The Night of the Solstice Read online

  “It might be dangerous,” said Charles, hopefully.

  Alys said seriously, “I’m going to take my baseball bat.”

  No one was happy with Claudia. By the time Alys had called Geri and they’d gotten the baseball bat and the flashlight, they had almost stopped believing anything was wrong.

  “You sure this isn’t a joke of yours, Claudia?”

  Claudia shook her head dumbly.

  They set out for the house on the hill.

  Chapter 3

  THE STORY

  With Claudia in the lead they walked around the side of the house to the heavy wooden back door.

  Alys was holding the baseball bat in one hand and the flashlight in the other. “Knock,” she said to Claudia.

  “But she can’t—”

  “Just do it.”

  Claudia knocked. The door was hard and solid, and her knuckles made only a faint tapping sound.

  No one answered.

  “Ring the doorbell.”

  “There isn’t one,” said Charles.

  “All right,” said Alys, and she banged with the bat on the door. Claudia jumped at the sudden noise.

  “That ought to wake ’em up,” said Janie, and she chuckled.

  “She’s awake, but she can’t open the door,” said Claudia. “She’s got paws!”

  Alys looked at her, then at the door. “Here, hold this,” she said at last. She gave Claudia the flashlight and gently tried the door handle. “It isn’t locked, anyway.” Slowly she pushed the door open a few inches. Just like the door in any horror movie, it creaked. “I’ll go in first. You hang on to the flashlight, Claudia.”

  Claudia was on Alys’s heels as she pushed the door open and stepped inside. The flashlight threw a wavering ellipse of white on the floor and walls of the huge dark room. Charles crowded behind Claudia, breathing in her ear, and Janie shuffled in after him.

  “We’re here,” Claudia called, but it was hard to call loudly into that silent darkness. “We’re all inside,” she piped again. The flashlight caught the gleam of a great chandelier overhead, and a mirror on the wall to the left, but the vixen was nowhere to be seen.

  “Let’s go,” whispered Charles. “Nobody’s home.”

  Just then, with a wrenching creak, the door slammed shut behind them. Charles yelled and grabbed the flashlight from Claudia, swinging it around toward the door. The pool of light fell squarely on Janie, one hand still on the doorknob. Janie giggled madly.

  “You idiot!” said Alys, lowering the baseball bat. “I nearly brained you.”

  “Shhhh!” said Claudia. “I heard something. Over there.”

  Charles aimed the flashlight straight ahead. Yellow eyes leapt at them out of the dark, and then with a wriggle of motion the vixen was sitting on an overturned chair.

  “All four of you,” she said. “Good. I had feared—”

  What she feared will never be known, for Alys, with a gasp, stumbled backward, running heavily into Charles. Charles yelled in pain and dropped the flashlight, which went dead on the floor. Janie began groping her way toward a light switch and accidentally poked Charles in the eye, and Charles yelled again.

  “It’s on the other side,” came a voice from the darkness, a dry little voice which could only belong to the vixen. Janie fumbled across the door, making sweeping motions. Her hand caught on something and there was light.

  The children turned as one to stare at the animal. They were all breathing hard.

  “Enough nonsense,” she said. “You are young enough to know better. Now, I have a very important matter to discuss with you, and I don’t want any hitting”—to Alys—“or any shouting”—with a look at Charles—“or any pointless arguing”—with a significant glance in Janie’s direction. “Is that understood? Then sit down and attend.”

  But only Claudia sat down, and no one else seemed to be paying much attention. Janie stood frozen. Charles wobbled back and forth drunkenly between the animal on the chair and the back door, while Alys made little charges at the vixen with the baseball bat.

  “Stop that,” said the vixen.

  “You … yow … wow,” said Alys. At least that was what it sounded like. She waved the baseball bat in rubbery circles around the vixen’s head.

  “Yes, I can talk, say it if you must and get it over with. I am even a—a witch’s familiar, if you will. But I am not evil and I do not wish to see you hurt. On the contrary, I desperately need your help.”

  “Help … help …” said Charles. Later he always insisted he’d only been repeating the vixen’s words.

  Meanwhile, Alys’s frenzied gaze fell on Claudia, who was sitting only inches away from the vixen. With a gurgle, she flung herself between her small sister and the animal. Then she grabbed Claudia by the back of the collar, and brandishing the bat with the other hand began to drag her away.

  “No,” said Claudia. “Alys, no!” She fell flat on her stomach, clasping Alys around the ankles. “Alys, please!”

  Alys merely tightened her grip. There was a look of fixed, mad determination in her eyes. With Claudia still attached she began to shuffle awkwardly backward toward the door, shaking the bat in the vixen’s direction every few moments. There were books and knickknacks scattered on the floor; Claudia went sliding over each with a bump and a yelp. The vixen looked on in astonished scorn.

  “Alys,” whimpered Claudia, “Alys, stop.” Alys collided with the door and fumbled for the knob, and Claudia reached the height of desperation.

  “Alys,” she said, and there was a new note in her voice, a note which made Alys look down into her small, commanding face. “Alys, get a hold of yourself.”

  Something cleared in Alys’s eyes, and she blinked; then her panting breath slowed and she stared down at Claudia. Claudia let go of Alys’s ankles and sat up, rubbing her stomach. She looked at the vixen, then up at her sister.

  “She doesn’t want to hurt us, Alys,” she said quietly. “She needs us.”

  Alys followed Claudia’s gaze to the vixen, who soberly inclined her red-gold head.

  A dazed and defeated expression came into Alys’s eyes. Slowly she lowered the baseball bat until it dropped from her nerveless fingers to the ground. Then, casting one last glance about the room as if bidding good-bye to all hope of sanity, she knelt on the floor.

  Charles rocked on his heels for a moment, and then, abruptly, he too sat down. But Janie was now walking round and round the vixen, looking at her from all angles.

  “Holographic projection?” she mused.

  “Sit down and shut up,” replied the vixen coldly. “Oh, very well, touch me if you insist, but quickly. I have a long story to tell and a short time in which to tell it.”

  When Janie found the vixen solid she looked at her fingers for a moment as if they had betrayed her; then a slow, strange smile came to her face, the smile of someone who can’t figure out how a magician does a trick, but who isn’t going to be fooled anyway.

  “Now sit!”

  Janie sat.

  “I have no more time for foolishness,” said the vixen. “Listen carefully. You and your world are in terrible danger—”

  “Huh? Our world?” said Charles.

  “—because in just two weeks, on the night of the winter solstice, the mirrors will be open to all, and Cadal Forge can come through. And he will come through, too, unless Morgana can get here first and close him out.”

  “Morgana?” said Alys blankly.

  “Morgana Shee is my mistress, and the lady of this house, and the greatest sorceress of her time. And she’s been betrayed, captured, imprisoned, entrapped, and who knows what else! And it’s up to us to save her because she’s the only person who can close the mirrors! Well?” She swept them with a gaze from eyes like golden lamps. “Will you help me? Will you lift a hand to save yourselves from slavery and destruction? Or will you sit here quietly and await your doom?”

  There was a pause. Finally Alys stirred. “I’m sorry,” she said, “and I don’t think
you’re evil anymore. But frankly I don’t have the first idea what you’re talking about.”

  The vixen sighed. “Of course you don’t. I fully intend to explain.” She hesitated a moment as if uncertain where to begin. Then she said, “I suppose you children have been taught to disbelieve in magic?”

  “Well …” said Alys.

  “Of course you have. And rightly so. Because there is no magic—or precious little of it—in this world, anymore. But that doesn’t mean there never was.

  “The world where magic originated is called Findahl, the Wildworld. And it is, or was, connected to this world by countless Passages. The Quislais found the Passages first—well, they would! The Quislais are—oh, I suppose you people would call them fairies. Anyway, they wandered into the human world, and soon other Wildfolk followed—sorcerei and elementals and beasts you know only through legend.

  “In those days the Wildfolk got along well enough with the people of Earth, which they called the Stillworld. But most were never really comfortable with your civilization. And presently the humans turned against magic and began burning witches.

  “The greatest sorcerei were too powerful to be caught, but many of the minor ones were killed, and witch-hunting proved to be the last straw for the Wildfolk. They decided to pull out of this world entirely.

  “The Weerul Council, the supreme ruling body of Findahl, decreed that all the Wildfolk be evacuated at once to their own world, after which the Passages would be closed forever. Humans were to be sealed in the Stillworld and Wildfolk in the Wildworld, and there would never more be any congress between them. Plans were made immediately for enforcing this law, and of all those affected only one dared raise a voice in protest—Morgana.” The vixen raised her head and eyed them grimly. “My mistress had always been something of a rebel, but this was more than that. You see, just before the Great Separation she fell in love with a young native American of the Yuma tribe, a dreamsinger. He was only a boy, but she loved him. And she wasn’t about to give him up for anyone.

  “The Weerul Council is powerful,” continued the vixen, “but, oh, my mistress was clever! She went before them with a unique argument. You see, although Morgana’s mother was a Quislai, her father was human, and she argued that by the Council’s own decree she was obliged to spend half her time in the human world and half her time in the Wildworld.

  “There was a tremendous debate about it, and Thia Pendriel, a magistrate of the Council, led the opposition. But in the end the Council ruled that a single Passage, the Great Coastal Passage by the Pacific, be left open and that Morgana be given control over it—on one condition. She had to keep it exclusively for her own use, and never, never let any humans through. The penalty for disobedience was death for both her and the human involved.”

  “Great Coastal Passage, huh?” said Charles curiously. “Where is it?”

  “It’s here, dolt!” said the vixen. “You’re sitting on it! No, don’t get up, you can’t fall through accidentally. Morgana made sure of that. You see, she built this house directly over the Passage, and in the Wildworld, at the other end, she built another house, a counterpart. Then she tied up all the power of that great Passage and bent it to her will, and made it into a number of smaller passages connecting the two houses. And those passages are the mirrors.”

  “The mirrors,” breathed Claudia.

  “Yes. This is Fell Andred, the Mirror House, and you can walk through a mirror in this living room and emerge in the great hall of Morgana’s castle in the Wildworld in one and a half seconds flat—if you have moonlight and the amulet.

  “The amulet was Morgana’s way of locking the Passage, of making it human-proof. She never told the secret of it to any of the other sorcerei. She settled down to live in this house with her new husband, and he willingly promised never to ask her where she went when she disappeared.

  “But the young dreamsinger was human, and insatiably curious, and … well, you can guess the end of the story. He couldn’t bear not knowing. He wheedled and cajoled and threatened and begged her until finally she made the amulet for him, and brought him into the Wildworld. And the long and the short of it is that he was caught there and Thia Pendriel had him put to death.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Alys. She felt it was a foolish thing to say, but she couldn’t help it.

  The vixen ignored this. “Morgana herself was brought before the Council in chains. Of course, she didn’t go quietly, and by the time she got there she had the deaths of quite a few minor sorcerei on her head. Thia Pendriel wanted Morgana cast into a Chaotic Zone, a place where the magic is so wild, so uncontrollable, that only a full Quislai could survive there and stay sane. There was a fight. The guardians of the High Council, the Feathered Serpents, soon ended that, but in the confusion Morgana managed to escape back to this world, where none of the sorcerei could follow her.

  “The Council decided that the most merciful—and most practical—thing to do was commute Morgana’s sentence to exile, with death as the penalty if she ever returned to the Wildworld. Morgana didn’t care. She was half-mad with grief anyway, over the loss of her love. In anger and bitterness she flung down her Gold Staff and her grimoire, her great book of spells, and she locked her workshop and swore never to touch the mirrors or practice magic again. She kept that promise, too, until just a few days ago.

  “Pay attention, now. I’m getting to the point.” Before anyone could protest that they were paying attention, the vixen continued.

  “All these many years since my mistress was exiled from the Wildworld she has been isolated from the Wildfolk, all of them. Except Elwyn. Elwyn Silverhair, her half sister. Elwyn, daughter of a queen of fairies. Elwyn, the scatterbrained, light-minded, fickle-hearted, irresponsible nincompoop! If you can find one good thing to say about her I’ll turn vegetarian! Amulets mean nothing to full Quislais. They are immortal and can cross any open passage at will. The only thing that will hold a Quislai is a thornbranch tangled in the hair. And if amulets mean nothing, common decency means less. The mischief Elwyn has done! Luring young men into the Wildworld and dumping them back twenty years later, and setting loose dragons, and . . . Well. The less said about it, the better. In any case, Morgana had no choice but to let her come and go as she pleased, and she often brought us news of the Wildworld, until about a century ago when she and Morgana had a terrible falling-out.

  “We hadn’t seen Elwyn since then, until last week, when she came tripping through a mirror as if she owned it, laughing like a loon, her long hair floating behind her. I don’t know what she said to Morgana, but within ten minutes it developed into a magnificent fight. Elwyn threw a sky-bolt, and you can see what it did over there.” Everyone turned to see that one wall of the living room was scarred and blackened in a circular area the size of a hula hoop.

  “Morgana knows a trick or two of her own,” added the vixen dryly, and for the first time her listeners took in the destruction around them: tables and chairs overturned and broken, rugs shredded, bric-a-brac scattered across the floor. “And Elwyn may be immune to pain or death or fear, but my mistress managed to chase her back to the Wildworld, all right. Much good it did! Next evening she returned and apologized in words so fair that I ought to have been suspicious right away. She and Morgana talked for hours behind a closed door, and the next thing I knew Morgana had gotten out her grimoire and was making up the amulet for herself and for me.” The vixen stretched her neck, and they saw that she was wearing a golden collar with a little bag of green material tucked underneath.

  “Then she told me that we would be going to the Wildworld that very night. Well, I was surprised, but I was ready at the time she appointed—an hour after sunset—only to find that she was already gone, and that wretched Elwyn with her.

  “When she didn’t return I realized something was wrong. The next day, at moonrise, I went through a mirror myself, and, to my horror, I found the house full of the smell of strange sorcerei—and one scent that was all too familiar. Cadal Forge was
there.

  “I spied on him and listened to his counsels, and then I understood. He had persuaded Elwyn to lure Morgana into the Wildworld, and it is he who is holding Morgana prisoner. Why? Because his plans involve the mirrors, and in either world only Morgana can possibly close them against him.

  “When I heard what his plans were I could scarcely credit my ears—but I should have realized, long ago, how twisted he had become. Morgana knew Cadal

  when he was a youth, the youngest wielder of a Red

  Staff in the Guild. Like her, he was dwelling in the human world. They shared a love of learning, and Cadal was actually apprenticed to a human alchemist—as close as you could get to a scientist in those days. But the Inquisition came and the alchemist betrayed Cadal to save his own life. The only thing your superstitious, blood-crazed ancestors hated more than science was sorcery, and they tortured Cadal before trying to burn him. Morgana rescued him from the stake itself and took him to the Wildworld to be healed, but the greatest wounds were not to his body.

  “He turned against all humans. He took a terrible revenge on the poor alchemist, and when the Council announced the Plan for Separation he argued passionately that instead of withdrawing from the Stillworld the sorcerei should simply conquer it. The councillors wouldn’t listen, of course, and eventually, after he intrigued against them once too often, they convicted him of treason. They cast him into a Chaotic Zone, but somehow he escaped, and I see now that he never gave up. He found other sorcerei of like mind and created a Society devoted to re-entering and mastering the human world.”

  “But how could he get here?” said Charles. “I thought you said you needed the amulet to go through the mirrors.”

  “Very good. You do—with one exception. Do you know what the winter solstice is? The longest night of the year, which falls on December twenty-first—in just two weeks! Well, even Morgana could not tame the passage completely, and on the night of the winter solstice, by light of a full moon that rises at midnight, it is open to all. From the moment the moon enters its quarter until the moment of dawn, anyone can cross over. Elwyn alone knew this, and she must have told Cadal Forge. Which means that in two weeks’ time he will be coming through, with the rest of his Society. And he’s got Morgana trapped in the Wildworld where she can’t do a thing to stop him.”