The Watchtower

annoy Sylvianne as I believe she had une petite crush on him when he first came to Paris and is still angry at losing him to Marguerite. Let’s just hope that she’s gotten over him.”
    As she turned the key, I said I hoped so, too. After all, I added to myself, it had been over four hundred years. Even Will’s charms couldn’t linger that long. Could they?
    *   *   *
    As we stepped into the park, I noticed that we passed through a shimmering curtain of violet mist, much like the haze I’d seen in the Square Viviani when Jean Robin’s tree had opened up for me.
    “Fairy shroud,” Madame La Pieuvre informed me when she saw me looking back. “To keep unauthorized mortals from witnessing fey activity. From outside, the park appears empty.”
    So far it appeared empty from the inside. We were walking along the allée of pollarded plane trees, the only sound the rustle of the heavy leaves. With the light of the city blocked by the fairy shroud, the park was as dark as the middle of a primeval forest. I looked up toward the sky, but the leaf canopy was so dense it would have blocked any moonlight or starlight even if the park hadn’t been covered by fairy shroud. I couldn’t see the leaves overhead, but I could hear them, layers upon layers of damp leaves rustling in the breeze, making a sound like running water. The sound stirred something in me, a feeling that made my heart race, but whether with fear or excitement I wasn’t sure.
    It’s just the Jardin du Luxembourg, I told myself. You walked in this allée earlier today and admired how ordered the trees were.…
    A leaf brushed my face and I brushed it away. My hand grazed rough bark … but we were walking down the center of the allée, weren’t we? How had this slim sapling broken through the neatly ordered line of pollarded trees? Had we strayed from the allée?
    I turned to look back toward the park gates, and a thick vine dropped over my shoulder.
    A vine? In the meticulously manicured and landscaped Luxembourg Gardens?
    Then I felt the soft velvet of Madame La Pieuvre’s hand gently but firmly unwrapping the vine from around my arm. To my relief I could see her even in the dark. Her round face glowed softly against the backdrop of tangled forest.
    “The trees—,” I began, but she silenced me by placing a damp velvety finger on my lips.
    “They’re listening,” she whispered. Placing one of her fingers to her own lips, she simultaneously untangled three more vines that had insinuated themselves around my arms and neck. She wrapped one of her arms firmly around my waist and propelled me down the allée—or at least down what used to be the allée. By the faint phosphorescent glow of Madame La Pieuvre’s skin, I could see now that the ordered line of trees had grown—in hours—into a dense and wild forest. The tree trunks here were twisted and gnarled, like coastal trees that had grown in a steady wind, and they were festooned with heavy vines looping down into the path. If not for Madame La Pieuvre’s many hands fending them off, I would have gotten tangled in them. Even the ground was no longer the level, dusty path I’d walked on earlier today. Roots buckled the earth and twisted beneath my feet. I tripped over one and would have fallen, but for Madame La Pieuvre’s firm, many-handed grip. She scooped me up and carried me over the last few yards of woods into an open clearing where she dumped me onto the soft lawn.
    “That patch becomes more unruly every year,” she said, smoothing her hair and straightening her cloak while helping me to my feet. “The mer fey used to believe that pollarding the trees would keep them from breaking free at night, but it only makes them angry and more fractious. Many of the old allées have become impassable at night.”
    I looked back at the dense stand of trees and wondered how we were going to get out of the park, but I didn’t have time to ponder that question because Madame La Pieuvre was purposefully striding across the lawn toward the statue of Diana, which glowed with the same phosphorescent light as Madame La Pieuvre emitted. The open sky above the park, although still veiled by the iridescent fairy shroud, also let in some light—a flickering, multicolored spangle that I guessed came from the Eiffel Tower in the north, and two yellow beacons from the south, like twin cat eyes, which came from the direction of the avenue de l’Observatoire. I was going to ask Madame La Pieuvre