The Onion Girl (54 page)
Authors: Charles de Lint
MANIDÃ-AKÃ
Everybody turns when Toby comes down the slope, one hand holding on to saplings for balance and to slow his descent, the other carrying a wreath of blue flowers, leaves, and twigs that seems to glimmer and glow.
You didn't desert me, I think.
In the midst of everything else that's going on, that seems like a big deal. An anchor that I can hold on to with my sister dead on the ground in front of me and these two canids with their hard cruel words. At times, they make it so that I can hardly breathe. Then I want to lash out at them, at myself, at the dead bodies of Pinky and Raylene, the one for killing my sister, the other for dying.
I focus on the wreath that Toby's carrying. At first I think it's for Raylene and I wonder how he knew she'd died, but then I realize what it is, who it's for, where he went to in such a hurry when he ran off. He went to that field of magic flowers he'd told me about. He plucked the blossoms he found there and wove them into a wreath for me. To break the spell that the Broken Girl has over me.
But we're way past that now.
“I know that little man,” Nanabozho says. “He's always sneaking around in the Greatwood, spying on people.”
Jack nods. “An Eadar.”
There's something in the way they're talking that makes me realize Toby wasn't so far off in his judgment of the People. They're discussing him the way people do the scrawny stray cats in my neighborhood, which
isn't with affection. I'm happy to see that Joe doesn't seem to feel the sameâI'm not sure what. Mild antagonism, maybe. Or a kind of annoyed indifference. And then I realize that the pit bull never even growled at Toby's approach.
isn't with affection. I'm happy to see that Joe doesn't seem to feel the sameâI'm not sure what. Mild antagonism, maybe. Or a kind of annoyed indifference. And then I realize that the pit bull never even growled at Toby's approach.
“What are you doing here?” Jack asks Toby. “Who are you spying for today?”
“He's not a spy,” I say. I get up from where I'm kneeling beside Raylene's body. “He's with me. He's my friend.”
And then Toby's standing beside me. He straightens his back and gives back as good a hard stare as he's gettingâwhich surprises me, considering how he usually runs away from any encounter with one of the People.
“I'm not an Eadar anymore,” he tells them.
Joe gets to his feet as well and all three of the canids study Toby for a long moment.
“Well done,” Joe says finally.
I don't know what the other two canids are thinking, but I get the distinct impression that “well done” isn't a part of it. I'm beginning to get a bead on them and I think I know their type now. They don't like changeâat least not when they haven't instigated it themselves, and especially not when it doesn't leave them at the top of the food chain. I wonder what new snide remark they'll make.
“There's a scent in the air,” Nanabozho says instead. “Something familiar, but I can't put a name to it.”
He disappoints me the most. I'd liked him when he came by to talk to me in the Greatwood. Now he's as much a stranger as Whiskey Jack, his cousin in the flat-brimmed black hat.
Jack's nodding in agreement. “Old. Deep.”
“And worrisome,” Nanabozho adds. “But I don't know why.”
I glance at Joe. I can see his own nostrils flaring, those eyes of his that never miss anything looking around. When he sees my gaze on him, he shrugs.
“There's something in the air,” he agrees, turning back to his cousins. “But worrisome? It doesn't feel like that to me. It feels more like my
abinà s-odey
âmy heart homeâthough it's far from this place.”
abinà s-odey
âmy heart homeâthough it's far from this place.”
“And that doesn't worry you?” Jack asks.
“No, it just makes me curious.”
Jack shakes his head. “Something's here that knows us too well.”
“I've nothing to hide from anyone,” Joe says, “so I have nothing to fear.”
“This is older than that,” Nanabozho says. “This is older than secrets and fear. It reminds me of my visitor, back at Cody's mountain.”
The three canids exchange glances and I want to ask them what they mean, who they're talking about. But Toby plucks at my sleeve, distracting me. When I turn to him, he hands me the wreath.
“Put it on the Broken Girl,” he says. “It will break the spell, I know it will. But I also think it will heal her. And you. Both of you.”
When the wreath is in my hands, I start to understand what the canids are feeling. It's like the air around us has gone completely still. As though the forest, the rocks, everything, is holding its breath. And then I see the twig from the Greatwood tree, woven into the flowers. It's not just a wreath of that healing vervain Toby told me about earlier, there's another, older magic involved in what he's thinkingâsomething that's sure to work. The twig didn't do anything for me as my dreaming self, but on the flesh and blood of the Broken Girl it should be effective.
She could be healed, whole again.
I could be healed.
My gaze drops from the wreath in my hands to the body of my sister lying on the ground at my feet.
But by that same token, I find myself thinking, if there is such powerful magic in that twig that can work on dead nerves and broken flesh, might it not also work to raise the newly dead? These are the dreamlands, after all. The land of fairy tales. Toby said the magic of the Greatwood twigs could create a miracle. What better use for a miracle than to save my sister?
Now. Here. Where I can. To make up for where I didn't before.
As soon as it comes to me, I know it's what I have to do.
“Are you certain of your choice?”
I blink at yet another new voice, but this one seems to come out to me from a secret place, out of the inheld breath that everything around me is holding. I find that I'm sitting on the ground again, the wreath held against my chest. Slowly, I lower the rough circle of leaves and blue flowers to my lap and look up from my sister's body.
A moment ago the gulch was crowded. There was the Broken Girl and Toby. The corpses of Pinky Miller and my sister. The three canids
and the dog that came with Joe. Now it's just my dreaming self, sitting back on my knees beside my dead sister. Everyone else is gone.
and the dog that came with Joe. Now it's just my dreaming self, sitting back on my knees beside my dead sister. Everyone else is gone.
But I'm not alone.
The woman who spoke stands where Joe had been only a heartbeat before. She reminds me of Nokomis, the White Buffalo Woman I saw that one time in the Greatwood. I'm sure it's her, even though I never saw her with a human face such as the one this stranger has. There's just this familiarity about her and there's no one else remotely similar to her in my experience. The stranger's face is round as the full moon, surrounded by a cloud of dark, curling hair, thick as a forest. Her complexion is a coppery brown while her eyes are old beyond measure, distant and mysterious, deep and warm at the same time.
We're not in the gulch anymore, either. Around me are the cathedral trees of the Greatwoodâor trees like them. These appear even older. Taller and broader of trunk, if that's possible. Cloaked with mystery, yet shining with an inner light that seems to emanate from the bark itself.
I return my attention to the woman. She has the same light in her eyes. She smiles and the shiver of fear that's been creeping up my spine falls away. I'm not so sure she's Nokomis now. I'm not really sure of anything anymore.
“Who ⦠who are you?” I finally manage to ask.
That beatific smile of hers widens slightly. “I don't have a name, child, though I've been given many. If you need a reference for me, think of me as the spirit Raven called up to inhabit the first forest in the long agoâthose echoes of the forever trees where life began.”
“So ⦠you
are
Nokomis.”
are
Nokomis.”
She shakes her head. “We are more like sisters. She is the earth, I am the wood. There are others like us ⦠in the first ocean, the first river, the first hill ⦔
“How come she has a name, but you don't?”
“She doesn't have a name any more than I do. Nokomis is simply a name she has been called.”
“You don't like names?”
She shrugs. “We ignore names for how they can lock you into a set state of being. We are always shifting, you seeânever one thing or the other, but many things all at once. I have been called Mystery and Fate. I have been called the White Deer Woman.” She looks down at the body of my sister that lies between us. “I have been called Choice.”
It comes back to me, that first thing she asked. The words that drew me out of the gulch, where I'd been standing with the others, to this place that seems so much older and deeper than anywhere I've been in the dreamlands so far.
Are you certain of your choice?
Kneeling down beside my sister's body, I lift the wreath Toby brought me and hug it against my chest. The woman looms over me until she lowers herself to the ground on the other side of Raylene, moving with such grace that she appears as cloudlike as her hair, gently floating, a stranger to gravity.
“Are you asking if I think it's the right thing to do?” I say.
“If you wish.”
That seems like an odd answer, but I find myself shaking my head and responding to her instead of asking what she means. I feel oddly disassociated and realize I've been like that since the canids first arrived back in the gulch. The grief for my sister waits like a tsunami, an enormous wave, poised above me, ready to fall. But for now I can both feel it, and be in this other moment at the same time. Talking with a stranger rather than folding in on my grief and letting it bear me away.
“I don't know if it's right or wrong,” I say. “Back ⦠where we were before ⦠they told me she's been doing terrible things. But I feel this needs to be done anyway. It's what I have to do since I already abandoned her once. If this can work, how could I turn my back on her again? Everybody deserves a second chance, don't they?”
I try to read an answer in her eyes, but the mystery in them only seems to deepen.
“Perhaps,” she says. “If they would actually make use of it. Do you think your sister would?”
I look at Raylene's still features, the blood smeared across her eyelids.
“I ⦠I don't know,” I say.
“And then,” she goes on, “you must also consider, would your brother deserve the same chance?”
I'm shaking my head before the words can come out of my mouth.
“No,” I tell her, emphatic. “What he did to us was purely evil.”
“But surely he wasn't born bad either? You said yourself that no one is.”
I close my eyes. She's making this too hard.
“I feel like you're trying to talk me out of this,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I only want you to be aware of why you are making this choice.” She pauses, then adds, “Do you forgive your sister for the things she's done?”
I shake my head. “It's not for me to forgiveâthat's something she'd have to take up with the ones she hurt. I can only forgive her for what she's done to me and hope she'll do the same.”
“And if she doesn't?”
“It doesn't matter. I'll still forgive her.”
“What if I told you that she would mock you for making this choice?”
“It's not about what she or anybody else thinks,” I say. “It's about what I have to do.”
I look down at Raylene again and run the back of my fingers along her cheek. Her skin already feels cold.
“Why are we here?” I ask. “Why did you bring us to this place?”
I look back at the woman sitting on the other side of my sister's corpse as I speak. That glowing shine in her eyes â¦
“You're the light I saw at the top of the Greatwood tree,” I say before she can answer my other questions.
“I am of that light,” she says. “Only the Grace herself can claim to be it.”
“You let me collect the twigs. But why? Why me? Why couldn't Toby reach them without my help?”
“You are of the light, too,” she tells me. “You have my light in you.”
This is the thing Joe's always talking about. I wonder if he knows this moon-faced woman with the light of cathedral trees glowing so bright inside her.
“Like Sophie,” I say.
She shakes her head. “Sophie is a daughter of another of my sistersâyou know that. I've seen the painting you did.”
She's talking about
Lost Mother Found,
the canvas I painted after Sophie's first adventure in the fairy-tale world. It shows a woman with the face of a full moon, her entire body suffused with a warm golden light, holding Sophie. It was my way of reminding Sophie of what she'd found in that other world, but while she'd hung the painting in her bedroom, she'd scoffed at the idea of there being any magic in her blood.
Lost Mother Found,
the canvas I painted after Sophie's first adventure in the fairy-tale world. It shows a woman with the face of a full moon, her entire body suffused with a warm golden light, holding Sophie. It was my way of reminding Sophie of what she'd found in that other world, but while she'd hung the painting in her bedroom, she'd scoffed at the idea of there being any magic in her blood.
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