“Blessed Lady,” Oasme said, “this man cannot be executed until you strike him. It can be as lightly as you like, but you must strike him.”
“It’s fine with me if he can’t be executed,” Nora said. “Oasme, why are you going along with this? We’re healers here, not killers.”
“‘She gives life and takes it away,’” Oasme said. “And the life of this man belongs to the goddess.”
“Then the goddess can do her own dirty work,” Nora said. “I won’t.”
Oasme looked horrified. “Recollect yourself, Blessed Lady!” But Nora turned away. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Ghakis exchanging more glances; the lead emissary shrugged. The soft tide of voices in the nave of the temple rose higher, pilgrims asking each other if they had just heard what they thought they had heard.
So much for making a quick, discreet exit, Nora thought, scanning the crowd. Still, if she left now, there might be enough confusion over the interrupted execution for her to get some distance away from the temple and meet Aruendiel before someone came to look for her.
The wave of sound in the temple faded suddenly. The crowd shifted, then parted, letting a slight figure in a black robe pass through. Nora drew in a dry, startled breath, although she was not completely surprised.
This is Olenan, Nora reminded herself. Human, like me. But it was hard to stop thinking of her as Sisoaneer. She came straight toward Nora, her bare feet making no sound on the floor. Her dark eyes were steady, her mouth unsmiling.
“High Priestess, you will not strike at this man?” Her voice was like a flute in the cool silence.
Nora shook her head. “I won’t.”
“Why not?” Olenan asked.
“I can’t. I don’t want to be a part of this.”
Olenan regarded Nora with somber patience. “Some are bound for death. I told you that.”
“I don’t have to send them there,” Nora said. “You also said that it’s better to heal than to kill.”
“Yes, and you’ve already brought one man back to life tonight. In the eyes of men, this other one”—she nodded at the condemned prisoner without looking at him—“is already dead.”
“He’s not actually dead, though,” Nora said. “And I don’t want any part in killing him. I’ve had enough of that.”
“My priestess, I must have my sacrifice. It is my right, my due.”
There was something almost trusting in the way she looked at Nora, as though she knew that Nora would understand finally and do the right thing.
But you’re not a goddess, Nora thought wonderingly. As mad as ever, and worse, Aruendiel had said.
“I can’t do it,” Nora said. “And I’m not your priestess. Not anymore.”
Olenan nodded slowly. “You will no longer serve me?”
“No. I can’t.”
Olenan’s mouth quivered, then made a straight line. “I understand, dear one.” She held out her hand; Nora thought she saw tears shine in her eyes. “Then I will make the sacrifice,” Olenan said.
Nora hesitated, wondering if there was anything else she could say. She had no reason to apologize, nor any real wish to, but at the same time she was troubled by an oblique sense of loss. She handed over the ax.
The prisoner watched them unblinkingly. Nora steeled herself for what would come next for him.
When the stone struck her temple, she heard it before she felt it. Delicate bones cracking under the granite’s bite.
Nora tried to get her balance, shuddering. The second blow made her teeth chatter. She lost count after the fifth. She could not focus her eyes; the world was spinning too fast. Her cheek lay against the cool hard smooth floor, which was unexpectedly wet. I have to get up, she thought. A brilliant red light bloomed inside her skull, so bright that it was painful to look at, and then it started to fade.
She had the confused idea that a bell had been rung, one long rich note reverberating through the whole world. Dissolved in it were voices she recognized: her mother, reading a number off the thermometer and saying you are not going to school today, sweetheart; her father telling her to give it some gas when you let the clutch out. Ramona and Leigh shrieked that the water was really cold, are you coming in, Nora, come on. EJ told her don’t throw like a girl, keep that shoulder loose. Aruendiel said make haste, make haste.
She could have listened to the bell’s sweet cry for her entire life, but it ended.
Aruendiel fought his way through the crowd of worshippers who milled about, chattering inanely, gaping at the spectacle that had unfolded before them. He used not only his own crooked shoulders, but also a spell that Tiretus Copperhand had devised for clearing a path quickly through the infantry ranks of an enemy. If some of the pilgrims who found themselves slammed against the wall of the temple suffered broken bones—well, those injuries would heal, unlike some.
In truth, it would have suited him better to use a sword on the interfering mob, but that would have slowed him down too much.
Olenan, in front of the statue of the goddess, turned to look at him. Her cheeks and forehead were flecked with dark spots, as though flies had settled on her face. More wet stains covered the front of her black robe and her hands.
Blood puddled around the dumb, inert tangle of cloth and limbs on the floor.
Aruendiel dropped to his knees beside the corpse. Gently he lifted her wrist and felt for a pulse, feeling the stillness of the flesh, the skin’s dwindling warmth. He made his eyes trace the contours of Nora’s kind and lovely young face under the mask of blood, trying not to look at the splattered gray matter, the pieces of her wrecked skull. It was her—he would know her anywhere, always—but she was gone all the same.
“I won’t let you bring her back,” Olenan said. Only then did he realize that she was weeping. “The way they brought you back. I smashed her brains to mud. Only the worms will enjoy her now.”
She should die for that remark alone, he thought. He lifted his head and saw her face crumble into fearfulness and malice.
“You should have struck at me,” he said.
“I did,” she said.
Chapter 24
As she walked, Nora knew where she was without having to think about it. She had been in this hall too many times in real life, and sometimes in dreams, not to recognize it. Lockers lined the walls, and automatically she recognized some of the numbers. Her friend Vicky’s locker was 379, just past the drinking fountain. Locker 431, with the Mets decal, that was Andy Reeves’s.
Her sneakered feet squeaked faintly on the linoleum. The classrooms she passed were quiet and shadowy, biding their time in the spooky secret life of school buildings without students. Was this a weekend or a holiday, or had school let out for the day? She glanced at the hall clock. Unhelpfully, the hour hand was missing.
In the next classroom, the lights were on, although it was as deserted as the others. “B47” was stenciled on the outside of the half-open door; under it someone had taped an index card with the symbol for infinity drawn in blue Magic Marker. She regarded the card for a moment, then pushed at the door and went inside. The desks were lined up neatly with a precision that suggested that school was not in session, although half of the blackboard was dusty with scrawled equations. The other half was clean and blank. Behind the teacher’s desk was a poster of Mr. Spock, gaunt and solemn, aiming a phaser at some unknown enemy.
Ms. V’s classroom. Was this one of those dreams in which she was going to have to take her geometry final without having gone to class or done any of the homework all semester?
It didn’t feel like that kind of dream, though. She felt no particular anxiety about taking the test. She didn’t feel much of anything.
—except that she was supposed to be somewhere else, wasn’t she? Where?
She looked around with a sudden sense of urgency. It came to her now that this classroom and the rest of
the Sidney M. Kriegsman Academic and Administration Building had been demolished some time ago—three years after her high school graduation, in fact—to make way for a new performing arts center. Nora touched the laminate top of the desk nearest her. It felt solid and dully smooth, undreamlike.
“Ms. Vorys?” Nora lifted her voice. “Are you here?”
The silence felt mournful. She noticed that there were no textbooks, no papers on the teacher’s desk, only a thin black rectangle that was immediately recognizable as a grade book. She had never seen Ms. V’s desk so neat, even at the very beginning of the school year. It must be summer vacation.
But what was she doing here in the first place, in a building that didn’t exist anymore? When she was supposed to be somewhere else. Where? It came back to her, finally. She was about to go away with Aruendiel, any minute now, he was waiting for her—
“Good, I thought you’d be able to find your way here.” It was a very young man’s voice, oboe-bright, still finding its way in the lower registers.
Nora froze, then cocked her head warily. She had heard that voice before, so many times. Most recently in a video that her mother had insisted they watch together, one that had turned up in some relative’s ancient stock of tapes. The video ended after just five minutes, and then it seemed to Nora that she and her mom sat in silence for at least twice that long.
“Who said that?” she demanded.
“It’s me,” the voice said. “I picked this room because you had Ms. V for geometry, too.”
“Who is this?” Her heart was pounding. “And where are you?”
“C’mon, Nora. It’s not that hard.”
Nora whirled, scanning the quiet classroom. “If this is a trick, whoever is doing this, I will curse you and kill you, because this is just cruel. Where are you?”
“Try outside.”
Hesitantly she stepped toward the squat casement windows. From here, if she remembered correctly, she should have been able to see the cafeteria roof and a wedge of parking lot, but the view seemed curiously indistinct.
She came closer and found herself staring into her brother’s brown eyes. She knew him immediately, even though she couldn’t quite make sense of what she was seeing. EJ was either unnaturally large or she was impossibly small.
His cheeks were still soft with a little baby fat. He wore the wire-rimmed glasses that someone found smashed in the road after the accident and sent to the family; they were still in a drawer in New Jersey. He smiled at her in that half-serious, half-goofball EJ way. But somehow he seemed to be part of the sky as well, as immense and distant as a constellation.
“EJ?” she asked. “EJ, is that you?”
He nodded. “It’s me.”
“It’s really you?” She closed her eyes and opened them again. He was still there. “Why are you so big?”
Her brother looked slightly self-conscious. “I’m still growing.”
“Oh, my God. Are you OK?” Nora steadied herself against the window frame. The metal was cold and dusty under her fingers. “Damn it! We missed you so much. Are you really real? Is any of this real?”
“I’m fine, I’m just fine,” he said. “I’m real. The classroom, it’s not exactly real. Just a memory. I thought you’d feel more at home.”
“Here?” Nora laughed shakily. “Geometry class? Ms. V gave me a C-minus, and that was generous. She felt sorry for me because you died.”
“You had the concepts down,” EJ said. “You just didn’t do the homework.”
“You weren’t there to help me. I mean,” she added, “it wasn’t your fault. You were gone. You were—oh, why did you have to be such a fucking idiot?”
“Nora?”
“You died,” she said. “You left us. Everything fell apart. Mom got weird and she joined this awful church, Dad just hid, I was a mess, I did stupid things. It felt like we were just three miserable people, not a family anymore. And they got divorced, and that was a relief. I thought we could all start over, except you can’t. Not really. Fuck, I’m so sorry.” Her voice was trembling. She blinked hard. “After all this time, all I can do is yell at you.”
“I missed you yelling at me,” EJ said, and Nora began to cry in earnest. “Listen, particle brain,” he went on. “I can’t tell you how often—well, if I could go back and not get into Kevin Weiss’s car that night, I would. He couldn’t drive straight when he was sober.”
Nora gave a strangled sobbing laugh. “He totaled his brother’s car on the way to school six months later.”
“But now you get killed?” he asked. “That was dumb, Nora. Even dumber than riding with Kevin.”
“What?” In the middle of wiping her nose, Nora lifted her head to stare up at EJ. “I’m not dead. I think I’d remember dying.” Thinking back, she could summon only cloudy impressions: a memory of lying on the floor, trying to raise her impossibly heavy head; a sense of perplexity and betrayal. And then the skein of narrative in her mind ended abruptly, ominously. “Oh, crap,” she said.
“She hit you on the head, remember? She faked you out. It’s so frustrating, Nora. All this time—what, seventeen years?—at least I could tell myself that you were alive. That you were doing things, meeting people, learning new things, being happy, being sad, whatever. And now it’s over.”
Nora ran a tentative hand over her head, searching for fractures, dents, fissures, and found none. Her flesh seemed solid enough. She touched her neck and found a pulse. “I’m breathing,” she said in protest. “My heart is beating.”
“That’s only habit, you’re used to having your heart beat,” EJ said. “After a while, you’ll forget.”
“But you don’t even have to think about your heartbeat,” Nora said. “It’s just what your body does. The, um, autonomic nervous system,” she added, because it was EJ she was speaking to, and you always had a better shot at convincing him with science.
EJ said nothing, but he wrinkled his brow at her in a way that made her suck in her (remembered?) breath because his expression was so familiar and yet had been lost for so long. I’m sorry, sis, it said, and also Grow up.
Everyone dies, Nora understood that all too well, but still, in her experience death only happened to other people. Death would come for her someday, but not today—not already.
“You mean I really don’t have a body anymore?” she asked. “Or, rather, my actual body is somewhere else, dead?” Perhaps already rotting. She tried to thrust that thought away.
EJ nodded, like distant cloudy galaxies shifting.
“What do you mean—‘it’s over’?” she demanded. “You’re here, I’m here. Even if I’m—dead—we’re talking, we’re doing things. The story hasn’t come to an end.”
“It isn’t the same,” EJ said.
“Well, no—”
“It’s harder here. You have to work at it. And I’ve been lucky. I had math. That’s my story now.” EJ shrugged slightly. “You had a good thing going. You traveled to a different world, you learned magic—who knew? I didn’t see that coming.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’ve kept up. You’re my sister. Hey, you remember the Cartesian formula for a sphere?”
“The what? Oh.” Nora gave her brother a long look. “Yes. I do. Well, not really, but strangely enough, I thought of it not too long ago. It just came back to me.”
EJ’s voice was teasing, a little proud: “That was me.”
Nora frowned suspiciously. “Aruendiel was trapped in a kind of bubble, and I needed to open it up—”
“That’s right. I helped you with the formula.”
“That was you.” She looked away, and found herself staring at Mr. Spock, frozen in an attitude of chilly skepticism. “I did wonder. Because it wasn’t something I would have thought of, normally. How did you know, at that moment—?”
“You needed help,” EJ
said simply.
She tilted her head back to look her brother full in the face. It was hard to tell how far away he was. “I didn’t know you were there. I didn’t know you could do anything.” Something was unfolding in her heart, a green shoot making its way through thawed earth.
“Well, when I could,” EJ said quickly. “Ms. V isn’t the only one you should thank for passing that final. Too bad you didn’t take more math, Nora. I could always reach you that way.” He gave a rueful smile. “I try with Mom and Dad, too, but they keep thinking of me as a little kid, even a baby. That makes it easier in some ways, but there’s a lot that doesn’t get through.”
“You always assumed I liked math as much as you did,” Nora said. “Equation boy. No one liked math as much as you.” She felt like crying again, but there were no tears. Had she already forgotten how to shed them, being dead?
“What happens now?” she asked, trying to keep her voice level. “Do I get judged? Do I meet God? Although frankly I’ve had enough of gods lately.”
“I don’t know, Nora. I think it’s a little different for everyone, just like when we were alive. You figure it out as you go along. Like I said, I have math. It’s very cool stuff here, really exciting. You can divide by zero, and that blows everything up in ways I’m just starting to understand.”
There was a new authority in his voice. All these years Nora had been thinking of him as frozen in time, sixteen years old forever, but he seemed older than sixteen now.
“Is that why you’re so big?” she asked.
“Sort of,” he said.
“I can’t spend eternity doing equations,” Nora said.
“You’ll need something else, then.”
“What would that be?” Nora glanced around the classroom as though she could find the answer pinned to one of the bulletin boards. Mr. Spock frowned at her.
The memories were clearer now. She could picture the crowded temple moments before her death: Sisoaneer’s stricken, triumphant stare; the packed, gawking pilgrims; candle flames fluttering in a web of darkness. In comparison, the orderly rows of empty desks in Ms. V’s room looked more and more unconvincing.
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 32