by Kari Maaren
“You’re cheating,” said Mel.
“I’m Cuerva Lachance,” said Cuerva Lachance. “And I do terribly badly want you to wake him up.”
“Which is it?” said Freddy.
“Both. Neither. Who can tell?”
Mel stared at the fire. Her eyes were so wide that Freddy could see the whites showing all around the irises. “I’ll do it,” she said in a trembling voice.
Freddy said, “Mel—”
“Everyone’s done something important but me. I should go,” said Mel, and moved towards the bridge.
Freddy shoved her sister aside.
Her heart was thundering in her ears. The rope bridge was scary, but it wasn’t anywhere near as scary as the thought of Mel falling into the fire. She could see a man lying dead in a jungle, bleeding into the undergrowth; she could see a boy lurking alone in a cave. She could see herself walking down that road with Roland, the funeral behind them. She could feel herself refusing to cry. She knew she took Mel for granted. Thinking of her dying made Freddy’s throat constrict, cutting off her breathing as completely as the rope had earlier.
“You stay back,” Freddy said. “I’ve travelled in time. This should be a cakewalk.” She didn’t believe that. She stepped onto the bridge.
Heat blasted up from below. It’s just a cliché, Freddy thought as she shuffled along the bottommost rope, her hands wrapped firmly around the topmost. Just a stupid cliché … the kind of thing you would find at the end of an action movie. You’ve survived wars. You can survive this. She wished she felt more in control. Roland had some control, and Cuerva Lachance, at the moment, had more. Freddy was just a character. She thought she might even be a character in a poem that didn’t have an ending. It was her fault it didn’t. And there’s another poem in here, too … the slimy things upon the slimy sea. Don’t think about the slimy things! Shuffle, slide, pause. Shuffle, slide, pause. She was about halfway across, and nothing terrible had happened yet.
“Freddy,” screamed Mel, “she’s burning the bridge! Hurry!”
Freddy risked a glance back. Cuerva Lachance was at war with herself. One hand was glowing with flame, the other glistening with water; she was flicking them at the rope bridge in turns. “I don’t know what I want! It’s worrying!” she said. Mel threw herself at Cuerva Lachance but went right through her. Freddy turned back to the task at hand. Shuffle, slide, shuffle, slide. No time for pauses now.
The middle rope fell away. Freddy hadn’t been using it, but she didn’t like to see it go. Roland was screaming now, too. They’re just kids, thought Freddy. They don’t need to see Cuerva Lachance burn me to death. The unexpected anger at this thought propelled her along through three more shuffle-slides. Her palms were slippery with sweat. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if one of the other ropes went.
“She’s almost through the bottom rope,” howled Roland. “Jump!”
Freddy looked. She was three feet from land. She took as firm a grip on the top strand as she could and sidled very quickly along the bottom one. A foot from the island, she felt it give.
Freddy swung herself awkwardly sideways and forward, crashing down onto the rock. Pain shot up her leg; her left foot had landed in the flames. Freddy pulled it quickly away.
The island was only big enough for about three people. Fire raged on every side. Freddy crawled up beside Josiah and shook him. He didn’t respond. “I think I’m going to sink the island,” Cuerva Lachance called across the lake, “though I’ll have you know I’m happy about this only on Tuesdays. Or maybe it should rain. It’s so hard not to decide!”
“Josiah, come on,” shouted Freddy, shaking him harder. His head lolled, and he slid down onto the ground.
Mel said suddenly, “It’s a story.” Her voice wasn’t loud, but sound here was as strange as it had been on the slimy sea. Distance didn’t seem to matter. The words carried easily across the flames.
“So?” said Freddy. She could feel the island beginning to shake beneath her.
“It’s a story,” said Mel. “How do you wake people up in stories?”
Time stopped briefly. Part of Freddy’s brain went, Oh, no, not that; we’ll never hear the end of it if we do that, but she knew Mel was right. “I hate you, Roland,” she said, and she kissed Josiah on the lips.
It was her first kiss. She didn’t enjoy it. Josiah opened his eyes.
* * *
Josiah said, “And they all lived slightly discontentedly ever after.”
They were sitting in the living room of the house on Grosvenor Street, neatly arranged on the couch and love seat. Freddy glanced down. She was holding a steaming mug of tea in her hands. Most of the chairs were gone. Cuerva Lachance wasn’t there.
“She’ll be off being nonsensical by herself for a bit,” said Josiah when he noticed them looking. “I don’t think it’s easy to mean nothing and everything all at once.”
Roland said, “Did anyone win? Is anything over?”
“Oh, you won,” said Josiah. “I would shake my fist at you if I wasn’t so tired.”
Mel got up from her seat, set down her own mug of tea, waddled over to where Freddy was sitting on the love seat alone, took Freddy’s mug of tea away and handed it to Roland, sat down beside Freddy, and wrapped her arms around her sister. She did it all in a completely matter-of-fact way, but Freddy could feel Mel’s tears trickling down onto her sleeve. She had scared Mel a lot at the fire lake. She had been thinking only of Mel scaring her.
No one said anything for a while. At last, Mel pulled away and took out her notebook, which she apparently kept in a pocket of her pyjamas. “I think we all won. No more forced choice for Three,” she said, making a note. “But no complete control for Three, either. Maybe you’re equals now. You’ve played it to a draw.”
Josiah pulled a sour face. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“You should consider it,” said Mel, “just for fun.”
“You kissed me,” Josiah remarked to Freddy, who could feel herself turning what she suspected was a very deep red. “I expect it was equally unpleasant for both of us. Let’s blame the story and leave it at that.”
“Are you guys going to leave us alone now?” demanded Roland.
“Certainly not,” said Josiah. “You’re Three; you’re stuck with us. You did make us, you know. And there’s school tomorrow. Don’t you want to watch me get beat up again? I thought you enjoyed it.”
Freddy and Mel exchanged glances. Freddy felt a knot in her stomach loosen. It was funny, after all the terror and betrayal and embarrassing moments on islands in lakes of fire, but part of her seemed to have been afraid that Josiah and Cuerva Lachance were going to go away now.
Maybe Josiah was her friend after all. It figured she would make the strangest friend she could without realising she had.
Freddy caught Josiah’s eye. She didn’t think the smile she saw lurking behind his eyes was entirely her imagination.
“The story’s over, at any rate,” said Josiah, “finally. Things should calm down for a while. There may be fewer tentacles.”
Freddy thought about how Cuerva Lachance and Josiah had been missing in the future. She wasn’t sure the story was over. Maybe it had paused. That was good enough for her.
“Let’s go home,” said Mel. Roland hesitated, then nodded. She was pretty sure there was a smile behind his eyes, too.
“You do that,” said Josiah. “I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”
“You’ll see us today,” said Freddy. The sun was coming up. As she spoke, the first beam crept through the window and, inexplicably, filled the air with rainbows.
epilogue
Mel and Roland went home. Freddy walked into the park.
There were things she would have to deal with soon. She needed to think about school and how she didn’t fit in there and how, strangely, she didn’t care that she didn’t. She and Roland needed to talk. She thought they needed to talk for quite a long time. Maybe she would try to sign
a little, though she didn’t think she would be very good at it yet. She and Mel needed to talk as well. And then … Freddy saw herself and Roland on that bleak road, walking away from a funeral at which she hadn’t cried. There were things in her life on the verge of going wrong. Maybe she could deal with some of them. Maybe she and her mother needed to talk most of all. And it had been a very long time since she had seen her dad.
There were things she would have to deal with soon, but not yet. Right now, something was beginning.
The path through the woods was spongy beneath her feet. Dampness trickled in through holes in her boots. She was almost glad it did, as her left foot was throbbing from the burn. She shivered. It was a brisk fall morning, and she didn’t have a coat. Freddy moved beneath the evergreens, watching the sunlight begin to trickle between the branches. A crow called somewhere in the trees.
Cuerva Lachance, hair wild, cheek bleeding, hat and coat gone, clothes in tatters, was sitting on the bench. Freddy sat down beside her. “Have you been yet?”
“Not yet,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I was waiting for you. It’s very peaceful here. You wouldn’t think there was a city all around.”
Freddy nodded. “Why did you give me the key?”
“Well, I haven’t, but I think I will. Without it, things would have gone very differently.”
“I guess.”
“And without the time travel,” said Cuerva Lachance, gazing innocently up at the treetops, “you would have been a different sort of person yesterday. Interesting to think about, really.”
Freddy looked at her, blinking. The time travel had been an accident … hadn’t it?
Cuerva Lachance beamed out from beneath her tangled hair. “You do realise I’m the same person as Ban, don’t you? I don’t always feel the same way about what we’ve done to Three. Well … I don’t always feel the same way about very much for very long.”
“But you have less power this way,” said Freddy. “You’re more of a story.”
“Oh, power.” Cuerva Lachance fluttered her fingers in the air. “You’ve seen what happens when I’m given power. I really enjoy it, but I also really don’t. Too much power for either of us would lead to the end of everything, and life’s too interesting for that. It’s better when it’s a three-way balance. Josiah would disagree, but he does tend to see everything in black-and-white terms.”
“Of course,” she added after a pause, “I may have disagreed with all this an hour ago. You never can tell with me. Which is the point.”
They sat side by side and watched colour leach into the forest. Birds were calling in the woods, but cautiously, sparsely. Winter was on its way; the summer birds had already fled.
“Do you need the key back?” asked Freddy after a while.
“Oh, no.” Cuerva Lachance nodded towards Freddy’s right wrist, from which the handcuffs, forgotten until now, still dangled. “Keep it. Am I going to invent some psychological mumbo-jumbo to convince you to take it? I can’t think how I’m going to do that.”
“I guess you’ll make it up as you go along,” said Freddy.
“That does tend to work for me,” said Cuerva Lachance.
She was gone. Freddy shivered in the chill of the morning. Without her meaning it to, her hand had slid into her pocket and found the key. It was just a key. She knew what lock it fit now. Maybe she didn’t need it any more. Maybe there wasn’t anything all that bad about crying.
Down through time, she heard: “Have you ever had one of those days where everything goes so stupidly wrong that you find yourself saying every five minutes, ‘Now, this can’t possibly get any worse’? And then it does?”
The voice faded to nothing. The crow cawed in the woods. Freddy got up and went home through the still morning as the sun rose full above the trees.
author’s note
Time-travel stories are a chancy proposition when they go so far back in history that it is impossible to know with any accuracy what things would have been like back then. I have therefore taken certain imaginative liberties with the historical (and prehistorical) bits. Any inaccuracies are entirely my own fault. However, certain details are based on myth, legend, folklore, and known history.
Loki and Heimdallr are both Norse gods whose names can be found in many surviving poems and stories. Loki is a god of mischief, a shape-shifter who is occasionally on the side of the other gods and occasionally opposed to them. He is sometimes associated with fire. He will be one of the key players during Ragnarök, the battle that ends the world, at which time he and Heimdallr will kill each other. Some of the insults Bragi trades with Loki / Cuerva Lachance during the flyting refer to the god Loki’s exploits.
Heimdallr is the guardian of Bifröst, the burning rainbow bridge that leads to the realm of the gods. He will blow the horn Gjallarhorn (not quite a trombone, but often depicted in artistic representations as almost the same size as one) to signal the beginning of Ragnarök. He sleeps little or not at all, as he must be forever vigilant. He is responsible for the organisation of humanity into social classes. One of the epithets associated with him is “Loki’s enemy.”
Bragi Boddason was, as far as we know, a Swedish court poet, and possibly the inventor of skaldic poetry. Considering the period in which he would have lived, the early ninth century, it cannot now be known for sure whether he ever existed. If he did, he may have given his name to Bragi, the Norse god of skaldic poetry. The poem “Lokasenna” deals with Loki’s disruption of a feast of the gods that Bragi is attending. Bragi is the first of the gods to challenge Loki and the first that Loki targets in his flyting.
The huli jing, or fox spirit, is a creature of Chinese mythology. Foxes may take human form, often appearing as breathtakingly beautiful women. They may have positive, negative, or ambiguous roles in stories. Associating with a fox spirit may be dangerous or beneficial.
Māui is a Polynesian culture hero, a trickster famed for, among other things, “fishing” various islands (which ones are involved depends on who is telling the story) up to the surface of the ocean. In the Māori version of his story, it’s the North Island of New Zealand, the island upon which Freddy and Josiah find the nameless boy, that is formed from the fish Māui catches.
“Robin Goodfellow” is sometimes used as another name for the puck, a type of trickster sprite found in British folklore. The mischievous fairy Puck, also called Robin Goodfellow, has a major role in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A less prominent fairy in the same play is called Mustardseed.
Mika’s creation myth bears a resemblance to many creation myths from various cultures. The idea of twin culture heroes with opposing characteristics can be found in numerous mythologies, most particularly in North and South American Native creation stories.
The paths of pins and needles that Freddy encounters in the house on Grosvenor Street appear in an old French version of the story now commonly known as “Little Red Riding Hood.” Freddy’s choice of the needles path echoes the choice of the girl in the story and leads to similarly problematic results.
Freddy’s favourite reference book, Bulfinch’s Mythology, exists, and if you are interested in the mythological bits and pieces that turn up in this novel, it is a good place to start.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet who lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is still widely known for being one of the originators of the Romantic movement in English literature. According to him, he composed the poem “Kubla Khan” in 1797 after it came to him in an opium dream. It should have been two or three hundred lines long, but he was interrupted in the composition of it by a “person on business from Porlock,” and all but the beginning of the poem was lost. He was also the author of the much longer poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” from which Roland takes his slimy things with legs and Josiah derives his albatross-flavoured cough. On the question of whether or not Mr. Coleridge believed in fairies, historical record is silent.
More Praise for Weave a Cir
cle Round
“This novel deserves to become a YA classic.”
—Juliet Marillier, Aurealis Award–winning
author of the Sevenwaters series
“Kari Maaren’s witty, cliché-skewering debut novel is a vivid picture of a blended family in turmoil, an intricate temporal puzzle box, and a grand adventure.”
—A. M. Dellamonica, author of The Nature of a Pirate
“A trope-defying, endlessly entertaining romp. Maaren’s wry sense of humor and crisp prose make this refreshing tale of destinies gone haywire an absolute must-read.”
—Charlene Challenger, author of The Myth in Distance
“Impossible sand, unfinished poems, Vikings, borks, dangerous deities, grade nine: Freddy Duchamp encounters all of these and more in the headlong adventure. This is a wonderful debut novel. I can’t wait for Maaren’s next.”
—Caitlin Sweet, author of The Door in the Mountain
about the author
Kari Maaren is a Toronto-area writer, award-winning musician and cartoonist, and academic. This is her first novel.
Visit her online at karimaaren.com, or sign up for email updates here.
Twitter: @angrykem
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3