Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

“Costa Rica.”

“Too many monkeys.”

And on it went. For every place he named, she had a reason why it wouldn’t be suitable. When Nuala joined them, they switched to English and new topics, but as usual, Nuala contributed little to the conversation. Bettina wasn’t offended. Last Saturday night’s talk notwithstanding, it was simply Nuala’s way. She wasn’t being unfriendly; she was only being Nuala. Quiet, soft-spoken, but with that spark of la brujería smoldering deep in her eyes. Bettina hadn’t exchanged more than a half-dozen words with her since Saturday.

While Salvador continued to split the remaining logs, Nuala and Bettina began to load the sled with split wood for the first of many trips to the woodshed where they would stack it. Despite the cold, the three of them were warm enough from their labor to be wearing only down vests over their shirts. The women made a half dozen trips to the shed before they started stacking the wood. This was the part that Bettina liked best, fitting the split logs together like uneven building blocks to make a stack along the back wall of the shed.

They worked in a companionable silence for a while, raising one stack to the roof of the shed before going on to start the second. Alone with Nuala, Bettina decided to see if she could draw her out again, reclaiming the ease with which conversation had grown up between them last weekend. She meant to find out what Nuala could tell her about the woman that Lisette had called the Recluse. Instead she found herself asking about los lobos.

“What are an felsos ?” she said.

Nuala paused with an armload of wood and gave her a look that Bettina couldn’t read.

“Where did you hear that term?” Nuala asked.

Something in her voice made Bettina hesitate.

“I can’t remember,” she said finally. “I just overheard it one day. It might have been a couple of the writers talking.”

She had no idea why she’d lied, why it seemed important to keep secret her conversation with that one lobo. She needn’t have tried.

“Or perhaps,” Nuala said, “you heard it from a handsome, dark-haired man you met in the woods behind the house.”

Bettina remembered the curtain in Nuala’s room, how it had moved when she’d returned to the house from her meeting with el lobo, as though someone had been watching her from inside. Who else could it have been but Nuala?

“Perhaps,” she admitted.

Nuala sighed. “I forget how young you are.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you are young,” Nuala told her, “you are immortal. Nothing can harm you. You see dangers, but know that they can only harm others, not you.”

“I don’t think that way at all.”

Nuala arched an eyebrow. “No? Then why do you spend time in the company of such a creature?”

“He doesn’t seem dangerous.”

“Let me tell you what an felsos means. It’s from the old Cornish and translates to ‘the cunning friends.’ And they are indeed cunning, though rarely friends—at least to us. The term is used much in the way that faeries were referred to as ‘the good neighbors.’ Not because they were, but because such a reference was less likely to give offense.”

“I thought you said they were Irish.”

“They are. Irish, Breton, Cornish. The genii loci of the ancient Gaeltacht. In Ireland my people always referred to them as the Gentry.”

Bettina frowned. Genii loci she understood. It was Latin; a genius loci was the guardian spirit or presiding deity of a place. But…

“Gaeltacht?” she asked.

“It’s what we called the Irish-speaking districts back home,” Nuala explained. “But I think of it as any home of the Gael—wherever the Celtic people gather and speak the old language, remember the old ways. Each of these places had a spirit, sometimes benevolent, sometimes not. More often they were neither good nor evil, they simply were—the third branch of the Celtic trinity, if you will.”

“So these wolves that come to our yard,” Bettina tried. “En otro palabras —in other words. They are evil?”

Nuala shook her head. “Not as you’re using the word. Long ago, they followed the Irish emigrants to the New World, but this land already had its own guardian spirits. So there was no place for them. But here they remain all the same. They are homeless, unbound, and they neither feel nor think the way we do. When the Gentry gather in a pack they can be like a wild hunt, ravening and hungry for blood, but even on an individual basis, they’re not to be trusted.”

“Why not?”

Nuala shrugged. “Mostly, I think, because they are jealous of us—the way the dead are jealous of the living. We have what they can’t have—we fit in, we have a relationship with our environment. We have homes. Most of us are comfortable in our own skins. They want this way we live. Some try to slip into our lives, pretending to be our friends, our family, our lovers, but never able to succeed because of their feral nature and their otherness. Some are only dangerous when we intrude into their lives, reminding them of what they can’t have. Others actively seek us out as prey, tearing us open to see where we have hidden our souls.

“All are dangerous.”

Bettina shivered. She remembered the sting of potential danger hanging in the air when she had walked with her wolf through la epoca del mito, but she was sure he meant her no harm. They had been alone. There were many things he could have done, or tried, but the worst he had done was speak in riddles.

Nuala laughed without humor.

“I can see it in your eyes,” she said. “As I said earlier, youth considers rtself immortal. You hear what I tell you. You understand the danger. But you are unable to conceive of it touching you.”

“No,” Bettina told her. “It’s not that at all. Por lo menos… ”

But Nuala wasn’t listening to her. She turned her back and carried her armload of wood into the shed.

“You will see,” she said over her shoulder. “In time, you will see. If you live so long.”

Bettina started to follow, to argue further, then shook her head. She wasn’t sure what the age difference was between Nuala and herself, but it was obviously enough for Nuala to consider her no more than a child, inexperienced and naive. And just as obviously, Nuala was one of those adults who grouped young adults, teenagers, and children together in her mind and considered all of them to be deficient in common sense. Bettina had learned long ago that there was no use arguing with such a point of view. One could only carry on.

The housekeeper’s attitude towards el lobo and his compadres irritated Bettina as well. Granted, she didn’t entirely trust the wolf herself, but suspicion was not conviction. And when she considered how an outsider might view her father and the uncles from his side of the family, she was willing to give los lobos the benefit of the doubt. For now. She would be cautious, but then she was always cautious, Nuala’s comments to the contrary.

She understood how la epoca del mito could be considered dangerous—it was mostly unknown territory, after all, no matter how often one crossed its borders. But she wasn’t afraid of the unknown. She wasn’t afraid of death, either. She didn’t welcome its approach, she would struggle against it, but in her experience, those who feared death were those who believed it to be an ending instead of what it was: a change. A journey into the unknown much the same as the time one spent in la epoca del mito. The difference was, one did not normally return from the fields of death.