Ysabel

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Unrecognizable.

  Yeah. Sure. You’re, like, six-foot-three, with big shoulders and hands, and blue eyes, and you shave your beard and no one will know you from Danny DeVito?

  And Ned’s mother was very, very quick. That’s why they’d wanted her here in the first place. One reason, anyhow. The other reason had to do with machetes and guns and bombs, and they weren’t going to talk about that. Although it was also why his uncle had taken that fake name—Ivanson, or whatever it was—and had been following her for years to places halfway around the world.

  Ned waited for the explosion. It didn’t come.

  Instead, Meghan Marriner, who never did, began to cry.

  “Oh, Meg,” her sister whispered. “Oh, honey . . .”

  Meghan held up a quick hand to stop her. Ned saw Kate Wenger biting her lip beside him, a gesture he knew pretty well by now.

  His mother wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand. She drew a breath and looked up. She stared at Martyniuk for a long moment.

  “Three times?” she said finally.

  He nodded.

  “Sierra Leone, the Gulf. Darfur? That’s where I saw you?”

  He cleared his throat. “Ah, four times, actually, being truthful. I was in Bosnia, but just for a few days . . . it didn’t end up looking too bad. You may not have spotted me.”

  She was still staring, still thinking. “You found out when I signed up for missions and you went there, if you thought they were dangerous?”

  He nodded again.

  “Dropped everything in your life? Took a false name, false ID? In war zones?”

  “That’s about it,” Martyniuk said. “It didn’t happen often, really.”

  “Four times, you just said.”

  Martyniuk nodded again. He made a face. “Damn. Looks like I just got rid of a beard I liked.”

  There was a short silence. “You look better without it,” Meghan Marriner said.

  “I tell him that too,” her sister murmured. “Meg, I—”

  Again, Ned’s mother held up a hand. “I’m going to cry again if you talk, so don’t, Kim.” She still hadn’t taken her eyes from the big, capable figure of Dave Martyniuk in the doorway. “I need to be really clear on this. You left your work in England, your wife, you put yourself in danger around the world, you certainly broke laws, with computers and a fake identity, and why?”

  He leaned on the doorframe, took his time. An unhurried man, Ned thought. “We felt a sense of responsibility.”

  Meghan closed her eyes for a second. “You thought I did these things because . . . ?”

  Martyniuk’s expression was grave. “Meghan, sisterin-law, I learned a long time ago, the hard way, that people do things for an amazing variety of reasons, some good, some bad. Even heroic things. Sometimes we don’t know all the reasons for what we’re doing.”

  “I’d say we usually don’t,” Edward Marriner said.

  His wife looked at him.

  “You knew about this, Ed? Do I have to kill you, too?”

  He shook his head, but the threat, the joke of it, had already changed the mood. Ned could feel himself beginning to breathe properly again. “I heard about it two nights ago, honey.”

  From the doorway, Martyniuk murmured, “If you want me dead, just tell me to shave closer. I seem to have lost the knack.”

  “You were rushing,” Ned said.

  The adults turned to him, all of them.

  “Right, Nephew,” his uncle said. “The unchallenged expert of the family. You shave—what?—twice a week to show off?” He was grinning, though.

  “Well, I know who isn’t going to teach me his technique, anyhow,” Ned said.

  “Listen to the lot of you! Bandage me already,” Greg interjected. “Is this how doctors treat wounded patients? Family arguments while we die on the table?”

  “An under-reported statistic,” Kimberly said soberly.

  Ned was opening his mouth to make another joke, out of sheer relief, when he felt a flaring, imperative presence inside himself. Awareness flashed in his aunt’s face in the same moment. He saw her look past him.

  He wheeled around. And looking out through the glass doors he saw, in the late-day sunlight, a slender, bald-headed man in a grey leather jacket step onto the terrace and stand there, waiting patiently.

  CHAPTER XV

  He accepted a glass of wine from Ned’s father at the table, dealing easily with the scrutiny of a large number of people, but Ned could see how tightly wound the man was. There was a sense that Phelan was keeping himself under control, but only just. As before, when he’d seen this man, had been with him, the world suddenly felt more intense. And how could that not be so, Ned thought—with what they knew about him?

  Ned glanced at his mother, and saw Meghan Marriner’s alert, appraising look at the newcomer. She kept still, watching. She’d finished with Gregory, wrapping his wound.

  Phelan saw that. “An injury? How did this happen?” The low voice, precise.

  He had spoken to Ned, even with the adults present, so Ned answered, “In Arles. Wolves.”

  “Cadell attacked you? Where? Why?” Eyebrows raised. Control at the brink of violence.

  He hasn’t found her, Ned thought. And he knows time is running.

  He said, “The cemetery. But no, it was Brys. On his own.”

  A hard look. “On his own? You are certain of that?”

  Ned nodded. “Yes. What are you doing here?”

  The obvious question, really. He was pretty sure he knew the answer.

  “Perhaps a proper introduction first,” his mother said. Her voice was cool, but not hostile. “I’ve just arrived, and I’m missing some critical information.”

  Ned looked at Kate. The two of them were the only ones here who’d ever seen Phelan.

  The Roman—the Greek, the stranger—smiled briefly at Meghan Marriner, a wintry smile. “I fear that, rude as it might seem, there isn’t time for proper introductions. My name is Phelan.” He looked briefly at Kate. “This time.”

  Aunt Kim crossed her arms on her chest. “But it was Protis, wasn’t it? And she was Gyptis?” A challenge in the words.

  Phelan looked at her, a different expression. “No, actually, though the tale produced those names eventually. It often happens that way. But they were never ours.”

  He paused and then, as if reluctantly, “And you are . . . ?”

  “Rude as it might seem,” Kimberly murmured coldly, “there isn’t time.”

  Ned, instinctively, looked at Uncle Dave and saw his mouth tighten, as if he was aware they were playing with danger.

  “I see,” said Phelan, after a silence. He looked at her thoughtfully. “You have some power, don’t you?”

  “Some,” Kimberly said. “Enough to recognize it.”

  Phelan nodded. He glanced at Ned. “You are related?”

  “My sister’s son.” Kimberly gestured at Meghan.

  The man in the grey leather jacket sipped his wine again. “This begins to make more sense, your presence among us.” He looked at Ned again.

  “Your presence among us doesn’t, yet,” said Edward Marriner. “And there is the matter of Melanie. We’d very much appreciate—”

  They heard a knock at the front door.

  Ned looked quickly that way, and swallowed hard. He knew who this was. Who it had to be. There had been no buzz to request admission from the locked gates.

  Steve, who was nearest, opened the door. With no surprise at all Ned saw Cadell standing there. He smiled cheerfully and entered, dressed as he had been at the Glanum ruins in the morning.

  The two men looked across at each other, one at the front entrance, the other by the glass doors to the terrace.

  Ned tried again—and failed again—to get his head properly around how long they’d known each other, and fought with each other for the woman he’d seen between fires at Entremont. The past infusing the present here, entering, defining it.

  It is not just about the three of them, Brys had
said.

  Brys was dead. Ned’s uncle had killed him. But perhaps it really was about the three of them, Ned thought, and everything else was bound up in that.

  “Am I too late for a glass of wine?” Cadell said in that deep voice, standing where Dave Martyniuk had been a moment before.

  No one responded, no one had time.

  The blurred motion with which Phelan drew the knife and threw it was quicker than any possible reply.

  It was in that moment, really, that an answer to another unspoken question came to Ned. He’d been wondering how Phelan could ever have battled the other man—so much larger, so obviously a warrior—on even terms in any sort of combat.

  He ought to have remembered the smaller man spinning off the cloister roof, flipping himself outwards and landing with so much grace. Speed and poise and effortless intelligence could serve in a fight as well as power, he thought.

  Cadell swore, an involuntary outburst. Ned heard Kate cry out, saw Steve back away from the door, at speed.

  With greater speed—almost impossibly so—Cadell took a step forward and seized a metal serving platter from the table. He hurled it like a discus across the room. Phelan twisted urgently sideways and the plate whipped past his face to smash loudly against the wall, putting a long, jagged crack in it between the glass doors.

  “What the hell ?” Edward Marriner exclaimed.

  Cadell had a hand to his left shoulder now. The knife was embedded there. Ned had seen that knife before. The cathedral, very first moments. He looked at Kate. She’d remember it. Her face was pale.

  Phelan’s was white. That plate had been moving fast enough to shatter his face, kill him if it had hit his throat.

  “A mild precaution,” he said. “To keep you from being tempted again. You don’t do well with temptation, do you? He’s been flying,” he explained, looking around the room. “Tracking me from the air. That’s how he came here. As an owl. She made him swear an oath not to fly. When a man disregards a sworn promise, he needs to have it enforced for him, or chaos descends upon the world, wouldn’t you say?”

  It was a question, but not addressed to anyone in particular. He was looking at the Celt.

  Cadell’s face had lost its colour as well. “I can kill you even with a wound, you know.”

  Phelan smiled thinly. Ice in his eyes. “You can say it. There’s a doctor here. I believe she’s finished with one injury.”

  “Two doctors,” Kim said quietly. “As I understand it, if you’d killed him here you’d have lost for this time and—”

  “I have no interest in what you understand. Believe me, if I had wanted to kill, the blade would not be in his arm,” Phelan said.

  Ned believed him.

  Cadell, across the table, was controlling his breathing, as if stepping down—carefully—from a towering, annihilating rage. If Aunt Kim was right, killing the other man with that discus would have cost him Ysabel now. And he had been throwing for the face.

  Cadell looked at Greg. After a moment, he said, “Again? You seem inclined to injure yourself.”

  “Not before you guys showed up,” Greg said.

  “Who did this?”

  “You really don’t know?” Phelan said.

  “I do not.”

  The Celt turned to Ned. They kept doing that. As if he had the answers here.

  He cleared his throat. “I told you this morning that we were heading to Arles, remember? Brys was waiting at the cemetery, or he followed us. Don’t know which.”

  “And?”

  “He had the wolves go for me. The others . . . Greg . . . defended me.”

  Cadell’s expression slowly changed. He shook his head. “I told him to leave you. I shall tell him again.”

  “Don’t think you can,” Ned said. “My uncle there killed him.”

  Another silence. Phelan and Cadell, from across the room, looked at each other.

  “This is truth?” Phelan asked.

  Ned, irritated, said, “Why would I lie? Just give us Melanie back and we’ll get out of this, you know it.”

  “And you know that cannot be done,” Cadell said, still holding his arm. “I told you this morning, and last night in the road. Now I tell you a third time.” He paused. He smiled. “Why would I lie?”

  “Well, I can think of reasons,” Kate Wenger said, bravely. “You lied about flying, didn’t you? We know that. Neither of you gives a damn about anything but Ysabel. You’d do anything to get to her first.”

  Everyone looked at her. Ned, instinctively, moved closer.

  “Just about anything,” Cadell agreed, gravely. It was hard, Ned thought, to disconcert these two. Probably came with the territory: if you had lived as many times as they had . . .

  Cadell turned to Dave Martyniuk, standing not far away. Seeing them together made you realize just how big Martyniuk was. The Celt was large, broadshouldered, rippling neck muscles and arms—and Uncle Dave was a bigger man.

  “Brys was a druid, and a companion of sorts. I should kill you for this, I suppose.” The words, lightly spoken, hung in the air.

  “I suppose,” Dave Martyniuk agreed. “But, as I told him, you don’t know nearly enough about me.”

  Cadell did look surprised at that. His head lifted, as if to a challenge. “You are aware of how many times and through how many lives I have fought?”

  “I’ve been briefed.” Uncle Dave nodded towards Kim.

  “Indeed,” said Phelan, from the other side of the table, the logical one, piecing things together. He and Kimberly exchanged a glance.

  Ned had never felt so many layers of tension in one place in his life. He was almost sick with it. On impulse he tried that inward search again: he found the three auras right away—his aunt, both men.

  And a fourth—a pale, soft hue.

  It shocked him, then he figured it out. It was himself. He was seeing his own existence in this other space. Still impulsively, he reached within and tried to close his presence down, screen it, the way the others could.

  It was gone. Ned swallowed hard. He looked up and saw that Aunt Kim had now turned to him, questioningly. He managed a shrug. What was he going to say? It wasn’t as if he had a clue, really.

  Phelan reclaimed his wine. He had put it down when the knock came at the door. He’d have known who was there, who was about to come in. Of course.

  Cadell was still staring at Dave Martyniuk. “You’re being reckless,” he said. “Relying on my goodwill at the wrong time. I’m not known for patience, and I dislike your manner.”

  “I’m sure you do. But not enough to risk losing the woman, I suspect. And as I said, you’d need to know more about me before we fought.”

  The Celt shook his head. “I have killed so many like you.”

  “No, you haven’t,” said Dave Martyniuk quietly.

  Then he added, in that other tongue, words that seemed to slice the air in the room the way Phelan’s blade had, and Ned heard those names again: Cernunnos, and the one that sounded like Cenwin.

  “Wherever you have fought,” his uncle added, in English, “and however many times, it was never where I did.”

  In the silence that followed this, they heard Phelan across the room say, “Ah,” as if something important had been clarified.

  For him, maybe. Not for Ned, that was for damn sure.

  Cadell looked from Dave across to the other man.

  “I’d call it interesting,” Phelan said lightly. “I would.”

  He smiled again, the same tight-mouthed look. Ned tried to remember if he’d seen joy or passion in this man’s face—other than when Ysabel had appeared up on the plateau.

  He couldn’t. But it had been there at Entremont. You couldn’t have missed it there.

  “I would be happy,” Phelan added, still looking at the golden-haired Celt, “to watch you fight this one. I see nothing but diversion for me.”

  “No one is fighting anyone, especially not with a knife in his arm,” Kimberly Ford said, a little too briskly. S
he scowled at Cadell. “You! Sit, we’ll deal with that. We seem to be all set, anyhow.” She gestured at the table.

  Ned saw Uncle Dave lean back, casually, against the wall by the computer table. “I do have a bad knee from this afternoon. Not moving all that well. Evens things out. But the truth is, your druid was attacking my nephew—you’d expect me to deal with that. And I didn’t try to kill him.”

  “Why not?” Cadell asked.

  An odd question. Dave hesitated. “Too final, from what my wife said. I told him, all of them, to let their spirits go back. They shouldn’t have been lingering after Beltaine.”

  “You know about that?” Cadell said.

  “Kimberly does. I listen. Go on, man, sit down, let her treat that wound. Your fight isn’t with me.” His voice was relaxed, steadying. “And, by the way, we honestly don’t know where she is. I assume that’s why you’re both here.”

  Cadell stared at him another moment, then turned to Ned again. Phelan had already done that.

  “It’s true,” Ned said. “We’re looking, you know it. We haven’t seen her.”

  He hesitated, then decided not to tell about sensing her presence in the cemetery. They were competing, weren’t they? This was a race of some kind, though he had no idea at all what they’d do if they won it. “I thought . . . I felt something in the valley north of Les Baux.”

  “Well, yes,” Phelan said. “You would have. But it is very old.”

  Cadell’s mood seemed to have changed. “I don’t think my flying here will matter to her.”

  As if he was pleading, in a way.

  Ned said, “You’re wrong. It’ll matter to Melanie. She cares about things like that. And she’s in her.”

  They both stared at him. He felt anger flare again. “Well, she is, isn’t she? That’s the whole point of this. Isn’t it? The summoning? So Ysabel changes a little each time, and you never know who she’ll choose. And don’t,” he added, glaring from one of them to the other, “say ‘Who are you?’ again, because I don’t know!”

  Nobody said it.

  Cadell abruptly sat down in the chair by Aunt Kim. He looked steadily across at his enemy. Two millennia and more, Ned thought. You could screw yourself up thinking about that.

  “Tell me,” the Celt murmured, “which oathbreaking will she count the greater? Flying to meet you here, or your wounding me when she ruled we could not fight? Seeking the edge you so much need, for later?”