The Watchtower

was planting a sap-rich kiss on his forehead. She reached up to her scalp, snapped off a branch, and laid it in Will’s lap. It was gold, and glimmered in the renewed afternoon sunshine as if a piece of the sun had fallen there.
    “Will, you take this gold branch with you to the pool at Paimpont and stand on its western bank at sunset. Hold the branch up so that it can summon the sun’s rays to it like a magnet. That is the key to entering the Summer Country, where immortality is the rule. Morgane will see the glittering key and take you across, and you can return here as you please as Will Hughes, immortal. I will be waiting for you, darling. We can marry, for you are the grandest mortal I have ever beheld. As an immortal, you may well be my equal!” Sylvianne swooped down with a whoosh and planted another gummy kiss on Will’s forehead. Then her voice turned to ice.
    “But if I find out that you have tricked me, Will Hughes, and gotten me to give you this immortal key because of your obsession with that scarlet trash, I and my multitudinous legions will track you down to whatever corner of the earth you hide in and impale you on one of the earth’s cracked bones. There you can hang for all eternity, instead of being held safely in my arms, an object lesson for the winds and birds, for humanity, to see. And even at that your fate will be a much too kind one.”
    Will, disappointed to learn he wasn’t already immortal, found himself shivering at the scale of her threat. It almost made him reconsider even his love for Marguerite. But Sylvianne was simply overwrought at the depth of her love for him, he reassured himself. That could change. She might encounter someone else she really loved. He’d just have to take his chances.
    Will grasped the gold branch firmly in his right hand and struggled down from her hammocklike embrace. As he stood again, he was surprised to find himself directly facing Sylvianne’s features; at a glance down he saw that her trunk legs were splayed out at right angles beneath her. She was kneeling to be on the same level as him!
    “Thank you for this gift,” he told her, “which I pledge to use to ensure our union.”
    Sylvianne smiled, and her eyes teared up once more.
    Will suspected that she still didn’t trust him, but she did seem prepared to let him go now, at least for a trip to Paimpont and back. None of her moods, good or bad, seemed to last long anyway. He should take advantage of this one. He hugged her trunk and kissed her lips, which flooded his mind with memories of the fantastical interlude they had shared and flooded his mind even more with recollections of his black-haired vision-lover. Then he left, striding briskly down the path toward the town, where he could book passage on the stagecoach to Paimpont.
    All Will heard from behind was a sigh. Perhaps a lament.
    All he saw in front of him was Marguerite, her beautiful face in his memory. She blotted out the woods, the gardens, the château, even the wind-caressed sun.
    Because she was the sun.

22
    The Reeds
    I didn’t sleep well that night. The room was musty, but when I opened the windows to let in fresh air, loud voices and music wafted up from the restaurant. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw Will’s face carved in stone. His ancestor’s, I’d gathered from the inscription on the sarcophagus base: Guillem de Hughes—but still, seeing his features like that made him, my present Will Hughes, seem dead.
    As well he might be. Octavia had told me what Morgane did to some of her supplicants. If Will had made his way here months ago and been successful in gaining his mortality back, wouldn’t he have come to find me by now? Or had Morgane granted him his mortality only to take his life away in his first mortal breath in four hundred years?
    By the time I went downstairs to meet Octavia at breakfast, I felt as though I were made of stone. She, however, looked fresh and plump as the just-shucked oysters she’d consumed last night.
    “Oh my,” she exclaimed through a mouthful of brioche, “have some coffee. We have a hard day ahead of us.”
    She was dressed as if for a safari through the Kalahari Desert, in khaki shorts that showed off her shapely legs and a safari jacket that hid her many arms. As I had my café au lait and croissant, she showed me the contents of our matching rucksacks: water canteen, chocolate bars, bread and cheese, flashlight, first-aid kit, compass, rope, waterproof matches, a Swiss