Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  “But there was no fire,” said Freddy.

  “But there was no fire.” Josiah nodded. “And neither Earth nor Sea knew how to get any. The only fire belonged to Sun, the son of Sky, and Sky guarded him jealously. So Earth just kept on crying. She cried so much that everything got very wet. The animals were having a hard time finding shelter. They got so uncomfortable that they finally gathered and asked Earth how they could help.”

  Freddy said, “I think I see where this is going.”

  “I expect,” said Josiah. “At any rate, Earth told the animals that she needed to bake her children but had no fire and no way of getting any. The animals put their heads together, but most of them had no ideas. Then the crow, the trickiest of the animals, spoke up.”

  “The crow was white at the time,” said Freddy.

  “The crow was white at the time,” said Josiah, casting her an annoyed glance. “She said to Earth, ‘I’ll fly up and steal fire from Sun.’ So the crow flew up into Sky … up and up. She flew so swiftly that Sky didn’t even realise she was there. She flew right up to Sun and plucked a flame from his cloak, and then she turned and fell back down to Earth. She fell for a long time, and she tumbled down onto Mountain and lay still. By this time, she had been burnt black.”

  “I knew it,” said Freddy.

  “Good for you. Shut up,” said Josiah. “Earth was ecstatic. She cried on the crow and healed her burns, but the crow’s feathers stayed black. Then Earth took the flame and placed it in a clay oven she had fashioned. She put the two dead children into the oven and let them bake. When she pulled them out, they had turned a nice deep brown, and they were alive.”

  He listened for a bit before he spoke again. “They were the first people. Earth loved them, and she gave them the fire for their own. The animals loved them less, as they could see they would be meat eaters. Most of the animals fled. The crow stayed longer than the others. She had an egg inside her. When she had stolen fire from Sun, he had been so amazed that any creature was bold enough to approach him that he had fertilised the egg. When she had fallen down onto Mountain, he had been so amazed that any creature could fall so far and live that he had fertilised the egg as well. The crow knew that egg was special. She laid it and gave it to the children, telling them only not to eat it. The children promised, and the crow flew away.”

  Josiah had been growing increasingly uncomfortable throughout this last bit. Freddy kept looking over at him. He was sweating again, and his voice was growing muffled. Now he stopped talking entirely.

  “She’s still going,” said Freddy. “You have to finish.”

  “I … don’t want to,” said Josiah. “I feel ill.”

  “You never feel ill. Come on,” said Freddy. “I want to know how it ends.”

  Reluctantly, sounding faintly horrified, Josiah continued. “The children grew up in a week, but the egg didn’t hatch. It was cold and black. The children thought it was stupid to waste the egg when food was so scarce. They put it into the fire to cook. The fire was what it had needed. In the midst of the flames, the egg hatched.”

  He ground to a halt again. “I … don’t…”

  “Finish it,” said Freddy.

  “The egg hatched … two children,” said Josiah, gasping. “A boy and a girl. The boy was stillness and constancy and the solidity of mountains; the girl was movement and change and the fickleness of flame. They watched over the two who had hatched them.”

  He turned to Freddy. “It doesn’t mean anything. Three tells stories—”

  “Look,” said Freddy.

  There were two more people near the campfire now.

  They stood just outside the ring of firelight, but the moonlight showed them clearly. Freddy saw two teenagers, both dressed in skins. They were holding hands. They looked very alike; both had long dark hair, thin faces, beaky noses, and sharp little chins. It was hard to tell from here, but Freddy didn’t think either looked particularly like the people gathered around the fire.

  One of the teenagers glanced at the other. Freddy thought he was male and the other one female. He pulled his hand away from the girl, who grinned at him and tilted her head in an oddly familiar way.

  “We need to go,” said Josiah. “We shouldn’t be here at all. This is not—”

  “No,” said Freddy.

  She had never quite trusted him, but—That’s not really true, is it? You’ve trusted him enough. You take his word for how this works, and you say you’re being Mel and biding your time while collecting clues, but really you’re just trailing after him like … like a duckling. You’re waiting passively for the time travel to end. What if it doesn’t end? You know he’s not telling you everything. You know he’s not even telling you everything about this place. You could be a time-travelling duckling for the rest of your life if you don’t take some initiative.

  Josiah stared. “What do you mean, ‘no’? We’re going.”

  Freddy said, “I’m not.”

  She stepped out from behind the bush.

  Josiah hissed behind her. It didn’t matter. He didn’t get to make all the decisions any more. Mika had answers, and Freddy wanted to know what they were. There was a language barrier, sure, but if Josiah wouldn’t help, she would find a way around it. Freddy moved towards the fire. She didn’t think Josiah was following. Cold fingers seemed to be dancing up and down her spine. It was terrifying—and exhilarating—and weird to be setting off into a future Josiah hadn’t seen.

  Freddy had gone only a few steps when she realised the people near the fire had fallen silent. Mika was looking straight at her.

  There was a strange moment then, as Freddy gazed into dark eyes that gleamed in the moonlight, and Mika smiled and waved. Somewhere in the dimness, Freddy heard the soft whir of wings.

  And the sun shone brightly over the neat little road and the hedgerows lining it on either side.

  13

  “Oh, not this one,” said Josiah. “I didn’t know we’d have to come here.”

  Freddy took four giant steps back towards Josiah, seized him by the throat, and crushed him up against the hedgerow. She vaguely remembered doing something like this before, when she had still been at the beginning of her time-travelling career. It was easier this time.

  “Something important just happened,” she said. “You’re not going to weasel out of talking about it.”

  He tried to pry her hands from his throat and couldn’t. She waited until he had shaded all the way to a deep plum colour before she let him go.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said when he could speak. “It was just a story.”

  “It was a story of your beginning,” said Freddy, “wasn’t it?”

  “I have absolutely no idea what you mean by that,” said Josiah. “You need to eighteenth-century yourself.”

  Before he could stop her, she took him by the throat again.

  “All right. All right,” he said when she had let go for the second time. “It’s possible that was … near the beginning of my existence. Mika may have been telling a true story, even. I’m not trying to weasel out of talking about it. I just don’t remember that far back. I don’t understand what we saw any more than you do. You really need to eighteenth-century yourself now.”

  She almost told him she was done taking orders from him, but unfortunately, what he was saying made a certain amount of sense. The problem was that it almost always did.

  Freddy sighed. “Fine. Boy?”

  “You don’t have the material for girls’ clothes in this period. Tuck your hair under the hat.”

  Her hair was long now. Long hair for both sexes was more common, historically speaking, than short hair for either. In societies where men wore their hair short, she hid hers beneath a hat or dressed as a girl. She could pass less easily as a boy than she had a year and a half ago, as her shape had changed a bit, but she did find that people often saw what they wanted to see. If she wore boys’ clothes, she was a boy.

  Following Josiah’s dir
ections, she made the alterations to her basic outfit that would help her blend in here. He was simultaneously doing the same thing to his own clothing. There was no one in sight, though Freddy could hear cows lowing in the distance. They were standing on a dirt road leading to some sort of farmhouse.

  “Three’s in there?” said Freddy, nodding towards the farmhouse.

  “I’ll bet he is,” said Josiah gloomily. “He does a lot of writing. And sleeping. Sometimes, he writes while he’s asleep. He thinks it’s inspiration, but it’s opium, really. Judging by where we are, it’s 1797.”

  “Well,” said Freddy, “do we interrupt him?”

  “I’d rather not,” said Josiah. “He thinks I’m a fairy.”

  Freddy had been standing there with her mouth open for a good ten seconds too long before she managed to say, “Excuse me?”

  “It’s Robin Goodfellow’s fault,” he explained, kicking moodily at a stone in the road. “He’s calling himself Robin Goodfellow at the moment. He thinks it’s funny. I told him it would have been hilarious in Shakespeare’s day, but it’s just stupid now. But no … it’s all about the giggles with Robin Goodfellow. So Sam has got it into his head that we’re both fairies. He’s … not quite right. Very smart man, very imaginative, but just a little bit off. Leaves out bowls of milk for me whenever he notices me hanging around. I’ve tried to explain the truth, but he thinks it’s fairy guile.”

  Freddy was having to bite her tongue hard to keep from smiling. She thought she was doing a decent job. “So we’re in England?”

  “We’re definitely in England,” said Josiah. “We’re English fairies. He’ll think your name is Titania.”

  She clapped her hands over her mouth to stop herself from guffawing out loud. Their last jump seemed to have got her into a strange mood. Josiah made a sour face at her.

  They walked up the hill towards the farmhouse. It was a beautiful day, cool and brisk; it felt like autumn to Freddy. The house in front of them was a sprawl of grey buildings. There was no one in sight, though Freddy could still hear the cows. Josiah led her around to what seemed to be the kitchen door. She had learned from experience that it was never worth going to the front doors of large houses; she and Josiah didn’t look respectable enough for that.

  “You knock,” said Josiah. “I recognise the need to hang around with Three, but I would rather pull out my own teeth than have a conversation of any length with this man. At any rate, I doubt we’ll be here long. I never saw us when I was here.”

  Freddy had grown used to this sort of tangled grammar. It took her only a couple of seconds to decipher it. At the same time, she experienced a stab of irritation at even having to figure it out. She really did seem to have had enough. He squirmed out of that last one, she thought. We haven’t talked about what happened at all. Josiah had been shaken by Mika’s story, but the second they had jumped, he had pulled back into his usual sardonic, detached self. He hadn’t even mentioned Freddy marching off to confront Mika herself. Something had changed for her, but he was pretending nothing had happened. Now he was ordering her around as usual, and in normal circumstances, she wouldn’t even have noticed.

  Freddy thought, I’ve fallen into a rut. It was a strange rut, but a rut nonetheless. She had been trusting that Josiah knew what was going on and would eventually get her out of this. And yet he hadn’t understood what was happening with Mika. What if Josiah was ultimately as clueless as she was and had simply been getting by on a tone of authority and a really good memory?

  She knocked, but she felt she was biding her time. Maybe she could do this one a bit differently.

  The knock brought a woman in a cap and apron to the door. “What is it, lad?”

  Freddy realised, a bit late, that Josiah hadn’t told her Three’s full name. “Sam” wasn’t going to cut it in eighteenth-century England. She glanced at Josiah, who had pressed himself flat against the house beside the door. “Message for Mr.…” she said, “uh…”

  “Coleridge,” hissed Josiah. Freddy blinked. Hadn’t Josiah once made a fuss in class about a poet named Coleridge? There was something else about the name, too—something obvious that she was going to kick herself later for forgetting—but there wasn’t time to try to think of what.

  The woman leaned out and glanced around at Josiah. “Oh,” she said flatly, “it’s you.”

  “No,” said Josiah. “I’m not officially here. I met Fred purely by accident in the lane.” His accent, Freddy noted, had become more British.

  “You drive the poor man to distraction,” said the woman to Josiah, hands on her hips. “The things he believes about you!”

  “Not my fault,” said Josiah. “And I’m sorry about the milk. I do try to keep out of his sight.”

  “Please, miss,” said Freddy in her best approximation of an English accent, which she suspected made her sound a bit too much like someone mangling a Mary Poppins imitation, “I have this message for Mr. Coleridge.”

  “Do you, now?” said the woman. “And where did you spring from?”

  Freddy looked at Josiah again. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. I depend too much on him. I shouldn’t. I don’t really know anything about him. She thought of him as her friend sometimes, but she knew he wasn’t really. She knew he didn’t react to things in the same way as ordinary people.

  “Porlock. He’s from Porlock. From Dr. Potter,” said Josiah.

  “Let the lad speak for himself,” said the woman.

  “He’s shy,” said Josiah.

  “Mr. Coleridge is working and cannot be disturbed,” said the woman.

  Freddy bobbed her head. “I was told it couldn’t wait, miss,” she said.

  The woman drummed her fingers on the door frame, then nodded. “I’ll see what can be done. Please come in,” she said.

  Freddy followed her through the kitchen and down a corridor to a drawing room. Josiah, uninvited, slunk along on her heels. “Porlock?” she hissed at him. “Dr. Potter?”

  “Nearby village. Sam’s doctor in nearby village,” Josiah whispered back. “You can work with that, can’t you?”

  “I know his name. He’s a poet, isn’t he?” she asked, but they had reached the room, and the woman was showing Freddy to a seat. Josiah went straight to a window nook and drew the curtains over himself.

  When the woman had gone, Freddy said, “Sam Coleridge? Is he the same as the poetry guy?”

  “If you haven’t heard of Coleridge,” said Josiah, his voice muffled by the curtains, “you’ve been living under a rock. Isn’t your mother an English professor?”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m the world’s biggest poetry fan,” said Freddy just as the poet’s full name came to her: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Josiah had brought him up in class. There had been an epic battle between Josiah and Mr. Dillon about the possibility of opium causing poetry. But there was definitely something else, too. It seemed important that she should remember it. Something with a book, thought Freddy, and Roland and Mel and … tentacles. No. Not the tentacles. But other things … like … pleasure-dome…?

  “It isn’t relevant, anyway,” said Josiah. “He’s just Three.”

  Pleasure-dome, thought Freddy again, and then she had it. Her hands clenched into fists. She knew something important: something Josiah didn’t know.

  A man entered the room. He was unexpectedly young. When Freddy thought of the poets whose works her mother taught, she almost invariably pictured a bunch of crusty old men. Sam couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. His brown hair fell past his shoulders, and he was just a little bit chubby. Mostly, he struck Freddy as distracted. His eyes flicked about the room, doing a full circuit before they lit on Freddy. His mouth was twisted into a sort of anguished grimace.

  “Please forgive me,” he said all in a rush as Freddy rose to meet him. “I have some urgent business I must attend to. Your visit has come at a very inconvenient time. I beg your pardon.”

  “But—” Freddy started.

  “Dr. Potter is
very kind,” said Sam loudly, “but I have sufficient quantities of laudanum for now. If you will excuse me—”

  “I’m not from Dr. Potter,” said Freddy, “actually.”

  Sam, already turning towards the doorway, paused. “You’ve gained entry on false pretences? Why?”

  “Robin Goodfellow,” said Freddy. It was all she could think of. It usually didn’t take more than a mention of Cuerva Lachance or Josiah for the Threes to fall in line. Of course, it tended to be Josiah himself doing the mentioning. He had never hidden behind the curtains before.

  “What of him?” said Sam.

  “You’ve seen him,” said Freddy. “And the other one. The one called … called…”

  “Mustardseed?” said Sam.

  “My name is not Mustardseed. You made that up,” said Josiah indignantly from the alcove.

  “Oh, is he here?” said Sam. “I’m sure the farm can spare some milk—”

  Josiah poked his head through the curtains. “If you try to give me milk, I shall flay you,” he said and withdrew once more.

  Freddy, turning back to Sam, was surprised to catch the merest ghost of amusement on his face. It was gone in an instant, but she knew she had seen it. You sneak, she thought with admiration. You don’t think he’s a fairy. You’re teasing him. She had never associated the idea of a sense of humour with her mother’s parade of dry old poets, either.

  “I know them both. What of them?” said Sam.

  Freddy drew a deep breath and removed her hat, letting her curly hair fall free. “Well,” she said, “at the moment, I’m with them, too.”

  And then she told him everything.

  It wasn’t what they normally did with the Threes. Some of them could handle the idea of time travel, but many couldn’t. Josiah would make up some story: he was generally his own twin brother, and Freddy was his guest. If everybody thought he was a god, Freddy became a god, too. If everybody thought he was foreign, Freddy was from his country. Some of the Threes had seen Cuerva Lachance travel in time, and those ones got an edited version of the truth. None of them got the whole truth, or none of them had until now. She didn’t care. Until now, they had been flitting aimlessly back and forth through time. Josiah said this was because of the rules, but she was tired of following the rules. Whose rules were they, anyway? And there was … the thing with the pleasure-dome. She didn’t think she had a plan yet, but it was possible a plan was on the verge of being born.