Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

Now Donal Greer had stolen that opportunity from her and she was back to where she had started before she’d used her wealth and influence to track down the pieces of the mask. The difference was, she was older. So much older. Her youth had been stolen from her. Damn Greer. He had stolen it from her.

By the time she heard the Gentry outside her door, her anger towards Nuala and Donal both had grown into a smoldering rage. She opened the door only to find that the wolves had bypassed her cabin and were walking deeper into the woods. When she called after them, the one in the rear turned to look at her, but then moved on with the others.

Their forms flickered, half in this world, half in the other, until they suddenly disappeared from sight. Cursing, Musgrave closed the door to her cabin and hurried to her own gate into the otherworld. Speaking the charm the Gentry had given her, she stepped through the trees into that other place. She turned slowly, listening. She saw her cottage where it stood under the trees, beleafed now, winter fled in this place. Here the small building was the only man-made structure on the hill. There was no city below, no road leading up from congested streets to the quiet of the hilltop, no estates scattered like an uneven quilt pattern on the slopes rising up to what bore the name of Kelly-gnow in the world she’d just quit.

Her gaze moved on, finally settling on the pool where Father Salmon slept. There she saw the Gentry, gathered around its rough stone wall, smoking cigarettes as they stared into the dark, still water. There was no pleasure in the leader’s face when he looked up at her approach. Turning away, he reached into the water and stroked the scaled back of the sleeping fish.

A thrill of anticipation and fear went up Musgrave’s spine at the thought that the salmon might wake. It would bring great change, but perhaps now, with all their plans in shambles, a change might be welcome. They would be transformed, but into what? Musgrave wondered if will was enough on its own to guide the change. If so, she had will and to spare, and she knew exactly what she would become.

“Was he brought here, do you think?” the leader of the Gentry said, speaking around the cigarette that dangled from his lips. “Or did he come on his own?”

“I think it’s like the First Forest,” she replied, crouching beside him so she could look into the water. “All forests are a reflection of it, but they are all a path back to it as well.”

The leader nodded. “Which would make this pool connected to where he sleeps at the beginning of time.”

“So it would seem.”

“Yet I can feel him under my hand. I could wake him.” He looked at her. “Yet one more mystery, eh?”

“I suppose…”

He straightened up and wiped his hand dry on his trousers. Turning, he sat on the stones that lipped the pool. He took a final drag from his cigarette, then flicked the butt away. Around him, the other wolves lounged. They gave the appearance of being half-asleep, uninterested in anything, but Musgrave knew they followed every word, every motion.

“It’s all gone to shite, these plans of ours,” the leader said.

Musgrave sat back on her heels. “We can blame Nuala for that.”

“How so?”

“She should have kept better guard of the mask.”

The leader shook his head. “She was never a part of this. How would she have known to guard it?”

Musgrave didn’t really hear his words—she heard the sound of them, but not their meaning.

“I think she did it on purpose,” she said, still seething at how the housekeeper had spoken to her. She straightened her back and gave the leader a stern look. “She is no longer under my protection. You and the others… you can do with her what you will.”

For a long moment there was only silence, then the wolves began to snicker. The leader laughed out loud.

“She was under your protection?”

“ ‘Was’ being the operative word,” Musgrave said. “She was useful, I’ll admit, and could possibly remain so if she were able to mind her own business, but I won’t have my employees speak to me with the disrespect she did earlier today.”

“Gave you a dressing-down, did she?”

“What do you find so amusing?”

The leader smiled. “That Nuala would need protection, for one thing. How small is your brain, woman?”

“I don’t understand. The enmity between you….”

“Oh, there’s no love lost, I’ll grant you that, but even if we could harm her, we wouldn’t.”

Musgrave began to get an uneasy feeling. What did he mean by even if they could harm her?

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because she has the right to feel as she does for us. I’m surprised that with all your study and research you never unearthed the story.”

Musgrave’s uneasiness grew. There was a dangerous look in the leader’s eyes, a sense of anticipation that rose from the other Gentry.

“Will you tell me?” she said.

“Why not? It’s old business. Here’s the way I know it. Back in the homeland, some randy old godling grabbed himself a lovely maiden, stole her from her sacred wood and dragged her into the deeper forest where he and his mates had their way with her for a month or so. Do you want the details?”

Musgrave shook her head.

The leader smiled and lit another cigarette. “Well, they finally grew tired of the game and tossed her away. Trouble is, they left her with child—not a single birth, as a human might have, but a litter.

“She fled her homeland and came here, stealing passage on one of the famine ships. Deep in the forests of this new land, hiding from both men and the native spirits on whose lands she encroached, she gave birth to her litter. She did her best with her unruly pack, raising them from pups to young men. But every time she looked upon them, she was put in mind of their sires, and finally she could bear the memories no more. So she left them to fend for themselves and went wandering.

“Does any of this sound familiar yet?”

Musgrave shook her head, though she could guess where the story was going. “I don’t know what hardships she faced,” the leader went on, “though loneliness must have been one. Loss of place another. But finally she found a haven and though she didn’t call for us, blood calls to blood, and we came anyway.”

“She’s your mother,” Musgrave said.

“And a loving woman, too, don’t you think?”

Musgrave ignored the comment. “So you’ve never even been to Ireland.”

“Ah, well as close as. We’ve visited by way of the otherworld, but there’s not much room there for the likes of us. It’s got its own hard men and patience isn’t one of their virtues either—though marking and protecting their own territory certainly is.”

Musgrave nodded, her thoughts turning back to Nuala and her relationship with the wolves.

“So,” she said. “The animosity you feel towards Nuala comes from her having abandoned you.”

The leader of the Gentry laughed. “Not at all. We got along fine. We had the city, she had her house on the hill, and if sometimes we sniffed around her woods, we kept our distance and took care not to disturb her charge.”

“So what happened?”

“You woke ambition in us.”

“I?”

“Oh, don’t play the innocent shite. All your talk of gaining power and wresting land from the native spirits, of being more than men so we deserved whatever we could take and hold—what did you think that v’oke in us?”

“But—”

Again that mocking laugh. “Don’t worry. We’ve no regrets. But you can see how our mam might not be too pleased to see us turning out like the father.”

Musgrave nodded. “She set her own sights too low.”