Sholto looked at her bleakly.
Canny took Ghislain’s hand. “It’s getting a bit chilly out here. Ghislain and I are going to make ourselves something to eat.”
Sholto got up. He fixed his eyes on Ghislain and said, “I’m asking you to behave”—he blushed—“like a gentleman.”
“I don’t give promises,” Ghislain said.
Sholto turned to Canny. “Don’t forget your letter.” Then he seemed to think of something else. He came right up to her and put his mouth to her ear—just as she had to Ghislain a little while back. He whispered something, met her sharp look, and stepped away. Then he went past Cyrus and stomped off around the front of the house. Cyrus made to follow, but Ghislain grabbed his arm. “There were two of her?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t know anything about that,” Canny said. She sounded aggrieved. “I didn’t do anything!”
“And you’re sure you don’t have a twin?” Cyrus said.
“No, I don’t!”
The dusk was now no longer blue, but gray. Cyrus’s face was indistinct under his phosphorescently white hair. Ghislain couldn’t make out an expression in either Cyrus’s face or voice when he said, “Be very careful with her,” and then extracted his arm from Ghislain’s grasp and followed Sholto.
* * *
THEY WENT INDOORS. Ghislain picked Canny up and sat her on the table. He lit the gas mantle over her head, and, as the soft mist of white light bloomed above her, he kissed her cheeks and then her mouth.
He got busy packing handfuls of kindling into the range. Then he lit them and crouched at the open hatchway blowing on the flames. He fed the fire more substantial bits of wood, then a shovelful of coal. He filled a pot and put it on to boil, then opened a cupboard to look for the new potatoes he was keeping there. “Boiled potatoes and salt,” he said. “I’m getting low on salt.”
“Next you’ll have me running messages. Doing shopping.”
“I won’t.”
“Admit it, you keep thinking what use I can be to you.”
“You’ve been useful. You stood with me.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
Ghislain closed the cupboard and came to sit beside her. They stayed silent for a few minutes. She gazed into the middle distance and he gazed at her.
“You left your letter outside,” he said.
“My own letters won’t have had enough time to get to Marli. Or she’ll have the first one now, but this letter has come too quickly to be an answer to that one, or to any of the stuff I’ve told her about the magic, and you. Marli’s letter will be all stories about things that are happening on the women’s ward. She likes the plots. The nurses and orderlies come and talk to her, to tell her their side of things. Because she’s always there, and she’s a good listener.” Canny made her explanation and then fell silent again. Ghislain waited, watching her face. She looked quenched, and broken.
“Even if my first letter has reached her—the one about the thing that slapped me on the other side of the ranges, then—” She sighed. “I forgot to tell her that I wasn’t just trying to entertain her. She’ll think I’m making up a story, that we’re having a game. So her letter will have a story in it, about something magical that happened to her.”
Canny leaned against Ghislain. She nestled, warm. “I’m not ready to have to choose,” she said, “whether to stay or go. I’d rather go on sitting with you than open Marli’s letter.”
He kissed her hair. “We could go lie down on the big sofa in the library.”
They did that, went to the library, kicked off their shoes and lay down, he wrapping her so that even her feet were tucked between his lower legs. She shivered for a time. “I’m going to feel homesick everywhere now,” she said. “I can’t go home. But I shouldn’t be here either.”
Ghislain thought that if he kept kissing her, he could make it so that she wouldn’t think of leaving him for a very long time. And when she did finally go, there really would be nothing for him to stay for. It would make everything easier. Even after his planning and work, he needed a decisive moment—like the moment this girl turned her back on him for good. If he kept kissing her, she’d become life for him. Then she’d leave, and that would be life turning its back on him, not the other way around.
“You should stay as long as you like,” he said. “We don’t have to do things to anyone else’s timetable. This is our house, and time means nothing here.”
She didn’t answer.
“I love you,” he said. “If you stay, I’ll stay.”
She continued silent, but still pressed against him, warm and pliant. “What did your brother whisper in your ear?” Ghislain asked.
“Nothing important.”
“Something trivial, private, embarrassing?”
“Yes.” Canny sat up and freed herself from his arms and got off the sofa.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m getting my letter.”
He stretched out a hand, relaxed, graceful. “Leave it a little while longer. Let me tell you how I acquired my Found One.”
Her face opened and lit up and she came to lie beside him again, in the loose circle of his arms, so that, as he talked, she could watch his face.
16
“ONE DAY, WHEN I’D BEEN working in the mine for about a year and was tired of it, tired of the family’s plan to tediously accumulate money for legal fees, I went in search of a quick fix for all of us. I went in search of some new, powerful magic.
“I broke into the linen press at Orchard House and stole the great-aunties’ Spell Veil. I thought I could go get my Master Rune. In other words, I didn’t believe what I’d been told about anchors. Of course I couldn’t go back to my own beginnings and find my Master Rune, but I did get out. I got out somewhere.
“When the family built this house they cleared the whole summit of the hill. It took years for the trees along the boundary to grow back, so that their tops hid the house from the view of people on the valley floor. When I was a boy what you used to be able to see was a skirt of old growth forest all around the base of the hill. And above that the garden terraces and the house. All the trees that are big now, like the black beech and golden ash, were just saplings.
“Anyway, when I wrapped myself in the great-aunties’ Spell Veil and left my body, I found myself still in the valley, as it was then, when the house was clear of trees. Only, in the place I found myself, the top of the hill was an island. The valley was full of water, a lake without a shore. The lake had scoured away the sides of the hills so that, instead of a shore at the water’s edge, there were bare, undercut bluffs.
“I was in a dinghy, but it had no oars. I had to paddle with my hands, kneeling up on the seat in the bow, scooping the water behind me. The dinghy waggled slowly forward, bow down and stern up. All the time I was paddling I was looking at the island. It was just the top three terraces of the hill. Actually, I think its shores were the farthest reaches of the Great Spell, where the imprisonment spell now begins.
“It was taking some time getting to the island. I paused for a rest and, without my hands agitating it, the water grew smooth, and I could see into it. It was clear, like resin. I could see far down, to drowned trees, their leaves yellow but still fixed to the branches. There was fruit down there too, rising like bubbles in the water, drifting up and bumping against the hull of my boat. Apples and pears and apricots and peaches, some full of holes, fruity caves where the wasps had burrowed because everything had been left to ripen too long.
“I finally got near the island. At the lake’s edge the surface of the water wasn’t smooth anymore, but rough with what I thought was a layer of dead leaves. But when I put my hand into the floating matter it felt all wrong; light and resilient. I grabbed a handful and lifted it to my eyes, and found that what I held was a handful of dead bees. The water all around the island was covered in a carpet of drowned bees.
“The boat bumped up against the stone wall of t
he lowest terrace. I stood to step onto the waterlogged garden, and someone came rushing out of the tangle of raspberry canes. And I saw that it was me—which I’d heard happened sometimes and is normal. After all, I was supposed to be going back within my own lifetime in order to get to the moment of my own conception and discover my Master Rune, bursting into the universe with every other possibility of my life. I was supposed to be in my own past, and I could expect to see myself. But I should have been seeing my younger self in a world I recognized.
“This me wasn’t any younger. He looked exactly like me then—in 1929, and now—seventeen years of age.
“He got down on his knees on the terrace wall, put his hands together, and scooped up a big handful of dead bee bodies. Then he went like this—”
Ghislain demonstrated, crushing the palms of his hands together so forcefully that his arms trembled. “And then this,” he said, and flung out his hands. “The ball of dead bees flew toward me, I yelled, and the whole mass flew into my mouth and down into my chest and stomach. Then all the bees came back to life and stung me. A fiery pain spread out into my whole body.
“I didn’t see what happened to that other me, because right then the bow of the dingy bumped up as someone climbed into it over the stern, out of the lake.”
Ghislain stopped. He smiled at Canny, his smile mirthful.
“Who?” Canny said. “Who climbed into your boat?”
“Iris, of course. She climbed in and told me that we had to go, immediately, if we were ever going to get back to our bodies. She took my hand and pulled me out of the boat and into the lake. We swam away from the island, then dived down into the lake’s perfectly clear, glassy depths. We swam over the tops of the trees to the house you know as the guesthouse.
“There was a long curtain billowing out the window of my room—the room with the northwest-facing dormer window.”
“My room,” Canny said, soft and wondering.
“It was a long, lace curtain,” Ghislain said. “And when I saw it I realized it was the great-aunties’ Spell Veil. Iris shoved me through my bedroom window and pulled the drifting length of lace in after us. She pushed me down onto my bed and held me there.
“And everything was real, Canny. You know how hard it is to hold someone in place when you’re both underwater? That was how it really was. The only unreal thing was the length of time one breath sustained us. Everything else was faithful to the facts of the world. The mattress was pulpy and waterlogged, and trapped bubbles came out of the bedclothes and floated up to the ceiling and joined there to form a silvery skin of air.
“Iris reeled in the Spell Veil and wrapped it around herself, then drifted down onto me so that I was wrapped too. And then I came back into my body with a sickening crash to find myself cocooned in the veil with Iris.”
“She had climbed into it after you did?” Canny said.
“It was the only thing she could think to do. You see, people don’t go and come back, not without an anchor. Iris had left her right hand free. She had covered it in pain runes, written with that kids’ invisible-ink recipe—egg white, lemon juice, water. She’d set two lit candles between her spread fingers. The candles burned down, and their heat and glow had brought out the invisible-ink pain runes, then once they burned lower, they actually scorched the skin of her hand. It was the agony of that brought her back to her body.”
Canny let out a little sigh. “Iris saved you.”
“Yes.”
“But she hates you.”
“That came later, when she’d lost her father and uncles and cousins, and her fiancé, a guitar-playing coal miner from Massenfer who was a friend of Lealand. Imagine the valley’s women. The methane explosion and chokedamp killed most of their men. The second fire—my Found One’s fire—took the rest. By my reckoning, another eight men might have survived if it wasn’t for what I carried.”
“The ball of bees. That was it, your Found One?”
“Yes, that was it. And maybe the other me was it too.”
Canny frowned and glanced away. There was something she should remember.
Ghislain went on. “Iris might not have hated me then, but she was always competitive, and envious of me. She was even more envious once she realized I’d brought something powerful back with me.”
Canny had forgotten to close her mouth, her lips were parted, soft, red with heat and sleepiness and excitement. She stared at him through slitted eyes, and then kissed him, passionately. She opened her mouth and drew his tongue into it. The taste of her was marvelous, but he broke away. “No,” he said.
“But—why?”
“You’re too young.”
“You might be older than me, but not all that much has happened to you.”
“I’ve been sequestered, that’s true. But I have the patience of a fifty-year-old.”
“A friend of the Professor’s who’s a neurologist says teenagers aren’t just adults who haven’t had as much time under the sun. He says teenagers’ brains are actually different. It’s physical. If you’re seventeen, Ghislain, you have a seventeen-year-old brain. Your patience is just a habit.”
“I know that,” he said.
Canny pushed her fist into his chest, for emphasis, and said, “I don’t want to grow out of my courage!”
“But there are things I’d love to grow out of,” Ghislain said.
“Don’t say that! The Professor and Mother are always telling me I’ll grow out of things. And if my grandma Mochrie is in the room she always says sarcastically, ‘Oh, she’ll grow out of hips that work properly too.’ And, ‘Growing out of things isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!’”
“I think I like this Grandma Mochrie.”
Canny stopped glowering. “Yes. Me too. She’s been very useful. And my other grandparent, who I don’t see very often, he’s useful too. He taught me how to scale a fish, and make cloth out of flax.” She patted Ghislain’s cheek. Apparently she was over her moment of self-abandon. “Granddad Afa,” she said affectionately.
* * *
CANNY WAS COMFORTABLE IN GHISLAIN’S ARMS—until she said something, her grandfather’s name, and Ghislain gave a seismic jolt and she actually felt his skin go cold.
“What’s the matter?” She could feel him trying to control his breathing. “Do you hear the others? Are they coming back?”
He was wrestling himself back into composure. He said, “I think there might be someone coming. I was worried about your letter. You left it out there, sealed, so they’ll know you haven’t read it. They might remove it. To bait their hooks.”
Canny rolled off the sofa and landed with a thump on the floor. Ghislain sat up and helped her to her feet, and she rushed outside.
No one was out there. Dew was falling and the boards of the porch were damp under her bare feet. The lawn was visible in the squares of lamplight shining from the library windows. The garden and forest were invisible. There was no moon, only the thick skein of the Milky Way, thousands of stars in a black sky.
Marli’s letter was where Canny had left it, its envelope dimpled with damp. She took it indoors.
Ghislain was waiting for her in the kitchen. He was nursing the fire in the range back to life.
Canny opened the envelope. It held only one page.
* * *
GHISLAIN WATCHED CANNY unfold the letter. Her fingers shook. He was shaking too and trying to hide it from her.
When he first caught her spying on him under the cover of Iris’s revised spell, he thought she was part of a plot. Iris’s plot. He was thinking it again—she was part of a plot, a grand and patient, mad and mysterious plot originating he-knew-not-where. But, whatever kind of plot it was, she wasn’t in on it. And he loved her.
Canny was reading. She looked up at him and passed him the page.
This is Sione writing for Marli.
Dear Canny. I have a cold so have to wait to write to you. Can you remind me when you are coming home? I would get Sione to ring and ask but there is n
o one at your house. I will write as soon as I feel a bit better. All my love, Marli
This is Sione again. It is a bad cold and her breathing is not good. I think you will not mind me telling you that.
Ghislain folded the letter and returned it to her. He said, “You have to go.”
“I’ll go tomorrow morning,” she said. “Sholto can put me on the train.”
* * *
ONE OF GRANDMA MOCHRIE’S FAVORITE SAYINGS, which she’d come out with when Sisema was trying to do something like make a trifle with shop-bought sponge fingers instead of homemade sponge cake, was: “If a thing is worth doing it’s worth doing properly.” Canny sat at Ghislain’s kitchen table and watched him doing things properly. He said he was starving and was going to boil potatoes. But it seemed that boiling something wasn’t going to keep him busy enough. He found some walnuts. There was a walnut tree in the garden, he said, and these were last summer’s nuts, seasoned, but still oily. “I don’t have butter. But I can make walnut butter.”
“You’re playing host,” she said to his back. “Because you’re scared I won’t come back.”
He didn’t answer.
“I will.”
He stayed quiet.
“Please don’t doubt me.”
He glanced at her. “I don’t,” he said, then continued to concentrate on cracking walnuts.
“Are you angry at me for going? You said I should.”
“I’m not angry.” He put the walnut meat in a mortar and began to crush and grind. “I don’t often have butter or oil,” he said. “It’s great to have some oil. My rabbits have no fat on them and I don’t keep a goat anymore. So I scarcely get any fat, animal or vegetable.” Then, “We are going to sit down like civilized people and share a meal.”
“I’m not a civilized person, and I don’t want you to be,” she said, petulant.
“Yes you do.”
He set out his potatoes, his precious salt mixed into the walnut butter. Canny discovered she was hungry, and the food was very good. She ate like a sixteen-year-old who has been rushing up and down hills for days. He picked at his food like someone facing an ordeal. She didn’t notice. She’d stopped watching him because she was hatching another plan.
Mortal Fire Page 27