The Wolf Tree (6 page)

“When I said you could come with me sometime, I meant
here,”
Ray said. “Just out into the mountains for a few days.”

Marisol had her dresses and supplies spread out on her bed. Javidos coiled on her quilt and darted his tongue at Ray. In the next room, the kitchen was noisy with the voices of the children and the clattering of Ma Everett cooking supper.

“He wouldn’t have wanted you to go otherwise,” Marisol said.

“I don’t need Nel’s permission.”

Marisol opened the clasps on a floral-patterned valise. “You needed his blessing. Now you’ll both feel better about your going.”

“But why do you want to go?” Ray lowered his voice.

Marisol cut her black almond eyes at Ray as she folded a dress to place in the valise. “Don’t you remember what we talked about?”

“Of course, but—” Ray shifted.

“Don’t you think I’m brave enough?”

“Yes, but—”

Marisol aimed a finger at his nose. “I was there when we faced the Hoarhound. I was there when we fought the Gog’s agents on the
Ballyhoo
. I have courage, Ray.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what are you saying?” Marisol asked, putting her
hand on her hip. At Ray’s hesitation, she added, “If you don’t want me to go, just say so.”

“I just want you to be sure you know what we might be facing.”

“I know, Ray. As well as you, anyway.”

Ray shrugged. “Then I suppose we’ll leave in the morning.”

“I’ll be ready.” She nodded and turned back to her packing.

Ray passed through the kitchen to go upstairs. He traveled with very little, but he decided to gather what few supplies he would need. “Supper’ll be ready in about half an hour,” Ma Everett called as he ascended the stairs.

At first Ray thought the loft was empty, but then he noticed Sally at the far end reading by the solitary window. Coming closer, he saw
The Incunabula of Wandering
open in her lap. Sally seemed frozen, almost as if she were in a trance, the way she always appeared when she read the book. She turned the page with a quick flick of her hand, and then returned to her statue-like state. She did not even realize Ray was standing behind her chair until he brushed his hand across her hair.

“Ray!” She looked straight up and then pulled herself around sideways in the chair.

Ray’s eye fell on the open page, to a long poem.

“What are you reading?” Ray asked.

“Oh,” Sally said, tracing her fingers along the lines. “It’s this song, called the Verse of the Lost. And look here. It says
something about the Elemental Rose in this line. Remember what that Cherokee elder said? Father helped figure out what the Elemental Rose was.” Sally eyes shone with wonderment. “What do you think the Elemental Rose is?”

“I wouldn’t know, Sally. I’ve never understood poems very well.”

“The Verse of the Lost isn’t a poem,” Sally continued. “Not in the real sense. I just want to figure out what Father was—”

“Sally, I need to tell you something.” She opened her mouth to continue, but Ray spoke first. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

Sally’s eyelashes batted against her cheeks. “What? Where are you going?”

“Kansas.”

“Th-the Darkness,” she said, her voice pitched with anxiety. “I heard Si talking to Buck about it. They said the Darkness killed Mister Bradshaw!”

“Don’t worry,” Ray said, touching a hand to the toby beneath his shirt. “Nel made me a protective charm. I’ll be fine.”

She grabbed his hand, squeezing it hard. “But why are you going, Ray? Is this about the Machine?”

“We have to find it—”

“But you need to cross to reach it.” Sally spoke rapidly, desperately. “Can’t you stay here and keep working on learning how to take animal form? You don’t have to go out there to learn to cross. Once you learn, then you can just
cross from here. You could find the Machine from anywhere. Then you can destroy it. You don’t have to go out to that Darkness.”

“It’s not like that, Sally,” Ray said, moving around until he knelt before her, resting his arms on her knees, holding her hands. “Do you remember last fall when I went down to Georgia?”

Sally lifted her chin with the slightest nod.

“I met a Creek Indian, Aunt Harjo. Her grandfather was a Red Stick, a powerful medicine man. She said her grandfather had learned how to take animal form and to cross into the Gloaming. She told me from what she understood that places within this world corresponded to particular places within the Gloaming. And to move within the Gloaming was to move within a world that followed no map. If I’m to reach the Machine, I must cross at the location where Grevol placed it. I have to find its source in our world first.”

“Kansas,” she said softly. “You think the Machine is in Kansas?”

“We’ll find out.”

She leaned forward, hugging him tightly. “I don’t want you to go,” she whispered.

“I’ll be okay.” Ray held her a moment before saying, “I need you to do something for me, Sal.”

She pulled back. “What? Look something up in the
Incunabula
? I could find out if—”

“No, it’s something I need you to keep.” He opened the buttons at his collar and pulled up the toby. “The rabbit’s foot.”

He took out the golden foot. Mother Salagi had told Ray to keep it safe. He could not risk bringing it with him into the Darkness. If the foot was to be safe, it should stay at Shuckstack.

“Remember what’s in this rabbit’s foot?” Ray asked.

“A lodestone?”

“From Father. He gave it to me before you were born, the last time I saw him. He told me the lodestone would lead me back to him. It did. It led me to him when it became the rabbit’s foot. Now I’m giving it to you so you’ll know that I’ll return safely. Will you keep it safe?”

“Of course.” She leaned forward once more, hugging him, squeezing him like she wouldn’t let him go. “I’m scared,” she said.

“Don’t be.”

Her soft cheek was pressed against his. She smelled of Shuckstack, of a nice wood fire and spring flowers and the spicy herbs drying in Nel’s room. She smelled of the sweet smell of his home.

“But Father …,” Sally whispered. “He never came back.”

“I’ll come back.”

She released him enough so that she could see his face, her large eyes searching his. “You will? You promise?”

Ray put the rabbit’s foot in Sally’s cupped palm, closing her fingers over it. He squeezed her hand. “I promise.”

4
THE SLEEPING GIANT

C
ONKER SLEPT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL
.

Five fathoms deep and filled with clear green spring water, the well was known to the sirens as
Nascuits ai Élodie
or Élodie’s Spring. It was a place of healing—secret, secluded, and sacred.

Élodie’s Spring lay in a recessed marsh surrounded on three sides by rock outcroppings. To a wanderer, the base of the bluff would look overgrown with a wild tangle of ferns and cattails and the skein of jeweled spiderwebs. No spring could be seen bubbling from the rock. And even if a wanderer had chanced upon the overgrown corner of the wild, he or she would have felt inexplicably compelled to continue traveling. Unless that traveler was a siren.

When Jolie had at last found the spring, she had pulled Conker’s body down into the healing waters. She wove a
blanket of reeds to cover him and pinned the edges with large stones to keep him from floating to the surface.

There he slept. Jolie did not know how long it would take for him to heal.

When she had first reached the spring, the woods were green with high summer. Soon autumn fell, and red and copper leaves blanketed the silver outcropping surrounding the well.

Jolie watched and waited, swimming down several times each day to check on Conker. He slept, and she could only hope he was healing.

The winter brought little snow but cold nights, and Jolie often slept in the spring’s waters by Conker’s side. His body was beginning to mend. She could feel it as she touched his chest and muscles and bones. But he did not wake.

And at last—after so long on Jolie’s lonesome watch—spring arrived. And with it so did her first visitor.

Electric green leaves wove a canopy over the well. In the shade, Jolie sat mashing cattail tubers that she had boiled for her evening meal. Something or someone was watching her.

Were the months of isolation driving her to invent worries? She considered it even as she listened for a footstep or a snap of a twig. All she heard was the chatter of the birds, the cedar waxwings and martins, gathering at the siren spring’s headwaters.

She turned her head a fraction and sniffed as she continued to crush the warm white tubers with the whittled spoon. She could smell nothing unusual to the sheltered spring. Her
senses told her that something had approached the well, but maybe it was just a deer or wandering bear. It couldn’t be a person.

With a forked stick, she lifted hot rocks from the fire and dropped them into the water-filled bladder at her feet. The heat lifted the aroma of the cooking fish, and she inhaled hungrily.

At the quick snapping of bracken several yards away, Jolie turned. A blurred form burst from the underbrush and leaped upon her. Ferocious instinct took over and Jolie fought, kicking up with her bare feet, tearing and slashing with her fingernails. The attacker growled at the blows, and the two thrashed until Jolie was pinned at the elbows, her face turned into the earth as the attacker held Jolie by her tangled hair. The hard edge of a blade pressed against Jolie’s throat.

As a final defense, Jolie began the high, warbling song sirens used to control others. The blade was released from her throat as the attacker gasped,
“Sirmoeur!”

Jolie turned her head and looked up.

She was tall, taller than Jolie, and a few years older. Her hair was golden red, almost to the point of being pink where the sun shone through the wisps. Her skin was pale, silvery. But unlike Jolie’s skin, hers shimmered iridescent, like the belly of a trout, swirling and shifting with faint hues of red and green and blue when she moved.

The siren scrambled off Jolie, throwing the blade to the side as she passionately took Jolie in her arms and pulled her
into an embrace.
“Sirmoeur!
Jolie,
meu sirmoeur!”
she cried over and over.

“Sister?” Jolie was startled to hear her siren tongue. “It is you, Cleoma?”

“Yes, yes, Jolie. You are alive!” Cleoma said. “I thought we had lost you. Forgive me for hurting you. Are you injured?” She ran her fingers over Jolie’s forehead, where a pink welt was rising and blood speckled where she had been scratched.

Jolie was too surprised to feel where she had been struck. She stared at her siren sister, thinking she must be some delusion that would vanish if she blinked. But Cleoma was real. She was here, in front of Jolie against all reason.

“No, I’m fine,” Jolie choked, half laughing, half sobbing.

Cleoma took Jolie’s hands in hers as she said, “I had no idea it was you. I was coming to
Nascuits ai Élodie
, when I saw someone hunched over a cook fire. I thought the well’s blessed waters were violated. But it is you,
meu sirmoeur!
Jolie, my sister.”

“Are the others with you?” Jolie said, looking eagerly to the bracken where Cleoma had emerged.

“No, I am alone,” she said. “I have come for the waters, to bring them back to our sisters in the Terrebonne.”

“They have returned from the open sea?”

“Yes, we learned of the Gog’s death and have come home. But listen—something terrible has happened.”

“What is it?” Jolie asked.

Cleoma sat back on her heels. She spread her hands
across her gown, the woven grasses not nearly so frayed as Jolie’s. “A sickness is spreading among the sisters. It began with the elders, but now even the young and strong are falling to it. Isabeau was the first to take the fever. She would not eat or swim. We gave her boneset and honey in hot water, but the fever did not break. Then she lost her sight. Soon others were sick, too.”

“Dear Isabeau!” Jolie gasped. “Is she …”

“She has returned, Jolie,” Cleoma said. “Inez and Breaux, too. But before they died, when the fever drove their minds where they could no longer recognize us, each mumbled over and over about ‘an eternal night’—the world covered in an endless dark. Whether it was the blindness or a vision of something more, we could not tell.”