The creature turned. It was hard to get a good look at the thing: the moonless moonlight of this in-between place sidled away from it, only getting caught here and there in clumps of matted fur. But by God, the smell! It was looking at Silver. Silver looked back. He stared into its mad, slit-pupiled golden eyes and thought, Oh God, what have I done.
“Silver!” yelled Tobias. “Climb a goddamn tree!”
The goat-beast let out a shrill screech and hurled itself towards him.
Were there hooves? Horns? It had eyes, Silver knew: did it have a suggestion of a face? He could hear Maud on the ground laughing with a hysterical breathless sound, near sobs. This was his fault. He had been afraid and had done what seemed natural, and now this was his fault, and by God, the thing was running straight at him—
He did not know what to do.
He did some magic.
He held out his hand and there was an apple in it: small, sour, wizened. The goat-beast came lolloping towards him with a great squealing and a dreadful waft of that rank meat smell. Silver weighed the apple in his hand, waited until he judged the thing was near enough, and then hurled the fruit square at it with his best schoolboy overarm.
It went through the thing’s flesh. The beast was not quite here; Silver felt the un-hereness of it the same way he felt the un-hereness of the long-drowned trees. But the apple was as real and solid as Silver’s boots. It lodged in the goat-beast’s half-real heart, and Silver licked his lips and spoke again in that language he had never learned. The words came to him out of the same strand of memory that had known Maud for a child once lost in the woods; a memory that was older than he was, and older than Tobias too.
The apple erupted: stick and stem and root and bough, the growth of generations unfurling in all directions. The goat-beast squealed in an unpleasantly human voice that cut off in a gargle as a branch rammed its seeking way out of its throat. The tree was pinning it into the moment; its moon-silvered mats of fur were gaining density and texture, and that was a human face, set above shaggy-furred but human shoulders; and the forearms ended in square and powerful hands, though the hind legs were tipped with hooves.
“A satyr,” Silver whispered aloud, fascinated despite the horror of it. The creature’s corpse was bleeding where branches perforated it. Its eyes were wide and staring and filming over in death. It was very, very dead. He swallowed.
The apple tree came into flower as he flexed the fingers of his left hand, his throwing hand; and the flowers fell as he let out a breath. They made a white carpet on the dim ground as the fruit began to blush on the branch in dull red clusters.
Silver felt Tobias’s eyes on him as a physical weight. His stomach was squirming.
He walked slowly towards the gnarled, bloody mass of tree and corpse. It was more of a hobble than a walk. His limbs were aching through and through, as if he had spent his energy in some great physical exertion. Maud was scrambling to her feet, staring at him. There was a long bruise on the side of her face.
The satyr smelled just as rank in death as it had living. Gore dripped from every place where the tree’s growing had speared it. Its ribcage and gut were open wide. Blood and viscera fouled the bark. The tree was unperturbed. Silver, dreamlike, watched his own hand reach for a dark apple and twist it off the bough.
“Surely you’ve read something of the dangers of fairy fruit,” said Maud, with a remarkable if shaky attempt at her usual briskness, just as Silver was about to take a bite.
And Silver hesitated: and Tobias was there, suddenly, at his right hand. He plucked the apple out of Silver’s limp fingers and threw it away into the shadows under the trees. Silver stared stupidly at him. Tobias had Maud’s revolver in his hands now. When had he picked it up? He took the shot out of it and scattered the powder, and then it went into another pocket.
“I didn’t really mean—” Maud said.
“If you didn’t mean to shoot, Miss Maud,” said Tobias, “you shouldn’t have taken aim.” He turned his frown on Silver. “And you ought to know better than to play the fool with old gods’ matters.”
“Is that what I did?”
Tobias jerked his chin at the satyr and the apple tree. “Don’t know what else you’d call that.”
“Well, I—the Wood—”
“I know the wood,” Tobias said firmly. “Four hundred years I knew the wood. But I never made myself a bloody wizard on the back of it. That’s Fay’s business. Bad business. You should know better.”
Fay was the dead Fabian: a pet name, Silver had once worked out, with not a little jealousy. Perhaps it was the sting of that jealousy now which led him to say quite coldly, “Mr Finch, I don’t believe our acquaintance as it stands justifies so much familiarity on your part. The Wood and I are not your concern.”
As a withering setdown this failed entirely. Tobias took it in stride with only a slightly quirked eyebrow—was that disapproval? Amusement? It was so hard to know—and turned back to Maud. “What did he say to you?” he said. “Your elf.”
Maud looked away. “Why does it matter?”
“You’re fairy-mad for sure. You’d do better to go home and forget. But since you won’t”—Tobias’s voice held a grim note Silver had never heard—“we’d better see the business through.”
“I don’t know,” said Maud. “I don’t know what he said. I told you, I can’t remember. I was only a little girl. What does it matter?” Her voice rose. “You interfered—and he interfered—and we’re lost, lost, the road is gone, and I’ve failed—”
“Ah,” said Silver. “About that.”
All this time the gore had been dripping down the apple tree, soaking the earth among the roots and remnants of hooves until it turned dark and sodden and began to puddle. In the shine of that gory pool, Silver could feel the twist of the air that marked Maud’s road.
He said, “I believe it’s just through here.”
As he spoke, the trees of the drowned forest shimmered and faded from view like a mist. They were still there: Silver could feel them. But they were also not there; or rather Silver himself, and Tobias and Maud, were somewhere else. Could the others even feel the strangeness of it, these two places superimposed one over the other? It made Silver’s teeth ache faintly somewhere near the back of his mouth.
The horizon opened out wide and pale: a pinkish sky illuminating black earth with rosy light. There were no trees in this place save the apple tree that pinioned the satyr. It was now in full fruit with big round apples that gleamed a poisonous scarlet. The rotten stink of the satyr was overpoweringly thick in the air.
“Oh,” breathed Maud.
“Hm,” Tobias said.
“What?” said Silver. He really thought Tobias could have been at least a little impressed.
“So that’s Fairyland,” said Tobias. He shrugged. “Nasty place.”
Two years ago
Tobias stayed, through May, through June. Midsummer came and went and no dark power rose in the woods; the Lord of Summer was dead as could be. Silver had known it already, but he caught a little of Tobias’s edginess all the same and kept close by him all that day and all that night.
The Lord of Summer was dead; Fabian Rafela, who had by some evil wizardry bound himself to that ancient spirit, was also dead; only the Wood lived, and Silver lived as its avatar. He went down to the aspen glade a day or two after the solstice to check on the rubbled ruins of the dead god’s altar. Very little of that ancient structure was left on the surface; he could feel broken stone under the earth. There was no life in it; it would not rise again. The aspen trees shivered in the breeze. Their dryads were silent.