Invitation

Aldric had gone three days without a road when the wood opened its heart to him.

He smelled it before he saw it — green and cold and sweet, like rain remembered rather than falling — and then the trees parted, and there was light where no light should be, deep in a wood that swallowed the moon whole most nights.

It was a glade ringed in silver birch, and in it they were dancing.

He had heard of such folk in cradle-songs sung by women who touched wood when they said the word aloud. He had not believed the songs did them justice. They were tall as young trees and moved like water that had decided to be light; their hair was smoke and starlight and old gold, and their laughter rang like small silver bells struck all at once. A woman with eyes like a winter lake turned toward him without seeming to see him, and smiled, and the smile alone unmade every grief he had ever carried.

They called him in — not with words, for they used none, only the turning of hands, the parting of the ring to make him a place — and he went, because the wood behind him had already forgotten his footprints, and because who among the sons of men has ever refused an invitation to be beautiful for one evening.

Someone pressed a cup into his hands. It smelled of orchards that do not exist in this age of the world.

He danced. He does not remember deciding to.

It was the water that told him.

He came close by the glade's small dark pool, laughing, turning, and for one beat of the circle he looked down instead of up — and the pool did not show him silver birch and starlit hair. It showed him a ring of grey figures, thin as famine, standing very still in a place where no grass grew, their faces turned not toward music but toward him, and their mouths, in the water's telling, were not singing.

He looked up. The gold was still gold. The bells still rang.

But he understood, the way one understands falling before the ground arrives, that the glade had not opened its heart to him at all.

It had opened its mouth.

The winter-eyed woman still smiled at him, patient as frost, and held out her hand for the next turn of the dance, and somewhere far off and very small, Aldric heard himself agreeing to take it.