The Watchtower Page 11

  Then Adele got up, smoothed her skirt, and walked out of the room.

  “Mon petit Edelweiss!” Octavia murmured. Several of her arms drifted in Adele’s direction as she left, but didn’t touch her. One drifted to her own hair and patted her already immaculate chignon, another plucked a white blossom from the bouquet that I’d brought her from Monsieur Lutin earlier today. She brought it to her snub nose, closed her eyes, inhaled the sweet scent, then put the blossom back into the bouquet.

  “Please don’t mind Adele. It pains her to think of me giving up a second of my life for her sake, but she simply doesn’t know how very wearing immortality is. It isn’t for her sake alone that I seek a release from it, but it would give me great pleasure to end my life with hers.”

  “Can’t you just…” I faltered, unsure how to delicately suggest suicide.

  “Even if I destroyed this fleshly body, the bit of myself that is fey would linger in bodiless form for all eternity.” Octavia leaned closer to me, her black eyes glittering and all her arms floating in the air around her like the ethereal spirits she spoke of. “I once encountered a bodiless fey spirit in the forest of Brocéliande—a poor tortured creature who had killed herself for love of a mortal. Her cries were enough to tear your heart in two. No, what I crave is the release of mortal death while holding the hand of my beloved.”

  Octavia held out the hand that had held the white edelweiss blossom, her fingers cupped as if she still held the flower, then held out another, and another, until eight empty hands were before me, each one begging for one thing.

  “Of course,” I said, unable to resist such an entreaty. ÉC;I’d be honored to have your company on the journey.”

  10

  Lightning

  The next few weeks were the most glorious of Will’s life. He saw Marguerite nearly every day, and her insistence that their relationship was to be viewed as “spiritual,” not “romantic,” seemed to be honored more in the breach than the observance. Or, as Marguerite would occasionally concede, amorousness could have spirituality at its core, and so could Eros.

  On a few difficult occasions he was a mere confidant, supporting her in her not-yet-completely-concluded separation from the poet. Those days had their bitterness, but he managed the bravest face possible while with her. And he managed to restore his own spirits afterward, though with a difficulty he compared to ascending the slick, mossy walls of a well.

  Their love had moments of ecstasy that he’d never experienced before and hadn’t imagined possible. Such moments did not flow only from lovemaking; they could arise from the most innocent of gestures, such as smiling deeply at one another upon first meeting, or holding hands on a London street shadowy enough to make that safe. Or from a few inspired words.

  One thread of uncertainty did, however, run through and occasionally threaten to tear this tapestry of love. Will was never quite sure to what degree Marguerite was leaving the poet for him, or to what degree she’d been tossed by the poet to him. Not as a favor to him, of course, but in the sense that Marguerite may simply have been taking shelter from their terrible fight. She spoke now of the depth of her spiritual feeling for Will—how even the poet conceded the depth of Will’s soul—but both poet and Marguerite had signed off on the foul sentry’s greeting and that glacially cold note … where were Will’s spiritual qualities then?

  Subtly but discernibly, Will could feel himself once or twice holding back from complete immersion in love for Marguerite. No doubt this was a transitional sensation—difficult nuances were to be expected—but he did hold back in moments, if anything because of fear. The ecstasy had been real, but so had been the initial pain, the suddenness of coming together, the change in his life so sharp that it was naturally coupled with insecurity. In rare moments, he even looked for solace at other women. But those moments were few and far between.

  This intense love affair lasted for about three weeks. Then came an event so powerful that it changed everything between them. Will was to remember the event as if it were part of his mind since the womb.

  They had spent an idyllic afternoon in a meadow by a pond, about twenty miles north of London, where they had ridden on horseback with picnic lunches. The whole afternoon was as serene as any since Eden, Will fancied. The moment he recollected best was when he glanced at the pond after one prolonged and melting embrace and saw two swans swimming side by side, their necks amorously intertwined as if inspired by Will and Marguerite’s example. The swans were under an overhang of foliage that shadowed the sun-ribboned water, but Will was sure of what he saw. The male swan was black and the female white, despite the rarity of the former. When he pointed out the near miraculous coupling to Marguerite, suspecting she’d respond to it, as he had, as an omen of their improbable love, instead her forehead creased with worry, her eyes darkened, and she looked away from him without a word.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, taking her hand.

  She looked back at him, her countenance still cloudy. “These swans remind me of an old family … tradition. A story of our founding.”

  “Really? Another coincidence that convinces me we were indeed meant for each other. There is a story about a swan in my family as well.”

  Instead of receiving this news with joy, Marguerite turned pale. “What is the story?”

  “Oh, it’s a child’s fairy tale, to be sure, about a mysterious and beautiful maiden who fell in love with one of my ancestors and married him on the condition that he never follow her to the water at sunset. Of course he does—what man wouldn’t suspect some adulterous dalliance?—and he surprised her in the moment of turning into a swan. At the sight of him she began to rise from the pool, but rather than lose her forever, he shot her down with an arrow.”

  “How cruel!” Marguerite exclaimed through trembling lips.

  “He only meant to keep her from fleeing,” Will explained—although in truth this part of the story had always bothered him as well. “She didn’t die, but she did leave him. She promised, though, that she and her kind would always look over him and his descendants, see?” Will pulled out the signet ring he still wore on a chain around his neck and showed Marguerite his family crest. She touched the carved insignia gingerly with her fingertips as if the metal were hot.

  “Hughes … it’s so common a name,” she murmured. “I didn’t realize…”

  “Realize what, darling?”

  But she only shook her head. “You were right. This … coincidence explains so much. We were meant to meet … why fight it?” She was trembling so hard that Will took her in his arms to warm her, but it took a long time to dispel the chill from her flesh.

  * * *

  They did not return to the city that night. It was the first time, Will realized with no small excitement and pleasure, that Marguerite had been willing to stay with him overnight. Will could not help but attribute her willingness to the “coincidence of the swans,” as he put it to himself. For the first time since he’d fled his ancestral home, he blessed his lineage.

  Marguerite led them to a tavern with rooms to let not far from the pond, a place she denied any previous experience with (except having heard of it), though in that regard Will suspected otherwise. But her past was her business. He still preferred not to ask too many questions. Their glorious future together was what mattered.

  They dined surprisingly well, given the ruetting, and then, tired from the heat and love of the afternoon, retired early. The sky was now a perfect pitch of lavender outside their room’s window, which looked out from the rear of the tavern onto a straggly yard, then a dense stand of maple trees amid tangled underbrush. The unusual light revealed heavy clouds moving in, the air growing damp and close with impending storm. Will and Marguerite embraced as they stretched out on the narrow bed, as if sheltering from the weather. They’d managed to doze off lightly when a thunderclap severe enough to shake the tavern’s timbers brought them to sitting up straight. Then a few lightning-to-thunder sequences erupted in quick succ
ession, followed by a fusillade of rain against the bark-shingled roof, volleylike, with a sort of military precision. It sounded to Will as if water might be warring on the earth, an audacious attempt at overthrowing one element by another. Then came another bolt of lightning, not followed by thunder but instead by a piercing cry from the woods outside, perhaps from an animal injured by the lightning bolt, or claw, or teeth, or knife.

  Their room was nearly pitch-black now. Marguerite got up clutching her nightgown, then lit the candle on their night table and brought it over to the window, though its glow was not going to penetrate the darkness very far. Beyond the yard, the window looked out on impenetrable obscurity. Will got up as well but more lethargically, not particularly moved by the mayhem of the storm or its possible victim, and came to stand by Marguerite’s shoulder. The next bolt, shimmering silver as if a large diamond in the sky had exploded into splinters, illumined nothing below but the yard’s high grass.

  A second cry pierced the air. Marguerite turned to Will and said, “I’ve got to go see what that is.”

  In the flash following next, her face struck him as incomparably beautiful. The thunder that exploded was so loud Will had to repeat his response. “I’ll go, too,” he told her, though he was still naked. “It’s too dangerous out there.”

  “Silly boy. One of us must stay up here and keep a lookout for the other. Stay by the window. Just in case I wind up screaming, too.”

  Will put a restraining hand on Marguerite’s arm, but she spun away from him and was out the door and down the stairs before he could even find the chair over which he’d draped his clothes. When he heard her open the yard door, he decided he’d better stay at the window to watch her. Marguerite strode out into the center of the yard, her nightdress billowing about her in a warm wind, like the wild wings of an uncertain angel. She glanced around closely in the thick grass; then, apparently having seen nothing in the yard, peered into the woods.

  “Be careful, please!” Will called down to her, with little confidence she could hear him. The wind was blowing the leaves in the woods at an upward angle now, as if it originated in some vent in the earth, and likely it had cast his words away from her.

  A third cry tortured the air. Marguerite must have had a sense of where it came from for she grew more focused in her gaze, looking at the woods to her left. She took three steps in that direction, and then Will saw, to his horror, a bolt flash only about twenty feet over her head and plunge toward the ground. The bolt had three vertical lines of sizzle within it that showered sparks everywhere. One of the lines struck Marguerite in the made her entire body luminescent.

  Will screamed at the top of his lungs, no heed to propriety or anything else, expecting Marguerite to become a statue of char, to disintegrate. But she didn’t; she barely broke stride, her only reaction a brief nod as if she’d shaken off an unpleasant sensation. She continued into the woods.

  Modesty never entered Will’s mind as he ran out of the room, down the stairs, and across the yard into the woods. At first he was relieved not to find her, as that proved she hadn’t died right on the spot, but as he flailed deeper into the woods without coming upon her, he feared that the lightning had struck her senseless and that she was now wandering in the woods out of her mind. Anything might happen to her … she might wander down to the pond and drown!

  At that thought he increased his speed, running in the direction of the pond, but before he could reach the water, he collided with the object of his search … and was repelled by a cataclysmic shock some ten feet backward through the air and hard into a tree, knocking him down.

  “Will!” Marguerite cried, running to him.

  He looked up and thought he must have died and gone to heaven. Surely the creature crouched above him was an angel. Her body was luminescent, her veins glowing with liquid fire, her face as radiant as a full moon.

  “What are you?” he asked when he’d regained the breath to speak and realized he wasn’t dead. “What in the world—or outside of it—are you?”

  11

  Queen of the Woods

  “There are a few things you should know about Sylvianne before you meet her,” Madame La Pieuvre told me as we crossed the street to the Luxembourg. Although the night was warm, she had thrown a dark cloak over her shoulders that she clutched at with one of her long, thin hands. She lifted her head to the sky and a spatter of raindrops fell onto her face. It was quite dry where I walked a few feet beside her. “Sylvianne is a very old spirit. She was here when the mer fey arrived from Ys. At first there was fighting. I’m afraid that the mer fey are not the most tolerant of creatures. They took control of the islands in the Seine and tried to evict the tree spirits from their homes. But the tree folk can be quite tenacious. They become attached to places and the trees that grow there. Since the mer fey couldn’t kill the tree folk themselves, they cut down the trees that were their homes. In retaliation the tree folk kidnapped and tortured the humans who were dear to the mer fey.”

  “That’s awful,” I said, recalling the man I’d seen leap the fence into the park. Was he one of the tree fey—or one of their human companions? Either possibility was not reassuring. I shivered. The night felt suddenly cold to me and I wished I had Madame La Pieuvre’s cloak even though hers was now soaked with the rain that fell only on her—as if she were drawing water from the sky. Perhaps this was her personal hydration system. When we reached the tall iron gates to the park,nt sizeme La Pieuvre produced a large, heavy key and fit it into the lock. I touched my hand to hers—it felt like old velvet worn down to the nap and was slightly moist. “Do they still do that?” I asked. “Do they still torture humans?”

  Madame La Pieuvre shook her head, scattering raindrops, without meeting my eye. “They agreed not to as part of the Trêve de Gui—the Mistletoe Truce, so called for the sprig of mistletoe held over the heads of the rulers of each people—that was signed between the mer fey and the tree folk. But by then the tree folk had acquired a taste for human company. They like to play with them.…” She looked up, suddenly apologetic. I think she had forgotten for a moment that I was human. “Their play is really quite harmless … usually. I believe most of their human companions enjoy it. But they can be a little … rough. I will tell them that you’re under my protection and that should keep them in line … only…”

  “Only what?”

  “Well, they sometimes take a perverse pleasure in appropriating the favorites of the mer fey.”

  “Oh,” I said, laughing. “That shouldn’t be a problem. I’m no one’s favorite.”

  “Oh, my dear,” Madame La Pieuvre said, stroking my cheek with her velvet hand, “you’re Will Hughes’s favorite, and that will particularly annoy Sylvianne as I believe she had une petite crush on him when he first came to Paris and is still angry at losing him to Marguerite. Let’s just hope that she’s gotten over him.”

  As she turned the key, I said I hoped so, too. After all, I added to myself, it had been over four hundred years. Even Will’s charms couldn’t linger that long. Could they?

  * * *

  As we stepped into the park, I noticed that we passed through a shimmering curtain of violet mist, much like the haze I’d seen in the Square Viviani when Jean Robin’s tree had opened up for me.

  “Fairy shroud,” Madame La Pieuvre informed me when she saw me looking back. “To keep unauthorized mortals from witnessing fey activity. From outside, the park appears empty.”

  So far it appeared empty from the inside. We were walking along the allée of pollarded plane trees, the only sound the rustle of the heavy leaves. With the light of the city blocked by the fairy shroud, the park was as dark as the middle of a primeval forest. I looked up toward the sky, but the leaf canopy was so dense it would have blocked any moonlight or starlight even if the park hadn’t been covered by fairy shroud. I couldn’t see the leaves overhead, but I could hear them, layers upon layers of damp leaves rustling in the breeze, making a sound like running water. The sound stirred som
ething in me, a feeling that made my heart race, but whether with fear or excitement I wasn’t sure.

  It’s just the Jardin du Luxembourg, I told myself. YouWe were in this allée earlier today and admired how ordered the trees were.…

  A leaf brushed my face and I brushed it away. My hand grazed rough bark … but we were walking down the center of the allée, weren’t we? How had this slim sapling broken through the neatly ordered line of pollarded trees? Had we strayed from the allée?

  I turned to look back toward the park gates, and a thick vine dropped over my shoulder.

  A vine? In the meticulously manicured and landscaped Luxembourg Gardens?

  Then I felt the soft velvet of Madame La Pieuvre’s hand gently but firmly unwrapping the vine from around my arm. To my relief I could see her even in the dark. Her round face glowed softly against the backdrop of tangled forest.

  “The trees—,” I began, but she silenced me by placing a damp velvety finger on my lips.

  “They’re listening,” she whispered. Placing one of her fingers to her own lips, she simultaneously untangled three more vines that had insinuated themselves around my arms and neck. She wrapped one of her arms firmly around my waist and propelled me down the allée—or at least down what used to be the allée. By the faint phosphorescent glow of Madame La Pieuvre’s skin, I could see now that the ordered line of trees had grown—in hours—into a dense and wild forest. The tree trunks here were twisted and gnarled, like coastal trees that had grown in a steady wind, and they were festooned with heavy vines looping down into the path. If not for Madame La Pieuvre’s many hands fending them off, I would have gotten tangled in them. Even the ground was no longer the level, dusty path I’d walked on earlier today. Roots buckled the earth and twisted beneath my feet. I tripped over one and would have fallen, but for Madame La Pieuvre’s firm, many-handed grip. She scooped me up and carried me over the last few yards of woods into an open clearing where she dumped me onto the soft lawn.