Free Very Best of Charles de Lint, The by Charles de Lint

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 was 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 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 the wildflower garden, a regular gallimaufry of flowering plants, both common and exotic. And then she was near the fountain. She could see Merlin’s oak, looming up above the rest of the garden like the lordly tree it was.
    And she could hear voices.
    She crept nearer, a small shadow hidden in deeper patches cast by the fat yellow moon.
    “—never a matter of choice,” a man’s voice was saying. “The lines of our lives are laid out straight as a dodman’s leys, from event to event. You chose your road.”
    She couldn’t see the speaker, but the timbre of his voice was low and resonating, like a deep bell. She couldn’t recognize it, but she did recognize Merlin’s when he replied to the stranger.
    “When I chose my road, there was no road. There was only the trackless wood; the hills, lying crest to crest like low-backed waves; the glens where the harps were first imagined and later strung. Ca’canny, she told me when I came into the Wood. I thought go gentle meant go easy, not go fey; that the oak guarded the Borders, marked its boundaries. I never guessed it was a door.”
    “All knowledge is a door,” the stranger replied. “You knew that.”
    “In theory,” Merlin replied.
    “You meddled.”
    “I was born to meddle. That was the part I had to play.”
    “But when your part was done,” the stranger said, “you continued to meddle.”
    “It’s in my nature, father. Why else was I chosen?”
    There was a long silence then. Sara had an itch on her nose but she didn’t dare move a hand to scratch it. She mulled over what she’d overheard, trying to understand.
    It was all so confusing. From what they were saying it seemed that her Merlin was the Merlin in the stories. But if that was true, then why did he look like a boy her own age? How could he even still be alive? Living in a tree in Jamie’s garden and talking to his father…
    “I’m tired,” Merlin said. “And this is an old argument, father. The winters are too short. I barely step into a dream and then it’s spring again. I need a longer rest. I’ve earned a longer rest. The Summer Stars call to me.”
    “Love bound you,” the stranger said.
    “An oak bound me. I never knew she was a tree.”
    “You knew. But you preferred to ignore what you knew because you had to riddle it all. The salmon wisdom of the hazel wasn’t enough. You had to partake of the fruit of every tree.”
    “I’ve learned from my error,” Merlin said. “Now set me free, father.”
    “I can’t. Only love can unbind you.”
    “I can’t be found, I can’t be seen,” Merlin said. “What they remember of me is so tangled up in Romance, that no one can find the man behind the tales. Who is there to love me?”
    Sara pushed her way out of the thicket where she’d been hiding and stepped into the moonlight.
    “There’s me,” she began, but then her voice died in her throat.
    There was