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Another light appeared, then another.
I dragged the boat further ashore so Wilder could climb out without getting wet, and then he helped me get it well enough out of the water to not be a risk for floating off without us in it.
By the time we were finished huffing and puffing the boat onto land, there was a whole swarm of my little green-yellow lights dancing around my head and landing in my hair.
A moment later, she emerged.
It had been several years since I’d seen her, but in that time, she hadn’t changed a single bit. She was a wee, hunched, fragile looking woman who had to balance on a wooden cane for support.
Or so it seemed.
I knew perfectly well she could hustle around the swamp without it, but she liked to keep people guessing, and I couldn’t blame her. No one ever worried about little old ladies hurting them. It was how she managed to escape notice, and defy expectation.
Her long, long white hair hung in a long braid down her back, and from her ears dangled earrings made of tiny bird skulls and black feathers. Her eyes, even from the distance and in the dark, sparkled a vital light blue.
“Memere?” I whispered. I had gotten so used to calling her by her formal title around others, I’d all but forgotten the way I used to just think of her as my grandmother.
She smiled, and I was reminded of how much she looked like a wizened little
Yoda. My heart swelled. I had used the distance of time to create a false sense of her, based on the stories I’d heard from others. The fierce, terrifying witch people were in awe of. She’d grown to be ten feet tall with dagger teeth and a snarling countenance in my imagination.
I realized the reason it had taken me so long to come back to her was because I had been afraid to.
Now that I was here looking her in the face, I knew I’d been a fool.
Let everyone else be afraid of her. She was my memere. I approached her, and she held her arms open. It felt like a trap, but for the time being I didn’t care, I just wanted to hug her. I had to stoop down, she was so small, but when she wrapped her arms around my neck, her cane pressed to my spine, I melted into the embrace, kneeling in the boggy, damp ground to get closer.
She smelled of wood smoke and herbs, something sweet and spicy and vaguely mystical.
I hadn’t spoken French in years, but as she muttered her greetings against my ear I could make out every word without difficulty.
“You came home, chere.”
“I did.”
She leaned back and placed an old hand on my cheek, her skin so incredibly soft it defied explanation. Her eyes twinkled, and looked as if they belonged in the face of a teenage girl, set deep in the wrinkled flesh of a very old woman.
“Bring your beau. Let’s go.”
How she knew Wilder was my lover without so much as a word was one of those creepy La Sorciere things I didn’t want to dive too deeply into. She knew what she knew, and it was best to just let that be the case.
We wove our way through thick brush and branches slung low under the weight of moss, until we found ourselves at a small clearing. The sky overhead was clear enough I could make out the stars.
In the center of the clearing, a dozen or so old sycamore trees had grown together, their branches intertwined and their smooth skin fused into one mammoth organism.
La Sorciere walked up to the tree and rubbed the bark as if it were the lucky belly of a Buddha statue. The tree let out an audible sigh, then the roots began to move and shift, and an opening appeared between two of the trunks, wide enough to climb through.
I glanced over at Wilder, whose mouth was hanging open in unmistakable awe.
“It’s nuts, I know.”
“It’s amazing,” he corrected. “You really were a little Keebler elf.”
Chapter Fourteen
Not a damn thing had changed inside the tree since I’d been gone.
An old black cauldron sat in the middle of the room, a well-established fire crackling under it. The fire, and the close quarters of us being inside a group of trees, made the space warm and inviting.
