The Harp and the Ravenvine

by Ted Sanders

  “No mention of any daughters, or a husband. Not a dropped clue or a shed tear. She never . . . I don’t know . . . said something cryptic about loved ones, or an old life, or terrible regrets or anything like that?”

  April considered it. “She had a nightmare once. I got the impression it was . . . personal.”

  An absurd shred of something like hope flickered to life inside Chloe. Maybe her mother truly did have regrets. But Chloe angrily snuffed out the thought, irritated with herself. Finding hope by imagining that Isabel had bad dreams about her past? Pathetic.

  April’s eyes suddenly went cloudy with that faraway dullness the Ravenvine gave her. A moment later, Loki trotted into the room, meowing loudly. April burst out laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” Horace said.

  “Oh, nothing. He’s feeling frisky. He just pooped. It was a good one, too.”

  Horace made a face. “I did not need to know that. How about you stick to your bird, and my cat’s life stays private, okay?”

  April shrugged. “Sorry . . . this is like a whole new world for me.”

  Horace dug a yo-yo out of his drawer and dangled the string in front of Loki. The cat leapt onto the bed and rolled over, purring. He pawed furiously at the string, snagging it now and again on his claws and biting at it comically.

  “Whoa,” April said. “Cats aren’t exactly my favorite, but that is . . . some super-impressive stuff.” Her glassy eyes seemed to dance back and forth, as if following the string. “His reflexes are blowing my mind right now.”

  If nothing else, Chloe thought, April’s abilities were a decent distraction from her current funk. “How come cats aren’t your favorite?” she asked.

  “Well, partly Arthur. He was attacked by one—that’s how he got injured. Cats are kind of cruel. Not all that smart, either. Or actually, I guess that’s not fair. They’re smart in a creepy way—a selfish way.” She startled and cried “Whoa!” as Loki unleashed a rapid flurry of paw swipes.

  “Selfish how?” said Horace.

  April considered it. “Like right now, Loki is enjoying your company, but he’s not really thinking about you as a friend. More like an employee. He likes you, but mostly he thinks of you as some crazy ape that occasionally does nice stuff for him.”

  “Sounds about right,” Chloe said.

  “Hey,” said Horace, objecting. He dropped the yo-yo and leaned into Loki. “Do you really think I’m a crazy ape?” he crooned. Then he reached out and scritched the cat between the ears.

  “Yow,” said April, slapping both hands atop her head. “Maybe let’s not do that.”

  Horace yanked his hand back. “Right, sorry,” he said, blushing beneath his shaggy hair. Chloe frowned. Horace always got red in the face when he was embarrassed, but around April his blushes seemed a lot . . . blushier.

  “It’s okay,” said April. “I’ve got to learn not to be plugged in all the time. But see, that’s what I mean—when I scratch my dog Baron’s head, I feel total love from him. He’s desperate for my approval. With Loki, though, he’s mostly just satisfied that you’re finally doing what you’re supposed to do.”

  “And how about now that I’ve stopped?” said Horace. Loki stared up at him with lidded eyes that seemed—to Chloe, anyway—pretty lovey.

  “He’s disappointed in you, but not surprised,” April said. “I don’t know. It’s hard to translate animal emotions into human ones. Let’s just say—and no offense here, Horace—as far as Loki is concerned, you not scratching his head just proves again how dumb you are.”

  Chloe laughed. She liked cats just fine the way they were, and none of this was coming as much of a surprise. But Horace, despite being the most logical person Chloe had ever met, was still kind of a romantic at heart. He frowned at Loki with genuine hurt in his eyes. “Is this true?” he asked the cat. “Am I dumb?”

  There was a knock at Horace’s door, polite and crisp. His mom peeked in, holding a plate in her hands.

  “Would it be way too mom of me to say I made cookies?” she asked.

  Chloe hopped up and opened the door wide. Her list of favorite people wasn’t very long, but Horace’s mom was definitely on it. In fact, Chloe abruptly found herself very much wishing that Jessica would stay.

  “We could probably use a little mom in here right now,” Chloe told her, waving her in and closing the door behind her. Jessica gave her a curious glance but seemed to get the hint. She crossed the room and settled down on the floor beneath the window, putting the cookies before her. On the wall beside her head was the tiny note Chloe had written for Horace the first night they’d hung out. If Jessica had ever noticed it, she never mentioned it.

  “I never baked cookies for three Tan’ji before,” Jessica said lightly. “I feel strangely unimportant.”

  Watching her, Chloe was struck as always by just how cool Horace’s mom was. Genuinely cool, the kind of person who always seemed to know where her foot was going to land several steps in advance. Jessica had to have known that her son had been out until all hours the night before, doing who knows what dangerous deed. But here she was, not even asking. Just making cookies and joking around like she was—well, not quite one of them, but still with them somehow.

  Before Chloe even knew why she was doing it, she said, “My mom is back.” Everyone stopped eating and stared at her. Chloe looked Jessica in the eye and tried not to stammer. “And you—it turns out you know her. You knew her.”

  “Oh,” Jessica said, clearly at a loss for words. As far as Chloe was aware, all Jessica knew was that Chloe’s mom wasn’t in the picture. But now the door to everything was open, for better or worse. Chloe pushed onward.

  “She was the girl you told us about. The Tuner. Her name is Isabel.”

  Jessica’s brow furrowed in confusion for just a moment, then flew high in genuine, unmistakable shock. Chloe felt a flood of relief she couldn’t quite explain—Jessica hadn’t known, hadn’t been keeping secrets. Jessica corralled her surprise, laying her half-eaten cookie on the carpet. “Isabel,” she said. “Isabel Burke. She’s your mother?”

  Chloe nodded.

  Jessica stared at her hard, studying her face. “That’s . . . a shock, to put it very mildly. I’m hoping you can tell me more.” Her voice was warm and encouraging.

  So Chloe told her more. She told her everything. Well, not everything—not about her father’s long lie. But everything else—the harp, the accident, her mother’s return. Several times during the story, Jessica covered her face with her hands, wiping away thin tears in the most motherly way imaginable. At some point Chloe realized she was crying, too. But she didn’t care. The doors were open. No one uttered a word until she was finished.

  “Anyway,” Chloe said when she was done. “She’s back now. And I don’t know what she wants.”

  Jessica took a long, slow breath. “I don’t know for sure either,” she said. “The last time I saw your mother, she was your age. People change.”

  “But she was like me, wasn’t she? I’m guessing she hasn’t changed much.”

  Jessica smiled. “You’ll end up being surprised by what life does to a person, I think. But yes, Isabel was strong willed like you. Stubborn. Fierce.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “No.”

  The immediacy of the response startled Chloe. Even Horace made a soft noise of surprise. “Why not?” he asked.

  “She was selfish,” Jessica said. “The Wardens could have treated her better, yes, and I felt bad for her. My sympathy ran deeper than you can know, in fact. Being a Tuner is . . . complicated.”

  “But?” Chloe prompted.

  “At the time, Isabel was mostly only concerned about herself.”

  Chloe sat forward, craving the words even if she didn’t want to hear them. “And do you think she’s still that way? Do you believe it when she says she came back for me? For our family?”

  “Oh, Chloe, I can’t say. I’m not going to judge a woman I haven’t met because of the girl
she was twenty years ago.”

  God, she was smart. “I’m not asking you to judge. Just guess. Based on how she was back then.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair. Like I said, we weren’t friends. We . . . weren’t close.”

  “You’re lying,” April said suddenly, and then slapped her hand back over her mouth again. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Andrews. You don’t even know me, and that was madly rude. I’m so sorry.”

  “Why the hell would you say something like that?” Chloe demanded.

  April gestured at the bed. “It’s the cat. Loki. His hearing is crazy good. I can hear all your heartbeats.” She turned to Jessica. “Just now after you said that—‘We weren’t close’—your heart pounded like a mile a minute. Loki twitched his ears at you, and even he thought . . . not like you were lying, exactly, because most animals don’t understand that concept. But he was suspicious. You felt doubtful. Nervous.” She looked around the room plaintively, cocking her mouth to one side and making her crooked nose even more crooked. “Maybe somebody could help me out here. Or maybe I should just go.”

  Jessica laid a hand on the girl’s leg. “Don’t go. You’re not wrong.”

  Chloe couldn’t quite grasp what was happening. “Wait, so you and my mom were friends?”

  “No, we weren’t. But it’s wrong to say we weren’t close.” She plucked her half-eaten cookie off the carpet. She scooped out the soft crown of a chocolate chip with her pinkie and sucked on it. Holding the cookie in her lap, she continued softly. “When I told you I was a Tuner, Horace, you never asked me how I became one.”

  Horace had the good sense not to respond. Chloe held her breath. This was it—this was what she needed to know. In the corner, April hugged her legs to her chest, trying to make herself small.

  “You all bonded to your instruments,” Jessica said. “You all went through the Find. But me? Any old harp will do. So the mystery of the Tuner is this: how do you become a Tuner in the first place?”

  “So how did you?” Chloe asked.

  “I was summoned, just like you. I was drawn to a kind of curiosity shop—a warehouse full of wondrous objects.”

  “The House of Answers,” Horace muttered.

  “No. It was called the Bent Ear. The sign said, ‘Everything will be heard; nothing will be spoken.’ I was intrigued, to say the least. None of my friends at the time—I was thirteen—wanted to talk about the things I really wanted to talk about. I kept my innermost self mostly to myself. But the sign seemed to promise . . . what I needed. Companionship. Shared secrets.” She laughed. “Plus my face was on the sign—or so I thought. But when I got closer, I realized it wasn’t me, just some older woman.”

  “Maybe it was you now,” Horace said.

  Jessica blinked several times, clearly startled by the idea. “I’m not sure I want to even imagine how such a thing might be possible,” she said. “Anyway, I went inside. A young woman was there. She introduced herself as Mrs. Hapsteade.”

  Chloe scoffed. “Young?”

  “Hey—this was twenty years ago, remember. I’m guessing she was younger then than I am now. Anyway, she had me write something with the Vora. You know the Vora, I’m guessing.”

  “What color was the ink?” Horace asked. “You’re not Tan’ji, so it had to be black, right?”

  “No, it was green.”

  “Green?” Horace said, clearly baffled. “Is that the color for Tuners?”

  April lifted her head. “No, it was green for me, too. Mrs. Hapsteade had me and Joshua write our names and stuff earlier today.”

  “Yes, green is for empaths,” said Jessica.

  Horace shook his head. “But that doesn’t make any sense. If you’re a Tuner, how—”

  “Horace,” Chloe said, trying not to be pissy. This was his mom, after all. But it was her mom she was trying to learn about. “Plenty of time for questions later.”

  Horace closed his mouth, though he didn’t look too happy about it.

  “Let me tell you the part that matters most right now,” Jessica said. “I was invited to return to the warehouse. I was told I might find something that interested me. Something that belonged to me. But when I came back the next day, Mr. Meister was there, and he looked me up and down, and he said, ‘No. We have nothing for you today.’” She shook her head sadly. “I was devastated. I left empty-handed.”

  Loki leapt down from the bed, sniffed at the cookie in Jessica’s lap, and then snuggled up against her hip. She started to pet him and then glanced at April, clearly thinking the better of it. “I came back again the day after that, but the sign was gone. The door was locked. I came back several more times. It was always the same—no sign, no one home. I tried to forget about it, but it wasn’t easy. And then, about a year later, I felt the urge to return and I discovered that the sign was back—the Bent Ear. I went inside. The place was all but empty. All the merchandise had been cleared out. But Mrs. Hapsteade was there, and Mr. Meister too, and also a young girl with bushy red hair. Her name was Isabel. She was nine or ten. And she was very excited.”

  Chloe could scarcely breathe. “Why?”

  “She’d been feeling the pull just like me. Today was going to be the day she found the thing she’d been looking for, and me too—but for her it had only been a few days since she’d first found the warehouse. They showed us over to this big Victorian-looking machine, kind of like a cast-iron stove but with two huge phonograph funnels coming out of it. They sat me down in front of one funnel, and Isabel in front of the other.

  “Both of these funnel things led into a single black metal chamber. The middle of the chamber was ringed with a series of . . . I’m not sure what you’d call them. Gears? And then on each side of the chamber was a small, thick door, sealed shut. I sat there, waiting, wondering what was about to happen to me. I was excited too. I was slowly beginning to realize that on my end of the machine, behind that sealed door, I could feel something. A presence. A pull. I don’t know how to describe it. I started thinking maybe it was the thing I was supposed to find. And then Mr. Meister started the machine, and those gears started to turn, and—” She swallowed and broke her cookie in half. She mashed the halves together again. “I’m not bitter. I didn’t understand what was happening until later, but even when I did, I wasn’t angry.”

  “What did they do to you?” Chloe said.

  “They cleaved her, that’s what,” said Horace. He looked as angry as Chloe had ever seen him. “They cleaved you and made you into a Tuner, when you should have been Tan’ji.”

  Jessica tugged affectionately at the blanket beneath him. “Not exactly. I wasn’t cleaved . . . but yes. I was supposed to be . . . could have been? Should have been? Might have become? . . . Tan’ji.”

  “What did your instrument look like?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I could feel it there inside that machine, for a little while, but I never saw it. But years later I was told—and I believe—that it was not an instrument of consequence.” She gestured at the Ravenvine, peeking out from April’s auburn hair. “Nothing nearly so powerful as this. Or the box or the dragonfly, of course.”

  Chloe didn’t know whether to feel angry or sick or sad. As usual, she veered toward angry, even though there was no one here worth being angry at. “And my mom? I suppose it was the same for her?”

  “Basically. Inside the machine on her end there was an instrument that she could have bonded to. A weak one. I couldn’t tell you what its powers might have been. She wasn’t an empath.” She looked around at the group. “I want to be clear—had we been allowed to become Tan’ji, Isabel and I would have been the weakest sort of Keepers there are.”

  “Or so you were told,” Chloe pointed out.

  “True,” Jessica replied. “But you know Mr. Meister. Whatever his . . . flaws . . . he’s not going to miss an opportunity to recruit a powerful Tan’ji.”

  Chloe couldn’t deny that. And as for Jessica, Mr. Meister had said that most empaths were relatively weak. But what about Is
abel?

  “So,” Horace said, “you were more valuable to them as Tuners than you would have been as Tan’ji.”

  “That’s right. They needed Tuners at the time.”

  “But why did they need two of you?”

  Jessica tipped her head back, clearly choosing her words carefully. “That’s how the kaitan works,” she began.

  “The kaitan—that’s the machine?” asked Horace. Chloe grimaced, hating the name.

  “Yes. The kaitan cuts the flow between each potential Keeper and her instrument. Permanently. It strips the instruments of their potential, leaving them powerless and Keeperless forever. And ordinarily, the Medium flowing from each individual would also wither away, but the kaitan stitches those two flows together. The end result is that the two individuals are bonded to each other, instead of being bonded to an instrument. We were fused—that’s the word for it. There’s no outward power when you’re fused, though. Just a closed loop of energy. It was like . . . Isabel was my instrument, and I was hers, but we couldn’t do anything with it.”

  Chloe stood up, unable to sit any longer. “So you and my mother are . . . bonded.”

  “We were bonded—very briefly. But a closed loop gets you nowhere, so there was one more step. The bond had to be pulled apart.”

  Chloe could hardly breathe. “And how did they do that?”

  “They took us away from each other. Physically, I mean. I was taken south; Isabel was taken north. I don’t want to upset you, but the experience was . . .” She fished for a word, her expression unreadable. “Uniquely painful? It hurt me in a way I’ve never been hurt before or since. From what I understand, it’s similar to what you guys might feel if you moved very far away from your instruments—except for you, the limits are basically infinite.” She rubbed her forehead, hiding her face for a moment, and then continued. “Our limits were not. Picture a thick bundle of rubber bands, stretched tight. Imagine that you just keep pulling, harder and harder, until they snap somewhere in the middle. The ends will be ragged and curled and . . . raw. That’s what they did to us.”