The Wolves of Midwinter Read online

  “I caught that, but why? What is it that so offends them?”

  “Anything and everything I do,” he said. “They have a way of interfering in the business of others, but only when it suits them.” He seemed annoyed. “Helena’s hearty, proud of her age, of her experience. But the truth is she’s very young in our world, and so is Fiona—and certainly in our company.”

  Reuben remembered Fiona’s unusually intrusive question as to whether Phil was coming to live at Nideck Point. He repeated the exchange to Felix. “I couldn’t imagine why this concerned her.”

  “She’s concerned because he’s not one of us,” said Felix. “And she can damn well keep out of it. I have always lived among human beings, always. My descendants lived here for generations. And this is my home and this is your home. She can keep her bloody notions to herself.” He sighed.

  Reuben’s head was swimming.

  “I’m sorry,” said Felix. “I didn’t mean to become so very unpleasant. Fiona has a way of provoking me.” He extended his hand suddenly. “Reuben, don’t let me alarm you with all this. They’re not a particularly frightening bunch of kindred. They’re a little bit more, well, brutal than we are. It’s just that right now they share the Americas with us, so to speak. It could be worse. The Americas are enormous, aren’t they?” He laughed under his breath. “There could be a lot more of us.”

  “Are they a pack, then, a pack with a leader in Hockan?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “If there is a pack there, it’s the women under Helena, and excluding Berenice. Berenice used to spend a lot of time with us, though not lately. But Hockan’s been with them off and on for a very long time now. Hockan has suffered his own losses, his own tragedies. I think Hockan’s under the spell of Helena. They used to confine themselves to the European continent, this bunch, but it’s simply too hard now for Morphenkinder in Europe, especially Morphenkinder who believe in human sacrifice at Midwinter.” He gave a scornful laugh. “And the Morphenkinder of Asia are more jealous of territory than we tend to be. So they’re here, in the Americas, now, been here for decades actually, searching perhaps for some special locale. I don’t know. I don’t invite their confidences. And frankly, I wish Berenice would leave them, and come live with us, if Frank could bear it.”

  “Human sacrifice!” Reuben winced.

  “Oh, it’s not all that horrifying, really. They select an evildoer, some utterly reprehensible and unredeemable scoundrel, some murderer, and they drug the poor bastard till he’s in a perfect stupor, and then they feast on him at midnight on Christmas Eve. Sounds worse than it really is, considering what we’re all capable of. I don’t like it. I won’t make the killing of evildoers ceremonial. I refuse to incorporate it into ritual. I refuse.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Put it out of your mind. They talk big but lack a certain collective or personal resolve.”

  “I think I see what’s happened,” said Reuben. “You were gone from here for twenty years. And now you’re back—all of you—and they’ve come to look the place over again.”

  “That’s it, exactly,” said Felix with a bitter smile. “And where were they when we were captive and struggling to survive?” His voice grew heated. “Didn’t see hide nor hair of them. Of course they didn’t know where we were, or so they’ve said. And said. And said. And yes, we’re back in North America, and they are, shall we say, curious? They make me think of moths collecting around a bright light.”

  “Are there others, others besides these, who might show up at the Yule?”

  “Not likely.”

  “But what about Hugo, that strange Morphenkind we met in the jungles?”

  “Oh, Hugo never leaves that ghastly place. I don’t think Hugo has found his way out of the jungles now for five hundred years. Hugo moves from one jungle outpost to another. When his present shelter ultimately collapses, he’ll seek another. You can forget about Hugo. But as to whether others might come, well, I honestly don’t know. There’s no universal census of Morphenkinder. And I’ll tell you something else if you promise to put it out of your mind immediately.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “We aren’t all the same species either.”

  “Good God!”

  “Why did I know you’d turn the color of ashes when I told you that? Look. Truly, it doesn’t matter. Now, don’t get agitated. This is why I so hate to inundate you with information. Leave the others to me for the time being. Leave the world to me, and all its myriad predatory immortals.”

  “ ‘All its myriad predatory immortals’?”

  Felix laughed. “I’m playing with you.”

  “I wonder if you are.”

  “No, truly. You’re easy to tease, Reuben. You always respond.”

  “But Felix, are there universally accepted rules about all this?—I mean do all Morphenkinder agree on this or that law, or—?”

  “Hardly!” he said with thinly concealed disgust. “But there are customs among our kind. That’s what I was referring to earlier, the Yuletide customs. We receive each other at Yuletide with courtesy, and woe to one who breaks those customs.” He paused for a moment. “Not all Morphenkinder have a place to celebrate the Yule as we do. And so if others join us on Modranicht, well, we welcome them.”

  “Modranicht,” said Reuben with a smile. “I’ve never heard that name for the Yule spoken aloud.”

  “But you know the word, don’t you?”

  “Night of the Mother,” said Reuben. “From the Venerable Bede, in describing the Anglo-Saxons.”

  Felix laughed softly. “You never let me down, my beloved scholar.”

  “Night of the Mother Earth,” said Reuben, relishing the words, the thought, and Felix’s pleasure.

  Felix went silent for a moment, and then went on:

  “In the old days—the old days for Margon, that is—Yuletide was the time to come together, to pledge fidelity, to pledge to live in peace, to reaffirm the resolves to love, to learn, and to serve. That’s what the teacher taught me a very long time ago. That’s what he taught Frank, and Sergei, and Thibault as well. And that’s what Yule still means to us, to us,” he emphasized, “a time of renewal and rebirth, no matter what the hell it means to Helena and the others.”

  Reuben repeated it: “To love, to learn, and to serve.”

  “Well, it’s not as dreadful as I’ve made it sound,” said Felix. “We don’t make speeches, we don’t offer prayers. Not really.”

  “It doesn’t sound dreadful at all. It sounds like one of those concise formulas I’ve been searching for all my life. And I saw it tonight, I saw it in the party, I saw it infecting the guests like some kind of wonderful intoxicant. I saw so many people behaving and responding in the most unusual way. I don’t think my family has ever much held with ceremonies, holidays, any celebration of renewal. It’s as if the world’s gone past all that.”

  “Ah, but the world never does go past all that,” said Felix. “And for those of us who cannot age, we must find a way to mark the passage of the years, to celebrate our own determination to renew our spirits and our ideals. We’re fastened to time, but time doesn’t affect us. And if we don’t watch it, if we live as if there were no time, well, time can kill us. Hell, Yuletide is when we resolve to try to do better than we have in the past, that’s all.”

  “New Year’s resolutions of the soul,” said Reuben.

  “Amen. Come, let’s forget about the others and go walk in the oaks. The rain has stopped. I never had a chance to walk in the oaks while the party was in full swing.”

  “Me either, and I so want to do that,” said Reuben.

  Quickly getting their coats, they went out together into the marvel of the lighted forest.

  How still and quiet it was in the soft lovely illumination, rather like the enchanted place it had been when he’d first wandered out here alone.

  Reuben looked around in the shadowy tangles of gray limbs, wondering if the Forest Gentry surrounded them, if they were up high i
n the branches above them.

  On and on they walked, past the scattered party tables, and deeper and deeper into the fairy-tale gloaming.

  Felix was quiet, deep in his own thoughts. Reuben so hated to disturb him, to ruin his contentment and his obvious happiness.

  But he felt he had to do this. He had no choice. He had put it off long enough. It ought to be happy news, he thought, so why was he hesitating? Why was he torn?

  “I saw Marchent today,” he confessed. “I saw her more than once, and it was markedly different.”

  “Did you?” Felix was obviously startled. “Where? Tell me. Tell me everything.” There came that immediate distress that was completely unnatural to Felix. Even with all the talk of the other Morphenkinder, he hadn’t been this suddenly anguished.

  Reuben explained that long glimpse in the village when he’d seen her in company with Elthram, moving about with him as if she were fully material, and then the moment in the dark corner of the conservatory as if she’d answered his summons. “I’m sorry I didn’t immediately tell you. I can’t explain exactly. It was so intense.”

  “Oh, I understand,” said Felix. “That doesn’t matter. You saw her. That’s what matters. I couldn’t have seen her, whether you told me about it or not.”

  Felix sighed.

  He held the backs of his arms with his hands, that gesture Reuben had seen in him when they had first spoken of Marchent’s spirit.

  “They have broken through,” he said sadly. “Just as I hoped they would. And they can take her away now when she’s willing to go. They can provide their way, their answers.”

  “But where do they go, Felix? Where were they when you called to them?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Some of them are always here. Some of them are always wandering. They are wherever the woods are thickest and darkest and most quiet and undisturbed. I called them together. I called to Elthram, that’s what I did. Whether they ever really go far away, I can’t say. But it’s not their way to gather in one place, or to repeatedly show themselves.”

  “And she will become one of them?”

  “You saw what you saw,” he said. “I would say it’s already happened.”

  “Will there be no moment in which I can actually talk to her?” asked Reuben. He had lowered his voice to a whisper—not because he feared the Forest Gentry would hear, but because he was opening his soul to Felix. “I had thought, perhaps, there would be some moment. And yet when I saw her in the conservatory, I didn’t ask for this. I felt a kind of paralysis, an absence of any rational thought. I didn’t let her know how badly I wanted to talk to her.”

  “It was she who came to you, remember,” said Felix. “It was she who tried to speak, she who had the questions. And maybe now they’ve been answered.”

  “I pray that’s true,” said Reuben. “She looked content. She looked whole.”

  Felix stood silent for a moment, merely reflecting, his eyes moving gently over Reuben’s face. He gave a faint smile.

  “Come, I’m getting colder and colder,” he said. “Let’s go back. She has time in which to speak to you. Plenty of time. Keep in mind the Forest Gentry won’t leave before Christmas Day and probably not before New Year’s. It’s too important to them to be here when we make our circle. The Forest Gently will sing with us and play their fiddles and their flutes and their drums.”

  Reuben tried to envision it. “That’s going to be indescribable.”

  “It varies from time to time, what they bring to the ceremony. But they’re always gentle, always good, always filled with the true meaning of renewal. They’re the essence of the love for this earth and for its cycles, its processes, its ever renewing itself. They have no taste for human sacrifice at Midwinter, I can tell you. Nothing would drive them away sooner than that. And of course they like you, Reuben, very much.”

  “So Elthram said,” said Reuben. “But I suspect it was Laura walking in the woods who stole their hearts.”

  “Ah, yes, well, they call you the Keeper of the Woods,” said Felix. “And they call her the Lady of the Woods. And Elthram knows what you’ve suffered with Marchent. I don’t think he means to abandon you without some resolution with Marchent. Even if the spirit of Marchent moves on, Elthram will have something to say to you before New Year’s, I’m certain of it.”

  “And what do you hope for, Felix, with regard to Marchent?”

  “That she’ll soon be at peace,” he said. “The same thing you hope for, and that she’s forgiven me for all the things I did that were wrong, and unwise, and foolish. But do keep in the mind that the Forest Gentry are distractible.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “All spirits, ghosts, the bodiless—they’re distractible,” said Felix. “They’re not rooted in the physical and so they’re not fastened to time. They lose track of the things that cause such pain in us. This is not infidelity on their part. It’s the ethereal nature of spirits. It’s only in the physical that they are focused.”

  “I remember Elthram using that word.”

  “Yes, well, it’s an important word. It’s Margon’s theory that they cannot truly grow in moral stature, these spirits, unless they’re in the physical. But we’re too deep in this woods to be uttering Margon’s name.” He laughed. “Don’t want to anger anyone unnecessarily.”

  The rain was starting again. Reuben could see it swirling in the lights as if the drops were too light to fall to the ground.

  Felix stopped. Reuben stood beside him waiting.

  Slowly, he saw the Forest Gentry materializing. They were in the branches again as they’d been earlier. He saw their faces coming clear, saw their dark shapeless clothes, knees crooked, soft booted feet on the branches, saw the impassive eyes regarding them, saw those tiny child faces like flower petals.

  In the ancient tongue, Felix said something to them, what sounded like a soft rush of greeting. But he kept walking. Reuben kept walking.

  There was a lot of snapping and rustling in the trees, and a shower of tiny green leaves appeared suddenly, leaves that swirled like the rain, only gradually falling to the earth. The Forest Gentry were vanishing.

  They continued on in silence.

  “They’re still around us, aren’t they?” Reuben asked.

  Felix only smiled.

  Alone in his room, in his pajamas and robe, Reuben tried to write about the entire day.

  He didn’t want to lose the vivid mind pictures crowding his brain, or the questions, or the sharp remembrances of special moments.

  But he found himself merely listing all the many things that had happened, in loose order, and listing the people he’d seen and met.

  On and on went his list.

  He was simply too stimulated and dazed to really absorb why it had all been so much fun, and so unlike anything he’d ever done or known. But again and again, he recorded details, the simplest to the most complex. He wrote in a kind of code about the Forest Gentry, “Our woodland neighbors” and their “wan” children, and just when he thought he could remember nothing else he began describing the carols played and sung, and the various dishes that had covered the table, and the descriptions of those memorable beauties who’d walked like goddesses through the rooms.

  He took some time describing the Morphenkinder women—Fiona, Catrin, Berenice, Dorchella, Helena, Clarice. And as he tried to remember each one as to hair coloring, facial features, and lavish dress it struck him that they had not all been conventionally beautiful, not by any means. But what had marked them all was luxuriant hair and what people call demeanor. They had possessed what someone might call a regal demeanor.

  They had dressed themselves and carried themselves with exceptional confidence. A fearlessness surrounded them. But there was something else, too. A kind of low seductive heat came off these women, at least as Reuben saw it. It was impossible to revisit any one in his imagination without feeling that heat. Even the very sweet Berenice, Frank’s wife, had exuded this kind of inviting sexua
lity.

  Was it a mystery of beast and human intermingled in the Morphenkind where hormones and pheromones of a new and mysterious potency were working on the species subliminally? Probably. How could it not be?

  He described Hockan Crost—the man’s deep-set black eyes, and his large hands and the way the man had looked him over so obviously before acknowledging him. He noted how different the man had seemed when saying his farewells to Felix, how warm, how almost needful. And then there was that low, running voice of his, the exquisite way he pronounced his words, so persuasive.

  There had to be some way male Morphenkinder knew one another too, he figured, whether or not the erotic signals were forthcoming. Hadn’t he felt some very similar set of tiny alarm bells the first time he’d met Felix? He wasn’t sure. And then what about the first few moments of the disastrous encounter with the doomed Marrok? It was as if the world was reduced to pen and ink when a Morphenkind was on the scene and the Morphenkind was done in rich oil paint.

  He didn’t write the word “Morphenkind.” He would never write it down, not in his most secret computer diary. He wrote, “The usual questions abound.” And then he asked: “Is it possible for us to despise one another?”

  He wrote about Marchent. He described the apparitions in detail, searching his memory for the smallest things that he might remember. But the apparitions were like dreams. Too many key details had faded. Again, he was so careful with his words. What he’d written might have been a poem of remembrance. But he was comforted that Marchent’s entire aspect had changed, that he’d seen nothing of misery or pain at all in her. But he had seen something else, and he didn’t know what that was. And it had not been entirely consoling. But was it conceivable that he and this ghost could actually speak to one another? He wanted that with his whole soul, and yet he feared it.

  He was half asleep on the pillow when he woke thinking of Laura, Laura on her own in the forest to the south, Laura having changed unimaginably into a full and mysterious Morphenkind, Laura, his precious Laura, and he found himself uttering a prayer for her and wondering if there was a God who listened to the prayers of Morphenkinder. Well, if there was a God, perhaps he listened to everyone, and if he didn’t, well, what hope was there at all? Keep her safe, he prayed, keep her safe from man and beast, and keep her safe from other Morphenkinder. He could not think of her and think of that strange overbearing Fiona. No. She was his Laura, and they would travel this bizarre road into revelation and experience together.