Wonders of the Invisible World (31 page)

“Thanks, sweetie. Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich before you go back to school?”

“You know they won’t let me in after First Bell.”

“That’s what they say,” her mother said with a chuckle. “But once you find your way in, they always let you stay.”

Averil stared at her. She glimpsed something then, in the corner of her mind’s eye; it grew clearer as she turned her thoughts to contemplate it. Her mother, giving up all the knowledge she had acquired at Oglesby, all that potential, just to go and have Averil and take care of her. And now that incredible name...

She drew a sudden breath, whispered, “I didn’t miss it.”

Her mother, who had stuck her head in the refrigerator and was searching through jars, said, “What?”

“My Naming. You just named me.”

Her mother turned, embracing mayonnaise, mustard, pickles, cold cuts and a head of lettuce. “What, sweetie? I didn’t hear you.”

“Never mind,” Averil said, and summoned all her powers to speak words of most arduous and dire magic. “I’ll-watch-Felix-for-the-rest-of-the-day-if-you-want-to-go-out.”

Her mother heard that just fine.

B
yndley

The Wizard Reck wandered into Byndley almost by accident. He had been told so many ways to get to it that he had nearly missed it entirely. Over a meadow, across a bridge, through a rowan wood, left at a crossroads, right at an old inn that had been shut tight for decades except for the rooks. And so on. By twilight he had followed every direction twice, he thought, and gotten nowhere. He was trudging over thick oak slabs built into a nicely rounded arc above a stream when the lacy willow branches across the road ahead parted to reveal the thatched roofs and chimneys of a village.
Byndley
, said the sign on the old post leaning toward the water at the end of the bridge. That was all. But the wizard saw the mysterious dark behind the village that flowed on to meet the dusk and he felt his own magic quicken in answer.

“You want to know what?” had been the most common response to the question he asked along his journey. An incredulous snort of laughter usually followed.

How to get back again, how to get elsewhere, how to get
there
....

“But why?” they asked, time and again. “No one goes looking for it. You’re lured, you’re tricked there, you don’t come back, and if you do, it’s not to the same world.”

I went there, he thought. I came back.

But he never explained, only intimated that he was doing the king’s bidding. Then they straightened their spines a bit—the innkeepers, the soldiers, those who had been about the world or heard travelers’ tales—and adjusted their expressions. Nobody said the word aloud; everyone danced around it; they all knew what he meant, though none had ever been there. That, Reck thought, was the strangest thing of all about the realm of Faerie: no one had seen, no one had been, no one said the word. But everyone knew.

Finally somebody said, “Byndley,” and then he began to hear that word everywhere.

“Ask over in Byndley; they might know.”

“Ask at Byndley. They’re always blundering about in magic.”

“Try Byndley. It’s just that way, half a day at most. Take a left at the crossroads.”

And there Byndley was, with its firefly windows just beginning to flicker against the night, and the great oak forest beyond it, the border, he suspected, between here and there, already vanishing out of day into dream.

He stopped at the first tavern he saw and asked for a bed. He wore plain clothes, wool and undyed linen, boots that had walked through better days. He wore his face like his boots, strong and serviceable but nothing that would catch the eye. He didn’t want to be recognized, to be distracted by requests for wizardry. The thing he carried in his pack grew heavier by the day. He had to use power now to lift it, and the sooner he relinquished it the better.

“My name is Reck,” he told the tavern keeper at the bar as he let the pack slide from his shoulder. “I need a bed for a night or two or maybe—” He stopped, aware of a stentorious commotion as his pack hit the floor. The huge young man standing beside him, half-naked and sweating like a charger, his face flushed as by his own bellows, was rubbing one sandaled foot and snorting. “Did I drop my pack on you?” Reck asked, horrified. “I beg your pardon.”

“It’s been stepped on by worse,” the man admitted with an effort. “What are you carrying in there, stranger? A load of anvils?” He bent before Reck could answer, hauled the pack off the floor and handed it back. Reck, unprepared, sagged for an instant under the weight. The man’s dark, innocent eye met his through a drift of black, shaggy hair as Reck balanced his thoughts to bear the sudden weight. The man turned his head, puffed one last time at his foot, then slapped the oak bar with his palm.

“Ale,” he demanded. “One for the stranger, too.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“You’ll need it,” the man said, “against the fleas.” He grinned as the tavern keeper’s long gray mustaches fluttered in the air like dandelion seed.

“There are no fleas,” he protested, “in my establishment. Reck, you said?” He paused, chewing at his mustaches. “Reck. You wouldn’t be the wizard from the court at Chalmercy, would you?”

“Do I look like it?” Reck asked with wonder.

“No.”

Reck left it at that. The tavern keeper drew ale into two mugs. They were all silent, then, watching the foam subside. Reck, listening to the silence, broke it finally.

“Then what made you ask?”

The young man gave an astonished grunt. The tavern keeper smiled slowly. His fatuous, egg-shaped face, crowned with a coronet of receding hair, achieved a sudden, endearing dignity.

“I know a little magic,” he said shyly. “Living so close”—he waved a hand inarticulately toward the wood—“you learn to recognize it. My name is Frayne. On slow nights, I open an odd book or two that came my way and never left. Sometimes I can almost make things happen. This is Tye. The blacksmith, as you might have guessed.”

“It wasn’t hard,” Reck commented. The smith, who had a broad, pleasant face beneath his wild hair, grinned delightedly as though the wizard had produced some marvel.

“My brain’s made of iron,” he confessed. “Magic bounces off it. Some, though, like Linnea down the road—she can foresee in water and find anything that’s lost. And Bettony—” He shook his head, rendered speechless by Bettony.

“Bettony,” the tavern keeper echoed reverently. Then he came down to earth as Reck swallowed ale. “There’s where you should go to find your bed.”

“I’m here,” Reck protested.

“Well, you shouldn’t be, a wizard such as you are. She’s as poor as any of us now, but back a ways, before they started disappearing into the wood for decades on end, her family wore silk and washed in perfumed water and rode white horses twice a year to the king’s court at Chalmercy. She’ll give you a finer bed than I’ve got and a tale or two for the asking.”

“About the wood?”

The tavern keeper nodded and shrugged at the same time. “Who knows what to believe when talk starts revolving around the wood?” He wiped a drop from the oak with his sleeve, then added tentatively, “You’ve got your own tale, I would guess. Why else would a great wizard come to spend a night or two or maybe more in Byndley?”

Reck hesitated; the two tried to watch him without looking at him. He had to ask his way, so they would know eventually, he decided; nothing in this tiny village would be a secret for long. “I took something,” he said at last, “when I was very young, from a place I should not have entered. Now I want to return the thing I stole, but I don’t know how to get back there.” He looked at them helplessly “How can you ever find your way back to that place once you have left it?”

The tavern keeper, seeing something in his eyes, drew a slow breath through his mouth. “What’s it like?” he pleaded. “Is it that beautiful?”

“Most things only become that beautiful in memory.”

“How did you find your way there in the first place?” Tye the blacksmith asked bewilderedly. “Can’t you find the same way back?”

Reck hesitated. Frayne refilled his empty mug, pushed it in front of the wizard.

“It’ll go no farther,” he promised, as earnestly as he had promised a bed without fleas. But Reck, feeling himself once more on the border, with his theft weighing like a grindstone on his shoulders, had nothing left to lose.

“The first time, I was invited in.” Again, his eyes filled with memories, so that the faces of the listening men seemed less real than dreams. “I was walking through an oak wood on king’s business and with nothing more on my mind than that, when the late afternoon light changed.... You know how it does. That moment when you notice how the sunlight you’ve ignored all day lies on the yellow leaves like beaten gold and how threads of gold drift all around you in the air. Cobweb, you think. But you see gold. That’s when I saw her.”

“Her,” Tye said. His voice caught.

“The Queen of Faerie. Oh, she was beautiful.” The wizard raised his mug, drank. He lowered it, watched her walking toward him through the gentle rain of golden, dying leaves. “Her hair...” he whispered. “Her eyes... She seemed to take her colors from the wood, as she came toward me, gold threads catching in her hair, her eyes the green of living leaves.... She spoke to me. I scarcely heard a word she said, only the lovely sound of her voice. I must have told her anything she wanted to know, and said yes to anything she asked.... She drew me deep into the wood, so deep that I was lost in it, though I don’t remember moving from that enchanted place....”

He drank again. As he lowered the mug, the wood around him faded and he saw the rough-hewn walls around him, the rafters black with smoke, the scarred tables and stools. He smelled stale ale and onions. The two faces, still, expressionless, became human once again, one balding and innocuous, one hairy and foolish, and both avid for more.

Reck drained his mug, set it down. “And that’s how I found my way there,” he said hollowly, “the first time.”

“But what did you steal?” Tye asked breathlessly. “How did you get free? You can’t just end it—”

The tavern keeper waved him silent. “Leave him be now; he’s paid for his ale and more already.” He took Reck’s mug and assiduously polished the place on the worn oak where it had stood. “You might come back tomorrow evening. By then the whole village will know what you’re looking for, and anyone with advice will drop by to give it to you.”

Reck nodded. His shoulder had begun to ache under the weight of the pack despite all his magic. “Thank you,” he said tiredly. “If you won’t give me a bed here, then I’ll take myself to Bettony’s.”

“You won’t be sorry,” Frayne said. “Keep going down the road to the end of the village and you’ll see the old hall just at the edge of the wood. You can’t miss it. Tell Bettony I sent you.” He raised a hand as the wizard turned. “Tomorrow, then.”

Reck found the hall easily, though the sun had set by then and near the wood an ancient dark spilled out from the silent trees. Silvery dusk lingered over the rest of Byndley. The hall was small, with windows set hither and yon in the walls, and none matching. Its stone walls, patched in places, looked very old. The main door, a huge slab of weathered oak, stood open. As he neared, Reck heard an ax slam cleanly through wood, and then the clatter of broken kindling. He rounded the hall toward the sound and came upon a sturdy young woman steadying another piece on her block.

She let go of the wood on the block and swung the ax to split it neatly in two. Then she straightened, wiped her brow with her apron, and turned with a start to the stranger.

He said quickly, “Frayne sent me.”

She was laughing before he finished, at her sweat, her dirty hands, her long hair sliding loosely out of its clasp. “He picked his moment, didn’t he?” She balanced the ax blade in the chopping block with a blow, and tossed pieces of kindling into her apron. “You are?”

“My name is Reck. Frayne told me to find a lady called Bettony and ask her for a bed.”

“I’m Bettony,” she said. Her eyes were as bright and curious as a bird’s; in the twilight their color was indeterminate. “Reck,” she repeated. “The wizard?”

“Yes.”

“Passing through?”

“No.”