Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  “I’m not cunning,” said Freddy. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  Cuerva Lachance, looking straight up at the sky, said, “Then why don’t you want to tell us who Three is?”

  “Because I do know you haven’t told me everything,” said Freddy. “It’s all less … innocent than you say it is. I just don’t know why.”

  “She knows,” said Cuerva Lachance, beaming.

  “We can’t give her a chance to tell them,” said Josiah.

  “Of course not,” said Cuerva Lachance. “But I was a Girl Guide once. I came prepared.”

  Freddy felt the rock shift behind her head. A second later, something else had shot out of it and around towards her face. She tried to pull herself away from it but couldn’t. Desperately, Freddy clamped her mouth shut. It didn’t do any good. Tendrils of … whatever it was … forced themselves between her lips, then her teeth. She felt her jaw being winched open, and she choked, but the tendrils stopped before they reached her throat, instead weaving themselves into a ball within her mouth. More tendrils fused together over her lips, gagging her. The gag held her head to the rock as firmly as the rope did her torso.

  “Breathe through your nose,” said Josiah. “If Three comes through, nobody’s going to get hurt.”

  If she got free, she thought, she would hurt him. It was the first time in her life she had ever sympathised with Keith. Josiah and Cuerva Lachance walked away behind the rock. She tried to shout after them, but her voice came out muffled and weak. A moment later, she was alone in the house on Grosvenor Street, in a part of it that couldn’t have existed.

  * * *

  Time passed. She had nothing to do but think, so think she did. If she couldn’t accomplish anything else, she could solve the puzzle.

  The thought she’d had before had been about power. She was sure Cuerva Lachance and Josiah weren’t as powerful as they seemed. Cuerva Lachance could … well, she could do this to the house on Grosvenor Street. Josiah could stop her from doing this, which was a different sort of power. They did influence the world. They did, somehow, balance each other out. But there was something skewed about the way they presented themselves and their relationship with Three. Something backwards.

  Backwards.

  Tied firmly to her rock, straining to draw enough air into her lungs, Freddy remembered. Ban. Ban had said everything was backwards. Maybe Freddy should have been thinking along those lines, but she hadn’t trusted Ban. And yet there were other clues, too, things that were inconsequential in and of themselves but that resonated with that idea of backwardness. Freddy drew a shallow breath in, let it out. Ban in the jungle: The girl is, as you put it, Three, though that’s a bit of a misnomer, I should say. Mika telling the story, seeming to call Cuerva Lachance and Josiah out of the air as she did. Other tiny things, hardly noticeable. Ban saying Three’s uncle thought she had been calling down demons. The boy in the cave being visited by Māui. Sam Coleridge annoying Josiah by steadfastly refusing to see him as anything but a fairy. Bragi standing up to Loki in the hall. Filbert avoiding the question of where the future Josiah and Cuerva Lachance were, holding her knowledge, whatever it was, effortlessly over Josiah’s head.

  Freddy blinked and nearly forgot to breathe, though she desperately needed more air. Everything was backwards. Cuerva Lachance and Josiah acted as if they were the ones with the power, but they weren’t, were they? It was Three. It seemed they were the dominant ones, but they couldn’t have been. Three shouldn’t even have been called Three. Mika had been able to control them; she had been One. Calling her—him—Three was just another misdirection.

  They want the Threes to think of themselves as inferior, thought Freddy. As third, not first. Why?

  “Have you got it yet?” asked Ban, poking her head up out of the sand. Freddy glowered down at her.

  “Yes,” said Ban, “of course she knows I’m here, but she also knows I don’t stay to help. I’m just popping in for the sake of drama. I have no idea how this is all going to turn out. I’m sure it will be very exciting.”

  Freddy thought inaudible swear words at Ban. She was getting tired of being surrounded by impossible people.

  “If I helped,” said Ban, “she would remember helping, and she would come around the rock and stop me. So I can only urge you to hurry up. Time is passing; the others will be here soon.”

  Freddy made an inarticulate noise in the back of her throat.

  “I think so, too,” said Ban. “If you’ll excuse me, I must go. I’ll just go talk to you in the past for a bit, and then it’s time for stories around the cooking fire. I never miss that.” She sank back down into the sand and vanished.

  Furious with herself and Ban and Roland and Josiah and Cuerva Lachance and the world in general, Freddy strained uselessly against her bonds. Ban pretended to be helpful, but she wasn’t. It was just more mind games from Cuerva Lachance. It was just more—

  —stories…?

  Freddy squeezed her eyes shut. Stories. She knew about the stories. Everywhere Three was, there were words, shaping stories, shaping history, even, sometimes. Bragi had changed everything by standing up to Loki with a poem. Ling had stopped a slaughter by telling her people what they believed. The boy in the cave had actually talked to a character from one of his own stories. Mika … Mika had done something very strange with her story. Freddy did know about the stories, but she hadn’t thought about what they meant.

  Josiah never wanted to talk about the stories. She’d pieced that bit together for herself. He didn’t like talking about Cuerva Lachance’s figments, either, and they were mostly characters out of stories … like Māui, now that she thought of it. She had seen Three’s connection to stories again and again, but she should have thought more about Josiah’s attitude. He’d always been cagey about it. She’d known he was trying to direct her attention away from something, but she hadn’t been sure what. She thought now that he hadn’t wanted her to think of Three as a storyteller. In particular …

  … He didn’t want me to think of Three as his storyteller … and of him as a story …

  Ban had asked Josiah and Cuerva Lachance—no, wait, Josiah and Loki—what they had done to reality. They had turned it inside out. She’d been wondering about certain inconsistencies in Josiah and Cuerva Lachance, but she’d been thinking of them as cosmic forces at the time. What if they weren’t cosmic forces? What if Mika hadn’t called them out of the air? And the choice …

  Freddy opened her eyes. The air in front of her was twisting out of shape. As she watched, Mel fell out onto the sand, a plump little ball in bunny-rabbit pyjamas. Roland, fully dressed, stumbled to his knees just behind her. And she knew why Roland shouldn’t have to make his choice. And she had no way of telling him she did.

  23

  “Freddy!” Mel bounced to her feet and ran across the sand, or tried to. What actually happened was that she jogged in place as if there were a treadmill hidden beneath the desert. She was absolutely white in the face. “The spider plants came to life and tried to kill us, and there were chairs with teeth, and the piano turned into a house on chicken’s legs! Where did you go?” It was the only time Freddy could remember Mel ever sounding anything like her actual age.

  “Stop running. You’re not going anywhere,” snarled Roland. He was almost as pale as Mel, and there was a long tear in his left sleeve.

  Josiah came out from behind the rock, Cuerva Lachance on his heels. “I see you got our message.”

  Mel stopped abruptly and accidentally by bumping down onto her rear end. “It was hard not to, what with all the crows coming in through our bedroom windows and all.”

  “Let her go,” said Roland. Freddy felt herself turning red. She’d never had an urge to be a damsel in distress, and she didn’t see why she should start now.

  “Sure,” said Josiah. “When you tell us who Three is and make your choice.”

  “What’ll happen if we don’t?” said Mel.

  “What do you think?” Josiah nod
ded at Cuerva Lachance.

  She smiled. “He lets me do what I want sometimes. Terrible things may happen. It’s also possible I’ll just go sit in a meadow for days. You never can tell.”

  “I’m banking on the terrible things, though,” said Josiah quickly. “I expect they’ll happen to Freddy.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be her friend,” said Roland. Freddy tried to waggle her eyebrows at him. She had known almost since they started time travelling that Josiah wasn’t exactly her friend. They got along surprisingly well: much better than she and Rochelle ever had, if she was going to be completely honest with herself. But she couldn’t trust him.

  Josiah hesitated briefly before answering. “She’s fun, but this is more important.”

  “Maybe Freddy’s Three,” said Mel.

  “Sorry. Try again,” said Josiah, sounding bored. “We know it’s one of you two. Just confess and make the damn choice already.”

  “We keep telling you,” said Mel, “no.”

  Josiah nodded at Cuerva Lachance again.

  As far as Freddy could see, she didn’t do anything at all. However, the rock holding Freddy was alive now. There was no transition between it being a rock and it being … something else. It breathed in, contracting the rope holding her in place. Another rope emerged from the rock and wrapped itself around her neck, cutting off her air completely. She raised her bound hands to pull at it, but it was as hard as the rock itself.

  Roland and Mel were both shouting at Cuerva Lachance, but since they were doing it together, Freddy couldn’t tell what they were saying. Tendrils of red were creeping across her field of vision as everything went fuzzy and dim and far away.

  “All right. All right. It’s Roland,” said Mel.

  The rope relaxed. Freddy drew a painful, ragged breath in through her nose.

  Roland didn’t notice right away what had happened. But Cuerva Lachance and Josiah were both looking at him now. He turned to Mel. “I’m sorry,” she said and signed. Freddy could see a tear trickling down her cheek. “They were killing her.”

  Roland glared across the sand at Freddy. “I knew you would be the one to screw up. I told you.”

  She couldn’t even shake her head at him; she was held too firmly in place. Don’t make the choice, she thought, wishing she could pour the words directly into his brain. Don’t make it! If you do, you really will be Three. There’s no such person as Three! She couldn’t pour the words directly into his brain. She squirmed. He was nearly sneering at her now. He thought she had ruined everything.

  “Don’t worry about her,” said Josiah. “You know she’s been exaggerating, don’t you? It’s just a little choice. Me or Cuerva Lachance. It hardly means anything at all. One of us will be slightly dominant for the space of your lifetime. That’s all it is. We do it because we always have.”

  You haven’t always done it, thought Freddy. Roland, develop psychic powers now, please.

  “She hasn’t told me anything,” said Roland. “I haven’t let her. I’m not going to make your stupid choice.”

  “Yes, you are.” Cuerva Lachance gestured towards Freddy. “Human beings are very fragile, aren’t they?”

  “You’re bluffing,” said Roland. “And we’re leaving. Come on, Mel.”

  He turned around. The desert turned with him, leaving him still facing towards Josiah.

  “We’re in control here,” said Josiah, “or hadn’t you noticed?”

  They’re not. It’s what they want you to think. Stop listening to them!

  She had to get through to him. It was stupid that she had the answer and had got herself all trussed up like some dimwitted princess in a fairy tale. She had let Cuerva Lachance put handcuffs on her, for crying out loud. Why had she done that? What was wrong with her?

  Never put handcuffs on an angry teenager.

  It was a sentence from her past. It came out of nowhere and hit her right between the eyes. She blinked. She had said that … the crazy lady in the woods. She had said it right before she had given Freddy—

  She stopped breathing, this time of her own accord. The crazy lady had given her a key.

  Slowly, gently, Freddy began to move her bound hands towards her tunic pocket.

  “We can stop you from leaving,” said Josiah. “We can trap you here forever if we like. This is our domain, not yours.”

  “It’s just an ordinary house,” said Mel. “Roland, think of it as an ordinary house.”

  “That won’t work,” said Josiah a shade too quickly. Freddy didn’t think it would work, or not entirely. It was obvious that the house on Grosvenor Street wasn’t an ordinary house any more. But Mel had the right idea. It was too bad she was still thinking about the situation backwards. Freddy’s right hand slid into her pocket. The angle was awkward, but she could just barely hook her fingers around her key ring. Careful not to let the keys jingle, she drew them gently upward.

  “Make the choice,” said Cuerva Lachance. “It’s all perfectly natural. And I never say that, so you know it must be true.”

  “The second you make it, everything goes back to normal,” said Josiah, signing simultaneously. “All three of you go home. School happens tomorrow as usual. Maybe I’ll finally manage to get suspended. You can play games with your friends and draw swords on your homework. Can’t you see there’s really nothing sinister about any of this?”

  “Sure,” said Mel, “which is why you have my sister tied to a rock and keep threatening to choke her.”

  Don’t draw attention to me, Mel. The keys were held firmly in her fist now. She sorted through them with her pinky finger. She could have found the key she wanted in her sleep.

  “I hate you all,” said Roland.

  Josiah shrugged. “Hate us all while making the choice.”

  Freddy had located the key. She eased it down between her fingers, letting it poke out into the air. Still moving as slowly as she could, she brought it around towards where she hoped the keyhole on the left handcuff was. She couldn’t move her head to see.

  “I’ve had dreams about you,” said Roland, his voice rough. “Over and over. I was all these different people.”

  “He’s one of those. Interesting.” Cuerva Lachance sounded quite friendly about it.

  “But I always felt the same in the dreams,” said Roland. “Trapped. Forced. The choice is more than you’re saying it is.”

  “It’s not, honestly,” said Josiah. “It’s just one little choice.”

  “I won’t make it.”

  “Then Freddy will stop breathing again. And I’m sure we can find something to do with Mel as well.”

  The sand around where Mel was sitting began to bubble in an ominous way. Freddy felt the key catch on something.

  “Stop it,” said Roland. “Stop hurting them!”

  “When you make the choice,” said Josiah. “We’re getting tired of waiting.”

  Roland’s face was twisted into the sulky scowl Freddy had always hated, but now she looked past the expression and saw fear there, too. Something inside her felt very strange. She had gone running off without a thought to rescue him. He had gone running off without a thought to rescue her …

  He was going to do it. He was going to have to, or he thought he was. Judging by his loathing of Josiah, Freddy thought he might choose Cuerva Lachance, and she really didn’t know what that would mean for her and Mel.

  The key slid into the lock and turned. The left handcuff fell open. She wasn’t quite sure this was a good thing. It was Cuerva Lachance who had given her the key.

  She had seconds, if that. She could try to tear off the gag, but frankly, she could have done that with the handcuffs on; she hadn’t bothered because the gag, like the neck rope, was as hard as stone. There was really only one thing she could usefully try: one thing that not a single person here would even suspect she could do.

  If I do that, she thought, he’ll know …

  The faint vestiges of the old anger stirred briefly. It felt like a reflex.
Shut up with the stupid pride already, Freddy told herself. She shoved the keys back into her pocket.

  Roland’s eyes had been wandering desperately from Cuerva Lachance to Josiah to Freddy and back again. She waited until they fell on her, then raised her hands.

  Freddy signed, clumsily, Don’t make choice. You … GM. They … NPC. Everything backwards.

  She had no idea if she’d got the signs right. She had no idea if he’d understood. She hadn’t been able to say what she’d wanted because she hadn’t known the sign for “storyteller,” but she thought maybe the gaming terms would work better with Roland anyway. She saw his face change, his eyes widening in astonishment as he realised what she was doing. She had never signed to him before or let on she understood what he was signing.

  Josiah and Cuerva Lachance had seen, too. “Damn it,” said Josiah, “how did she…?”

  The rope around her neck contracted. “Freddy!” said Mel, seeing her struggle to breathe. Freddy brought her hands up to tug at the neck rope, but once more, it was too solid to move.

  “Backwards,” said Roland. “NPC?”

  They’re non-player characters, Roland, Freddy thought. Everything was going red and black again. Will you please do something about that now?

  The world was fuzzing down to nothing. People were yelling at each other, but very far away. Freddy thought her eyes might have closed at some point; she wasn’t quite sure where she was.

  She was on the ground. She didn’t know how that had happened. Someone was thumping her on the chest. Freddy choked, then breathed.

  “Get up,” said Mel. “Get up, get up. It’s not over.”

  Freddy opened her eyes. “What…?” she croaked. The gag was gone. She sat up. Her throat felt bruised.

  “He made Cuerva Lachance let you go,” said Mel. “With his brain. But they’re fighting back … both of them.”

  Freddy glanced over at Roland. Around him, the desert boiled. Cuerva Lachance was standing on top of the rock, her coat blowing wildly about her. As Freddy watched, her hat was whipped away into the crackling sky. Roland said, “This isn’t happening. You’re not doing anything. Get down from there!”