by Sarah Zettel
“Pretty princess,” whispered the first. “Come with us.”
“Come with us,” repeated the second. “Let us show you our forest.”
“Come with us,” said the third, the grey one. “There is a green glen near here, where it is summer still. Let us show you the wonders there.”
Compulsion filled her, taking hold of soul and sense. Their words caressed her skin, her heart. She climbed to her feet. She wanted to go with them. She needed to go with them. Their eyes lit fires of promise within her and pulled her forward.
A confusion of noise tumbled over her. Men and horses burst out from between the trees. Moonlight flashed on swords, men shouted, animals squealed in high-pitched terror and dark blood splashed onto snow. Ananda stood in the middle of it all, utterly stupefied, until the commotion died away and Sakra came to take her hand. She looked up at him with tears in her eyes, like a child who had lost a pretty toy.
Then the dream changed. Sakra vanished. In his place stood a fox with a long, sleek tail and eyes like beads of jade.
“They are weaker today,” said the fox. “If they grow much weaker, they will die, and what will their mother do then, poor thing?”
The fox vanished, taking the dream with it. When Ananda finally awoke the next morning, she only knew that she was afraid.
Chapter Five
It had taken several hours of argument before Bridget would see the sense in letting him sail to this town called Bayfield.
Kalami faced her in the front room of the house she simply called “the keeper’s quarters,” and had forced himself to be patient. As she had risked herself to pull him from the water once, it was easy to see how she would have no desire to perform such feat again. “If my boat cannot journey safely as far as your mainland, it will not be able to carry us all the way to Isavalta. I must be sure of my repairs.”
“You do not know the lake,” she had countered. “Superior is not like an ocean. The waves can come at you from any direction. There are squalls that give no warning sign, and all of a sudden you can find yourself swamped by waves that are thirty feet high.”
She had opened her mouth and stabbed her finger at him to make some other point, but Kalami had held up a hand to interrupt. “Bridget, you may be sure I shall take all the care there is. I am used to a storm-tossed sea.”
She threw up her hands, astounded at his deficiencies. “What I am trying to tell you is that this is not a sea, it’s a lake. There is a difference.”
Kalami had smiled at her then. “As I learned the night I first came here.”
“Well if you go down between here and Bayfield, I’m not going to be able to pull you out, am I?”
At first he had thought it was just concern for him that weighted her words down with all that bitterness. But, as he finally set sail between the red and green islands that Bridget named “the Apostles,” he realized there was something more there.
Bridget’s life had been punctuated by emergencies that had dragged her from her bed at night. More than once, it had been to stand helplessly by to witness this lake claim yet more lives. She had told him of one of these accidents, one night when he had accompanied her into the cramped room at the top of her house’s tower to watch with fascination while she lit the great lamp. She spoke of watching a ship founder, run aground on the shoals and battered by the random swell of the waves, and her horror as she realized that not even her father could do anything but stand in the rain and pray. She had not looked at Kalami at all as she told her tale, or for a long time afterward. She had just watched the beam of her light playing over the waters.
But despite all Bridget’s warnings, and her insistence on going over the chart with him five separate times, the lake of which she was so wary remained calm. The danger came as he neared Bayfield and its busy quay. His borrowed memories told him something of steamships, but he was not prepared for the size and number of them, or for the sight of the metal sides rising so high over his tiny craft. He felt like a minnow trying to work its way through a school of whales.
But in the end he did find a slip at the pier to which he could tie up and he was able to make his way down the dock to the harbormaster’s office to pay his fee with the money Bridget had counted out for him. It was there he saw that his world and Bridget’s were not so different after all. He recognized the kind of men who lounged about the wooden building — men in thick coats and mended trousers with caps of cloth or knitted wool on their heads. The style of their clothing was strange, but their weather-roughened faces and their thick hands were infinitely familiar, as was the rise and fall of their voices, arguing about events of local import, the business of ships, and the likely turns of the weather as predicted by the frigid wind that blew across the lake. Also familiar was the powerful smell of fish and human sweat that rose from the gathering.
Kalami had lived his boyhood among such men as these on the island of Tuukos. That was, before his father had signed himself and Kalami into service with the Isavaltan lord master. To be sure, there they ate better, but what little freedom they had possessed was forever given away.
“Mornin’, boys,” said Kalami genially in Dan Forsythe’s voice as he passed. “Fine day.”
“Fer now,” allowed one elder fisherman as he turned his head to spit in the dirt.
A few of the younger men rolled their eyes and poked each other with their elbows. Evidently, this was the anticipated response.
They went back to their own conversation immediately as Kalami stepped up to the harbormaster’s window and laid down the coins Bridget had given him on a small ledge. They were then collected by a young man in a white shirt adorned with black bands to gather up the sleeves. The young man made a few notations on a piece of paper and handed that back to Kalami, who tucked it into his pocket.
“Thanks.” He gave the young man a wave as he turned away.
“Where you in from?” asked one of the younger of the loungers. He had an enormously long neck. A good three inches of it protruded above the high collar of his deep blue coat. His ears stuck out on either side of his head as if to balance it on its precarious perch.
“Run in from Sand Island.” Kalami stuck his hands in his coat pockets, which seemed to be the thing to do here if you were not whittling, or tossing a knife into the dirt, or fiddling with a clay pipe or a bit of fishing line.
The men considered this for a bit. Then one stout follow with a face as brown as the frozen dirt under their boots removed his grimy pipe from his mouth, took a clasp knife from his pocket and began to gouge the one into the other. “Don’t know you from Eastbay.”
“Ain’t been there.” Kalami leaned one shoulder against the harbormaster’s building, to assume an appropriate posture of leisure. “I’m stopping up at the lighthouse for a piece.”
“The lighthouse?” Long Neck popped his pale brown eyes out. “You mean you actually got something out of that frigid old biddy?”
“Not that he’d be the first,” added the hatchet-faced man with the black cap pulled down over his sandy red hair. In case no one got the jest, he dug an elbow into Long Neck’s ribs.
“Jealous?” asked the Elder with the Pipe as he replaced his knife into his pocket and his pipe into his mouth.
“Nah,” said Hatchet Face. “He’s just mad because she didn’t believe him when he said his prick was as long as his neck.” He chortled. “Offered to prove it too, from what I hear.”
There was general laughter at this, but a shrill voice cut them all short.
“That’s enough out of you, Jack Chappel.” A fishwife with her heavy skirts tucked up into the band of her apron stood on the dock with one fist planted on her stout hip and the other clutching her broom. “And the rest of you. I won’t be hearin’ any more of it.”
“Now then, Mrs. Tucker,” said Elder Pipe Smoker sagely. “It’s just the young lads.”
“It’s just the young lads who need a clout on the ear so they know to mind their manners.” She shook the broom a
t them, as if to put this observation into practice. “And you!” She marched up to Kalami so that she could poke him in the chest with one dirty finger. “What do you have to say about it?”
Kalami pushed himself away from the wall and met her furious gaze steadily. “Ma’am, I say Miss Bridget is a fine lady. She pulled me out of the drink when I might have drowned and give me someplace to stay while I fix my boat.”
“Good. Good.” The fishwife nodded with satisfaction and stepped back as if he now rated the respect of some room to stand. “Maybe you can teach something to these young skunks.” For good measure, she spat at the feet of Jack Chappel and Long Neck before she shouldered her broom and stalked off.
It was only when she was out of earshot that the rueful chuckles and the shaking of heads started.
“Pay her no mind,” said Elder Pipe Smoker. “I suppose she’s got a right. Bridget Lederle saved her boy.”
“Plenty others in town could say the same,” remarked a little man with bright black eyes who had not spoken before. “The lake’s the very devil, and the islands only make it worse. Could maybe use a few more like her out there.”
There were thoughtful nods all around this, except from Jack Chappel, who looked like he wanted to make another salacious remark, but his friend, Long Neck, helpfully kicked him in the ankle and he seemed to decide it was time to keep quiet.
When the oldest man shifted his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other and sucked contemplatively and noisily on the stem, Kalami judged the silence had run its course.
“As it happens” — Kalami scratched the back of his head — “I’m on an errand for Miss Bridget.” He tucked his hand back in his pocket and jerked his chin inland. “Any of you can tell me where I can find Grace Loftfield?”
“Gypsy Grace?” Elder Pipe Smoker lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “Those two ain’t spoken in …” He removed his pipe from his mouth and squinted into the bowl. “Them two just ain’t spoken.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” Kalami shrugged. “I just know I’ve got a message to deliver.”
The keen look Elder Pipe Smoker gave him said that the man was eager to know what that message might be, but apparently there were limits to the rudeness he himself would commit.
He pointed his pipe stem up the broad street that ran straight inland rather than heading off up the looming bluff.
“That’s Rittenhouse. You take that to Second Street. You’re looking for the pharmacy. She’s up above that. Can’t miss the sign.”
“Maybe he figures to have better luck there,” suggested Long Neck, and the group laughed again. Flashing them a grin to let them know he appreciated their wit, Kalami left them to their guesses and their gossip.
Except for the fact that Second Street was the third turning along the way, Kalami had little trouble finding the place that was meant. The pharmacy was familiar to both Samuel Hansen and Dan Forsythe. Kalami could not read the letters on the remarkably clear glass window, but through their eyes he recognized the two bottles, one of red liquid, and one of green, that stood on display amid an amazing array of jars and bottles of colored, clear and cut glass. Despite himself, Kalami took a moment to marvel. Never had he seen so much glass in his life, except for the decorations of the holy days at the imperial palace, and those were the work of a hundred years.
More windows looked out of the stone building’s second story. Kalami squinted up at them and saw in one a white card dominated by a complex drawing of a human hand. That, surely, was the sign Elder Pipe Smoker told him he could not miss.
He marked the window and found a narrow door with yet another window in it, which showed a battered wooden staircase leading up. Twisting the knob let him in and he climbed the dark stairway into a paneled hall with a single strip of worn carpet running down the center of it.
As he observed was the polite custom, Kalami took off the cap Bridget had loaned him and knocked on the first scarred and pitted door on the left.
“You may enter,” said a woman’s voice from the other side.
Hat in hand, Kalami did as he was instructed.
The room on the other side of the door was as different a place from Bridget’s house as he could have imagined. Bridget lived in a sparse comfort, with plain painted walls around her. This place was crammed with pillows, carpets and heavy furniture. Equally heavy shelves had been stuffed with a dizzying array of figurines and oddments, some of which he could not identify even with the aid of his borrowed memories. The walls were covered with elaborate charts delineating features of hands, heads and eyes. Between these hung images of stiff, staring people rendered in grey and white, all of whom looked grim and surprised. The artist who was responsible for these evidently had not had much sense of cheer about his life.
Grace Loftfield seemed an afterthought in her own room. It was easy to see her relationship to Bridget. He had no idea of her height. She was seated behind a tapestry-covered table dominated by some great round thing draped with a length of fringed red lace. She did, however, own Bridget’s sturdy bones, wide eyes and blunt nose. Her hair was more fair than Bridget’s, but even in the dim light that filtered through the heavy curtains, he could see they shared the same pale skin.
“Good mornin’, ma’am,” he said in Dan Forsythe’s best manner. “I’m — ”
But Grace Loftfield did not let him finish. “I know who you are.” The words were thick with anger.
“You do?” Kalami made himself twist his cap in his hands. “‘Cause …”
The woman rose slowly and Kalami saw that she was even smaller than Bridget, more round and less strong, but as she stalked around her table, Kalami also saw a long wooden club clutched in her hand.
“Get out of here,” she grated.
“But Miss Bridget told me — ”
“Pah!” She did not actually spit, but the sound was the same. “You’re a skilled liar, sir, but I’ve seen you.” Her finger shook as she pointed at him. “You’re one of them. One of the ones who took my sister away.”
“Perhaps you do know me,” said Kalami in his own voice. “But the one who took your sister is long dead.”
This statement did nothing to drain the livid anger from Grace Loftfield’s face. “As is my sister. You go, back to wherever you came from.” Now the accusing finger pointed toward the window as if she expected him to jump, or fly away. “You leave me and my niece alone.”
Slowly, without taking his eyes off her, Kalami shook his head. “I cannot.”
He noted how her fist tightened around the handle of her club. “You will not.”
“I cannot,” he repeated, firmly. “She is needed.”
“I told you to go!” she screeched, her whole face twisting with the strength of her anger and fear.
“I cannot do that either, for I need you as well.”
Which was too much for her. She swung the club for his skull and Kalami ducked, falling onto her overstuffed sofa. She brought the club down again, but he rolled sideways. She’d swung too hard and overbalanced, toppling forward and catching herself with one hand on the sofa cushions. Before she could recover, Kalami grabbed the club, wrenching her around and trying to rip it away from her. She stomped hard on his foot, but her shoes were light and his boots were strong. He yanked the club out of her hands and they stood facing each other, both panting for breath.
“Will you sit?” inquired Kalami, gesturing toward her chair with his empty hand. “We have much to say to each other.”
Her eyes flickered to the door, and then to the window. Her face clearly said she was contemplating that perilous exit and Kalami tensed in preparation. But she read his movement as clearly as he had read hers, and instead returned to her own chair and sat.
“Thank you.” Without looking away, Kalami cleared some of the pillows from the sofa and sat himself on its edge, laying the club across his knees. “Now, mistress, your niece tells me you are what is here called a medium.”
“What is that to you,
sir?” She smoothed back the several locks of hair that had become disordered in the struggle.
“I have need of such skill.”
One corner of her mouth turned up in a thin smile of triumph. “Well, you are to be disappointed. I am a professional medium only. My séances are a sham. I am rather surprised my niece neglected to point that out to you, but I can display their works for you, if you like.”
“This also your niece tells me.” He paused to make sure she was fully attentive. “I believe she’s wrong.”
Grace struggled with herself for a moment, her strong rounded jaw working back and forth, as if her mouth were trying to decide what to say. She wanted, Kalami saw, to acknowledge the reality of her abilities, but she did not wish to acknowledge her lie.
“I would be most willing to pay for your services,” said Kalami softly.
Her eyes narrowed. He had read it right then. The luxuries around her were threadbare, and the dimness of the place was due not only to what Bridget described as a “theatrical air of mystery,” but to the fact that this woman could not afford much in the way of lamps or candles.
Her face twitched again, betraying yet another internal struggle. “How much?” The words came out reluctantly, but they came.
As a sign of good faith, Kalami laid the club aside, although admittedly it was on the side away from Grace and still within his reach. “I would pay in kind,” he told her. “I have skills of my own. Surely, there is something you want that you lack the ordinary means to obtain.”
She looked away at that, biting down on her lower lip. Kalami let her think about it. As in all things, a willing participant was so much more to be trusted than someone who had to be coerced.
Kalami watched Grace rub one hand back and forth on the arm of her chair. There was too much flesh on that hand, and it was beginning to sag into the wrinkles of old age. He leaned forward. “You know I can do as I say. You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”
She still said nothing, but her hand rubbed the chair arm even harder, as if she were attempting to scrape something off her palm.