The Children(115)

He retreated a step, toward the cottage’s warm heart. “Come in?”

She followed him in a gentle trance. Everything seemed both sharp and hazy, like a knife in a dream. It was all just right. The wooden floor was cool on her feet, and the light that filled the room, glancing off its comforts and treasures, seemed to come from nothing and everywhere. A goldish light with the faintest flicker, more heartbeat than flame.

It illuminated two rope hammocks and a rocking chair. A rag rug and a stack of books and shelves lined with found things that made Guin’s fingers itch with longing. Seedpod and lapis and chewed-up fool’s gold, a bouquet of long-tongued honeysuckle tipping sweetness over the air. She reached for a stone with a tiny wilderness inside it, a wisp of green smoke. Moss agate. Gripping it like a hand brake, she faced her brother.

Ennis had never looked so much like their father. Llewellyn as Hamlet: lean and overcast, dressed in black. He’d seemed a boy in the doorway. She saw him more clearly now. Blond hair darkened to ash, the first feathering of age visible around his eyes. The slender whippet strength of his child body drawn out into the brutal thinness of an unhappy man.

“Sit. If you want to.” Ennis nodded toward the rocking chair. Moved restless around the room as she sat gingerly, telling her, “I picked those flowers a while ago. They’ll stay fresh, just like that. That big pod, when you shake it, sings an actual note. You should hear the tree it’s from, when the wind is going. And that stone you’ve got, if you look really close . . .”

He reached for it, then caught himself before their fingers touched. They hadn’t touched at all yet. She could feel his retreat, his pride becoming abashment as he backed up to the wall. Without looking at her he said, “You know where we are, right? You . . . understand?”

“No, En.” The land’s grip on her neck had loosened. She could still feel it, though. “I don’t understand anything.”

For a while he didn’t reply. It was okay, though. To sit quietly, to push off and let the rocking chair sway. A window to Guin’s right framed trees and a paint box smear of twilight, pinned like another treasure to the wall. Through it came a soft ripe breeze. Behind that, again, the fey sound of bridle bells.

A fleet brightness moved over his face. The sound meant something to him. Everything here meant something to him. When the bells died he said, “Do you remember the little deer, when we made the salt lick?”

Love swelled in her chest like a storm surge. She nodded.

“The glove we found in the attic, with the missing . . .” He raised his own hand a little. “On the first day. Do you remember that?”

Guin whispered, “Yeah.”

“And that night, right before the fire.” His gaze saturating, anguished. “When you told me Edith was sending you to boarding school.”

“I remember.”

Ennis cupped a hand over his eyes. She could see the pulse jumping in his throat and the web of his thumb. “Do you . . .” he said. “Do you remember . . .”

“Ennis. En. It’s okay.” Her voice artificially bright, to hide the heartbreak in it. “You’re not—you’ve never been good at telling stories.”

He exhaled hard, halfway to a laugh. It was true. Guinevere was the one who’d told them to him.

Before that, of course, it was Llewellyn. Their father’s stories never began in the usual way: Once upon a time. He liked to start like this: Listen. A one-word spell, to make them close their mouths and go still. Now Ennis cast it.

“Listen.”





Sixty-Three




“A cottage used to stand where the Farmhouse stood. This was a hundred years ago. More. A girl lived there with her mother, deep in the woods.”

Guin watched him, mouth open. She hadn’t expected a fairy tale.

“The mother made medicines, and the girl made useful things with wood—spigots, cradles, that kind of thing. It was always the two of them. Until, one winter, the mother died of a fever. After that, the girl was alone.”

His voice curled around the word, carved of it a sea cave. Guin could see it perfectly: the girl kneeling inside it, the moon in its mouth like a watchdog.

“So, she made a wish. You can know a thing without being taught, and the girl—a woman, now—knew how to make wishes into knives, or . . . fishhooks. The world, it isn’t what people think it is.” Ennis nodded in a general way, meaning: out there, she supposed. Back in that sorry land of laptops and streetlights. “It’s weirder. And the woman was . . . how did Dad put it? Cunning.”

The word sent Guin back in her chair, made nerves run buttery over her shoulder blades.

“The cunning woman wished for love. Not the romantic kind. She wanted what she’d had, the kind of love you either get or you don’t, and when it’s gone it’s gone. Because she was cunning, she cast the wish on a line, and what she caught was . . .”

Ennis paused before he said it. Exactly as Edith had paused, before telling Guin the name of her first book.

He said, “Mother.”

Guin felt her skin prickle and lift. As if, for a moment, the air had become salt water. She planted both feet to stop the chair’s idle rocking.

“The woman wasn’t lonely anymore, and she thought that was enough. But Mother said to her, Don’t you want more? With the right material I can give you anything. So the woman went fishing again. This time she did it in an ordinary way. She met a man, and she brought him home. It took a few men, though, before she found the right one for Mother.”