Greenmantle by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online

place later on to see if he could find any sign of her secretive visitor. While he got his own dinner ready, he tried to make up his mind if he should bring a piece with him or not. In the end he settled on his cane. Out here, who needed guns?

5
     
     
    There was a tall, grayish-blue stone on the slopes of Snake Lake Mountain, a pointed finger of rock that lifted skyward among the cedars and pine, the maple, birch and oak. It looked to be a part of the forest and the backbones of stone that lifted from the rich forest floor, but it was older than either—a lost remnant of something secret. It stood in a small flat meadow, scooped from the slope. Above, the forest climbed onto the top of the hill in a tangle of underbrush and old trees; below it, younger trees trekked on down the slopes to circle the small village of New Wolding and its outlying fields before it wandered off to meet Black Creek and the land beyond.
    Stags scraped the velvet from their antlers against that stone. Goats and sheep grazed there often enough to give the meadow the short, trimmed look of a lawn. But mostly it was Tommy Duffin who frequented the meadow and played tunes on his reed pipes to the tall old standing stone. He played in the evenings, as the twilight fell….
    Like his father before him, and his grandfather as well, Tommy had the coarse rough features of the Duffins. His face was plump, his eyes somewhat vacant-looking, his hair lifting in an untidy thatch from his head. But when he lifted his pipes and set his breath into them, he changed.
    His features seemed to become thinner, more defined, and a fire touched his eyes, a flickering of firefly light that said, I know mysteries, hear them in my music. And then he was no longer the same boy of fifteen who lived with his mother in the cottage closest, but one, to the hill.
    That Tuesday evening, Lewis looked up to see Tommy passing by. Lewis was sitting out on the steps of his cabin and lifted a hand in greeting. Tommy nodded, friendly enough, but already that sense of distance was creeping into his eyes and he never broke step as he continued on up to the stone. The wolfish Gaffa gamboled in the fields across from Lewis’s cabin, making his own roundabout way to his master’s destination.
    Lewis continued to sit on his steps. He heard a blackbird’s song, the hum and creak of insects, then—lifted above them, sweeter by far—the sound of Tommy’s piping.
    One by one the villagers began to drift in the direction of Snake Lake Mountain, what they called Wold Hill after the hill they’d left behind in the old country. The Lattens passed by first, William and Ella, both stout and graying now, their son Willie, Jr. and his wife, Rachel, walking with them. Then Alden Mudden, Emery and Luca Blegg, and the Hibbuts sisters, Jenny and Ruth, all in a group. Tommy’s mother, Flora, followed, walking arm in arm with old Ailie Tichner, the only resident of New Wolding older than Lewis since her husband, Miles had died last winter.
    Peter Skegland came next with his wife, Gerda, and their two daughters, Kate and Holly. Walking with the two Skegland girls was Martin Tweedy. His parents, George and Susanna, were not far behind. Bringing up the rear was Lily Spelkins, who’d be sixty-three this summer, but was still as slender and supple as a young girl, and would sometimes dance with the younger women when Tommy’s music grew too gay to resist.
    There aren’t many of us left, Lewis thought as he fell in step with Lily. There were still representatives of all the families that had first immigrated here, all in a group in the late twenties, but slowly and surely they were dying out. Their lives were long, but Lewis didn’t like to think of a time when there would be no one left to follow the old ways.
    There were so few children—and none in the past ten years. Many had left the village. Of the twelve cottages that made up New Wolding, four stood empty now. They needed only one of the two big