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

no red-haired boy standing by the tree. Instead, she found an old man with the red-haired boy’s eyes. And a stag. The stag turned its antlered head towards her and regarded her with a gaze that sent shivers scurrying up and down her spine. For a long moment its gaze held hers, then it turned, its flank flashing red in the moonlight, and the darkness swallowed it.
    Sara shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, but she couldn’t escape the chill.
    The stag…
    That was impossible. The garden had always been strange, seeming so much larger than its acreage would allow, but there couldn’t possibly be a deer living in it without her having seen it before. Except… What about a boy becoming an old man overnight? A boy who really and truly did live in a tree?
    “Sara,” the old man said.
    It was Merlin’s voice. Merlin’s eyes. Her Merlin grown into an old man.
    “You…you’re old,” she said.
    “Older than you could imagine.”
    “But—”
    “I came to you as you’d be most likely to welcome me.”
    “Oh.”
    “Did you mean what you said?” he asked.
    Memories flooded Sara. She remembered a hundred afternoons of warm companionship. All those hours of quiet conversation and games. The peace that came from her night fears. If she said yes, then he’d go away. She’d lose her friend. And the night fears… Who’d be there to make the terrors go away? Only he had been able to help her. Not Jamie nor anyone else who lived in the house, though they’d all tried.
    “You’ll go away…won’t you?” she said.
    He nodded. An old man’s nod. But the eyes were still young. Young and old, wise and silly, all at the same time. Her red-haired boy’s eyes.
    “I’ll go away,” he replied. “And you won’t remember me.”
    “I won’t forget,” Sara said. “I would never forget.”
    “You won’t have a choice,” Merlin said. “Your memories of me would come with me when I go.”
    “They’d be…gone forever…?”
    That was worse than losing a friend. That was like the friend never having been there in the first place.
    “Forever,” Merlin said. “Unless…”
    His voice trailed off, his gaze turned inward.
    “Unless what?” Sara asked finally.
    “I could try to send them back to you when I reach the other side of the river.”
    Sara blinked with confusion. “What do you mean? The other side of what river?”
    “The Region of the Summer Stars lies across the water that marks the boundary between what is and what has been. It’s a long journey to that place. Sometimes it takes many lifetimes.”
    They were both quiet then. Sara studied the man that her friend had become. The gaze he returned her was mild. There were no demands in it. There was only regret. The sorrow of parting. A fondness that asked for nothing in return.
    Sara stepped closer to him, hesitated a moment longer, then hugged him.
    “I do love you, Merlin,” she said. “I can’t say I don’t when I do.”
    She felt his arms around her, the dry touch of his lips on her brow.
    “Go gentle,” he said. “But beware the calendaring of the trees.”
    And then he was gone.
    One moment they were embracing and the next her arms only held air. She let them fall limply to her sides. The weight of an awful sorrow bowed her head. Her throat grew thick, her chest tight. She swayed where she stood, tears streaming from her eyes.
    The pain felt like it would never go away.
    But the next thing she knew she was waking in her bed in the northwest tower and it was the following morning. She woke from a dreamless sleep, clear-eyed and smiling. She didn’t know it, but her memories of Merlin were gone.
    But so were her night fears.

    * * *

    The older Sara, still not a woman, but old enough to understand more of the story now, fingered a damp leaf and looked up into the spreading canopy of the oak above her.
    Could any of that really have happened? she wondered.
    The electric charge she’d felt in the air when she’d approached the old