The Trouble with Fate (22 page)

Yep, all those things were grab-Toto-and-run scary, but there were
worse
things down at that end of the clearing than an evil walnut.

I may have left school in sixth grade, but I’ve been selectively self-educating since
then through Bob’s no-fines, no-jailtime lending library. Thus, I knew that before
Columbus proved them wrong, those dumb-ass mortals had thought the world was flat.
Hard to believe anyone could be that stupid. Almost impossible, unless you were standing
where I was, looking at flat-earth evidence with your mouth hanging open in disbelief.

The world I’d been born to was round. Which meant, there was always a horizon. It’s
one of those laws of nature you take for granted. But here in Threall, that cardinal
rule did not apply. Where I was expecting some sort of vista beyond those two walnuts—a
forest, or maybe a babbling brook, anything to give you a reference for perspective—there
was nothing. No sense of definition between ground and sky. The air between the almost-dead
and living tree was flat as flannel, and gray as a banker’s suit. Featureless—a backdrop
of seething gray.

Not something you turn your back on, or for that matter, get too cozy with. What I
meant to do was sidle away from it, but what I did was lurch. It took a few steps
before I got my center of gravity realigned. It was almost like I was too light—I
paused, stricken, and touched my stomach. There was no answering quiver from my Were.

I was empty. Gutted and tenantless.

It had been a long-held wish: the total exorcism of my Were-bitch.
Had I willed her dead?
I froze, both hands pressed hard on my belly, my breath suddenly caught in my chest.
Or was she alive and well in my mortal body, down in earth’s realm, thoroughly disgusted
by the scents emanating from the strip club?
I didn’t know, but I kind of wanted her back, just to check.

I might have stood there for quite some time, my worry split between the walnut’s
malevolent ball of light, and the fact that my canine nature hadn’t made the boat
to Threall, but someone issued an invitation.

It was a single chord.

Soon followed by a single note, plucked by a string instrument that thankfully bore
no resemblance to a harp. Two more notes. Plaintive. Then those unseen fingers delivered
to me a song. Simple in construction; its melody climbed upward, took a half step
backward, pressed on for a higher note. Lazily played and melancholy too, as if the
song were a line drawing, hastily sketched in by an artist puzzled by something he
couldn’t figure out.

By the time the musician had played the final chorus, I’d pinpointed the location.

I started toward the wall of rock about a hundred feet to my left and as I did, the
mist moved away, as if saying for all the world, “Clear the way, here comes the mighty
Mystwalker.”

Hard not to experience a little stroke of pleasure at that thought.

As I got closer, it parted and revealed the presence of yet another ancient tree.
Great effort had been made to keep this elderly beech safe. From what danger, I wasn’t
sure, but it had been protected by a fence of sorts, fashioned from various lengths
of branches. Someone, or several someones, had dug a trench, and then rammed branches
into the exposed earth at a forty-five degree angle, one piece on top of the other.
The end result was an intricate puzzle of forked branches and straight ones, bristling
with pointed edges. The barrier curved completely around the elderly beech, serving
as a six-foot-high impediment to anyone who had a pocketknife and a desire to carve
their initials. I don’t know who the hell would love that tree enough to go to all
that trouble; it was as ugly as sin too. Its thick branches had grown twisted, so
that the overall visual was tortured wood, as viciously gnarled as an old lady’s arthritic
knuckles.

Quiet from the center of the branch barricade. A listening sort of stillness.

There was no entrance that I could see. I walked around it until I found a peephole
in the fence, and took a peek.

Well, hell. The last thing I expected to see was a teenager reclining on a silk divan,
plucking a mandolin. She had an arresting face, much like the girl in the art book
Bob had never been able to flip. I’d spent a lot of time studying that image, caught
by the thought that the girl looked somewhat like Lou. And here it was again, another
version of that the same autocratic face; long nose, shapely chin, eyes made compelling
by the measuring look under their half-mast lids. Except this girl was far younger—in
her late teens—and her hair wasn’t dark like Lou’s but blond, so pale it was almost
silver. It fell past her shoulders and rippled down her back. Her dress was gentian
blue, the vaguely medieval bodice and waist fitted to her slender body. The rest was
long and predictably flowing. Fairy-tale fashion by way of Disney. The robe was a
little too overdone in the embellishments, I thought, not much liking the embroidered
silver flower design that ran up her sleeves.

Mum had been a prettier Fae.

Her eyes slanted toward me. Brown, not blue. She played a few more chords on her mandolin,
and then asked me something in—ah, for crap’s sake—Merenwynian.

“I don’t speak Merenwynian,” I said glumly. That response prompted another stream
of lilting gibberish from the girl on the divan. “Like I said, I don’t speak Merenwyian,”
I repeated very slowly, in that same earnest manner foreign-born people repeat things
to us Canadians, as if saying the same thing louder and at a snail’s pace would somehow
improve our comprehension.

The musician’s fingers kept moving over the mandolin strings, but she spared me a
hooded, annoyed glance from under her lashes.

“Goddess,” I said in exasperation, turning to glance back at the black walnut and
the dark ominous gray behind it. “You don’t know how much I wish that you spoke English
or that I spoke your language.” I forced myself to tear my glance from the ominous
canvas. Gave her a rueful smile through the fence. “It would make my trip to la-la
land so much easier, because if there was ever a time I needed a spirit guide, this
would be it. You see, I…”

My words petered out.

By all the stars in earth’s heaven, I’d just spoken the last sentence in my mother’s
tongue. I opened my mouth to test this sudden skill—

“It’s near dawn in Merenwyn. He is taking a chance sending you so late,” she said
in English. She softly played a few opening bars of what sounded like a Baroque piece.
“Or did he think that you’d find me already sleeping?” She frowned at her long fingers
on the neck of the mandolin and then carefully put the instrument down, so that its
base rested on a rough rag rug that seemed mostly to be made of duns, browns, and
bits of blue, and its short neck rested on a hideously ornate gilt table.

“Who
are
you?” I asked.

The blonde drew up her legs and clasped her arms around her knees. We exchanged a
wordless moment through the crack in the makeshift fence. If I’d met her in earth’s
realm, on first glance she’d pass for human, just like Mum and Lou had. Her face was
set in Lou’s calculating coldness, and yet, I fancied that I caught that distinguishing
otherworld quality; some of that river-old sadness Mum’s face sometimes wore when
she looked out our kitchen window.

“What is your message?” she asked eventually.

A trifle snappishly, I replied in my mother’s tongue, “I don’t have a message.”

It seemed to me her chin sharpened. She released a knee and placed a hand on the fissured
gray bark of the old beech beside her, but the movement looked odd to me; done in
the same manner one half of a couple might do to catch their mate’s attention. Uneasily,
I squinted up into the foliage. Green ovate leaves, lots of twisted branches, and
nothing else I could see except the obligatory ball of light. It was the hue of an
overripe mango: orange bleeding into crimson.

“We have a challenger,” the girl said.

I did a quick left/right with my eyes. The space inside the ring of branches wasn’t
that large; really, just enough space for the person contained within its circle of
debris to pace in a figure eight around the two pieces of furniture and the massive
tree’s trunk, providing they were careful not to stumble over the twisted worm pile
of its partially exposed root system. As far as I could tell, she was the sole occupant.
I looked over my shoulder and surveyed the clearing and its parameters behind me.
Nada in the open field around me. Though now that my gee-this-ain’t-right instincts
were roused, the surrounding woods appeared a trifle more mysterious, the cliff face
a fraction more massive and impassive, and the blue-fogged hulk of the black walnut
down at the other goal area even more horribly creepy. As for that long dark flannel
screen behind it …
Don’t stare at it. Don’t beckon the things in that gloom to come into the light.

I cleared my throat. “I’m not here to challenge anyone.”

“What shall we do?” asked the girl of the tree. A pause during which I heard nothing
except my breathing—there was just so little ambient noise in this world—as she waited
for an answer. “Yes, we
have
been bored. And the other one hasn’t spoken in such a long time.” Above her, deep
in the foliage, the light ball in her beech friend flashed; dash, dot, dash. She frowned
at me in a appraising manner. “She’s older than we have seen before, and has not as
pleasing a countenance as our last guest.” She pursed her lips. “No, she is not unappealing.
Her hair is neither sun nor shadow, though her eyes are the green of the Chiron House.
And she is…” She tilted her head back to get a bigger picture of me through her viewing
hole. “Well shaped.”

Unbelievable. I was standing on an astral plane, getting Joan Rivered by a fae nut-job.

“DeLoren.” My tone was stiff. “My eye color comes from the house of DeLoren.”

I think Loony Tunes heard me, because she gave a light huff, but she didn’t lift her
head from her communion with the Almighty Tree Spirit.

She’s as mad as the proverbial hatter.

Mad-one nodded once or twice as she listened, and then she patted the trunk, obviously
in agreement with the game plan.

Then her unfocused eyes sharpened, and pinned me.

“Are you a mystwalker?” I asked bluntly.

“We are disappointed.” She sniffed. “Return to your mage.” A little pause, in which
I was probably supposed to genuflect and then disappear. When I didn’t, she emphasized
her point with a grand “away, beggar” wave before adding, “Inform him that you are
not worthy of our time.”

I raised both brows. “Just in the interests of clarity, who’s ‘he’?”

That question made her chew on the inside corner of her lip. Then she tucked her chin
in and said sotto voce, “She pretends not to know of whom we speak. I said as you
instructed, but she is
still
here.”

“Hey, tree.” I waggled my fingers at the beech.

Mad-one turned her head very slowly in my direction and studied me briefly, her hand
still flattened on the fissured bark, before she smiled. As smirks go, it was akin
to the wolfish appreciation a Were pays to a tray of thick juicy steaks—a mental tabulation
of what was going to taste best as it went down.

“It is possible I’ll have to deal with this one,” she said.

“You know what? I’m good,” I said. “I know what I’m looking for. You just stay there,
and talk to your tree pal, while I wander around.” I gave her a Starbucks smile through
the crack in the barricade. “Won’t take more than five minutes, tops.”

Her brow had creased as I’d begun speaking, but that had cleared somewhere in the
middle of my dialogue. Now, her head tilted to one side, she examined me like I was
someone very dim. As she did, her fingers continued to stroke the rough bark.

“I
will
have to deal with this one,” she told the tree. The interior of the ball caught in
the old beech’s thick branches flickered, more orange than yellow. “You are safe,”
she said softly, though I took that to mean the old beech was safe, and me, not so
much. “I won’t stray far. It will not take long to attend to this problem.” Her gaze
was upward, directed at the ball of light over her head. “I will be safe,” she said,
a lover’s smile on her face, both rueful and affectionate. “Do not worry. We’ll be
together when daylight comes.”

Oh … It clicked. Bats-in-the-belfry wasn’t talking to the
tree,
she was conversing with the lightbulb nested in its leafy arms. I’d thought of the
glowing orbs as simply pretty lights, set there by the Mystwalker to keep the dark
away. But now, as I let my gaze wander over the sea of bright balls glowing in the
deep purple sky, I remembered something.
“They say a part of every Fae lives in Threall, the dreaming portion of us,”
Mum had told me that late winter afternoon a decade ago.

But not as bodies, Mum, I thought. Not as people in corporeal form. The souls of hundreds
of dreaming Faes were all around me. Indeed, Threall’s night was gleaming with the
glorious illumination from their soul-lights.

Like most things, simple once you understood. Each tree carried a soul. And to talk
with one, all you had to do was touch its trunk.

Yes, so freakin’ simple.

All I had to do to find Lexi and Lou was touch a few hundred trees. It hurt my head
just thinking about it. I rubbed my temple. It would take forever.

A scrunch of fabric, as Mad-one left her silk divan, and then, suddenly, she was right
on the other side of the divide, staring at me through the crack in the fence. Not
a single blemish or wrinkle marred her petal-soft skin. Despite that, an absolute
conviction came to me suddenly that she was as old as her gnarled beech. Tired too,
I thought. And what? Sad? Weighted? Bound?

Her forehead creased. Whatever weakness had been exposed during my study was wiped
out by the sudden anger that tightened the soft skin around her eyes.