Charles de Lint: Forests of the Heart

“None of us did,” Ellie said.

“But we should have. We should have paid more attention to all those tirades of his. We should have gotten him help.”

Ellie shook her head. “Even if we’d known, he wouldn’t have let us.”

“But we still could have tried.”

Ellie sighed. “You’re right. We should have tried.”

“I don’t excuse your brother,” Aunt Nancy said after they’d all fallen silent, “but consider this. If all the darkness each of us carries within us, all our angers and unhappiness and bad moments were pulled out of us and given shape, we would all create monsters.”

“But it’s not something we’d do on purpose,” Miki said.

“I doubt he meant for it to turn out as it did,” Aunt Nancy told her.

Later still, el lobo carried the body up to a small cave he’d found set high above the water line for when the floods came. The trail leading up to it was better suited for goats, but except for Tommy, they all made the trek up. They sealed the opening with boulders and rocks, everyone pitching in. When they were done, Ellie took a sharp rock and scratched a picture on the face of the stone above the cave. It looked like a rough cartoon of a donkey or a horse to Bettina.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s Eeyore,” Ellie said, her eyes welling with tears.

“What’s an ee-yore?”

Miki began to cry again when Ellie explained.

Bettina wasn’t strong enough to attempt to guide them all out by the direct route she and her wolf had taken to get here, and no one was up to the long trek it would take otherwise, so they made a rough camp out of the canyon, higher up on the west side. El lobo carried Tommy up while Ellie, Hunter, and Miki scavenged wood to fuel their fire. They came back with lengths of mesquite and ironwood and they soon had a small fire to hold back the night. For food they had to share a few biscuits and some beef jerky that Aunt Nancy pulled out of her seemingly bottomless backpack, along with a packet of tea.

“It’s the first thing you learn when you go into the bush,” she said. “You never go without provisions.”

She also had a small tin cup in there which they all shared for the tea.

There was little conversation. One by one, they turned in until only Aunt Nancy, Bettina, and her wolf remained awake. They let the fire die down. A three-quarter moon rose after a time, its appearance welcomed by a chorus of coyotes, yipping in the distance. The moonlight let them see the towering heights of the Baboquivari Mountains, far to the west.

“It’s a beautiful night,” Aunt Nancy said. “If you’d like to go for a walk, I can watch over things here.”

Bettina smiled at the older woman’s subtlety. She liked Aunt Nancy, with her mix of toughness and kindness, and the mysteries lying so thick around her. If Bettina looked at her a certain way, she could see Aunt Nancy’s spider shadow, that echo of the shape she’d been wearing when she first attacked the Glasduine. And then, recalling the spider, Bettina felt a whisper of wings stretching in her own chest.

She remembered how those shadows had spoken to each other just before the final assault on the creature, known each other. That was another mystery Bettina would like to explore further, but now was not the time. She was too drained from the ordeal, distracted by the constant burn of the pain in her hands and the presence of her wolf, sitting so close to her that she could feel his body warmth.

“A walk would be nice,” she said, rising to her feet.

El lobo hesitated, until she smiled at him, then he rose, too.

They walked along the lip of the canyon, easily marking their path, for they both had keen night sight, the one because of her brujería, the other because of his own otherworldly heritage. Bettina wanted to hold her wolf’s hand, but even that much pressure on her palms would be too much. So she slipped her arm into the crook of his.

There was much still unsaid between them, but for now they allowed an affectionate silence and each other’s company to suffice. The desert night stirred around them, crowded with spirits, tranquil and resonant. After a while Bettina had to sit down. Her heart was full, but her energy level was lower than she could ever remember it being before.

“Y bien,” Bettina said. “This was an awkward and unpleasant way to come back home, but I’m still glad to be here.”

“I would like to know it better,” her wolf said, “but…”

His voice trailed off.

“I’m not going back,” Bettina said, her voice soft. “Not to stay. Only to collect my things.”

Her wolf couldn’t look at her. His gaze went off, into the desert night.

“And I can’t stay here with you,” he said finally. “This body…”

“Gives you responsibilities back in the Kickaha Mountains. I know.”

She knew he was bound by the promise he’d made to the manitou who had given him the body he now wore.

“What will become of us?” el lobo asked.

Bettina sighed. Could there even be an “us”? So much lay between them, differences that could push them ever further apart. But there was as much to draw them together, if they were willing to work at spanning the distances.

“No lo se,” she said. She really didn’t know.

“Sometimes it seems that the whole of our lives are bound to the debts we owe to others.”

Bettina nodded. “But what kind of life would it be to always live alone?”

“An unhappy one.”

“Sí.”

“So we accept our debts and obligations.” He paused a heartbeat, then asked, “And los cadejos. Have they spoken more of the bargain you made with them?”

Bettina shook her head. “No. But I can feel them inside me, distant and weary. And something else. The sensation of wings unfolding in my chest.”

Just speaking of it woke a flutter in her chest, a rustle of feathers that only she could hear.

“You never knew?” her wolf asked.

“No seas tonto. That I was so much like Papa that I could take to the skies as a hawk, just as he and his peyoteros do? How could I have known? This is something else I must come to terms with.”

“But it doesn’t frighten you?”

“Claro . But only a little.”

“Wise, lucky, and brave.”

Bettina smiled. “I never felt brave.”

“Bravery is acting in spite of your fears.”

“I suppose.” She hesitated a moment, she added, “The Gentry are dead—the Glasduine killed them.”

Just saying it aloud made her shiver again, knowing all too well how they had died. But she left it at that and he didn’t ask for more details. Having seen what the Glasduine was capable of, he would know that they had died hard.

“I thought as much,” her wolf said. “And I can’t deny that I wondered if I would survive their death.”

“How could you not? You are your own being now.”

“I don’t always feel that way,” he told her. “Mostly I feel as though everything I am is merely made up of the borrowed and discarded parts of others.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, without a trace of self-pity, but it made Bet-tina’s heart go out to him.

“It must be strange,” she said. “But, even those of us with less extraordinary origins—aren’t we all pieces of those who came before us? We carry the bloodlines of our ancestors and we form our beliefs from what we learn from others as much as from what we experience ourselves. What is important is who we become—despite our origins as much as because of them.”

“You see? Yet another wise response.”

“I would punch you,” she told him, “except it would hurt me more.”