Wonders of the Invisible World (5 page)

“I—” Leta said, and stuck there, slack-jawed again. “I—I—”

Behind the man, his followers, rugged and plainly dressed, glanced at one another. That look, less courteous than the young man’s, cleared Leta’s head a bit.

“I haven’t,” she brought out finally. “But the man I work for is a—is trying to be—a mage; he knows a thousand things I don’t.”

“Then may I speak with him?”

“He’s out—” She gestured, saw the broom still in her hand and hid it hastily behind her. “Down by the river, catching toads.”

“Toads.”

“For his—his magic.”

She heard the faint snort. One of the followers pretended to be watching a crow fly; the other breathed, “My lord, perhaps we should ask farther down the road.”

“We’ll ride to the river,” the young lord said, and turned to mount his horse again. He bowed graciously to Leta from his saddle. “Thank you. We are grateful.”

Blinking at the light spangling off his harness and jewels, she watched him ride through the trees and toward the water. Then, slowly, she sat down, stunned and witless with wonder, until she heard Ansley’s voice as he walked through the doorway and around her.

“I found five,” he announced excitedly, putting a muddy bucket on his table. “One of them is pure white!”

“Did you see—?” Her voice didn’t come. She was sitting on the floor, she realized then, with the broom across her knees. “Did you see the—? Them?”

“Who?” he asked absently, picking toads out of the bucket and setting them on his papers.

“The traveler. I sent him to talk to you.” She hesitated, finally said the word. “I think he is a prince. He is looking for a palace surrounded by thorns, with a sleeping princess inside.”

“Oh, him. No. I mean yes, but no I couldn’t help him. I had no idea what he was talking about. Come here and look at this white one. You can do so many things with the white toads.”

She had to wait a long time before Dylan came home, but she stayed awake so that she could tell him. As he clambered into bed, breathing a gust of beer at her, she said breathlessly, “I saw a prince today. On his way to rescue a princess.”

He laughed and hiccuped at the same time. “And I saw the Queen of the Fairies. Did you happen to spot my knife too? I set it down yesterday when I was whittling, and it must have strolled away.”

“Dylan—”

He kissed her temple. “You’re dreaming, love. No princes here.”

The days lengthened. Hawthorn blossoms blew everywhere like snow, leaving green behind. The massive oaks covered their tangled boughs with leaves. An early summer storm thundered through the woods one afternoon. Leta, who had just spread Ansley’s washing to dry on the hawthorn bushes around the cottage, heard the sudden snarl of wind, felt a cold, hard drop of rain on her mouth. She sighed. The clothes were wet anyway; but for the wild wind that might steal them, she could have left them out. She began to gather them back into her basket.

She heard voices.

They sounded like wind at first, one high, pure, one pitched low, rumbling. They didn’t seem human, which made Leta duck warily behind a bush. But their words were human enough, which made her strain her ears to listen. It was, she thought bewilderedly, like hearing what the winds had to say for themselves.

“Come into my arms and sleep, my lord,” the higher voice crooned. “You have lived a long and adventurous life; you may rest now for a while.”

“No,” the deeper voice protested, half-laughing, half-longing, Leta thought. “It’s not time for me to sleep, yet. There are things I still must teach you.”

“What things, my heart?”

“How to understand the language of beetles, how to spin with spindrift, what lies hidden in the deepest place in the ocean and how to bring it up to light.”

“Sleep a little. Teach me when you wake again.”

“No, not yet.”

“Sleep.”

Leta crept closer to the voices. The rain pattered down now, great, fat drops the trees could not stop. Through the blur of rain and soughing winds stirring up the bracken, she saw two figures beneath an oak. They seemed completely unaware of the storm, as if they belonged to some enchanted world. The woman’s long, fiery, rippling hair did not notice the wind, nor did the man’s gray-white beard. He sat cradled in the oak roots, leaning back against the trunk. His face looked as harsh and weathered, as ancient and enduring as the wood. The woman stood over him, close enough for him to touch, which he did now and then, his hand caressing the back of her knee, coaxing it to bend. They were both richly dressed, he in a long, silvery robe flecked with tiny jewels like points of light along the sleeves, the hem. She wore silk the deepest green of summer, the secret green of trees who have taken in all the light they can hold, and feel, somewhere within them, summer’s end. His eyes were half-closed. Hers were very wide as she stared down at him: pale amber encircling vivid points of black.

Leta froze. She did not dare move, lest those terrible eyes lift from his and search her out behind the bush with Ansley’s trousers flapping on it.

“Sleep,” the woman murmured again, her voice like a lightly dancing brook, like the sough of wind in reeds. “Sleep.”

His hand dropped from her knee. He made an effort, half lifting his eyelids. His eyes were silver, metallic like a knife blade.

“Not yet, my sweet Nimue. Not yet.”

“Sleep.”

He closed his eyes.

There was a crack as though the world had been torn apart. Then came the thunder. Leta screamed as she felt it roll over her, through her, and down beneath her into the earth. The ancient oak, split through its heart, trailing limbs like shattered bone, loosed sudden, dancing streams of fire. Rain fell then in vast sheets as silvery as the sleeper’s eyes. Leta couldn’t see anything; she was drenched in a moment and sinking rapidly into a puddle. Rising, she glimpsed the light shining from the cottage windows. She stumbled out of the mysterious world toward it; wind blew her back through the scholar’s door, then slammed the door behind her.

“I saw—I saw—” she panted.

But she did not know what she saw. Ansley, his attention caught at last by something outside his books—the thunder, maybe, or the lake she was making on his floor—looked a little pale in the gloom.

“You saw what?”

But she had only pieces to give him, nothing whole, nothing coherent. “I saw his eyes close. And then lightning struck the oak.”

Ansley moved then. “Oh, I hope it won’t topple onto my roof.”

“His eyes closed—they were like metal—she put him to sleep with her eyes—”

“Show me the tree.”

She led him eagerly through the rain. It had slowed a little; the storm was moving on. Somewhere else in the wood strange things were happening; the magic here had come and gone.

They stood looking at the broken heart of the oak, its wood still smoldering, its snapped boughs sagging, shifting dangerously in the wind. Only a stand of gnarled trunk was left, where the sleeper had been sitting.

“Come away,” Ansley said uneasily. “Those limbs may still fall.”

“But I saw two people—”

“They had sense enough to run, it seems; there are no bodies here. Just,” he added, “a lot of wet clothes among the bushes. What exactly were those two doing?”

“They’re your clothes.”

“Oh.”

She lingered, trying to find some shred of mystery left in the rain, some magic smoldering with the wood. “He closed his eyes,” she whispered, “and lightning struck the oak.”

“Well, he must have opened them fast enough then,” Ansley said. “Come back into the house. Leave the laundry; you can finish all that later.” His voice brightened as he wandered back through the dripping trees. “This will send the toads out to sun....”

She did not even try to tell Dylan, for if the young scholar with all his books saw no magic, how could he?

Days passed, one very like the next. She cooked, washed, weeded in the garden. Flowers she had rescued from wild vines bloomed and faded; she picked herbs and beans and summer squashes. The scholar studied. One day the house was full of bats, the next full of crows. Another day he made everything disappear, including himself. Leta stepped, startled, into an empty cottage. Not a thing in it, not even a stray spider. Then she saw the scholar’s sheepish smile forming in the air; the rest of his possessions followed slowly. She stared at him, speechless. He cleared his throat.

“I must have mistranslated a word or two in that spell.”

“You might have translated some of the clutter out of the door while you were at it,” she said. What had reappeared was as chaotic as ever. She could not imagine what he did at nights while she was at home. Invented whirlwinds, or made his pots and clothes dance in midair until they dropped, it looked like.

“Think of magic as an untamed creature,” he suggested, opening a book while he rained crumbs on the floor chewing a crust he had found on his table. “I am learning ways to impose my will upon it, while it fights me with all its cunning for its freedom.”

“It sounds like your garden,” she murmured, tracking down her gardening basket, which was not on the peg where she hung it, but, for some reason, on a shelf, in the frying pan. The scholar made an absent noise, not really hearing her; she had gotten used to that. She went outside to pull up onions for soup. She listened for Dylan’s ax while she dug; he had said he was cutting wood that day. But she didn’t hear it, just the river and the birds and the breeze among the leaves.

He must have gone deeper than usual into the woods, she thought. But she felt the little frown between her brows growing tighter and tighter at his silence. For no reason her throat grew tight too, hurt her suddenly. Maybe she had misunderstood; maybe he had gone into the village to sell wood instead. That made the ache in her throat sharper. His eyes and voice were absent, those days. He looked at her, but hardly saw her; he kissed her now and then, brief, chuckling kisses that you’d give to a child. He had never gone to the village so often without her before; he had never wanted to go without her, before...

She asked him tentatively that night, as he rolled into bed in a cloud of beer fumes and wood smoke, “Will you take me with you, next time?”

He patted her shoulder, his eyes already closed. “You need your rest, working so hard for two houses. Anyway, it’s nothing; I just have a quick drink and a listen to the fiddling, then I’m home to you.”

“But it’s so late.”

He gave her another pat. “Is it? Then best get to sleep.”

He snored; she stared, wide-eyed, back at the night.

She scarcely noticed when the leaves first began to turn. Suddenly there were mushrooms and berries and nuts to gather, and apples all over the little twisty apple tree in her own garden. The days were growing shorter, even while there seemed so much more to do. She pulled out winter garments to mend where the moths had chewed; she replenished supplies of soap and candles. Her hands were always red; her hair, it seemed, always slightly damp with steam from something. The leaves grew gold, began to fall, crackle underfoot as she walked from one house to the other and back again. She scarcely saw the two men: the scholar hunched over a book with his back to her, her husband always calling good-bye as he went to chop or sell or build. Well, they scarcely saw her either, she thought tiredly; that was the way of it.

She stayed into evening at the scholar’s one day, darning his winter cloak while the stew she had made of carrots and potatoes and leeks bubbled over the fire. He was at his table, staring into what looked like a glass ball filled with swirling iridescent fires. He was murmuring to it; if it answered him, she didn’t hear.

At least not for some time. When she began to hear the strange, crazed disturbance beneath the wind rattling at the door, she thought at first that the sound came from within the globe. Her needle paused. The noise seemed to be coming closer: a disturbing confusion of dogs barking, horns, faint bells, shouting, bracken and fallen limbs crackling under the pounding of many hooves. She stared at the glass ball, which was hardly bigger than the scholar’s fist. Surely such an uproar couldn’t be coming from that?

The wind shrieked suddenly. The door shook on its hinges. She froze, midstitch. The door sprang open as if someone had kicked it. All the confusion in the night seemed to be on the scholar’s doorstep and about to roil into his cottage.

She leaped to her feet, terrified, and clung to the door, trying to force it shut against the wind. A dark current was passing the house: something huge and nameless, bewildering until her eyes began to find the shapes in the night. They appeared at random, lit by fires that seemed to stream from the nostrils of black horses galloping past her. The flames illumined great hounds with eyes like coals, upraised sword blades like broken pieces of lightning, cowled faces, harnesses strung with madly clamoring bells.

She stared, unable to move. One of the hooded faces turned toward her as his enormous horse, its hooves sparking fire, cleared her potato rows. The rider’s face was gaunt, bony, his hair in many long braids, their ends secured around clattering bones. He wore a crown of gold; its great jewel reflected fire the color of a splash of blood. White moons in the rider’s eye sockets flashed at Leta; he opened his jaws wide like a wolf and laughed.