To save my brother, I made a promise to the strange and powerful lord of the woods. I didn’t keep that promise, and now he’s taken my little nephew. I swear I’ll get him back, no matter how dangerous the forest between the worlds may be, or how angry its lord. I succeeded when I was only sixteen, after all, surely I can prevail again.
But as I stumble from one peril to another, I begin to think he was taking it easy on me last time. Maybe he doesn’t want me in his realm after all, even though he once offered me a home here. Maybe I waited too long. Well, he’ll have to tell me so to my face. I’m not giving up until I find the heart of the woods, or die trying.
I’ll save my family and escape again. I want to return to my normal life ... don’t I?
Iron nails or a horseshoe would have been the traditional defense, but I didn’t think they’d do much good in this case. They were preventatives, and it was too late.
It had been too late for sixteen years, because I had made a promise and I hadn’t kept it.
A minute later, we were in the woods. We’d played in this fringe of the forest, under strict instructions not to go out of sight of the house.
Out of habit, I glanced over my shoulder, but couldn’t see even the stone fence.
I should have been able to see it.
“What?” Ted asked.
“Nothing.” No reason to worry him. Anyway, it was probably a good sign. I’d been afraid he was going to jerk us around, make us wander the ordinary forest for hours. Like last time, when I’d been alone.
I was on the verge of tears, hot and exhausted and hopeless.
“What kind of game is this?” I shouted at the veiling canopy of leaves. It should have been night, but wasn’t; that was the only indication that I’d left the normal world behind. “I thought you wanted a challenge! If you don’t let me try, how do you win?”
“You misunderstood.” The smooth mocking voice whispered in my ear.
I whirled and stumbled as I hastened to put space between us.
“Misunderstood?” I panted.
“We’re not competing. I’m toying with you, Tommy.”
“It’s Thomas.”
“Is that so? How reckless you are.” He smiled, and something fluttered in my stomach.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“You haven’t earned that,” he answered, but he was still smiling.
I found myself wanting to smile back, although I had no idea why.
“If you’d caught hold of me last time,” he went on, “you’d have skipped the past few hours.”
“Really?” I asked, edging closer.
He laughed, like leaves rippling in wind. “Too late now, Thomas.”
He stepped backward.
I lunged, and tumbled into a hole that could not have been there a moment ago, speeding down like a chute in snakes and ladders until I landed, sprawled on my back under a pink-purple tree, with an unfamiliar voice asking, “Are you all right?”
A bird was talking to me, and the woods sparkled with magic, and I would never see the world as ordinary again. And I was, despite everything, happy.
“He was Oberon in your book, right?” Ted asked suddenly, jarring me from my memories.
I’d adapted A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a beginning reader series called The Little Classics. Simplified language, heavily illustrated. I’d gotten a lot of praise for the art.
“You read?”
He wasn’t deterred. “And Puck. That was you.”
A younger me, more waifish and pointy-chinned, dark hair wild and tangled with leaves. No one had commented on the likeness.
“Yes.”
“Aren’t they friends, Oberon and Puck?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Puck is a servant. A slave, even, maybe.” A wild power captured and constrained, I’d thought when I read the play. But that wasn’t me. “It was just a convenience. I don’t have to pay myself to model. Nancy was Titania.”
Nancy had been the girlfriend who most impressed and alarmed my family: a dancer, beautiful, with red-gold hair and dramatic air. Not someone who was going to settle down to have a few kids and keep house, the way my parents expected relationships to work. They’d been relieved when she moved to Paris, without me.
“She was out of your league,” Ted said.
I’d thought so, too. “Some people find me inexplicably appealing, what can I say?”
Ted snorted. He’d always been a bulldog, though, once he had his teeth in a question. “I expected you to go off all that ... weird stuff ... after what happened to us.”
“I couldn’t,” I admitted. He had filled my dreams while I worked on A Midsummer Night’s Dream -- but I dreamed of him most nights, regardless.
We escaped and made it safely back to Nana’s and thought that avoiding her house would make what had happened into a dream. Ted had filled up his days with sports and learning to fix cars. I’d focused on my portfolio and gone to college to study illustration and design. At college I’d become, if not outgoing, sociable enough to have a circle of friends, date sometimes.
Senior year I’d been working on a term project with a photography student. We got along well, both artistically and personally, and eventually started sleeping together. He was the first man I had sex with. A great guy, talented, kind, cute. I really liked him. One night, drunk and in my arms, he pressed his tear-streaked cheek to mine and whispered, “Why can’t you love me?”
And that’s when I realized: I had left my heart behind. In the woods, with him.
