“If we knew war was coming,” Ezroc suggested, “maybe we could try to stop it.”
“You and me?”
“Er—”
“Just you and me?”
There was a short, hopeless silence.
Then Denaero said with a sudden change of tone: “Can we fly now? When I fly with you, I feel I can do anything.”
Her face had brightened; Nathan noticed how quickly her moods switched. Like a child who stops crying at the offer of chocolate cake— only she was an adult now, with an adult’s concerns. Yet her indifference to danger, too, was curiously childlike.
“Not in daylight,” Ezroc replied. “You could be seen—the risk is too great. Just meeting is chancy enough. I’ll come back when it’s dark.”
“At sunset,” she begged. “No later. Promise me.”
“After dark,” Ezroc amended. “I promise.”
He rose, splashing across the water, mounting skyward while the mermaid gazed after him, receding into the distance, a small black dot against the gold-green shadow of the sunken reef.
URSULA RAYBURN came into the bookshop the day after DCI Pobjoy, with the object of giving Annie a formal invitation to her Christmas party.
“We’ve finally set a date,” she said. “The second Saturday in December. I want to ask everyone in the village, to say thank you for making us so welcome. My friends in London told me I’d loathe village life: hostile natives, snooty county types, yokels with accents you could cut with a knife … Anyway, it hasn’t been like that at all—everyone’s been lovely. Oh, and if there’s anybody you’d like to bring, that’s fine, too. I’m sure there are loads more people ’round here whom I’d adore, even though I haven’t met them yet. There’s your uncle who lives in that gorgeous house in the woods—I’ve heard a bit about him. Would he like to come, do you think? Or is he too old and doddery? I’m not at all ageist, honestly—I don’t mind old people if they don’t act old, if you see what I mean.”
Annie suppressed a grin. “Uncle Barty isn’t at all doddery,” she said. “I’ll ask him—thank you—but I don’t know if he’ll come. He’s not really a party person.”
“Is he a recluse? How exciting! I’ve never met a real recluse. It’s such a social coup if you can get them to venture out.”
“I’ll try,” Annie promised. “What about Nathan? You did say you’d be having all the children.”
“Heavens yes. That way no one has to worry about babysitters— and lots of kids rushing about always make a party sound lively even if it isn’t. My best friend Sharia’s coming down from Camden: she’s still breast-feeding her little boy, she does it in the pub and everywhere. It really gets the men going seeing that sumptuous brown boob popping out of her dress!”
“I expect it does,” Annie said, blanching slightly. She had always done any public breast-feeding in the ladies’ room. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, how’s Romany? After her fall in the river—”
“That was ages ago.” Ursula waved the incident away, dismissing it into the remote past. “Now she’s got the flu—or a cold—one of those fluey, coldy things kids get all the time, though I must say it’s not like her. Gawain’s usually the sickly one. She has these shivering fits, and every morning when she wakes up the sheets are soaked. I got really panicky and called the doctor, but he says there’s nothing much wrong with her. If you ask me, it’s that room. There’s damp getting in somewhere; I don’t care what anyone says. I’d like to move her upstairs but I’m still worried about the vibes.”
“That’s where you hung the crystals, isn’t it?” Annie said. “Ri-anna’s bedroom. Isn’t it purified yet?”
She was troubled by Romany’s illness but didn’t want to show it. She didn’t need Ursula, too, thinking she was nuts.
“I’m not opening it to the public till the party,” Ursula declared rather grandly. “I want to show people up there—you know—This is the room where the body lay, a rotting corpse, for six months or whatever it was. Donny wants to get a mock skeleton with a wig and lay it out in the bed, just for a laugh. It would give people a hell of a shock, wouldn’t it? By candlelight, like when you found it.”
“It was daytime,” Annie said.
“Dramatic license,” said Ursula. “You don’t mind, do you? I wouldn’t expect you to go up there—too traumatic—that’s why I’m telling you about it. Only don’t mention it to anyone else—that would spoil the surprise.”
“I won’t,” Annie assured her. “About Romany—my uncle’s pretty knowledgeable about herbs and stuff. I could ask him to prepare a tonic for her, if you like. Just natural ingredients. It can’t do harm and it might do good, as they say.”
“Fantastic! I bet he knows all sorts of ancient mystical recipes …”
“Probably,” Annie concurred.
“Will it taste all right? She’s not very good with nasty medicines, I’m afraid.”
“Oh yes, it’ll taste fine,” Annie said with quiet confidence. “Which reminds me, what are you doing about food for the party? Would you like me to bring something?”
“That’s awfully kind. I’m doing soup and sausages and things—I thought, not salads, not midwinter, though I know people do. It’s just, salad in cold weather is so depressing …”
The conversation became technical.
When Ursula had gone Annie sat for some time gnawing on her secret worries, wondering what, if anything, she could do, about Romany and other matters, and how much of it was her imagination, and whether evil, once let into your life, could ever be completely exorcised.
“COULD YOU draw the circle?” Annie asked Bartlemy over the phone, later that day. “It might tell us if Romany is in danger.”
“And it might not,” Bartlemy said. “Even if I conjured Nenufar—”
“No, don’t do that,” Annie said hurriedly. “But the other spirits—”
“—may not know. Still, it would give Hazel a chance to try her skills, under the proper supervision.”
“No! Not Hazel. I—I don’t want the kids to know …” Annie’s voice faltered, petered out.
Bartlemy said calmly: “If they are aware of a potential threat, they can be on their guard. That’s no bad thing.”
“Yes, but…”
“What is it you really want?”
“I am worried about Romany—we’ve talked about it before—it’s just…”
“Nathan?” Bartlemy said.
“I want to know.” Annie’s tone went suddenly harsh. “His father— I want to know. All his life I’ve wondered, doubted … Now I need the truth.”
“You mean, you suspect—”
“Suspicion isn’t enough. I want to be sure. Then I’ll deal with it. I’ll—I’ll tell him, if I have to. If it’s important…”
“You know it’s important. But Annie—”
“Please don’t but me. I’ve made up my mind. I want to ask the spirits—the powers—whatever you call them. The usual suspects. The seeress, the Hunter, the Child. Then—”
“They won’t be able to tell you much,” Bartlemy reminded her. “We are fairly certain Nathan’s father is from another universe. In the moment of Daniel’s death you passed the Gate and became pregnant— that’s a matter beyond the scope of the spirits of this world. As I’ve said before, the magic circle has its limitations.”
“I know, but—what if he’s interfering? What if he’s been interfering here—in our world—for hundreds of years? That would put him within their scope, wouldn’t it? We have to ask them. Please. There’s no one else to ask, after all.”
Bartlemy sighed softly. “Very well. Come tomorrow. But don’t hope for too much. Spirits, like oracles, prefer to talk in riddles, if only to make things more complicated. And riddles can conceal ignorance as well as truth.”
The following evening Annie walked over to Thornyhill. There was a wind seething in the treetops, sending the last of the leaves scurrying down the road. Even without the gnomons, the wood seemed to be full of spirits�
�not the sinister phantoms of the Grail but strange, wild spirits with strange, wild purposes of their own. A restlessness crept over her, as if she was infected with some of that wildness, a feeling unlike any she had ever known. All her life she had run with fate, fighting the small battles that came her way, bracing herself for the bigger ones. Accepting, coping, but never challenging, never defying. Loving Nathan completely, she had rarely thought about her emotions for his true father, the being who had taken her without her permission, in some dimension beyond her will—taken not just her body but a piece of her soul, giving her a child not in love but for some goal too obscure to comprehend. Yet the seed of emotion was there, long dormant, perhaps not a seed but an ember, a smolder; she could feel the flicker of it kindling inside her, waking another Annie, an Annie who was everything she wasn’t. An Annie who would burn down the barriers between worlds, who would find him if it took a thousand lives, a thousand deaths, who would find him and face him and make him pay. He had no right! The words scorched across her heart. She fought down the flame and the fury, but the other Annie remained, just under the skin, changing her—changing her for all time. I love Nathan, she thought, I would give my life for him. But it isn’t for him I want to know. It’s for me.
It’s for me …
Opening the door to her at Thornyhill, Bartlemy felt that a little of the night came in with her—a breath of the wind’s wildness, a sense of lost seasons blowing away like leaves. She had always seemed such a gentle creature, slight and soft, with her heart-shaped face, her wispy mouse-brown curls, the secret strength barely visible in the set of her mouth, the openness of her gaze. But now she appeared suddenly lit up, both pale and glowing, a hint of glitter in her eyes. She looks almost beautiful, Bartlemy thought, almost dangerous … And he was troubled, because he loved her as if she were indeed his niece, and although he had lived fifteen hundred years he still had everything to learn about women.
He said, “Do you want some tea?” but she declined, accepting a drink instead, the dark strong drink that she guessed he brewed himself. She swallowed it quickly, out of not bravado but impatience, scarcely feeling the heat of it in her throat.
In the living room Bartlemy had already drawn the curtains, rolled back the rug. The blackening of former circles showed like a brand on the boards. He had sprinkled the powder around the perimeter, traced the Runes of Protection outside. Annie sat in a chair safely out of range, with Hoover beside her. Bartlemy lit the spellfire on the hearth and extinguished the electrical lamps, so the light was blue and flickering. Then he spoke the word and the powder ignited, etching both circle and runes in thin lines of flame. Annie had seen the routine before, finding it both fearful and curiously banal, since Bartlemy’s attitude remained efficient and matter-of-fact, devoid of melodrama. But now the urgency of her need consumed all other feelings. She sat tautly, leaning forward, unconscious of Hoover’s body pressed against her legs, offering protection—or restraint.
Bartlemy spoke briefly in the language of the Stone—the same language the Grandir used for spell and sorcery—the language of power throughout the multiverse. A faint mist appeared at the hub of the circle, shaping itself into a seated figure, ghost-pale but veiled in red. It lifted a transparent hand where the tracery of bone showed through phantom flesh and drew back the veil. The face beneath was equally dim, skull and skin melding one into the other, the eyes empty. But the apparition held in its other hand a small orb that it placed in one eye socket; the orb glowed into definition and color, focusing on some remote point far beyond the borders of both spell and circle.
Bartlemy said: “Greeting, Ragnlech.”
“Who disturbs our meditation?” As ever, the voice of the seeress echoed strangely, as if many voices blended into one. “We are the sisterhood; we are not to be summoned lightly. We are watching for the hour of Doom.”
“Will it be soon?” Bartlemy asked with the hint of a frown.
“The portents are unclear. But the old spells are disintegrating; new spells must take their place. There is a break in the Pattern, the Balance begins to fail. We have no time for lesser matters.”
“Yet the lesser matters, too, have their part,” Bartlemy said. “You know me, Ragnlech. I have been involved in these things for some while.” The seeress bowed her head as if in affirmation. “There is a child who may be in peril, Romany Macaire. She lives at Riverside House, where Nenufar the water spirit once dwelled in the form of a mortal woman. I believe Nenufar still hopes to obtain one of the Grail relics for her own purposes. She could be using this child. What can you see of all this?”
“The Three are shielded,” the sibyl said. “I have told you before. We cannot see them—it hurts our Eye. It hurts … it hurts …” Red tears ran down her cheek from the socket that was occupied, dripping into nothingness. “We will not look farther. We are watching the Pattern … There is a child, but she is not significant. The werespirit uses what she can. They are too close to the breakpoint—the point of power. We will not look!”
“So as the hour of Doom approaches you will watch the Pattern, not the flaw,” Bartlemy mused. “A useful task for a seeress.”
“We have given warning—”
“But few details.”
“It is enough.” The form of Ragnlech started to fade. “I will go—”
“One more question.” Something in Bartlemy’s tone, a note of spell-power or Command, called her back. “Nothing to do with the Three. There is a boy living here, now fifteen. Nathan Ward. Tell me the name of his father.”
There was a silence. The Eye glowed brighter: red veins stood out on its surface, like cracks in marble. Annie thought she could see it beginning to pulsate.
“Forgive me,” Bartlemy said. “It is such a simple question. One for a streetwitch or a reader of tea leaves, not for the sisterhood.”
“We cannot—see!” The wraith-hands flexed and clenched. “The doom is in him—in him. Nathan Ward … the child of two worlds! His father’s name is beyond the Gate—beyond the Veil of Being. It is written in the stars of another world. We cannot see—we cannot look—”
Bartlemy murmured a word, made a gesture of dismissal. The sibyl faded, taking her Eye with her.
Annie whispered: “The doom … is in Nathan?”
“Riddles,” said Bartlemy. “Empty riddles. She told us nothing we don’t already know. But she is a seeress; she has a reputation to protect. The sisterhood know how to elaborate on blindness. Do you want to go on?”
“Yes,” Annie said. She was shaking, but her resolution was unchanged.
Bartlemy turned back to the circle, resumed the summons. The old crone whom Annie had seen once before appeared, half bald and mumbling on her single tooth.
“Hexaté,” said Bartlemy. “You were not called.”
“There was talk of a child,” the crone said with unexpected clarity. “And Nephthys—my sister Nephthys. We shared the ceremonies, binding earth and water. We drank the blood together—wine and blood— blood and wine. We danced in the moondark. They brought us children for the sacrifice, always girls, no more than six or eight years old, plump and sweet. Plump and sweet! We roasted them in the spellfire and ate their flesh. Are the ceremonies to begin again? Have they brought a fresh young child for us to share? I cannot smell the roasting flesh … Where is Nephthys?”
“Go back to sleep,” Bartlemy said. “The fires you speak of are long cold. This is another spellfire, one not used for roasting children. Go back to sleep!”
“Nephthys … my sister in kind, my sister in kin … She will need me, or the rites will not be complete …”
“She has other fish to fry. Literally, I suspect. Begone!” The archaic order seemed to penetrate the fog of the werewoman’s mind: she glanced around with extraordinary speed, as if someone had tapped on her shoulder, then vanished in a trail of yellowish smoke and a smell of decay.
“She still hangs around,” Bartlemy remarked, “clinging to her memories. Senility in a mortal is
a disease of the mind and the body, but not the soul. Senility in a spirit is something else. A turning inward, a clutching at the past—almost self-indulgence. She may malinger for centuries. There is, I’m afraid, nothing to be done.”
Annie said only: “Go on.”
She wondered briefly what had happened to the good guys, the fairy godmothers who would bless the princess in her cradle, send the kitchen maid to the ball, find the loophole in every wicked enchantment. Gone back to the children’s books from which they came, she thought. And even in children’s books, all the oldest stories were about blood. The Ugly Sisters cutting off their toes to fit their feet into the crystal slipper—the old witch in her gingerbread house who tried to push Hansel and Gretel into the oven … In the end, there was always blood.
Children like stories about blood. Grown-ups know better.
Bartlemy had switched back to Atlantean, repeating the incantation. The air thickened within the circle; another figure materialized. A tall figure with the antlers of a stag and a savage, swarthy, slant-eyed face, not quite human, not quite animal. He wore only a few ragged skins, and the hair on his chest and arms was as dense as a pelt.
“Cerne,” said Bartlemy.
“Wizard,” said the Hunter.
“You are the Lord of the Wood,” Bartlemy continued. “The lord of all woods, or so they say. What do you know of the water spirit who trespasses on your territory?”
“I do not fear her,” Cerne replied, in something close to a growl.
“I never asked if you did,” Bartlemy murmured. “So she is to be feared, even by such as you? Well, well. I asked what you knew of her.”
“She comes rarely to my domain; she dare not. The sea is her kingdom and her retreat. But there is a word on the wind and in the chatter of the streams, a word in the whispers of the night. They say a portal will open, or be opened—a key has been found to a Gate without any keyhole. A time is drawing near that will change all things. Werespirits may no longer be bound to this world; there may yet be a way through. I heard of a region where the trees go on forever. I would give much to see it.”
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