A wide brick building, with three stories and a steep roof, on a flat lawn against a background of trees. Brona saw within the shades of gray the red of the brick, the green of the lawn, the first flush of orange across the leaves—
—and a driftwood, moonbeam, seafoam palace spiraling up from the edge of an ocean shore.
A tall frame house with eight girls posing on the porch and on the steps, their hair swept into buns, their skirts decorously long. Brona saw them smoothing their collars, tucking in hairpins, jostling to get into the picture’s frame—
—and a moon-haired figure in green-leaf motley and bells of gold dancing along the spine of a dune.
A young woman in a blouse with full sleeves and tight cuffs standing beside a piano, one hand stretched to touch the piano’s lid, the other hidden in a fold of her skirt. Brona saw the deep red of the piled hair—her hair. She saw the wide, solemn mouth—her mouth. She saw the straight brows, the long, tapered eyes, the classical nose—her brows, her eyes, her face—
She closed her eyes, and felt a cool, slender hand brush her cheek, and heard a voice as richly timbred as a wooden flute. But what marvel has wrung ocean spray from fiery maid?
And then she heard another voice, the same voice, only an alto, not a tenor, flute. You can’t hide a fire, you know. If you try you’ll only put it out.
Jade, she thought. Mr. Green. Valentine. Berenice.
“Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes. Saw Leona’s worried face. Saw the pages crumpled between her hands. Thought, Berenice and Mr. Green. Valentine and Jade.
“Brona?”
She groped for a reply, and in that moment the clatter and growl of the busy café was drowned beneath the heavy booming surge of surf—of her blood, but they were one and the same. Berenice and Valentine. Jade and Mr. Green.
And Valentine had been carrying his flute case.
She stuffed the photographs into the envelope, crumpled as they were. “I have to go,” she said, and she went.
There was no path through the wood. There was no wood, just the rutted, snow-swept grounds, the sagging fence, the highway rushing with traffic beyond. As Brona ran down the front stairs of the school, winter’s cold biting through her sweater, she saw two figures walking across next-year’s lawn towards the highway. Brona, running after them, stumbled over frozen lumps of dirt, caught her feet in snow-buried hollows. She lost her grip on the envelope and let it go. Jade and Valentine were nearly at the fence. The traffic roar softened to a sobbing sigh. The bright flash of cars blurred into the gleam of a sunlit ocean, their speed into the ageless curling collapse of a foam-capped wave.
“Wait!” Brona cried. “Valentine, wait! You don’t know what they are!”
Valentine stopped, turned back. The small, dark-haired figure beside him only glanced over her shoulder, but she also stopped. The wave hung on the verge of dissolution. The town was still visible beyond.
Brona came up to Valentine, panting. “You don’t know,” she said.
“I know you’re Berenice Ross,” he said, almost angrily. “You were a scholarship student in 1916. You disappeared halfway through your second term, and now you’ve come back again with more skill, more talent than, than—” He groped for a word.
“Than seems humanly possible,” Jade said in her sweet voice. She smiled across her shoulder at Brona, her eyes pale as seafoam under her black, arching brows.
“Than I could ever dream of,” Valentine bitterly said.
“Is that how she told the story?” Brona asked him, ignoring Jade. “There and back, with a small gift to show I’d been?”
“A small gift.” Valentine’s eyes were fixed on hers. “A small gift?”
“Valentine, listen. Perhaps they’ve told you more this time than they ever told me. I could not have guessed—I could not have dreamt—where it was they were taking me. And I can’t tell you it is any less wondrous than they’ve made it seem. I can’t, because they took every memory of it from me when they let me go.”
Jade finally turned to face her. “My dear, is that what you—”
“You’ve had your turn,” Brona said harshly without taking her eyes from Valentine. “Yes, I have skill. But do you think it was something they gave me? I walked back into this world with nothing, no family, no home, no name, because they had taken away my past. And it’s been years, Valentine. If Berenice— If I left here in 1917, that means they only kept me for a year. One year. And ever since then I’ve had to invent myself and my life with nothing but a bit of talent to do it with. Can you imagine what that would be like? Adrift in time, unable even to guess why I go on, and on, never aging, never knowing who I am, or what I am, or where I am from?” She snatched at a breath. “I’m good because I’ve had ninety years to practice in!”
Valentine listened, his face stark as bone. “Then why, for God’s sake, are you going to school?”
She laughed. Humorless as it was, it eased the tension. She looked away, scrubbed her face with her palms. “Because I got tired of playing in hotel lounges.”
“What?” Valentine laughed, too, in surprise.
“You think I should be making the grand tour, recording with the great symphonies, living in Europe maybe?” She gave him a twisted smile. “Try being rich and famous when you can’t get a social security number, or pay your taxes, or apply for a passport. This school, all the schools, they’re like holidays. They’re havens, really. I didn’t even know—would you believe it?—that I’d ever been to this one before.”
Silence fell. In the worlds beyond where the three of them stood, traffic growled, surf sighed and boomed. And finally, finally, Jade spoke.
“But Lady Red,” she said, “sweet berry, fiery child. We took nothing from you.”
Brona groped for her voice. “Only my life. Only my name!”
“But those were only what you left behind.” Jade cocked her head like a puzzled bird. “My dear, we did not send you away. It was you who chose to go.”
Brona fumbled after memory, and caught only rags. A gown of kelp leaves. A red bird with a trailing white tail. “But why?”
“You did not believe us when we told you how much you had changed.”
Brona did not know what to say, what to believe. After another long moment, it was Valentine who spoke.
“I would not want to leave,” he said.
Jade laughed and clapped her hands. “You are coming, then?”
He drew himself up and braced his shoulders. “Yes.”
“Hurrah!” Jade laughed again. “And you, little fire bear? Are you ready to come home?”
Home, Brona thought—Berenice thought. Home. She did not know what or where that was, but she thought, she was almost certain, that she would never know until she learned where it once had been.
And the wave, cold and green in the winter sun, rolled foaming across the sand.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Holly Phillips is now the author of novels The Burning Girl and The Engine’s Child. A second short story collection, At the Edge of Waking, was published in late 2012 by Prime Books. Phillips won the 2006 Sunburst Award for In the Palace of Repose and was among the finalists for the 2006 Crawford Award, given by the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The collection was also nominated for the World Fantasy Award and “The Other Grace” was a finalist in the short story category.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
“In the Palace of Repose,” H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, 2004.
“The New Ecology,” On Spec 49, Summer 2002.
All other stories original to this collection.
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