"My mom?" I was afraid to ask. I feared his answer.
"She is here too. She is recovering."
Sweet relief dropped my head into my hands. Tears I didn't know had been hiding in long dried ducts trickled over my cheeks. Galead was there to wipe them away, as many as he could, with a gentle hand. He smiled as I wept, understanding all the emotions I must be feeling, I thought. Somewhere inside me I could feel the tremor of something sparking to life.
"We will see her after you've eaten. You have been sleeping for two straight days you know."
"Two days?"
"Yes. There isn't much time to before Winter Break." He smiled, heading for the door. "Lets eat before anything else. I'll be right back with something."
"No. I need to get up and move around a bit."
"Meet me in the kitchen then. That will do for a start I think." I agreed.
Galead shut the door behind him. An old looking handle clicked as it latched closed. Left alone I felt the walls close in. I believed in magic and the fantastical camouflaged in the mundane. My mother had raised me to believe. I held truth could be found in acts. My father had shown me this as I grew. I knew, accepted it all without really thinking, and yet I didn't want to, not any longer. Sitting there, with so many thoughts swirling, the sky felt like a crushing weight laid upon my head. One drawn breath to slow it down. A single exhale to hold steady. The old archer's trick my father had taught me. It helped to clear my head enough to focus. My targets were set, I knew what needed doing. Opening the door, I stepped into an unwalled hallway.
The cabin the brothers shared was modestly sized. Large rounded logs ran the length of the walls and ceiling. Stained golden honey, the color gave the cabin a weightless airy feel despite the lack of many windows. There would be few spots for the dark to gather within those walls. They had an affinity for art, the brothers did, I noticed as I descended the stairs to the living area. Rich tapestries depicting Celtic and Medieval scenes hung from the walls. Greek sculptures from mythology were scattered about the room. They clashed with the furniture and other furnishings, which were clearly more modern. I included the kitchen in the modern category once I made my way over to eat.
Galead placed a plate of fruit and scrambled eggs in front of me. He went about some chores as I ate in silence. Shoving the empty plates away, I asked to see my mother. He hesitated, but I insisted. He led me down a narrow side hall to a solitary room at the back of the cabin. Inside lay my mother.
She was stretched out on a small low sitting bed. The kind that was more design and function than comfort. It had that Scandinavian look to it. Her forehead was covered in a long strip of wet white cloth dripping wide watery drops down her scalp. Perspiration beaded her upper lip in shiny little pebbles dotting sallow skin. Galead's brother, Wayne, sat on a stool beside her.
"You told me she was recovering." My tone was accusatory.
"You know what Isabel is. You know what you are now." That stung me more than a little. "Do you know what your mother is?"
I shook my head, I did not. Not exactly, I suspected. Not in the face of everything else that had already been revealed.
"There is more to her than you know, Thera. For now that will have to wait. We have treated her as best we can."
"That's not good enough. She needs a doctor! We have to take her to the hospital."
"We can't do that," Wayne said, removing her cloth to dip it in a basin filled with water and before placing it on her head again. "Not without risk to herself. And you. Tristan has gone to fetch help if he can find it."
"What are you talking about? He has gone to find help. What help can be better than a doctor?" I demanded, nearly yelling.
My voice disturbed what troubled rest belonged to my mother. She moaned, twisting the covers in pain. Her eyelids fluttered, trying to lift enough to focus until they landed on me.
"Thera," she whimpered, holding out a trembling hand lacking the strength to hold the gesture.
I was beside her in an instant, wrapping my arm around my mother, glad to have not lost my only remaining parent. The heat was a telltale sign of the fever ravishing her inside. I hugged her, unwilling to let her go, even as the slick perspiration slid along the palm of my hands.
"All will be well," she rasped in my ear. "The Circle will help us."
"Mom."
"The book. I need my book," she said.
"What book, mom?" I asked.
"Leather...locked. My...closet. Home." she said, her voice fading in and out as she struggled to find the strength to stay awake. "Don't leave...unguarded."
My mom's eyes opened wide, a wild look in them. I didn't know if it was from the fever or not. It unsettled me.
"I'll get it," I told her.
"Do not open it!" she said in a desperate whisper. "You...needed...trust...love...you."
She closed her eyes, slumping against me. Wayne helped lay her gently back down. The sheet became tangled and I gasped when her wound came into view. I expected to see a bandage or open wound where she had been stabbed. But instead there was only a narrow dark scar closed over her skin. Granted, I was not experienced with such things, but that stab wound had looked dire to me when she had collapsed. Now, only a fever remained.
"What happened to her wound?" I asked them both.
"The other lass, that Isabel, she healed it," Wayne told me. "A Song of Healing she called it. Healed the gash at least, but not the infection. That is what Tristan is about now. Finding one of her coven to help."
"Her coven? What, like a witch's coven?" that couldn't be right, I told myself.
"Thera, she needs to rest." Galead took me from the room while the confusion made me pliable and an easier task for him.
"Isabel helped my mother? The girl who attacked us." I asked as soon as the door closed. "Why would she do that?"
"I don't know, but she volunteered to do it. Your mother was in bad shape or else we wouldn't have even listened to her."
"Where is she now?"
Galead ushered me down a secret flight of stairs hidden behind a false wall next to the kitchen a short time afterwards. Spongy moss, so sun starved its green shaded to black, sprouted from mortared cracks. It felt slick under our feet to make each footfall a likely tumble. The musty air wafted up from somewhere far below, each spiraling turn giving darkness another way to stay, the boogie man another home. It felt as though I had fallen straight into a scene from a classic horror movie.
By the time our descending steps had spiraled to a stop we were well underground beneath the cabin floor. I had only counted two slips and neither had been by me. A long, wide chamber greeted me, opening its great dank maw and daring us to enter. My steps were gingerly laid over the stone floor, partly to avoid awakening the hopeless aura the chamber gave over. And in part to avoid tripping on the uneven stones. The four guttering torches lining the walls did very little to provide proper light. The oily smoke they emitted drifted along a distant ceiling and out through micro fractured stone blocks as Galead led inward. The flames gave off only the weakest warmth I realized, beginning to shiver. I'm sure Galaed didn't notice or else just chalked it up to a trick of the flickering light.
He led us to the first of three heavy wooden doors. The stone amplified our steps and I was, momentarily, expecting a clown to lunge at us from behind one of them. My childhood fear haunted me still, even after all that had so recently happened. The thought sprang a lopsided grin to my lips. Still, no painted face or big red nose shoved against the black barred panes set into that old, grey wood. Yet something resided within that first cell. I could hear the sounds brought on by shallow breathing slipping out between the bars, even as Galead made ready to open the door.
"Wake up, Isabel. You have a guest."
The grating of the heavy iron key being inserted into the lock echoed hollowly throughout the enormous chamber. The crisp click as Galead turned the key, unlocking the door, was loud as trumpets sounding in the dawn. The hinges screeched just as loudl
y from disuse in the deep watching dark. Torch light was too feeble to penetrate the cell's recesses. I found myself taking an involuntary step away as the smell of surf and sand and withering flotsam washed over us. My mother had kept the flowers from my father's funeral, the one reminder she kept from the new truth we were forced to live. She had held them secreted in her bathroom even as the petals browned and gathered like dirt as they fell. Finally, when they were no more than stems left in filmy water, she disposed of them. The stench of that unclean vessel with the rotted florals was like perfume when compared to what we now could smell.
I couldn't see, but I could hear just fine as a slow shambling sound inched closer to the wide flung door. Drag. Pause. Drag. That was the pattern that wormed its way around us in the acoustic cavern. And again it repeated. The grey stone floor did nothing to muffle the sound and I imagined some great malformed monster eyeing us hungrily from the unseen part of the cell. It was toying with us by dragging its heavy feet.
Galead widened his stance, hand resting on the hilt of that polished dagger he carried as the sounds drew closer. I could see the tension in his neck and shoulders. Tense but not panicked. On the other hand, I wanted nothing more than to bolt from the room and put as much distance as I could between myself and Isabel. I didn't want to be a party to this any longer. But there were questions needing answers and I felt I owed it to my mother to get them.
Drag, pause, drag. Slap.
Isabel's hand slapped the wooden frame to pull herself to the edges of the light. She hovered there, half shrouded in shadow, swaying and materializing then fading like some ghost at the edge to her cell.
"What do you want?" she croaked in a parched voice.
The mermaid's voice carried the frail state her body displayed. In the dimness I could just make out her chapped pink lips, edges of puckering skin starting to stand up in jagged dry totems. Even shading her eyes, Isabel could not hide the dark wrinkles ringing them in. The hand itself showed the fading health her short imprisonment had brought.
My flashlight inched up her body. There was something else that could not be seen by the flaming illumination, as much as I strained. My light crept upwards. The once soft skin shone lusterless and flaking. An odd pattern began to form the more that was revealed. It was as if her skin sat layered in tiny plum colored diamond shapes one overlapping the other from wrist to elbow. A patch similarly shaped and cut below her eye refracted the shine from my light.
The flashlight fell from my trembling fingers. The patches looked like the dried skin around the scratch on my thigh. Only it wasn't skin I realized. They were scales! I might have believed her claims that I had some tie with Medusa. I thought I had made peace with it and the voice in those dreams. But awake and forced to face it with the physical proof instead of just the abstract view struck me with its full force. She wasn't human. And if she wasn't, then neither was I.
"Oh, it's you." Isabel wet her lips with a swollen tongue, unable to raise her voice above an airy level. "Have you come to gloat? To curse me? No, to take your revenge, right?"
"We are here to talk. So be good or I will have to put you back in the cell," Galead said, motioning to an alcove at the end of the chamber where sat a long table.
"I need water and something to eat if we are going to talk."
"After," he told her, taking Isabel's arm to help her as she shuffled across the floor. She sat where he placed her, while I seated myself across from her. Galead remained standing behind Isabel, defensive and guarding.
We stared at each other for what could have been as long as eternity. Neither of us spoke. Her eyes were unreadable. I tried to make mine hard and cold.
"So. Do you want me to say none of it is true?"
"No," I told her. "I know it is true. I can hear my blood speak to me. I feel it inside. What I want to know is why."
"Why what?" Isabel rasped, the unexpected acceptance making her wary.
"Why did you attack us? You know, being family and all." I wasn't having much luck keeping the scorn from my voice.
"For you. To bring you with me and keep you safe."
"To keep me safe? Safe from, say, someone trying to kidnap me? Oh no, that was what you were trying to do. So not safe from you then."
"Seriously, cousin? You carry the blood of Medusa in your veins, the first cursed. You are the key that we all need," she spat.
"Key to what?" I asked, leaning close to hear her failing voice.
"Hope."
I saw Galead stiffen over her shoulder. His face was dark and unsettlingly troubled. What she said meant something to him, of that I was sure.
"What does that mean?" thoughts of my father came and went like so much wind.
"Ask him." She jerked her head at Galead before a dry, hacking spasm wracked her body. Her once lustrous hair fell over her shoulders in a patch of brittle briars.
"Water. You promised."
"Alright. Stay here and we will be back with some water," he told her, motioning me to come with him.
"And food."
He didn't respond as he led me back up the stairs and into the kitchen. The light was too bright at first, my eyes trying to adjust, but not quick enough to help him fulfill his promise.
"What's wrong with her?" I asked Galead as he filled a large jug with cool tap water.
"Isabel, in her human form, can come ashore but she needs considerable amounts of water to keep her shape. To keep her alive actually."
"Do we need to add salt to this then? Since she lives in the sea?"
"No. That is a common myth-stake. She can live in any body of water, salt or fresh. The ocean offers her and her pod the greatest protection, but once they traveled the rivers and lakes in many lands. Once, long ago, they had no more need of protection than any other person."
"You know about her. About them. What about me?"
The cold clear water sluiced from the corner as Galead fumbled with his grip. Slowly and deliberately he turned off the flow from the faucet. I knew he was stalling by the way his jaw was clenched. I would do the same, I supposed, in his position.
"What do you know about the story of Medusa?"
"She upset the gods with her beauty so Athena cursed her. Athena turned her into a woman so ugly and frightening that her gaze would turn anyone who looked in her eyes to stone. She had snakes instead of hair and was half snake herself." He urged me to continue. "Perseus cut her head off to turn another monster to stone to save a princess. He used one monster to kill another monster." I paused, thinking of what I had just said. If Medusa was a monster, then what was I?
Galead avoided looking in my direction, fiddling with the top of the container before speaking. I imagine he was thinking the same thing.
"Is that story true?" I asked hesitantly.
"A thimble of truth mixed in a jar of lies," he said, slamming a palm down in frustration. "I know much and more about you, Thera. About Medusa too. More than I am allowed to say. Beyond what the modern fables say. Many claims of truth are no more than a new mythology created with feigned authority."
My voice quivered as I asked the question my soul dreaded the answer to.
"Am I a monster?"
"You are whatever you wish yourself to be. No, I don't see a monster. I see the heart of kindness beating within you. I see a soul glowing behind eyes of emerald gems. I see the strength that only the good can wield carved in every fiber of your being. You are far from a monster, Thera. You are the warm hope future days command for those lost in a world of monstrosities."
I wished I could believe him. My mother had been attacked and wounded. My cousin turns out to be a mermaid trying to kidnap me. Galead was a mystery. And I had used Medusa's curse to turn two men to stone. Hope was not a word I would have used. Happy endings seemed like dreams that would forever be far from reach. This was not how a girl imagines her life will go.
*
Crisp cool water cascaded over Isabel's head, running rivulets of micro-rivers down the length of
her body, as she emptied half the jug over herself. Very little liquid reached beyond her bare feet as every drop was absorbed into her skin before it could puddle. Her body rippled, dry patches of scaly cells fading into the smooth skin she had worn before. The transformation was completed in a matter of minutes.
I tapped Galead's shoulder once I was able to stop staring in transfixed wonderment at that unbelievable scene. He had stood nearby, but turned his back to avert gazing until the whole process was completed. We took up seats at the cell's solitary table once more. He took a seat beside me this time. He laid his dagger on the table with a loud thud as a warning to the captive. I thought it was unnecessary, but as Galead had said, Isabel would be strong once she had been rejuvenated and he wasn't going to take any chances with my safety.
"A man of his word. I like that. Better hold onto this one, Thera. Good men are hard to find and all that," Isabel taunted.
I wasn't taking the bait. She would have to try harder to distract me. Besides, Galead and I were not a real couple no matter what my friends believed. It was just a front.
"What did you mean earlier about me bringing hope?" I asked.
"Your good sir knight didn't tell you?" she teased, winking Galead's way as she said it. "Just what took so long with the water then?"
"Isabel!" Galead growled at her, bringing his palm down hard on the old wood.
"Alright. You don't bring hope, but you are the key to our hope. There is a spell that will end the curse forever. No more hiding in skins we do not belong. Never again being hunted by those afraid to see us as we truly are. No more living in a prison without walls. The power of the Circle will be broken. We will take back what was stolen when the curse was placed on your ancestor, and on mine."
"What was stolen?" I was confused.
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