Spiritwalk Read Free Page A

went downstairs and out into the garden.
    Into the Mondream Wood.
    Eschewing the paths that patterned the garden, she walked across the dew-wet grass, fingering the damp leaves of the bushes and the low-hanging branches of the trees. The dew made her remember Gregor Penev—an old Bulgarian artist who’d been staying in the House when she was a lot younger. He’d been full of odd little stories and explanations for natural occurrences—much like Jamie was, which was probably why Gregor and her uncle had gotten along so well.
    “
Zaplakala e gorata
, “ he’d replied when she’d asked him where dew came from and what it was for. “The forest is crying. It remembers the old heroes who lived under its branches—the heroes and the magicians, all lost and gone now. Robin Hood. Indje Voivode. Myrddin.”
    Myrddin. That was another name for Merlin. She remembered reading somewhere that Robin Hood was actually a Christianized Merlin, the Anglo version of his name being a variant of his Saxon name of Rof Breocht Woden—the Bright Strength of Wodan. But if you went back far enough, all the names and stories got tangled up in one story. The tales of the historical Robin Hood, like those of the historical Merlin of the Borders, had acquired older mythic elements common to the world as a whole by the time they were written down. The story that their legends were really telling was that of the seasonal hero-king, the May Bride’s consort, who with his cloak of leaves and his horns, and all his varying forms, was the secret truth that lay in the heart of every forest.
    “But those are European heroes,” she remembered telling Gregor. “Why would the trees in our forest be crying for them?”
    “All forests are one,” Gregor had told her, his features serious for a change. “They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.”
    She hadn’t really understood him then, but she was starting to understand him now as she made her way to the fountain at the center of the garden, where the old oak tree stood guarding its secrets in the heart of the Mondream Wood. There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time.
    The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth—through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees, remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.
    Which was why the druids’ Ogham was also a calendar of trees.
    Why Merlin was often considered to be a druid.
    Why Robin was the name taken by the leaders of witch covens.
    Why the Green Man had antlers—because a stag’s tines are like the branches of a tree.
    Why so many of the early avatars were hung from a tree. Osiris. Balder. Dionysus. Christ.
    Sara stood in the heart of the Mondream Wood and looked up at the old oak tree. The moon lay behind its branches, mysteriously close. The air was filled with an electric charge, as though a storm were approaching, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
    “Now I remember what happened that night,” Sara said softly.
    Sara grew to be a small woman, but at nine years old she was just a tiny waif—no bigger than a minute, as Jamie liked to say. With her diminutive size she could slip soundlessly through thickets that would allow no easy egress for an adult. And that was how she went.
    She was a curly-haired gamine, ghosting through the hawthorn hedge that bordered the main path. Whispering across the small glade guarded by the statue of a little horned man that Jamie said was Favonius, but she privately thought of as Peter Pan, though he bore no resemblance to the pictures in her Barrie book. Tiptoeing through