Also by Charles de Lint from Tom Doherty Associates DREAMS UNDERFOOT THE FAIR AT ...

394 Pages·2003·5.96 MB·English

Also by Charles de Lint from Tom Doherty Associates
DREAMS UNDERFOOT
THE FAIR AT EMAIN MACHA
GREENMANTLE
INTO THE GREEN
THE IVORY AND THE HORN
JACK OF KINROWAN
THE LITTLE COUNTRY
MEMORY AND DREAM
MOONHEART
MOONLIGHT AND VINES
SOMEPLACE TO BE FLYING
SPIRITWALK
SVAHA
TRADER
YARROW
Forests or the Heart
Charles de Lint
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in
this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
FORESTS OF THE HEART
Copyright © 2000 by Charles de Lint
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or por-
tions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Edited by Terri Windling
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty
Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeLint, Charles
Forests of the heart / Charles de Lint.—1st ed.
p. cm.
"A Tom Doherty Associates book."
ISBN 0-312-86519-8 (acid-free paper)
1. Artist colonies—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.D357 F67 2000
813'.54—dc21 00-027679
First Edition: June 2000
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Grateful acknowledgments are made to:
Miss Anna Sunshine Ison for the use of her cadejos poem,
and for allowing me to make a slight adjustment in it to fit
the story. Copyright © 1998 by Miss Anna Sunshine Ison.
Printed by permission of the author.
Ani DiFranco for the use of lines from "Pixie" from her
album Little Plastic Castle. Copyright © 1998 by Ani
DiFranco, Righteous Babe Music. Lyrics reprinted by per-
mission. For more information about DiFranco's music,
contact Righteous Babe Records, P.O. Box 95, Ellicott Sta-
tion, Buffalo, NY 14205-0095.
for
Karen Shaffer and Charles Vess
the stars shine brighter
where you walk
Contents
Author's Note
1. Los lobos
2. Musgrave Wood
3. Chehthagi Mashath
4. Masks
5. Los Días de Muertos
6. Ice
7. En el Bosque del Corazón
8. Los cadejos
Author's Note
Special thanks to Mary Ann for helping me find the time to write this through
a couple of years that were inordinately busy; Charles Vess for providing me
with some of the Green Man material (though I hasten to add that my take on
that venerable figure is far different from the usual folkloric depictions); Miss
Anna Sunshine Ison for los cadejos; Mardelle and Richard Kunz for putting up
with far too many questions by e-mail—and for tracking down the answers to
them; Jim Harris for the lexicon; Rodger Turner and Paul Fletcher for
valiantly helping me through some rather severe computer woes (and thanks
as well to Rodger for that early reading of the manuscript); Barry Ambridge
for straightening me out on tires; Swain Wolfe for explaining the difference
between power and luck; Lawrence Schmiel for vetting the Spanish (any errors
are mine); Amanda Fisher for once again helping with the bookmarks; and the
folks at Tor for being very patient this time.
I've been taken to task by a number of readers for not noting the music I was
listening to when I've written my last few books. So, this time out my ears
were filled, my toes tapped, my spirit was made more full by ... well, too large
a number of fine musicians to list them all here. But briefly, of late I've been
listening to a lot of Steve Earle, Fred Eaglesmith, Dar Williams, Ani DiFranco,
Stacey Earle, Buddy Miller, Tori Amos, the Walkabouts (including their
"Chris and Carla" recordings), and all the various incarnations in which
Johnette Napolitano finds herself, one of my favorites being the CD she
recorded with Los Illegals.
When I'm actually writing, however, I lean more towards instrumental
music where the words in my ear don't interfere with the words going down
on the screen. For this book that involved less Celtic music than usual, though
Solas was never far from the CD player. Mostly I found myself playing some
of those neo-Flamenco artists such as Robert Michaels, Ottmar Leibert, Ger-
ardo Nunez, and Oscar Lopez, while towards the end of the book, Douglas
Spotted Eagle's Closer to Far Away and Robbie Robertson's last two albums
(Music for the Native Americans and Contact from the Underworld of Red-
boy) were in constant rotation.
But man does not live by worldbeat alone. Many of the hours spent on
this novel found me nodding my head to Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Miles
Davis, Bill Evans, Charlie Haden's duet albums, Clifford Brown, and this won-
derful ten-CD set that my friend Rodger gave me: The Complete Jazz at the
Philharmonic on Verve.
If you decide to try any of the above, I hope you'll enjoy them as much as
I have.
And as usual, let me mention that the city, characters, and events to be
found in these pages are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or
dead is purely coincidental.
If any of you are on the Internet, come visit my homepage. The URL
(address) is http://www.cyberus.ca/-cdl
—Charles de Lint
Ottawa, Spring 1999
In the middle of the journey of our life,
I came to myself within a dark wood where
tne straight way was lost.
—DANTE ALIGHIERI,
from Tne Divine Comedy
1
Los lobos
El lobo pierde los dientes más no las mientes,
The wolf loses his teeth, not his nature.
—MEXICAN-AMERICAN SAYING
Like her sister, Bettina San Miguel was a small, slender woman in
her mid-twenties, dark-haired and darker-eyed; part Indio, part Mexican, part
something older still. Growing up, they'd often been mistaken for twins, but
Bettina was a year younger and, unlike Adelita, she had never learned to for-
get. The little miracles of the long ago lived on in her, passed down to her from
their abuela, and her grandmother before her. It was a gift that skipped a gen-
eration, tradition said.
"¡Tradición, pah!" their mother was quick to complain when the oppor-
tunity arose. "You call it a gift, but I call it craziness."
Their abuela would nod and smile, but she still took the girls out into the
desert, sometimes in the early morning or evening, sometimes in the middle of
the night. They would leave empty-handed, be gone for hours and return with
full bellies, without thirst. Return with something in their eyes that made their
mother cross herself, though she tried to hide the gesture.
"They miss too much school," she would say.
"Time enough for the Anglos' school when they are older," Abuela
replied.
"And church? If they die out there with you, their sins unforgiven?"
"The desert is our church, its roof the sky. Do you think the Virgin and los