“Cute,” Teoquan said.
“We playing whose is bigger, or we going?” Patience asked.
“Sorry, darlin’.” Parallel bridge rails, brand new, made of white grit and encrusted with ice, waited at the edge of the chasm. Ev stepped out over the edge and found himself in a low-roofed corridor of blue ice, standing beneath tons of glacier.
A thick stream of vitagua flowed from the ceiling, blocking their path. It twisted away from Teo, its movements snakelike.
Patience whistled, impressed. “Did you use a chantment to do that?”
Teoquan shook his head. “Vitagua responds to passion. I happen to be very passionate.”
“By which you mean stubborn.”
“You say tomato, baby.”
“I’ve never seen anyone but Astrid manipulate vitagua.”
“Eliza seems able to push vitagua around,” Ev said.
“Eliza used to be a chanter, back before she was murdered by the witch-burners,” Teoquan said. “She’s got a few of her old chops, even if she ain’t married to the well no more.”
“Married?” Ev said, disliking the sound of it.
“Till death did her part.” He grinned.
Ev looked at Teo’s teeth. They were big, but like everything else about him, they looked human.
“Shouldn’t the vitagua be Frog Princing you?” Ev asked.
“No,” Teo said. “I’m special.”
They stepped out of the tunnel, passing the sunken face of a child with the features of a stork, and into a cathedral-sized cavern supported by irregular columns. The chamber was aglow with orange light.
Patience strode to the base of the first column. Each of them was an ice sculpture of someone. There were dozens of them, hundreds, maybe. “These are former chanters?”
“These can’t all have been from Indigo Springs,” Ev said.
“Eliza sent out search parties. The Indigo Springs guys are all here, but she found other chanters too, from other wells.”
“Other wells—are any of the wells open?”
“Nope. Far’s anyone can tell, your kid is holding the last well. All our chicks in one fragile hatchery.”
“Astrid is working on finding … an apprentice, I guess you’d say,” Patience said.
“Will Forest,” Teoquan said. “Am I right?”
“If he agrees.”
“A white guy. Quelle fucking surprise.”
Ev opened his mouth, but Patience spoke before he could: “Where’s Jacks Glade, Teo?”
“Follow the fiery brick road,” he said, pointing in the direction of the orange light before vanishing amid the chanter statues.
“You’ve made such charming friends here,” Ev said.
She laid a hand on his arm. “The better Teo likes me, Ev, the less likely he is to make trouble.”
“You think you can defang him with a little flirting?”
“Courtesy ain’t flirting. Teoquan and Eliza have something in common. The Roused respect them.”
“But you like him?”
“I’m here to play ambassador, remember? Teo speaks for the Roused who want everything melted tomorrow, regardless of the consequences to the real, or to Astrid.”
They started toward the light, following an unusually warm breeze. Fire, Ev thought as he gave Patience a hand around a geyser of ice and caught sight of Jackson Glade.
Jacks was caught in a massive frozen wave of vitagua, a rising wave of fluid with a crisp curl at the top. Vitagua dripped from above, freezing on its upper edge, forming icicles. The ice was intensely clear and the boy was upright within it, arms outstretched as if he were swimming for the surface of this peculiar sea. His open eyes were glowing coals, and his face was lifeless. He wore the clothes he had been shot in, that terrible day of the siege at Albert’s house. The belly of his shirt was torn and blood soaked. Veins had grown from the wound into the substance of the glacier, pulsing minutely.
Ev stared. Astrid had spoken of Jacks’s death, but to find him here, torn open and preserved like a pickle in a jar …
Memory struck, crystal clear: Jacks at two in the playground, wearing a saggy diaper and nothing else, chubby baby legs churning as he ran away from the Chief.
The glow—the heat—was coming off Jacks. Under his skin was the shifting orange light of embers. At his feet, vitagua bubbled into a brick-lined canal.
“That’s the Chimney,” Ev said, but Patience wasn’t listening. She had one hand on the wave and the other over her mouth. She was sobbing.
“Hey,” he said, reaching out, feeling helpless. The touch was awkward. But pulling away would probably make it worse.
Patience turned to mist, passing through Jacks, through the wave. She solidified on the other side, changing into a short Latina beauty. The huge dress billowed around her.
“Stupid damn kids,” she said.
“It wasn’t your fault.” That was Teoquan, gliding out from elsewhere, his face wet with blue magic.
Ev had enough time to think that this wasn’t the point before Patience dissolved completely into grief.
Teoquan opened his arms and with a step, Patience was in them, crying. “You told them not to be idiots. What could you do, jump in front of a bullet?”
There was no room for Ev in this scene. “I’m going to go find Albert,” he said, leaving them together, slipping into the forest of statues.
From earliest childhood, for as long as he had been able to remember, Ev knew the world had him wrong. He’d refused to wear skirts, tried peeing standing up, took absurd pride in being labeled a tomboy. He had outplayed the boys in sports … when he’d been allowed on the field at all. He joined the town’s bagpipe band, boycotted Girl Scouts, and flirted with enlisting in the army.
Albert Lethewood had been the only man he ever felt any kinship with, any attraction for, and to this day Ev—who through his teens had had crush after crush on girls, made vows to be celibate, and periodically fantasized about becoming a priest—could not say why. Had it been the magic within Albert? Had young Ev gotten tired of fighting a battle he couldn’t even name? Had Albert come along just as he was giving up?
It was his life—if anyone could know, it was he.
Albert had been thought an alcoholic or gambler; he’d been beneath the notice of most of town. Playing the town bum had been his way of concealing the magical well: a façade, an attempt to avoid the death that had finally claimed him.
Here, in the unreal, Albert was a hero.
His statue was huge, his pose noble, his expression brave. Ev gazed upward, cast back to the seventies when they had married—Ev wearing a kilt and poor Albert in a borrowed suit.
Albert had courted Ev, chased her in his way, but it was she who had chosen him.
Now, of course, it was obvious why the sex, even with her in charge, had felt slightly off. Why the experience of pregnancy had been so awful. His body had tried to reject the life, Astrid’s life, within him.
In hindsight, it felt as though he must always have known what was wrong, but nothing was ever that simple. Ev had loved Albert; he couldn’t deny it. And Indigo Springs wasn’t the kind of place where you met other transgendered folk. Astrid was ten before Ev even heard the term. Those days, if the subject came up at all, the phrase you heard was sex-change surgery. In small-town America, that meant self-mutilation; it was something sick men did. Ev was over fifty the first time someone told him about female-to-male transition.
You grew up. You got married. You had kids.
Vitagua contamination had been clarifying, almost a relief. Curse or no, exposure to magic had battered down a locked door in Ev’s mind. At first he’d reached for a delusion, the most comfortable fantasy he could find: a fictional detective who delivered mail, as he did, a detective who shared his name. Of course he was Everett Burke, and of course Ev Burke was male.
Madness—for madness it had been—had been preferable to wrongness.
Here in the unreal, Albert’s statue was upright, c
lear eyed, all the things he’d pretended not to be in life.
“Married to the well, hmmm?” Ev said. Teo had a gift for sticking the knife in.
Part of Ev hated himself for caring at all. He’d tried to have a woman’s life—to marry a man, have a family. Seen from this side of his transformation, the attempt felt like a lie.
But he had tried. Had loved Albert. Had resented, still resented coming second.
Albert gazed down at him with infinite compassion.
“I’m not coming second again,” Ev told him.
That brought his thoughts back to Teoquan and Patience. And, just like that, they reappeared.
“Hey, Virgin Harry, you done moping over your ex?”
“Teo,” Patience growled. “His name’s Everett.”
“It’s all right,” Ev said.
“Honey, you’ve seen Jacks. Now we gotta shake.”
They returned to the bone bridge, stepping out atop the glacier and heading in three different directions.
Ev went in search of Eliza. “I’ve been wondering if there are any crews working outside the city.”
Eliza peered at him over her granny glasses. “We’ve been thinking about Astrid’s offer to set up a letrico mill. We need the power.”
Relief washed through him. “On the hill where the wind’s blowing in? I could work on that, yeah.”
“Didn’t your daughter send you here to be a diplomat?”
“Patience has that covered, and I like to keep busy.”
She nodded, seeming to understand. “I’d like to start soon, before…”
“Yes?”
Her eye fell on Teoquan. “My power here is diminishing.”
“Maybe we can do something about that,” Ev said, almost carelessly.
They let that sit between them, the raccoon fiddling with the cuffs of her long dress.
“I’ll talk to your daughter,” she said, and he shook her warm, tiny hand as the sound of Patience, laughing at something Teo had said, rang like chimes on the chilly air.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
EAT, SLEEP, SAVE THE world. Not the kind of job where a girl got vacations. Not that Astrid had ever taken one. Jacks was always trying to get her to ease up.…
They were in Overlord, sliding through the gateway in pursuit of the padlock chantment the Alchemites had used on Ellie Forest. It was in Atlanta, according to Astrid’s seers, so now they were rolling down a street in Georgia, Igme blowing barely magical bubbles out to vitalize the city and the Chattahoochee River.
The raids had almost become routine. Astrid made chantments; Janet kept them from attracting too much notice. The panic afterward had even become minimal. Two nights ago they had chased the Alchemites to Britain. They failed to recover the chantment that had turned Ellie against Will, but they did contaminate Manchester. Afterwards, barely five hundred people had fled the city. The rest stayed, adapting to the slight magical changes to their landscape.
Now it was Georgia’s turn.
Before the magical well had blown open, Astrid had barely left Oregon. Now she was crossing the world, seeing its great cities … and altering them irrevocably. All she remembered about Atlanta was Ev watching the Olympics on TV, and studying about Sherman burning the place down in the Civil War.
Her head was spinning. So much vitagua, so many voices.
They had materialized in a neighborhood called Cabbagetown, near an old mill that had been converted into loft apartments. Galleries and funky restaurants lined the rain-damp street.
“Up ahead,” Clancy said. Smoke hung in the air ahead, lit from within by red and white flashes: a fire, and firetrucks.
“He burned them out,” Astrid said, quoting one of her grumbles. “Three dead Alchemites, and he’s got their chantments.”
“Who?” Will asked, voice taut. “Who, Astrid?”
They crested a hill, looking down on the fire. Ambulances and police outnumbered the fire trucks; the house was gone, the ruins smoldering. Paramedics were working on three or four limp forms. One was a figure with bird wings.
Pieces of Sahara, bits of you, the voices murmured.
Will squeezed her hand. “Astrid, focus.”
“He’s not supposed to go out alone,” she said. “Since Lethewood murdered Uncle Lee, they’re supposed to work in teams. Big bro’s busy in Utah, Alchemites on his back doorstep, what’s he gonna do? He can’t handle a bunch of girls?”
Janet had been pouring water on the road using a magic watering pail that made them inconspicuous. Now she switched to the plastic heart, healing the surviving Alchemites from afar.
“What the hell’s she talking about?” she asked.
“I think Astrid’s saying a Fyreman burned these women,” Will said.
Astrid said, “Clancy, turn north. Now’s when we go to his house.”
“You sure?”
“The grumbles say so.”
Igme coughed. “Begging your pardon, but when the voices get helpful, it’s usually so they can screw you over.”
“Lying with the truth,” she agreed. “Turn right up here.”
“She said ‘Uncle Lee,’” Aquino said. “Jacks Glade’s father was named Lee.”
“Clancy, stop here!” The trolley brakes whined; they coasted to a halt in front of a colonial-style bungalow with a stone fence.
“This is it.” She hopped down, touching the mailbox, and found herself remembering her mother at about thirty, in her mail carrier’s uniform. She tried to shake the impression away, but there it was: Ma, female, fluffy hair more blond than gray … carrying mail that originated from this house.
“Uncle Lee was Chief Glade,” she said. Someone had asked that, hadn’t they?
“He knew whoever lived here?”
“He sent letters … pictures of Jacks, but only as a baby. The letters stopped in the eighties.”
“They probably got fax machines or something,” Janet said.
Astrid stepped closer to the house, and the grumbles fell silent. She flinched back; the murmurs rose again.
“Magic’s not working.”
“How can we check the place out if our stuff doesn’t work?”
“Go in and look?” Will suggested, sounding amused.
Walking to the corner, farther from neighbors’ prying eyes, Astrid extended her hand again. There was a dead zone of sorts, just outside the perimeter of the fence.
Then I made a hole. She reached for a shovel propped against the fence. Instead of chanting it, she simply dug. Remember when this was all you did—turn up soil, plant seeds?
Was that her own thought, or another grumble? The longer this went on, the harder it was to be sure.
We’re starting to sound like you.
The shovel crunched against something.
“Careful.” Will knelt, brushing loose soil away. He unearthed a length of heavy chain, coal black in color, buried in a line that ran parallel to the fence. Crystals of salt and sea-glass crusted its links, and a twisted nylon cord was wound through. He teased up a loop of the cord with a stick, so Astrid could lay a finger on it.
“Primer cord,” she said.
“Explosives?” He let it fall, pulling her back.
“It’s called … rosarite. It’s gunpowder, glass, and sea salt.” Vitagua died when exposed to salt water—you could contaminate living things, but it wasn’t like when it got into the rivers—and it could not pass through glass. Gunpowder meant fire— “I bet this runs all the way around the house.”
“That’s why the chantments don’t work?” Will said.
“Let’s find out how tough it is,” Astrid said.
Driving the shovel into the soil outside the magical dead zone, she bled vitagua into it. She thought of gardens and weeds, grassroots boring holes through softwood, trees splitting mountains apart, roots insinuating themselves into cracks in the rock and growing, pushing outward …
Willow roots and cottonwood—stubborn, tough, destructive.
Green shoots unfur
led from the blade of the chanted shovel. As they met the buried chain, they burned. Smoldering, poisoned by the salt and sliced by the edges of the glass beads, the shoots hesitated, curling.
“More power?” Will held out a fist-sized chunk of letrico.
“Thank you.” New shoots knotted around the chain, smoking as they were burned back. Then two glass crystals sheared off the links, leaving naked iron underneath. A root expanded between them.
Power sizzled through the shovel. One link of chain twisted, stretched, and broke. Roots overwhelmed the small hole she’d dug. The grass around the little bungalow charred in a straight line, burning a scorch mark that followed the perimeter of the fence. A lumpy braid of willow branches churned up from underground.
Will extended the magic turkey baster over the fence, blowing a contaminated soap bubble out onto the lawn. “So much for the magical dead zone.”
“That took a lot of letrico,” Clancy said.
He was right. And the shovel was still drawing power, pushing roots eastward—toward more rosarite elsewhere? Astrid yanked it free, breaking the connection. “Search the house.… Oh, too late.”
A clunking sound—the garage door opening—made them jump.
A car turned the corner, a cream-colored convertible driven by a young black man. He braked sharply, gaping at the Springers with their chantments, the trolley laden with letrico.
“Do I know that guy from TV?” Janet asked.
“Duh. He’s a trial witness,” Igme said. “Lucius something?”
“He’s a Fyreman,” Astrid said, and froze. The last time she fought a Fyreman, she’d smashed his brains in.
Jacks’s dad, dead on the living room floor …
The man scrambled out of the car. There were test tubes in his hand—by the time she recognized them, he’d drunk them: all at once, like shooters. He extended his arms, and flames boiled toward her. The trolley shivered.
Astrid drove a stream of vitagua toward their attacker. It sputtered like grease, emitting the smell of scorched lilacs.
It’s flammable, she remembered: It won’t douse anything.
She misted the yards to either side, making the grass and trees grow wild, burying the neighborhood in an explosion of growing plant matter.
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