Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

“Those are things I’ve not spoken of with anyone. And certainly not here.”

He nodded. “I didn’t hear it from you. I listened to the gossip of the spir-itworld. When you first came, I asked after you, and the stories came to me. Of you, your abuela, your parents.”

“Why would they speak of me? What could they hope to gain?”

El lobo laughed. “They would gain nothing. It’s simply the nature of spirits to gossip. Surely you’ve seen by now that they’re worse than humans? If you don’t want to be gossiped about, you must ask them specifically not to.” He shrugged. “But even then they will still talk, couching their stories in riddles and half-truths.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about me?” she asked.

“Everything.”

“You can say that after the list you’ve just recited.”

“Those are things that are spoken of about you,” he said. “One can infer a great deal from such, but not what matters most. I don’t know how you truly feel. What your hopes and dreams might be. I have listened to the spirits speak of you; I have yet to hear you speak.”

Bettina turned from the pool with its sleeping salmon and walked away, under the trees. El lobo fell in step beside her, quiet now. His gaze, when she glanced his way, held only concern; the teasing humor fled.

“It’s all true,” she said after a while. “Mas o menos. I did not specifically send los cadejos away, but I have not made them welcome since the night Abuela followed the clown dog into the desert. And my beliefs, Abuela’s teachings. While it’s true they have caused a rift between my mother and sister and myself, I have reconciled my faith with my knowledge of the spirits.” She looked at him again. “I see room for all in God’s world. Perhaps we do not all practice the charity we should to each other, but surely He does.”

“I know nothing of your god,” el lobo said.

“Why would you?”

“But I would like to understand this hold he has on his followers.”

She nodded. “Ese está extraño,” she said. “The first night you took me to the salmon’s pool, I saw the Recluse there, but she seemed like a mission priest to me. You told me you saw no one.”

“I told you I saw no man.”

“Ah. But why would you keep her a secret from me?”

“Because you weren’t involved,” he said. “If you weren’t a part of what she and the Gentry were up to, why draw you into it?”

They’d walked farther now than Bettina had ever been in this part of la epoca del mito. By now, in the world where Kellygnow stood, their way would have taken them through the neighboring estates. Here, there was only the wild wood, ancient and tall, the immense trees untouched by the lumbermen who had founded so much of Newford.

“I hadn’t known about my father,” she said. “That he had forgotten he was a man. I thought he had abandoned us—out of love,” she added. “That he thought it would hurt us to grow old while he remained forever unchanged.”

“Only he can say.”

She nodded. “When this is done, I will find him and ask him.”

El lobo hesitated, then said, “It’s not always wise to question the motives of an old spirit such as he.”

“Are you warning me against asking you too many questions?” she asked with a smile.

The humor returned to his eyes. “I am hardly an old spirit. To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely certain what I am.”

“But still I will ask him,” Bettina said. “He may be an old spirit, but he is still my papá.”

“This is true.”

“¿Y bien? And as for love—do any of us trust or understand it?”

“I don’t understand it,” her wolf told her. “I can only feel it.”

“Do you trust it?”

“If you mean, do I trust the feeling? Then certainly. Do I feel it will be returned…” He shook his head. “I have no idea. Do you seek it?”

“Everyone looks for love,” she said. “But I have learned not to make my happiness depend upon it. My abuela would say that even in a relationship, one must be happy with oneself as an individual, or what do you have to offer the other?”

“I would have liked to have met your grandmother. You still miss her, don’t you?”

“Sí,” Bettina said. “I think of her every day.”

She gave him a wan smile and they walked on in silence for a time. The forest remained unchanged, the tall trees rearing skyward to their impossible heights, the footing even, mostly moss and a carpet of autumn leaves with little undergrowth to impede their way. It was not a forest they could have found in the world they’d left behind.

“I thought we would have come across some sign of the creature by now,” el lobo said finally. “Or at least heard about its passage. But the trees are silent to my ears and the gossips are most noticeable by their absence.”

Bettina nodded. This aspect of la epoca del mito was completely unfamiliar to her, so she had been following her wolfs lead. Now she glanced at him.

“You were going to show me how to call up los cadefos,” she said.

The thought of their return filled her with mixed emotions. She’d realized ever since her dream and Adelita’s gift the other morning just how much she missed them. She was anxious as well. How would they react to her contact after such a long silence?

“I was,” el lobo said. “I will. But I was hoping to find the creature’s trail before we needed to do so.”

So he was nervous, too. That didn’t bode well. What wasn’t he telling her now?

“Why was that?” she asked, striving to sound calmer than she felt.

He shrugged. “Because there is always a danger in coming to the attention of old powerful spirits.”

He left so much unsaid, Bettina thought, but she understood exactly what he meant, his reservations obviously mirroring her own. She stopped and turned to him.

“Even if we didn’t need their help,” she said, “this is something I must do. I have not treated them fairly. I must make amends for my broken promise.”

El lobo nodded.

“Y así, ”Bettina said. “So how do we do this?”

El lobo shook his head. “Not we, but you. You must welcome them back to you. But we must do it in some place that is familiar and dear to you both or else they might choose not to hear you.”

“The desert is too far from here,” Bettina said. “We don’t have the time to make such a trip.”

El lobo gave her that maddening smile of his. “Surely your grandmother taught you that the spiritworld can be whatever you need it to be?”

“No,” she replied. “We ran out of time before she could tell me so many things.”

“Most clothe it in a landscape with which they’re familiar, or one that they expect to find, as we did when we crossed over. We were in the eastern woodlands when we left your world, so that is how we see the spiritworld now, or at least an idealized version of those forests. But it doesn’t have to be so. The spiritworld can be anywhere we need it to be.”

“I see… I think. But that doesn’t explain how we can change where we are now into the desert.”

“That’s somewhat more complicated,” el lobo admitted. “It would be easier if your croi baile was in the desert.”

As had happened the first time she and her wolf had met in la epoca del mito, not all the Gaelic words he used were automatically translated by the spiritworld’s enchantment.

“My what?” she asked.

“The home of your heart. That one place where you feel truly and completely at home. Each of us has one, though not everyone cherishes it as they should. We carry an echo of it with us. Here.” He laid a hand on his chest. “It comes with us wherever we go—no matter how far we travel from the physical location.”