I thought it was the right thing to do.
It was the right thing to do.
But the right thing and the smart thing are not always the same thing.
I should have known she would have reacted more or less that way. This, to Eleanor, was the worst possible news, the one thing she could never bear. It is the equivalent of a death in our little family.
I wander the woods with Chuck after Eleanor has left us. Of course with Chuck. Chuck is all I have now.
We wander and wander, no aim in sight nor in mind. We wander farther and wider than we have ever gone in these woods, in the Port Cal woods, in any woods anywhere.
Farther, in fact, than I ever imagined these woods could go. It is a massive expanse of forest, covering many miles, containing small waterways, populated with the sounds, if not the sights, of many different kinds of life. Birds chirp and cheep, some in songs completely foreign to my ear. There is scurrying all around, on either side of us, no matter what path we take. Claws dig into bark as this or that creature makes its way up a tree to get a better vantage point to take a gander at the two of us.
Because there is no mistake: Chuck and I are the center of our invisible neighbors’ attention.
Oddly, though, Chuck makes not a single dash to root anything out. His ears do not even twitch, the way they do when something moving under cover catches his attention.
It is as if none of this is new to Chuck, and he is not surprised by any of it. And I surprise myself in turn by not being surprised.
We walk and weave our way with determination through a fluidly changing landscape that moves from entirely coniferous woods, to oak and birch, to dense and viney rainforest. As the landscape changes, the temperature fluctuates, from hot to cold to temperate, and the moisture level changes too, from rain to arid air. We seem for all the world to be traveling all the worlds, through their intertwined network of secret woods. Had I not been the places I have been lately, had I not seen, felt, heard all that I have, this would be unnerving to me. But as it is, as it happens, it doesn’t even feel that strange. I feel somehow right about the incredibly moving world I’m speeding through. I feel almost familiar with it.
I walk blindly but surely, knowing not what lies in front of me, but certain of the fact that I want to walk, to travel, to progress, from the scene that is behind me, the truth, the reality, the shame and sadness that is behind me.
And walk I will. Walk I do. Chuck at my side and occasionally ahead.
Until finally we come upon our destination.
I recognize it as soon as I arrive, even though I have never before seen it, or anything like it.
It is a patch of intense emerald moss, the size and shape of a baseball field. I can smell the moss, the rich vapor of it rising in clouds with every step I take onto the soft carpet of it. I walk, feeling the ground give gently under my feet, until I reach the center of the great wide open. I turn to see my footprints and Chuck’s, still there behind us but closing up quickly, like wounds that instantly heal themselves.
And I make one long rotation where I stand, taking in the majesty of it, of the massive array of stones ten feet, twelve feet, twenty feet tall that stand guard around the rim of the emerald-carpeted field.
This is their place. I know it. I feel it.
“Of course you know this place,” he says from behind me.
I don’t look at him. I continue staring at the stones.
“Because it is likewise your place,” he adds. “In a way.”
“Because I am them,” I say.
“You are not them,” he growls.
“I am not you,” I say defiantly
He does not take up this challenge. He waits. He pats Chuck, I can see out of the corner of my eye, stroking him lovingly. Chuck responds, raising his head, leaning into him.
“You were not supposed to tell her,” he says. “You agreed not to tell her.”
“I agreed not to tell her about you. I didn’t say anything about telling her about me. She had to know.”
“Well, you saw what you did. You have made it much more difficult.”
“Made what more difficult?”
“Protecting her.”
Now I spin to face him.
“Why does she need protecting? What is going to happen to her? Why would my telling her about me change anything?”
“Marcus, these are very bad, bad witches we are dealing with.”
“They say the same thing about you!” I scream, and shove him hard in the chest, as if this were nothing more than a schoolyard fight.
He indulges me, does not respond to it.
“I understand your confusion. But we have to get past this now, because time is not your friend at present.”
“Nobody is my goddamn friend at present!” I say, shoving him twice as hard, sending him a good ten feet backward.
He calmly walks to me again.
“I am your friend, Marcus. I have always been. That is why I left you, to spare you.”
I try my shove move once more.
And feel the shock of it all the way up my bones.
It feels as if I have punched a steel wall with both hands. An electrified steel wall.
He continues. “They do not have our power, Marcus. That is why they fight through other means. In order to finish me, they need you. Just as they needed you and your mother, years and years ago. By telling your mother about this, you have only accelerated things. It could force their hand, so to speak.”
“Would they—?”
“The answer is yes, son. The answer to all questions about the coven that begin with the words would they is yes.”
I go into a panic, begin pacing madly, walking a circle, not knowing what to do, knowing what I have done.
He reaches out, places his long, bony hand on the crown of my head like a skullcap.
I calm. My mind is still a mess, but my heart slows, I can think, I can listen. I can feel myself turning toward my father. Not so much out of a sudden trust as out of desperate need.
“There is still time,” he says. “They will not do anything. Not yet. Dr. Spence is great trouble to us,” he continues. “All vile roads lead to him, which I think you already suspected.”
“Yes,” I say, “and when I found Eleanor there with him …”
A low, terrifying growl comes from him now when I mention this. It appears not to come out of his mouth but down through him, through the ground.
He still has his hand there, atop my head, gripping it, holding me somehow totally within his embrace, when we feel it.
As though responding to a sound in the air that isn’t actually heard, we all—me, Chuck, and my father—prick up and turn to look into the distance, the direction I came from.
“They are coming, aren’t they?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
“Do we stay? Do we meet them?” I ask, terrified that the answer is yes.
He shakes his head. “This is theirs. We should not meet them on their ground.”
“Good enough for me,” I say, and the three of us make a calm but direct retreat across the field, through the standing stones, and out.
We immediately step into yet another world I have not been to before. It is like the surface of the moon, almost, a rolling, undulating landscape of bald limestone hills and crevices through which every imaginable type of flower pokes, one small stem at a time. It is colder, much colder, than the land we have just passed out of.
“What are we—?”
“You have been walking, my son, through your kingdom,” he says with a sweeping gesture. “You were earlier, and are now, walking through not only land but time. The ancient Celtic forests, bogs, hillocks—all under your aegis, if all goes according to the will of Cernunnos, god of Celtic forests.”
Already the limestone has given way to brown, marshy, thick, pungent peat squishing under our feet. This immediately gives way to fields of heather, before falling away before us and once again plunging into warm, dense forest.
“I still don’t know about you,” I say, following closely at his heels.
“I know you don’t. As time is an issue, perhaps you had better ask.”
I surprise myself by getting rather directly to the point.
“Can you tell me that you are not evil?”
He laughs for a good thirty uncomfortable seconds. Then, as it settles, he answers.
“No,” he says. “If indeed evil exists, then I am in part evil.”
“So do you doubt it exists?”
“I do not.”
“Jesus,” I say, backing off the pace a bit. “You know, I’m giving you every chance here to work with me….”
“You cannot live as long as I have lived, through all I have seen, and deny the existence of evil, son. Likewise, I believe that the individual who disclaims any evil content in his own nature is immediately to be feared and distrusted more than anyone. Because then you are in the presence of both evil and deceit.”
We walk through snow now, but we are not hampered.
“As I have told you, you are evil too,” he says. “You already understand this, I know. It is now your duty, your destiny, to learn to gather your strengths and overcome your mighty flaws to do what is right for your people, for the world. Such is the obligation you and I carry, Marcus Aurelius, that our adversaries do not.”
I find myself certain of one thing he has tried to instill: the sense of time getting away. I feel it strongly, that we have none to waste, and so I don’t.
“Why are they our adversaries?”
He stops and faces me. It is still snowing on us, and the snow caps his shoulders and his head, making him look older, more austere, more like a mountaintop statue than somebody’s father.
“The coven, Marcus, is an ignorant and hateful race. Because of you, because of the union of myself and your mother, it declared a holy war of purity. They’re so threatened by the reality of mortal blood mingling with their own that they have threatened the existence of us all. They have pledged that if they don’t extinguish this”—he points at me, touching my chest with his long-nailed finger—“then the flame of an entire race will go out with their efforts.”
“They claim the flame is going out anyway. Because of you. Because you had me. When you and Eleanor … because she was a nonwitch.”
He takes a deep, slow breath, continuing to tap my chest lightly. “They lie, Marcus. This is about you, but not in the way that they say. It is about their fear of you, your mixed blood, and their ancient, closed society.”
I am staring at the finger, contemplating it all.
“They say they want you,” I say.
“And so they do,” he says. “As I’ve said, they want us both. They want the throne. They want these.”
As he says it, he holds two fists up, at his shoulders. Then he extends two middle fingers toward the sky, bearing the two now-massive staghorn rings.
“And as you know,” he says, “these rings do not come off.”
“Oh my,” I say nervously. “Oh … shit.” I look at my own ring, at the Prince ring, which I now see has grown bigger. I feel the roots of it extending up my arm, down into my chest.
His rings, their root system, after all these years, must reach all the way to his legs.
“There have always been good and evil together, Marcus, beating in the same breast of every creature to draw breath. The essence of a life lies in one’s capacity to carry on a good struggle from within.
“The finest, the leaders, the caretakers of a people are the ones with the strength to carry on that struggle properly. That is how Cernunnos chooses.”
Emphatically now, he puts the backs of his hands, and the bulk of those rings, up in front of my face.
“Cernunnos chooses wisely.” He gestures around at the suddenly lush and warm and aromatic forest enveloping us. “He chose our line to rule centuries ago. We must be equal to this. That is how we know. That is how we know we are right.”
He grabs my hand now, holds it up next to his own so I can see them together.
“Cernunnos chooses wisely,” he says again.
Without another word, we travel on, beyond everything everywhere. He knows not to say more. He knows I cannot take any more inside a head that is full to bursting with millions of years of absorbed history. With evil, rattling away at the bars of its cage.
He knows too that he has reached me.
Just as I am convinced that there is no end to this journey, and no end to the ancient Celtic forests of our kingdom, we reach the end.
We walk through yet one more almost impenetrable thicket of trees and emerge.
To an immediate cliff edge.
It is Chuck, grabbing my shirt in his teeth, who keeps me from going over and falling all that way.
Which must be seven hundred feet, straight down. It is a sheer face, this cliff, as if a giant had sliced two great lands apart with a huge, serrated knife. At the bottom, past ledges and ledges and improbable horizontal trees growing into a stiff wind, is the crashing, screaming mayhem of the ocean’s edge.
“We’re pretty near the sea,” I say to him, looking straight down as puffin and tern fly sorties to and from precarious cliffside nests.
“We are always near the sea,” he says.
“And you were going to let me fall,” I suggest.
“It is your kingdom. You had better learn it.”
“So,” I say. “What now?”
“They have to be stopped. Immediately.”
“How? There are so many of them.”
“Spence. He is our problem. He is the Doctor.” Again, he holds up the fingers. “The Surgeon.”
“How do we get him?”
“Through she who would be Princess,” he says.
“Come again?”
“We must go the way they go. Up through the bloodline. We must have the daughter.”
“Eartha?”
“We need her. I cannot get near any of them without being detected by all of them. But you, son, can have her. She is, in fact, stalking you. And since you have eliminated her familiar, she is not as aware as she would be.”
“So what am I supposed to do about it?”
“She will come to you, and you will know the time is right. You will bring her to me, here.”
“And what?” I ask, getting that nervous, lost, things-are-bigger-than-me feeling again.
“We will convert her,” he says calmly. “And put an end to this detestable blood war.”
I find myself shaking with the suggestion, and I do not know why. It is warm, there is a sweet salt-air mist spraying up from the white foam at the base of the rocks, but I am shivering like a newborn pup.
“Convert her?” I say cautiously. “That sounds … what is that all about?”
“Magic, Marcus. An obair at its zenith. You have seen much of the worst of our world, and now you are to see its best. You and I are going to make things right. We are going to heal a deep, angry, weeping fissure running through the heart of our people.
“Through this girl, in this girl, our people are going to return to being one people. A magnificent people again. Like we have not seen in a generation.
“Like you and your mother have not seen, ever. A world we all should have had for a long time now, which we will have, finally.
“All of us, Marcus,” he says.
All of us.
Chuck has to grab me again before I stumble off the ledge, overwhelmed by the thought of it.
Healed. One. Together again. A family.
My family.
As it should be. The way it was supposed to be a long time ago.
But for now, he is gone. Vanished in the mist.
And Chuck and I begin the long walk—all the way back through time and forest—home.