The Watchtower (15 page)

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,ey arriveme 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 Treve 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 allee 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 something 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 allee 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 allee, weren't we? How had this slim sapling broken through the neatly ordered line of pollarded trees? Had we strayed from the allee?

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 allee--or at least down what used to be the allee. 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.

"That patch becomes more unruly every year," she said, smoothing her hair and straightening her cloak while helping me to my feet. "The
mer
fey used to believe that pollarding the trees would keep them from breaking free at night, but it only makes them angry and more fractious. Many of the old allees have become impassable at night."

I looked back at the dense stand of trees and wondered how we were going to get out of the park, but I didn't have time to ponder that question because Madame La Pieuvre was purposefully striding across the lawn toward the statue of Diana, which glowed with the same phosphorescent light as Madame La Pieuvre emitted. The open sky above the park, although still veiled by the iridescent fairy shroud, also let in some light--a flickering, multicolored spangle that I guessed came from the Eiffel Tower in the north, and two yellow beacons from the south, like twin cat eyes, which came from the direction of the avenue de l'Observatoire. I was going to ask Madame La Pieuvre about the lights, but when I reached her, I was distracted by the display in front of the statue.

A dozen candles had been lit at the statue's base, explaining why it glowed, as well as heaps of flowers, fruit, and small glasses of bitter-smelling, green liquid that cast an emerald glow on base of the statue.

"Who left these?" I asked.

"Worshippers of the tree spirits," she said, kneeling before the statue and lifting a rose to her nose. "There have been cults dedicated to the tree spirits here since before the Romans came. They simply changed their names to Diana and Faunus and Silenus so that the Romans would let them be. When the Christians gained power, they laid their offerings and lit their candles to the Virgin Mary and the saints. During the Terror they hid their relics in the catacombs. In this day and age they call themselves Wiccans and neo-pagans and come to places where the tree spirits still hold rule."

Madame La Pieuvre stood and looked around her. Other lights were flickering at the edges of the shrubbery. I stared at one candle shrine before a statue of a dancing faun. The face of the faun in the flickering candlelight seemed to be laughing. As if in response to my thought, I heard a scrap of laughter rise in the air from the trees behind me--
Had there been trees there when I walked in the park earlier?
--and then an answering peal of hilarity from deep within the gardens near the carousel. Something white flashed in the onyx-green woods and someone--or
something
--shrieked.

"So it's just people," I said, picturing young girls in the white, embroidered camisoles and slips sold in flea markets and young, goateed boys in skinny jeans and vintage vests--the type of students and tourists that filled the cafes and streets of the Latin Quarter--wandering the dark park in search of an authentic Parisian adventure.

"People," Madame La Pieuvre replied. "And those that feed off them. Come..." She wrapped two of her arms around me tightly and pulled me toward the Grand Basin. "Sylvianne holds court at the Medici Fountain. Stay close to me."

We skirted the Grand Basin, which lay eerily calm in the center of all the moving foliage, and the Luxembourg Palace--or at least I assumed the palace still stood where I had seen it this morning. Drapes of violet and mauve fog fell over it now.

"To shield the guards from what's happening in the park," Madame La Pieuvre answered my unasked question. We followed a narrow path--narrower than I recalled these paths being--past a statue of Silenus cavorting with a bevy of naked nymphs. More candles, flowers, and glasses of green liquid stood around this statue. The green-tinged candlelight gave the satyr's face an even more salacious leer than usual.

"These statues," I asked as we approached a long, rectangular basin of lily-pad-covered water, "are they here because this is a favorite place of the tree folk--or do the tree folk frequent the park because of the statues?"

"A little of both," Madame La Pieuvre replied. "Humans often erect shrines and statues of pagan gods in places where they've glimpsed ... well, something they didn't understand. And then the fey are drawn to these places. They like nothing more than to be flattered in marble and bronze." She gestured toward the group of statues at the end of the long basin. Candles flickering in a shallow grotto illuminated a tarnished bronze giant hovering over twoslim white figures carved from marble.

"The Cyclops Polyphemus surprising the lovers Galatea and Acis," Madame La Pieuvre informed in a tour guide's voice. "Do you know the story?"

"A little ... from art history class. Polyphemus loved Galatea, but Galatea loved Acis, right? It doesn't look good for poor little Acis."