by Cate Tiernan
Anyway, in the middle of the freaking night (this stuff always happens in the middle of the night), I woke up because people were yelling and screaming. So I jumped up and threw open my window, looking out into the darkness for the fire or the invading army or the escaped circus tiger. And saw nothing.
But, you know, when people all around you are running and yelling, it makes a person sit up and take notice. I mean, you can keep your head while others lose theirs, but for God’s sake figure out what’s causing the shrill screams of panic. My two cents.
Then I saw it. It took a while to figure out what the hell I was looking at, but I put all my context clues together and cottoned on to the fact that people screaming “The dam broke! The dam broke! It’s coming this way!”—plus an enormous gray slug rushing down the valley, weirdly fast—meant we were all about to die.
I grabbed my jacket and threw it on over my nightdress. (We’re talking a Victorian-era nightdress—lace, yards of fabric, long, the works.) I raced downstairs and found the innkeeper and his wife throwing everything they could into the back of their old box wagon. The horses were neighing and rearing and kept almost toppling the wagon.
Much pandemonium. I remember it was cold, and my feet were bare. I ran out to the stables and found about eight horses freaking out and trying to kick down their stalls. In a split second I tried to figure out which one was the least likely to kill me, and then I undid its stable door bolt. It was a mare, a dappled gray with beautiful lines. I had no idea whom she belonged to. She reared and kicked and I whipped around her slicing hooves and looked for some kind of saddle. But most people took their saddles into the inn with them, because of thieves.
The screaming was louder, and then I heard a series of explosions that rocked the ground like thunder, almost shaking me off my feet. I read later that the rushing flood broke a gas main that had then been ignited by a spark—the showering flames had set most of the buildings on fire. I grabbed the horse’s nose halter and clambered onto her back while she tried to throw me off. But I had been riding horses since I was three years old, so I grabbed her mane with both hands, clamped my knees to her sides, dug my bare feet in, and shouted, “Go!”
And she leaped right out of the barn into the fire. I had no reins, no way to steer this horse. I yanked her head sideways, my fist in her mane, and she turned like a ballerina, swinging left on her two hind feet.
And we raced out of that town, running through the fire, only a hundred yards or so ahead of a great, gray wall of water that was crushing everything in its path. We tore out of there as if creditors were chasing us and ran and ran uphill for what seemed like hours.
At one point I looked back, and all I saw was the flooded valley and the rooftops of buildings, a few still burning and sticking oddly out of the churning, rushing river.
My nightgown and the sleeves of my jacket were charred and singed; I had some blisters on my arms and legs. But I had made it, had escaped being badly burned (immortals feel pain just as regular people do), escaped having to fight the flood, get knocked around, drown but not die, etc. Most people hadn’t survived. Sheffield. That was the name of the town.
I came out of it fine—the jacket I had grabbed had all my worldly goods sewn into the seams and the lining, so I was quickly able to buy new clothes, sell that pretty, lovely, brave mare, and get a new ticket to London. It had made quite a story. I had been victorious over disaster!
Now I couldn’t swallow, sitting here in the stall at River’s Edge. I was still, my hands aching, my chest about to burst. The clean saddle in my lap seemed like it was mocking me, my pathetically tiny penance.
The other horses. All the other horses in the inn’s stables that night. What had happened to them? I could have set them all free, in seconds. They could have run to safety. I probably could not have, in all actuality, saved any people. Maybe another small one, on the back of my horse. But the people had all been trying to take care of themselves, and at the time it never even occurred to me to bother about them.
Or the horses. I’d gotten my ass out of there, leaving trapped and panicked animals behind. I sank miserably into the barn floor. I’m just—such a waste. Such a failure as a person. I couldn’t think of words bad enough to describe me. That, my friends, is only one of hundreds of similar tales, tales where I came out on top, happy and lucky and in good shape. Leaving death and destruction and victims all caught up in the dust cloud on my tail.
CHAPTER 8
Uh-oh. Are you having a moment?”
I looked up to see River grinning at me from the doorway. I rubbed my hand over my eyes and couldn’t muster a smile.
“A whole lot of moments?” Her voice was kind. She came and sat next to me on the dusty floor, littered with bits of hay and stains from tack oil.
I bobbed my head with my usual suave sophistication. I didn’t know why these old memories were affecting me this way—I was literally remembering them differently, from a more acute angle than I ever had. And it was so, so awful.
I looked away from her, still loathing even the suggestion of crying in public.
She rested one hand on my filthy knee. “Drag all the skeletons out where we can see ’em,” she said softly. “That’s the only way to get rid of them. They hate the sunlight.”
Oh, like I would ever admit stuff like this to anyone. No way.
“Maybe I’m not worth saving.” I hadn’t planned to say it—it came out in a whisper. I’d felt guardedly optimistic this morning; now I wouldn’t be surprised if River kicked me to the curb and told me not to come back.
River was silent for a moment. “You don’t believe that.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what to think. I was writhing inside, like an ant under a magnifying glass.
“I think… I’d like to show you something,” she said.
I squelched an unhappy sigh. Here was another teachable moment, hurtling toward me like a freight train.
“I’d have to link our minds together,” she said, and I felt a flicker of interest.
“Why?”
“I have to show you—I can’t just tell you about it.” She waited for my answer.
I couldn’t pass this up. I nodded.
We swept a space clean on the floor, and River drew a perfect circle freehand using some of the rock salt we put on the walkways to make them less icy. An old green candle stood on a shelf; River blew the dust off it and kindled its flame. I made a mental note to ask someone to teach me to do that.
“Now we sit, our knees touching,” she said. Just like we had the night she had stripped all the black dye out of my hair, making me look like the real teenage me.
“Okay.”
“And we’ll call our power, and I’ll cast the spell, and I’ll put my hands on your face,” she explained.
“And you’ll suck my consciousness out through my eyeballs?”
The corners of her mouth turned up. “No. Promise.”
“Okay.” I let out a deep breath, then closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. I heard River singing, chanting, and after a while I joined in, following along. I inhaled deeply, as if I were breathing in lights of many colors, enough to crowd out the blackness that was coiled inside me, aching to get out.
I inhaled again, filling with serenity and beauty, peace and joy. A leftover tear leaked from my eye as I felt the miracle that was magick casting its radiance over me, over us. Filled with magick, I felt only awe, only a brilliant, crystalline perfection drawing me to it. And then River’s cool fingers touched my face. I wondered what she was going to show me at the same moment that I had the nauseating duh that this mind-meld might very well work two ways. Would she be able to see the random and mundane grotesqueness inside me, as I could see inside her?
“No,” said River, and then she was standing in front of me, holding her hand out toward me. I looked around—it was daytime; we were outside somewhere. The scene had a dreamy feel to it, but I felt like we were really there. I reached out, seeing my hand
take hers as if from a long distance away.
“I won’t go into your consciousness unless you ask me to,” she said as we walked. “And you know how to block me or anyone else, even if I tried.”
I was digesting these thoughts when I saw we had come to a tall stone building, the kind you find in old European cities. This one looked pretty new—it wasn’t weathered or chipped. The stones were smooth and stacked together with perfect precision. I heard voices as we came out into a square, a piazza, because we were in Italy—I recognized it.
A crowd of white-robed, foreign-looking people were swarming around a raised platform set up at one end of the square. Flags showing coats of arms hung from several of the buildings. River and I stood at the back of the crowd. I tried to make out what the shouting was about, but I could only barely understand the occasional word, sort of.
“Why can’t I understand them?” I asked River. “I speak Italian.”
“They’re speaking Middle Italian,” she explained. “This is Genoa, the year 912. Come on.”
We moved easily among the crowd—not like we were going right through people, and not like we floated over them, but just that we went forward and somehow eased our way through. Sharp, strong smells filled my nose. The bright colors, the loud shouting, the scents—it was in complete contrast to, say, present-day western Massachusetts.
I remembered that River was from Genoa. She’d been born in… 718? And she was from one of the main houses of immortals, the Genoa branch. So she’d inherited a lot of power.
“Oh…”
I could see now. The platform was maybe eight feet off the ground and had a flag on the front: a coat of arms in red and green, featuring a three-headed snake, hissing. Nice. There were at least twenty people on the platform, and it took a minute to understand what I was seeing: the bargaining, the calling for bids. It was a slave auction. I’d seen them before, in different times, different parts of the world—it was amazing how common slavery had been in so many places until relatively recently. These looked like ragamuffin white people being sold to…
“Who’s buying them?” I asked River.
“Mainly men from the Muslim countries to the east,” she said.
“Where’d the slaves come from?”
“All over. A lot of Slavs. Some Baltic, some Turkish. Mostly Slavs.”
I was wondering why she’d wanted me to see this, when my eye was caught by a flash of red. Up on the platform, behind everyone, stood a woman. Her back was to me, and she seemed to be directing the order of slaves being sold. At her word, beefy guys dispassionately hauled people forward. There were men, women, and children. The auctioneer was yelling constantly, working the crowd, describing a slave’s attributes and trying to get the bids up. Two tall men with dark hair and eyes stood over on one side. One of them spoke to the woman, and she turned around, laughing.
It was young River, not quite two hundred years old. She was beautiful, with long black hair hanging down her back in complicated braids. A small white linen cap was tied under her chin. Her dress was simple but luxurious, and compared to the rest of the crowd, she was clearly of a higher class.
She called something back to the man, and they both laughed. Then she turned and spoke to the auctioneer’s assistant, who bowed and nodded. Her clear brown eyes scanned the crowd shrewdly—she was gauging her audience. She quickly counted the slaves yet to be sold this day and almost absently touched the brown leather pouch tied to her waist.
I turned to the River at my side. She was watching the scene calmly, but there was deep sadness in her eyes.
“We were very successful slave traders,” she said. “My brothers and I. We operated as different branches of a large, mythical family and were able to stay in Genoa for almost three centuries before the witch rumors started.”
“Who are those men?” I pointed to the tall, dark men at one side.
“My brothers,” she said. “Two of them.”
One of the men called, “Diavola!”
The River on the platform turned and raised her eyebrows, then called back an answer to his question.
“Was Diavola your first name?”
“My third,” River said. “The name I was born under was Aulina.”
It only sank in gradually: River, one of the few actually truly pretty good people in the world—certainly the most good person I’d ever met—had bought and sold human beings. For centuries.
On the platform, a sobbing woman slave was being torn from her squalling infant. Diavola watched dispassionately nearby. River turned away.
“I’m ready to go,” she murmured, and again I was aware of her fingertips touching my temples. With the next breath, I drew in reality and the scene faded away.
I didn’t open my eyes. I don’t think they were ever closed. It was more like River came into focus in front of me.
She lowered her hands and began to dismantle the spell. As much as each spell was created layer upon layer, so it was taken apart, layer by layer. I got my usual panicky horror at the feeling of bliss fading, leaving my world washed out and grayer, leaving me incomplete and flawed. That’s why people would kill other people to take their power. I saw it now. Of course people would want more of that feeling, want to have it more often, have it last longer, be stronger. If I were truly Terävä, I would kill River right now and seize her power for myself.
I blinked and drew in a shocked breath, awed by my horrible thoughts. But you won’t kill River, I thought quickly. You would never do that. Never. You’re not all bad. You’re not someone who would do such a thing. You know that.
I was barely aware of when River blew out the candle.
“Everyone is worth saving,” she said softly, not looking at me. Her slim hands rested lightly on her knees.
I felt my butt frozen to the floor, the ache in my back and along my legs. For future reference, I would prefer to do magick wearing sweatpants, on a water bed. Enough with cold floors.
“You told me once that you used to be dark. Was that what you were talking about? That your family used to be slave traders?” I asked.
River gave a short, sardonic laugh, making me blink. I’d never heard her do that. “Yes, that was part of it. But sadly that wasn’t even the darkest part of my history. Slave-trading was bad, it was really bad, and it put my karma in the toilet. But my story goes deeper and gets much worse, I’m afraid.”
I had trouble believing that, but in my mind I saw Diavola, young and beautiful and without feeling as she split families apart and consigned people to wretched futures with slave owners.
“My point is, everyone is worth saving,” she said, more firmly. “If I didn’t believe that, I couldn’t go on. I’d have ended it all a long time ago.”
I nodded as we got up, brushing hay off my seat and wiggling to get some warmth going. “Yes, I mean slaving was not good. But slaves were everywhere back then. That society considered it normal. No one thought you were awful for being in that line of business, at that time.”
Her eyes were thoughtful. “You think that makes it all right, not evil?”
“I think it makes it less evil,” I said honestly. “You can only be formed by your society.” I came up with a quote I had heard once: “ ‘Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ ”
“Hmm,” said River. “That could make for some very interesting dinner conversation. So if you think that the nature of the society helps determine the relative evilness of a thing, would you say that Reyn’s marauding and plundering was less bad, because it was so common back then? So many tribes did it?”
I stared at her. How neatly she had turned the tables on me. I looked for spite in her eyes but saw only warmth and compassion.
I couldn’t craft a coherent, well-reasoned reply. Instead I stiffly hung the cleaned tack and saddles on their pegs and tried to squash my immediate urge to lash out at her.
“That was different,” I said, knowing how ridiculous it sounded, and knowing that she had me. I coul
dn’t make excuses for her without making excuses for Reyn, and I would never make excuses for Reyn.
“Hmm,” she said again, and looked at her watch. “It’s late. And I think you’re on the dinner team.”
She managed a slight smile at my unenthusiastic look, but she seemed tired or withdrawn, as if visiting that past had drained her.
I felt a little less bad.
CHAPTER 9
During my centuries of debauchery and wastedness, I had lost most of my practical skills. Now I found a quiet, surprising satisfaction in my ability to do things somewhat competently. Even if I had to do them side by side with Jess and the unsmiling Butcher of Winter.
As long as I didn’t have to stand too close to Reyn, I was okay. We hadn’t spoken since our Winter Wonderland experience. Perhaps if I didn’t get a whiff of the fresh-laundry scent of his shirt, I might possibly be able to not throw myself at him and make out right on top of the kitchen table.
“Here.” Jess set a basket of already (thank God) scrubbed turnips, carrots, and potatoes on the kitchen table. He’d put a big roast in the oven hours earlier, and the room was filled with delicious-smelling steam.
“You want ’em cubed or in big chunks or what?” I asked.
“Big chunks. I’ll add them to the pot,” he replied, and turned to open a bottle of wine. Without asking, he filled a wineglass halfway and put it at my elbow. No one here drank much at all, and I knew that some of us, like Jess for example, had had huge substance-abuse problems at some point.
But I wasn’t going to look a gift glass in the mouth. I picked it up quickly and inhaled its sweet, rich tang. Then I took a sip and let it linger in my mouth. So, so lovely. I tried not to think about times when I’d chugged half a bottle in one gulp.
Jess put most of the bottle into the great big pan in the oven. A wave of roasting meat filled the room, and my stomach growled.