or what about . . .

She was suddenly filled with a clarity of vision, myth and folklore all explained in one simple, fairly reasonable rationale, making it tidier, safer, somehow. She’d only half-understood what Franz had been trying to tell her. Coming upon it from her own twisty forest sidepath, rather than by the straight desert road Franz had pointed out to her, made it all make sense.

And she understood as well, now, what Franz had meant when he’d suggested she should try to express faerie through her paintings. How had he put it? Something about how freeing it could be to visualize spirit in anthropomorphic terms. She knew exactly how she would do it. She could already envision the lines, the play of hue against shape against shadow, memory teased with dream, all mingled in a collage, wholes that made up a bigger whole.

It would start with a thematic similarity to what Franz was doing with desert images; that couldn’t be helped. But she knew that once she began to explore the possibilities of her media and of the forest landscapes against which these ideas would play, she’d develop her own take on the concept. The important thing would be to keep the work natural, to let the images flow out of the subject matter, rather than trying to force her ideas into them the way she had with the paintings for her last show.

She found she was grinning; she could hardly wait to get started in her studio. She’d make some quick sketches in between packing up the work that she was sending down to Danielle, and then next week she’d start in on it in earnest.

Completing a last slow circuit of the beaver pond, she stopped when she reached the dam once more and crunched her way across its interlocking branches, back down onto the frozen surface of the marsh. There she paused to look back at the pond, her head awhirl with riddling images of line and form and color.

Like magic, she thought. It had all come to her just like some faerie gift.

She started to turn away, then paused again, head cocked as an odd sound broke the stillness.

A baby, she thought. That was a baby’s cry. What was a baby doing out here . . .?

She heard it again, the long wailing cry of a child. Hungry. Or in pain. Needful. Not so much demanding as forlorn. It came a third time, then the sound faded.

Slowly Eithnie shook her head. It couldn’t have been a baby, not out here, deep in the bush, this late at night, the air so cold you could see your breath. It had to have come from an animal. She’d heard raccoons make a sound like that once—outside of her cabin early this summer.

She listened carefully, but the child’s cry wasn’t repeated. Nor was there any other sound except for that of her own breathing and the rapid drum of her pulse in her temples. She was alone, the night was still, and nothing was any different, except everything had changed. The shadows were ominous, the moon not quite bright enough to pierce and unravel their potential dangers. The sense of discovery and the good feelings that had filled her just a few moments ago were now gone, had fled inexplicably into the darkness.

Eithnie turned to go but lost her balance, falling into a small stand of closely bunched marsh grass. A hare that had been burrowed in the middle of it rose up as she sprawled on top of the grass. It was already in its winter coat and exploded into motion, its snow-white fur startlingly bright against the dark background of the frozen marsh. For one moment, just before it vanished, she thought she caught a glimpse of a stickman’s features where the hare’s should be: twisty wood, gnarled cheekbones and chin, eyes slitted and feral. The moment passed and the hare was just an animal again, bolting for safety.

Eithnie threw herself back from the little creature, flailing her arms about as she tried to regain her balance. Her heart lodged in her throat, although she knew she was in no danger. Sitting up, heartbeat still drumming in double time, she watched the hare disappear into the wood.

She found herself remembering an evening this past summer, walking out in the fields behind Joe’s farmhouse and hearing a fox kill a rabbit. The sound it had made had been like a baby’s cry as well and she would never have known what it had been if Joe hadn’t been there to tell her. That might be what she had heard tonight. Not raccoons facing off with each other, but the sound of some poor little bunny who had gotten a worse shock than having a woman fall upon its hiding place, who had gotten itself killed. Died with a sound like a baby’s cry escaping its throat.

Eithnie pushed herself to her feet. Another memory was floating up out of the clutter of her mind’s attic now. As soon as she recognized it, she tried to push it away, but she was already too late. It lay there in her thoughts, called forth by thinking of babies and dying, a piece of the past that she’d never been able to let go of, try as she might. It stuck to her like a burr—no, like one of the Sonora’s cholla thorns. It leapt into mind, drawn by the heat of a thought that came too close, and then worried its way deeper and deeper under the skin.

Eithnie’s enjoyment of the evening had completely fled now. Skating home across the marsh, she knew with the prescient certainty of far too much previous experience that she was going to have awful dreams tonight. She could try to stay up, drink strong coffee and busy herself with a hundred and one things, but it wouldn’t do any good. Eventually she’d have to sleep and sleeping, she’d dream.

And when she finally stumbled into the landscape of dreams, the past would be there, waiting for her.

EIGHT

| Dreamtime

She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t keep the baby. She’d left Jimmy because he’d hit her and she would never go back. He’d make a terrible father, and she was afraid she’d make a terrible mother herself—at least in this circumstance. She couldn’t imagine going to term and then giving the child up for adoption either. The third option was to get an abortion and that was something she couldn’t face; not now. Maybe never.

God, she’d really messed things up. How could she have been so stupid? So much for the rhythm method. She wasn’t a wild teenager anymore, she was almost thirty. She was supposed to have her life together by now. Instead she was still scratching out a pretense of a living as a painter, just barely making ends meet on the wrong side of the poverty line. And now she was pregnant. Just like a Tuck. Living hand to mouth in a cheap Vanier bachelor apartment with always more going out than was coming in.

Broke, unmarried, pregnant—par for the course for a Tuck, that’s what her mother would say. Eithnie could show her the good reviews her work was starting to get, but her mother was more concerned with the ring finger of her left hand, waiting for the sparkling diamond to show up.

So she couldn’t go to her mother now. Getting pregnant would be the final nail in the coffin of their failing relationship. And she couldn’t tell her father either. He might be more supportive insofar as her art and life-style were concerned, but she didn’t doubt that he’d draw the line at having an unwed mother for a daughter as well.

She just didn’t know what to do. It was hard to talk about it with anybody because she didn’t know what she wanted. That was the first thing Clara said when she finally told her friend. “What do you want, Eithnie?”

For it never to have happened. Never to have met Jimmy Martin, never to have fallen for him, never to have found herself carrying his baby.

She never even told him about missing her period. About buying one of those stupid little pregnancy tests at the pharmacy and having the wrong color come up. About finally going to the doctor. She didn’t want anything more to do with him. She’d read in the papers a few years ago about some woman in Hull, or Montreal, whose boyfriend took her to court so that she couldn’t get an abortion. She could see Jimmy doing that. Not because he’d want a child but just for the meanness of it, just for what it would put her through.

She didn’t know that she even wanted an abortion. But did she want a baby? How would she support a child when she could barely support herself? She agonized over it for weeks, paralyzed, unable to make any decision, avoiding everyone she knew, holing up in her apartment. All she could muster the energy to do was to stare out the window at the brick wall of the neighboring building across a bleak, narrow alleyway. And then the decision was taken away.

She woke one night in a cold sweat, her body cramped with pain. She couldn’t think straight, she couldn’t see properly, she could barely crawl across the bed to the phone and dial 911.

Everything after that was a blur, with flashes of coherence: coming down the stairs on a stretcher, inside an ambulance with the siren bleating, waking on a gurney in the emergency room and hanging on to consciousness long enough to grab a nurse’s hand but fading out before she could ask him what was the matter with her.

Later there were faces-, nurses, doctors, strangers, then finally Clara, looking down at her. She was on a bed, weird sounds in the room, electronic beeps and urgent voices that didn’t sound quite human, like they were slowed down or speeded up, or both, and then the pain drove her away again.

She never thought about the baby. She never once put two and two together until much later when the doctor was talking and then the only word she heard was “miscarriage.” He was telling Eithnie that she’d lost the baby and all she could think was, How can I have lost her, I never even had her, before drifting back into unconsciousness.

And then she was standing in a vast field. For as far as she could see the grass was littered with bones. She heard the sound of a baby crying. She knew her child would have been a daughter, and she was now lost in that field of bones and Eithnie had to find her. If she did, she could still save her. She could still change the past and the child would grow to term and when she was born she would be Eithnie’s child. There wouldn’t be any of Jimmy in her.

But Eithnie never found her. She never moved. She stood there paralyzed, shaking and sweating until she heard a low wailing sound that she finally realized was her own voice, moaning, rising up from deep in her chest until it was a scream, but it didn’t have any sound. It was only in Eithnie’s head, an awful searing shriek that seemed to go on forever until she couldn’t bear another moment of its—

Eithnie sat bolt upright, her limbs trapped in the tangled folds of the comforter and sheets, panicked and sweaty until she realized it was just the dream again. She’d finally stumbled off to bed at four o’clock in the morning because she couldn’t stay awake a moment longer, and then the dream had come, just as she’d known it would.

The dream.

Her heartbeat started to calm as she held on to that thought. It was just a dream. The field of bones wasn’t real. She’d never had a baby. Just the idea of a baby that grew for three months inside her until something went wrong and her body rejected it—no, her. Rejected her. The child would have been a girl.

She put her hands against her face. Her cheeks were wet with tears. She could cry forever. She could—

She suddenly realized that she could see through her hands—not in between her fingers—but right through her palms as if they had become transparent. She closed her eyes but her eyelids had gone transparent as well. Her vision was blurry, but she could see, as though she were underwater, lying at the bottom of the beaver pond, looking up at the sky and the sun through murky water.

I must still be dreaming, Eithnie thought.

But it was a candle she saw, not a sun. It was standing in a silver candle holder on top of the old pine chest at the end of her bed, casting a warm golden light across the comforter. She had to be dreaming because she hadn’t lit that candle.

Except then she finally saw him. Through her closed eyelids, through the palms of her hands. She saw him and she didn’t know what he was.

Dreaming, she told herself. You’re only dreaming.

He wasn’t human. He was like a man, but he was so thin he seemed more like an image filmed through an anamorphic lens. In the candlelight, his skin appeared to be not so much flesh as bark, brown and rough. His hair was long, hanging down either side of a narrow face in uncombed, knotted locks festooned with tiny twigs and leaves and feathers and slivers of mica that caught the candlelight like gems.

He wore recognizable clothes—a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans from Eithnie’s own closet. They hung on him as they’d hang off a scarecrow or a stickman drawn by a child.

Stickman, she thought, and then she knew that sitting in her rocking chair, watching her, was another faerie visitation.

His eyes were so dark she couldn’t tell what color they were. The tips of his ears stuck up through the matted thatch of his hair like stiff leaves. Eithnie found herself wanting to touch his skin, to see if it felt like bark as well. She wasn’t scared. She wanted to hang on to this dream. She wanted to get a piece of charcoal and capture the angular lines of his features, the way her clothes hung from his bony limbs, the dark enigma of his eyes, the strange forest of his hair.

He was so alien she knew she shouldn’t be feeling what she was feeling, but she couldn’t help herself. She was attracted to him. An odd sort of attraction. Like walking in the woods and coming across a view so perfect, it took your breath away: the meadow lush with grass and thick with wildflowers; every tree in just the right spot, with just the right spread of foliage; the sunlight coming down through their boughs in that indescribable, flawless green you can never quite mix on the palette. A deep yearning rises in you then, a rush of blood in your temples, a quickening of the pulse. You want the feeling to turn into something physical so that you can wrap your arms around it and just hold it.

That was the emotion the stickman woke in her now. A glamour had come over her. Eithnie wanted to reach out and pull him towards her, touch his flesh with her transparent hands. She concentrated on her breathing and slowly the sheer presence of the uninvited visitor faded down to a level she could handle.

She felt flushed all over. She knew he could see it and she knew he knew why. She cleared her throat, embarrassed.

“Can . . . can you talk?” she asked him.

He smiled. His lips were so thin they might as well have been nonexistent.

“Can you breathe?” he said and she got the point.

His voice was like the masked woman’s: thick with an accent Eithnie couldn’t place, melodious and husky. That and the eyes were all they had in common. The masked woman’s body had been full under the folds of her brocade, her features foreign, but not unhuman; he was like a cedar fence, rearranged into man-shape and given life, a mop of dark moss on top of his head to complete the pretense.

“What are you doing here?” Eithnie asked.

Bone-thin shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug as eloquent as any of Joe’s.

“Watching you,” he said.

“Why?”

It wasn’t so much a conversation they were having as an interview gone all stiff and wrong.

Another shrug. “I saw you skating and followed you home.”

Followed me home and watched me through the windows, for how long? she thought. And for how many times before?

“Do you live out there”? she asked “By the beaver pond?”

“No. I was guarding Broceliande. Her baby died stillborn, but she continues to carry it around as though it’s only sleeping. In her state, she could easily wander too tar astray. We see enough trouble as it is without bringing more down upon us.”

What he said raised a hundred questions, but Eithnie focused on only one.

“I heard a baby . . .”

“Crying?”

She nodded.

“You heard Broceliande She gives voice to her child’s tears because the dead can’t weep for themselves. It wasn’t always a pond,” he added. “Or at least it wasn’t always so big.”

Eithnie remembered. When she first used to come up here the beaver had only dammed a small section of the marsh; now they had taken up almost half of it with their pond. There were too many beaver for the amount of suitable habitat. They were at the point now where they couldn’t expand any more and they were going to die oft. A friend of Joe’s had been trapping them—better a quick death in a trap than slow starvation, was the way Joe explained. But when Eithnie heard that an otter had gotten killed in one of the traps, she told Joe’s friend she’d shoot him if she ever saw him on her land again. The man didn’t know that she didn’t own a gun, but hadn’t been back since that day.

“Everything changes,” Eithnie told the stickman.

Her uninvited guest nodded in agreement. “Some change is natural,” he said. “The beaver population grows. They flood more land. In time their numbers wane and the pond will grow smaller again.” He leaned forward and his features grew sharper. Other changes are forced upon us and there is nothing natural in them.”

“Like what?”

“Fouled water,” he told her, his eyes slitted and dark. “Fouled air. There are those who foul everything they touch. And now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year ”

“Silences?”

“When species die, leaving a silent space in the worldsong that can never be filled.”

“At least it’s not so bad up here,” Eithnie said lamely, discomfited by what her own species was doing to the world.

And yet even here she had noticed one major change—just over the few years since she first had started coming up to Bouchette. It was the frogs. She hardly ever heard them anymore because, with their sensitive skin, they were the first to be affected by invisible poisons like acid rain. Their populations were being decimated by pollution that came from over the Great Lakes into the waterways of Ontario and Quebec.

She looked at her guest again and considered the strange appearance of his skin. If he was an element of nature, perhaps the poisoned rains affected him and his kind as it did the trees—

And then she laughed. Not because of the acid rain—which was serious and real—but at how she’d fallen into accepting dreamtime as real time, this faerie vision as a neighbor’s visit, discussing local concerns.

“Why do you laugh?” the stickman asked her.

She brought a knuckle to her lips to stifle a giggle.

“I’m sorry. I was forgetting that none of this is real.”

He gave her a puzzled look and Eithnie flushed, embarrassed again. Even if he were a figment of her imagination, within the context of this dream he was real enough—at least insofar as he was concerned.

“You think that you are dreaming,” he said.

“Well . . . yes,” Eithnie replied honestly.

“And that makes me what? A manifestation of your sleeping thoughts? Something drawn up from your subconscious to amuse your mind while your body rests?”

“Something like that.”

And then, unaccountably, she found herself telling him about the ideas that had come to her while she was out skating on the beaver pond. His expression as he listened was unreadable When she was finished, he cocked his head and gave her a feral smile.

“If all this world is a dream,” he said softly “then who is dreaming?”

“Me,” Eithnie said.

“Let us presume that you are awake, that this is not a dream.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Then let us regard it from another perspective: If faerie are created by your dreams, made real by your deciding they exist, then of what do the faerie dream? What have they decided is real?”

“This is too confusing,” Eithnie said.

It was getting bad, she thought when you couldn’t even understand what your own subconscious was coughing up.

“Let me show you what faerie is,” the stick-man said. “Let me show you how real they are, and how they wither and die.”

Eithnie didn’t hesitate She wanted to know where this dream would lead. Getting out of bed, she grabbed the clothes she was wearing the night before and ducked into the bathroom to change. When she came back out. she was halt expecting the stickman to be gone, for the dream to head in some new, unforeseen direction, but he was still there in the rocking chair, rail-thin in the clothes he’d borrowed from her closet.

When he rose from the chair, Eithnie was struck by the relaxed grace of the movement. He might have looked as though he’d been bundled together with twigs and branches, but he didn’t move like it at all. He was like one of her cats—all loose muscles, no tension. Eithnie wondered where the cats were. They usually fawned all over guests. Then she remembered once again that she was dreaming. It was hard to remember. It was so much easier to just slip into the flow of the moment and not think about anything else. Perhaps this was what it was like for Joe. He always lived in the present moment, except he didn’t have to think about it. He just did it.

“You’ll need a warm coat,” the stickman told her.

“Are we going down to the marsh?”

When he nodded his head in response, she heard a sweet, distant jingle and realized that he had little bells caught up in his matted dreadlocks along with all the bits of wood and leaves and seeds and burrs.

She put on a ski jacket and a pair of Ski-Doo boots, muffler, toque, and mittens. The stickman stood waiting in her borrowed clothes, feet bare.

It was cold outside. And dark. The moon had gone down and it took Eithnie’s eyes a while to adjust to the dim lighting. Her companion didn’t seem to have any problem at all; he led her across the field, down the long hill towards the marsh.

“What’s your name?” she asked him as they walked.

He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Albin.”

“I’m Eithnie,” she told him.

“I know.”

He would, she thought.

They had reached the marsh now, slipping and sliding across the frozen surface. She looked at his bare feet and wondered how he could stand going barefoot. He led her over to the cedar swamp, east of the main body of the marsh, north of the beaver pond. The spillover from the beaver pond had drowned a few acres of cedar and all that was left now were the dead trees, poking up out of the ice. They headed in among them, working their way through the snags, twisting around one and then another, until they came to a bit of higher ground made up of a small hummock, round-backed like a surfacing fish frozen in the act of breaking water. The cedars were still alive here, green boughs forming a thick barrier that kept the center of the island private.

It was when Albin stopped that Eithnie first noticed the other stickmen. A dozen, two dozen of them. Some came pressing out from in between the boughs of the island’s cedars. Others were in the trees around Eithnie, so still, their bodies so woody and twiglike, that they were invisible until they moved.

And now, for the first time, Eithnie was frightened. Now she realized why Albin had put on some of her clothes before he talked to her: it humanized him. Made her stop thinking of him as something too alien. It was more “We’re all bipeds here, see I’m wearing clothes just like you.” But neither he nor the stickmen were anything like Eithnie. The attraction she had felt towards him turned to dust in her throat. She still knew she was dreaming, but that didn’t help at all. The dream was just pushing ahead on its own steam now. She had no control. She couldn’t get off. She knew, because as soon as those first stickmen came out of the cedars she did everything she could to wake up, but she was still there.

Looking closer, Eithnie realized that the stickmen were in ragged shape, like children’s toys that have had too much rough play. They were battered, misshapen, with broken limbs or cuts that bled a blood thick as sap. Some were even skinnier than Albin. Some were all body with fingers as long as their arms, others were all head, almost no body.

Tap-tap-tap.

Impossibly long fingers tapped against thighs and forearms and torsos and Eithnie remembered the previous visitations that had sent her scurrying to Arizona. The sound was music without a melody, a rhythm of stick against twig against hollow wood. Like Joe’s shakuhachi—the music was made from the quality of the taps and the silence in between.

They circled around her. coming closer and closer. They moved stiffly, edging closer, as though trying to get her scent, or trying to figure out whether she was dangerous. Or maybe whether she was good to eat. The closest ones plucked at the hem of her jacket. Another one tugged at her toque, trying to pull it off. Eithnie gave him a push and he skidded a few feet away on the ice. The other stickmen backed quickly away, startled by the movement. Eithnie turned to Albin, but he wasn’t looking at either her or the other stickmen. His gaze was on the island.

The woman was there—still masked, all chestnut hair and brocade, sitting on a fallen cedar trunk, holding her book on her lap. No, it wasn’t a book, Eithnie saw. It was a dead child. The woman was rocking a dead child. Eithnie took a half-step forward, but Albin put a hand on her arm to stop her.

“We seldom have children in this place,” he said. “And when they are born to us, they are born dead.”

Eithnie couldn’t speak. All she could do was look at that terrible lifeless bundle that the masked woman was cradling on her lap.

“This child of hers is not the first to die—only the latest,” Albin told her. “The first died seven years past.”

When I had my miscarriage, Eithnie thought.

Her throat closed up, her chest tightened, constricted under the parka. Everything was too hot. She could feel sweat beading on her forehead; her shirt was sticking to her chest and back.

The stickmen were fading away—returning to the island, climbing into the trees, or just standing still and looking like another bunch of branches stuck into the ice. The tap-tap-tap was still there, but fainter now. The sound came from behind the cedars now, until it, too, faded, and finally the only ones left were Eithnie and Albin and the woman. Broceliande.

And the dead baby on her lap. No, Eithnie realized. It was a book An open book. She looked away before she got lost in its pages again, raising her gaze to Broceliande’s masked face.

“You did this to us,” Albin was saying.

Eithnie managed to shake her head. No. It wasn’t me.

But she found it hard to argue. People were poisoning the water, the air. She’d always known that the forest she loved was slowly dying, if not in her lifetime, then in the next. Wildlife and their habitats were disappearing at an alarming rate, taking with them the spirits of the land as well.

“You must remember,” Albin said.

“Remember what?” she asked sharply, finally finding her voice.

She wasn’t responsible for any of this. She loved the forests. It was the fault of others; it was their responsibility.

“You must remember what it is like to have your children die before they are ever born.”

Eithnie flushed as though she’d been struck. “But I . . . I do know . . . .”

Albin’s dark gaze locked on hers and held it for long, breathless moments. She wasn’t hot anymore She was cold. She felt as naked as the stickmen, freezing out here on the ice.

“But you lock it away,” he said finally. “You want to forget.”

He looked away and Eithnie could breathe again. But the chill wouldn’t go away. It was locked into her bones now. marrow-deep, as surely as moments ago his dark eyes had trapped her gaze.

Albin stripped off the shirt and jeans he wore and let them fall on the ice. Naked, he looked exactly like any of the other stickmen. If the others had still been around, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him apart from the rest. There was a gaping hole in his side, wrapped with a moss poultice, leaking thick sappy blood. His upper thighs looked as though they had been chewed on by porcupines. But it was his eyes that tore at her heart. The grief in them. Not for himself, but for the forest. For Broceliande. For the world and what it had lost and what it was losing.

“I . . . I’m sorry,” she said, knowing the words were horribly inadequate.

Albin nodded slowly, then turned away. He crossed the ice to where the masked woman sat and helped her to her feet. Eithnie followed behind, keeping her distance. She saw that the mask was pocked with tiny holes, its edges uneven and rough. The brocade was threadbare and worn through in places. The book had become an infant once more, a small mummified infant. It was stiff and small, a frightening thing, bound about in gray swaddling. It didn’t have eyes, just dark sockets in its sunken features where two eyes should have been.

Broceliande herself—what little Eithnie could see of her behind the mask and hair and folds of cloth—was pale, but her skin didn’t have the ragged texture of the stickmen’s. Her forearms were smooth and rounded, her fingers delicate and perfectly shaped. The eyes watching through the slits of the mask didn’t seem to be quite sane. Yet for all that she was so tattered and threadbare, and despite the vacant look in her eyes, she was still somehow regal, Eithnie thought.

“She was a queen once," Albin said, as though echoing her thoughts. “Her court was a forest, her courtiers the beasts of the land, the birds of the air. Once she held all our histories in her mind. She was the lorebook of this forest, the binding force that kept us hale. And only she has that skill. We are creatures of the present. We can’t remember as she could. Without our history, our safeguarded past, there is no connection to our future. We are cut adrift in time. We are fading, almost gone."

What he was saying struck a familiar chord, but Eithnie couldn’t quite put a finger on where she’d heard it before.

“I want to help,” she told him. “How can I help?”

“She is lucid at times,” he went on, either not hearing Eithnie, or else ignoring her offer. “But rarely.”

Eithnie looked at the tattered figure of Broceliande, cradling her dead baby as though it were still alive. This wasn’t one of the lucid times. But Eithnie remembered the earlier visitation. Broceliande’s clothes hadn’t seemed so threadbare; she had been regal, mysterious, awe-inspiring, dangerous. Not an object of pathos.

“She looks different from before,” Eithnie said, talking about the masked woman as though she wasn’t present. Whatever was left of Broceliande’s mind was far away at the moment. She wasn’t looking at Eithnie anymore with those not-quite-sane eyes. She had bent over the withered infant on her lap, crooning tunelessly to it.

“She’s changed,” Eithnie added when Albin didn’t reply.

Albin nodded. “When you saw her before, she was in one of her lucid moments. They grow more rare.”

“She seemed like she wanted something from me.”

“Yes,” Albin said simply.

“I do want to help. Just tell me what I can do.”

Then Eithnie remembered how she’d fled to Arizona Broceliande had come to her, spoken to her, and Eithnie had taken oil, scared witless Something in Albin’s features told her that he was remembering the same thing.

“I’ll make up for running away,” she said.

Albin shook his head. Look at us Look what we have become. It’s too late tor the spirits of this forest now I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen.”

Eithnie wanted to protest but what did she know about faerie needs’? She couldn’t stop the acid rain from falling. She couldn’t stop the forest from dying any more than Broceliande could have stopped her child from dying.

Albin gave Eithnie a last sad look then he turned and led Broceliande away through the wall of the cedar boughs. One moment they were in front of Eithnie, the next they were gone. She started forward to follow, then hesitated. II Albin had wanted her to come, he’d have asked. Entering the island’s cedar thickets uninvited didn’t seem like such a good idea, not with all the stickmen in there. Who knew what they might do?

And they weren’t just in there, she remembered. She turned away and studied the surrounding area, looking tor movement, tor tree boughs that had eyes and limbs that moved tor stickmen. Instead she saw the glow of a cigarette, up where the land rose a bit going north, a red spot seen through the dead cedar boughs that brightened every time the smoker took a drag.

Truly feeling part of dreamtime, not real at all, Eithnie gathered her shirt and jeans from where Albin had dropped them and walked toward the cigarette glow, weaving a zigzagging path through the dead trees. The chill was still there, deep in her bones, but it didn’t feel physical anymore. It was a cold place in her mind, in her spirit, that she couldn’t touch, couldn’t warm. She didn’t know what could.

She reached the northern edge of the cedar swamp to find Joe Ikeda sitting on a stump. He took a final drag from his cigarette, then ground the butt under his boot. Lifting his boot away, he picked the butt up and stowed it away in the pocket of his jacket.

Eithnie sat down on a fallen snag that lay a couple of feet from where Joe was sitting, holding the bundle of clothes against her chest. It made her think of Broceliande’s dead child. She knew if she closed her eyes, she’d see the field of bones. Maybe it would put her back there. Maybe Broceliande would be there now, too.

She wasn’t interested in finding out, so she looked back the way she’d come. She was deep in dreamtime now, she supposed, because she didn’t even bother to ask Joe what he was doing here. She simply accepted it as part of the way the dream seemed to be unfolding.

“Some night, isn’t it?” Joe said.

Eithnie nodded. She saw a twofold meaning to the simple question- it had been a busy, eventful night, and it was a beautiful one. She agreed with both.

“Saw you down there with the monkeys,” Joe went on. “I’ve never been able to get that close to them myself.”

Eithnie turned to look at him, wondering if that was a joint that he’d been smoking. “Monkeys?”

“Down there in the cedar swamp.” The tone of his voice plainly said that he thought she wasn’t all here.

Eithnie just shook her head. “Monkeys could never survive in this kind of weather, Joe.”

And then she listened to what she was saying. Faerie or monkeys—each was as improbable as the other. Dreamtime, she reminded herself. She was walking in dreamtime now and anything could happen.

“They’re not just any kind of monkey,” Joe said. “I don’t know how they got here, but I’ve seen them before, back in Japan, on the island of Honshu.”

“Monkeys.”

“Macaques,” Joe explained. “Snow monkeys. They’re the ones that were used to symbolize the wisdom of the Buddha, you know? ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’ They can run in troops of up to six hundred and survive a Honshu winter which, let me tell you, can drop up to five feet of snow on them.”

Eithnie thought of the insight that had come to her while skating. Okay, she told herself. Let’s revise it slightly. Perhaps there were . . . spirits, or at least spiritual forces loose in these woods. Primal essences. Who was to say that we wouldn’t perceive them each in our own way? She saw faerie creatures, perhaps because for some reason she was predisposed to seeing faerie; Joe saw snow monkeys because that was what his subconscious would let him see.

“Have the macaques been around a long time?” Eithnie asked him.

Joe nodded. “I’ve been watching them for years.”

“Well, how come nobody else knows about them?”

“Who says they don’t? Maybe they just don’t talk about them.” Joe got up and stretched. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I’m heading home.”

This was so Joe, Eithnie thought. He never asked what she was doing here, didn’t ask if she wanted to walk back with him. Whatever happened, happened. Even in her dreams he was enigmatic. She was used to it from him by now, but suddenly, tonight she wanted more. She was scared and cold and she still had a piece of Albin’s glamour stuck in her that had left her with the unmistakable need of physical desire. She just wanted to be held. She just wanted—

But Joe was no more aware of this than he ever was of human feelings.

Call him back, she told herself. Make a move, take a risk.

She wanted to, but the words stuck in her throat. Instead she was silent as she crossed the ice and ran to catch up to him. They didn’t talk as they walked back through the frozen marsh together.

When they reached the bottom of the field that went up the hill to Eithnie’s cabin, Joe gave her a wave and continued on his way. She watched him for a few moments, then headed up the hill. When she opened the cabin door she startled Tizzy, who was sleeping on the throw rug in front of it. He started to bolt outside, but Eithnie didn’t want him out tonight, not even in the dreamtime. She grabbed him just as he was dashing out and hauled him back in, shutting the door with her foot. Tizzy gave her mittened hand a swat and sulked off to a spot in front of the stove, where he turned around twice and lay down. Long before she’d shed her boots and jacket, he looked as though he’d been sleeping there all night.

Eithnie went upstairs, shed more clothes, and finally blew out the candle that was still burning in its holder on the chest at the end of the bed. She gave the rocking chair a glance, then crawled in under the comforter.

This was the weirdest dream she’d ever had, she thought as she was lying there. So much of it was so . . . so ordinary. Getting dressed, getting undressed, walking around, stopping Tizzy from dashing outside for the night. She found it particularly odd to dream of lying in her bed trying to fall asleep. The last thing she remembered was something Albin had said to her before they set off on their trek into the cedar swamp. As she was drifting off, she wondered: What do faerie dream of?

NINE

| Chopping Wood

Eithnie’s dream stayed with her long after she woke the following morning. Like most people, her dreams were often vivid upon waking, but all too soon details would fall by the wayside, the dream itself fading except for a hazy, rather general recollection that carried none of the true power and resonance one experienced in the dream. But as she stoked the fire, fed the cats and let them out, sat down with a coffee, and looked out a window over the marsh, the details of what she had dreamed last night only sharpened.

She remembered the names. Albin. Broceliande. She could remember their features. In fact . . . She picked up a piece of paper that she’d covered with calculations yesterday when she was trying to come up with prices for the paintings she was taking down to Ottawa. Turning it over, she used a ballpoint pen to quickly sketch Albin in the clothes he’d borrowed from her; the stickmen tapping their too-long lingers against their bodies; Broceliande cradling her dead baby.

And Joe. She’d dreamed of Joe, too.

She set the pen aside. She didn’t need to sketch Joe. There were dozens upon dozens of studies and finished paintings of him lying around the cabin. A watercolor portrait of him was going down to the gallery at the end of the week.

Thinking of Joe reminded her that, what with talking about macaques and all, she’d never gotten around to asking him about the fetish pouch she’d found when she got back home from Arizona. And then she laughed. She’d forgotten to, yes, but like the faerie visitation, that part of the night was also just a dream. Whatever answer he might have given her wouldn’t mean much in the waking world.

Rising, she poured herself another cup of coffee, then fetched the pouch from the drawer where she’d put it away. Maybe she’d ask him this morning, she thought, fingering the fetish objects inside through its soft weasel fur. She could use a little morning outing before she got back into the deadly chore of sorting and matting and framing again. She sipped her coffee and admitted to herself the real reason for dropping by Joe’s cabin. She missed him, plain and simple. After last night’s dream, she wanted to see him in the flesh.

She laid the bag down on the table and took her coffee upstairs. The stove was putting out a good heat by now, but she still felt strangely chilled as she took a quick shower and dressed. Details from the dream returned: how the coldness had lodged inside her when Albin told her about Broceliande. And how she’d felt when Albin was sitting there at the end of her bed. . . .

Watch it, she thought, or you’re going to start believing it all really happened.

When she came back downstairs, the weaselskin pouch caught her gaze and she found herself considering how it was more likely that Albin had left it, rather than Joe.

Stop it, she told herself.

But that was it. Before she did anything else, she was going to have a talk with Joe. Collecting the pouch from the table, she stuffed it into her knapsack, bundled up against the cold, and then set off along the dirt road towards Joe’s cabin.

The road took her past the farmhouse where Joe had lived before he’d built himself a log cabin over on the west side of the lake. Five hundred yards from the farmhouse, the road split, the left branch leading down to the cottages that hugged the lake’s northeast shore, the right continuing on to Joe’s place. A half mile past the split, she came to where Joe’s pickup was parked under a large pine. From here it was another quarter of a mile by foot, following a narrow track that traced the contours of the lake’s western shore.

She knew he was home when she heard the steady thunk of his ax, the sound traveling to her long before she reached his cabin. The woods were so quiet that the noise carried for miles. When she finally came in sight of the cabin, she circled around back and found him by the woodpile, chopping kindling. He looked up at her approach, made aware of her presence more through intuition than from any sound she’d made.

“Didn’t think you’d be up so early today,” he said.

She couldn’t help but smile. That was Joe. She hadn’t seen him for weeks, but he acted as though it had only been yesterday that they’d talked on the phone and made plans to track down that cow moose. And of course he wouldn’t say a word about her not being at her cabin when he came by to pick her up.

“What do you mean by so early?” Eithnie asked.

Joe gave her one of his patent shrugs in response. For all the cold, he was stripped down to a long-sleeved undershirt. A strip of cloth with a Japanese print on it was tied about his head, serving as a sweatband. His dark eyes had a mischievous sparkle.

“Considering how late you got to bed last night,” he said, “I thought you’d sleep in until noon.”

“How would you know how late I got to bed last night?” Eithnie asked him, startled.

“Then it must have been your twin I was out in the marsh with last night,” he replied.

Eithnie felt everything inside her go still. Her heart ceased beating, her lungs refused to take in air. Vertigo had her swaying for balance until she edged over to the back porch of the cabin and slowly lowered herself down onto its stairs.

“What . . . what did you say?”

Joe propped his ax up on his chopping block and leaned on the long handle, a puzzled look coming over his features.

“Last night,” he said. “I met you over by the cedar swamp where the snow monkeys were foraging. Then we walked back together through the marsh.”

“You were . . . there?”

“Of course I was there,” Joe said patiently. “But maybe you weren’t—all there.”

He smiled, making a joke of how she tended to space out at times, but it got no response from her. Stepping back from where he’d been working, he embedded the head of his ax into the chopping block and crossed over the yard to sit beside her on the steps.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she told him honestly.

She’d thought she could handle having faerie in the forest in her dreams, in private visitations—not in everyday reality. Broceliande, carrying around her dead baby. Albin. Little faerie men made of sticks and twigs and moss and burrs. It couldn’t have been a private hallucination if Joe had seen them, too. Not as faerie, but as macaques, and that was just as improbable—wasn’t it?

If they were real, then they were really dying. If they were real, then she had really fled when Broceliande came to her for help. If they were real . . .

Eithnie pulled off her knapsack and brought it around to her lap. She fumbled with the simple fastenings until she finally got them open. Joe sat quietly beside her. His presence radiated support though he didn’t move, didn’t put a hand on her shoulder, didn’t speak a comforting word. He took the weaselskin pouch from her when she passed it to him and turned it over in his hands, curiosity plain in his eyes.

“Do you know what it is?” she asked.

“It looks like a skibdagan,” he said. “A medicine bag.”

“You didn’t leave it in my cabin when I was away, did you?”

Joe shook his head.

“Well, then I guess the monkeys did.”

He gave her an odd look, then smiled. “You’re pulling my leg, right? It’s because I never told you about the macaques before.”

Eithnie took the pouch back from him and returned it to her knapsack.

“Not this time,” she said. “I think I’d better go home and . . . and think about this.”

“Eithnie, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I can’t talk about it. Not won’t,” she added when he started to protest. “Just can’t. Not yet. It’s just too weird.”

“But—”

“Maybe I’ll be ready tonight,” she said. Or maybe she’d just check into a loony bin. “I’ll come by.”

As she stood to go, Joe caught her arm. She found herself wanting to lean into him, put her arms around him . . . but she couldn’t do it. The habit of being a solitary person was too strong.

“I’ve never seen you like this before,” he began.

“I’ve never been like this before, but I’ll be all right. I guess.”

She thought of the stickmen, how they had been not just furtive, but feral, circling her like a pack of wild dogs, waiting to sense her fear.

“The macaques would never hurt you,” Joe assured her. “They’re more shy of an encounter with one of us than we are with them.”

Right, Eithnie thought. That’s why she had found one sitting in the rocking chair by her bed, sexual energy coming from him as though the very air he breathed were an aphrodisiac. Right. Real shy.

“I suppose,” she said. He looked so worried that she lifted a hand to his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. The flesh was warm beneath his shirt. She’d never touched Joe before. “I’ll be okay,” she added, suddenly feeling awkward.

“At least let me drive you home.”

Eithnie shook her head. “The walk’ll do me good. Don’t worry, I really will be fine. I just need a bit of time to think some things through, that’s all. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Maybe I should come by your place.”

Eithnie thought of the dark walk from where she could park her jeep beside Joe’s pickup to here. The faerie aren’t dangerous, she told herself, but she wasn’t quite so sure now. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

“That’d be good,” she said. “Do you want to come for dinner?”

“Sure. I picked up some caribou meat from Laura Small when I was out to the reserve a couple of days ago. Want me to bring it along?”

“No.”

It was so hard to concentrate on the conversation when her head was spinning with visions of stick-men and faerie queens cradling dead babies that turned into books . . . and back again. . . .

“I . . . I’ve got plenty of food,” she added.

She started to go, turning back when Joe called her name.

“Take care of yourself,” he told her. His eyes were full of worry.

She nodded, then headed off down the trail again, not even thinking about how odd it was that taciturn Joe who never showed his feelings for other people should be so open with his concern for her.

Remember, Albin had said to her. Remember what it’s like to have your children die before they are born.

She didn’t like to remember those days. But on the walk back to her cabin the memories came back to her and for once she didn’t push them away.

After the miscarriage she really fell apart.

The Weirs saw her through the worst of it. She didn’t know where she’d be without them. But it wasn’t just their support that helped pull her through the grief; it was the Bouchette countryside. The forest. Through Clara and Franz she got back in touch with her oldest and dearest childhood companions: tribes of trees and wildflowers, open fields and closed dells, muddy marshland and birdsong and the chorusing frogs holding their parliament down by shore.

Wild walks. When she was growing up, her parents had lived in a subdivision that lay just off the upper road—Highway 8 running between Hull and Aylmer—as opposed to the lower road that followed the Ottawa River and cut through Deschenes. Subdivision was a bit of a misnomer—at least it was then. There were only seven or eight houses at the time—in an area where there were now some thirty or forty.

All around her house were wild walks—untouched woodland and fields, or farmers’ pastures and croplands that had grown wild again. Partly because there was no one else her own age living nearby, but mostly because she just loved it, Eithnie spent as much time as possible outdoors; spring and summer, autumn and winter. Each season was marked with its own magic and she came to know them all. Which flowers she could expect as soon as the frosts left, which came in late summer; which weeds retained their personality when dried and which just kind of withered away; which trees grew in what kind of soil, which budded first, which lost their leaves last.

It was all magic, from the mouse tunnels she could follow through the dried grass in the spring to the time a great snow owl landed on an old stump not twenty yards from where she sat, from the russet glimpse of a fox spied across a field to the sparrows that would eat crumbs from her packed lunches right out of her hands.

And always the trees, ancient tribes that walked across the land, the slow stately march of forests sending their outriding scouts ahead of them to explore the fields through which they would eventually tread. Eithnie felt a special kinship with them that she had never been able to explain, as though she, too, were part of the tribe, just a little more mobile, that was all.

That idea of tribes of trees came to her from that favorite childhood story of hers—a book she still had on her shelves today: The Wandering Wood, written by a contemporary of George MacDonald’s named Matthew Reynolds and illustrated by the British watercolorist Ellen Wentworth. It told the story of a little girl who was befriended by a tribe of birch trees and how she helped them move from the forest where they lived to another farther away from the woodcutters who threatened them. It was full of all sorts of amazing little details, wonderfully realized in Wentworth’s watercolors. Reynolds had based the society of his tree tribe on bees; there was a queen tree and her male followers. For the tribe to be settled elsewhere a daughter seed from the queen tree was required. It had to be planted in the new forest and then eventually the tribe would grow up around it again. The saplings had to be protected while they grew, while the tribe slept, and that became the little girl’s responsibility. It took years, of course, for the trees to mature, so she was an old woman by the time the birch queen and her followers were grown enough to thank her.

Wentworth’s paintings of the tree creatures were the first time Eithnie had seen faerielike creatures depicted in a way that wasn’t saccharine. Later she realized that they were similar to Arthur Rack-ham’s goblins and gnomes; the birch queen herself would have rivaled Rossetti’s My Lady Greensleeves, or any portrait of Titania. Magical though the central figures were, what Eithnie loved most about Wentworth’s paintings were the background details—the lovingly rendered woods and fields, wildflowers and hedgerow weeds, the foxes and starlings and mice and owls. Trying to copy Wentworth’s paintings, and then her style in the field, was what first put a brush in Eithnie’s hand.

Rambling and painting. By the time she was in high school, she longed to have lived in an earlier time, to have a patron support her art, to be a naturalist and a painter and not have to take part in what went on in the rest of the world.

Her parents were always bemused by these interests, but they didn’t try to cure her of them. Her quirks were pretty easy to take when they looked around at how their peers’ children were making trouble with drugs and teenage rebellions—not to mention the Tuck cousins in their trailers and shacks up along the old Mountain Road, forever getting arrested for everything from car theft to breaking-and-entering.

Eithnie’s parents didn’t like her to wander around at night, so she always waited until they were in bed before she crept out the back door or opened her window and popped the screen to go out for a midnight ramble. She was no longer surprised by how many of the artists and writers she knew who had had a similar habit of night wandering, a shared quirk of character that helped her recognize kindred spirits when she met them. The varied hues and combinations of the sun’s light was what infused her paintings, but muses walked the night.

Just as every season put its own mark upon the most familiar stretch of woodland, so did the same area become two different worlds, depending on whether she visited them during the day or the night. Eithnie liked them both pretty much equally. If she leaned a little more favorably towards the night, it was only because it was quieter and there was less chance of running into someone else. Her solitary habits had begun in those childhood rambles, and she found herself retreating back to them that summer after the miscarriage.

She came alive again in those forested hills. She spent much of every weekend hiking about through the fields and woods. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed that communion until she got it back. Too many years of living in the city, of city streets and small apartments, the lofts and studios of friends, smoky clubs and late nights, all had taken their toll. The city blurred her memory, her perception. The city was such an insidious mistress. Bit by bit, she stole away Eithnie’s desire to be anywhere else until she forgot she had ever lived any other way, until she forgot there was more to the world than concrete and glass and steel.

Eithnie went up to Bouchette with the Weirs as often as she could—this was before they had built their cabin, before the Kinsellas had built theirs. They camped out in tents on the hilltop looking over the marsh, the same hilltop where eventually the cabin she would someday own would stand. She spent almost every weekend through the summer up there, rain or shine. The long rambles in the woods, all together, or solitary, brought healing and, eventually, a measure of forgetfulness.

Eithnie was painting again, Clara was writing poetry, Franz and Ruth were making sculptures, John was drawing up blueprints for the cabins they were going to build. They all took turns looking after young Kelly Kinsella, carrying her around in a backpack, and when it was Eithnie’s turn it wasn’t a chore. By the time that summer drew to an end, Kelly’s chubby baby face seldom reminded Eithnie of what had died, but celebrated life instead.

Eithnie still visited the field of bones in her dreams, but the nightmares were spaced further and further apart as her healing progressed. It was partly because of Clara and Franz, because of who they were, because they could make her feel like family while allowing her the solitude she needed, the thin wall that kept people from coming too close. It was partly the Kinsellas, too, who didn’t know about the miscarriage then, who just accepted Eithnie as she was. It was partly working again in oils and water-colors, pencils and charcoal, rediscovering not just her art, but her vision, her own way of seeing and assimilating everything around her. And it was partly Kelly, who taught her not to be afraid of children.

But mostly it was the land itself. The marsh that was changeless from one day to the next, yet was never quite the same. The granite-backed hills and the thick forest. The lake up past Joe’s farmhouse where the springfed water ran cool and deep even on the hottest day, and the smaller lake up in the hills above the marsh, a true secret place.

This was sacred land, Eithnie realized, and she missed it when she was away. But she could handle the city again. What she couldn’t handle was her family.

She had never told her parents about the miscarriage and the secret drove a deeper wedge between them. Eithnie wished she could have a relationship with her blood family the way she’d come to have with the Weirs, but she couldn’t seem to reach out to them for it, and neither could they. She’d been ready to give up altogether until that day she’d met Sharleen outside Danielle Lachance’s gallery in the market and found herself agreeing to go have lunch with her.

As they got a table in the open-air cafe behind the gallery, Eithnie thought about the baby Sharleen had given up in high school. Sharleen was talking animatedly, hands cutting the air between them to accentuate what she was saying, and Eithnie realized that her own hands were laid protectively across her belly.

“I bought one of your paintings,” Sharleen was saying. “I couldn’t believe you’d done it—I mean that, you know, my own cousin was selling paintings, but how many Eithnie Gerrows are there going to be in this world and you were always drawing, right? Even when we were going to school.”

Eithnie found it very odd that a Tuck would have the money or the inclination to buy a painting, though if any of her family would, it would be Sharleen.

“Which one?” she asked.

“It’s called ‘The Heron.’ It took me three paychecks to be able to pay for it, but the woman in the gallery was really nice about it and held it for me until it was all paid off.”

Eithnie was flattered, and impressed. She couldn’t think of one member of her family, either a blue-nosed Gerrow or a white-trash Tuck, who had ever expressed any interest in the arts.

“I really love it,” Sharleen went on, “but I have to admit that I don’t get the title at all. I’ve looked and looked and I can’t find a heron anywhere in the painting.”

She was talking about a piece Eithnie had painted during what she thought of as the “summer of her discontent.” It was of the marsh, looking down at it from where she pitched her tent. Twice a day a heron had cut across the horizon—midmorning it flew over to the lake, midafternoon it returned to its nest in the marsh. The heron wasn’t in the painting, but Eithnie could no longer look at the marsh without thinking of it. Hence the title.

She explained this to Sharleen, but wasn’t sure she’d gotten it across; all her cousin said in response was, “Neat.”

There was a momentary lull. Eithnie caught Sharleen eyeing the waiter’s rear end as he took an order from the next table over, and she had to smile. What she’d always liked the most about Sharleen was that she was completely up-front. There were no hidden waters; you never had to second-guess what she was saying. What you see is what you get.

“So are you still, uh, dancing?” Eithnie asked.

Sharleen grinned. “You mean stripping?”

Eithnie nodded.

“No, I gave it up. Remember the last time we ran into each other? I guess it was Christmas Eve on the Mall, a few years back.”

“Sure.”

“I was still living with Codie,” Sharleen said. At Eithnie’s blank look, she added, “That guy who got busted with my brother, back in sixty-nine, remember? I was complaining about wanting more out of life, and you told me that the only limitations we have are the ones we make for ourselves.”

Had she said that? Eithnie thought. She couldn’t remember.

“Well, I took what you said to heart,” Sharleen went on. “I dumped Codie, quit stripping, and went back to high school—and let me tell you what a weird trip that was. But I hung in there and after I graduated, I actually got a for-real job. It’s no big deal, just a clerk position in the government, but it’s better than any kind of job I ever had before. Pay’s not near as good as stripping, but I feel one whole lot better about myself.”

Sharleen gave her Gerrow cousin one of the toothy smiles that made Eithnie want to ask why she didn’t take up modeling. Some toothpaste company would pay a fortune for the use of that smile.

“And I’ve even got a straight boyfriend,” Sharleen added. “His name’s Tommy Heringer and I don’t think he ever had a detention in school, never mind done any time.”

“I’m glad you’re happy,” Eithnie said, smiling herself. And she was.

Sharleen was a perfect example of how wrong Eithnie’s mother could be. She’d dismissed the Tucks since she’d married and fled the family fold. She’d labeled them all as worthless. But if that were true, what did she see when she looked in the mirror? Eithnie always wanted to ask. No matter how much she pretended it wasn’t true, she was still a Tuck. Perhaps she feared, deep down, that everything she’d gained for herself could be taken away, finger-snap, just like that, and she’d be back to living in some shabby little trailer again.

“And I owe it all to you,” Sharleen was saying. “You really turned my head around that day.”

Eithnie brought herself back to the conversation and shook her head. “You did it yourself.”

Sharleen disagreed. “I don’t know why what you said made any difference, when a hundred other people have tried to tell me the same thing at one time or another, but that day it really stuck. I just couldn’t get it out of my head and I knew that if I was ever going to try be like the people I admire, I had to do something right then and there.”

“But nobody’s words could do it for you,” Eithnie said. “It was your effort, your wanting the change badly enough.”

“Whatever,” Sharleen said, but she had a smile that told her cousin she still thought differently. “So what’s going on with you?” she added. “When I bought that painting of yours, the lady in the gallery said you hadn’t been producing much work for the first part of the year. She said that the one I bought’s the first you’ve done in a long time.”

Eithnie started to hand her the casual line she’d been answering that question with, but the words wouldn’t come. Looking at her cousin, she didn’t see white trash like her mother would have done, she saw family— maybe the only family she had, or at least that she could relate to. She found herself spilling the whole sordid story: Jimmy, his violence, the pregnancy and all.

“Jesus,” Sharleen said when Eithnie paused for breath. “That must have been really tough for you, what with the way your old lady was always on at you about us damn Tucks.”

When Eithnie started to talk about the miscarriage, Sharleen reached across the table to take her hand. Eithnie wondered if her cousin realized how much this was like a replay of that moment in the hospital when Sharleen had given up her baby, except this time it was Eithnie who was crying and Sharleen who was doing the comforting.

Eithnie told herself then that she wanted to hang on tighter to this closeness she felt with Sharleen, to build on it; but she never did, and neither did Sharleen. Perhaps because their families were so weird that neither of them quite trusted a relationship within their own bloodlines for all that they really did care about each other. Of all that had happened to them in their mixed upbringings, Eithnie thought that legacy of distrust was certainly the saddest.

After that, Sharleen turned up only when Eithnie least expected her. Some five years later she showed up at a community art course Eithnie taught for two semesters at Algonquin before she finally moved to Bouchette. Sharleen produced some of the best work in her class, as much through sheer determination as talent. Eithnie spoke to her on the phone a year later and was delighted to find that she was still painting.

The last time Eithnie saw her was at their grandmother’s funeral at the beginning of summer. It had been a strange experience.

Laurel Tuck had been the only person beside Sharleen that Eithnie knew very well from the Tuck side of the family. Everyone for miles around had called the old woman Granny Wis’om, for she was the resident hillbilly wisewoman everyone went to for cures and poultices and the like. Eithnie didn’t think anyone was really broken up about her death except for Sharleen and herself. She could still remember going up to Granny’s trailer with Sharleen to listen to the old woman’s stories on afternoons when her parents thought that she had volleyball practice.

When the funeral was over, Sharleen had just wanted to go home, but she promised she’d come up to see Eithnie in Bouchette whenever she got a chance. That had been a good five or six months ago, but Eithnie wasn’t at all surprised that her cousin hadn’t come yet. What did surprise her was that Sharleen still hadn’t returned any of her phone calls. It wasn’t so much to do, just to pick up the phone, was it?

Walking back from Joe’s cabin, she wasn’t thinking about Sharleen as she headed up the long driveway to her own place. So it was with real surprise that she saw, first Sharleen’s car—a little red Toyota parked beside her jeep—and then Sharleen herself, grinning at her from where she was sitting on the porch.

Sharleen looked great. Her chestnut hair was still bleached blonde, but it looked natural, tied back in a loose bun with the odd stray strand dangling by her cheeks. She wore a bit of eyeshadow, a bit of lipstick, but they highlighted her good looks rather than hid them. She’d dressed casually in cotton leggings with a black-and-white zebra motif, black winter boots, and a ski jacket that was mostly teal, broken with a medley of appliqued geometric shapes in light gray, magenta, and navy blue.

Eithnie spotted an artist’s portfolio in the back of the Toyota as she walked by. She felt a sense of relief. This was just what she needed. Some down-to-earth company. They would show each other their current work and have a long, normal conversation over a nice hot pot of tea. There weren’t many people more natural and easygoing than Sharleen. Nor anyone less likely to go off on flighty tangents.

The pleasure of seeing her cousin let Eithnie push all thoughts of faerie from her mind. She didn’t even stop to wonder what Sharleen was doing here. She wasn’t going to think about the night when she had called her; she wasn’t going to think about why she had been trying to call her. And most of all, she wasn’t going to think about the two of them sitting in Granny Wis’om’s trailer all those years ago, listening to folktales and tall yams that Granny Wis’om insisted were the truth.

TEN

| Granny Wis’om

If you don’t come up here and give me a hug,” Sharleen said, “I’m going to kick your butt.” Eithnie laughed. She stepped up onto the porch and the two women hugged. The pressure of her cousin’s arms around her drove away the last of the sense of dislocation that had been plaguing Eithnie ever since she’d left Joe’s.

“You’re looking great,” Eithnie said as she stepped back.

“Yeah, well, you’re not all that shabby yourself. Maybe there really is something to this fresh country air I keep hearing about.”

“Jeez, there’s hope for you yet. What’re you doing up here?”

“You did say come any time.”

“I know, but—”

“You just never expected I’d take you up on the invite, right?”

“This is true,” Eithnie said. “But I’m so glad you did come. Surprised, but glad.”

“Well, I got your messages,” Sharleen explained, “but I was out of town when you called, so I couldn’t get back to you. I was going to phone you last night, then I just thought, the hell with it. I’ll drive up and really send her for a whirl.”

“How long’ve you been waiting for me?” Eithnie asked. “Why didn’t you just go inside?”

“The door’s open?” Sharleen asked, plainly disbelieving that anyone would go away and leave their doors unlocked when they went out. “When there was no answer, I never even tried. Your jeep was here, so I just figured you’d gone to do whatever you outdoorsy types do when you’re communing with nature.”

“The front’s locked, but that’s because it’s the only way it’ll stay shut. The back’s always open.”

“Turned into a trusting sort, did you?”

“This is the country,” Eithnie told her. “Get used to it. It’s too bad you didn’t know about the back door.”

Sharleen smiled. “I was okay. I was enjoying the scenery, actually.” She pointed down to the marsh. “This is the same view as in ’The Heron,’ isn’t it?”

“Pretty much. I was sitting on that big rock down there when I painted it.”

“You did an amazing job of capturing the feel of it. I think I like the piece even better now.”

Eithnie blushed. She’d never been good at accepting compliments.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get your stuff out of the car and go inside. I’ll make you some coffee or tea to warm you up.”

“I brought up a case of beer,” Sharleen said. “Wanna share?”

“How about chips?”

“Will pretzels do?”

“You’re on.”

Half an hour later they had Sharleen’s suitcase, art supplies, and portfolio transferred from car to house and were slouched side by side on the sofa in the cabin’s sitting area, feet propped up on the coffee table in front of them, beer bottles in hand, a bowl of pretzels between them.

“Now this is the life,” Sharleen said. “Maybe I’ll move up here.”

“I’ve got the room,” Eithnie told her. “But what about—what was his name, Tommy?”

“Actually there was a Ron after Tommy, but right now, I’m single and free.”

“I’m glad you finally decided to come up.”

“I should’ve made the trip a long time ago,” Sharleen said. “But you know how it is.”

Eithnie nodded.

“The funny thing is,” Sharleen went on, “it wasn’t just because you called that I came up.”

Eithnie’s eyebrows rose questioningly.

“Granny Wis’om told me I should see you.”

“But she’s . . .”

“Dead. I know. Kinda creepy, isn’t it?”

Eithnie turned to look at her, sure she was being put on. But Sharleen’s eyes were guileless.

“Are you saying . . . ?” Eithnie began.

“C’mon, Eithnie. You know what she was like. And either she was talking to me, or I’m starting to hear voices and personally, I prefer the idea of ghosts.”

Eithnie remembered how back in school Sharleen was always telling tales about Granny Wis’om’s abilities as the local hillbilly witch, as much for the fun of passing along a chill as for the run-off of respect she received by being related to the old woman. Some of the Tucks might get teased by the more urbane students for being hicks, but not Sharleen and her siblings. Nobody would admit to actually believing the stories, but nobody was quite prepared to take the chance of raising the old woman’s ire either.

“You . . . you really talked to her?” Eithnie asked.

“It’s not like I’m going to make something like that up,” Sharleen replied in her usual matter-of-fact manner.

Eithnie shook her head, beginning to feel as though she’d stumbled into the pages of a supermarket tabloid and was trapped somewhere between “NUN GIVES BIRTH TO CHIMP” and “RAIN OF SHOES ON MIDWEST FARM—AN ACT OF GOD, OR THE WORK OF THE DEVIL?”; just so much newsprint and ink, trying to get back to where things made sense.

Only there was no way back. She had stepped into a world where the impossible had become not only possible, but probable, and her perception, how she saw the world, was now forever changed.

“So what did she say?” Eithnie asked with an attempt at dry humor. “Go look your old cousin up?”

“Not exactly.” Sharleen took a final swig of her beer and stood up. “You want another one?”

Eithnie nodded. “I think I need it.”

Sharleen went upstairs to where they’d put her suitcase. She came back with a book in her hand, stopped off at the fridge for two more beers, and returned to the sofa. She put the book on Eithnie’s lap, a beer on the coffee table by Eithnie’s feet.

“Let me tell you,” Sharleen said as she twisted off the top of her own beer, “I had a bitch of a time tracking the damn thing down, but this is what she told me to bring you, so I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon going from used bookstore to used bookstore until I finally ran it down at Pat McGahern’s.”

Eithnie stared at the book that Sharleen had put on her lap. Matthew Reynolds’s The Wandering Wood, illustrated by Ellen Wentworth.

“I’ve still got a copy of this,” she said. “I’ve had it since I was a kid.”

Sharleen laughed. “Good to know the old witch isn’t infallible.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Beats me. Read it, I guess.”

Read it? Eithnie thought. She twisted off the cap of her own beer and took a long swallow before opening the book. The familiar paintings leapt off the page as she flipped through. She stopped at one that showed the birch queen holding court beside her tree, surrounded by her cavorting followers.

And then she knew. Joe saw macaque where she saw faerie, a particular kind of faerie born from the pages of one of the the most important pieces of her childhood. What she’d done was update the concerns from a woodcutter’s ax to the current threat of ecological pollution.

She looked up from the book to find her cousin regarding her curiously.

“Looks like someone’s actually making sense out of all this,” Sharleen said.

Eithnie met her gaze and asked the inevitable question. “Sharleen, do you believe in faerie?”

Sharleen considered that for a moment.

“I suppose,” she said finally. “At least the kind that Granny would talk about. More like errant spirits, forces of nature that manifest in whatever shape we give them.”

Eithnie wasn’t surprised with Sharleen’s response. She wasn’t surprised that someone who’d spent the better part of her life hanging around biker bars and the like should be talking to her about faerie as though they were real. She was well and truly beyond surprise by now.

Instead she found herself thinking about one Native-American myth of the Otherworld, how everything in it looked like whatever you’d expect to find. Bears met bears, ravens met ravens, people met people. Yet they were never quite the kind of beings we would meet in our own world. The spirit-bears had feather and bead decorations worked into their fur; the ravens wore bandoliers made of dyed porcupine quills. The people were faerie. Like us, but different.

And maybe, if your own soul was attuned to something a step sideways from normal, you’d meet a horse with a man’s torso, a man with goat legs, a woman with a fish’s tail. Or macaques. A troop of the Buddha’s monkeys cavorting through the marsh, doing whatever it is that snow monkeys do. . . .

“Nature spirits,” she repeated softly. “And everyone sees them differently.”

It was more a statement than a question.

“I don’t know,” Sharleen said. “I think it’d depend on what you expect to see, what you’re told will be there.”

“Who talks about that kind of thing?” Eithnie asked. “I mean, seriously.”

“In the old days,” Sharleen said, “the folktales talked about faerie; today the tabloids give us UFO aliens, Elvis. . . . It’s still mythology, just a different point of reference.”

“A crazy one,” Eithnie said, but she made the point half-heartedly.

Sharleen nodded. “But someone’s seeing this stuff. You know everybody’s got a ghost story, or can tell you about something strange that’s happened to them or to someone they know. They might not necessarily believe it, but they’ll still pass it on.”

“But wouldn’t children see more purely?”

“Maybe,” Sharleen said. “Depends on what they know. If they were like us, growing up on Disney every Sunday night, they’d probably still see faerie and dwarves and the like.”

“Talking rabbits. Coyotes with access to mailorder catalogs.”

Sharleen smiled. “But a kid these days is more likely to follow a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle into a sewer than trail after an elf in the woods.”

“And what about invisible childhood friends?” Eithnie said.

“You had one?”

Eithnie thought about the tribes of trees around her parents’ house that she used to talk to, especially her grandmother pine. Had that been her own version of Granny Wis’om, comfort for when she couldn’t make her forbidden visits to Sharleen’s?

“I guess I did,” she said. “But not invisible so much as—she’d just be unrecognizable to anybody else.”

“Same difference.”

Eithnie nodded.

“So why were you asking me about faerie?” Sharleen wanted to know.

“I think we’ve got them up here in the forest.” Eithnie tapped the cover of the Reynolds story. “And just like in the book, they’re dying. A tribe of tree faerie is looking for a new home.”

“That was Granny’s message?” Sharleen asked.

“Only partly. I think she had you bring me the book to remind me—”

Eithnie could see the masked woman suddenly, as she’d been that first time, holding the book rather than her dead child, her eyes sane and sad. Broceliande. Her name was like music. And her voice. She could hear Broceliande’s voice saying, You must remember.

“—to remind me how I can be of help.”

“You’re losing me,” Sharleen said.

Eithnie smiled. No kidding, she thought. How do you think I feel?

“Let me start at the beginning,” she said.

“I don’t know what to say,” Sharleen said when the whole story of Eithnie’s faerie visitations was laid out before her.

“I know,” Eithnie said. “It all sounds so crazy.”

Sharleen shook her head. “You forget. I grew up with Granny Wis’om; I’m the one her ghost decided to visit. And I’ve heard stranger stories.”

“You have?”

“Oh, yes. So I believe what you’re telling me. I just don’t know what you’re supposed to do. Maybe the masked woman’s dead baby is like a seed and you’re supposed to bury it somewhere else to start this new faerie grove?”

“Do you think so?”

Sharleen shrugged. “It makes as much sense as anything else. But what I really think you have to do is wait for them to tell you.”

Right, Eithnie thought glumly. Just wait. Remembering Albin’s parting comment last night—It’s too late for the spirits of this forest now—she didn’t think that waiting would do much good at this point. She’d gotten the distinct feeling from him that her offer of help had come too late and she’d subsequently been written off. The faerie weren’t going to be coming back to her; she would have to go to them. And tell them what?

“The worst thing you can do,” Sharleen said, “is let this take over your life.”

“How can I not let it?”

“But that’s just it. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to put it away and let your subconscious worry about it while you carry on with other things.”

“But—”

“Look,” Sharleen said. “I brought up the makings for a nice Italian dinner. Why don’t you go for a walk and clear your head while I put it together? Just think of something nice, or nothing at all, and by the time you get back I’ll have everything ready. Trust me; you’ll feel a lot better when you come back in.”

Eithnie tried to protest some more, but when she realized that Sharleen wouldn’t be budged, she put on a jacket and went outside.

The wind had picked up and she could smell snow in the air which made her glad that Sharleen was here, rather than on the highway coming up, because when the snow came, it would fall thick and hard. No half measures this far north. They were in for a blizzard and the highway would be a death trap.

By the time she walked to the far edge of her lawn, she was wishing she’d put on something warmer because the wind proved to have a real bite to it. She stood under the tree where she’d discovered a raccoon high up in the boughs this summer, fast asleep. He wasn’t there now.

It was getting dark earlier and earlier as the days sped into December. If she turned, she’d see the lights of the cabin, spilling out the windows; Sharleen sitting at the table by the drawing board, cutting vegetables. But she didn’t turn. She looked down at the marsh.

The first snow started to fall and she stuck out her tongue to catch flakes, just as she had when she was a child. When she talked to trees.

She walked a little farther down, in the field now, weeds and grass brittle under her boots. The snow was falling harder.

“What do you want from me?” she asked the faerie. There was no answer, but she wasn’t really expecting one. She just went on. “If it’s pollution killing you, where can I take you that it won’t?”

Because that was what Broceliande in her moment of lucidity had wanted her to remember. That was why Granny Wis’om had sent Sharleen up with the Reynolds book, though what her grandmother had to do with faerie was beyond her.

They had wanted her to reseed the faerie’s trees. They had wanted her to start a new faerie grove somewhere, to nourish and nurture it, just like the little girl did in The Wandering Wood. But she didn’t know how she could. Where would she take the seeds? Farther north still? How far could she go before the pollution wasn’t so severe, but trees could still grow? And she had to be able to live nearby.

She didn’t know if she was prepared to do that. Sharleen joked about Eithnie being a country girl, but she wasn’t really. She loved it up here, but she liked knowing she was just an hour-and-a-half’s drive away from Ottawa with its concert halls and galleries and art supply shops and restaurants. She didn’t think she’d do well in the kind of complete isolation that living still farther north would bring.

The faerie made a bad choice, she thought. They should’ve picked Joe.

You must remember.

Just because she lived and breathed that Reynolds book when she was young?

You must remember.

Not just the book, but the miscarriage. The child she’d lost. Didn’t they realize that she hadn’t even been sure that she wanted to bear a child? They thought there was a kinship between Broceliande and herself because they’d both lost a child, but it wasn’t the same. How can she lose what she never had?

But she’d keep her now, Eithnie realized. She wouldn’t care about Jimmy, or about raising the infant on her own. She’d just love the child for herself. Ruth’s kids had taught her that she could do that. She wouldn’t be paralyzed again—the way she’d been that summer. The way humanity was paralyzed when it tried to confront the problems of the environment. The way, she realized, she’d been when the faerie first came to her.

But she was ready to help now. She just didn’t know what to do.

The first thing was to find them, she decided. She thought they probably lived up in the hills above the marsh. There was a small lake there, spring-fed just as Lac Caya was, but completely hidden away. It was surrounded by pines. A tribe of pine trees.

Which one was the queen tree? she found herself wondering.

She looked up toward those hills, but then a light on the road caught her eye—a pickup’s headlights coming from the direction of the farmhouse, blurry in the wind-driven snow.

Joe, she thought. She’d forgotten about him coming over for dinner.

She jogged back through the field and snow, hurrying to beat Joe to the cabin.

“Do you have enough for three?” she asked as she burst inside.

Sharleen looked up from where she was stirring pasta at the stove.

“Why?” she asked. “Are you having some faerie over?”

For some reason, the idea of Albin sitting at the table with Sharleen and her, a stickman in his borrowed clothes spooning up pasta and drinking wine, made Eithnie giggle, which started Sharleen off. By the time Joe had parked his pickup and come in, the two of them were holding on to each other in front of the stove, barely able to stand, they were so giddy.

It was the beer, Eithnie told herself, not hysteria. But she wasn’t sure.

It took her three tries to make the introductions.

Joe and Sharleen hit it off immediately, which left Eithnie with an unfamiliar feeling of jealousy until she realized that Sharleen was just being herself. Though in some ways her cousin had changed a great deal since high school, she was still a flirt. But whereas before it had been a come-on, now it was merely a harmless mannerism and Eithnie doubted that any recipient would take it seriously.

Joe certainly didn’t. But then Joe was that rare individual who accepted everyone the same: men and women, rich and poor, French and English, Native and white. He always looked beyond the surface. At the moment, he was simply enjoying the company.

Joe left around ten. “While I can still get the truck home,” he said as he got up to put on his jacket. “Will you look at that snow come down.”

Almost ten centimeters had fallen since suppertime. With the blowing winds, it was already drifting twice that height in places. Eithnie saw him out to the truck, because she could tell he wanted to talk to her, only not in front of Sharleen. She joined him in the cab of the pickup while it was warming up. A moment ago, the wipers had cleared the windshield; now there was already a thin film of snow covering it again.

“So how’re you doing?” Joe asked.

Eithnie thought about her talk with Sharleen and how everything seemed to just keep getting stranger and more complicated.

“Okay,” she told him.

It wasn’t entirely true, but it was close. She hadn’t exactly made peace with how strange her life had become, but at least she could think about it without falling to pieces.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She shook her head. “Not right now.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the macaques,” he said. “I didn’t. . . there just seemed to be something . . . secret about them. As though I couldn’t talk about them, or they’d be gone.” He smiled. “I guess I’m not making a lot of sense, but I don’t know how else to put it.”

Eithnie had never seen Joe at a loss for words. He either had something to say and said it, or kept quiet. Mostly, he’d keep quiet. He was like his shakyhachi music, she thought, the silence in between the notes of conversation.

He sat silent now, and she was conscious of the warmth of his thigh against hers in the cold truck. His eyes on hers were equally warm, as though some wall between them had fallen. Perhaps the wall had been hers and not his; perhaps he’d just been waiting. Now she was ready to take a chance and see just how far a relationship with Joe could go. But first she had to deal with what was waiting for her, down in the marsh.

She startled him, and herself as well, by leaning across the seat and giving him a soft kiss on the cheek. She didn’t wait for his reaction. Instead, she got out of the truck and hurried back towards the cabin, head bent down against the wind. Joe didn’t put the truck into gear and leave until she’d stepped through the door and closed it behind her.

Inside, Eithnie found that Sharleen had taken out her portfolio. She gave Eithnie an arch look, noting the flush in Eithnie’s cheeks.

“You didn’t tell me you had a new man in your life,” Sharleen teased.

“I’m not entirely sure I do,” Eithnie replied, embarrassed.

“Nonsense,” said Sharleen as she pulled a stack of watercolors out of the portfolio. “I saw the way he looked at you. Now, come give me some constructive criticism.”

Eithnie brought some of her own paintings and the two of them settled into artist’s heaven, letting themselves get swallowed in each other’s work. This was just what she needed, Eithnie thought. Knowing that she had a long night ahead and that it was going to get strange, she cherished this stolen harbor of normalcy. It kept her from thinking about faerie and what it wanted from her. It kept her from thinking about the rough stubble of Joe’s cheek and the taste of his skin on her lips.

Sharleen had come a long way since those art classes at Algonquin. The first painting was a study of a row of city backyards, seen from above. The detailing was uncanny. The washes and brush strokes merged into an almost photographic image without ever losing the strengths of the medium, without becoming merely technical and slick. She’d managed to capture the heart and spirit of the city just as Eithnie strove to portray the spirit of the woods.

“This is gorgeous,” Eithnie said.

“That’s the view from my back balcony,” Sharleen explained.

If this was the quality of the rest of her work, it was long past time for Eithnie to introduce Sharleen to some of her gallery contacts. It was time to stop thinking of her as her Tuck cousin, the white-trash girl she used to be, and recognize the person Sharleen was now. A strong-willed, open-hearted woman. A talented fellow artist.

“So how am I doing, Teach?” Sharleen asked.

Eithnie had fallen silent, so enamored by the images before her that she’d forgotten to make any commentary.

“This isn’t student work,” she told Sharleen, “except in the way that any artist worth her salt is always going to be learning.”

Eithnie pored over Sharleen’s portfolio and then the two women turned to Eithnie’s work. Her paintings of the last several months seemed flat and stale by comparison. Could she be as raw and open as her cousin, dare to put so much of her own soul in her work? She wasn’t sure, but sitting there, her hands were itching to try.

The snow let off while the two cousins held their private little art show, but the wind was still whistling outside the cabin. There was almost twice the snow fallen as there had been when Joe left.

Sharleen helped make up the sofa bed, but Eithnie insisted she take the one upstairs.

“I get up early,” Eithnie told her, which was true, but what she didn’t add was that she knew she would be late to bed tonight and she didn’t want to wake her cousin.

Eithnie waited until Sharleen was settled, listening to the water run upstairs in the bathroom, the floorboards creak as she got undressed and ready for bed. When Eithnie heard the bedsprings settle, she slipped on her scarf and parka and took her boots to the back door. She was so busy being quiet about it that she never noticed Sharleen sitting on the stairs, watching, until she spoke.

“You have to be careful,” Sharleen said, and Eithnie just about jumped out of her skin. “Sorry,” she added.

“How’d you know I was going out?”

Sharleen smiled. “It was kind of obvious from the way you’ve been fidgeting half the night. But you really do have to be careful. Faerie aren’t like you and me. Granny always said that they don’t know the difference between right and wrong. It’s not that they’re bad. Or that they’re good. They just don’t think the way we do. Sometimes people who try to help them just get . . . all used up.”

Eithnie didn’t like the sound of that. It made her think of Broceliande, her plump Botticelli figure, and then all those little anorexic stickmen. Maybe Broceliande used them all up; Eithnie couldn’t help but wonder. And now the faerie queen was going to start on her.

“But Granny’s the one who sent you up here with the book,” Eithnie said. “Sounds to me like she wants me to help them.”

Sharleen shrugged. “To tell you the truth, Granny could be a little like faerie herself. She wasn’t mean, she just didn’t always think about people as people. Sometimes it seemed like they were just markers she moved around on a gameboard.”

Eithnie really didn’t want to hear that either.

“I feel like I’m committed,” she said. “Like in those old stories, you know, where someone makes a promise and then they have to keep it.”

Sharleen nodded, understanding. “I’ve been thinking about those names you told me. Broceliande was an enchanted forest in Brittany—one of the places where Merlin was supposedly trapped in a cave or a tree.”

Eithnie had known she’d heard the name before. And now she remembered where she’d heard Albin before. “Albin could be Albion. The old Celtic word for Great Britain.”

“Or a corruption of Oberon,” Sharleen said.

Her cousin’s reading base had gotten a lot wider since the last time they’d talked, Eithnie realized.

“But that’s from Shakespeare, isn’t it?” she said.

Sharleen nodded. “And he got it from some old French romance where Oberon was supposed to be the son of Julius Caesar and Morgan le Fay, born in an enchanted French forest, which brings us back to Broceliande again. It all fits—faerie and enchantment and forests.”

It made a kind of sense.

“So more than just the stories came over to Canada,” Eithnie speculated. “I mean, if we’re going to accept faerie as real, then why couldn’t they have emigrated here just like the people did?”

“That’s sort of a funny concept, isn’t it?” Sharleen said, frowning. “That everything’s got to come from the old country. That nothing can be native.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was reading this article on Charles Loloma—the Hopi artist. He was talking with some white guy who was researching the Mandans, a tribe of Native Americans with blue eyes, light skin, and blond hair. Well, the scholar asks Loloma, ‘Could the Mandans be descended from Welsh or Norse explorers, or some other white race?’ and Loloma says to him, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that possibly the Mandans sailed overseas, started the white race, and then came back home?’ ”

Eithnie smiled. She loved it.

“I’ll ask Albin if I can find him tonight,” Eithnie told her cousin.

Sharleen smiled back at her. She had a Madonnalike quality about her tonight, a faint nimbus of light that seemed to cling to her skin. She seemed like something fey herself—or at least angelic. Eithnie wondered how far off this perception was. She believed in faerie because she’d seen them. What made her cousin believe? How could she be so grounded in reality and still believe in nature spirits?

“I guess it’s because they don’t scare me,” Sharleen said when Eithnie asked her. She shrugged. “What bothers people the most about things they can’t explain is that they know if they do accept them as real, it will change everything for them. They won’t be able to look at the world exactly the same as before.”

Eithnie knew that feeling all too well.

“So the reason they’re afraid to believe,” Eithnie asked, “is that they’re afraid of change?”

Sharleen nodded.

Was she afraid of change? Eithnie thought. Joe’s face came unbidden to mind. Perhaps she was so scared of what changing their relationship might mean that she couldn’t get up the nerve to allow it to happen. She’d kissed him tonight, but she hadn’t had the courage to stay and face him after. . . .

“I guess I know what you mean,” she said wryly.

Sharleen continued to smile at her, looking more angelic than ever. “This thing you feel you have to do, can’t it wait for morning?”

Eithnie didn’t feel able to wait. It was as if the promise was burning inside her and if she waited too long it would consume her. She couldn’t hesitate, be paralyzed again; she had to act. Now.

“Never mind,” Sharleen said. “Just be careful.”

That much Eithnie could promise.

ELEVEN

| Broceliande

It’s as cold as I expected it to be, but unlike the way I was dressed when I was out before supper, this time I’m prepared for it. I spend a few moments clearing the back porch, and then shoveling myself a path to the woodshed. I take down my snowshoes from where they’re hanging on the wall, and bring them back to the porch to put on.

The first little while I feel as though I’m wearing oversize clown shoes on my feet, but I start to get the rhythm after a while. The snow is real fine and granular so I don’t sink very deeply; I skim over the top. I make good time crossing the marsh, but have trouble finding my way up through the woods to the pine grove surrounding the little lake. I take off the snowshoes when I reach the forest; they’re impossible to use as I wind back and forth around clumps of undergrowth and fallen snags. It’s dark under the trees and a surprising amount of snow has made its way down through the cedar and pine cover so that I’m really slogging along, breaking a trail through drifts that rise as high as my knees.

I stop and listen for the tap-tap-tap of faerie fingers, but all I hear is the sound of my own breathing and the rasp of my ski jacket as the fabric rubs against itself. The wind has fallen off and the forest is utterly still around me. When I reach the small lea on the shore of the lake, I stand for a moment to absorb the quiet. It’s as though I’m alone in the world, utterly and completely, but it’s not a scary feeling. It’s very peaceful. Then a clump of snow falls off the bough of a nearby pine.

I start at the unexpected sound, pulse suddenly drumming. When I turn back towards the lake, Broceliande is there.

She’s sitting under the old pine that leans across the lake, her cloak and brocade tangled in amongst its roots as though the folds of cloth have grown from the wood. The snow hasn’t got under this tree yet; the carpet of needles is still thick and untouched by the wet and the cold. She’s not paying any attention to me. Her masked face is lowered.

The book is in her lap. Not a child’s corpse, just the book, its cover a collage of leather and bark, feather and shell. In the center of the cover is the triskelion of three hares’ heads, cleverly rendered so that they’re sharing each other’s ears. Vines grow out from between the pages of the book, dangling down into her lap where they get lost in the skein of root and brocade.

“Broceliande,” I say.

She lifts her head, her gray gaze regarding me through the eye-slots of her mask, her attention caught by the sound of my voice rather than my use of her name.

“Hello,” she says simply.

She lowers her left hand, the one holding the mask. I tense, remembering my earlier fear that when I saw her face, I’d see myself looking back. But the features are unfamiliar.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Eithnie.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“Thank you. It’s from the Irish. My father told me it means ‘kernel.’ ”

“Kernel of what?”

I smile and give her a shrug. “Beats me.”

She frowns and I can see her fingers tighten a little where she’s holding the book.

“Who does?” she asks. “Who would beat you?”

“Nobody,” I say quickly. “I just meant that I don’t know either.”

“0h.”

I can see her relax again. I expect her to ask me what I’m doing here, why I’ve come, to say something, but she just regards me with her peaceful gaze.

“I want to help,” I tell her.

“Help with what?”

I’m confused. She’s not at all the same woman I saw last night, suffering the shock of her child’s death. She seems more like a child herself. I look around for Albin, for any of the stickmen, but we’re alone under the pines.

“A new grove,” I say. “I want to help you move away from here. It’s all the poison in the ground and the water that’s—” I stop myself from saying it’s made her child die.

“I don’t see any poison,” she says.

“But. . . ?”

I look around again, hoping to find Albin peering at us from behind some stand of reeds, but it’s still just the two of us. When I turn back to Broceliande, she smiles at me.

“Hello,” she says cheerfully.

“Hello,” I say back, confused.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“I’m Eithnie,” I tell her.

“That’s a pretty name.”

It’s as though we’re caught in a recording loop, I think. What was it that Albin told me? Once she held all our histories in her mind. Without our history, there is no connection to our future. We are cut adrift in time. We are fading, almost gone.

Without help, they are going to die out; the forest might remain, but without its soul. Yet I can’t help them unless I know what to do. In my old storybook the little girl was given the seed to plant, given the instructions as to what to do, how to protect the new grove. I look at the book that Broceliande is holding.

“May I see your book?” I ask.

She hesitates for a moment. I see something pass across her gaze—an uncomfortable memory, perhaps, a hint of nervousness. I can’t tell. Then she hands me the book.

I hesitate myself, remembering what happened the last time I looked into that book of hers. I sit down on the carpet of pine needles by her knee, take the book onto my lap, rub a finger across the barky indentation of the hare triskelion. And open the cover.

I turn to the first page of the book and it’s blank, as white as the snow that lies so deep beyond the trees that shelter us.

I look up to Broceliande, but she’s gone. The space under the pine is empty, without even an indentation in the carpet of pine needles to show that she was ever there. When my gaze drops back down to the book, I see that all I’m holding is a lapful of bark and pine twigs. I start to brush them away, but find I can’t move. My eyelids feel as though they’ve gained ten pounds and I can’t keep them open anymore. I’m so tired. Can’t move my hand. My arm. Can’t get up.

I know I can’t stay here. If I fall asleep in the snow I’ll never wake up again. But that knowledge doesn’t give me the strength to rise. Instead, I feel myself falling forward onto that soft bed of pine needles, my body rolling to one side, out from under the pine, into the snow. . . .

TWELVE

| Mask of Leaves

Eithnie didn’t know how long she’d been lying there in the snow, but someone was kneeling beside her now, helping her to her feet. She heard her name being spoken.

“Eithnie.”

She couldn’t tell who it was, only that it was a man. She thought it was Joe, then she thought it was Albin. She saw a man with the head of a hare—but that couldn’t be right. Then it was a mask he was wearing, like Broceliande’s, with lacquered leaves of green and yellow. The mask’s leaves stood up around his brow like a crown and made a beard on his cheeks and chin.

He led Eithnie back down through the woods and across the frozen marsh. He took her to where the lights of her cabin beckoned welcomingly in the cold darkness. He left her at the back door, leaning against the wood. She tried to grab his arm to make him stay, but the snow billowed up in a dervishing cloud and took him away like the dream he had to be.

She wanted to follow. She wanted to tear off the mask and find out who was underneath it, but he was gone now and she could barely move. She fumbled with the doorknob until finally it turned; the door opened and then she stumbled inside. The warmth of the cabin hit like a blow. She managed to shut the door and sit down on the stairs, and for long moments that was all she could do.

After a while, she found the strength to strip off her boots and jacket. Sharleen had fallen asleep while waiting up for her return. She left Sharleen on the sofa bed and made her way upstairs. There she stripped off the rest of her clothes and took a hot shower to get rid of the chill. Her body warmed, but there was still a coldness lodged deep inside of her.

What had happened out there by the little lake? Did the faerie again reject her offer of help? Or—she thought of the blank pages in Broceliande’s book-had they lost all memory now so that they didn’t even know who she was or why she was there?

Eithnie pictured the stickmen forgetting they were ever mobile, standing still in the thickets and underbrush and turning into trees as they lost all memory of motion. Maybe that was what had happened to her: she had fallen under that spell of forgetfulness and hadn’t remembered how to move anymore. She could have died if the masked man hadn’t come to help her.

She sat on the edge of her bed, trying to remember the man beneath the mask. She’d thought it was Joe at first, but while Joe could be unpredictable, there was no way he’d have simply left her at the cabin door in such a state. She was sure of that, but suddenly she couldn’t stop thinking of how Clara had joked about him being an aspect of Trickster. That hare face she had seen for a moment—that was another of Trickster’s faces. And Trickster would wear a mask. He could look like a little stickman named Albin. He could look like anything he wanted.

She shook her head. No, that was too crazy. Joe had a kind of magic, but it was only the magic she’d put on him because she. . . Admit it. Because she loved him. We always see the ones we love wearing a dusting of magic.

Eithnie got up and looked out the window. It was snowing again, but lightly now. She turned back to the bed, but knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She paced restlessly back and forth along the length of the room. Finally she pulled one of her old sketchbooks down from the bookcase and took it to bed with her. She sat with a pillow propped up against the headboard and started to idly flip through the pages, thinking about how she had complicated her life—not just this business with faerie, but with inaction, with her inability to change. To open her heart. She knew what she wanted her art to say, but she’d lost track of how to say it. She knew what she wanted her relationship with Joe to be, but she didn’t have the courage to initiate it.

She found herself really admiring Sharleen, respecting her for her courage and her perseverance. She couldn’t think of anyone who had been dealt a worse hand in life, but Sharleen had turned it around and made everything work for her. She was also beginning to understand what Franz meant by metaphor. It wasn’t whether or not she believed in faerie that was important, but what she did with what she’d learned from her experiences with them.

It’s all got to do with memory, she thought. With forgetting, with losing parts of myself.

Eithnie paused over a pencil study that she’d done of a dead hare upon the side of the road going into Bouchette. It reminded her of the decoration on Broceliande’s book and of the masked man who came out of the winter woods and brought her safely home. At first she was just taking in the linework and the shading, but then Eithnie refocused her gaze, trying to take the image in as a whole, the design that it made on the page rather than the parts that made the design.

When the hare lifted its head to look at her, she quickly closed her eyes.

No, she told herself. She refused to complicate things any further. But she couldn’t stop from looking again and then it was too late.

She wasn’t holding her own sketchbook anymore; it was Broceliande’s leatherbound journal lying upon her lap. The vines sprang out from between the pages and entwined themselves around her shoulders and arms, her neck and into her hair. Her bed became the roots of a pine tree, growing into a tangle around her feet and ankles, slowly crawling up her legs. Their strangling touch made Eithnie want to scream, to throw the book down and leap up, to get away. But she couldn’t fight them. Her gaze, her attention, her soul, was bound to the book, ensnared by the book, drawn into the book.

No. Not a book. It was a door, opening and taking her places.

To the marsh, down below the hill, and the air was thick with spirits. They came in all shapes and sizes, from the lily pads and the cattails, the rushes and the old cedar stumps swallowed by water, from the small darting fish and the frogs, the crawdaddies and the dragonflies, from the herons and the beaver, the otter and the snakes, from the slow overflow of the beaver pond and the motionless water of the marsh itself.

This was what she would see if she always saw the world with spirit eyes. Everything alive. Everything . . .

She saw scum form on the water. Fish floating belly-up, others swimming slowly through the depths, their bodies misshapen, extra fins, one eye, three eyes, blind. Frogs died, burned by poisoned rain. A beaver was caught in a half-submerged trap and drowning. Fungus grew rampant on the shoreline trees—mutant strains that blighted the leaves, rotted the wood.

And the spirits. There were so few left, so few willing to abide the wilderness once it was touched by man. They fled, becoming silences in the worldsong of the marsh.

Eithnie looked away. Vertigo touched her.

She was in an ocean, down in the dark cool waters, and here the spirits were born of whale and seal, fish and crustacean, seaweed and rocky shoal, coral and reef. There were mermaids and mermen and spirits that wore shapes reminiscent of rays and starfish and sea urchins and eels.

She saw oil spills that spread swiftly over the water, ensnaring birds, dragging them down into their greasy embrace. Sea otters choked on the black liquid and drowned. Metal radiation canisters popped open on the sea floor and the lower water denizens died by the millions, from tiny one-celled creatures to strange bug-eyed, pale fish.

Spirits dying. So many more silences added to the worldsong. There were great gaps in the melody now. In places, the slow stately tune was no longer recognizable as music.

She looked away. Looked away. But there was no escape.

She was in the desert, out in the wide open wild lands, and here the spirits were born from saguaro and barrel cacti, palo verde tree and cottonwood, from coyote and high-flying hawk, sunning lizard and mule deer, scorpion and spider, from the dry red earth and volcanic rock, from arroyo and scarp.

The slow whimpering death visited here as well. Weather patterns changed and forests of saguaro were caught in frosts that lingered for too long, weakening their resistance to natural perils. Poachers took more than their allotment of deer, coyote died in traps, hundreds of snakeskins dried in the hot sun. Subdivisions choked the desert with concrete and artificial lawns.

She couldn’t bear it.

She was taken from midwestern farmlands to Australian outback, Andean mountaintop to Brazilian rain forest, from Russian steppe to Mediterranean seashore, and always she was surrounded by the bewildering array of faerie, of spirits, until she felt she could see no more, her mind couldn’t hold any more, her own spirit could no longer assimilate the intimate brushings of this whirlpool of faerie presences that teased and touched and tasted the meager supply of her own essence.

She couldn’t change it all, couldn’t help them all, didn’t even know how to help one small faerie grove in her own backyard.

She remembered Sharleen’s warning, Sometimes people who try to help them just get all used up.

She felt them, heard them, breathed them, there wasn’t a pore of her skin that they hadn’t touched; her ears were clogged with the whispering sound of their voices; her lungs were thick with their presence. It was all she could do to slowly . . . painfully . . . micro-measure by micro-measure . . . try to . . . close . . . her . . . eyes. . . .

Her eyelids met and for that one moment Broceliande’s journal lost its hold on her. The respite was a blessing, a gift for which she’d be eternally grateful. The human mind wasn’t meant to perceive the world in its pure spirit form, in chaotic endless motion. Glimpses of it were small treasures, but the whole revealed all at once was far too much. It was not for nothing that shamans had spoken of the Otherworld as a dangerous place. It was said that those who returned from faerie returned either poets or mad.

The vines were still entangled in her hair, the roots wrapped around her legs, but she knew if she could just close the book again, it would lose its hold on her. It would just be her sketchbook once more and she’d be lying in her own bed again. She could feel the pages against her fingers, the rough surface of the cover on her lap. But she couldn’t seem to close the heavy pages of Broceliande’s journal.

And then her eyes began to open again, involuntarily, beyond her control. Her eyes opened wide, and when they did, the faerie were gone.

She was standing in the field of bones.

She wasn’t asleep. This time there would be no escape into waking. This time she was really here, in this nightmare field of children’s bones underfoot, unable to move, unable to do anything except scream. . . .

But then she saw Broceliande, her face a study of anguished torment. Eithnie realized the nightmare had never been hers, although she had been bound to it by her miscarriage.

This was Broceliande’s nightmare. These were the bones of spirits and dreams. Eithnie’s heart filled with such empathy that she found she could barely breathe She started to move towards the faerie queen. Broceliande turned. The gaze that met Eithnie’s was vacant, sanity fled. No wonder Broceliande had no memory. Memory brought her back here, to this landscape of despair.

Eithnie watched Broceliande’s mouth open. She could actually see the scream start deep in the faerie queen’s chest and travel up, seeking release; but it never came. The scream was silent, as Eithnie knew all too well. A true scream might have released her, might break the silent hold with which the field of bones had trapped her. Eithnie tried to scream for her and suddenly she was back in her bed. Broceliande was gone. The book was gone. She was clutching a handful of moss and twigs and wet leaves. Faerie gold, when the treasure found in faerie proves to be just refuse in our world. Then the wet mess shivered out of focus and it was just her sketchbook she was holding, the pages dry, a dead hare sketched out in pencil on the open page.

Eithnie put the sketchbook aside and got out of bed to stand by the window. Fumbling with the latch, she finally worked the window open and let the cold air blow in. Her skin immediately goosebumped. The snow had stopped again. The marsh was frozen and white.

She cried out for Albin. Come to me, she said silently, and help me understand. But the only reply was the soft whispering of a wind as it moved across the logs of the cabin. She stood there for a long time until the cold started to chill her and she had to close the window.

But she wasn’t any warmer with the window closed, the wind shut away. The chill was still lodged deep inside her.

“Albin,” she found herself whispering against the windowpane.

Her breath frosted the window, clouding the glass. She looked for a figure to appear in the snow below the window, a masked figure, a stickman, but Albin didn’t come.

Maybe because he didn’t exist. Maybe none of it did. Maybe she had just gone mad. . . .

But Joe had seen the faerie spirits. And a ghost had sent Sharleen up here to bring her a piece of her childhood.

You must remember.

“I do," she said softly. “I do know what has to be done. I just don’t know how."

Eithnie leaned her forehead against the windowpane and the cold snared her brow.

The problem was too big, and that made you give up before you even started. Her heart felt swollen with sorrow. She wanted to crawl into bed and never get out. She turned slowly from the window, but as she moved towards the bed, she suddenly realized that she was not alone anymore.

He was standing by the door, face hidden behind the mask of leaves. His skin was as dark as the barky skin of the stickmen, but his was smooth. He wasn’t stick-thin either. He had a deep chest, strong arms, narrow waist, muscled thighs. Only his eyes were visible behind the mask and they were familiar to Eithnie, but she didn’t know whose they were. Albin’s. Joe’s. She didn’t know.

She grabbed the first thing at hand to cover her own nudity, even though he was nude himself. She clutched an old flannel shirt against her chest and realized it was the one Albin foraged from her closet last night, the one she’d brought back from the marsh. It still smelled like him. An old smell, mossy. Was it Albin behind the mask?

“What. . . what are you doing here?”

Never mind that Eithnie had been calling for Albin to come to her. She panicked seeing him standing there, naked, wild and beautiful like the forest at its most mysterious.

“You promised to help,” he said simply.

It wasn’t Albin’s voice, it wasn’t Joe’s; more like a combination of the two. She could hear both of them in it, and something else as well, something more primal, as though some hidden secret of the forest was in her bedroom, given shape, given a voice.

“I promised to help,” she repeated slowly.

“The seed,” he said. “You promised to carry the seed.”

And then she understood. Reynolds couldn’t put such a thing in his book; Wentworth couldn’t have painted it. This wasn’t a children’s storybook. It was real. All too present and real.

Eithnie felt coldness inside her. She remembered Broceliande, trapped in that land of despair.

We’re not even the same species, she found herself thinking. It’d be like monkeys and bears. But she had promised to help. She wanted to help. She just hadn’t known what making the offer meant. She remembered how Granny Wis’om had always told her it was dangerous to make bargains with faerie.

Was it even still her choice?

Yes. It had to be.

As she moved towards the masked man, she thought of kissing Joe’s cheek.

Part fox, part hare, part snake, and part grumpy bear, was how Clara had once described him.

As soon as she thought of Joe, she could almost feel him there behind the mask; Joe, who was as much at home in the forest as any faerie could be. The local Green Man of the Woods. She thought how she would give anything to be his Broceliande, his May bride. But this wasn’t Joe. What would happen between Joe and herself if she conceived a faerie’s child?

“Eithnie?” the masked man said.

She heard the question in his voice, the echoes of Albin’s and Joe’s voices and the forest itself that mingled in it. Had some spirit possessed Joe’s body; was he sleeping behind the mask while the forest claimed his limbs?

“Who . . . who are you?” she asked.

“Whoever you need me to be.”

She crossed the room, stepping slowly closer until she was directly in front of him. Still holding the shirt against her chest, Eithnie lifted a hand to remove the mask, but then she let her hand drop before she touched the green and yellow leaves.

She saw Broceliande in her mind’s eye, the way she had been in the first vision—beautiful, wild, untamed.

You must remember.

She thought of the child she had lost, the baby she’d been afraid to admit she wanted.

She thought of Sharleen, asleep downstairs.

Sometimes people who try to help them just get all used up.

I guess it’s the chance I’ve got to take, Eithnie thought as she dropped the shirt and led the faerie man to her bed.

She gave him a name as he lowered his mouth to her breasts.

Who are you?

Whoever you need me to be.

She called him Joe and under the faerie tap-tap-tapping of wood against wood that rose around them as their bodies joined, she heard the deep throaty resonance of a shakuhachi keep time with the quickening rhythm of her own breath.

THIRTEEN

| Butterfly Effect

Eithnie awoke with a sense of peace. The coldness that had lodged inside her was gone. The field of bones was forever fled. She didn’t know how she knew she wouldn’t visit that awful landscape again; the knowledge was simply present, inside her. A gift. A faerie gift that would never change into so much moss and leaves.

She turned her head, but the only trace of last night’s visitor was an indentation on the other pillow. She knew she should be full of questions about what had happened last night, who it was that had come to her bed—especially if it hadn’t been Joe.

But it didn’t seem important. It wasn’t that Joe himself was not important; it was just that she knew what would come would come, that she now had the courage to open a relationship with him and it wasn’t a faerie gift. She’d found this gift within herself.

She lay in bed awhile longer, unwilling for the moment to leave the nest she’d made for herself in its comforter and sheets. But she knew she couldn’t stay in bed all day. Rising, finally, she put on a bathrobe, belting it as she followed the smell of fresh coffee and bacon downstairs.

“I thought this’d get you up,” Sharleen said.

Eithnie smiled and made her way to the table where the coffee pot was sitting. She poured herself a mug and brought it up to her lips, softly blowing away the small cloud of rising steam that rose from the mug. She didn’t speak, not until breakfast was over and the two of them could sit together on the sofa.

“I feel good,” Eithnie told her cousin when she got to the end of relating the previous night’s experiences.

“No wonder,” Sharleen told her. “You got laid, girl!”

“You know what I mean.”

The teasing smile left her cousin’s lips. “Yeah. At least I think I do.” She took a sip of her coffee, then regarded Eithnie curiously. “Who do you think it really was that came to your bed last night?”

Eithnie shrugged. “Oddly enough, I don’t feel as if it matters.”

“But you said it seemed more like Joe’s body than Albin’s . . .”

And it was Joe’s name she’d given her masked night visitor. Joe’s flute she’d heard as they’d made love.

“It was a magical experience,” Eithnie said finally. “And its mystery seems to be a part of it.”

“So you’re not even going to ask him?” Sharleen asked, sounding shocked.

“Not today,” Eithnie replied. “Not for a long time.” Her voice trailed off, her gaze dreamy until she shook herself. “Have you ever heard of Edward Lorenz?”

Sharleen shook her head, laughing. “You sound like your friend Franz with some new book you want to palm off on me. But I’ll bite. Who’s Edward Lorenz?”

“He was a meteorologist who became a mathematician back in the early 1960s. He was trying to figure out the randomness of weather prediction and mapped out this pattern called the ‘butterfly effect’. The way his theory goes is, the flapping of a single butterfly’s wings in China will produce a small but inevitable change in the world’s atmosphere. That tiny variation will combine with any number of other variables creating an ongoing situation in which the weather is always going to be unpredictable.”

“I don’t get the connection.”

“Whatever we do makes a difference,” Eithnie said. “Doesn’t matter how small our efforts might seem to us, it’ll still make a difference.”

“But what about all the people who don’t do anything, or who don’t do anything positive? Won’t their actions, or lack of actions, cancel out the good we’re trying to do?”

“I guess I’m thinking that it’s also like dominoes. You know how when you knock one over, more and more fall, one after the other, until they all come down? Lorenz’s theory assures me that what I do will make a difference. I can’t tell how, I can’t predict when or where, but it will effect a change. I just have to concentrate on maintaining that effort so that one day all the dominoes will come down in the right way.”

“To save the world,” Sharleen said.

Eithnie shook her head. “To save one small faerie grove. That’s the first step, anyway.”

They sipped at their coffee, each lost in her thoughts for a time until Sharleen turned to Eithnie.

“So tell me,” she said. “Last night . . . What was it like?”

Eithnie closed her eyes. Deep inside her, she could hear a Japanese bamboo flute playing. A smile came to her lips as she thought of her late-night visitor.

“It was the most tender and loving intimacy that I’ve ever experienced,” she said.

But the words sounded flat, inadequate. She could feel her heart swelling inside her. It was time to pick up a brush and paint.

FOURTEEN

| Lia

We stand at the shore of the marsh, watching a woodpecker work on an old cedar stump that rises out of the still water a half-dozen yards away. The bark of the stump is gray and wrinkled, most of its branches gone. The woodpecker’s three times the size of my hand, with gorgeous red and blue and gray feathers.

Tocka- tocka - tocka.

The sound makes Lia laugh.

She’s three years old now, a perfect little Pre-Raphaelite child with a slender figure and a head of dark chestnut hair to die for. It hangs in tangled ringlets, haloing her expressive features. Her eyes are the same hazel-brown and green as the gaze of Broceliande, her namesake. She’s a precocious and solemn child, but quick to laugh as well. Ruth says I let her run too wild, but how can I explain that Lia is a part of the wild, that she’s a fey child, as much a part of forest and fields as my own body?

I realize now that even if I hadn’t miscarried all those years ago, I was still too young to raise a child at that time. Not in years, but in maturity. I’m not so sure I’m any more mature these days, but at least this time everything about it feels right.

Lia’s an amazing little girl. Everyone loves her. There’s a fair amount of speculation about who her father is, but only Sharleen and I know the truth. I say that the father is gone and doesn’t want to be involved, which is true insofar as I know. I haven’t seen anyone in a Green Man’s mask since that night. I haven’t seen Albin or Broceliande or any of the faerie. If it weren’t for Lia, I’d be tempted to think they had never existed at all.

I never did ask Joe about that night and he’s never asked about Lia’s father. I guess we’re a couple now—or at least as much of a couple as anyone can be with Joe. We still keep up our separate cabins, but we spend a lot of time together. Sometimes I’m happy with the way things are, sometimes I want more. But I know Joe’s committed to Lia and me. He still spends time in the bush, still seems like the Green Man to me, the Trickster, but he’s always there for us.

Joe dotes on Lia. Once, when she was climbing all over him, he called her a little monkey and I had a weird moment, thinking, does he see her as a macaque? Does everyone see her differently, in their own way, in the way that they would see faerie? I think maybe they do, but only in the way that all of us perceive each other through our own individual lens of personality, expectation, and worldview.

Sharleen and I have managed to break the Tuck curse and taken the chance in trusting a familial relationship—at least with each other. She brought this great poem up on one of her visits, credited to an anonymous poet. I’ve got it pinned up above my drawing board:

As the old man walked
the beach at dawn,
he noticed a young man
ahead of him picking up
starfish and flinging them
into the sea.

Catching up with the youth,
he asked him
why he was doing this.

The answer was that
the stranded starfish
would die if left until the morning sun.

But the beach goes on
for miles and there
are millions of starfish,
countered the other.

How can your effort make any difference?

The young man looked
at the starfish in his hand
and threw it to the safety
in the waves.

It makes a difference to this one,
he said.

We see a lot of Sharleen these days and it’s not just because Sharleen’s crazy about Lia, though I wouldn’t mind if it was. I want Lia to have as much human interaction as she can get before she goes away.

Because she will go away.

Not just the way every child eventually has to leave the family fold. Lia will have to leave to embrace her destiny. I hate to use that word because it sounds so pretentious, but how else can I put it?

The man behind the green and yellow mask of leaves told me that the weaselskin medicine bag was left at the cabin for Lia. It holds the fetish magic that will take her home. Into faerie.

Red and blue and turquoise beads. Bits of dried tree root and moss. A clutch of tiny feathers wrapped together with thread. The tooth. And the pinecone, not so green now, more a fawn color, and slightly opened. The fetishes mean as little to her now as they do to me, but one day they will speak to her and she’ll go.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to survive her going.

You always hear about the price mortals have to pay when they deal with faerie, but I never thought the price would be so dear. I don’t know if what little currency of courage I have will see me through. But until then, until she goes, I’ll cherish her, the fey echo of my underskin river and faerie, as Broceliande’s grove is the echo of an older forest.

“C’mon, mum,” Lia says, tugging at my hand.

The woodpecker’s flown off and she wants to circle around the marsh to look at the beaver dam. There’s never an empty moment in our days together.

It’s going to be so hard to say good-bye.

About the Authors

BRIAN FROUD is the design genius behind such films as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. He is also well known for his enchanting fantasy cover illustrations, as well as his previous books: The Land of Froud, Goblins, and the bestselling Faeries (with Alan Lee). He lives in Devon, England.

CHARLES DE LINT received the first annual William L. Crawford Award for Best New Fantasy Author in 1985. In 1988 he won the Casper Award for Best Work in English for his novel Jack the Giant Killer. His recent works include The Dreaming Place, World Fantasy Award nominee The Little Country, and Dreams Underfoot, a short-story collection (of which three stories were also nominated for the World Fantasy Award). Besides fiction, de Lint’s writing includes poetry, nonfiction, and reviews for various magazines and newspapers. He currently makes his home in Ottawa, Ontario, with his wife, MaryAnn Harris.

Table of Contents

- COVER
- ABOUT THE BOOK
- TITLE PAGE
- DEDICATION
- TABLE OF CONTENTS
- COPYRIGHT
- EPIGRAPH
- INTRODUCTION

- CHAPTERS

- Chapter 01 - Falling
- Chapter 02 - The Hollow Woman
- Chapter 03 - Flight
- Chapter 04 - Dry Wash
- Chapter 05 - Vancouver Airport
- Chapter 06 - Log Cabin Home
- Chapter 07 - Anima
- Chapter 08 - Dreamtime
- Chapter 09 - Chopping Wood
- Chapter 10 - Granny Wis’om
- Chapter 11 - Broceliande
- Chapter 12 - Mask of Leaves
- Chapter 13 - Butterfly Effect
- Chapter 14 - Lia

- PLATES

- Plate 01
- Plate 02
- Plate 03
- Plate 04
- Plate 05
- Plate 06
- Plate 07
- Plate 08
- Plate 09
- Plate 10
- Plate 11
- Plate 12
- Plate 13
- Plate 14

- ABOUT THE AUTHORS

- BACK COVER