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10
RELYT

 I  woke up drenched. Water, I thought. Pond water. Wet and slimy as the frog in the tale; I must have just changed shape. But there was no one around to change me. Then I felt the light pouring in the window, heavy and hot, steaming me, stewing me, making a broth out of my sweat. I got my head out from under the pillow. There were things coming out of my ears. I was a bug with antennae in a cocoon. I had to unlayer myself from twists and tangles of damp cloth to find out what I had turned into.

Finally, everything else was on the floor. I looked and found some of the words: sheets, blankets, wires, pillow, little clam thing that opened when it hit the floor, popping out a perfect circle. Staring at it, I found its word in my head. CD. Music. I sat on the empty bed, making more words as I looked around the room. Some I knew; some were new. But I found them all in my head, all the ones I needed.

I saw my face in the mirror across the room. Like still water, its surface, and clear, so clear you could dive into it, get to the other world inside it. The Otherworld. I smiled at my face, wondering if the mirror would crack at what it saw. But no. It didn’t care. It just said what it saw, dank teeth and mossy hair and all. Skinny body, white as a fish. Feet that could grow mushrooms in the dirt on the soles.

Well, I go where she tells me.

I smelled something that wasn’t me. Something that made me want to follow it. Want to eat it. I got out of bed, started to track it. Words caught my eye before I got out the door. Pants. Shirt. Hide this, hide that. Brush, comb, wash. File, scrub, deodorize. Rinse, spit. Some of the words were very faint. Others just lay on the bottom of my mind and nodded at me without bothering to get up. I shrugged back at them. How was I to know which? Teeth and feet gave me the broad picture. Shrug. But she said: Do what they do, my clever one.

So I did. All of it.

Then I followed the smell, which was smaller now, but still there in the air, sweet and warm and dense. I found it in the room called kitchen, where the witch Gram was stirring her cauldron.

She jumped when she saw me. What? I thought wildly. What did I do?

“What’s that smell?” She sniffed, and her black witch eyes widened at me. “Tyler. Is that my old bubble bath?”

“Vanilla musk,” I said, staring into her pot.

“You took a bath?”

I showed her the bottoms of my feet. And then my teeth. She scratched one eyebrow with her left thumb, making me shy again. I couldn’t find a word for that magic.

She turned back to her stirring. “Are you hungry?” I nodded so hard I thought my head might fall off. “I just made Hurley a toasted cheese sandwich. How does that sound?”

“Like a toasted cheese sandwich.”

She made a little toad-noise in the back of her throat, then shook her head a little. I waited for her to speak the words of the spell for the toasted cheese sandwich. But nothing happened. So I had to wait longer while she took out more words, bread and cheese, sliced and melted, turned and turned, while a hollow thing with wicked teeth tried to eat my insides, and I could see the colors the smells made in the air.

Finally, she put it on a plate and gave it to me. I bit into it, and it bit back. I whined like a dog, feeling cheesy strings hanging out of my mouth. She poured me cold milk, watched me drink it.

“No wonder you’re gobbling your food. You missed supper and spent half the night running around in the wood. Well. At least you’re out of bed by noon, today. Good. You can go upstairs and give Hurley a hand with whatever he’s building in the attic.”

Hurley. The Grunc. I nodded. He had a magic eye, she said. I must find it and tell her what form it took. If it was magic in itself, or if the power lay in the Grunc Hurley.

“Okay,” I said. A strange word, but I liked saying it. OK. O. K. Oak. Hay. Oak. Aye. Eye.

“And keep an eye on him. Don’t let him lift anything heavy or take a saw to anything that holds up the house.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“It’s good to have you here, Tyler,” she said. “I’m very glad you came to visit. It’ll do us good to have some company now. Someone else to think about.”

She touched my hair when she said that, stroked it like a cat. Then I felt her hand come away too fast, as though it felt something it didn’t expect. Hair like a mirror. Or like twigs. I just ate my food. I felt her eyes on me. Her witch’s gaze.

Then she heard her pot bubbling on the stove and turned away from me. But bubbles had a fat, rich, gamy scent, so I said, “I’ll have some of that, too.” More words came, just as I felt her eyes again. “Please, Gram?”

“It’s stew I’m putting together for supper. You can have another sandwich if you want.”

“Okay,” I said. I smiled at her, and waggled my eyebrows up and down, which was another thing that my head told me to do. She made her toad-noise in her throat, but then she laughed after that, so I was safe.

When I finished the second one, I followed the pounding noise up and up into the top of the house. I found the Grunc in the hollow part under the roof. The attic. It had windows under the eaves. I could see the wood. So could his eye, which was pointed at it. His other eyes were busy seeing the wood in his hands, the hammer and nails, the saw and saw-horses, the little pile of dust the saw had chewed up and spat back out.

“Hey, Hurley,” I said. His great cobwebby brows lifted; his eggy eyes with their blue cloudy yolks widened at me. His mouth stretched.

“Tyler. You came to visit me.”

“Gram sent me up to help you.”

I smelled mice and bats, ants, furry molds, and damps. There were words everywhere; most smelled old. Some I recognized from other times. That mantelpiece. That clock, that didn’t say anything, though it must have recognized me. That old painting, with the face in it that might have belonged to one of us. I saw us in its foxy jaw, its great wild eyes, its hair like the night-wind blowing over the world. Those eyes seemed to watch me.

“I’m making a revolving platform for my telescope,” the Grunc said. He stepped on a big, thick square of wood raised a few inches above the floor underneath a window in the roof. Skylight. The platform sagged a little, but didn’t break. He put one foot on the floor and the platform revolved creakily as he walked it around. “This way I can keep the telescope in one spot and see out any of the windows—north, south, east, west—well, not north unless those doors are open.”

“Wow,” I said, another good word. Or was it whoa? Woe. “Brilliant, Grunc.”

“Thank you, boy. Want to help me saw?”

He didn’t see me out of the eyes in his head. In those eyes I was what he expected. The boy Tyler. Not the Other, the reflection. Sometimes they see. They see the shadow that doesn’t quite match, so I stay where light doesn’t fall. Or else on crooked surfaces, like stone and grass and old floors covered with forgotten things. Or they see our eyes reflecting moon or fire, so I stay in shadow at night. Or they feel, like Gram. They feel what they can’t see. Maybe fingers longer than the eye sees, or hair not right for humans. Or they see the footprint on the ground with the wrong number of toes, or longer than the foot. Such things say that we don’t belong here: we are Other.

But mostly, they just see what they expect.

I held the wood steady while he sawed. Molding, he called the long, thin stretch of wood. For a frame around the edge of the platform. To make it look nice. When he finished sawing, he glued the pieces into place. No nails, he said. Might crack the platform. So while he hunkered down, placing his pieces, I wandered over to his other eye, standing by itself and staring out a window. I looked into it.

I saw her in the trees, gazing back at me.

I started. And then, when I looked again, she faded; she went elsewhere. Maybe she was a tree; maybe she was the sleeping owl in the tree. I felt a hand reach out of me toward her, an invisible thing coming out of where they say we have no hearts. I was here; she was there. I was solid; she was air. I was shadow; she was light. No matter how close they lie, shadow and light, next to each other, so close there is no word for the place where they touch, they never enter one another’s realm. So she seemed that far from me, even though I saw her fading like a dream in the Grunc Hurley’s third eye.

But there are ways. Passages. Places to cross to and from, where even the witches’ stitches haven’t reached. So I came here, and he went there, where now he was with her, and I wasn’t. I go where I am told. Nobody, not even she, told me not to have my own thoughts about it.

“There,” Hurley said, pulling himself straight on his slow legs. “All glued and clamped down. We’ll let it set and then we’ll paint it. And then I’ll mount the telescope. Did you have a look out there?” He came over next to me, put his eye to it. “What did you see in the wood?”

“Trees,” I said. “Mostly.” The wood that humans saw held a lot of words. But what they didn’t see was an entire, ancient realm. Oh, they knew a few words, enough to say in their old tales and songs that it was there. But they had shut their eyes long ago; they didn’t see anymore what was real. Now they only saw the words for it.

The Grunc made a sudden noise. I looked at him, wondering if he could see her. Then I saw what he saw: the red car on the gravel at the corner of the house, next to the black. Truck.

The Grunc made his grunting noise again. Doors thunked open, closed. I saw the cousin Syl’s shadow, spilling over gravel and grass as she talked to someone standing on the other side of her car. Her hair was the color of fairy gold; her face could have belonged to us. No one knew about her, what her eyes saw. Find out, my clever one, I was told. See what she can see.

“There she is,” Hurley murmured.

“Maybe she needs help,” I said. I had to let her look at me, let her face tell me what her eyes saw. If her face said doubt, said wonder, or horror, or confusion, if it couldn’t find the word for what it saw, then I would know what to do next.

“I don’t think she needs help with anything,” the Grunc said.

I saw where he was looking then: into the wood. The thing in me that wasn’t a heart made a leap like a toad. I moved too fast; my hand blurred, reaching for the telescope. I saw my true hand, long and twiggy, skin like bark. I stopped myself before Hurley saw. He raised his head, blinked, both his eyes staring down at the wood.

“She’s gone again.”

“Who?” I asked him, my voice shaky like an owl’s. “Who?”

But when he turned toward me he saw Syl in the window across from us. He forgot to answer me. “There’s Sylvie,” he said happily. The stranger and his truck had gone. “Looks like she could use some help with those groceries.”

“Looks like,” I said, and pulled my shadow out of the light on the floorboards before he saw my gnarly fingers, my bramble hair. “I’ll go.”

I shambled my barefoot, droopy-legged way downstairs. There were no animals in the house, at least nothing tame, that would wonder at me, scold or cringe when they saw me, or fluff out twice their size and yowl. I didn’t think the cuz Syl would do any of those things when she saw me coming out of the house. But her eyes did grow big; her hair might have straightened a little, for a moment.

“Tyler?”

Her arms were full of a bag. I took it, smelled more things to eat. “Hay, Syl,” I said. “High.”

“You’re out of bed.”

“It was too hot in there.”

“What is that—” She bobbed her head at me and sniffed. Then she drew back, stared at me askew, her eyes puckered up. “What is that smell?”

“Vanilla bubbles.”

“You took a bath? And you’re helping me with the groceries?” Her eyes squinted at me some more. “Are you all right? Owen Avery said you had an accident with his rowboat last night.”

I nodded. “I fell out.”

“Well, what were you doing rowing in his pond in the middle of the night, anyway?” She closed her eyes, opened them again. “Listen to me. Of course I know why you were out on the water on a summer night. I did that often enough myself. But Owen was really worried. Are you—I mean besides the bath—”

“And I brushed my teeth.”

“It’s worse than I thought.” Her eyes stared at me again, the pale golden brown of ripe hazelnuts. I didn’t know what they saw. “Is that,” she said slowly, “all you want to tell me about last night?”

I shrugged. “Nothing to tell.”

“You didn’t see anything strange? You weren’t—Nothing frightened you?”

“Nothing.” I picked through words, found another one useful for dealing with humans. “I’m sorry about the boat. Did it sink?”

“No. It’ll be fine. But, Tyler, be careful. You disappear into the woods at night; you are careless in water. You run around with a girl who calls herself Undine.”

“Judith,” I said, doing the Tyler amble back to the house. “She was there, too, and nothing happened to us. It’s summer, and the dark smelled like frogs and trees. The fireflies were blinking messages back and forth. I was standing up in the boat trying to catch one and I lost my balance and we both fell in. Then Owen Avery saw us and we swam away in the dark. That’s all. I guess he recognized me.”

I wasn’t sure she did, but I couldn’t tell until after I put the grocery bag in the kitchen, and I went out again, stood in the hall so I could listen to what they said.

Gram said a lot first, words like clean and polite, helpful, breakfast with her instead of the TV. “He’s a different boy,” she said. “It’s as though he turned into someone else overnight.”

And then Syl spoke, and I knew she hadn’t seen me with her hazelnut eyes; she didn’t have a clue.

“I think he’s just in love.”

---

11
IRIS

 T arrant Coyle’s card came fluttering out of the paper grocery bag while I was folding it up. I took one look at it and tore it into confetti.

“Idiot!” I said so sharply that Sylvia, sitting quietly at the table and staring into her coffee, jumped. “Sylvia Lynn, if you let Titus Quest Company have this place, I’ll haunt your marriage bed when I’m dead.”

The startled expression on her face made my brows jump up. Then she hid behind a sip of coffee. “Okay, I won’t. But why does he want it? He said something about a museum.”

“Pah! That man wouldn’t recognize a museum if he were hanging on a wall with a plaque under him.”

“Well, then—”

“He knows something. Or he thinks he knows something. He thinks he can make money off of it.”

Her eyes grew very wide. “You mean—about what you’re warring with in the woods?”

“He hasn’t a clue. It means Tinkerbell to him, little glowing lights at the far end of the garden, tiny winged creatures who wear acorn caps on their heads and ride black beetles for horses and feast on nectar and strawberries. He’d turn my wood into a kind of theme park.”

Sylvia inhaled coffee on an incredulous laugh. “Gram,” she said weakly when she stopped coughing. “You can’t be serious.”

“Try him. He’d open all the passages in Lynn Hall and wait to see what came through.”

She sobered at the thought, told me, after a moment, what was on her mind. “I don’t want to discuss anything yet. I mean about how long I’m staying.”

“No,” I answered equably, tossing a pinch of lavender in the stewpot to make the kitchen smell good. I’d seen her red car on that long road running between fields to the Avery place; whatever was talked about there had given her something to think about.

“I’ll call the shop tomorrow if I decide to stay a little longer. But before I leave, I thought we might go through the hall, and I’ll make a list of things that need to be done. Now, if you’d like.”

“That would be helpful.” I started cleaning the leeks she’d brought me. I really wanted to dance across the kitchen floor, cackling with glee, seize her in my hands and whirl her around a few times. But I controlled myself. “Very helpful. Just let me finish here.”

I chopped the leeks, trying for once in my life to be tactful, not to say the thing that might force her to a hasty decision. Hurley was still playing in the attic; I wasn’t sure where Tyler had gone. Back up to visit Hurley, or to his room, or out in the wood maybe, loitering in hope of his Undine. Syl had to be right about him, I thought. Love would make a growing boy brush his teeth and smell like a candy dish. I hadn’t even seen then what he had done to his bedroom.

I added the leeks to the pot, along with a sprinkle of this and that. Then I put a lid on it and left it to simmer. I stood in the middle of the floor, my head empty, trying to remember what I had been about to do. Liam stepped into the emptiness; it spread suddenly through the rest of me, through the entire house, all the places where he wasn’t, and never would be, ever. “Gram?” I heard Sylvia say. I came back to life, untied my apron.

“All right,” I told her. “I’m ready.”

Rummaging in a drawer, we found an old spiral-bound notebook to record our findings. On the first page Sylvia wrote:

Kitchen: Replace pineapple wallpaper.

Paint window frames and moldings to match new wallpaper.

New linoleum?

I looked down at it. You could see bare floorboards in a couple of spots, but those were half-hidden under the refrigerator and under the bookcase where I kept my cookbooks and herbals and binders full of whatever local tidbits of history or family lore I had collected for Jane, or she had passed along to me.

“How old is it?” Sylvia asked.

I thought back. “Older than you are, younger than I am.” It was covered with geometric shapes, half-circles, triangles, circles, in what had once been bright yellow, red, orange, green. “I think Liam and I laid it down ourselves in the fifties. It has that look.”

She nodded. “It’s not in terrible shape, and it can wait, if you can still live with it.” She sounded doubtful.

“I think we bought it to match the pineapples. Yellow and green—”

She nodded again, pinching the bridge of her nose in a way that reminded me of her great-grandmother. “I can imagine.”

“That’s who you look like!” I exclaimed. “Those eyes, that pointy jaw—”

“Who?”

“Liam’s mother, Meredith.”

She slewed her eyes at me, just like Meredith used to. “Thanks, Gram. You never liked her.”

“She was difficult,” I admitted. “Persnickety as a cat, and so tart vinegar must have run in her veins. But she aged well; she always was a pretty woman. And she did dote on Morgana, from the day she was born. I remember once—” I stopped myself. “Don’t let me get started on Meredith.”

She smiled and turned to a new page. “What’s next? What’s bothering you the most?”

I went out into the hallway. “All those closed doors. I cleared most of the furniture out of them, over the years since you left and we stopped even thinking about using them. But I shut them up last fall; I’ve no idea what might have been going on in them during winter.”

There were over a half dozen rooms down the long hallway, on either side of the warped and swollen front door. A formal dining room, I remembered vaguely. A library. A gun room. A couple of sitting rooms that opened into one another to make a ballroom. Meredith was the last of the Lynns to keep up every single room in the house, including the tiny servants’ quarters in the attic and my laundry room, which in her day she referred to as the butler’s pantry.

I looked at Sylvia, wondering if it was all too much; she looked so young and slight. But she didn’t seem at all daunted by the thought of gun rooms and musty ballrooms. Maybe that came from dealing with business affairs and strangers and shipments on your doorstep from places halfway around the world. She just jotted down a couple of notes on the state of the paint on the wainscoting in the hallway, the faded paper and missing bulbs in the chandeliers. Then she turned to another page in the notebook, marched up to the first closed door, and opened it.

Something flew at us. We both ducked; Sylvia slammed the door. She stared at me wordlessly. I put my hand on my heart, panting. Then I said, trying to be firm, “We can’t just—We should have more gumption than to be frightened away before we’ve even started.”

She swallowed, then tilted her chin slightly, reminding me of Meredith again. “Yes. This is your house. You have a right to know what’s going on in it. Gram. Do you think it was a ghost?”

“Maybe it was Meredith,” I said shakily. “She loved this old wreck.”

Sylvia opened the door a crack, peeked in with one eye. Then she gave a snort of laughter and opened the door wide. She bent and picked up a long gauzy sheer that had frayed off its curtain rod and blown across the room at us. Somehow I’d managed to leave a window cracked all winter. We crossed the room to have a look at it. The sill and floorboards were pretty much worse for being snowed on. But other than curtains, the room was empty. No feathers or bird droppings in the hearth; no sign of small animals. Whatever might have come in out of the cold must have found cozier winter quarters.

Sylvia wandered, busily writing. I felt around under the mantelpiece, found the pattern I’d scratched into the paint with Liam’s penknife.

“Come and draw this,” I said.

“What is it?” she asked, ducking down to peer at it. “It looks like a web.”

“It’s a reminder of which pattern in my quilt guards which room. There’s one in every room, under the mantels if there’s a fireplace, or in a corner of molding behind the door if there’s not. That’s in case my threads fray; I’ll know which room my stitches are guarding when I mend them. If you draw and label them in your notebook, I can refresh my memory. Or at least I can when I remember where I put the quilt.”

Crouched down under the mantel, she got her pencil busy again. I wandered, looking at memories in my head. This was one of the sitting rooms that turned into the ballroom; those wide double doors between the rooms would slide into the walls. There had been balls in her day, Meredith had told me when Liam brought me to meet her. The upper crust of three counties came to dance in Lynn Hall when she was young.

Well, that had been some time, and time again, ago. Liam and I had gotten married in those rooms; so had Kathryn and her first husband, Edward. After that, with Kathryn moving away, and Morgana pregnant and never bothering to marry, and then dying, I lost interest in those old rooms. I thought I had emptied them before I shut them up. But I had missed a few lingering memories.

“Replace windowsill,” Sylvia read from her notebook. “Sand floor?” She tugged gently at another sheer; it came down off the rod. “Replace curtains.” She walked back to the door, clicked the light switch. Only half the little bulbs in the chandelier and the wall sconces lit up. “Replace bulbs.”

“Thank goodness I’ll be dead and in my grave soon.”

“You’re not leaving me alone with all this,” Sylvia protested, sliding open the doors into the next room. Dust fuzzies scampered along the floor ahead of her. The air had an odd smell of smoke and wax, as though someone had been dancing there by candlelight. Maybe smells haunted a room like ghosts do. Or maybe, considering all the doorways in the house, it hadn’t been ghosts doing the dancing. I crossed the room to the fireplace, felt under the mantel for the pattern I’d left there.

“I’d better check these threads. Now where was it I put that quilt?”

Sylvia came over to copy the pattern. This time she tore a page out of the notebook, held it against the scratches in the paint, and ran her pencil lead back and forth over it. We studied the pattern it made.

“It looks like a snowflake,” Sylvia said, and wrote on the top of the paper: Ballroom II. She turned, making more notes. Water stain under one window. Curtains. Wallpaper bubbling at seams. A curtain sighed, billowing outward over a closed window. For just a moment, music drifted through my head, like an echo from bygone years.

And then I knew it wasn’t. It was no music I had ever heard played in those rooms. Sylvia had a quiet, distant look on her face; her pencil hovered, motionless above the paper. I remembered finally where I had put the quilt.

“It’s in the cedar chest that Meredith gave Liam and me for a wedding present.”

Sylvia came back to earth. “The quilt? Gram, where are you going?” she asked, as I headed out the door. “We haven’t finished in here.”

“I have to find it.”

“This minute?”

“I might forget in the next,” I said tersely. She followed me to the attic. We had to go down the second-story hallway, past the bedrooms to get to the attic stairway the servants had used to climb to and from their little chambers. That’s when I saw what Tyler had done to his room.

I stopped so suddenly that Sylvia bumped me. We both hovered in the doorway, staring. The bed was made. All the clothes that had been draped over the furniture and puddled on the floor had disappeared into closets and drawers. The CDs were stacked neatly on the desk. The backpack hung on a hook in the closet. Tyler’s shoes, which evidently were for decorative purposes, stood toe to heel on the closet floor. His baseball cap, which I thought had taken up residence on the lampshade, sat on the shelf above his shoes.

Sylvia’s face was so still it might have been a cameo.

“Do boys in love clean up their bedrooms?” I asked.

“Not in my experience. I mean, Madison—I mean some people are tidier than others. But—”

“Who is Madison?”

Her eyes flicked away from me; she didn’t answer that. “It’s usually consistent, this tidy business. I’m tidy, so I know. Maybe he wants to invite her up.”

“The Coyle girl?”

“If that’s who he’s in love with today.”

“He used my bubble bath.”

“So that’s what I smelled.”

“I haven’t used it for years. I thought it would be flat by now.” I glanced up at the ceiling, trying to see through the floorboards. “I wonder if he’s up there with Hurley. You could ask him.”

“Me?”

“Well, you’re his age, nearly.”

“Gram, I’ve lived twice his lifetime.” She was silent a moment, thinking, then added slowly, “I’ll find a way to talk to him. Until then, we should just pretend he’s normal. That way he won’t think we’ve noticed anything.”

“He won’t feel self-conscious, you mean.”

She gave a little nod, frowning for some reason, and still avoiding my eyes. Love, I guessed. This untidy Madison, whoever he was, might or might not be someone I would have to figure into my plans for Sylvia. But I did as she suggested, pretended not to notice. We went upstairs to the attic and found Hurley at the top, one eye glued to his telescope. His toys were scattered around him: hammer and nails, saw, sawhorses, wood glue, and metal measuring tape. Little piles of sawdust lay like anthills on the floor.

Hurley straightened, waved cheerfully. “I’ve been working on a moving platform for my telescope,” he told us, and gave it a push with one foot. It turned ponderously. “I’m going to paint it sky-blue, before I mount the telescope on it. Then I can turn and watch Sylvia drive in, and then turn back and watch whatever is going on in the wood.”

“What is going on in the wood?” I asked him. Wherever Tyler was, he wasn’t in the attic; Hurley might have caught a glimpse of him among the trees.

“Crows, mostly,” Hurley answered. “A couple of wild turkeys. Mourning doves.” He applied his eye to the lens again, and added, “Tarrant Coyle.”

“What?” Sylvia and I said at once. Sylvia glanced out the window overlooking the driveway.

“I don’t see his truck.”

“What’s he doing in my wood?” I demanded. “Give me that.”

I put my eye to the lens, saw what surely looked like the back of Tarrant Coyle, with his saggy jeans and his T-shirt that had the Titus Quest Company logo on the back. That man probably wore the company logo on his shorts.

“What’s he doing?” Sylvia asked.

Not much, from what I could tell. Walking a little, looking here and there… I could feel my lips go thin, pushed tight against what I didn’t want to say in front of Hurley. “Skulking,” I said finally. “That’s what it looks like.”

Sylvia watched him, though he was barely visible to the naked eye, just a flick of blue and black among the shadows.

“Maybe,” she murmured, “he’s looking for his daughter.”

“Maybe.” But I doubted that. “I think I’ll go down and ask.”

“Wait, Gram,” Sylvia pleaded. “Let’s at least get what we came for. Is that the cedar chest?”

It was nearly hidden in a jumble of oddments in a corner, behind paintings and lamps; boxes were piled knee deep on the lid.

“Yes,” I said, and Sylvia waded over, started to unbury it.

“Pretty,” she commented, and it was: a simple varnished chest with a rounded lid that opened easily to give you a sweet breath of cedar. I helped her clear the boxes off, then opened the lid. As always, the smell made time turn for me, took me back through all the moments I had raised that lid to get a blanket on a cold winter night for a guest, for a child, for Liam.

The quilt lay on top. It was bulky, winter white. Onto each broad, pieced square of heavy cotton I had fastened a white, crocheted web of thread; each web guarded a different room, every window, doorway, chimney, every opening in it.

We were both quiet as we looked down at it. I heard Sylvia swallow. I closed my eyes, wanting to bang my head against a beam. Something had gotten into the trunk, nibbled away at the threads, fraying the crochet-work into tattered threads. I wondered if there was a complete pattern left anywhere on it.

Far away, I heard an engine start.

Sylvia rose to glance out. “He must have been parked on the road so that you wouldn’t see him.”

Hurley was still looking for him, shifting his telescope hither and yon as though he were following a flock of birds that couldn’t make up their minds which way was south. Sylvia went over to him while I pulled the quilt out of the trunk to see if anything in our lives was still safe.

“What do you see?” she asked Hurley. Her voice sounded tight. “Is it Judith Coyle? If it is, I want to talk to her.”

“Looks more like a Rowan,” Hurley said after a moment.

“What?”

“Recognize that hair anywhere.”

“Let me see,” Sylvia said, and I raised my head at that tone: a Rowan was either the first or the last thing she wanted to see in Hurley’s telescope. She put her eye to it, drew back as quickly, as though she had found herself being looked at.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Leith Rowan,” she said, and passed the telescope back to Hurley. She added on her way out, without meeting my eyes, “I’ll be back in a moment, Gram.”

But she wasn’t.

---

12
SYLVIA

 L eith led me a long way before he let me catch up with him. I walked fast, confused and desperate for answers, frightened for Gram and Hurley, whom I’d left alone with that unpredictable wood-creature, with its bright, false smile and its mysterious, inhuman motives. And frightened for myself, the changeling I’d made of myself that I couldn’t protect anymore, and that seemed every bit as dangerous as the fay lurking in Lynn Hall.

But as quickly as I moved, Leith moved faster, somehow without disappearing entirely. I caught glimpses of his flaming hair ahead of me in the wood, and then halfway across a field, and then along the road between Gram’s property and Owen Avery’s hillside. I reached that road just in time to see Leith turn down an ancient, rutted dirt road that ran along a brook to where a mill had been built, a couple of centuries before. That road ended, or at least the overgrown memory of it did, on a steep bank beside the only remaining wall of the mill. There, civilization ended; the woods ran wild. Rowans lived far back along the water. The land had been posted for decades against trespassing by a Rod and Gun Club that appeared to be mythical; I’d never known anyone who knew anyone who belonged to it.

I was slowed there by the ancient ruts of wagon wheels, by weathered stones and the roots of trees drawn up above the earth by pounding rains and shifting frosts. Maple, oak, and yew grew close to the water on both banks. The scene looked placid enough: the rocky, babbling country brook, pooling here and there just deep enough for a trout to linger in its shadows, buttercups and forget-me-not reflected in the water, flowering raspberries and honeysuckle tangled with wild phlox farther up the banks. But Gram had told me the shallow stream had flooded four times in her life, pulling up slabs of slate out of its own bed and carrying them away along with a cottage or two caught in its raging. Still waters ran deep; limpid shallows could be even more treacherous.

Leith was waiting for me at the mill. He was sitting on the stone wall, eight feet above the water, balanced in a broken hollow where the mill wheel must have turned on its axle. If I hadn’t been looking for him, I wouldn’t have noticed him; he could melt into stones and shadows until even his red hair seemed part of the placid landscape. Even if I hadn’t been looking for him, I wouldn’t have gone much farther. The road reached its abrupt end just beyond the mill; the massive, crumbling trunk of a fallen oak stretched across it like a boundary marker. Rowans had their ways of discouraging visitors; the rumor that any season was hunting season in that stretch of woods was one of them.

Leith shifted when I came up, turning his head to look at me instead of the water. He didn’t speak. Neither did I. For a moment, I thought I didn’t have words for what I needed to say; I had never said it before. His eyes were wide, wary; probably neither had he.

I said abruptly, “I wore glasses for the first time in the second grade. I remember how surprised I was when I could see the individual leaves on trees. Everything looked the same, but slightly changed. Clearer. I remember wandering around the schoolyard at recess, looking at the different world. I could see the way drops of water falling out of an old pipe caught fire in the light and turned to jewels. I could see expressions instead of blurs on faces across a distance. I could see bug-life going on around me, movement in the roots of things I’d never noticed before. I looked at you, and you looked back at me, and that’s when I knew I must be wearing a pair of magic spectacles, because I recognized what you are. And in that moment, I saw you recognize me. It took me longer to realize that the magic wasn’t in my glasses.”

He gave a little nod, surprising me. “I remember,” he said huskily, “you seeing me through those big lenses. I thought they were magic, too, for a moment. Then I realized I just had never noticed you before—you were one of the little kids. I didn’t really look at you until that moment. After that, I never forgot you.” He paused, gazing down at me from the ledge, balanced to slide down and join me, but not yet. He added, “Must be something drastic going on at Lynn Hall to make you put all this into words. In this part of the wood anything could be listening.”

“Well, what would they hear that they don’t already know?” I demanded. My voice wobbled badly. “Gram, who thinks she knows everything, seems the only one who needs the magic spectacles.”

He slid down then, landing like a cat, lithe and noiseless. “You never told her?”

“How could I? She hates what I am. That’s why I live so far away from her, in the middle of a city, stones under my feet, over my head, and surrounded by books, so nobody is surprised by the odd things I know. Grandpa Liam made me heir to Lynn Hall, and Gram expects me to learn how to keep the doors and passageways protected against—against the likes of me—and the man she trusts more than anyone alive is in love with a wood-nymph, and there’s a changeling living under her roof, and she can’t see!”

Leith’s lips pursed; he gave a slow, liquid whistle. A bird answered. He glanced at it sharply, then took a step closer to me, lowering his voice. “Who got taken?”

“My cousin Tyler. You must have seen him at the funeral; he helped carry the casket.”

“The boy with the green hair.” His brows crinkled; he asked hesitantly, “How can you tell for sure?”

I had to laugh. “He already looks like a changeling, I know. But the other—It shifts back and forth—I see fingers, then twigs, hair, then leaves or moss. Its eyes—sometimes they’re human, sometimes they look like empty sky, or flowing water. He—It took a bath.”

“Tyler doesn’t?”

“A bubble bath. It came out to help me carry groceries. And it cleaned Tyler’s room.”

A corner of his mouth curled up. “Have you thought about keeping it around?”

“But, Leith, what happened to my real cousin? Owen said that Tyler and the Coyle girl had overturned his boat in the middle of his pond in the middle of the night. I saw it floating upside down in the water. I think Tyler was taken then. How much—how close to them are you? How much do you Rowans know? Can you help me get Tyler back?”

He was silent, pondering a moment. Then he touched my wrist lightly. “Let’s sit down.”

He led me around the mill wall to the water’s edge; we sat in a little grassy clearing on the bank. The brook ran deeper there, its voice less quick and frothy. It curled around boulders instead of pebbles. Still, the sound carried our words in the right direction, away from the boundary tree, the pathless wood.

Leith said, surprising me again, “I know about Owen. I’ve seen them in the woods together.”

I sucked in breath. “Really? What—what is she like?”

He smiled a little. “Pretty much what you’d expect.”

“How dangerous is she? Can she—take him, too, the way Tyler was taken?”

He scratched his brow, gazing at the water, where a dragonfly the color of turquoise and as long as my thumb hovered, a dazzle of blue, then skimmed away. “I’ve just seen them. I don’t watch them. It’s private. Mostly they were just talking. I saw him laugh. Another time, I heard her laugh. It sounded like—like bluebells ringing. Or a wind chime made of water. I only saw them once as lovers. And then—only because I have these eyes. It was as if she’d covered him with light. Anyone with normal eyes would never have noticed.”

I blinked, my eyes dry, but burning oddly. “You make it sound beautiful.”

“Well, how else would it be, for them to draw us to them like that?” He paused, flicked a pebble into the brook. “Maybe Iris is right. Maybe they are terrible and dangerous. Maybe Owen is risking life as he knows it, loving one of them. But that’s how it looks to me, when I see them together. Just two people who love each other and are trying to keep it secret to protect themselves.”

“Dorian doesn’t see it that way.”

“I know.”

“She thinks you don’t see it at all.”

His mouth curled again. “I know. She just thinks I’m a hardheaded mountain man with a shy heart. I can gut a fish and skin a deer, sneak up on a rabbit, catch a trout with my hands, and run with the coyotes. And run like a wild thing at the threat of a suit or an office job.”

“What about Owen?” I asked hollowly. “Can he see what you are? Part human and part fay?”

Leith hesitated. “I don’t know. He’s good at hiding things. It’s hard to tell what he thinks. I wouldn’t bet on anything. Except,” he added steadily, “that if he recognizes what I am, he can probably see the same thing in you.”

I was silent. Owen had given me the warning about Tyler; he had seen that coming. I wondered if he might know what to do about it. “Do you have any ideas?” I asked Leith. “About what to do if you find a changeling child under your roof?”

He ran a hand through his hair, red brows quirked. “Don’t they have stories about that? You’re the one with the bookstore.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Bookshelves were littered with changelings; the tales seemed to end well, the true child properly restored, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember how. Whoever had sent the startlingly tidy and polite impostor into Gram’s house had done it for a reason. To talk? “Maybe we bargain,” I guessed. “Or maybe not. Maybe they just wanted to find out who could recognize it. Three with eyes to see…”

“What?”

“It’s from a rhyme Gram taught me. It never had any meaning before. But how can I tell Gram what it is without telling her that?” I asked uneasily. “That I can see better than she can?”

“Ask Owen to tell her about Tyler,” Leith suggested. “He must be used to juggling truths and half-truths with Iris.”

His voice sounded dry. I looked at him. Owen and Leith juggled half-truths around each other all the time, I realized. “You don’t trust him,” I guessed.

“It’s more that he doesn’t trust me. And I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Rowan and might take his daughter away to wear skins and live in a cave. Or if it’s because he thinks I might take her farther away than that.”

“They’re both afraid for each other, Owen and Dorian.”

He nodded, blinking, his eyes suddenly shadowed. “I love her. She’s good-hearted and beautiful and she belongs in these mountains; she never wants to leave them.”

“She never has.”

“Neither do I. We don’t have to explain what we love to each other. It’s all around us; it’s the history in these old mountains. And it’s the way history never really changes them. I think of that, and I think everything between us is safe and uncomplicated. And then I remember.” He threw another pebble into the water with more force. “And I remember what else I am.”

“How did it happen?”

“Who knows? There’s stories. Who can tell if they’re true or not? Rowans keep things close… My grandmother told me a story when I was little, about a man who shot a deer and it ran off, wounded. He followed it, to kill it, because you don’t just leave matters like that, you don’t let animals suffer needlessly. He didn’t see the deer again. But he found a young woman with a bullet in her shoulder. She had hair as red as fire and skin soft and white as apple blossoms. So of course he took her home and married her. She had some kind of speech impediment—didn’t use words much—but they got along fine until a year and a day after her red-haired child was born. Then she turned back into a deer, and that was the last the hunter saw of her. Took me a few years before I realized my grandmother was telling me about my mother. By then, I had another mother, and I could only barely remember a time—more like a dream—when there might have been someone else, and then for a while maybe no one… I asked my grandmother about it, but she just said it was a story, maybe it had happened to some Rowan, way back, or maybe not, but nobody knew for certain.”

I was silent, my own mother’s face suddenly vivid in my head. Her tale had died with her, it seemed; not even Gram could guess at it. Who had she loved? For how long? An afternoon? A decade? Did she even know what power had possessed her? Or had it seemed just some sweet-faced stranger with whom she had spent an idle summer’s hour, and forgotten by twilight, except to remember that she hadn’t even asked his name? Had it been that innocent? Or had she been truly possessed, taken, ravished—any of all those storybook words—by some darker mischief in the wood, and left to explain the inexplicable? Raped by a fairy, she might have thought, but never said, not knowing that Gram of all people would have believed her.

Leith was looking at me questioningly. I shook my head. “Not a clue… Gram asked my mother on her deathbed, for my sake, she said, but even then my mother wouldn’t say.”

He grunted softly. “Maybe she didn’t want Iris to know.”

“Maybe… She was pretty hardheaded, too.” I stirred restively, then, remembered that I’d left Gram in the attic while I ran after a Rowan. “I’ve got to get Tyler back before Gram recognizes the changeling—it might threaten her, or something. I’ve got to find out who sent it. Leith, do you know anyone who might know how to get the attention of the wood-folk?”

“Rowan, you mean?” He shook his head. “There are others like me scattered through the mountains. We recognize each other when we meet. But no one talks about it. The others tend to be even shyer than I am; they live on the edges of our world, as close to the wood as animals—or the wood-folk themselves. They aren’t seen often, and they don’t encourage visitors.” He hesitated, looking at me, then added slowly, “There is a place I know… Deeper in the woods, past the fallen tree where the road ends, there’s a circle of trees. Even when I’m hunting, and not paying attention, when I walk into the circle, something changes. Time slows. Stops, maybe. I can almost understand the wind. Color seems richer there, as if you finally see it for the first time, recognize the treasure that it is. Sometimes, when I stand and listen, I can almost hear voices… it seems that someone just beyond eyesight looks at me… But as many times as I’ve waited, no one has ever come. If you want to talk to one of them, and they want to talk to you, maybe you can find each other there. Do you want me to show you? It may not be worth the walk. But maybe…”

Maybe, maybe not. But maybe.

“Yes,” I said recklessly, and he rose. I followed him to the end of the road, past the boundary tree and beyond all the warning signs I recognized from the tales you never take seriously until you’re lost in one and have long forgotten how it ends.

---

13
TYLER

 I  was in the most beautiful and the most horrible place I’d ever been in my life. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten dumped out of a boat on a pond into what looked like a room in somebody’s palace. I was crouched on a soft white sheepskin laid on a floor of flagstones and gold. Windows were open all around me; curtains so fine you could see through them, and glinting with tiny jewels and beads, drifted in the breeze like ghosts. I smelled flowers beyond the windows, and something else, something spicy that you might want to eat if you could remember what it was. There were soft chairs, cushions, even a bed under a green velvet canopy. Everything seemed touched with gold: chair legs dipped in it, the canopy edged with gold ribbons, gold thread in the cushions, a tabletop etched with it, and the tray and cups and the bowls on it all made of solid gold. I could have eaten golden pears and nuts and candied fruits, drunk out of a gold cup, then crawled behind the canopy to fall asleep on a blanket that looked woven out of spiderweb and cloud. And gold.

I didn’t want any of it. I didn’t want to move. I was damp and slick, sweating pond water it felt like, and I smelled like an old fish tank. I kept feeling the dark water flow past me as I fell into it, deeper and deeper. It dragged things loose in my head; nothing was secret anymore; nothing was safe. The water seemed to turn into memories, and all of them were of my dad. Me teaching him a game on the computer. Looking up from my homework and finding him watching me with a funny smile on his face. His hand on my head. Sitting beside him on the couch, my legs just long enough to prop on the coffee table next to his. Eating chips and shouting together over a soccer match. Him hounding me outside to mow the lawn or rake the leaves; me whining to him for more allowance, a bicycle, a dog. Me falling out of a Sunfish; him diving in after me; both of us treading lake water and watching the sailboat blow over.

On and on—his floppy hair, his father’s gold wristwatch ticking in my ear; his finger pointing at words as he read me a story. His gold wedding ring. The scar on his chin, the gold cap on his tooth, the little hole in his ear where sometimes he wore one of my mother’s earrings. His voice. His big feet. They made me want to cry. Everything made me want to cry. But I couldn’t; tears wouldn’t come out. It was stuck inside me, this nasty, monsterish feeling, of something so uncomfortable I couldn’t stand it, but I couldn’t get rid of it, either. All I could do was hunker down around it, feeling it grow and grow as memories collected, and feeling myself turn into a troll, something surly and mean and snarling, my dank skin growing burls and warts, hoping nobody would come near me because my voice would flare out of me like a welder’s fire.

That’s when she came in.

I don’t know who she was. She had long smooth white hair and dark blue eyes, and supermodel cheekbones. She moved like air. She picked up a gold cup with fingers so long and delicate they could have wrapped around it twice. She held it out to me. A yellow butterfly fluttered out of her mouth, making a sound like a question.

I just curled closer to myself and told her no. A frog fell out of my mouth, something left from the pond water. I watched it glumly as it hopped across the sheepskin.

She spoke a flower, still waving the cup at me. I shook my head. She insisted, with a pearl. I yelled at her then, to go away; tiny turtles and black beetles came out of my mouth. She tried the candied fruit then, cherries so bright they hurt my eyes, slices of orange and lemon with the peel still on, sugared lumps of things I couldn’t identify. I turned my head away, spat a few more bugs onto the floor.

She stood staring at me; finally she said a tiny blue butterfly. Then she was gone. I stretched out a little on my island of sheepskin and wallowed back into memory as deep as I could go.

After a while somebody else came in. She looked like Undine—she was trying to, anyway. The pale curly hair was right, and so was the fishing vest. But her skin looked slick and blotchy, like a mushroom that had been in the fridge too long, and her eyes were too small, and black instead of green.

She spoke words though, instead of butterflies. “You should eat something, Tyler. You’ll feel better.”

“No,” I said. I never wanted to eat again. Or drink or sleep or even talk. “Just leave me alone.”

“Pepsi?”

I snorted. Like they had a drinks machine down the castle hallway. “Go away.”

She didn’t. She set the bowl of fresh fruit on the floor between us, sat down, and started nibbling on grapes. At least they looked real enough. But she ate the stems, too, as if she couldn’t taste the difference. I watched her a moment, then pushed my eyes against my arm, blocking out the light.

“Don’t you want to know where you are?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why you’re here?”

“No.”

“You’re in the queen’s palace of perpetual summer—”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes.”

“No. I’m at the bottom of the pond. Down in the muck and fish droppings, the slimy roots of water reeds and dead frogs. And I’m staying here. The dead don’t eat, and they don’t drink, and they don’t breathe, and they don’t talk except in worms.”

I clamped my mouth shut. She talked for a while about bright days and warm nights, and breezes scented with newly blooming flowers, as though we were at some tropical resort. I let her voice fade away. I watched my dad in his bathrobe pour his first cup of morning coffee, his hair standing straight up, just like mine did. I watched him tie my shoelaces. Watched him watching me tie my shoelaces. Yell when I cut current events for homework out of the newspaper before he had a chance to read it. His face when I gave him a matte-board frame I’d made in school decorated with tinfoil stars and pieces of painted macaroni. That frame with a picture of me in it, hanging next to his computer.

On and on. Teaching me to ride a bicycle, yelling when I forgot to feed my fish for a week and they went belly-up in the tank. Helping me bury them under a rosebush. Asleep on the couch until I stuck a feather up his nose. Me stumbling down a dark hall in the night to tell him there was a bear in the house, then hearing the bear-noises turn into his snores. Him floating on a blowup mattress in a pool with his eyes closed while I careened toward him in a cannonball dive. Him lying in a strange place with his eyes closed, in a suit and a tie, just like Grandpa Liam. Sleeping, people around me kept saying. He looks just like he’s sleeping.

Well, so was I, and I wasn’t going to wake up until he did.

The other one—the substitute—the changeling. Patrick. He smiled a lot, but his eyes were hidden. Like a house with an open door and a welcome mat, and all the window blinds shut. You couldn’t see in; he couldn’t see out. He’d come into my room while I was at the computer, rubbing his hands and talking like a Scout leader about sports. Didn’t I think I should: a) Get out in the fresh air, b) Get some exercise, c) See what the rest of the world was up to. Wouldn’t I be interested in: a) Swim team, b) Going out for track, c) Soccer, d) Basketball, e) Golf, f) The local gym, g) Anything except sitting on my butt playing computer games on such a bright sunny day. He could barbecue manly stuff, but when he tried a simple thing like waffles on the stove, he’d set the smoke alarms off. He was always asking what band I was listening to, and then asking me to turn it down. He asked once to play a game with me, and then gave up when he lost the first time. He took me running with him once, hiking once, sailing once, after he gave me the rudder and I got us stuck on a mudflat. He tried. Once. Give him time, my mom kept saying. Give him a chance. He’s not your dad. But he’d like to be your friend.

Down on the pond-bottom, I didn’t want anyone. I wanted to be left alone.

I smelled something. It smelled like a memory, which is why I opened my eyes. The Undine-thing was gone. I was alone except for the teasing smell, light and sweet, like grass or trees but with a few wildflowers thrown in. It meant something really good, but I couldn’t remember what. It lingered under my nose, while I searched for it in my past. A girl’s perfume? The smell of a store where I’d gotten a special present? Then I saw her.

She wasn’t the butterfly girl, or the Undine-thing. At first I saw her sideways, the way I was lying; she stood so still she seemed unreal, not breathing, not blinking, just standing in a pool of light and watching me. I sat up on my knees to see better.

After a moment I realized my mouth was hanging open. I closed it, still staring up at her. She looked like she was made of gold. Her skin and hair were ivory-gold, like the honeycomb Grandpa Liam had shown me in the wood. Colors seemed to flow around her, little silky drifts and ribbons of green and purple and blue, red and orange, yellow, ivory and gold, like she carried her own private breezes with her. I wanted to look at her forever. I didn’t know anyone could be that beautiful and still be real.

Maybe she wasn’t, I thought then, but I didn’t care. Something about her felt old, like a boulder, or a tree when it’s watched the sun and the moon rise for a century or two. Quiet inside, like it’s got all the time in the world.

She smiled and came to me. She knelt at the edge of the sheepskin, so that she could look straight into my eyes. She lifted her hand, touched my cheek with her long, delicate finger. I smelled that light sweetness again, and I wondered dizzily if it was the scent of her I remembered, in the air on a long-ago summer day, that had made me feel something brilliant was about to happen.

“Tyler,” she said.

“Hah,” I said. My mouth was hanging open again. She was so close, I saw my reflection in her eyes.

“I made all this for you. So that you would be happy. You aren’t happy.”

“I’m—I’m—” Nothing useful would come out.

“There is rose-scented water for you to wash with, a pool full of warm, crystal water just outside if you want to bathe. The bed is for you; you don’t have to cling to this little island of sheep wool. Don’t be afraid. Nothing will hurt you.”

“I’m not afraid,” I whispered. Her eyes were green, like new spring leaves. Like Undine’s, almost, but full of light. “Who are you?”

Her smile deepened. “No one ever asks. No one ever has to. You know me. And I know this all seems a little strange to you, but you need do nothing except breathe my summer air, lie in the light, eat fruits and the finest bread and savory meats and sweetmeats, drink the purest of waters. You are my guest; you may have anything in my house you desire. Anything under my sky. Come. Take off your heavy shoes, feel summer beneath your feet. Come out and hear the birds sing. Or stay here and my musicians will play music while you rest.” I didn’t see her reach for it, but the gold cup was in her hand, and she held it out to me. “Drink. It’s just cold, fresh water, sweeter than the rarest of wines.” I lifted my hand, touched the cup. She breathed, “Drink.”

I smelled the water just before I took the cup. Then I felt it again: the cold, dark, swift plunge into memory, the dank heaviness seeping through me again. I slumped back on my knees, while all the color and richness around me grew suddenly meaningless, worthless, nothing anybody could really want.

“No, thanks,” I mumbled, and curled up again on my damp, smelly island. I shut my eyes and made her go away. There was an odd clink, as if the gold cup had fallen, or a word coming out of her had changed into something metallic before it hit the floor. Then even her scent was gone. I dug back into my underwater murk, wrapped myself in mud and memories, and hid there.

---

14
IRIS

 I  called Owen when Sylvia followed Leith Rowan into the wood and didn’t come back. They might have just walked together over to the nursery to visit with Dorian; it could be that simple. But she would have called to tell me. Other than that, I couldn’t imagine. I refused to. All those broken threads in the quilt had set a chill in my heart. Doorways unguarded, windows and chimneys wide open to any passing power— and now the heir to Lynn Hall had gone out for a moment, four hours earlier, and no telling by now in what world that moment was measured.

“Owen,” I said, when I heard his polite, unencouraging greeting. “Is Sylvia over there with Dorian?”

I heard his breath check. Then he grunted slightly, acknowledging my question, without wasting time on entire words. I waited.

“She’s not here,” he said when he came back to the phone. “Dorian is in the nursery with customers. She hasn’t seen Sylvia today. Why?”

“She followed Leith Rowan into the wood to talk to him for a moment, she said. That was four hours ago.”

“I’ll be there.”

He hung up before I could tell him I didn’t want him over here; I wanted him to go searching the hollow up Blue Bear Creek, where generations of Rowans lived farther back than anyone else went in those ancient mountains. Dorian and Leith. I’d heard their names coupled more than a few times in the past season. Owen would know by now on what lost branch of the creek, what offshoot of the twisty mountain roads Leith lived.

Tyler was drifting through the kitchen, looking wistful, though he’d eaten his way through leftover vegetable soup and a quarter of a loaf of oatmeal bread a couple of hours before.

“Sit down,” I said, and gave him some milk and cherry-chocolate cookies. He started at the crack of the screen door; Owen hadn’t wasted any time. Tyler started again, nearly spilling his milk, when Owen came through the door and looked at him. The boy had grown delicate overnight, it seemed, skittish as a fawn. Love, I supposed, had wrought its changes, though I’d never seen it give anyone the appetite of a young vulture before.

Owen looked a trifle stunned, at least for him: his eyes widened and he was rendered mute by the clean, tucked-in shirt, the tied shoelaces, the slicked-down green hair.

“Hello, Mr. Avery,” Tyler said politely, and offered a gift: “Would you like a cookie? They’re awesome.”

“Ah,” Owen said. “No.” He added, not to be outdone in manners, “Thank you, Tyler.” He dragged his eyes off the boy finally and looked at me. Here? he asked silently. Or some place private? Tyler solved the problem, picking up his milk and cookies and taking them into the den; I heard the door close. Owen gave me an incredulous stare.

“It’s all right,” I told him. “He’s in love.”

“What?”

“That’s why he’s so peculiar. Judith Coyle.”

Owen closed his eyes and pressed fingers against his brows, murmuring something, a habit he’d acquired to clear his thoughts.

“One thing at a time,” he said, emerging again. “Sylvia. She went where?”

“We were up in the attic,” I explained. “She saw Leith Rowan in my wood through Hurley’s telescope, and she went down to talk to him. I have no idea why. She said she’d be back in a moment. You must know where Leith lives.”

“Why would she go there?” he demanded.

It wasn’t like him to ask unnecessary questions. “How would I know?” I asked him back. “I just want to know where she is.”

“Why would she—” he started again, then stopped, stood thinking.

“And another thing,” I told him. “That quilt I made years ago, each pattern guarding an entry into the house—” He nodded, fixing me with one of those ponderous, inexpressive gazes. “Well, the mice got at it who knows how long ago, and if there’s an unbroken pattern anywhere on it, I didn’t notice.”

“Are you telling me this entire house is unguarded?”

“No. I’ve added other guards to its passageways through the years. But those patterns guarded everything—every window and door, every flue, every water pipe, even Hurley’s skylight, which I added to the quilt when he put it in. The only thing I didn’t think to guard were mouseholes. Do you know where Leith lives? Can you go there and find out if Syl is with him, or if he saw her at all, or if she just—” Just walked out of the world. I shied away from saying that. “If he knows anything.”

“I’ll find him,” Owen promised. He hesitated for some reason, finally added, “I think you should come with me.”

“Why? How could I follow if you have to hike up a stream or a hillside? Anyway, what if Sylvia calls, needing me?”

He glanced at the closed door of the den, and then back at me, looking oddly uncertain. “Then why don’t you call some of the guild members and have them come over and get the quilt? They can work on different patterns, get it back together as soon as possible.”

“It’s closing the barn door,” I grumbled. But it was an idea, so I said I would. “Call me,” I added. “You have one of those pocket phones, like Sylvia. She might come back here while you’re out there, and I can let you know.”

For some reason, that made him laugh. “Cell phone,” he said. “I’ll leave you the number, but there’s probably better reception on the moon than anywhere a Rowan lives.”

Whatever that meant. “Just hurry,” I said, and he left.

I had just lifted the phone to call Jane when Tyler opened the kitchen door again. I dialed Jane’s number, watching him walk over to the cookie jar and dip into it. Jane’s phone rang. Tyler’s hand emerged, stuffed with cookies, I saw with the kind of ungrudging awe the aged yield to the young when they perform their careless miracles: walking barefoot across a rain forest, somersaulting on a skateboard, surfing down the Amazon, consuming an entire pepperoni pizza.

Then I saw his shadow.

His arm crossed a shaft of sunlight as he put the lid back on the cookie jar. In that trifle of time, the shadow of his skinny arm dwindled even more, grew knobby, misshapen; his fingers looked like a handful of twigs, and more than anyone human could use. Of course I stared; I couldn’t control that. But he was busy wrapping the cookies in a napkin, so he didn’t meet my eyes for that second: he didn’t see in my expression how the sudden terror prickled painfully across my shoulders, and I could feel my hair blanch a shade whiter than it already was.

Then he raised his eyes and smiled at me, and a voice said in my ear, “Jane Sloan.”

“What?” I had forgotten about her. The Tyler-thing’s smile faded a little; I saw the sudden wariness in its eyes, a darker, wet-moss green spilling into them.

“You called me,” Jane boomed irritably. “Who is this?”

As always, her voice stiffened my backbone, put some starch into my expression. I managed a pinched smile at the Tyler-face and a frown at the phone at the same time.

“Jane,” I barked back. “It’s Iris.” I flapped a shooing hand at the changeling, who, reassured, began its sidle toward me and the door. I opened it, gave the passing shoulder a couple of gingerly pats, feeling for unfamiliar knots and bumps, then closed the door firmly.

“Iris!” She made an effort, considering my bereavement. “How are you? What can I do for you?”

I had a sudden vision of the strange twig-child clinging to the other side of the door like some weird insect, its ear growing hollow and crusted with bark to hear us.

I toned down my own regal register. “Jane. Can you come over?”

“What? I can hardly hear you.”

“I need your opinion about a quilt. It’s been up in the attic too long.”

“Guilt? You have something guilty in your attic?”

“Quilt!”

“A guilty quilt? What is that? Some antique local expression I’ve missed? You mean as in—” I heard her suck in air with excitement. “Iris. You couldn’t have—”

My voice spilled out again, probably shook the changeling off the door. “Jane, don’t be ridiculous! This is about threads, not beds! Just, please, come over.”

“Well, of course, I would, but Agatha isn’t here to drive me.”

“Call Joe Barnes. Better yet, call Penelope. Bring Miranda or Lacey if they’re not busy. I need all the opinions I can get.”

“Have you called Owen?” she asked practically.

“I’ve sent him on another errand.”

She paused, finally impressed. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I hung up, listened for a breath, then realized that my listening was probably audible, and opened the door abruptly, as though I were running errands myself. The hall was empty. But light from the open porch door showed me a pool of cookie crumbs, like fairy dust, outside the kitchen door, that continued in a line across the floor underneath the closed door of the den.

I stared at it, my mouth dry, and wished, suddenly, desperately, for Owen. Or Sylvia—she might not know what to do with a changeling, or even her unpredictable grandmother, but her instincts were sound, and there was a comfortingly fat waffle tread on the sole of her boots.

The phone rang.

I felt my old bones try to reshape themselves for a breath, before I pulled myself together and picked up the phone, hoping for Owen again.

“Yes.”

“Ms. Lynn?” a man said.

I rubbed my eyes, answered impatiently, “Yes, what?”

“This is Tarrant Coyle. I was hoping I could come by and speak to you for a moment.”

I hung up, which was the only thing I wanted to say to Tarrant Coyle. Then I went back up to the attic to get Hurley to help me bring the quilt down.

He’d been up there for hours, trying to get his new platform balanced properly so that it wouldn’t scrape the floorboards when he turned it. I’d sent what I thought was Tyler up earlier with a sandwich for him; I wondered grimly which one of them had eaten it. There was an empty plate on the floor beside the platform, and Hurley, aiming his lens at the woods, showed no sign of falling over from hunger.

“Have you seen Sylvia?” I asked him.

“She’s with Leith,” he said, with such lucid idiocy that I nearly exploded.

Yes, she’s with Leith! I wanted to rage at him. She’s been with Leith for four hours and counting, and whatever wood she’s in I would bet your addled old head that it’s not the wood under your nose. And what, will somebody please explain to me, is she doing with any Rowan for four hours in any wood anywhere?

I just said tersely, as I opened the cedar chest, “Hurley, come and help me with this. I need to take it downstairs. I’ll trip over it if I try to do it myself.”

“Certainly, Iris,” Hurley said obligingly. But I had to wait, while something in the trees distracted him. I heard footsteps on the stairs and closed my eyes tightly, hoping for Sylvia, or Owen, or even Jane, limping up without her walker.

But it was the changeling, smiling brightly as it came in.

“Gram,” it said to me, and nodded to Hurley, who had absently turned the telescope to peer at it. “Grunc. I came to help.”

It must have run out of cookies. “Good,” I said, and piled the quilt into its arms. Hurley had completely forgotten to help; he’d even forgotten to move, just stood there watching us through the telescope.

The changeling asked, over the drooping hillock of quilt, “Where do you want it?”

“In the big room full of furniture, on a couch.”

It turned, paused at the top of the stairs to look back. “Are there more cookies?”

“I’ll make you more,” I promised, and it disappeared down the steps. I closed the cedar chest, thinking wearily that the Tyler-thing could disappear out the back door and into the wood with that quilt for all the good those broken patterns would do any of us in either world.

Hurley was still looking at me through the telescope. He asked cautiously, “Who was that?”

“I haven’t a clue.” I heard a car coming down the driveway, then. Hurley, distracted again, trained the telescope on it. I asked tightly, “Who is it?”

A car door slammed. “Jane Sloan,” he said tonelessly.

I sighed. “Good.”

Another door slammed. “And Miranda. And Lacey.” His voice brightened at the sound of the last slam. “And Penelope,” he announced, emerging at last from behind his lens and smiling at the thought.

The Starr sisters wore their gold and pearls, their silk twin-sets with midcalf skirts. It was nearly check-in time at the bed-and-breakfast, I remembered, even as Penelope said, after she had shoved open the front door, “I’m just dropping everyone off; we’re expecting guests any moment.”

I stared at her hair. It seemed to glitter, like fairy-tale hair, with threads of white-gold in the honey-gold. She flushed a little, adding pink to the mix.

“How did you do that?”

“I streaked it this morning before breakfast. Are you all right, Iris? Is there anything I can do before I go?”

“Nothing that simple,” I said tersely, and her eyes widened a little.

“Trouble?”

I nodded. But I didn’t know where the changeling was, so I just said, “Lacey and Miranda can tell you later.”

“Call me when you want to go home,” she said to them. She kissed my cheek and went back to the car. Jane, with her nose for it, had already started down the hall toward the trouble. A piece of it, anyway. We caught up with her, paced ourselves to the walker, which she whipped along in her no-nonsense fashion quickly enough when she sensed something unsavory ahead. She came to a complete stop in the doorway of what I still thought of as Meredith’s drawing room. The changeling had put the quilt where I had asked, spread out on one of the couches. We all looked at it, unable to get past Jane’s walker.

“Iris,” she barked. “Is that—Is that what I think—”

“Yes,” I said wearily.

“Well, how in the world did you let it get into that condition?”

“Mice got after it, I suppose. I thought I’d put it in a safe place.”

“Oh, my,” Lacey whispered. “All of it?”

“Yes. Every single pattern.”

“Jane,” Miranda said briskly, “if you can bring yourself to move a step or two, we could examine it more closely. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it looks.”

“It is,” I assured her, as the logjam in the doorway broke and we moved in around Jane.

“Oh, my,” Lacey said again, breathlessly, searching through the broken threads on a square. Her voice firmed abruptly. “Iris. Do you still have your crochet pattern designs?”

I nodded vigorously, relieved that she could see the possibilities. “Yes.” I paused, cleared my throat. “Well. Here and there around the house. If I can remember where I put them…” They were beginning to look askance at me. So was I, at myself, at the monumental carelessness of the one who should have been guarding Lynn Hall most carefully. I touched my eyes, wishing, suddenly and irrationally, with every bone, for Liam. “I’m sorry,” I said. My voice sounded harsh with failure and bitterness. “I screwed up.”

“Iris!” Jane protested.

“That’s how they put it now, isn’t it? It’s ugly, but that’s what I did.”

Lacey put a comforting hand on my arm. “It’s easy enough to forget about an old quilt in an attic. Any of us can do that. And I think, if we all work quickly enough, we can get this back together in no time. All we need are the patterns. We’ll take the quilt squares apart, match your pattern copies to the crochet designs on them, and pass them out to everyone who can crochet. I’m sure Sylvia can learn quickly enough—” She stopped, finally sensing the absence of Sylvia. “Dear. Where is Sylvia?”

“That is the problem,” I told them tightly. “Isn’t it? The passages are open and I don’t know where she is.”

They stared at me, and then at one another. Jane sat down suddenly on top of the quilt. “Iris,” she whispered. I had never heard her sound so fragile.

I couldn’t see the changeling, where it might be crouched and listening, but I had to tell them about it. “That’s not all—”

Not even that was all.

I heard steps from the direction of the back of the house, heavy and tentative. Not Sylvia or Owen, I thought puzzledly. Not Hurley, either. A man, burly melting to lumpy, rounded the doorway facing the kitchen, and peered at us tentatively. Something reassured him, brought a smile to his face; he stepped forward.

“Iris,” he said, nodding at me. “Ladies.”

It was Tarrant Coyle, in ironed denim jeans and a shirt that didn’t express an opinion or draw you a picture, just buttoned up and stayed mute. So did we. He took his baseball cap hastily off his head, and held it over his heart.

“I knocked at the back door. The boy let me in. Tyler.” I started to speak; he held out the cap, firmly and solemnly. “Iris, believe me, I would not be here bothering you in your time of distress, unless I felt it was rock-bottom important. And before I go any further, let me say that, as regards to Liam—”

“No.”

“Pardon?”

“As regards to Liam, don’t say anything,” I told him irritably. “Just be quiet about Liam. Tell me what you’re doing here.”

“Well.” He cleared his throat, then took us all in again, and smiled. It was a little, suggestive smile, as though we all shared something together, and I didn’t like it a bit. “I understand from my daughter Judith that you ladies belong to a secret society. She says you’re all witches, and the society has been ongoing for over a hundred years. Now.”

“Really, Tarrant,” Miranda said with enough ice in her voice to freeze the gold in her earlobes. “If Judith is talking about the Fiber Guild, I assure you that all we do is sew.”

“I know. Darn socks and swap yarns. Heh. She spies on you. And she’s told me what you really do. And what I think, ladies, is what we have here is an incredible opportunity for a business partnership. Can we sit down and—”

“No,” we all said together.

“Okay. Let me put my cards on the table. Iris, you sell or lease—or you persuade Sylvia to sell or lease Lynn Hall and the woods and the adjoining lands to Titus Quest Company for a major sum of money—more than enough for you and Hurley to find a cozy place to live, and to compensate Sylvia—and we’ll be in business.”

I closed my eyes, heard Jane demand bewilderedly, “What business, Tarrant? What are you babbling about? I’ve heard more sense from a hound with its tail caught in a door.”

Tarrant widened his stance, solidifying his position, and continued, unfazed, “This is my vision, ladies. And it’s like nothing that’s been conceived or built anywhere, ever. We’d fix up the hall and make it into a kind of museum—so it’d never be full of hordes eating cotton candy—just quiet, intelligent visitors who’d like to learn a bit more—”

“About what?” Lacey asked faintly.

Tarrant took his eyes off his vision and slewed them, meaningfully, toward my wood. “About who else lives in that wood. Who uses Lynn Hall as their passage between worlds. Of course. I can offer the entire Fiber Guild consulting fees about that—for your history, anecdotes, the craftwork you do, artifacts, written tales about sightings, adventures— especially those who got taken and survived—”

Jane gave one of her fruity snorts. “Sounds like space aliens.”

“Exactly,” Tarrant said with enthusiasm. “That’s what gave me the idea. And then, in the adjoining field, we’d put the commercial stuff. The theme rides, the vendors, the games, all that stuff. But in the wood itself-—now this is really special—we’ll mark the places where things might happen, for real, and make a guide-yourself-path for the really brave, who are willing to take the risk, actually make contact—”

“Tarrant.” My voice hit the chandelier above our heads; I heard prisms tinkle. “Why are you still here? Why are we listening to you?”

He looked at me like the goat who’s just eaten the shoe you threw at it. “I think you know why, Iris,” he said evenly. “I think you’d rather do it this way than have it all over the county that all of you—including the principal’s wife, the local historian, and a couple of mothers with families—belong to an ancient, secret coven of witches who corrupt the young and innocent—my daughter included—by enticing them to join.”

In the silence I heard the screen door slam, saw the changeling go dancing through the roses toward the wood.

---

15
RELYT

 T he Grunc Hurley saw me. But he didn’t say, he didn’t tell her, the witch Gram, who promised me cookies, so I was safe. Until he says: I saw it through my magic lens. I saw you. Eye saw you. Your scaly tree face, your twigs. Your shadow, that flows and flows across our night, across the secret borders of another world. Netherworld. Other.

Three witches came into the house, so I didn’t stay for them to look at me. I listened, but the witch Gram didn’t say Tyler. Quilt, she said, and Sylvia. And quilt again, and quilt, quilt, quilt. Never Tyler missing. Oh! Tyler lost. O! Just stitches and Sylvia until the man with the red cap came sneaking around the back and saw me see him. So he had to come in, then. He said some interesting words—cotton candy, museum, artifact, commercial—but they didn’t mean anything to me.

So I left them and went into the wood to find my heart.

They have human words for her; I’ve heard some. Queen. Huntress. Sorceress. She. She who bids me come and go. She who must be obeyed. They give her names that come and go like leaves. Never the same one twice, and always dangerous to say. To say is to summon. They think it’s that easy. If she came to me every time I said or thought her name, she’d never leave my side.

But this time she found me.

Sometimes she only sends her voice, coiling and purring like a cat into my mind. Or like a bolt of lightning, sudden, swift, and white-hot. I’ve seen enough of love in human fashion to know she doesn’t. Love. Me, or any of us. But it doesn’t stop me. Or any of us. She is our moon. Our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl’s eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves. She is what humans remember when they step into the wood: a glimpse of her, memory receding faster and faster, into sunlight and scent and shadow, of what once they saw, once they knew.

She uses me, but I don’t care. For her, I sharpen my wits. I learn. If I make mistakes, I use my charms. The Grunc Hurley saw me with his lens, but not with his own true eye. So now I know. He didn’t say: where is Tyler? He only said: who is that? So he doesn’t know what he knows. And he gave me something to give to her that she wanted: the little gift of knowledge.

We can be seen in that lens.

I never expect her. So when I saw her, my limbs went fluid, my shadow peeled off the ground, went swooping away like a shout. She stood between worlds, in a fall of light, a blur of tree and shadow. A human, glancing at her and away, wouldn’t have noticed. Unless there was that snag at the eye or the mind. That backward glance. That closer look. But only if she wanted. If she chose to be seen.

She chose my eyes. I bowed my head, a windblown shrub, twigs tangling. She smiled at me. I drank her smile like wine, like air and light. But the smile didn’t reach her summer eyes, the young leaf green that inhales light and more light until it glows within.

“I have something for you,” I said, to kindle that smile. “The Grunc Hurley sees us truly with his attic lens. Shall I steal it for you?”

She shook her hair, that cascade of gold that flowed into the light. “Never mind the Grunc Hurley, my sweet. I want you to do something else for me.”

Anything. Anything, anything.

“The boy refuses all my gifts, my comforts. He won’t eat, he won’t drink, he won’t even move. He barely speaks, even to me.”

If I did that, what would she give me? I wondered instantly. If I spurned her and all her gifts? Her eyes flashed a laugh at me, as though she heard. Anyway, I never could. Foolish Tyler. Clever Tyler. To make her lack, want.

“This is what I want you to do…”

She told me. And then the light was empty. It took longer for my eyes to see that than for her to leave me. I stood gazing at nothing, nothing, for a senseless moment until my eyes said she had gone elsewhere.

I turned away, went to look for what she wanted.

It didn’t take long. Of course the Undine would come. She would want to know, to talk, after the midnight swim Tyler took through the pond water. I found her lurking at the edge of the trees, gazing up at Tyler’s window. I wasn’t interested—she was too young, too ignorant—but I had to pretend. So I gave her my sweetest Tyler-smile. Still her eyes grew big at me. But at what she sensed, not saw, because she only said:

“Tyler.” Her voice squeaked. “Is everything all right? Did you get into trouble?”

I shook my head. “My cuz talked to Owen. And then to me. Nobody is really angry.”

“You look different.”

“I took a bath. Got the frogs out of my hair.”

“It’s not that…” She studied me, her face puckered. I turned away, keeping to the shadows, not knowing how close to witch she was already. I heard her sniff and looked back at her, smiling again.

“I spilled Gram’s bubbles in the water.”

She laughed then, a little mourning-dove coo that flew sweetly into my ear. Her skin was flower-petal new; her eyes pale green like young apples. I thought, Well, maybe… But I didn’t let her see that, either.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“Looking for you.”

“Oh.” She turned away then, but not before I saw her strawberry blush, her little bird-V smile. She bent down quickly, picked up a dry seedpod, and tucked it under a flap in her vest. I saw something flash in the attic then: the Grunc’s telescope, the eye searching, watching. I bent down, too, picked up a hazelnut cap, flicked it away.

“We could go for a walk,” I said. “I know a place where mushrooms grow as big as babies’ faces.”

She squinched her face at me, but it was only playing. “It’s too warm and dry for mushrooms, now.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I can’t.” She frowned then, at the house, not at me. “I have to wait for my father. He’s in there talking to Iris about some weird idea.”

“Weird.”

“I told him—” She stopped, began again. “You know how you say things when you’re excited, thinking someone else will be as excited and as interested as you? But they see something else—they look at what you’re saying all wrong— but then it’s too late, you’ve already said it.”

She expected a noise, so I made one, to whatever she said with all those words.

“It’s been years since I started talking about it, and I thought he understood—he made me think he did—so I kept telling him.”

“What?”

“About the Fiber Guild. How I watch them. How they’re all witches, doing magical things with their threads to keep the wood-folk away. How I want to be one. I mean, I was eight or something when I first told him! And all these years later, I find out what he’s really thinking about everything, all the secrets I’ve told him—”

“What?” It was a good word. Like a rock in a river, sticking up to let you land on it, so you could make your way across the flow. What. Watt. Wot.

“Know what he said to me while we were driving out here?”

My lips shaped “Wh—” again, but she flowed right over it.

“He said he’d been waiting for the perfect moment for years, and this was it: Liam dead, the heir to Lynn Hall living on the other side of the country, and Iris getting too tottery to keep up the place herself. With all I told him, he was going to make us rich.”

Her mouth clamped shut. Mine was open, but I had trouble trying to find a word that matched whatever it was she was talking about.

“How?” I tried finally, another rock word.

“You won’t believe it.” The berry was under her skin again: strawberry, raspberry, staining that cream. I wanted to put my hand on her bare neck, lick her cheek. But she might not like that, and then she wouldn’t trust me, and then how could I do what I had to do?

The screen door banged; her father came out on the porch, thump, thump, putting his cap on, and leaned over the railing to call “Judith!” at the trees. It startled me until I remembered that Undines have names. “Jude! I’m leaving! Let’s go!”

She just stared at him, her arms folded. “So go,” she muttered. “I’m not coming with you ever again. I’ll live here in the woods.”

I liked that. “Okay.”

The Coyle man came off the porch, shambled like a bear through the rose garden, shrugging off thorns. He came to the trees, peered in. He nodded to me, and said to her, “There you are. Did you hear me call?”

“I can’t believe,” she said, her voice small and taut as a thread, “you did that.”

“What? All I did was make a business proposition.”

“You betrayed all I told you in confidence. Iris will never trust me again.”

“Oh, piffle. I hardly mentioned your name. Anyway, it’s to Iris’s advantage. She’ll stew over it for a day or two, then get to thinking seriously about it, and I’ll get a call from her before the end of next week. I guarantee you. Wait and see.”

“She must think you’re nuts.”

“Doesn’t matter. She’ll do it for whatever reasons.”

“You’re blackmailing her. Over me.”

His eyes narrowed. They were some murky brown, like his hair, sticking out around the cap, but they weren’t mean, just stupid. “Look,” he said. “This is the idea of the century, and I didn’t have to use you to make her think about it. It’s good enough to stand on its own two feet. It’ll be great for Iris, and for this community. I bet Tyler here’d think it’s a winner. Wouldn’t you, Tyler?”

I said that word again, feeling murky myself, not understanding anything.

“Think of it,” the Coyle said. “A three-part adventure. Did you tell him what’s in these woods?”

She gave a little nod. “Some.”

“Fairies, boy. Real ones. I bet half of what we think are fireflies are really Them, flying around at night like little stars. They’ve been here for centuries, and the Lynn family knows all about it. They probably have documents, letters, stories about sightings. The entire Fiber Guild must have stories. We’ll use the house as the fairy museum, so to speak, and we’ll put the rides on that field, all with a fairy theme. The Little Folk. Brownies, elves, that kind of thing. And flying— lots of flying rides. Maybe a castle. Or a witch’s house— maybe we can get the Fiber Guild to do their sewing in it. Or would that be better in the museum?”

“Dad!” the Undine wailed. “They’d hate that! Anyway, it won’t work unless it’s secret.”

“Well, it’s not, is it?” he asked, eyeing her. “Secret any longer. Is it?”

“But—”

“Anyway, listen to this, Tyler. This is the best part. We’ll put trails through this wood to all the places that might be openings, passageways to the Otherworld. Mushroom trails, bread crumb trails—whatever they have in fairy tales. And people can walk through the woods, and maybe, if they’re quick enough, or smart enough—whatever it takes to see a fairy, we’ll have to do some research on that—they can have their own personal encounter with the Otherworld. Wouldn’t you be interested in that, Tyler?” He touched my shoulder. Then he looked at his fingers puzzledly, without knowing why. “Isn’t that an idea whose time has come here to stay?”

I felt laughter, like little bells shaking all the way through me. “Sure,” I said.

“Tyler!” the Undine breathed reproachfully.

“I mean, I’m not sure. Don’t you think it might be dangerous?”

“What’s dangerous? They’ve been around for centuries; nobody’s even noticed they’re here, except the Fiber Guild, who keep them all locked up so nobody else can see them. That’s not fair. Do you think it is?”

“No.”

“Tyler!”

“He’s just being fair,” the Coyle said. “He’s part Lynn, and he can see it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about! Either of you!” Her eyes were suddenly shiny, under water. “It’s secret because they’re dangerous! Not little Tinkerbells and brownies— they’re powerful and nasty and the Fiber Guild keeps us safe.”

“They’re just shy,” the Coyle argued stubbornly. “And the Fiber Guild keeps them trapped. Now come on, I don’t have all day to spend here. I have work to do.”

“I’m not going home.”

“Well, okay, if you want to spend some time with Tyler, here.”

“Ever!”

He blinked, then smiled. “Ever’s a long time. You’ll find your way home soon enough. Maybe Tyler can make you see what—”

She turned away from both of us and ran.

The Coyle followed a few steps, then stopped, puffing. “Tyler—”

I nodded, trying to look worried. “I’ll find her.”

“Try and make her see what I’m doing, will you? I’ve got a vision, boy, and it’s a doozy. Tell her to call me when she wants to come home.”

“Okay.”

He went back into the yard. I followed the Undine deeper into the woods. I could hear her cracking twigs, stirring up dead leaves, running like a startled deer, with no direction but away.

“Judith,” I called. “Please stop. I’m sorry. I’m just confused about all this—Please.” I put some panting in my voice, then I pretended to trip over something, and yelled, “Ow!” Then I really did trip. Some tree put a gnarly root out between my feet and I went flying, just like the Coyle said we did. I landed so hard my breath went somewhere. When I caught it finally—a little snatch of air, another snatch—the wood was quiet around me.

The Undine stood in front of me. Her tears glittered on her face, in her eyes; all the beautiful color was everywhere under her skin. She was panting, too. But her wet eyes weren’t angry, and when she knelt beside me, neither was her voice.

“Oh, Tyler. Are you hurt?”

“No.” I made a sound like a laugh. “Just clumsy.”

“Why did you—why did you encourage him like that?”

“I don’t know.” I pulled myself over to the tree, leaned against it, dragging in big gulps of air, entire cauldrons. “I mean, I don’t know anything about any of this. You told me some of it, but I didn’t understand much then, either. How do I know what fairies do or don’t do? Or what the Fiber Guild knows or does or doesn’t do? I wouldn’t recognize a fairy if it bit me on the nose.”

“You said they might be dangerous.”

“I was just saying what you told me before. I never thought about them. I don’t even know where to begin. I mean, what did he mean about openings in the wood where people might see them? Are there really places like that?”

She sighed. “They’re what the Fiber Guild guards. And my dad wants to—-just open them all up and see what comes out. It’s like opening up all the cages in a zoo and waiting to see if a hummingbird or a grizzly bear comes out.”

“What kinds of places?”

“Like the pond. Hollow trees. Springs. Places where the worlds touch.”

“Here?” I asked skeptically. “In my Gram’s wood?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Come on.” She tugged at my sleeve as she stood. “Get up. I’ll show you.”

“Is it far?” I asked. “I told Gram I’d be home for supper.”

“Just come on, Tyler. You’ve never worried about time before. Anyway, it’s not far at all.”

But it was: she led me there, and then I led her farther than she had ever gone in her life, even in her dreams.

---

16
OWEN

 I  went to Leith’s place first. I had been there a couple of times with Dorian. That’s how I knew things had gotten disturbingly serious between them, when Leith invited me to dinner. Being welcomed under a Rowan’s lintel was tantamount to becoming a member of the family, after you passed the rigorous test of locating the lintel in the first place. Iris had been right not to come with me. After I drove down dirt roads that splintered off one another in maddening groups of three, none ever suggesting, by so much as a roof shingle nailed to a stump, who might live down those goat-paths, I had to park where the road ended, walk over a fallen trunk across a stream, and then down the stream bank until I came to a two-room cabin with a fire pit in front of it, and a couple of chairs made of unstripped birch on the porch.

Of course no one was there.

I stood on the porch, trying to eke a clue out of the landscape where to look next. The stream flowing lightly past me under the mossy trunk told me nothing. Neither did the pair of crows watching me from the branches of a hemlock. I heard no human voices, nor did I see any other signs of human habitation. Leith might have been the only Rowan living within that private corner of the world. Except that there was no sign of him, either.

The eerie, flickering face of the changeling eating cookies at Iris’s kitchen table stole into my thoughts. Its eyes, human one moment, hard little seed pods the next, dark and empty as a hollow in a tree the moment after, had nearly caused me to jump out of my skin. Fortunately, I don’t change expression easily anymore; neither Iris nor the changeling seemed to notice my shock. That I saw it so clearly could mean only one thing: it was a danger to those I was born to protect. I feared for Iris if she did recognize this imp of unpredictable power and obscure motives, and I had no time to waste before I got back to her. I would have to drive all the way to the village before I could call her on my cell phone, and even then I could tell her nothing that wouldn’t add to her worries. I could only hope she had followed my advice and summoned a few seasoned veterans of the Fiber Guild, armed with needles and pins, to stay with her.

The thought that Sylvia herself might have been taken, lured away into twilight realms, gave me a moment of blank, unreasoning panic. I had no idea where else to look for her, but how could I look for her there? The world around Leith’s tiny porch, trees edged close to his cabin, boughs brushing tenderly against his windows, birds flitting through the long, dusty-gold, late-afternoon light, a squirrel scolding my intrusion, the ceaselessly chattering water, seemed at once mysterious and utterly prosaic. It did not admit to any possibilities except its own lovely and intractable habits. I couldn’t see within the wind; I couldn’t understand the language of water.

But, I remembered with relief, I knew someone who might.

I didn’t know where to find Rue, either, but I knew a place to start looking. I managed to make my way out of Rowan territory with the dumb luck of desperation; all the roads I chose led me out, rather than in tangles. I made a quick trip back to my house to call Iris before I continued the search.

“Owen,” I said when she answered. “Is she back yet?”

“No.” She bit the word off explosively, sounding exasperated in the extreme. “And there’s more trouble.”

“Tyler?” I suggested obliquely, in case she hadn’t noticed the changeling.

“You noticed,” she answered bitterly.

“Yes.”

“Well, even that’s not everything.”

“What—”

“The rest can wait—-just find Sylvia. Did you see Leith?”

“No.”

She spat a word I didn’t know she knew into the phone and slammed it down. I turned, trying to think through the echo in my ear, and found Dorian watching me. I hadn’t heard her come into the house, but I was relieved to see her.

“At least you haven’t vanished. Are there any customers in the nursery?”

She shook her head, frowning. “No. I was about to close the shop. Who’s missing?”

“Sylvia, apparently. Iris hasn’t seen her for hours. Would you go over there when you’re finished? She could use some help.”

Dorian nodded vigorously, holding my eyes in that way she had when she knew she hadn’t heard everything. “What’s wrong? I mean, Syl’s a big girl; she might just be out shopping or visiting or something—”

“When last seen, she had followed Leith into the wood behind Lynn Hall to talk to him for a moment. According to what Iris told me, that was over five hours ago.”

Dorian’s eyes grew wide; her fingers, kneading the crooks of her elbows, had slackened. “Leith?”

“You haven’t seen him this afternoon, have you?”

“No.” She paused, added slowly, “He usually comes by on Saturdays to help me in the nursery. He calls when he can’t make it.”

“Did he call?”

“No.” Her fingers got busy again, untied her work apron. “I’ll find him. He might be at the cabin. Or Dr. Caddis might have had an emergency somewhere.”

“I stopped by his cabin. He isn’t there. I doubt that he’s been with Sylvia all this time; I just wanted to ask him if he knows where she might have gone. We don’t need Leith, and I really wish you would go to Iris.” Her eyes were on my face again, the flecks of color vivid in them. I nodded. “There’s trouble. Iris will explain.”

She swallowed. Then she said tightly, pulling her apron off, “I’ll lock up the cash box and go over.”

“If I run across Leith, I’ll send him to Lynn Hall.”

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“Yes.”

Her mouth tightened; she breathed, before she turned, “Be careful.”

I waited until I saw her pickup heading toward the hall. Then I drove half a mile back down the road, parked, and began to hike down the old mill road, while all around me the dazzling light, the deeper shadows, the serene stillness of the wood warned me of that gray old man Dusk walking the path through the wood behind me.

I remembered the place where I had first seen Rue as vividly as if I’d been there yesterday. I walked a double path toward it: the one under my feet, the one through memory. One imposed itself upon the other; the leaves crowding around me pushed into my thoughts. At the road’s end, where it dwindled away beside the mill wall, I clambered over the ancient, fallen oak into the pathless trees. Mossy stones marked the flow of underground water; I followed that. Rowans hunted all year in these woods; because of their poverty and sheer stubbornness, local law looked the other way. More than one indignant hiker had been hastened out by random bullets careening off the trees; the hunters were never caught and rarely seen. Leith had told me that they only discouraged strangers that way; they were careful around the rest of us.

The underground stream led to a grove of birch growing in a circle. The first time I found it, I’d been following a path of gigantic pastel mushrooms growing along the stream, under the hemlock. It had been spring, then; the birch had put out young leaves of such sweet, fiery green that seeing them in a shaft of light had taken my breath away, for all the many springs I’d seen. Within the shaft of light, within the circle of slender trees, something moved. Someone. I had stopped, transfixed, watching a slender figure emerge out of leaf and light, and look my way.

This time, as I reached the circle, I saw the last shaft of daylight vanish into dusk, and the face that looked my way was Leith’s.

I stopped, trying to put this and that together and growing profoundly uneasy. Leith wore an expression I’d never seen on him before, and wished I hadn’t then: he looked uncertain, grim, and vaguely guilty of something.

“Owen,” he said, nodding briefly, without surprise.

“What are you doing here?” I asked incredulously, wondering for an instant if he, too, had a lover among the wood-folk.

“I’m—I brought Syl here.”

Astonished, I joined him within the trees. In the dusk, the birch leaves hung so still they might have been the jeweled leaves of fairy tale. “Well, where is she?”

“She went looking for Tyler.”

“Tyler. Tyler’s at—” I stopped. Tyler wasn’t at Lynn Hall. And Leith knew it, and so, apparently, did Sylvia. I heard my voice rumble out of me, like a roar from a provoked bear. “Where is Sylvia?”

“She went—she went—” The unflappable Leith grew incoherent; he waved a hand at the trees around us, and finished unhappily, “She found a way in.”

“In.”

“She’s part—” He drew breath, held it, while I stared at him. “I know you understand,” he said finally. “I’ve seen you with—with the woman you love. I can see you because a part of me is—is fay. And so is Syl. We saw it in each other when we were schoolkids. That’s why she moved so far away, so no one else would see it. That’s why I’m drawn to this place. This doorway. I brought Syl here to see if someone would come to her, and tell her why they took Tyler. But she—she found a way in, herself. She walked into the light, and after a while— she wasn’t there. I’ve been waiting for her.”

I was staring at him again. “Sylvia?” I heard myself say from a distance. The heir to Lynn Hall had just walked out of the world into fairyland. The heir to Lynn Hall, born to guard, and watch, and keep all passageways locked against the wood-folk, was one of Them herself. And one of us.

And so was the young man who had stolen my daughter’s heart.

I wanted badly to sit down. I wanted badly to bellow at Leith until his hair streamed in the wind of my wrath, and his face turned the color of water. But when the shouting was done, the facts would still be there. I wasn’t fay; I was Avery, born to use whatever magic that name had given me against the Otherworld. But I had never recognized anything Other, any danger in either Leith or Sylvia. And I had crossed a boundary, too, loving whom I loved. Like Sylvia, I had lied to Iris.

I leaned against one of the birch trees in lieu of sitting and tried to put my wits in order. First things first. “We’ll get into this later. Right now, I need you to go to Lynn Hall and—”

“I don’t want to go anywhere near Lynn Hall,” he protested. “I can’t tell Iris I know where Syl is and not tell her where. I’ll wait here for Syl. You go.”

“Dorian is there.”

He regarded me silently for a breath. “You don’t care? About what I am?”

“Of course I care. But she loves you, and I think you love her, and considering whom I love, I can’t put up a case for the deceit and treachery and lovelessness of the entire folk of the wood.”

“What will she think?” he murmured uneasily.

“I have no idea. You’d better ask her.”

He didn’t answer. He was looking over my shoulder, past the ring of trees; the gentle wonder on his face made me turn abruptly.

Rue stepped into the circle beside me. In the dusk, her smooth hair glowed an eerie, buttercup gold; her dark eyes warned of night. As always, she left me mute in that first moment I saw her: something of the wood that had taken a human form, yet could not disguise its own wild beauty, its Otherness. She stepped to my side, laid her hand on my shoulder.

“I heard you call me,” she said softly. “You should not have come looking for me.”

“I had to.”

“I know.” Her eyes went to Leith. “Red cap. A Rowan.”

He smiled a little, said breathlessly, “Yes.”

“I’ve seen you.”

“I’m Leith.”

“And you’ve seen me. More than Leith, I think. More than human.” Her fingers tightened a little on my shoulder. “You must leave these woods. It isn’t safe here tonight.”

I didn’t dare touch her; I would have lingered there all night, just to feel the pulse in the crook of her elbow against my lips, just to hold her long, light bones. “I’m looking for Sylvia,” I told her. “Leith saw her disappear into your world. She’s searching for Tyler.”

Rue shook her head, her brows tilted with a very human worry. “I haven’t seen your Tyler. If one of you has been taken, you must deal with the one who has taken. That is no simple matter.”

“Can you take me where Sylvia has gone?”

She shook her head again. “I have brought you as close to our world as I dared, so close our boundaries have blurred…”

“Yes,” I breathed.

“I dare not bring you closer. We have been one another’s forbidden secrets. I could not bring you into our world without revealing that.”

“Sylvia—”

“She found her own way in; she left nothing for us to follow. It’s a journey out of time, into an ancient, complex realm. Humans who stray into it sometimes never find their way back.”

“I’ll risk it,” I told her recklessly. “Why would anyone have taken Tyler? Only because he’s a Lynn? Or does your queen want to use him as a bargaining chip? Would she keep Sylvia instead?”

Rue’s hand covered my mouth, swift and moth-light. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t keep saying names. Don’t keep thinking, wanting. Just go, now, quickly.”

I couldn’t help it; I took her hand, to feel her long, delicate fingers within mine. “Come with me. Or come to me later—”

She said something, made some small sound. Her face turned away from me; she was staring over my shoulder. So was Leith, I realized belatedly. Then a sound thundered out of the woods around us, unfamiliar and overwhelming. It sounded like a crazed human shout, its echoes overlapping but increasing in force instead of fading. My bones froze. Rue wavered in the sound like smoke shredded by wind. Leith gave a hoarse, shocked shout back at it. But he didn’t run; maybe, like me, he couldn’t move. I could only turn my head slowly, reluctantly, afraid to see, but unable not to look.

I saw them at the edge of the trees across the little clearing: a dark line against the twilight wood. I couldn’t see their faces, or their mounts clearly, yet they were more than shadows. The Wild Hunt, I thought instantly, and knew we couldn’t outrun that. The figure in the center was crowned; I saw the watery ripple of silver as some fay light struck it. Here and there a piece of harness glinted, a tiny bell shook, a black ribbon took to the wind, a bird riding a shoulder or the antlers on a helm, caught that stray glittering in its unblinking eye.

“It’s the wrong time of the year,” I heard the prosaic woodsman whisper.

“You Rowans hunt in any season,” I said unsteadily, as Rue’s fingers, still human in my hand, trembled, cold as ice. “Why shouldn’t they?”

The wood spoke a word again, this time with a little less thunder. Rue’s hand slipped out of mine. She began to drift away from me. I caught at her; I might as well have tried to grasp my own shadow. She pulled at my heart; she winched it out of me with each flickering, dissipating movement; she seemed to melt away as I watched.

“Rue…” I whispered, and tasted the bitter word, felt it burn my throat.

One final word flew out of the trees, this like a swift, hard blow, as though invisible lightning had cracked through the air between us. I flinched, and felt the pain a moment later. It was, I realized, exactly as if I had been struck by something heavy, weighted with metal, and obscurely familiar.

Then the magic was gone; there was only the wood in the twilight, growing dim and cool. The pain I had felt as Rue left me had only just begun: already my skin longed for her, my eyes, my stunned heart, my numb and remorseful brain.

“Now what?” Leith demanded.

I had no idea. “We wait,” I suggested wearily, “until we find something better to do.”

He stared at me as I sat down within the ring. “Your face… It looks like something hit you.”

“That last word.”

“What?”

“I think she flung a gauntlet at me. We’ve been challenged.”

---

17
TYLER

 F or a long time nobody came. I think I fell asleep, curled up on the sheepskin; even in my sleep I tried not to let myself touch anything but that. Like I was floating in dangerous waters, full of hungry sharks, killer whales, gigantic squid, and if I let a hand or a foot drift off my life raft, they would bite it off. They would get me, then. Whoever they were.

My waking thoughts ran into my dreams; they were all about my father. Jumbled memories, maybe not all of them true, since I was dreaming; some of them were probably wishes. Like learning to ski, which he’d always promised we would do together someday. In my dreams, he finally took me to the slopes, where we didn’t even need lessons. We were all geared up, bright clothes and caps, and flying down a trail together, ski poles tucked under our arms, snow fanning out behind us, while we laughed and shouted, and a misty-blue world of distant mountains and forests spread out everywhere around us. We were brilliant. Awesome. My dad was so fast he disappeared inside his own private snow cloud. I was trying to keep up, and cheering him on, when I started feeling funny. I couldn’t see him anymore, inside the blur of snow. He had somehow skied even faster than the snow he kicked up, like sound traveling so fast it can’t be heard until it catches up with itself. He had traveled so fast that all that was left of him was a memory of motion.

I woke up, feeling so alone that I didn’t know how I could keep living inside myself.

The Undine-thing was back, sitting on the floor with its back against the bed. I glanced at it, and groaned, and closed my eyes again, just wanting to burrow somewhere lightless and dank and silent, where I didn’t have to think.

It poked me, and whispered, “Tyler.”

There was something funny about its voice. It leaned over me then, put its lips very close to my ear. “Tyler.” The word fluttered in my ear like a tiny hummingbird. My eyes opened really wide. I smelled a mix of sweet berry shampoo, grass, dirt, sweat. My head came up then, and I saw her own true eyes.

“Judith?” My voice squeaked. I was never so happy to see anyone in my entire life.

She put her finger to her lips. She didn’t look very happy. Her face was dirty; her hair was tangled, with little bits caught in it of leaf and crumbled wood, lichens, spiderweb, and even a dead roly-poly bug. She looked like she’d crawled through a hollowed-out log. “Where are we?”

“You don’t have to whisper. It’s not like they don’t know we’re here. How did you get here, anyway?”

She scowled. “That thing brought me. That Tyler-thing.”

“What Ty—?” I stopped. I sat up all the way, then, remembering for the first time that there was still a normal world out there, with Gram, and Grunc, and Syl in it, and they’d be wondering where I’d gone. Or maybe not. “There’s something wearing my face around Lynn Hall?”

“I thought it was you. It tricked me into going into one of the passageways between worlds, so here I am.”

My mouth was hanging. “It’s that much like me?”

“Well.” Her face got a little less pinched for a moment. “Almost. It took a bubble bath.”

I snorted a laugh. “And they still think it’s me? Why did it take you?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t say. But we have to get back there and warn people before it steals somebody else.”

She got to her feet restlessly, moved around a little, looking at things. She made a face at the bowl of candied fruit, then picked up a mirror framed in gold and made another face at herself. She rubbed a streak of dirt off her cheek, picked the bug and a few twigs out of her hair.

I made a brilliant deduction. “You didn’t come through water.”

“No. I took the Tyler-thing to a big old hollow tree. It said it didn’t understand how I could possibly see that as a passageway to anywhere. So I finally stepped inside the tree, which I’ve done at least a couple dozen times before, trying to see if it would really work. This time, it did.”

“What happened?”

“It was like there was no inside… I just fell into the ground. I rattled down through tree roots and dirt and bracken, and finally slid out here. And there you were, snoring on the sheepskin, with dried pond scum in your hair. So I knew it was really you. But where are we? Whose house is this?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. People came in a while ago; they kept trying to get me to eat.” I paused, remembering. “One was so beautiful. Not like superstar beautiful. Like something ageless and changeless, that everyone still keeps falling in love with. Like the moon. I think she is the queen of everything. She said she made this place for me. She wanted me to eat and drink. Sleep in the bed, wash in the pool… Before her, another one came that they tried to make like you. But its eyes were all wrong. It kept trying to get me to eat, too. I don’t know why.”

Judith’s eyes were narrowed, looking at something far, far away. “That sounds familiar… Why does that sound familiar? Did you eat or drink anything?”

“No. I almost took a gold cup full of water from the queen. She made it sound so good. And then I remembered the water I’d fallen through, fish-tank water, turtle-pond water, and it didn’t sound so good anymore.”

“Glamour…”

“What?”

“That’s what it’s called. Fairy magic. When they make something, like these hangings on the bed, look like they’re woven out of gold and silk, but really they’re just made of cobweb and straw. Or when you trick a fairy by moonlight out of its pot of gold, and in the morning all you have is a tin bucket with some dead leaves in it.”

I thought about that. “So she’s not really that beautiful?”

That made Judith grin for some reason. “She might be. She always is in stories. I’m just saying that’s how they work their spells over humans, sometimes. They make us think we see what we want to see. Maybe they trick us so that we can never see them clearly, never come too close, never learn too much about them.”

She was wandering around while she talked, picking things up, opening little drawers in tables, lifting the corners of rugs with her foot. She went to a window, raised a curtain an inch, and peeked out.

“What’s out there?” I asked.

“Trees, flowers, a pool… it’s pretty. You haven’t looked?”

“I haven’t moved off this sheepskin.”

“Really?” She came back to me, then, knelt in front of me. “Why not? Weren’t you curious?”

“No.”

“Were you scared?”

I thought. “No. I was mostly just—I wanted everyone to stay away and leave me alone. I just wanted to think about my dad.” She didn’t say anything. I went on after a moment. “They kept saying eat, and drink, and sleep in the soft bed, come swim in the nice pool. But none of it made any sense to me. No one told me why I’m here; they just dropped me in the middle of this fancy resort and told me to have fun. Like I wanted to be here.”

“Nobody ever said they understood humans very well.”

“I kept thinking and thinking about my dad. All these memories came back… Maybe part of it was going to Grandpa Liam’s funeral. It reminded me of my father’s. And my mom getting married again, and suddenly having a different—whatever he is. I didn’t think about Syl or Gram wondering where I was, not even about anybody coming for me, or how I’d get out of here. I just started remembering, and I didn’t want to stop. And then you came.”

“Do you want me to leave you alone, too?”

“No.” I shook my head, hard. “No.” I reached out, and suddenly her hand was in mine, and I wasn’t embarrassed, and I didn’t want to let go. “I didn’t know how much I wanted to see you until I saw you.”

She smiled, her face turning pink, and I realized, like something smacked me in the forehead, that she liked me, too. Me. Green hair, geeky glasses, grungy clothes, and I hadn’t taken a bubble bath since I was two.

“I can’t believe that other Tyler fooled me,” she sighed.

“You haven’t known me very long. And the last thing you expected was a fake me.”

“He was too clean. And he tucked in his shirt, and combed his hair, and he smiled so much.”

I thought then that maybe I should give the bubble-bath idea some attention. “I think I’m hungry now,” I said, surprised again.

“Don’t eat,” she warned. “Or drink. I can’t remember why. If it’s something they want you to do, you probably shouldn’t do it.”

“Well, what should we do?”

“You could get off the sheepskin.”

I was still sitting on it. For a moment, my fingers tightened on the wool. I wondered if she was trying to trick me, too, into leaving my damp and smelly island where I could be safely miserable. She just held my hand and waited, without laughing at me, or getting impatient. I remembered how happy I’d been to see her, deep in me, beyond the murk and memories. How I said her true name instead of her fairy-tale name, because I knew who she was.

So I let go of her and stood up and walked off the sheepskin. Just like that. She smiled a little, crooked smile, and got up, too.

“Now what?” I asked.

She scratched her head, dislodging a scrap of bark. “I guess we can try to find a passageway back. If we got in, we should be able to get out. If we can find some path that Iris hasn’t guarded.”

“There should be at least two. Owen’s pond and your hollow tree.”

“Unless she’s sewn them back up again.”

“You mean we could be stuck here?” I demanded.

“Well, that’s what the Fiber Guild is for.”

That’s when I started to be afraid.

Judith went to the door and opened it, a simple thing that never crossed my mind to do. She peered out. I looked over her shoulder. The long hallway lined with closed doors, the flagstones and chandeliers, made me blink.

“It looks like Lynn Hall.”

Except that the chandeliers were made of gold and had candles in them instead of bulbs. And there were carpets on the flagstones, weavings of white and gold and green that looked like they’d just been made that morning. There wasn’t a smudge or a fleck of dirt on them, not even a stray grass blade.

Judith breathed into my ear, “Let’s go.”

The hallway we walked down seemed endless, maybe because I kept expecting one of the doors to pop open, someone to leap out at us, yelling, “Gotcha!” Finally, we saw a little door in the far wall that was different from all the others. It wasn’t painted; it was carved all over with fruit and flowers and vines. The handle was the prong from a deer’s antlers.

“Weird,” Judith muttered, and played with it carefully until the door opened. We went through it into a little courtyard. Vines and flowers grew up everywhere along the stone walls. Fieldstone, just like Lynn Hall was made of, though I’d never seen a garden in it like that. Stone paths wound under little trees, plots of flowers. In the middle of the courtyard was a fountain. When I heard the water splashing, my mouth remembered that it hadn’t tasted water since I got dumped into the pond. The statue of a woman stood in the center of the fountain. Water poured out of the urn she tilted on her shoulder, and splashed down into the bowl. The statue was barefoot and smiling; she pointed with her free hand at the water, as though she were inviting us to come and drink.

The water looked clear and fresh as rain. Staring at it, I could almost taste how cold it might be, how sweet, coming from that cheerful statue’s urn. I heard Judith swallow. But as I stepped toward it, she caught my arm.

“Are you sure?” I asked her helplessly. “Maybe it’s only food we should stay away from. Or everything but water.”

Her face squinched; I knew she couldn’t really remember. But she only whispered nervously, “I don’t think so. Let’s get out of here. It’s creepy that there’s no one around but this statue.”

It was hard to turn my back on that water. But I did, and saw another door. This one was more like a gate, made of small birch trunks linked together with rings of gold. It reminded me of old chairs in Grandpa Liam’s study, made of sapling branches, he told me, so supple they could be curved and tied together with strips of bark. The gate didn’t have a latch. I pushed it, wanting to get away from the noisy reminder of water behind me, and it swung open.

We walked into what looked like a picnic in Gram’s rose garden.

Every rose tree and bush was in full bloom. Tables spread with lace and gold cloth stood around the grass; all of them held gold and silver platters of huge slabs of meat, whole fish, mounds of fruit so high you could get killed if the pile toppled when you pulled out a pear, great wedges of cheese, bowls of salads, stews, so many kinds of vegetables I didn’t recognize half of them, breads and cakes and pies and roasted nuts. I could smell everything very clearly, not a gross tangle of smells, but little individual breezes blowing under my nose: hot salty beef, then crusty bread pulled straight out of the oven, then garlic, or pepper, or orange when you first break into the peel and the juices spray, and then some kind of intense dessert, a serious chocolate felony, not just a wimpy misdemeanor. And silver pitchers stood everywhere among the food, some beaded with water from the icy liquid inside.

My stomach felt like it was about to float away. My knees went wobbly. I would have crawled over to that garden of smells and fallen facedown into whatever I reached first, as soon as I’d drained one of the frosty pitchers dry.

But Judith was pulling at me, and saying my name over and over until it finally made sense. “Tyler.” She was still whispering for some reason. “Tyler. We have to go now.”

Just one bite of that roast chicken, I wanted to moan. Just one gulp of water.

But she tugged, and I stumbled after her, not knowing where we were going until all the smells were behind me, and I could see again.

Trees bordered the rose garden, just like at Lynn Hall. Only these made a thick, dense wood you couldn’t see far into. All the trees looked alike, slender as birch, with a greeny bark and long, pale leaves. They were crowded so close that I didn’t think we’d be able to move through them. But Judith, running now, plunged into them, and so I followed.

I nearly bumped into her a moment later. She had stopped dead among the trees and she was staring up at them. She took a sudden step back into me, and groped for my hand, making a little whine in her throat.

I looked up. Leaves and bark were somehow turning into faces, hair, hands, clothes, all around us. Some of the faces were still streaked with the smooth, green-brown bark; if you blinked, they seemed to turn to tree again. Blink again and there was a face, a shadowy arm, a green skirt. The faces were just human enough to show what they were thinking, and it wasn’t very friendly.

One spoke, and I recognized her somehow, in spite of the tendrils of her hair that curved into leaves, and the strange color of her skin. She was still beautiful, the way a mountain is, or a starry night, something like nothing else you’ve ever known, that you’ll never really understand, and that will never ever notice you. But you don’t care; you want to take it away with you in your heart.

“You haven’t shared our feast,” she said to me softly. “You have refused all my gifts.” Her eyes turned to Judith, whose eyes were so wide I could see the white all around them. “I brought you here hoping that in the company of another human, he might take some interest in what I’ve made for him. But you rejected all my harmless pleasures. You made him run from them.”

“We don’t—” Judith’s voice still came out in a whisper; she cleared her throat, started again. “We don’t know what you want from us.”

“Don’t you? I’ve seen you peering into windows at the witches. I’ve watched you in the wood, looking at this and that, studying, learning. I’ve watched you stand at the borders between our worlds, wanting to come in. Now you’re here, and all you can do is run. Have you learned all you wanted from us so quickly? You have come to my great banquet and eaten nothing. You’ve heard the pure water singing in my fountain, and drunk nothing. Is that how you learn as well? Peering in and never entering? Never taking a chance? Always hungry, never eating, thirsty and never daring to take one sip—”

I was ready. I would have marched back into the rose garden and clambered into the middle of one of her tables and started laying waste. Judith, her eyes narrowed now, the skin of her face as white as ice, answered abruptly, “Gingerbread. The witch’s house. Eat and you get eaten. And the nasty goblins, trapping the sister who eats their fruit, and pinching the one who tries to rescue her. And that other story—the woman who gets snatched out of her world and has to spend half her life in the underworld because she eats six little seeds from a fruit. Fairy tales are full of food and most of the time if you eat, you’re toast.”

The queen stared down at her, her own eyes wide and unblinking, like a tiger’s before it pounces. Then she spat a word that came out as a hazelnut, and in the next moment there was nothing around us but trees. Everywhere. We walked and walked, but we were in a prison of trees. An entire world of trees. We might have just been going around in circles, but when we couldn’t find any other way out, we fell over, exhausted, among all the trees that ever were, and went to eat and drink in our dreams instead.

---

18
IRIS

 W hen nobody came back by nightfall—not Syle, nor Tyler, not even Owen—I went to war. Those I loved were disappearing around me, and I could feel the thunderheads building in my heart. Bad enough that Liam had left me; at least I knew where the body was. The Starr sisters and Jane had stayed with me throughout the long afternoon; Dorian had joined us later, to tell us that her father was still searching. Another five hours had passed; the full moon was rising to stare into our world. Where is she? I wanted to ask it. You can see. Dorian’s face had grown pale and set. Once or twice she opened her mouth to tell me something, then changed her mind. I waited, but whatever it was stayed unsaid. I sent her into Liam’s study finally to make the calls for the gathering, and I went into the kitchen to work a little common household magic.

Hurley and the Tyler-thing were safely in the den; I could hear their voices as I passed, laughing at something on TV. The changeling had kept out of my eyesight most of the day since I recognized it, though it didn’t give me any reason to suspect it knew I knew. But I knew exactly where I wanted it now, and I knew how to get it there.

I heard the click-step of Jane and her walker while I was measuring flour.

“Genevieve can’t leave the bar,” she announced, muting her customary foghorn because we didn’t know who might be listening. “Penelope has to mind the bed-and-breakfast; Bet and Jenny are at a Rotary Club dinner. Hillary, Charlotte, and Agatha are all on their way. What in Blueberry Hill are you cooking at a time like this? It’s an emergency meeting, not a social event.”

“They aren’t for you,” I said shortly. “And keep your voice down.”

She frowned at me. “What is it, Iris? What haven’t you told us?”

“Later,” I breathed. “Just send Dorian to me, will you? I need her to do something for me.”

She did, without comment, though she followed Dorian back in, probably breaking the legal speed limit for walkers so she could listen.

“I want the chairs in a circle,” I told Dorian, who was the only one of us present who had any muscles. “And I want you to go to the end of the driveway and tell everyone to park on the road and walk in. Take the flashlight in Liam’s study.”

Dorian, her eyes wide, just nodded. She’d been phoning here and there, I knew, trying to find Leith; he seemed to have vanished along with everyone else. Jane’s eyes were narrowed, trying to drill their way into my thoughts.

She whispered, which I didn’t know she remembered as an option, “Iris, what are you doing?”

“You’ll see,” I promised, and shoved the bowl under the beaters. “Mix this, please, while I chop. I’m in a hurry, and I can’t talk about it now.”

I heard the den door open when Jane turned on the mixer. The Tyler-thing poked its head in the kitchen door a moment later, smiling.

“Cookies?” it said to us. I saw Jane’s sour lemon-drop mouth sweetening a little at its puppy-dog friendliness. She almost cracked a smile in my kitchen, which would no doubt have caused the decorative plates to leap off the wall.

“Cookies,” I agreed. “What are you and Hurley watching?”

“Funny family pet videos.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll let you know when they’re done.”

“Thank you, Gram.”

“Such a well-mannered boy,” Jane said after his head disappeared. “A shame about the ring in his eyebrow and the green hair, but really what could you expect with Kathryn marrying so soon after dear Ned was killed?”

“Exactly what I told myself,” I said, turning the mixer off and scraping the nuts into the bowl. “When Ned died, I just knew that boy would get his eyebrow pierced and there’d be no stopping him.”

“You know what I mean, Iris.”

I went after the dried cherries and the chunks of dark chocolate with my chopper. “Of course.”

“Of course a growing boy needs a father figure, but where on earth did she find Patrick? He looks like an ad for some kind of tooth-whitening product.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Do you know?”

“What?”

“Where—How—What she sees in him?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

She gave up picking at me, since I was just using her fuel to stoke a deeper fury. I threw the last ingredients into the bowl, and stirred them unmercifully. “Jane, do something useful and turn on the oven on your way out the door?”

She sniffed, but I was rattling pans too noisily to hear her, so she just did what I asked. I threw spoonfuls of dough on a cookie sheet, and heard the sticky front door creak open. I froze, unreasonably hoping. But I heard a soft laugh, a gentle phrase upended into a question: women’s voices.

I slid the cookies into the oven and went to meet them.

Genevieve was among them, which delighted me.

“The guy who takes my days off happened to be at the bar,” she said, kissing my cheek. “So he’s subbing for me. Dorian said you have a quilt emergency.”

“We have several,” I said. She was dressed in a pair of pencil-thin jeans and a black sweater with a deep V-neck, a lovely setting for her long blond hair. Her lipstick was the color of the jewel in her navel, the color of the cherries in my cookies, and the sight of her took an edge of worry off my mind. I turned to greet Agatha, saw Charlotte and Hillary coming up the drive with Dorian. “Good,” I said tightly to no one, and took them all to show them the moldering threads overlaying the quilt still spread over the couch. Miranda and Lacey passed out crochet hooks and hastily sketched patterns and threads of any color I’d been able to find. Dorian had pulled the chairs into a circle with some thought to our frailties; there was enough room to walk between them.

I waited until everyone was seated. There were nine of us, which seemed to me a satisfying number. I took them through the first emergency: the quilt, and its urgent need for repair. Dorian stared at me incredulously when I asked Jane to teach her how to crochet. Obviously she was wondering how I could rattle on about such mundane matters when her father and her lover and her best friend all seemed to have dissolved into moonlight. But she knew me. She swallowed her doubts and tried to pay attention to Jane. Agatha was teaching Hillary, who was looking with disbelief at the elaborate patterns on the quilt squares and the simple chain stitch running off her hook.

“How in hell—” I heard her murmur, and Agatha pinched her lips around a smile, glancing at her mother.

I smelled the cookies.

The changeling poked its head in wistfully just as I opened the oven door.

“Not yet,” I lied hastily. “Give them a couple more minutes. They’re too soft.”

It closed the kitchen door again. I listened for the den door, heard it close, too. Then, as quietly as I could, I took the pan out of the oven and slid the cookies onto a plate. I left the oven door open, the empty pan on the table, and took the cookies into the next room. I put the plate on Genevieve’s lap.

“Just hold them,” I told her tersely. “And keep your stitches going, ladies. We have another emergency to trap in our threads. Genevieve, I want you to smile your best when it comes in, and offer it cookies. Talk to it, while we weave the net.”

I heard little shreds of words starting and fraying around the circle. But nobody questioned. This was why we had gathered for over a century, and for those who’d been paying lip service all those years, now was the time for a leap of faith.

The changeling, sniffing like a dog, came into the room.

It hesitated when it saw the circle. I saw it shift one foot backward, as though not even my cookies were enough to lure it among us. Then Genevieve, facing it, gave it her warm, cherry-red smile, and lifted the plate.

“We couldn’t wait,” she said. “They smelled so good. Come and take some before we eat them all.”

None of us was eating any, I realized then. But Agatha smoothed over the mistake, reaching for one and biting into it. The Tyler-thing, its eyes on Genevieve’s smooth golden hair, and the creamy V of skin within her black top, brightened. It stepped into our circle, went over to her, and took a handful of cookies.

Genevieve was used to chattering amiably to customers through difficult situations, and the changeling looked so much like Tyler that she didn’t seem struck by anything amiss, except for whatever was amiss with me. I doubt that anyone else noticed much beyond my own relentlessness: I chained faster than I thought my fingers could move. But no one questioned my eyesight or my sanity; everyone just crocheted quietly along with me. Our chains grew quietly as the changeling talked about funny pet videos and scattered crumbs on the floor, and Genevieve kept its attention, chatting and working her own chain as she balanced the plate on her lap. Slowly our silence and the rhythm of our hooks worked their own magic: our minds began to touch, seep together, link themselves around the changeling. Stitch by stitch, thought by thought, we cast our chains, circling and circling, until it finally realized it stood alone among us, while we circled it with our eyes, our hooks, our chains.

It made a little sound, spraying crumbs. Then it froze, only its eyes roving, trying to see our faces, or a gap in our web, a place to escape. In its sudden fear, it lost control: thumbs turned visibly into twigs; a cheekbone hardened into bark; its nose flattened, grew knobbed like a burl. Lacey’s face turned so pearly I thought she might faint. Jane, whose eyes were starting out of her head, muttered something to Lacey that caused her spine to snap straight. Hillary, staring at the changeling, looked, with her spiky hair and elfin bones, as though she were turning into one herself. Genevieve, her marvelous social abilities floundering at last, stuffed a cookie into her own mouth, squeaking a little as she bit.

I said to it, “Tell us who sent you. And why. And what you have done to Tyler.”

“Witches,” it hissed, spraying crumbs. It spat a few more out, as though tasting poison. “Magic. Wicked magic.”

“Chain stitch,” I told it. “Elementary. Did you also take Syl?”

“Syl.”

“And Owen?”

“Leith,” Dorian added faintly. It was trembling, shifting, tugging at air, or invisible bonds.

“I go where I’m sent,” it answered. “Do what I’m told.”

“Who sends you? Who commands you?”

It flopped on its knees, looking so like Tyler for an instant that I nearly dropped my hook. Then its hair turned into brambles, and I breathed again. I saw its eyes grow white and luminous as moons, as though they reflected some distant light.

“She. She commands my heart.”

“Did she also command you to take Syl?” Jane asked, sensing, as she did sometimes, that I could use somebody’s strength. I flung her a grateful look, and worked my chain, picking up speed again.

Its face puckered into an unexpectedly human expression. “The cuz Syl? No.”

“What about Leith?” Dorian asked again. “And Owen?”

“Not Owen. I don’t know Leith. She didn’t say them.”

It tugged an arm, an ankle, testing our invisible threads. Apparently they held; it grimaced, making the distorted face that peers at you out of tree bark. “She’ll come for me,” it warned suddenly, loudly. “She’ll take me back.”

“We might bargain,” I said tersely. “If we choose. We might keep you, trapped here forever in our stitches. Or we’ll unravel you, bramble and twig and leaf, and stitch you into a pattern that not even your queen will recognize.”

“She’ll see me,” it insisted. But its voice quavered. “She will come.”

“Easier for you if she gives us back our Tyler. And anyone else she has taken who belongs to us. Then we will give you back to the wood. And then we will find every path and passage, every door between our worlds and stitch them so tightly closed that you’ll forget our world exists.”

“Whoa,” it said faintly, or maybe, “Woe.”

And then it shouted, or cried, or wailed, made a sound that blasted through the room, and flung open doors to fill the house. It could have stopped hearts, that sound; it certainly stopped our hands. But it only made us clutch our hooks instead of dropping them, and it failed to break our chains. Then it curled up around itself and turned into what looked like a small tree stump in the middle of my carpet, shooting a few upright leafing twigs out of itself, maybe to signal that it was still alive.

We sat stunned in the aftermath, staring at it, and waiting for the echo to die down. In its fading, I heard a heavy panting coming from beyond the circle. I jumped, fear skittering on its spider-feet across my neck and down my arms. We all turned, slowly and apprehensively, to see what the changeling’s shout had summoned from the wood.

It had called up Tarrant Coyle, I saw with amazement. He stood in the hall doorway, hand to his heart, catching his breath and staring at the tree stump.

“What,” he demanded weakly, “in heck-fire kind of demon was that you ladies conjured up?”

Miranda answered pointedly, which was fine with me; I couldn’t find a word in my head. “That wasn’t a demon, Tarrant. It was a changeling. You spoke to him, I believe, earlier today. Tyler.”

His eyes bulged. “That’s Tyler? What’d you do to him?”

“Tarrant!” Jane snapped. “Pay attention! That’s the kind of magic you think you want to be dealing with in Iris’s wood.”

“Changeling,” Lacey supplied faintly. “A fairy substitute for a human child.”

“Looks like a stump,” he muttered, wheezing at it. “Or a weird kind of altar. You sacrificing things now?”

“We just got rid of Hurley,” I told him irritably. “He knew too much.”

“Iris,” Charlotte said reprovingly. “Don’t confuse Tarrant; it doesn’t take much, apparently.”

“I’d like to know what Tarrant is doing here, sneaking around my place as though he thinks he already owns it.”

“I wasn’t sneaking! I was just walking down the hall—the front door was open—when there was this bloodcurdling yell, and I saw that—that—come to think of it, it did look a bit like Tyler, just before it changed. That green hair…”

“Tarrant!” I wanted to throw my hook at him. “Just tell us why you’re here?”

“I can’t find my daughter,” he said fretfully. “I saw the cars parked on the highway, and I hoped she was still here with you.” He crossed the room, flicked a curtain open. “Or spying on you, anyway.”

“Still here? When was she here before?”

“She was with me this afternoon, when I came to talk to you. She didn’t want to come home with me. She was mad at me. So I left her—” He paused. His eyes widened, moved reluctantly to the twiggy thing in the middle of the floor. “I left her in the wood,” he said to it dazedly. “With Tyler.”

The phone rang.

I nearly leaped out of my chair, remembered in the nick of time what I was holding. I handed my hook and chain carefully to Miranda, who knew enough not to set it down, to keep it suspended between worlds.

“It has to be Owen or Syl,” I told them tightly, and banged the kitchen door open so hard it hit the cookie sheet on the stove and sent it clattering to the floor. I snatched up the receiver, gripping it so tightly it was a wonder it could speak at all, and demanded, “Yes?”

A man’s voice asked hesitantly, “Is this Iris?”

“Yes!” I bellowed.

“Wow,” he said, awed. “My name is Madison. I’m a friend of Syl’s—well, more than a friend. Between you and me, I’m trying to persuade her to marry me—and I’d really like to talk to her. If that’s possible?”

I tried to say something civilized, gave up finally, and told him the truth. “I have absolutely no idea.”

I hung up and crept back to my chair to anchor my wobbly knees before I sat down on the floor.

---

19
SYL

 L eith led me along an invisible path, an underground stream, through the wood to a circle of birch trees. I don’t know how long we waited. Standing there, listening to the lightly chattering leaves, feeling the sunlight inch across my hair, my hands, I felt all sense of time drift out of me. There seemed so much else to consider besides my fears. The stunning threads of gold in Leith’s red hair; the wedges of flame on his cheeks as he lowered his eyelids: butterfly wings of fire. He leaned against one tree, arm around its trunk, cheek against its milky bark, such a still, intimate pose that it made me wonder how well he knew that tree, if their silence was another form of language. Once he glanced at me: the deep flash of blue in his dark eyes made my breath stop. He gave me a little, crooked smile. The trees swayed and breathed around us, though I hadn’t noticed any wind at all before. In our private wood, our little endless moment, such things didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, not Gram, or Lynn Hall, or Tyler, just the sunlight moving slowly across my eyes, into my heart.

I stood in a dream of light. It was so lovely, this warm cascade, that I wanted to slip out of my body, become an indistinguishable part of it. Now and then, like bits of another dream, I glimpsed Leith, sitting among the tree roots, his face upturned to watch me; I saw the green wood, oddly shadowy now, beyond the ring of white birch. Once I heard him say a word. See, it sounded like. Or Sigh. Syl. I didn’t know what he was trying to say. I didn’t care.

Then I dissolved into the light. I felt it transform my bones, fill my head until there was no more room for thought, pool in my eyes until I could see nothing but that gentle, dazzling stream of gold.

My heart spoke one last word, an astonished, expanding O! before it burst into light.

I stood in front of Lynn Hall.

As I recognized it, I recognized myself again: my mortal body, all my human fears for other mortals, the part of me that could never live in such beauty. I had glimpsed what I could not have, and I felt a terrible grief at the loss. Light had spilled me out of itself onto this ragged lawn, among those straggly roses with their speckled leaves and their buds withering before they could open. The pear tree, under which Grandpa Liam had breathed his last, held only a few leaves and tiny, blackened swellings of new pears. Beyond the dying garden, the wood was so overgrown with vine and bramble that I would have needed a scythe to enter it.

I looked at the hall, which seemed entirely overgrown with ivy; tendrils drifted up from the chimney pots like smoke. The back screen door was sagging off its hinges. The inner door was open. I had come for Tyler, I remembered grimly; he couldn’t stay here, either. I shook away the lingering, timeless light in my head, the lovely memories of enchantment, and went to find him.

I entered the hall cautiously, but I didn’t hear anyone, or see so much as a shadow move. I could only find a couple of rooms open. The kitchen held little more than an open fireplace, a battered table, and a sink with a few tin pots in it. A doorway with a faded tapestry hung across it to separate it from the kitchen led me into another room. This held a bed cobbled out of stripped saplings, a thin, lumpy mattress, a sheepskin, none too clean, on the flagstones, and a clay bowl on a rickety table with a withered apple and a couple of walnuts in it.

A movement on the sheepskin caught my eye. I looked more closely, and found a little toad making its way clumsily across the wool. I picked it up and opened a window, which whined and splintered paint on the way up. I had let the toad fall into the cool shadow of the hall before the fairy-tale implications reverberated through my thoughts: all those damp, unlovely, imperiled creatures belonging both to air and water, in need and rescued by good-hearted strangers passing by. I tried to go farther into the hall; other doors were nailed shut.

That, too, reverberated uncomfortably: it seemed one reincarnation of the hall in my great-great-great-grandmother’s manuscript. I didn’t want to think about it. I just wanted to find Tyler and get back to the Lynn Hall we both knew. I went outside again, walked around to the front of the hall to look out over the neglected field. Weeds had grown so high they blocked my view of anything that, in my own world, I might have recognized. I was not surprised.

This didn’t look like any fairy world I would have imagined. It looked more like Lynn Hall under a curse. I went up the low slate steps leading to the front door and turned the doorknob. As I expected, the door was swollen shut, and couldn’t even rattle in its frame. I kicked at it a couple of times with my bootheel, then gave up. I sat down on the bottom step, dropped my chin in my hands, and brooded at the baffling scene.

Tyler’s voice, somewhere near my right foot, said, “Thanks.”

I stared down, saw the little toad making its way along the wall.

“Tyler?” I asked incredulously. It didn’t say anything else; it disappeared into a hole under the steps.

But it had spoken a word in Tyler’s voice. So he had been here, in this place, maybe in that drab bedroom before he found his own way out.

Three with eyes to see…

I had no idea why that little scrap of nursery rhyme flitted through my head. But it made me remember that I did have eyes to see; I was part wood-folk myself, and maybe this bleak house, this unkempt, parched landscape were only a memory of truth. I had taken a magical path to get there; surely not all the magic lay in the journey. Where was the enchantment here? The poetry? The beauty that lured mortals into the land beyond time?

“Where indeed?” a breeze whispered in my ear. I started. Then I stood up, searching through narrowed eyes, trying to see into thin air.

“Tyler!” I shouted abruptly. “Tyler!”

Not even a bird answered.

The whole landscape was a riddle, I thought bemusedly. A puzzle. A trick. Hiding something, maybe, or trying to reveal something; I hadn’t a clue which. What could a weedy field or a dying rose tree say? Or a great house with all the life in it forced into two mean rooms? What had happened to all its grace and loveliness, all its tales and memories?

The wood, great swathes of ivy and brambles hanging from the trees, looked no more inviting and far less accessible than the weed-choked field. But things happen in a wood. Children get lost and found; princesses are abandoned and rescued there; lovers meet, get separated, meet again. All I had found and rescued in the house was a toad that hadn’t hung around to chat.

I went across the stiff, brown grass to the edge of the wood. The brambles clinging to the trees sent tendrils snaking into other trees, making a wall of thorn and flowers— little wild roses, blackberry and raspberry blossoms—between me and whatever was hidden inside. I found a dead branch and beat at them, feeling like the prince in the fairy tale on a rescue mission. How had he gotten in? He had gotten lucky, I remembered. Other princes had failed and died, impaled on thorns; he had come, through no virtue or skill or worth of his own, on the right day. The briars parted, and he strolled in.

Evidently today was not the right day for me, but I wasn’t going to wait a hundred years. I battled with the brambles until I was breathless and sweating, but it was like poking at a snail. They drew thicker and tighter, the more I smacked them. I flung down my weapon finally and yelled at whoever had stolen Tyler and shown me the ruins of Lynn Hall.

“What do you want? What is it you want from me? I’ve come to take Tyler home, and I’m not leaving without him!”

“What makes you think you can find your way back?” someone asked behind me.

I whirled. The voice was a woman’s, but I couldn’t see anyone among the ragged rose trees. Not even anything, like the toad, that in a fairy tale might have spoken. It was a good question, I admitted. But I decided not to think about it yet.

Kitchens, was what I did think, then. Kitchens are full of sharp implements. Even the poorest kitchen had a knife to skin the stolen hare with. Or to cut the brambles in your path. I went back into the hall, rummaged through the rickety drawers, one after the other, and found nothing but useless oddments: a mousetrap without a spring, a spoon without a handle, a fork with two tines bent one way, the middle tine bent the other, one blade of a very dull pair of scissors, a tarnished silver candle-snuffer. I reached for the last unopened drawer with exasperation, and realized, as my fingers closed around the drawer pull, that my mother had put it on.

Frozen, I stared at the drawers. All of them had the same drawer pulls my mother had chosen to replace the broken wooden knobs in Gram’s kitchen drawers. They were small, round glass prisms of different colors; multifaceted, they caught light from every direction and refracted it back in every hue of the rainbow, casting little streaks of color unexpectedly throughout the kitchen. They had seemed to me an extravagant choice for my mother, who preferred things functional and elegantly simple. But, in the end, scant weeks before she had died, she had filled Gram’s kitchen with these butterfly lights.

I couldn’t move. I didn’t know where I was anymore, what I was seeing around me, whose house this really was. I opened my fingers, looked at the pale green prism on my palm, and it blurred and swam in the sudden, burning tears that welled and overflowed and fell, for the first time in my life. I caught them in my fingers, stared at them, astonished that I had to come all the way to fairyland to learn how to cry.

“I never knew what happened to her.”

I whirled, the tears shaken down my face. A man watched me from the kitchen doorway. A rainbow from one of the knobs quivered on his cheekbone. His hair was dark and curly, his eyes golden brown as hazelnuts. He stood there quietly as I stared at him, wondering why that coloring, that tapered jaw, those dark brows, peaked with a touch of uncertainty, looked in any way familiar.

Then I swallowed, and pushed back hard against the cupboard so that my knees wouldn’t give way and drop me on the floor.

I forced myself to answer. He had a right to know. “She died some years ago. Mortal years.” My voice hurt, coming out. “Did you—did you love her?”

He nodded. “She didn’t believe me, though,” he said softly. “She didn’t trust me. She said—my kind don’t love. Our blood runs cold; our hearts are empty. We trick mortals into loving and then abandon them.” He let one hand rest on the cupboard beside him, his fingers open to catch the rainbow there. “So she abandoned me.”

I blinked away tears again. “She was just—She was taught that.”

“I know. We know.”

“Is it true?”

He shrugged a little, his face calm, thoughtful. He looked scarcely older than I, but in another world, he might have been as old as the flagstones under our feet. “Sometimes. Not always. As it is in your world.”

“Yes.” I took a breath, my mother’s face vivid in my head, lovely and fierce and desperate. “She loved me so much,” I whispered, “that I don’t see how she could not have loved you.”

He bowed his head, hiding his eyes; his hand closed around the rainbow, but it eluded him, dancing on his fingers. “I always hoped to see her again. But she never called to me.”

“She was afraid,” I guessed. “Maybe of you, maybe of Gram… Who knows? Maybe she knew she didn’t have the time, or the strength to fight for you, if Gram found out.”

He raised his eyes again—my eyes—and I saw the question in them: Do you?

Maybe, I thought. You could be a trick, and your whole world a beautiful, empty lie, as Gram believes. But if you are a heartless illusion of love and beauty, come to trick me into challenging the entire Fiber Guild because I am your child as well as Morgana’s, then I have to believe that I am a heartless illusion of a human, incapable of loving, too, and if that’s true, then what am I doing here in the first place?

“Maybe,” I breathed. “Maybe not. But maybe. Where is Tyler?”

“In the wood.”

“How do I get in there? The thorns won’t let me in.”

He gave me a look of very human surprise. “We thought you would know. They’re your threads.”

I felt my blood run cold then, as cold as fairy blood. “Oh, no,” I whispered through my fingers. “Oh. No.” Then I shouted wildly, “Gram!” as though she were in the next room. “Whose house is this, anyway?” I asked him raggedly. “In what world did Lynn Hall ever look like this?”

“It is what Iris sees when she envisions us reclaiming Lynn Hall, using it for our door between worlds.”

I looked around me, shivering, stunned. “Gram thinks we’re so terrible?”

“We,” he answered pointedly. “Not you.”

“Not yet.” I pushed cold hands against my forehead, trying to think. “I can’t lie to her forever. Threads. A thread has a beginning and an end; people follow them through labyrinths and dark forests.”

“Here they lead nowhere,” he said a trifle bitterly. “Except to the knot at either end.”

“Threads can be cut. Stitches can be undone.”

“There’s great power in her threads. A magic born of fear and hatred as old as this house seeped into the wood and field and water around it. How can we fight such power except with the same ancient forces?”

“I don’t know,” I told him breathlessly. “Nobody ever asked me that. Nobody ever came to me to say the things you’re saying to me.”

“You belong to both worlds; you are one of them and one of us. You must pass back and forth between your worlds with every thought, every breath. How do you reconcile them?”

“I never have.”

“Try,” my father pleaded. “For all of us.”

I nodded, gazing at his so familiar, unfamiliar face that my mother must have loved so much she ran, terrified, from love. “I don’t even know how to get back to Gram to tell her what she’s done,” I told him ruefully. “I came through a dream, I think. Gram hasn’t been able to shut the passage through light.”

He smiled a little, a rainbow trembling at the corner of his mouth. “You came that way? That’s the oldest, and simplest, and most difficult way…”

“She’d need to thread her needle with the sun.” I turned restlessly, wondering if I could travel a rainbow’s arch between worlds. “Up the chimney?” I guessed, looking dubiously at the blackened hearth. “Magic goes up and down chimneys in tales. Or maybe I can find a passage in the attic, if I can get the hall door open.”

He nodded toward my ankle at the drawer behind it. “There’s the one you haven’t opened.”

“There’s nothing in those drawers.”

“There’s everything before they are opened: gold, hope, a good knife blade…”

I bent to open the drawer with the green prism pull. It had already given me so much, I realized, and I’d barely touched it. At first glance the drawer looked as though I’d emptied it.

“What’s in it?” my father asked.

“Nothing.” Then I looked closer. “A bit of thread.”

“Three with eyes to see,” he said, and at the third glance I recognized it: the way out.

I picked up the inch or two of thread that was caught between cracks in the wood, as though someone, reaching for something, had snagged a sleeve and pulled a thread loose.

It kept coming. I pulled out a foot or more, and then I pulled the drawer out, and saw where the thread went: under the cupboard, out the back, and underneath the tapestry hung between the rooms.

I turned to my father before I followed the thread into the next room; he smiled at me, a rainbow in one golden eye. I walked behind the ancient, faded hanging

and into the circle of the Fiber Guild.

---

20
IRIS

 T hat was the loveliest thing I ever saw.

Before I recognized her, before my eyes finished seeing what they saw, and my head put a name to it, that’s what my heart thought. A slender, golden-haired woman stepped out of air into light and shadow, one of our threads arching gracefully from her fingers to the end of my hook. She had unraveled my chain, I realized, and wonder changed to mortal terror, just that fast. Then I knew her and, for the third or fourth time that evening, I nearly jumped out of my chair.

“Sylvia!” My voice croaked like an old raven with shock. Tarrant, sitting apart from us, gave a brief bark of astonishment. Nobody else said anything, or moved. Mouths hung open all around the circle; no words came; nobody could even blink. For that moment, she held them all spellbound.

Then I heard a throat-clearing rumble from Jane, and her support hose snag together as she shifted. Miranda’s teeth clicked together as she closed her mouth; she murmured succinctly between them, “Shit.”

“Is that you?” Dorian asked faintly, her voice trembling. “Or another changeling?”

Sylvia looked at her. “Me. I just met my father.” She turned to me again, her eyes wide, distant, a stranger’s regard, which at that moment she pretty much was. “That’s who I look like.”

“Oh, my,” Lacey whispered.

I tried to summon up something more coherent. “Is that where you’ve been?” was all I could manage.

She nodded. “I went looking for Tyler. Leith took me to a place in the woods. A passageway he knew.”

“Leith,” Dorian said, straightening abruptly in her chair as though she’d sat on a pin. “He doesn’t know—Syl, what are you saying?”

“Ask him.”

“Where is he?” Dorian pleaded. “Where’s my father?”

“I’m not sure… Leith watched me when I crossed into the Otherworld, but I don’t know if he came, too. I never saw Owen.”

Dorian put her hands over her mouth, said through them, “What are you saying, Syl? About Leith?”

“He’s part fay,” Sylvia said simply. “Like me. We’ve known that about each other since we were kids. That’s why I left these mountains as soon as I could.” She gave me that stranger’s glance again, the one that told me that I couldn’t hurt her, or that she was afraid I could. “I didn’t want you to find out that I’m what you all fear most.”

Well, there she gave it to me in a nutshell: the tangled mystery of Morgana’s love, the knot of all my loves and hates. What, her cool eyes asked me, are you going to do with me?

I felt old suddenly, a hundred years older than I’d been five minutes before, and frail, and useless, and completely confused. Something hung by a thread between us: from the beginning stitch still looped around my crochet hook to the end of the strand between her fingers. Love, I guessed it was, or life, maybe just truth at last, considering where she had found the end of my thread to follow it.

“What am I supposed to do?” I demanded of her, of everybody silently listening. “Stop loving you? Just like that? When did you stop loving me?”

I saw her swallow; the thread trembled between us.

“Oh, Gram,” she whispered. “Never.”

“Then why should I be the one to stop?”

“I thought—you’ve always hated—”

“Well, nobody—not a Lynn or an Avery, not even Morgana, and certainly none of the wood-folk—ever gave me a reason not to. Is that why she never told me? Because she was afraid I would have hated you?”

“I think—I think probably, Gram. She never told me, either.”

I pulled my crochet hook through the thread and threw it on the floor. It hit the little tree stump; a twiglet rustled. Sylvia seemed to notice it finally; she looked down, and her brows went up.

“It’s the Tyler-thing,” I said impatiently, before she could ask.

“So I see. You scared it.”

“It scared me.”

“How did you recognize it?” she asked hopefully.

“Not with your eyes,” I told her bluntly. “I saw its shadow. Where is Tyler? You didn’t bring him back with you.”

She shook her head. “I tried. Gram, he’s trapped in your wood behind your stitches. You will have to let him out.”

I was the only one speechless, then; everyone else found something to say about that, including Tarrant.

“You mean your sewing circle really works?” I heard him exclaim, and then Jane’s bullhorn overrode the clamor.

“We didn’t steal him away,” she protested to Sylvia. “We didn’t send a changeling to take his place. Whoever wants it back, let them bring Tyler to us.”

“And Judith,” Tarrant added heavily.

“Judith?” Sylvia repeated, her brows going up again. “Your daughter? How—”

“We think the thing there took her, too. I left her with it. Looked just like Tyler, anyway. You didn’t see her there?”

“No. I didn’t see either of them. I couldn’t get into the wood to find them. Those stitches are like a wall of brambles around the trees.”

“How do we know that, Sylvia?” Charlotte asked practically. “That the brambles weren’t put there to trick you, and force us to destroy our work?”

“I agree,” Miranda said gently, but implacably. “There’s no telling what would come out of that wood if we take out the stitches around it.”

“Whose pattern is that?” Agatha asked at a tangent. “We need to know where the stitches are if we decide to take them out.”

“It’s one of mine,” Lacy answered. “I gave it to Iris years ago: a long linen runner crocheted all around the sides.”

“I remember,” I told her, which was a minor miracle. “It’s in my bedroom, on the dresser.”

“We’re not,” Jane boomed adamantly, “cutting a single stitch. There must be another way to rescue the children. Sylvia could go back and try again.”

“Absolutely not,” I snapped. “They might decide to keep her, too.”

“Or she might decide to stay?” Charlotte said coolly, always the one to pinpoint the unpleasant angle.

“Thank you, Charlotte, for bringing that out into the open.”

“I think it’s obvious. Half the one, half the other, and heir to Lynn Hall, the most powerful passageway in these mountains. She’s kept that from us, all these years. So how do we know what else she’s keeping from us? How do we know if anything she tells us is true?” She looked around the circle as we gazed at her silently, and added, without a blink, “Someone had to say it. It’s there.”

Hillary said in her blunt little voice, startling us, “It’s there, if you look at it through the Fiber Guild’s suspicious eyes. Maybe Syl has a different way of looking at it.”

“I think—” Sylvia said.

“What other way is there of looking at it?” Charlotte asked reasonably. “We’ve all read Rois Melior’s manuscript. She had the clearest view of things. They’re a cold, loveless, dangerous people; they steal humans, trick them, even kill them. What clearer record do we have of them than hers?”

“Then why,” Dorian said sharply, color running all through her face, “has my father found one worth loving for over a dozen years?”

You could have heard a pin drop. Leaves, like little ears, were trembling all over the changeling-stump. I could hear my heart beat, like a drip of water into an empty bucket. Time slowed for a little, or I just stopped thinking about things, went somewhere else that was peaceful and simple.

Then I blinked, and found Sylvia crouched beside me, holding my hand. “Gram,” she whispered, looking up into my face. “Are you all right?”

I touched her face, with all its fay and human beauty. “Yes. I’m still breathing. Owen in love, all these years…” Around us the circle was silent again; everyone might have vanished, for all I knew. “Do you know what, Sylvia?”

“What?”

“It would be such a relief not to have to carry all this secrecy, this fear, these rules, these worries, all these threads and patterns around all the time. Especially at my age.” Owen’s dark, brooding face came into my head then. The one I trusted more than anyone except Liam had lied to me, too, all these years. “Like Morgana,” I murmured. “Like you… concealing, not daring to tell me… Was it love, too, with Morgana?”

“I think so. He loved her.”

“Really?” I said, surprised. “All these years… Maybe we were wrong?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe.”

I smiled, brushed her cheek again. “Where is Owen?”

“I don’t know, Gram.”

“He went looking for Leith,” Dorian said, breaking the hush around us, the little bubble of timelessness. “He said he knew where he was going.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“So do I,” Jane muttered. “I’d like to know what he thinks he’s been doing, an Avery hiding something like that from a Lynn all those years.”

I ignored her. “What should we do?” I asked Sylvia. “What do we need to do to get Tyler and Judith back?”

“I don’t know.”

But she did know; I saw it in her steady, conjecturing gaze. Was I strong enough? Wise enough? Brave enough to do the obvious? I wasn’t certain either. It went against centuries of common lore, local history, family tradition. And at my age…

“All right,” I told her grimly, as the faceless, ancient figure took shape in my imagination, her spiky crown spearing moonlight on its way through the trees. “How do I find her?”

Of course that caused explosions around the circle, from Jane and Charlotte especially. After an extraordinary glimpse of Lacey shaking her crochet hook in Charlotte’s face, I got up, breaking the circle, which was an unprecedented thing to do in the middle of a spell. I went to my bedroom, found the runner under the jewel box on my dresser. It was a long oblong of white linen, with a delicate scattering of embroidered violets at either end; its sides were completely hedged in with some seriously intricate crocheted spirals and chains.

I took my nail scissors to it.

Then, because the front door was still open, and I didn’t want to go back into the storm, I walked out into the night instead. I thought of all the times Liam had done just that: stepped out of the door into that glittering swarm of stars and fireflies, leaving all the noise and artificial brightness behind him, along with his wife, who was busy making her complex patterns out of the fields and trees he wandered through. I went around the house to the back, where trees caught stars in their leaves, and the fireflies flashed their tiny, fairy lights in the shadows.

I dropped my handful of shredded threads at the edge of the wood and waited.

---

21
OWEN

 W e waited interminably, decades and centuries, it seemed, for Sylvia to return to the circle of trees. Time flowed oddly, shifting in huge, unpredictable segments. Now the air was smoky with dusk. Now it was black, brilliant with the brief, impassioned language of fireflies. Now, in a swift jump forward, the full moon hung overhead in a sky so laden with stars they seemed about to fall to earth like ripe fruit. The taciturn Leith, inspired by moonlight, told me stories of his childhood: how no Rowan’s door was ever locked, in case someone needed to borrow something, how he knew every tangled road and who lived on it, as well as the denizens, two-legged and four, along every branch and brook and stream in Rowan territory. He told me how he had raised a fawn that had gotten separated from its mother when he was little older than the fawn. That had led to helping other creatures: an owl with a missing claw, a crippled rabbit he refused to yield to the stewpot, even a lost bear cub he had tracked through a fall of late-spring snow.

He even told me the truth about the scar under his cheekbone.

“I slipped on ice one winter morning and banged my face on the corner of the outhouse. I didn’t want to talk about it. All the other kids had indoor plumbing.” He paused. “Now you’ll have to become part of the family. You know my secret.”

“You mean besides the secret that you’re part fay?”

“Naw. You can’t blackmail me with that one. I know your secret.”

I was silent, wishing beyond hope that it were still true. My ears caught every rustle in the dark. But it was never Rue, and, anyway, she didn’t rustle; she came to me as silently as starlight.

“I wish…”

“Anything could happen,” Leith reminded me. “Maybe Syl will—”

“Sylvia can’t rescue us all. If she brings herself and Tyler out safely, I’ll be content.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I’ll have to be.”

Sometime later, flicking away a stone my tailbone found, I had an idea. “I have a flashlight at one end of a ballpoint pen in my pocket. You could find your way out with that. Tell Dorian you’re safe and and see if Sylvia has returned.”

“I already told you: I’m not going anywhere near Lynn Hall tonight. Anyway, I’m a Rowan; I don’t need a flashlight. I could smell my way back to the mill road. You go.”

“To face Iris and tell her that the heir to Lynn Hall found her way into fairyland without a map? No, thank you.”

Later, I talked about my wife. I couldn’t see Leith’s face; we both seemed caught in some endless, enchanted night within the circle; it seemed safe to talk about anything there.

“Her name was Frederica. She’d been called Fred all her life, and she made me promise, before she would agree to marry me, that I would never shorten her name. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why she left me. I got careless and accidentally called her by the name she hated. It seems as likely as any other reason I can come up with, why she ran away from me.”

“She didn’t leave a note?”

“Not a word, not a note…” I slid down the tree roots, stared back at the moon above our heads. It seemed very close; it could have seen through my skin, into the memories and the pain of being abandoned, which had been dead embers, I thought, until Rue was taken from me. “I thought she was happy. She started the nursery; she loved to garden. Dorian and I adored her. We played music together, cooked together. Dorian looks like her: that curly hair, cinnamon, nutmeg, strands of pepper and cardamom, those eyes…”

“River eyes,” Leith murmured. “Speckled like a trout.”

“Frederica’s were more amber, with flecks of gold and gray in them.”

“Maybe she was fay. She had to leave her mortal shape after three years and three days or something. When did you meet her?”

“When we were two.”

“Oh.”

“Her father was a friend of my uncle’s, from the city. He and his wife came to visit; they fell in love with the mountains and decided to live here. Maybe that was the mistake we made. She’d lived here all her life, married a man she grew up with; she wanted change. Adventure.”

“Could be,” Leith said. I couldn’t see him anymore; I only heard his slow, thoughtful voice. “Things like that happen. Or maybe it’s not so simple at all… Maybe she went for a walk in the wood and found this place. This circle of trees. She fell asleep here, and woke up in a different world entirely. She’ll come back someday, thinking she’s only been gone an afternoon, and find that a hundred years have passed in the world she accidentally left.”

“She’ll find my grave and drop a tear on it,” I said dryly.

“She’ll see Dorian’s children’s children, and recognize them by their speckled eyes.”

I was silent again, oddly comforted by that tale. Frederica hadn’t meant to leave us. She had fallen into an enchanted sleep, during which she had some lovely and unusual dreams… She woke to see the sun setting, the woods growing shadowy around her. She stepped out of the circle and found, as she walked home, that during her dreams her world had changed beyond imagination…

“Maybe.”

“Listen,” Leith said abruptly, urgently, and I did. At first I heard nothing, but I didn’t have his Rowan ears, which must have heard the trees sough on the other side of the hill.

All around us the birch began to chatter. Wind out of nowhere flowed over us like a tidal wave. As quickly as we could push to our feet against it, it ebbed; the wood was suddenly, utterly still. The fireflies had gone, probably blown clear into the next hollow.

“What is it?” Leith breathed, still clinging for balance and trying to see into the dark.

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it.”

I took the penlight out of my pocket but didn’t turn it on. There was another strange sigh of wind through the trees around the circle; twigs, dry leaves, needles crackled and snapped, as though something enormous, dark, and swift traveled through the bracken. More quickly than I could blink, a puff of red glowed among the trees, a little ball of fire that was gone the moment I saw it.

“I really don’t like this…”

I heard Leith shift, but he didn’t answer. Then we heard what sounded like the high, light ring of a thousand tiny bells.

And then a horn’s clear, sweet call swept from ridge to ridge across the valleys, echoes overlapping endlessly without losing their purity. We listened for a long time, it seemed, before they began to fade.

“The Wild Hunt,” Leith said dreamily. For an instant, in our enchanted circle, he seemed about to answer its summons.

Then he stiffened, and I flicked the penlight on. We stared at one another. Then we both began to run.

It wasn’t easy, floundering over rocks and tree roots at that hour of night. But the direction of the wind and the flow of riders through the trees had been toward Lynn Hall; we had no time to think. Leith, ahead of me, followed the meager, dancing pinpoint of light I trained ahead of him. I followed his steps, trying to keep up, and listening, my nape-hairs prickling, for hooves and bells and wicked laughter at our backs.

We had no hope of getting to Lynn Hall before them, but just getting there, as fast as possible, seemed imperative.

“What’s Iris been up to tonight?” Leith wondered raggedly, as we finally reached the fallen boundary tree and flung ourselves over it.

“No idea,” I managed. I hadn’t run so far so fast in years, and we still had the mill road to travel before we reached my car. A sudden gust of wind behind us, strong enough to set the old hemlocks creaking, made me find my second wind. The rugged road, with its dips and ruts and sections worn down to bare root and stone, was difficult enough to walk in daylight. By night, even under that moon, it was treacherous. But a moment’s glimpse, across the brook, of a horse whose breath seemed a cloud of mist and white fire, a rider wearing what looked like horns the color of bleached bone, inspired me to a mindless burst of strength and energy that lasted until we reached the end of the mill road and my car.

The keys were still in my pocket, and the car hadn’t morphed into a pile of rust during our sojourn in the circle of trees. We tumbled into it; I peeled away to take the turn down the long road between the Trasks’ pasture and Iris’s hayfield.

We saw them clearly then: riders streaming out of trees, down roads and ridges, even following the path of water, some with owls on their heads, or great racks of burning horns, horses breathing fire or stars, all of them headed toward and vanishing into the wood behind Lynn Hall. I heard Leith’s incredulous gasp. I floored the gas pedal, careened around the turn into the highway so fast I felt the back end still trying to go straight. Other cars were parked near Iris’s driveway. I didn’t wonder why they were out along the road; I was just relieved that she wasn’t alone. I sprayed gravel turning into the drive, and again when I braked, opening my door at the same time.

The front door was open. Lights were on in the living room and the kitchen. There was a tree stump on Iris’s carpet. No one was in the house. So I thought, anyway, until I bumped into Hurley in the kitchen.

“Owen,” he said. He seemed shaken, his face slack, his eyebrows working. “There is something happening in the wood. I was watching it through my telescope. So I came down to tell Iris, and I saw it out the window with my own two eyes. I’ve never seen it with my eyes before.”

“I haven’t, either.”

“Are you going out there?”

“Yes,” I said, moving fast out the other kitchen door toward the back porch.

“Then I’ll come with you.”

I went out onto the porch and stopped dead. Most of the Fiber Guild, including my daughter, stood scattered among the roses. For some peculiar reason, Tarrant Coyle was among them. Under the bright moonlight, I could see Iris at the boundary between lawn and wood. There was a taller, slender figure beside her; light cast by the windows burnished her sleek hair the same elusive cobweb shade as Iris’s.

“That’s Syl,” Leith breathed. “How did she get here?”

Her head lifted slightly as though she had heard her name, but she didn’t turn. Facing them both, ranged among the trees, was the mass of riders we had seen coming. Some looked nearly human; others began with a semblance of normality that trailed off into leafy branches or flowering wood. Faces in the shadows were amorphous, indecipherable. Moonlight glinted off metal and jewel, odd bits of harness. Small bells sang. A horse’s eye, predawn black, reflected a tiny, cold moon the perfect circle of the moon above the wood.

The rider directly in front of Iris wore a crown of what looked like silver and moonlight. Tall and graceful, she at least assumed a human shape; her long pale hair flowed like a cloak over the dark, shimmering robes she wore. Fireflies, flickering constantly around her, blurred her and her dark mount; a human eye, casting a casual glance into the shadow, would not have recognized what it saw.

She and Iris seemed to take the measure of one another silently: two ancient warrior-queens, guarding their boundaries.

The woodland queen spoke finally. “You called me.”

“It’s her,” Hurley said surprisedly. “The one in my telescope.”

I don’t know which surprised me more: Hurley’s seeing eye, or the implication that Iris herself had flung open the door between worlds and roused this army massed against her.

“You have some children of ours,” Iris answered.

I blinked. That would explain Tarrant’s presence, I realized.

“And you have one who is mine.”

She had a lovely, fluting voice; it could have blended easily into the light rill of branch water, or a dove’s coo. Iris’s voice held all the untuned, timeworn notes of her mortality. But it held steady; I heard no fear in it, just her usual, reassuring brusqueness.

“What do you want,” she asked the queen, “in return for my grandson and his friend?”

“What will you give me?”

“The one who is yours,” Iris answered.

“And what else?”

Iris hesitated. In the exacting world of fairy tale, that seemed fair: Iris was getting two for one. But she seemed uncertain, and made what sounded like a terribly reckless bid. “What more do you want?” she asked the fairy queen. “What do you want that I can give you?”

The woodland queen didn’t answer immediately. She dismounted, causing a minor galaxy of glittering fires to move across her from crown to foot. She took a step closer to Iris, where the shelter of trees ended and the lawn began. Iris didn’t step back, but she did grasp Sylvia’s arm, maybe to stop herself.

“You turn back our paths of flowing water,” the queen said. “You block our passageways through tree and well and pond; you thread your thorns and weedy vines between our worlds as though you own them both. As you close our paths, you close your minds to us. In your thoughts you keep us trapped in some bleak place that you must never enter, no matter how our ancient wonders call to you across the boundaries. We are the word you must not say, the food you must not eat, the wine you must not drink, the forbidden love, the dangerous wood, that which tempts and lures and always, always destroys. Is that all we are to you?”

“Yes,” Iris said. Her changeling granddaughter’s face turned toward her then, and Iris cleared her throat. “Until tonight. Until now. That is what we have always been taught.”

“Then this is what I want,” the woodland queen said, taking another step, and then another, toward her. It was as though we watched a river spilling over its banks, and if Iris did not move back she might be swept away and drowned. She stayed stubbornly rooted, though behind her, a few of the guild members in the rose garden eased toward the house.

“What?” she asked, her voice sounding harsh, and I realized that even she was a bit unnerved. So was I, by then. Two women, one frail with age, the other young, and inexperienced, and possessing a conflicted heritage, were all that stood between our tranquil world and that fay, glittering horde.

The queen stepped out of the wood. “To give you a different tale.”

In the wash of light from the windows, we saw her face clearly, not the cold-eyed winter queen of Rois Melior’s manuscript, but the golden queen of summer, with her corn-leaf eyes, and her bewitching smile, and her bare feet scarcely bending a blade of Iris’s grass.

She gave a soft call then. I tensed, preparing for the storm that Leith and I had glimpsed. The screen door banged behind us; we both jumped. A creature smelling of earth and leaf mold and vanilla musk shambled down the steps and through the roses, inspiring some colorful exclamations from the guild. Its odd, tree-imp face turned toward Iris before it passed into the wood.

“Awesome cookies, Gram,” it said. “Thanks.”

I could see the human faces then, emerging from the trees, tired, dirty, and about to puddle into tears of relief. They flung their arms around Iris and Sylvia, and then Judith saw her father and ran to him. The voices among the roses had risen to a piercing tumult; Iris flung her own voice into it.

“Hush!”

Everyone did, including a couple of mounts nervously shaking their harness bells behind the queen.

“I took your children and sent you one of ours just for this,” the queen told her. “Not to harm you, but in hope that you might find a reason to talk to me. Our world is very old; yours is very powerful. Tales make us seem fearsome, and so we can well be. But not always. And your stitches may bind us in our world, but they also bind the beauty and the wonder in it, which so many of you, wandering in and out of our world, bring back with them to tell about.”

“Including my granddaughter,” Iris said simply, touching Sylvia’s hair. “She turned my thoughts around, in the end.”

“Yes,” the queen said softly. “She was very brave to come freely into our world.”

“You saw me?” Sylvia asked.

“Of course, I did. I made everything you saw.”

“How did you—how did you know about the drawer pulls?”

“I didn’t. It was you who picked them out of my random magic. You gave them significance. You found the thread. You found your own way home.”

“Oh,” she whispered, a sound so faint it might have been lost, except that everyone else on both sides of the border seemed spellbound.

“It will be hard,” Iris admitted, “to change the habits of centuries. Ways of looking at the world get ingrained and tenacious after so long a time. Even now, it’s hard for me to trust you.”

The queen nodded. “I know. And I wonder when you’ll all decide you have been dreaming, and go back behind your doors to resume your stitchery, and lock yourselves away again from the world you enter, time after time, in your stories. But perhaps, if the three of us think hard enough, we will find ways to live more peacefully with one another.”

“Maybe,” Iris answered slowly. “Maybe not. But maybe.”

A breeze, very light and faint, stirred through the woods. I was looking, I realized finally, at an empty, dwindling cloud of fireflies. Voices were rising again; women moved, hesitantly, out of the garden toward the trees.

Except for Dorian, who took the porch in a single bound and had her arms around Leith before he could take a step. “It’s about time!” she said fiercely, patting my arm in greeting when she could spare a hand.

Tarrant, his arm tight around his daughter, brushed past us without a backward glance. “For my money, you can keep Lynn Hall,” he told me with mystifying intensity. “Stitch up everything in sight. Did you see those fire-breathing horses? And that huge guy with the horns coming out of his head?”

Even Jane had made it across the lawn, gripping Agatha with one hand and her walker with the other, to peer into the wood.

She barked, “Did I just see what I think I saw?”

“I thought it was beautiful,” Lacey said gently, as I passed her to join Iris. “All the fireflies and those strange, lovely faces in the moonlight…”

“Owen!” Iris exclaimed. “Where on earth have you been?”

“Waiting for Sylvia in the wrong wood,” I told her, and asked Sylvia, “How did you find your way back?

She shook her head slightly; her face, all its reserve melted away, looked a trifle dazed, and oddly peaceful. “I found one end of Gram’s thread in a drawer and followed it back to a Fiber Guild meeting,” she answered vaguely.

The humorless Charlotte drifted past us to put an arm around a tree and stare wordlessly into the wood.

“Charlotte?” Iris said. “Are you all right? Charlotte?”

“I had no idea…” she whispered.

“What?”

She looked briefly at us, an expression on her face it probably hadn’t worn in twenty years. Then she wandered into the woods, in the wake of some vision. Sylvia smiled; Iris sighed.

“I hope I did the right thing,” she said, rubbing her eyes tiredly.

“You were magnificent,” I told her.

“Was I? Are you sure, Owen?”

“Yes,” Sylvia and I said together.

“Where did Tyler go?” she asked fretfully. “He just got back, and now he’s gone again—”

Sylvia put an arm around her, turned her toward the house. “He’s in the kitchen, Gram. He said Judith wouldn’t let him eat or drink there.”

“That was my fault. So many things are my fault… Morgana’s secrets, you running away from home—”

“Gram, let’s go in; we’re all tired.”

“Even Owen afraid to tell me things—”

“How did you know?” I asked her, stunned.

“Dorian announced your love affair to the Fiber Guild. Come in with us? I’d like to hear more about it.”

“Yes. In a moment.”

I waited more than a moment, until all the women had gone, and even Charlotte had come back from her private dream. Until even the fireflies had gone elsewhere. But no kindly gesture from the woodland queen granted me my wish, and I could only rue the bygone day.

---

22
SYL

 I  left Lynn Hall a few days later, flew back home to put my store in order, and find someone to do my job for the rest of the summer. Madison met me at the airport. I think I fell in love again at the sight of him: his big-boned, easy grace, his long black hair, most of all the smile that flashed out of all of him when he saw me. I could love him, I thought dazedly. I didn’t have to be afraid.

Later, we curled up in my bed, eating Chinese food out of boxes and talking. I had the soy sauce and fortune cookies on my side of the bed; he had the wine and most of the napkins. We reached across heedlessly when we needed something, endangering each other with waving chopsticks. I dropped rice on his pillowcase; he spilled soy sauce on my silk pajamas.

“Never mind,” I said, and took them off, and tossed them over the end of the bed. Madison stared at me.

“What’s happened to you? You just—you just threw your clothes on the floor. You didn’t get out of bed and put them neatly into the hamper.”

“I know,” I said, hardly believing myself. “Life’s messy?”

“You learned that in a week? At a funeral?”

“Sort of.”

Someday I’d tell him, I thought. Or he would guess. Or not. It didn’t matter yet, and when it did, I would find a way.

“Your grandmother is fierce,” he commented, refilling our glasses. I started, shaking wine onto the sheets.

“You talked to her?” My voice squeaked. “She didn’t tell me.”

“Well, I’d hardly call it a conversation. I told her who I was—and that I wanted to marry you, so she’d take me seriously—and asked if I could possibly talk to you. She said she had no idea and then there was this bang in my ear.”

“She has an old-fashioned dial phone.”

“A what?”

“What day was that?”

“Ah—Saturday night, it would have been.”

The shortest night in the year, the longest night of my life…

“She really didn’t know where I was then,” I told him. “She was worried.”

“Where were you?”

I floundered. “Out. Looking for Tyler. He went missing, too.”

Madison gave me a long, clear-eyed look, as though he glimpsed the tale that thereby hung. But he shelved that for now, to my relief, and took another bite of mandarin beef. “I almost flew out then and there,” he said calmly. “That message you left had me a bit worried. You changed your mind so fast about needing me.”

“I did,” I sighed, remembering the call under the hydrangea bush. Already it seemed a decade ago. “That was when Gram told me that I’d inherited Lynn Hall. It scared me. What she might want from me.”

“So what does she want?”

“Nothing much now,” I said contentedly, stretching like a cat, my chopsticks probably decorating the wall behind me with sauce. “Just to spend a month or two with her this summer, helping her fix the hall up. She and Hurley will stay there for as long as they want. When it’s empty, I’ll decide then what to do with it.”

“I’m coming out there,” Madison warned me, “when my summer class ends. So don’t go falling in love with anybody else.”

“Don’t you, either.”

He looked at me, surprised. “Really?”

“Really,” I said soberly. “Really, truly.”

He gave me a winey, mandarin kiss, and then looked at me again, silently, steadily. “Okay, then,” he said softly, and put his arms around me, spilling my wine again on both of us, like some ancient ritual blessing.

Tyler spent a good part of the summer at Lynn Hall, too, helping us now and then as we painted, chose wallpapers and linoleum, replaced curtains, dealt with the formidable clutter in the attic. He and Hurley went fishing together; Hurley taught him to use his drill and lathe, which Tyler managed without losing fingers. He talked about his father, thoughts and memories spilling out at random. Once, while we were in the attic, packing Gram’s discards in boxes for the local thrift shop, he talked about what happened in the wood.

“It hardly seems real now,” he told me. “More like a dream. Is it that way for you?” I shook my head. “Oh. Well, mostly I was curled up in a ball on a sheepskin, thinking about my dad. Or I was following Judith around. She and I only have each other to talk about that part. She says I should keep it secret. That no one will believe me. Do you think that’s true?”

“Not entirely. You’ll meet a few people around here, I think, who will believe you. Just be patient. You’ll learn to recognize them.”

He was silent a moment, rolling old juice glasses in newspaper. “I understand what the queen was trying to do,” he said finally. “Why she did what she did. But mostly, I felt like she just brought me to a place in a fairy tale where I needed to be most. Where I didn’t have to do anything but think about my dad. And be miserable. As sad and angry and hopeless as I wanted to be.”

I swallowed, remembering the place where she had brought me. “She has a gift for that.”

“And then Judith came, and helped me.” He smiled. “Just what I needed. You look at the queen of the wood one way, and she’s beyond wicked. Stealing children, making humans get lost in her world. Look at her another way—and there’s a different story.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I murmured. “That’s what all those old tales say. Maybe this is what happened, maybe that. Something happened, that’s what we know for sure. The story changes every time you take another look at it. It changes into what you need most at the moment you choose to look at it.”

Tyler was silent again, maybe swallowing that, maybe not. He only said, “Nothing really changed. My dad is still dead. Grandpa Liam is still dead. My mom is still married to Patrick. What’s different is that I can see things a little more clearly. Like when I get a new pair of glasses. I see what I’ve been missing.”

“I know that feeling.”

“Really? I thought you already had everything figured out.”

“I only thought I did.”

“Well, how can you tell the difference between thinking you do and really doing it?”

“You can’t. You can’t see what you can’t see until you can see it.”

“Well, how do you—” He gave up, smiling. “Never mind. I guess you have to be there.”

“You will,” I promised him. “You’ll outgrow Patrick so fast he’ll be missing that green-haired boy before he realizes he never knew you.”

Tyler grunted. “I’m thinking of bleaching it. Judith said that’d look cool with my black eyebrows.”

“There. You see?”

“See what?”

Judith, I thought. Fashion. Passion. “You’re already on your way beyond Patrick.”

Gram didn’t call a guild meeting the next month. She needed to think, she said. She needed some peace and quiet, is what she told the incredulous members who called to remonstrate. They were the ones who hadn’t seen Gram’s confrontation with the wood. All they knew was that for the first time in a hundred years, there was no monthly meeting. It was, Jane told Gram, as if the moon had decided not to rise on that night. But it was a comment, not a criticism; she understood as well as Gram that they needed to rethink their stitches. Gradually the story of that night made its rounds, over cups of coffee, in the supermarket parking lot, at the Village Grill, where Genevieve passed what she had seen to discerning customers, along with mugs of beer and burger baskets.

“I’m glad Iris is thinking about it,” she told me when I stopped in one slow evening and we had the bar to ourselves. “I wouldn’t want to make that decision. I mean, that Tyler-clone turned into a tree stump right in front of me. I don’t know how far we can trust them. But if I never had to crochet another baby bootie, I’d be beyond ecstatic.”

Gram finally talked about it with me, when we sat out on the porch one tranquil night, smelling the roses and watching the coracle moon sail above the pear tree.

“I can understand it better now,” she said abruptly, out of nowhere, I thought, but I was wrong.

“What, Gram?”

“Why Liam loved to ramble. He was never afraid. The wood was never something to be kept tied up in stitches. Water was just water; it didn’t have to be guarded, feared for, mistrusted. It was just something lovely going its own way under the stars. I could never see those fireflies without wondering what they were hiding. Or pass a hollow tree without trying to remember whose stitches were guarding it. I still do. But now I find myself looking at it the way Liam might have. Wondering, if I stepped inside the hollow, what I’d feel, or smell, or hear. If for an instant, I’d think like that tree.”

I smiled at the thought of Gram inside a tree. “Did he really do that?”

“Owen said he did. He’d walk in drifts of autumn leaves. He’d skip stones on water, walk on fallen trunks. He’d play in the woods like a child. All the while I fretted and counted stitches and tried to sew the world into order.”

“What will you do, Gram?”

“About the Fiber Guild?” She was silent a little, gazing into the dark, listening, maybe, as I was, for the faint jingle of harness bells, for a distant voice that was neither human nor animal. “It’s very old, and could be very powerful, if we need it to be. And it creates, as well as binds. I won’t disband it. But maybe, for a while, we could just sew. Concentrate on what we make instead of what we control. See what happens.”

“Are you going to undo all the old bindings?”

She shook her head. “There’s enough wide open now. The old spells will fall apart eventually with time, if we don’t need them.” She paused again. “We’ll see. At least, I will as long as my old threads hold together. After that, you’ll have to make decisions.”

“I will,” I promised her. “But don’t be in any hurry to leave me. You know I can barely thread a needle.”

The Fiber Guild met again the following month, on the night Madison was flying in to visit us. His class had ended; he was bringing his fishing pole, he said, his camera, his binoculars and bird books, and an assortment of instruments, including a fiddle, spoons, and a nose harp.

“Might learn a few old tunes in those mountains,” he told me with enthusiasm. It occurred to me to wonder then which of us might have to drag the other away.

“Madison.”

“Yes, my darling, my dear.”

“Oh, never mind,” I said helplessly. If he fell in love with the mountains and Lynn Hall, time would figure that one out, too. “I’ll see you at the airport.”

Dorian was coming with me, out of curiosity and to keep me company. Neither of us would make the guild meeting; we would pick Madison up and have dinner afterward in the city, which was a respectable way of getting out of sitting around for several hours and poking holes in a cloth with a needle. I drove over to pick Dorian up, found her and Owen both in the nursery. It was Saturday, and there were still customers, buying late-blooming mums, and bulbs, and whatever produce had ripened in the nursery’s vegetable garden.

Dorian combed her hair with her fingers, took off her apron, and passed it to her father. “If Leith comes by after work, tell him I’ll be home before midnight,” she said, and kissed her father’s cheek.

“Be careful,” he told us, his eyes losing their absent look for a second. “Watch out for deer.”

“Always. Do you want us to pick up anything for you?”

He shook his head. He’d always been somber, but there had been a dark energy about him that I missed. Gram had noticed it, too: he had lost interest in his life. Losing Liam and then his fay love, almost at the same time, had taken the heart out of him, she guessed.

“Are you sure?” Dorian asked, fretting over him. He patted her shoulder.

“I’ll make myself some supper, play a little music… You have fun.”

The greenhouse door opened; another customer entered, stopped immediately, as they all did, to stare at the great cascades of fuchsias in their hanging pots, trailing blossoms to the ground in one last, magnificent display before winter killed them.

But this customer wasn’t looking at the fuchsias. She was gazing at Owen, who was pulling out the green beans and cherry tomatoes Dorian had picked and then forgotten in her apron pockets.

Dorian passed her with a smile, not noticing anything. But I couldn’t move, watching, wondering, recognizing something in her, though she looked like one of us, any of us, in her thin silk shirt and long, faded skirt. Her feet were bare, I noticed; she limped a little, taking a tentative step toward Owen. Her face had once been beautiful; now, aged a bit maybe in her translation into human, she still looked striking, with her slanted eyes as dark as autumn berries, and her hair, long and petal-smooth, streaked buttercup and ivory.

Owen saw her.

He closed his eyes. I saw him take one long breath and loose it, before he began to smile, and I went out quickly, turning the open sign around as I closed the door softly behind me.

A year and a day, they had together, maybe, before she turned back into fairy. Or maybe a decade and a day. Who knew? But he would have forever the gift she gave him: she had found her way back.

And so had I.

—«»—«»—«»—

[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

[A 3S release—— v1, html]

[March 11, 2006]