She followed him down, protesting, “But it’s mine!”

“You said we could choose anything.”

“It’s just a worthless thing I grew, it’s nothing of the tower’s treasure. If you must take after all, choose something worth your life!”

He glanced back at her, as they rounded the tower stairs to the bottom. His face was bone-white, but he could still smile. “I will give you back your rose,” he said, “if you will let me take the Amaranth.”

“But I am the only Amaranth.”

He strode past his startled companions, whose hands were heaped with this, no this, and maybe this. As if the dragon’s magical eye had opened in his own eye, he led her himself into the dragon’s mouth.

 

 

 

 

The Snow Queen

 

 

Kay

 

 

They stood together without touching, watching the snow fall. The sudden storm prolonging winter had surprised the city; little moved in the broad streets below them. Ancient filigreed lamps left from another century threw patterned wheels of light into the darkness, illumining the deep white silence crusting the world. Gerda, not hearing the silence, spoke.

“They look like white rose petals endlessly falling.” Kay said nothing. He glanced at his watch, then at the mirror across the room. The torchieres gilded them: a lovely couple, the mirror said. In the gentle light Gerda’s sunny hair looked like polished bronze; his own, shades paler, seemed almost white. Some trick of shadow flattened Gerda’s face, erased its familiar hollows. Her petal-filled eyes were summer blue. His own face, with sharp bones at cheek and jaw, dark eyes beneath pale brows, looked, he thought, wild and austere: a monk’s face, a wizard’s face. He searched for some subtlety in Gerda’s, but it would not yield to shadow. She wore a short black dress; on her it seemed incongruous, like black in a flower.

He commented finally, “Every time you speak, flowers fall from your mouth.”

She looked at him, startled. Her face regained contours; they were graceful but uncomplex. She said, “What do you mean?” Was he complaining? Was he fanciful? She blinked, trying to see what he meant.

“You talk so much of flowers,” he explained patiently. “Do you want a garden? Should we move to the country?”

“No,” she said, horrified, then amended: “Only if—Do you want to? If we were in the country, there would be nothing to do but watch the snow fall. There would be no reason to wear this dress. Or these shoes. But do you want — ”

“No,” he said shortly. His eyes moved away from her; he jangled coins in his pocket. She folded her arms. The dress had short puffed sleeves, like a little girl’s dress. Her arms looked chilled, but she made no move away from the cold, white scene beyond the glass. After a moment he mused, “There’s a word I’ve been trying all day to think of. A word in a puzzle. Four letters, the clue is: the first word schoolboys conjugate.”

“Schoolboys what? ”

“Conjugate. Most likely Latin.”

“I don’t know any Latin,” she said absently.

“I studied some . . . but I can’t remember the first word I was taught. How could anyone remember?”

“Did you feed the angelfish?”

“This morning.”

“They eat each other if they’re not fed.”

“Not angelfish.”

“Fish do.”

“Not all fish are cannibals.”

“How do you know not angelfish in particular? We never let them go hungry; how do we really know?”

He glanced at her, surprised. Her hands tightened on her arms; she looked worried again. By fish? he wondered. Or was it a school of fish swimming through deep, busy waters? He touched her arm; it felt cold as marble. She smiled quickly; she loved being touched. The school of fish darted away; the deep waters were empty.

“What word,” he wondered, “would you learn first in a language? What word would people need first? Or have needed, in the beginning of the world? Fire, maybe. Food, most likely. Or the name of a weapon?”

“Love,” she said, gazing at the snow, and he shook his head impatiently.

“No, no —cold is more imperative than love; hunger overwhelms it. If I were naked in the snow down there, cold would override everything; my first thought would be to warm myself before I died. Even if I saw you walking naked toward me, life would take precedence over love.”

“Then cold,” she said. Her profile was like marble, flawless, unblinking. “Four letters, the first word in the world.”

He wanted suddenly to feel her smooth marble cheek under his lips, kiss it into life. He said instead, “I can’t remember the Latin word for cold.” She looked at him, smiling again, as if she had felt his impulse in the air between them.

His thoughts veered off-balance, tugged toward her fine, flushed skin and delicate bones, something nameless, blind and hungry in him reaching toward another nameless thing. She said,

“There s the cab.”

It was a horse-drawn sleigh; the snow was too deep for ordinary means. Had she been smiling, he wondered, because she had seen the cab? He kissed her anyway, lightly on the cheek, before she turned to get her coat, thinking how long he had known her and how little he knew her and how little he knew of how much or little there was in her to know.

 

 

Gerda

 

 

They arrived at Selene’s party fashionably late. She had a vast flat with an old-fashioned ballroom. Half the city was crushed into it, despite the snow. Prisms of ice dazzled in the chandeliers; not even the hundred candles in them could melt their glittering, frozen jewels. On long tables, swans carved of ice held hothouse berries, caviar, sherbet between their wings. A business acquaintance attached himself to Kay; Gerda, drifting toward champagne, was found by Selene.

“Gerda!” She kissed air enthusiastically around Gerda’s face. “How are you, angel? Such a dress. So innocent. How do you get away with it?”

“With what?”

“And such a sense of humor. Have you met Maurice? Gerda, Maurice Crow.”

“Call me Bob,” said Maurice Crow to Gerda, as Selene flung her fruity voice into the throng and hurried after it.

“Why?”

Maurice Crow chuckled. “Good question.” He had a kindly smile, Gerda thought; it gentled his thin, aging, beaky face. “If you were named Maurice, wouldn’t you rather be called Bob?”

“I don’t think so,” Gerda said doubtfully. “I think I would rather be called my name.”

“That’s because you’re beautiful. A beautiful woman makes any name beautiful.”

“I don’t like my name. It sounds like something to hold stockings up with. Or a five-letter word from a Biblical phrase.” She glanced around the room for Kay. He stood in a ring of brightly dressed women; he had just made them laugh. She sighed without realizing it. “And I’m not really beautiful. This is just a disguise.”

Maurice Crow peered at her more closely out of his black, shiny eyes. He offered her his arm; after a moment she figured out what to do with it. “You need a glass of champagne.” He patted her hand gently. “Come with me.”

“You see, I hate parties.”

“Ah.”

“And Kay loves them.”

“And you,” he said, threading a sure path among satin and silk and clouds of tulle, “love Kay.”

“I have always loved Kay. ”

“And now you feel he might stop loving you? So you come here to please him.”

“How quickly you understand things. But I’m not sure if he is pleased that I came. We used to know each other so well. Now I feel stupid around him, and slow, and plain, even when he tells me I’m not. It used to be different between us.”

“When?”

She shrugged. “Before. Before the city began taking little pieces of him away from me. He used to bring me wildflowers he had picked in the park. Now he gives me blood-red roses once a year. Some days his eyes never see me, not even in bed. I see contracts in his eyes, and the names of restaurants, expensive shoes, train schedules. A train schedule is more interesting to him than I am.”

“To become interesting, you must be interested.”

“In Kay? Or in trains?”

“If,” he said, “you can no longer tell the difference, perhaps it is Kay who has grown uninteresting.”

“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “Never to me.” She had flushed. With the quick, warm color in her face and the light spilling from the icy prisms onto her hair, into her eyes, she caused Maurice Crow to hold her glass too long under the champagne fountain. “He is beautiful and brilliant, and we have loved each other since we were children. But it seems that, having grown up, we no longer recognize one another.” She took the overflowing glass from Maurice Crow’s hand and drained it. Liquid from the dripping glass fell beneath her chaste neckline, rolled down her breast like icy tears. “We are both in disguise.”

 

 

The Snow Queen

 

 

Neva entered late. She wore white satin that clung to her body like white clings to the calla lily. White peacock feathers sparkling with faux diamonds trailed down her long ivory hair. Her eyes were black as the night sky between the winter constellations. They swept the room, picked out a face here: Gerda’s— How sweet, Neva thought, to have kept that expression, like one’s first kiss treasured in tissue paper — and there: Kay’s. Her eyes were wide, very still. The young man with her said something witty. She did not hear. He tried again, his eyes growing anxious. She watched Kay tell another story; the women around him—doves, warblers, a couple of trumpeting swans — laughed again. He laughed with them, reluctant but irresistibly amused by himself. He lifted champagne to his lips; light leaped from the cut crystal. His pale hair shone like the silk of Neva’s dress; his lips were shaped cleanly as the swan’s wing. She waited, perfectly still. Lowering his glass, the amused smile tugging again at his lips, he saw her standing in the archway across the room.

To his eye she was alone; the importunate young lapdog beside her did not exist. So his look told her, as she drew at it with the immense and immeasurable pull of a wayward planet wandering too close to someone’s cold, bright, inconstant moon. The instant he would have moved, she did, crossing the room to join him before his brilliant, fluttering circle could scatter. Like him, she preferred an audience. She waited in her outer orbit, composed, mysterious, while he told another story. This one had a woman in it — Gerda — and something about angels or fish.

“And then,” he said, “we had an argument about the first word in the world. ”

“Coffee, ” guessed one woman, and he smiled appreciatively.

“No, ” suggested another.

“It was for a crossword puzzle. The first word you learn to conjugate in Latin. ”

“But we always speak French in bed, ” a woman murmured. “My husband and I.”

Kay s eyes slid to Neva. Her expression remained changeless; she offered no word. He said lightly, “No, no, ma chère, one conjugates a verb; one has conjugal relations with one’s spouse. Or not, as the case may be.”

“Do people still? ” someone wondered. “How boring. ”

“To conjugate,” Neva said suddenly in her dark, languid voice, “means to inflect a verb in an orderly fashion through all its tenses. As in: amo, amad, amat. I love, you love — ”

“But that s it!” Kay cried. “The answer to the puzzle. How could I have forgotten?”

“Love?” someone said perplexedly. Neva touched her brow delicately.

“I cannot,” she said, “remember the Latin word for dance.”

“You do it so well,” Kay said a moment later, as they glided onto the floor. So polished it was that the flames from the chandeliers seemed frozen underfoot, as if they danced on stars. “And no one studies Latin anymore.”

“I never tire of learning,” Neva said. Her gloved hand lay lightly on his shoulder, close to his neck. Even in winter his skin looked warm, burnished by tropical skies, endless sun. She wanted to cover that warmth with her body, draw it into her own white-marble skin. Her eyes flicked constantly around the room over his shoulder, studying women’s faces. “Who is Gerda?” she asked, then knew her: the tall, beautiful, childlike woman who watched Kay with a hopeless, forlorn expression, as if she had already lost him.

“She is my wife,” Kay said, with a studied balance of lightness and indifference in his voice. Neva lifted her hand off his shoulder, settled it again closer to his skin.

“Ah.”

“We have known each other all our lives.”

“She loves you still.”

“How do you know?” he said, surprised. She guided him into a half turn, so that for a moment he faced his abandoned Gerda, with her sad eyes and downturned mouth, standing in her naive black dress, her champagne tilted and nearly spilling, with only a cadaverous, beaky man trying to get her attention. Neva turned him again; he looked at her, blinking, as if he had been lightly, unexpectedly struck. She shifted her hand, crooked her fingers around his bare neck.

“She is very beautiful.”

“Yes.”

“It is her air of childlike innocence that is so appealing.”

“And so exasperating,” he exclaimed suddenly, as if, like the Apostle, he had been illumined by lightning and stunned with truth.

“Innocence can be,” Neva said.

“Gerda knows so little of life. We have lived for years in this city and still she seems so helpless. Scattered. She doesn’t know what she wants from life; she wouldn’t know how to take it if she did.”

“Some women never learn.”

“You have. You are so elegant, so sophisticated. So sure.” He paused; she saw the word trembling on his lips. She held his gaze, pulled him deeper, deeper into her winter darkness. “But,” he breathed, “you must have men telling you this all the time.”

“Only if I want them to. And there are not many I choose to listen to. ”

“You are so beautiful,” he said wildly, as if the word had been tormented out of him.

She smiled, slid her other hand up his arm to link her fingers behind his neck. She whispered, “And so are you.”

 

 

The Thief

 

 

Briony watched Gerda walk blindly through the falling snow. It caught on her lashes, melted in the hot, wet tears on her cheeks. Her long coat swung carelessly open to the bitter cold, revealing pearls, gold, a hidden pocket in the lining in which Briony envisioned cash, cards, earrings taken off and forgotten. She gave little thought to Gerda’s tears: some party, some man, it was a familiar tale.

She shadowed Gerda, walking silently on the fresh-crushed snow of her footprints, which was futile, she realized, since they were nothing more than a wedge of toe and a rapier stab of stiletto heel. Still, in her tumultuous state of mind, the woman probably would not have noticed a traveling circus behind her.

She slid, shadow-like, to Gerda’s side.

“Spare change?”

Gerda glanced at her; her eyes flooded again; she shook her head helplessly. “I have nothing. ”

Briony’s knife snicked open, flashing silver in a rectangle of window light. “You have a triple strand of pearls, a sapphire dinner ring, a gold wedding ring, a pair of earrings either diamond or cubic zirconium, on, I would guess, fourteen-karat posts.”

“I never got my ears pierced,” Gerda said wearily. Briony missed a step, caught up with her.

“Everyone has pierced ears!”

“Diamond, and twenty-two-karat gold.” She pulled at them, and at her rings. “They were all gifts from Kay. You might as well have them. Take my coat, too.” She shrugged it off, let it fall. “That was also a gift.” She tugged the pearls at her throat; they scattered like luminous, tiny moons around her in the snow. “Oh, sorry.”

“What are you doing?” Briony breathed. The woman, wearing nothing more than a short and rather silly dress, turned to the icy darkness beyond the window light. She had actually taken a step into it when Briony caught her arm. “Stop!” Briony hauled her coat out of the snow. “Put this back on. You’ll freeze!”

“I don’t care. Why should you?”

“Nobody is worth freezing for.”

“Kay is.”

“Is he? ” She flung the coat over Gerda’s shoulders, pulled it closed. “God, woman, what Neanderthal age are you from?”

“I love him.”

“So?”

“He doesn’t love me.”

“So?”

“If he doesn’t love me, I don’t want to live.”

Briony stared at her, speechless, having learned from various friends in extremis that there was no arguing with such crazed and muddled thinking. Look, she might have said, whirling the woman around to shock her. See that snowdrift beside the wall? Earlier tonight that was an old woman who could have used your coat. Or: Men have notoriously bad taste, why should you let one decide whether you live or die? Or: Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere between earwigs and toe mold.

She lied instead. She said, “I felt like that once.”

She caught a flicker of life in the still, remote eyes. “Did you? Did you want to die?”

“Why don’t we go for hot chocolate and I’ll tell you about it?”

They sat at the counter of an all-night diner, sipping hot chocolate liberally laced with brandy from Briony’s flask. Briony had short, dark, curly hair and sparkling sapphire eyes. She wore lace stockings under several skirts, an antique vest of peacock feathers over a shirt of simulated snakeskin, thigh-high boots, and a dark, hooded cape with many hidden pockets. The waitress behind the counter watched her with a sardonic eye and snapped her gum as she poured Briony’s chocolate. Drawn to Gerda’s beauty and tragic pallor, she kept refilling Gerda’s cup. So did Briony. Briony, improvising wildly, invented a rich, beautiful, upper-class young man whose rejection of her plunged her into despair.

“He loved me, ” she said, “for the longest night the world has ever known. Then he dumped me like soggy cereal. I was just another pretty face and recycled bod to him. Three days after he offered me marriage, children, cars as big as luxury liners, trips to the family graveyard in Europe, he couldn’t even remember my name. Susie, he called me. Hello, Susie, how are you, what can I do for you? I was so miserable I wanted to eat mothballs. I wanted to lie on the sidewalk and sunburn myself to death. The worms wouldn’t have touched me, I thought. Not even they could be interested.”

“What did you do?” Gerda asked. Briony, reveling in despair, lost her thread of invention. The waitress refilled Gerda’s cup.

“I knew a guy like that,” the waitress said. “I danced on his car in spiked heels. Then I slashed his tires. Then I found out it wasn’t his car.”

“What did I do?” Briony said. “What did I do?” She paused dramatically. The waitress had stopped chewing her gum, waiting for an answer. “Well —I mean, of course I did what I had to. What else could I do, but what women like me do when men dropkick their hearts out of the field. Women like me. Of course women like you are different.”

“What did you do?” Gerda asked again. Her eyes were wide and very dark; the brandy had flushed her cheeks. Drops of melted snow glittered like jewels in her disheveled hair. Briony gazed at her, musing.

“With money, you’d think you’d have more choices, wouldn’t you? But money or love never taught you how to live. You don’t know how to take care of yourself. So if Kay doesn’t love you, you have to wander into the snow and freeze. But women like me, and Brenda here — ”

“Jennifer,” the waitress muttered.

“Jennifer, here, we’re so used to fending for ourselves every day that it gets to be a habit. You’re not used to fending, so you don’t have the habit. So what you have to do is start pretending you have something to live for.”

Gerda s eyes filled; a tear dropped into her chocolate. “I haven’t. ”

“Of course you haven’t, that’s what I’ve been saying. That’s why you have to pretend — ”

“Why? Its easier just to walk back out into the snow.”

“But if you keep pretending and pretending, one day you’ll stumble onto something you care enough to live for, and if you turn yourself into an icicle now because of Kay, you won’t be able to change your mind later. The only thing you’re seeing in the entire world is Kay. Kay is in both your eyes, Kay is your mind. Which means you’re only really seeing one tiny flyspeck of the world, one little puzzle piece. You have to learn to see around Kay. It’s like staring at one star all the time and never seeing the moon or planets or constellations—”

“I don’t know how to pretend, ” Gerda said softly. “Kay has always been the sky.”

Jennifer swiped her cloth at a crumb, looking thoughtful. “What she says, ” she pointed out, tossing her head at Briony, “you only have to do it one day at a time. Always just today. That’s all any of us do.”

Gerda took a swallow of chocolate. Jennifer poured her more; Briony added brandy.

“After all,” Briony said, “you could have told me to piss off and mind my own business. But you didn’t. You put your coat back on and followed me here. So there must have been something—your next breath, a star you glimpsed—you care enough about.”

“That’s true, ” Gerda said, surprised. “But I don’t remember what.”

“Just keep pretending you remember.”

 

 

Kay

 

 

Kay sat at breakfast with Neva, eating clouds and sunlight. Actually, it was hot biscuits and honey that dripped down his hand. Neva, discoursing on the likelihood of life on other planets, leaned across the table now and then and slipped her tongue between his fingers to catch the honey. Her face and her white negligee, a lacy tumble of roses, would slide like light past his groping fingers; she would be back in her chair, talking, before he could put his biscuit down.

“The likelihood of life on other planets is very, very great,” she said. She had a crumb of Kay’s breakfast on her cheek. He reached across the table to brush it away; she caught his forefinger in her mouth and sucked at it until he started to melt off the chair onto his knees. She loosed his finger then and asked, “Have you read Piquelle on the subject?”

“What?”

“Piquelle,” she said patiently, “on the subject of life on other planets.”

He swallowed. “No.”

“Have another biscuit, darling. No, don’t move, I’ll get it.”

“It’s no —”

“No, I insist you stay where you are. Don’t move.” She took his plate and stood up. He could see the outline of her pale, slender body under the lace. “Did you say something, Kay?”

“I groaned.”

“There are billions of galaxies. And in each galaxy, billions of stars, each of which might well have its courtiers orbiting it. ” She reached into the dainty cloth in which the biscuits were wrapped. Through the window above the sideboard, snow fell endlessly; her hothouse daffodils shone like artificial light among the bone china, the crystal butter dish, the honey pot, the napkins patterned with an exotic flock of startled birds trying to escape beyond the hems. Kay caught a fold of her negligee between his teeth as she put his biscuit down. She laughed indulgently, pushed against his face and let him trace the circle of her navel through the lace with his tongue. Then she glided out of reach, sat back in her chair.

“Think of it!”

“I am.”

“Billions of stars, billions of galaxies! And life around each star, eating, conversing, dreaming, perhaps indulging in startling alien sexual practices — Allow me, darling.” She thrust her finger deep into the honey, brought it out trailing a fine strand of gold that beaded into drops on the dark wood. As her finger rolled across his broken biscuit, she bent her head, licked delicately at the trail of honey on the table. Kay, trying to catch her finger in his mouth, knocked over his coffee. It splashed onto her hand.

“Oh, my darling,” he exclaimed, horrified. “Did I burn you? Let me see!”

“It’s nothing,” she said coolly, retrieving her hand and wiping it on her napkin. “I do not burn easily. Where were we?”

“Your finger was in my biscuit,” he said huskily.

“The point he makes, of course, is that with so many potential suns and an incredibly vast number of systems perhaps orbiting them, the chances are not remote for life — perhaps sophisticated, intelligent, technologically advanced — life, in essence, as we know it, circling one of those distant stars. Imagine!” she exclaimed, rapt, absently pulling apart a daffodil and dropping pieces of its golden horn down her negligee. The petal pieces seemed to Kay to burn here and there on her body beneath a frail web of white. “On some planet circling some distant, unnamed star, Kay and Neva are seated in a snowbound city, breakfasting and discussing the possibility of life on other planets. Is that not strange and marvelous?”

He cleared his throat. “Do you think you might like me to remove some of those petals for you?”

“What petals?”

“The one, perhaps, caught between your breasts.”

She smiled. “Of course, my darling.” As he leaped precipitously to his feet, scattering silverware, she added, “Oh, darling, hand me the newspaper.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I always do the crossword puzzle after breakfast. Don’t you? I like to time myself. Eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds was my fastest. What was yours?”

She pulled the paper out of his limp hand, and watched, smiling faintly, as he flung himself groaning in despair across the table. His face lay in her biscuit crumbs; the spilled honey began to undulate slowly out of its pot toward his mouth; coffee spread darkly across the wood from beneath his belly. Neva leaned over his prone body, delicately sipped coffee. Then she opened her mouth against his ear and breathed a hot, moist sigh throughout his bones.

“You have broken my coffee pot,” she murmured. “You must kneel at my feet while I work this puzzle. You will speculate, as I work, on the strange and wonderful sexual practices of aliens on various planets.”

He slid off the table onto his knees in front of her. She propped the folded paper on his head. “Nine fifty-seven and fourteen seconds exactly. Begin, my darling.”

“On the planet Debula, where people communicate not by voice but by a complex written arrangement whereby words are linked in seemingly arbitrary fashion by a similar letter in each word, and whose lawyers make vast sums of money interpreting and arguing over the meanings of the linked words, the men, being quite short, are fixated peculiarly on kneecaps. When faced with a pair, they are seized with indescribable longing and behave in frenzied fashion, first uncovering them and gazing raptly at them, then consuming whatever daffodil petal happens to be adhering to them, then moistening them all over in hope of eventually coaxing them apart ...”

“What is a four-letter synonym for the title of a novel by the Russian author Dostoyevsky? ”

“Idiot, ” he sighed against her knees.

“Ah. Fool. Thank you, my darling. Forgive me if I am somewhat inattentive, but your voice, like the falling snow, is wonderfully calming. I could listen to it all day. I know that, as you roam from planet to planet, you will come across some strange practice that will be irresistible to me, and I will begin to listen to you. ” She crossed her legs abruptly, banging his nose with her knee. “Please continue with your tale, my darling. You may be as leisurely and detailed as you like. We have all winter.”

 

 

Gerda

 

 

Gerda heaved a fifty-pound sack of potting soil off the stack beside the greenhouse door and dropped it on her workbench. She slit it open with the sharp end of a trowel and began to scoop soil into three-inch pots sitting on a tray. The phone rang in the shop; she heard Briony say,

“Four dozen roses? Two dozen each of Peach Belle and Firebird, billed to Selene Pray? You would like them delivered this afternoon?”

Gerda began dropping pansy seeds into the pots. Beyond the tinted greenhouse walls it was still snowing: a long winter, they said, the longest on record. Gerda’s greenhouse — half a dozen long glass rooms, each temperature controlled for varied environments, lying side by side and connected by glass archways — stood on the roof of one of the highest buildings in the city. Gerda could see across the ghostly white city to the frozen ports where great freighters were locked in the ice. She had sold nearly all of her jewelry to have the nursery built and stocked in such a merciless season, but, once open, her business was brisk. People yearned for color and perfume, for there seemed no color in the world but white and no scent but the pure, blanched, icy air. It was rumored that the climatic change had begun, and the glaciers were beginning to move down from the north. Eventually, they would be seen pushing blindly through the streets, encasing the city in a cocoon of solid ice for a millennium or two. Some people, in anticipation of the future, were making arrangements to have themselves frozen. Others simply ordered flowers to replicate the truant season.

“I’m taking a delivery,” Briony said in the doorway. “Jennifer isn’t back yet from hers.” She had cut her hair and dyed it white. It sprang wildly from her head in petals of various lengths, reminding Gerda of a chrysanthemum. Jennifer loved driving the truck and delivering flowers, but Briony pined in captivity. She compensated for it by wearing rich antique velvets and tapestries and collecting different kinds of switchblades. Gerda had persuaded her to work until spring; by then, she thought, Briony might be coaxed through another season. Meanwhile, spring dallied; Briony drooped.

“All right,” Gerda said. “I’ll listen for the phone. Look, Briony, the lavender seedlings are coming up.”

“Of course they’re coming up,” Briony said. “Everything you touch grows. If you dropped violets from the rooftop, they would take root in the snow. If you planted a shoe, it would grow into a shoetree.”

“I want you to sell something for me.”

Briony brightened. She kept her old business acquaintances by means of Gerda’s jewels, reassuring them that she had only temporarily abandoned crime to help a friend.

“What?”

“A sapphire necklace. I want more stock; I want to grow orchids. Stop by the flat. The necklace is in the safe beneath the still life. Do you know anyone who sells paintings?”

“I’ll find someone.”

“Good,” she said briskly, but she avoided Briony’s sharp eyes, for the dismantling of her great love was confined, as yet, only to odds and ends of property. The structure itself was inviolate. She turned away, began to water seedlings. The front bell jangled. She said, “I’ll see to it. You wrap the roses.”

The man entering the shop made her heart stop. It was Kay. It was not Kay. It might have been Kay once: tall, fair, with the same sweet smile, the same extravagance of spirit.

“I want,” he said, “every flower in the shop.”

Gerda touched hair out of her eyes, leaving a streak of potting soil on her brow. She smiled suddenly, at a memory, and the stranger’s eyes, vague with his own thoughts, saw beneath the potting sod and widened.

“I know,” Gerda said. “You are in love. ”

“I thought I was,” he said confusedly.

“You want all the flowers in the world.”

“Yes.”

He was oddly silent, then; Gerda asked, “Do you want me to help you choose which?”

“I have just chosen.” He stepped forward. His eyes were lighter than Kay’s, a warm gold-brown. He laughed at himself, still gazing at her. “I mean yes. Of course. You choose. I want to take a woman to dinner tonight, and I want to give her the most beautiful flower in the world and ask her to marry me. What is your favorite flower?”

“Perhaps,” Gerda suggested, “you might start with her favorite color, if you are unsure of her favorite flower.”

“Well. Right now it appears to be denim.”

“Denim. Blue?”

“It’s hardly passionate, is it? Neither is the color of potting soil.”

“I beg — ”

“Gold. The occasion begs for gold.”

“Yellow roses?”

“Do you like roses?”

“Of course?”

“But yellow for a proposal?”

“Perhaps a winey red. Or a brilliant streaked orange.”

“But what is your favorite flower?”

“Fuchsias,” Gerda said, smiling. “You can hardly present her with a potted plant.”

“And your favorite color?”

“Black.”

“Then,” he said, “I want a black fuchsia.”

Gerda was silent. The stranger stepped close to her, touched her hand. She was on the other side of the counter suddenly, hearing herself babble.

“I carry no black fuchsias. I’m a married woman, I have a husband — ”

“Where is your wedding ring?”

“At home. Under my pillow. I sleep with it.”

“Instead of your husband?” he said, so shrewdly her breath caught. He smiled. “Have dinner with me.”

“But you love someone else!”

“I stopped, the moment I saw you. I had a fever, the fever passed. Your eyes are so clear, like a spring day. Your lips. There must be a rose the color of your lips. Take me and your lips to the roses, let me match them.”

“I can’t,” she said breathlessly. “I love my husband.”

“Loving one’s spouse is quite old-fashioned. When was the last time he brought you a rose? Or touched your hand, like this? Or your lips. Like. This.” He drew back, looked into her eyes again. “What is your name?”

She swallowed. “Why do you look so much like Kay? It’s unfair.”

“But I’m so much nicer.”

“Are you?”

“Much,” he said, and slid his hand around her head to spring the clip on the pin that held her hair so that it tumbled down around her face. He drew her close, repeated the word against her lips. “Much.”

“Much,” she breathed, and they passed the word back and forth a little.

“I’m off,” Briony said, coming through the shop with her arms full of roses. Gerda, jumping, caught a glimpse of her blue, merry eyes before the door slammed. She gathered her hair in her hands, clipped it back.

“No. No, no, no. I’m married to Kay.”

“I’ll come for you at eight.”

“No.”

“Oh, and may I take you to a party after dinner?”

“No.”

“You might as well get used to me.”

“No.”

He kissed her. “At eight, then.” At the door, he turned. “By the way, do you have a name? ”

“No.”

“I thought not. My name is Foxx. Two x’s. I’ll pick you up here, since I’m sure you don’t have a home, either.” He blew her a kiss. “Au revoir, my last love.”

“I won’t be here.”

“Of course not. Do you like sapphires? ”

“I hate them.”

“I thought so. They’ll have to do until you are free to receive diamonds for your wedding.”

“I am married to Kay.”

“Sapphires, fuchsias, and denim. You see how much I know about you already. Chocolate?”

“No!”

“Champagne?”

“Go away!”

He smiled his light, brilliant smile. “After tonight, Kay will be only a dream, the way winter snow is a pale dream in spring. Tomorrow, the glaciers will recede, and the hard buds will appear on the trees. Tomorrow, we will smell the earth again, and the roiling, briny sea will crack the ice and the great ships will set sail to foreign countries and so shall you and I, my last love, set sail to distant and marvelous ports of call whose names we will never quite be able to pronounce, though we will remember them vividly all of our lives. ”

“No,” she whispered.

“At eight. I shall bring you a black fuchsia.”

 

 

Spring

 

 

“Dear Gerda,” Selene said. “Darling Foxx. How wonderful of you to come to my party. How original you look, Gerda. You must help me plan my great swan song, the final, definitive party ending all seasons. As the ice closes around us and traps us for history like butterflies in amber, the violinists will be lifting their bows, the guests swirling in the arms of their lovers, rebuffed spouses lifting their champagne glasses — it will be a splendid moment in time sealed and unchanged until the anthropologists come and chip us out of the ice. Do you suppose their excavations will be accompanied by the faint pop of champagne bubbles escaping the ice? Ah! There is Pilar O’Malley with her ninth husband. Darling Pilar is looking tired. It must be so exhausting hunting fortunes.”

“Tomorrow,” said Foxx.

“No, ” said Gerda. She was wearing her short black dress in hope that Foxx would be discouraged by its primness. Her only jewels were a pair of large blue very faux pearls that Briony had pinched from Woolworth’s.

“You came with me tonight. You will come with me tomorrow. You will flee this frozen city, your flowerpots, your patched denim —” He guided her toward the champagne, which poured like a waterfall through a cascade of Gerda’s roses. “And your defunct marriage, which has about as much life to it as a house empty of everything but memory.” He had been speaking so all evening, through champagne and quail, chocolates and port, endlessly patient, endlessly assured. The black silk fuchsia, a sapphire ring, a pair of satin heels, gloves with diamond cuffs were scattered in the back of his sleigh. Gerda, wearied and confused with too many words, too much champagne, felt as if the world were growing unfamiliar around her. There was no winter in Foxx’s words, no Kay, no flower shop. The world was becoming a place of exotic, sunlit ports where she must go as a stranger, and as another stranger’s wife. What of Briony, whom she had coaxed out of the streets? What of her lavender seedlings? Who would water her pansies? Who would order potting soil? She saw herself suddenly, standing among Selene’s rich, glittering guests and worrying about potting soil. She laughed. The world and winter returned; the inventions of the insubstantial stranger Foxx turned into dreams and air, and she laughed again, knowing that the potting soil would be there tomorrow and the ports would not.

Across the room, Kay saw her laugh.

For a moment he did not recognize her; he had never seen her laugh like that. Then he thought, Gerda. The man beside her had taught her how to laugh.

“My darling,” Neva said to him. “Will you get me champagne?” She did not wait for him to reply, but turned her back to him and continued her discussion with a beautiful and eager young man about the eternal truths in alchemy. Kay had no energy even for a disillusioned smile; he might have been made of ice for all the expression his face held. His heart, he felt, had withered into something so tiny that when the anthropologists came to excavate Selene’s final party, his shrunken heart would be held a miracle of science, perhaps a foreshadowing of the physical advancement of future homo.

He stood beside Gerda to fill the champagne glasses, but he did not look at her or greet her. Not even she could reach him, as far as he had gone into the cold, empty wastes of winter’s heart. Gerda, feeling a chill brush her, as of a ghost’s presence, turned. For a moment, she did not recognize Kay. She saw only a man grown so pale and weary she thought he must have lost the one thing in the world he had ever loved.

Then she knew what he had lost. She whispered, “Kay.”

He looked at her. Her eyes were the color of the summer skies none of them would see again: blue and full of light. He said, “Hello, Gerda. You look well.”

“You look so sad.” She put her hand to her breast, a gesture he remembered. “You aren’t happy.”

He shrugged slightly. “We make our lives.” His champagne glasses were full, but he lingered a moment in the warmth of her eyes. “You look happy. You look beautiful. Do I know that dress? Is it new? ”

She smiled. “No. ” Foxx was beside her suddenly, his hand on her elbow.

“Gerda? ”

“It’s old,” Gerda said, holding Kay’s eyes. “I no longer have much use for such clothes. I sold all the jewels you gave me to open a nursery. I grew all the roses you see here, and those tulips and the peonies.”

“A nursery? In midwinter? What a brilliant and challenging idea. That explains the dirt under your thumbnail.”

“Kay, my darling,” said Neva’s deep, languid voice behind them, “you forgot my champagne. Ah. It is little Gerda in her sweet frock.”

“Yes,” Kay said. “She has grown beautiful.”

“Have I?”

“Gerda and I,” Foxx said, “are leaving the city tomorrow. Perhaps that explains her unusual beauty.”

“You are going away with Foxx?” Kay said, recognizing him. “What a peculiar thing to do. You’ll fare better with your peonies.”

“Congratulations, my sweets, I’m sure you’ll both be so happy. Kay, there is someone I want you to — ”

“Why are you going with Foxx?” Kay persisted. “He scatters hearts behind him like other people scatter bad checks.”

“Don’t be bitter, Kay,” Foxx said genially. “We all find our last loves, as you have. Gerda, there is someone — ”

“Tomorrow,” Gerda said calmly, “I am going to make nine arrangements: two funerals, a birthday, three weddings, two hospital, and one anniversary. I am also going to find an orchid supplier and do the monthly accounts.”

“You’re not going with Foxx.”

“Of course she is,” Foxx said.

Gerda took her eyes briefly from Kay to look at him. “I prefer my plants,” she said simply.

An odd sound cut through the noise of the party, as if in the distance something immense had groaned and cracked in two. Kay turned suddenly, pushed the champagne glasses into Neva’s hands.

“May I come — ” His voice trembled so badly he stopped, began again. “May I come to your shop tomorrow and buy a flower?”

She worked a strand of hair loose from behind her ear and twirled it around one finger, another gesture he remembered. “Perhaps,” she said coolly. He saw the tears in her eyes, like the sheen on melting, sunlit ice. He did not know if they were tears of love or pain; perhaps, he thought, he might never know, for she had walked through light and shadow while he had encased himself in ice. “What flower?”

“I read once there is a language of flowers. Given by people to one another, they turn into words like love, anger, forgiveness. I will have to study the language to know what flower I need to ask for.”

“Perhaps,” she said tremulously, “you should try looking some place other than language for what you want.”

He was silent, looking into her eyes. The icy air outside cracked again, a lightning-whip of sound that split through the entire city. Around them, people held one another and laughed, even those perhaps somewhat disappointed that life had lost the imminence of danger, and that the world would continue its ancient, predictable ways. Neva handed the mute and grumpy Foxx one of the champagne glasses she held. She drained the other and, smiling her faint, private smile, passed on in search of colder climes.

 

 

 

 

Ash, Wood, Fire

 

 

Black, her eye said. Cinder black. And smooth. Black moved under her eye. She moved, too, pulling her face out of the crook of her elbow, into dawn. Gray light spilled over everything: gray stones, gray hearth, gray ashes on her hands. The black moved, bumping against her arm. She sat up quickly, making a grating morning sound in her throat. Black beetle, slow, and long as her thumb. The stones had grown cold under her. She flicked the beetle onto its back, watched it wave its legs, crawl on air. Then she blew it upright. It lumped away towards the hearth, where it would blaze like a coal in her fire. She straightened, yawning, pushing matted ribbons of hair into her cap. The beetle disappeared under the grate.

She blew embers alive, piled chips and sticks, and blew, piled more sticks and bark, and blew, and then the wood. Something tiny wailed and snapped, sap bubbled. She burned hearts, bones, black beetles. The warmth touched her face; she closed her eyes. The warmth seeped into her; she was the warmth, warm. Warm, she thought; warm, she breathed. Almost warm enough to come alive. Sap in the wood, seed in the earth, warming . . .

A beetle lumbered, loud and black, grumbling behind her. She hadn’t burned it. Or she had, and in the fire it had grown enormous.

“—at her, dreaming, with fires to be ... fires . .

Fires.

She moved to other hearths in the vast kitchen, blowing, coaxing, growing fire in the stone ovens, under great kettles of icy water that ham-hands, red with cold, hung to sway in front of her face. The kitchen filled with the sound. A kettle heaved in front of her, splashing water onto her flame. Ash hissed, smoked. A word licked at her ear; a hand, wet and hard, felt for something under her apron. She made a noise, twisting, picking a smoldering stick out of the fire. A haunch nudged her; she sprawled on stones.

“Nothing but bone; dogs wouldn’t sniff at you, they wouldn’t bother. Kitchen scraps have more on them.”

“Leave her alone,” the Beetle said in her flat, harsh, rasping voice. “Leave her to work, then, or I’ll toss you to the hounds, you pale horny toad. Slug. Get those kettles hissing. You. Girl. What is her name?” she asked, exasperated, of the hanging sausages. “Does she have one? ”

Every morning, every morning.

“Anastasia.”

“Rosamunda. ”

“She never said. ”

“She can’t speak.”

“She can.”

“Isolde.”

“I can talk,” she said, her back to them all. “Talk,” said the fire. “Talk,” said the dripping, hissing kettle. A face, in its shiny, battered side, looked back at her, distorted in the dents. The nose dipped sideways, the chin veered, melted into a pool.

“Talk, then,” someone said. “Tell us your name.”

The face had no name. She sniffed instead, swiped her nose against her shoulder. Pots laughed, knives snickered in the bacon; an oven door screeched, clanged shut.

“My name is Ash,” she said. “My name is Wood. My name is Fire.”

“Her name is Patch,” someone said, high and grating, through his nose. “Patch, from Thickum Spinney. Salt. Salt, over here.”

Salt ran behind her, little light steps on the stones.

“No,” argued a furiously stirred pot. “That was the last fire we had. This one’s new.”

“Naawoh,” a spattering pan said derisively. “This one’s been here forever. You’re new.”

“Five years,” Pot huffed.

“That’s new. Fire’s been here forever.”

“Fire!” the Beetle snapped. “Over here!”

She made, she made, until the kitchen grew thick, sultry with smoke and steam and smells. Perfumed maids, black flowers, scented the steam as they picked up copper water cans; black stalks of gentlemen appeared and disappeared into the mists, then came back again, for vast silver trays upon which Flower, mute and stunted man, laid a single rose, a white carnation. The argument flared intermittently, little flames here, there, springing to life, sinking.

“The other was shorter.”

“This is the other. She grew.”

“That high? Overnight?”

“You don’t notice,” the Beetle said abruptly. “In here. Faces always coming and going. Chopper! Apples, apples, keep them coming. You. Onions. A mountain of onions. A swimming sea of onions. Chop them small as babies’ teeth.”

“The other’s hair was light.”

“How could you tell? She’s ash, head to foot. She drifts, hearth-creature. Puff at her and she’d waft apart.”

“This one’s too tall ...”

“Pepper!”

She tried to think back. Had she been smaller? Or had that been someone else? Fires content, for the moment, she took fresh hot bread from a basket, wedged herself out of the way in a corner of wall and hearth, pushed close to the warmth, and tore at the bread. Stone and fire, stone and fire, nothing else but that, no matter where she looked. Grate and ash, wood, armloads of wood, winter wood, summer wood, each with its smell of snow or sun. Nothing more. Fire never counted years, neither did she. Still, dusted with bread crumbs, warm, nodding a little against the hard warm stones, she saw her hands, fingers gray and black with ash and char, nails broken, knuckles split with dryness and cold, an old mark or two where the fire had tried to eat her. Her hands belonged to fire. Had they ever done anything else? Had they been born smelling of char and sap?

They were what hands looked like that belonged to fire.

She had no other hands. None that had peeled an apple, placed a flower on a tray. She was Fire. What did years matter to fire?

“Fire!”

She moved, dodging around elbows, across floor slick with apple peel, her eyes searching, finding the discontented flame under a vast pan hung on a triple chain, heaped with butter and onion. Eyes stinging with smoke and onion, she heaved wood, built it up with her bare hands, angled this log on that, until the fire itself — billowing, snapping tree-bones, boiling tree-blood —drove her away with its hot breath.

Fire. Wood. Ash.

The black flowers began to return the silver trays, littered now with crusts and cold bacon fat, crumpled napkins, flowers withering in brown pools of tea and chocolate. A hillock of scraps began to grow in a great bowl for the Kitchen Dogs, the Beetle said, though there were no Kitchen Dogs, only Kennel Dogs, fed as carefully as princesses. Salt and Pepper and Choppers, Stirrers and Scrubbers passed and repassed the bowl; dipping into it, swift as birds, pecking away at the mound, a dart of hand, a suddenly rounded cheek. Fire ate only bread, finding tastes — the flood of salt, the sweet tang of orange peel—confusing, disturbing. They brought words into her head; they made her want to speak, though the words that pushed into her mouth were all in some peculiar language —the language that silk spoke, or perfume — and she could neither shape nor understand them.

“Fire!”

In a breath, between meals — the plates scrubbed from one, the quail braising for the next, onions and apples browning in butter, Pins rolling out piecrusts all down a long table, bread out and cooling — the argument flared again.

“She was a little bit of a girl, with no front teeth. This one has teeth.” This from a Sauce so lovingly stirred it might have held the last cream, the last sugar, the last rosewater in the world.

“Teeth grow.” This from the Kitchen-Beetle herself, huge circle of hips, round and black from behind, a circle of back, a small circle of black head, hair pulled into yet another circle at her neck, so fiercely and unshakably round it might have been carved of stone. Her heavy cheeks were cream threaded with veins of strawberry, her brows as pale as the marble pestles, her eyes shiny black insect eyes that saw everything and had no expression.

“Not as quickly as all that.”

“How often does anyone look?” Pastry, pressing rings of beaten egg whites out of a funnel, flung up his arms. Egg white squirted high; Salt watched, open-mouthed. Falling, it just missed the Sauce. “No one would look unless she wasn’t there making fires. She didn’t have teeth. She has teeth. Who has time to look?” His free hand pounced under the table, drew out a Chopper, small and dark, cheek full of something, his eyes and mouth clenched tightly shut, his body frozen by the hand at his neck. “Look at this one. Does he have front teeth or not?” The Sauce shrugged. Pantry pushed the Chopper back under the table. “Who knows? Who cares? None of them have names.”

“I have teeth,” said the table. “I have a name. All of us have names.”

“What’s hers, then, rat?”

“Fire.”

Pantry stamped under the table. “Cockroach. Get to work.”

“She’s too tall, ” muttered Sauce. Steam enveloped his face; he inhaled rapture, and forgot Fire.

Then the nut pies went in, and the quails stuffed with apples and onions; the kitchen rats reeled, drunk with smells. She hauled wood constantly; going out to the snowy yard, piling it in her arms, taking deep breaths — not of the wild, golden spicy air, but of pitch and wet bark, the inner smells of trees, as varied to her as their names. She had no names for trees, only the pictures in her head that each wood scent conjured: some were dark and bristled, green all year; others stood pale and slender, wore leaves like lace and rustled with secrets at every breeze. The ovens set within the stones ate wood, ate forests. Pitch boiled and wailed, trees gave her their fragrances, their memories, clear to her even in the riot of kitchen smells, so that, kneeling at the grates, sweating, balancing logs, dodging smoke, brushing burning cinders back into the fire with her hands while the kitchen clattered and chopped and roared behind her, a green wood grew around her, the ghosts of trees.

“Fire! Where’s that girl?” the Kitchen-Beetle snapped. “She might as well be a block of wood, for all she hears you. Where did she go? She was just there — ”

“I’m here, ” she said from the heart of the wood, and the trees faded away.

“Fire!”

They descended from the upper world, the stately bearers of silver and copper, flowers and food. They bore away entire woods full of quail, whole vegetable gardens of salads, and came back for the nut orchard, and the cream from the milk of a hundred cows. They returned carrying bones, crusts, herbs trapped like green wings in hardening sauce. Scrubbers and Pluckers and Choppers snatched cold leftovers; Cooks, Bakers, Sauces, and the Beetle herself ate hot seasoned quail dripping with sauce, nut pies crusted with brown sugar and butter. Fire, dreamy with heat, ate bits of bread charred with ash, chopped apples that had hung on trees, food going gray in her fingers until it seemed she ate ash. The Kitchen-Beetle’s eye, bright and thoughtless as she gnawed birds, swiveled aimlessly and fell on Fire. As always, other eyes followed.

“The other spoke more.”

“This one is the other. She’s turning.”

“Turning?”

“Becoming,” the Beetle said impatiently. “They do. They all do. They put out leaves. They begin to dream.”

“Her?” Sauce snickered. “She’s disappearing, more like it. She’s growing ash on her thick as bark. She can’t think much, she’s put together like twigs. Twigs for bones, wooden thoughts.”

The Beetle looked at Fire, great white teeth tearing at quail, her eyes black as the underside of a pot, and as flat. She made a sound, between a snort and an inquiry, and tossed the bones.

“It’s in the air,” the Beetle said. “She smells it. In the wood.” She heaved to her feet; Scraps ran among all their feet, collecting what they had let fall. She raised her voice. “Pluckers!”

Geese, this time, their long white necks lolling across the thighs of Pluckers, trembling at every touch. Their feathers blew everywhere; fire scorched them, Sauce cursed them. Scraps leaped after them, snatching them as they floated. A snowdrift rose between the Pluckers; flurries of down, the last winter storm, swirled around Fire when she opened the door to bring in wood. The kitchen snow confused her; outside, in the melting snow, she smelled gold, she smelled water running slow and warm through still, secret woods. Inside was fire and snow still flying, through the tender green smells of wood.

Mushrooms simmered in butter and rosemary over the flames; geese, headless, impaled, turned slowly on spits — the fires hissed and spattered with their fat. Cauldrons of potatoes and leeks boiled, spilling frothy water into the flames. She made, she made, coaxing drenched fire alive here, there, building and rebuilding next to ovens full of bread shaped into swans, of airy towers spun of egg white and sugar hardening in the heat. Chocolate, and raspberries frozen all winter, and hazelnuts pounded fine as dust, melted together under a flame, never high, never too low, teased with tidbits like a child. The world turned fire under her eyes, her busy fingers; she shaped potato flames, raspberry flames, geese flames, as if she were remaking everything out of fire, while pots were stirred, whisked away, others hung, and the voice of the Kitchen-Beetle wove the clutter and chaos around her into supper.

Then she found herself dreaming in a darkening kitchen, a piece of potato half-eaten in her grimy hand. She leaned against a cooling oven. A solitary Scrubber splashed among the last of the pots. All around her, fires were burying themselves deep into heartwood, in the darkening hearths. A coal fell, a heart snapped—sang. The Kitchen-Beetle sat in the shadows, still and silent, watching, listening to the small noises. Fire watched her: the circles of her knees, her breasts, her darkened face. Cinders fumed. A pot settled on the rack. A flame sprang up, hid itself again. They sat, Fire against the oven stones, Kitchen-Beetle in her chair, in the heart of the fire, listening to the kitchen speak.

The Beetle dwindled, went small, small, a moving bit of dark in the darkness. Fire dreamed of fire. An eye opened among the coals. It was green as leaves: her eye. Another opened. Another. The ring of hearths watched her out of her eyes. A flame danced, spoke. Her voice, her word. She stirred against the stones, murmuring. Her cap brushed off; hair tumbled down, dark as wood. All her eyes watched the beetle crawl toward the hearth. It spoke as it passed her: a sudden gleam across its dark, polished back.

“Fire,” it said, and she breathed the word, felt it dance across her heart, light as leaves, whispering, whispering. She rose finally, brought in wood, and water, and began to make.

Morning found cold grates everywhere. Cooks, Sauces, Bakers milled bewilderedly, betrayed, calling, “Fire! Fire!” and never seeing her, while beside the door a young woman stood watching, tall and sapling-slender, her eyes as green as new leaves, her hair shiny as the beetle’s back, perfumed with wood. The lowly Scrubbers saw her first, and the Choppers, and Scraps and Stirrers; they flashed their teeth, or lack of them, grinning in wonder, as she opened the door to light.

“Fire!” the Kitchen-Beetle called peremptorily to no one, to anyone, as if a ghost of ashes might rise out of a hearth, a little, smudged, graceless bundle of twigs, and begin to kindle herself alive, while Fire passed out of the kitchen into Spring.

 

 

 

 

The Stranger

 

 

Syl saw the stranger at ebb tide, standing among the tide pools, half-hidden by great hoary rocks slick with weed and moss and the living sea-things that clung to them. He watched the tide; she watched him as she walked along the shore road that ran between the sea and Liel’s sheep pastures. Behind him, the sky turned silken with twilight: rose and mauve and a deep, soft purple, colors she wanted to spin out of the air into thread for tapestries of no more substance than light. Everything in them would be nameless, she decided, her eyes still on the nameless man, like things in dreams. . . . Then the stranger moved.

He pulled something rectangular off his shoulder; his hands flicked across it, opening, pulling, twisting. Odd angles emerged from it, wings, cylinders, strings. He bent his head to it; his hands moved again. A single, deep note broke with a breaking wave, sighed away. A flurry of notes, flute and reed, spun into a gathering wave, and then more strings and a small drum, a single, flat beat, and the wave broke. Syl stopped, swallowing something like a sharp, sweet note in the back of her throat. Then she saw what he was doing to the sky, and the small notes danced along her bones.

Colors moved to his playing, shaped themselves. A cloudy purple wing stretched; an eye peered, whiter than the moon. A dark cloud rolled like tide across the sky; a graceful neck, a black and craggy profile rose out of it like smoke. Gold, a strand of light pulled from beneath the horizon, limned a claw, opening against the black, then plumed into a brilliant cloak of airy feathers. Syl felt the drum beat in the back of her throat.

He is weaving with the sky, she thought. And then the music stopped.

The sky darkened; he was a shadow against it, folding away his secrets, hanging them at his back. Then he blurred, or the night blurred over him. Still she stood motionless, trying to blink away the dark while all the color faded from the sky, and the tide among the broken shells played the only music.

“I saw,” she said later to Liel, as she put a bowl of mutton stew in front of him. But she could not say what.

“What, lass?” he asked absently, chewing; his eyes were full of sheep, shearing, skins, wool, lambs to keep, lambs to slaughter. His eyes cleared slowly at her silence; he was seeing her again, his Syl, moving in and out of the firelight, quick, graceful, methodical, laying the bread to be cut on the oak cutting board, the oak-handled knife beside it, and the butter in its yellow crock. She put the back of her hand to her forehead, as she did when she was trying to remember. He waited. Then her hand lifted, her brows liked, raising brief furrows in her smooth forehead, and she sighed, meeting his eyes.

“I don’t exactly know. I was daydreaming, most likely.” She sat, spreading her coarse skirt and coarser apron neatly, liking the feel of the rough blue weave and then the rougher cream. He ate another bite.

“Where?”

“Along the shore. I walked to Greta’s, to get some black wool from her, since we have so few black, and she has them thick as blackbirds in a field.”

“That’s where you were, then.”

“That’s where I was.”

They ate a while. The fire whispered, snapped scents and burning stars into the air, whispered again. Liel finished, leaned back in his chair. Syl, musing over the twilight music, lifted her eyes and found his eyes on her. He smiled a little.

“I was just watching you. The way your hands move in the light.”

She smiled back, watching the fire pick out threads of brown and gold in his dark hair. He had gray eyes that always told her every thought. His expressions were uncomplicated and familiar: one for sheep, another for thunder, one for watching her weave, another for drinking beer with his brother, another for telling her his dreams, another for untying the ribbons in her hair, and then at her throat, and then at her breast.

She rose, began to clear the table. He watched her a little longer, then got up to open the cottage door and listen to the night as it wrapped itself around the island. He did that every evening, smelling weather in scents of air and earth blowing across from the mainland, listening for unfamiliar noises among the sheep, for warnings in the distant barkings of farm dogs, listening for the tide, which he only heard on the stillest or the stormiest of nights.

“It’s quiet,” he said at last, and closed the door. She dried the last dish, placed it on the shelf. Then, as she did every night, she stood at her loom, looking at her weaving in the dying firelight, studying the colors and patterns she had chosen. Liel came to stand beside her.

“Pretty,” he said, and touched a pearl-gray strand running through a weave of lilac. Then he touched her arm. She turned and followed him to bed.

The next morning, the sea mist swirled across Gamon Kyle’s fields, massed itself into a white, winged shape with blue, burning eyes. The fire that came out of its mouth was blue. As the smoke billowed up from Gamon’s hayfields, the farmers and fishers came running with buckets, or riding carts from the village full of barrels sloshing half the water out of them before they reached the fields. The animal shaped itself again above their heads. They stared, frozen with wonder at the sight of cloud furling into feather, sky igniting itself. Then the blue poured down again, and they heard the screams inside Gamon’s barn.

By the time they got the fire out, most of Gamon’s fields were cinder and his barn was a skeleton of charred timber. He stumbled among the ruins carrying salvage: a rake with a burned handle, some harness, a curry comb.

“What was that? ” he kept asking hoarsely. “What was that?”

“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Liel told Syl, coming in at midday sweating and streaked with char. She had been at her weaving all morning; the wind had swept smoke and fire in the opposite direction. She stared at him over her loom. Cinders had eaten his shirt to shreds, raised blisters on his skin. He wore an expression she had never seen before. “Enormous,” he said, as she coaxed the cloth from his body. “White. White mist. Its fire was blue. Like the sky. Like it had breathed in sky and turned it into flame. And then it turned Gamon’s farm into flame.”

He winced as she peeled shirt from his shoulders, and she said, not even trying to make sense of fire in the sky, “I’ll fetch water. Oh, Liel. Did he lose it all?”

“All but a couple of hens.”

“His horses?” she breathed in horror. He nodded, still wide-eyed, stunned with wonder.

“It might have been beautiful,” he said absurdly, “if it hadn’t been so terrible. ”

She shook her head mutely at his babbling. “Sit down,” she said gently. “Let me take your boots off. Then I’ll get water.”

“Don’t bother with it. I’ll go sit in the stream a while. Syl, I wish you could have seen it. Fearful and deadly, but like — a great wave, or a mountain exploding. You hate what it does, but it’s like nothing you could ever imagine, nothing—” He swallowed, all the words crowding into his eyes. Syl dropped his smoldering boots outside the door. She looked up at the sky suddenly, trying to connect it with fire. It held a cloud and a couple of blackbirds. She went back inside to help Liel with his trousers.

The next day, Greye Hamil’s barn and apple orchards burned; the smell of scorched green apples spread clear across the island. The day after that something clawed furrows a foot deep down the length of the village street, and nine fishing boats moored at the dock turned into charred husks. Dogs were chained up, doors were barred, no one ventured out but Syl, who had come into the village with the shawl she had woven, to leave it at the shop that sold her work. The silence, the deep scars in the street amazed her; so did the shop’s barred door.

She tapped on a window until the shopkeeper opened the door and pulled her hastily inside.

“Syl Reed,” she said, a heavy woman with a plump rosy face and perpetually startled eyes. “What possessed you?”

“I brought this,” Syl said bewilderedly, unfolding the shawl. A butterfly opened its green and peacock blue wings against a filigree of cream wool. The shopkeeper folded her hands under her chin and forgot the fire.

“Oh, Syl, it’s lovely, so lovely.” Then the terror came back into her eyes. She took the shawl and drew Syl toward the back of the shop. “You can’t go home now, not alone.”

“I must,” Syl said, eluding her fingers. “I left stock simmering on the hearth. What has gotten into this village? ”

“It’s the things.”

“What things?”

“The things —Syl, where have you been the past three days?”

“Weaving, ” Syl said blankly. “You know how I get when I work.” She stopped abruptly, her own eyes widening, as she remembered the unfamiliar expression on Liel’s face. “Things. Something terrible, he said. Something beautiful. And then — he kept talking about the sky.”

“Cloud, ” the shopkeeper said. “It forms itself out of cloud.”

Syl touched her throat, where a word had stuck. She whispered, “Oh.”

“And it burns everything with fire the color of the sky.” She paused, sniffing. “Something’s burning,” she wailed, and Syl wrenched open the door.

The smoke came from the little wood between Liel’s pastures and the sea. Running, feeling the heat from the billowing flames, she turned off the road, cut a corner through the trees, and climbed the stone wall into the summer pastures. She stopped then, sobbing for breath, transfixed by what hung in the sky.

Its wings, spanning the length of the field, were teal and purple and bronze. They tapered to an angle along an intricate web of bone, then the pelt or glistening scales parted here and there into a loose, trailing weave through which ovals of blue sky hung. The head, secret and proud like a swan’s, rose on a graceful swan’s neck of gold. Its claws were gold. Its eyes were huge, lucent, gold moons.

Its shadow spread across the upturned faces of farmers and villagers who had abandoned the fire to wield pitchforks and rakes against it. The sheep had pushed into a noisy, terrified huddle against the field wall. As Syl stared, the great head dipped downward, precisely as a bird’s, and caught a black lamb in its mouth. It stretched upward again, higher than seemed possible, tossed the lamb into the air, let it fall free to shatter itself against the ground, then caught it, with a flick of claw, at the last moment. Blood sprayed across the sheep, across the upturned faces.

Syl ran again, scarcely realizing she moved, seeing only Liel among the islanders. She pushed into the crowd, heard his soft grunt of dismay as he saw her. She gripped his arm and heard someone say, “For a price.”

She saw the stranger among them.

His eyes were cold and dark as night, his hair as white as spume. He might have come out of the sea; his skin had little more color than mist. His rectangular box of secret music hung from his shoulder, revealing nothing, not a string or a singing reed. “For a price,” he repeated to the silent crowd. He had a singer’s voice, each word precise and modulated. He was tall and lithe and still, Syl sensed, as a stone. A part of him was that hard, that ancient. He seemed to her scarcely more human than the beautiful, deadly thing in the air above him. “I have seen these monsters invade before. They are ruthless. Your island is tiny. They will destroy it day by day, until by summer’s end it will be little more than a charred cinder rising out of the sea. And on that, they will live.”

The monster loosed a stream of blood-red silk, red wind, out of its mouth. Trees along the field wall flamed; sheep turned black. The din and the smell became sickening.

Syl, still staring at the stranger, felt something crawl along her bones. She turned her face against Liel, but still she saw, behind her closed eyes, the cloudy wings forming above the sea to the stranger’s music.

“What price? ” a villager asked frantically: Sim Jame, who owned a tavern there. Mel Grower, with acres of nut trees and an oak wood, echoed him hoarsely, “What price?”

The stranger named it.

There was no sound for a moment, but from the sheep, and the silken fire breaking the bones of trees.

“How can you control them?” Aron Avrel said abruptly, his face white and slick with sweat under his black beard. “Are you mage, or what? Did you follow these monsters or did you bring them? For a price you’ll help us. Help us into trouble, then help us out?”

The stranger looked at him, his eyes holding no more expression than stones in a field. “Does it matter?” he asked. “You cannot control them. I have known them all my life.”

“Show us,” Liel said, his voice grim, exhausted. The stranger looked at him, and then at Syl, standing with her fingers linked around Liel’s arm, her long red-gold hair tangled and tumbling around her face from her running, her eyes, golden-green as ripening hazelnuts, wide and stunned with recognition of the stranger’s face.

Still his expression did not change. But his eyes did not move away from her as he slid the box off his shoulder. He pushed a lever or a knob, or perhaps he only reshaped air and wood with his fingers. A flute of ebony and gold lay half-cradled in the top of the box, half-extended into air. He bent his head, blew a few soft, breathy notes, and then a clear, wild, tuneless keening that brought tears, hot and stinging with smoke, into Syl’s eyes. The sheep stopped their din; the islanders stood motionless. The monster dipped its head dreamily toward the trees. It breathed in fire, or it grazed on fire, pulling strands of flame away from the burning leaves and branches until they stood charred and cold, shaking blackened leaves to the ground. Teal and bronze and flame coiled as the great wings closed around the last of the flames. Colors swirled, began, under the mad, haunting whirlwind of notes, to break apart. Fire turned to light, teal misted into sky. Purple lingered longest, Syl saw, a final streak of smoke or an edge of wing.

The music stopped. The musician lifted his head. The sky was empty. Sun struck his face, traced a line beside his mouth, revealed faint shadows beneath his eyes. It was some time before anyone spoke.

“That much,” Aron Avrel said slowly, “we’ll have to borrow from the mainland.”

The stranger slid the flute back into wood and shadow. “They won’t wait for it,” he warned them.

“But you’ll wait.”

“I will.”

There was argument, drunken and tumultuous, as the islanders cooled their smoke-dry throats with beer, and ate the bread and cheese and hot peppered lamb Syl set out for them. The stranger was mage, he was monster; they should kill him and steal his box. But no one could play it like he could, and then they’d be left with the monsters, and no telling how many of them there might be. They should send to the mainland for money; they should send to the mainland for help: any help would be cheaper than the stranger. But they knew where they could borrow money, but who knew where to find another mage that fast? Who knew the name of any mage, anywhere, anyway? Money, at least, could be found. Even if they had to borrow it against the price of the entire island. If the monsters didn’t turn it into a charred. rock, first.

Syl saw them fed, refilled their cups, while Liel and others went to see what could be mended and what must be slaughtered of the sheep. The islanders drifted in and out of the cottage, arguing, and keeping an anxious eye on the sky. Syl wandered among them, fretting over Liel and seeing, now and then, instead of him the white-haired stranger with the burning trees behind him, bending over his flute, or standing at the sea’s edge, painting pictures with the sky.

She went to her loom, searched for colors among her dyed wools: that teal, that deep purple. And how could she weave the wings themselves, she wondered, the graceful trailing filigree revealing ovals of sky? She wanted other colors suddenly, colors harder, brighter than wool. Liel made lists on scraps. She found a torn bit of paper and some ink. Salt, Liel had written on the paper. Salve for cow’s udder. She turned it over and began to sketch the wings.

Near dawn, they smelled it again: the harsh, acrid smell of burning blown across the island. Liel groaned and dressed. Syl waited until he had gone before she dressed. She went out, saw the red glow on the other side of the village where Sly Granger had his hop fields. She stood a moment, the back of her hand against her brow, and tried to think. Then she didn’t think; she just guessed and ran across the pastures to the shore road, and then up it to where she had first seen the stranger.

She found him sitting among the rocks, playing music softly. The tide was high; his back was to her. She watched him for a long time from behind a rock, while he sketched wings and faces, massive bodies that appeared and disappeared in the milky mist above the sea. The sky brightened; the mist turned opal, caught flashes of color he wove into his music. He plucked a string, piped a note; a line of wing appeared, an eye. Cloud separated into bone, scales, teeth. He drew another secret out of the box: thin bands of silver that, struck, sounded like high, sweet bells. The sounds turned into a flock of silver birds that flew into the mist.

The sun rose, burning through the mist. He stopped playing finally and watched the lines of light flash and melt across the waves. Then he turned his head and looked at her.

He did not move or speak, but he drew her across the sand, something alien, marvelous, incomprehensible that chance or wind had blown adrift onto the island. He watched her come, his eyes no longer expressionless, but masking all expression. She said, looking at the bright, empty sky, and then at him, her voice strained with bewilderment, “They re yours. Those monsters. Those beautiful and terrible things. You make them.”

“I am them,” he said. He folded away the silver bars and then the strings, into the impossibly shallow box. “We are what we make.”

She thought above that, holding her hair out of her eyes with one hand against the strong morning wind. “Then you,” she said wearily, “are terrible and beautiful, weaving dreams and nightmares with cloud and fire, burning in a breath what small slow things we make through time. And for nothing. For money.”

He was silent; again she felt something ancient, wild, inhuman in his stillness. “What,” he said finally, “do you make?”

“I dye wool from the sheep you burned. I weave the colors into shawls, blankets, things to wear, to hang.”

“For nothing?”

She blinked, at an edge of cold air, or brine. “For money. It’s common pay for making things. But I make. I don’t unmake. You—” She drew breath slowly, her eyes straying again to the sky. “If I had your colors to make with. If I had the dreams behind your eyes. I would sit here on this beach and weave sea and sky and light until there was nothing left of me but bone to weave with. And then my bones would float away on all the colors of the sea.”

There was a flick of expression, a spark off stone, in his eyes. “Colors. They’re everywhere. ”

“For you, maybe. Not for me. I don’t know how to make them. You think them into being. You don’t have to destroy for that. And you would be paid all the wealth you want. ”

“I told you, he said evenly, they are mine. They are what I am. They exist to destroy. They cease to exist when they cannot use their powers. They are made of light and fire. They must use themselves or die. It is what I make. ”

She was silent then, staring at him. “Then what of you?” she cried abruptly. “What an impossible fire there is in you.”

It was as if she struck worn stone, split it through its heart to reveal the secret, jeweled colors, the solid fires of crystals within. And she saw more, as his face struggled against its own expression: the massive burden that had hardened around the secret fire, kept it raw, untouched by time, burning within its secret dark.

He bowed his head. Wordless, he pushed the drumhead back into the box; she saw his hand shake. Then he met her eyes again, his own eyes ancient, haunted, and weary.

“And what light is in you, ” he said, so softly she barely heard his voice above the tide, “to see me so clearly.” He stopped; still held in his gaze she could not move. He was seeing colors now, her colors, her hair, her eyes. He lifted his hand, let a strand of windblown hair brush across his wrist. “Fire,” he whispered. “Gold. And your eyes. Amber flecked with green.” Her eyes widened; for a moment longer she could not move, she could only watch his hand reach out to her, swift as running tide, then drop, just before he touched her. She could move then. She took a step back, and then another, while he watched.

“I am driven,” he said, just before she turned and ran. “I cannot help myself. Nor can I help you.”

Liel had come back; she found his ash-streaked clothing on the floor. He was out in the fields, she guessed. Then, with him safe, she stopped thinking. She wove and did not weave, and when she did not weave, she drew, and made watercolors out of her dyes, and painted what she drew, so that when Liel returned at noon, the cottage was full of scraps of paper and linen, covered with wings, faces, eyes.

He said nothing when he saw them. He ate quietly, she nibbled absently, puzzling over how to get the colors brighter, richer, full of fire, full of light. He said finally, finished with his soup, and leaning back in his chair, “Sly lost all his hops. And his house.”

She blinked. She saw what surrounded them, then, on chair and loom, hearthstones, floor. She rose quickly, gathered the fragments. She felt him watch her. She said, picking up one last wing, her back to him, “I talked to the stranger.”

“Did you?”

“It did no good.”

He grunted softly. “No. But you were brave to try.” She turned then, met his eyes, saw them wistful, lonely, because she was straying down some dangerous and bewildering path, and he could not see his way to follow.

She went to him; he put his arms around her, as he sat, and dropped his face against her. “It’s just the colors,” she said helplessly. “They haunt me.”

“The colors.”

“Is someone going to the mainland?”

“Aron and Gamon and Sim left this morning in Lin Avrel’s boat, after we got the fire out. The sooner the better we all decided. There’s nothing else we can do. Is there?”

“No.”

“Then don t try.”

She touched his hair; his hold tightened. She did not answer. He loosed her slowly after a time, looked up at her; her eyes had filled with colors again, the stranger’s dreams. He rose, left the house without speaking.

She went back to her weaving.

At mid-afternoon, when the light dazzled through the windows and open door, making the warm shadows even darker, impenetrable, she heard a step on her threshold. She raised her eyes absently, still intent on her weaving. The figure at the door, limned with sunlight, was at once too bright and too dark to recognize.

Then she recognized its stillness.

“I came to see,” he said, “what you make.”

She stood slowly, feeling her heart hammer in her throat. It was as though she had found the tide at her doorstep, or something wild from the wood wanting in. He did not wait for her to welcome him. He stepped in, glancing around him at all her simple things: the painted crockery, the iron pots, the red vase full of buttercups, a moonshell, a piece of lace, the hanging she had woven to hide the bed. Then he looked at the weave on her loom, of cream and white and pale yellow, with a thread, here and there, of salmon.

“What is it?”

“A blanket,” she said. “A wedding gift.”

And then he saw the little pile of her sketches.

He looked through them, holding them so carefully not even the papers rustled as he drew one from behind another.

In the light that fell from the windows over her loom only his hands were illumined, holding what she had made of his makings. His face was in shadow.

“The colors are too pale, ” she said finally. Her voice sounded odd, loud and tuneless, in the silence. “I had to use my wool dyes for paint. I don’t know any other way. ”

He looked at her finally; she heard his drawn breath before he spoke. “Why?” he whispered. “Why do you want them? They burned your sheep, your wood —”

“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “Fire burns. Yet we take it into our houses, we live with it. Because we can’t live without it. Something in my heart wants them. They drive you to make them. You should understand. ”

“They don’t harm me.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice shaking. “Oh, yes. They have driven you out of the world. But still you make them because they are so beautiful, so powerful—they set fire to your heart long before they burned anything else. They have charred you, made a dead island of you to live on. And you let them. You let them. You make them out of light and set them free with your music to burn and kill. You never ask yourself why. You make because. Because you can.”

He moved abruptly into light, so that she could see his face, white as the moonshell, and she thought of something that had been born in the sea, and died, and left its hollow, brittle ghost behind.

“And would you? ” he asked tautly. “If you could?”

Her eyes filled with tears, at the thought of the screaming animals, Liel’s shirt frayed to a web with sparks, the charred trees, the barns and boats and houses burned. “No,” she whispered. “I could not.”

“I can.”

She didn’t answer. He waited, his eyes burning dark, challenging on her face. She did not speak. He dropped the sketches; they scattered like leaves across the floor. A face, half bird, half cloud, stared up at her out of one pale yellow eye. He turned; so did she, dropping down onto the stool at her loom, staring at its soft, pale shades, until she heard him leave.

The next day, Hila Burne’s cornfields were swept bare by something, Liel said wearily, red as fire, breathing gold fire, with great amber eyes flecked with green. They saved the house and the barn, he added, as Syl, her eyes wide, burning dry as with smoke, patched the holes in his trousers.

“They’re not so beautiful now,” she said.

“No.” Then he thought, leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, his feet stretched out toward the cold hearth. “Well. There’s always that moment when you first see it. You forget, for just that moment, what it does. All you do is see, and then it’s like all the things you thought you’d never see in life. Strange lands, palaces, silver rivers rushing in secret through dark forests, mountains older than the moon. It’s part of his magic, I think. That, for that one moment, you forget the past, and each of his makings seems the first one and the most wonderful.”

She gazed at him, needle suspended. “I never knew you wanted to see those places.”

“I never thought about them until now.” He didn’t speak again; when she opened her mouth, she heard his slow, exhausted breathing. She put his trousers down then and went quietly to the hearth. She knelt and gathered her sketches off the grate, where they would have been consumed in the mornings fire. She put them on the shelf above her loom.

She woke before dawn and walked to the sea.

She didn’t think of Liel finding the bed empty beside her; she didn’t think of what the stranger might say or do when he saw her. She stood among the rocks, watching the tide catch each changing hue of dawn, carry it ashore, and spread it out in the sand under her eyes. She heard music. She watched the sun rise; the music seemed to pull the great, hot fiery eye above the world. It pulled her; she drifted, following the beckoning tide. She found him where she had first seen him, standing half-hidden in the shadow of a rock. He did not turn his head; she did not speak, only listened, and watched the sky, to see what he might weave on his vast loom.

His music stopped. He looked at her. He did not speak, but his eyes spoke, making and unmaking her.

She turned her head after a moment, gazed at the tide again. She said softly, “I don’t know what you are. Something of you is human, it seems. ”

“I make trouble, and I am paid, and I leave.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing more.”

“I know. ”

“I have nothing to do with you.”

“No.”

“Nothing to do with your small weavings, your painted plates, your paper and dyes, your eyes that see beyond fire into light.”

She swallowed. “No.”

“This is all I am. All I want.”

“Yes.”

“To ask me to stop is to ask me to die.”

She whispered, “I know.”

“It would be like drowning in fire.”

“Could you —” She drew breath; her voice trembled. “Could you find another — some other way— ”

“How can I know that? This is all I know.”

“No one has ever — ”

“No one has ever asked. No. No one has ever come to me at dawn to watch me weave with the colors of the rising sun. No. I kill, I burn, I unmake. No one has ever been as inhuman as you.”

She felt herself tremble, though the morning wind was gentle. She held herself tightly, felt words, edged, sharp, in her tight, burning throat. “I see what I see. What I can make, I will make. I will never be able to forget you. Because your weavings have come between me and my loom. I will be haunted by your colors until I find ways to make them. You have set fire to my world.”

She did not see him again. Two days later, she found, among the rocks, his music open in all its parts, seawater playing the flute and reeds, broken shells playing the small drum. No one came for the money borrowed from the mainland, and on the island, nothing burned except in memory.

 

 

 

 

Transmutations

 

 

Old Dr. Bezel was amusing himself again; Cerise smelled it outside his door. The shade escaping under the thick, warped oak was blue. A darker shadow crossed it restively: he must have conjured up his apprentice, who had been among the invisible folk for five days. Cerise planted the gold-rimmed spectacles Dr. Bezel had made for her firmly on her nose and opened the door.

As usual, Aubrey Vaughn, slumping into a chair, looked blankly at her, as if she had fallen through the ceiling. She noted, with a sharp and fascinated eye, the yellow-gray pallor of his skin. She slid her notebook and pens and the leather bag with her lunch in it onto a table, then opened the notebook to a blank page.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said in her low, quiet voice. She added to the velvet curtains over the windows, for Dr. Bezel beamed at anything she said and rarely listened, and Aubrey simply never listened, “At least I’m not five days late.”

But this time Aubrey blinked at her. He could never remember her name. She was a slender, colorless wraith of a woman who appeared and disappeared at odd times; for all he knew she was conjured out of candle smoke and had no life beyond the moments he encountered her. But gold teased him: the gold of her spectacles catching firelight and lamplight among laughter, sweat, curses, music . . . He made an incautious movement; his elbow slid off the chair arm. He jerked to catch his balance and felt the mad, gnarled imp in his brain strike with the pick, mining empty furrows for thought.

“You were there,” he breathed. “Last night.”

Behind her spectacles, her gray eyes widened. “You can see me, ” she said, amazed. “I’ve often wondered.”

“Of course I can see you.”

“How long has this been going on? Dr. Bezel, he sees me. You will have to dispose of one of us.”

“Yes, my dear Cerise,” Dr. Bezel agreed benignly, peering at his intricate, bubbling skeleton of glass. “Now we will wait until the solution turns from blue to a most delicate green.”

“You were there,” Aubrey persisted, holding himself rigid to calm the imp. “At Wells Inn.”

“You are beginning to see me outside of this room? This is astonishing. What is my name?”

“Ah–”

“You see, I had a theory that not only am I invisible to you, the sound of my voice never reaches you. As if one of us is under a spell. Apparently even my name disappears into some muffled thickness of air before you hear it. ”

“I can hear you well enough now,” he said drily. He applied one hand to his brow and made an effort. “It’s a sound. Like silk ripping. Cerise. ”

She was silent, amused and half-annoyed, for on the whole, if their worlds were to merge, she preferred being invisible to Aubrey Vaughn. He was seeing her clearly now, she realized, as something more than a mass and an arbitrary movement in Dr. Bezel’s cluttered study. She watched the expression begin to form in his bleared, wincing eyes, and turned abruptly. His voice pursued.

“But what were you doing there?”

“Now see,” Dr. Bezel said delightedly, and Cerise forgot the curious voice in the chair as she watched a green like the first leaves flush through the bones of glass. “That is the exact shade. Look, for it goes quickly.”

“The exact shade of what? ” Aubrey murmured, and for once was himself unheard and invisible. “Of what?” he asked again, with his stubborn persistence, and, unaccountably, Dr. Bezel answered him.

“Of the leaves there. Translucent, gold-green, they fan into the light.”

“What leaves where?”

“No place. A dream.” He turned, smiling, sighing a little, as the green faded into clear. “I was only playing. Now we will work.”

What leaves? Aubrey thought much later, after he had chased spilled mercury across the floor and nearly scalded himself with molten silver. Dr. Bezel, lecturing absently, let fall the names of references intermittently, like thunderbolts.

Cerise noted them in her meticulous script. What dream? she wondered, and made a private note: Green-gold leaves fanning into light.

“Also there is a well,” Dr. Bezel said unexpectedly, at the end of the morning. Aubrey blinked at him, looking pained. Dr. Bezel, distracted from his vision by Aubrey’s expression, added kindly, “Aubrey, if you tarnish the gold of enlightenment with the fires and sodden flames of endless nights, how will you recognize it?”

Aubrey answered tiredly, “Even dross may be transmuted. So you said.”

“So you do listen to me.” He turned, chuckling. “Perhaps you are your father’s son.”

Cerise saw the blood sweep into Aubrey’s face. Prudently, she looked down at her notebook and wrote: Well. She had never met Nicholaus Vaughn, who had enlightened himself out of his existence; he had not, it seemed, misspent his youth at Wells Inn. Aubrey said nothing; the sudden stab of the pickax blinded him. In the wash of red before his eyes, he saw his bright-haired father, tall, serene, hopelessly good. Passionless, Aubrey thought, and his sight cleared; he found himself gazing into a deep vessel, some liquid matter gleaming faintly at the bottom.

“Analysis,” Dr. Bezel instructed.

“Now?” Aubrey said hoarsely, bone-dry. “It’s noon.”

“Then let us lay to rest the noonday devils,” Dr. Bezel said cheerfully. The woman, Cerise, was chewing on the end of her pen, deliberately expressionless. Aubrey asked her crossly,

“Have you no devils to bedevil you? ”

“None,” she answered in her low, humorous voice, “I would call a devil. I am intimate with those I know.”

“So am I,” he sighed, letting a drop from the vessel fall upon a tiny round of glass. Unexpectedly, it was red.

“Then they are not devils but reflections.”

He grunted, suddenly absorbed in the crimson unknown. Blood? Dye? He reached for fire. “What were you doing at Wells Inn?” he asked. He felt her sudden, sharp glance and answered it without looking up, “In one way, I am like my father. I am tenacious.”

“You are not concentrating,” Dr. Bezel chided gently. They were all silent then, watching fire touch the unknown substance. It flared black. Aubrey risked his red-gold brows, rubbed his eyes. At his elbow, Cerise made the first note of his analysis: Turns obscure under fire. Aubrey reached for a glass beaker, poured a bead of crimson into a solution of salts. It fell as gracefully as a falling world.

Retains integrity in solution, Cerise wrote, and added: Unlike the experimenter.

The puzzle remained perplexing. Aubrey, sweating and finally curious by the end of the hour, requested texts. Dr. Bezel sent him out for sustenance, Cerise to the library. There she gathered scrolls and great dusty tomes, and, having deposited them in the study, retired beneath a tree to eat plums and farmer’s cheese and pumpernickel bread, and to write poetry. She was struggling between two indifferent rhymes when a beery presence intruded itself.

“What were you doing at Wells Inn last night?”

She looked up. Aubrey’s tawny, bloodshot eyes regarded her with the clinical interest he gave an unknown substance. She said simply, “Working. My father owns the place.”

He stared at her; she had transformed under his nose. “You work there?”

“Five nights a week, until midnight.”

“I never saw —”

“Precisely.”

He backed against the tree, slid down the trunk slowly to sit among its roots. “And you work for Dr. Bezel.” She closed her notebook, did not reply. “Why?”

She shrugged lightly. “I have no one to pay for my apprenticeship. This is as close as I can get to studying with him.”

He was silent, eyeing the distance, his expression vague, uncertain. The woman beside him, unseen, seemed to disappear. He looked at her again, saw her candle-wax hair, her smoky eyes. It was her calm, he decided, that rendered her invisible to the casual eye. Movement attracted attention: her inner movements did not outwardly express themselves. Except, he amended a trifle sourly, for her humor.

“Why?” he asked again, and remembered her in the hot, dense crush at the inn, hair braided, face obscure behind her spectacles, hoisting a tray of mugs. She wore an apron over a plain black dress; now she wore black with lace at her wrists and throat, and her shoulders were covered. He tried to remember her bare shoulders, could not. “What do you need to transmute? Surely not your soul. It must be as tidy as your handwriting.”

She looked mildly annoyed at the charge. “What do you?” she asked. “You seem quite comfortable in your own untidiness.”

He shrugged. “I am following drunkenly in my father’s footsteps. He transmuted himself out of this world, giving me such a pure and shining example of goodness that it sends me to Wells Inn most nights to contemplate it.”

Her annoyance faded; she sat quite still, wondering at his candor. “Are you afraid of goodness?”

He nodded vigorously, keeping his haggard, shadow-smudged face tilted upward for her inspection. “Oh, yes. I prefer storms, fire, elements in the raw, before they are analyzed and named and ranked.”

“And yet you — ”

“Cannot keep away from my father’s one great passion: to render all things into their final, changeless, unimpassioned state.” The corner of his mouth slid up: a kind of smile, she realized, the first she had seen. He met her eyes. “Now,” he said, “tell me why you study such things. Do you want what my father wanted? Perfection?”

“Of a kind,” she admitted after a moment, her hands sliding, open, across the closed notebook. She was silent another moment, choosing words; he waited, motionless himself, exuding fumes and his father’s legendary powers of concentration. “I thought — by immersing myself in the process — that perhaps I could transmute language.”

A brow went up. “Into gold?”

Her mouth twitched. “In the basest sense. I try to write poetry. My words seem dull as dishwater, which I am quite familiar with. Some people live by their poetry. They sell it for money. The little I earn from Dr. Bezel turns itself into books. I work mostly for the chance to learn. I thought perhaps writing poetry might be a way to make a living that’s not carrying trays and dodging hands and stepping in spilled ale and piss and transmuted suppers.”

His eyes flicked away from her; he remembered a few of his own drunken offerings. “Poets, ” he murmured, “need not be perfect.”

“No, ” she agreed, “but they are always chasing the perfect word.”

“Let me see your poetry.”

“No,” she said again swiftly, rising. She brushed crumbs from her skirt, adjusted her cuffs, the notebook clamped firmly under one elbow. “Anyway, the bell has run, Dr. Bezel is waiting, and your unknown substance is still unknown.” He groaned softly, a boneless wraith in the tree roots, the shadows of leaves gently stroking his father’s red-gold hair. She wondered suddenly at the battle in him, tugged as he was between noon and night, between ale and alchemy. “Do you never sleep?” she asked.

“I am now,” he said, struggling to his feet, and groaned again as the hot, pure gold dazzled over him, awakening the headache behind his eyes.

Dr. Bezel, bent over an antique alembic and murmuring to himself, remained unaware of their return for some time. “How clear the light,” he said once, gazing into the murky, bubbling alembic. “It reveals even the most subtle hues in water, in common stones, in the very clay of earth.” Cerise, flipping a poem away from Aubrey’s curious eye, made another note of Dr. Bezel’s rambles through his dreamworld: Clarity. Something within the alembic popped; a tarry black smeared the glass. Aubrey winced at the noise and the bleak color. Dr. Bezel, surprised out of his musings, sensed the emanations behind him and turned. “Did you see it?” he asked with joy. “Now, then, to your own mystery, Aubery. Cerise has brought your texts.”

Aubrey, sweating pallidly, like a hothouse lily, bent over the scrolls. While he studied, Cerise ventured a question.

“Is there a language, in this lovely place, or are all things mute?”

“They are transmuted,” Aubrey murmured.

“Puns,” Cerise said gravely, “do not transmute: there are no ambiguities in the perfect world.”

“Nor,” Dr. Bezel said briskly, “is there language.”

“Oh,” she said, disconcerted.

“It is unnecessary. All is known, all exists in the same unchanging moment.” He poured a drop of the tarry black onto a glass wafer. Aubrey gazed bewilderedly at his back.

“Then why,” he wondered, “would anyone choose to go there?”

“You do not choose. You do not go. You are. Study, study to find your father’s shining path, and someday you will understand everything.” He let fall a tear of liquid onto the black substance. It flared. The smell of roses pervaded the room; they were all dazed a moment, even Dr. Bezel. “It is the scent of childhood,” he said wistfully, lost in some private moment. Aubrey, saturated by Wells Inn, forgot the word for what he smelled. Driftwood, his brain decided, it was the smell of driftwood. Or perhaps of caraway. Cerise, trying to imagine a world without a word, thought instantly: roses, and watched them bloom inside her head.

Aubrey, after some reading, requested sulfur. Applying it to his unknown and heating it, he dispersed even the memory of roses. Cerise, noting his test, wrote: Due to extreme contamination of surroundings, does not react to sulfur. Neither does his unknown. She drew the curtains apart, opening a window. Light gilded the experimenter’s profile; he winced.

“Must you?”

“It’s only air and light.”

“I’m not used to either.” He shook a drop of mercury into a glass tube, and then a drop of mystery. Nothing happened. He held it over fire, carelessly, his face too near, his hand bare. He shook it impatiently; beads of red and silver spun around the bottom, touched each other without reacting. He sighed, ran his free hand through his hair. “This substance has no name.”

“Rest a moment,” Dr. Bezel suggested, and Aubrey collapsed into a wing-backed chair patterned with tiny dragons. They looked, Cerise thought with amusement, like a swarm of minute demons around his head. He cast a bleared eye at her.

“Water,” he ordered, and in that moment, she wanted to close her notebook and thump his head with poetry.

“We are not,” she said coldly, “at Wells Inn.”

“Look, look,” Dr. Bezel exclaimed, but at what they could not fathom. He was shaking salts into a beaker of water; they took some form, apparently, before they dissolved. “There is light at the bottom of the well. Something shines . . . How exquisite.”

“I beg your pardon,” Aubrey said. Cerise did not answer. “How can I remember,” he pleaded, “which world we are in if you flit constantly between them?”

“You could frequent another inn.”

“I’ve grown accustomed to your father’s inn.”

“You could learn some manners.”

Silent, he considered that curious notion. His eyes slid to her face as she stood listening to Dr. Bezel’s verbal fits and starts and writing a word now and then. Limpid as a nun, he thought grumpily of her graceful, calm profile, and then saw that face flushed and sweating, still patent under a barrage of noise, heat, the incessant drunken bellowing of orders, with only the faint tension in her mouth as she hoisted a tray high above heedless roisterers, betraying her weariness. He rubbed his own weary face.

“I could,” he admitted, and saw her eyes widen. He got to his feet, picked up a carafe of water from a little ebony table. He went to the window, stuck his head out, and poured the water over his hair. Panting a little at the sudden cold, he pulled his dripping head back in and heard Dr. Bezel say with blank wonder, “But of course, it is the shining of enlightenment.”

“Where?” Aubrey demanded, parting plastered hair out of his eyes as if enlightenment might be floating in front of his nose. “Is it my unknown?”

“It is at the bottom of the well,” Dr. Bezel answered, beaming at his visions, then blinked at his wet apprentice. “From which you seem to have emerged.”

“Perhaps,” Aubrey sighed. “I feel I might live after all.”

“Good. Then to work again. All we lack now is a path ...”

Path, Cerise wrote under her private notes for Dr. Bezel’s unknown. Or did he speak of a path of Aubrey’s unknown? she wondered. Their imponderables were becoming confused. Aubrey buried a drop of his under an avalanche of silvery salts, then added an acid. The acid bubbled the salts into a smoking frenzy, but left the scarlet substance isolated, untouched.

“Sorcery,” Aubrey muttered, hauling in his temper. “It’s the fire-salamander’s tongue, the eye of the risen phoenix.” He immersed himself in a frail, moldy book, written in script as scrupulous as Cerise’s. Dr. Bezel, silent for the moment, pursued his own visions. Cerise, unneeded, turned surreptitiously to her poem, chewed on the end of her pen. It lacks, she thought, frowning. It lacks ... It is inert, scribbles on paper, nothing living. I might as well feed it to the salamander. But, patently, she crossed out a phrase, clicked words together and let them fall like dice, chose one and not the other, then chose the other, and then crossed them both out and wrote down a third.

“Yes,” she heard Dr. Bezel whisper, and looked up. “There.” He gazed into a beaker flushed with a pearl-gray tincture, as if he saw in it the map to some unnamed country. Aubrey, his head ringing with elements, turned toward him.

“What?”

“The unknown . . .”

“In there?” He eyed the misty liquid hopefully. “Is that the catalyst? I’d introduce my unknown into a solution of hops at this point.” He reached for it heedlessly, dropped a tear of crimson into the mystery in Dr. Bezel s hand.

It seemed, Cerise thought a second later, as if someone had lifted the roof off the room and poured molten gold into their eyes. She rediscovered herself sitting in a chair, her notebook sprawling at her feet. Aubrey was sitting on the floor. The roof had been replaced.

Of Dr. Bezel there was no trace.

She stared at Aubrey, who was blinking at her. Some moment bound them in a silence too profound for language. Then, a moment or an hour later, she found her voice.

“You have transmuted Dr. Bezel.”

He got to his feet, feeling strange, heavy, as if his bones had been replaced with gold. “I can’t have.”

She picked up her notebook, smoothed the pages, then held it close, like a shield, her arms around it, her eyes still stunned. “He is gone,” she said irrefutably.

“I couldn’t transmute a flea.” He stared bemusedly at his unknown. “What on earth is this?” He looked around him a little wildly, searching tabletop, tubes, alembic. “His beaker went with him.”

“No, you see, it was transformed, like him, like your father — it is nothing now. No thing. Everything.” Her voice sounded peculiar; she stood up, trembling. Her face looked odd, too, Aubrey thought, shaken out of its calm, its patient humor, on the verge of an unfamiliar expression, as if she had caught the barest glimpse of something inexpressible. She began to drift.

He asked sharply, “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“Why?”

“I seem to be out of a job.”

He began to put his unknown down, did not. He was silent, struggling. Her mind began to fill with leaves, with silence; she shook her head a little, arms tightening around her notebook. “Stay,” he said abruptly. “Stay. I can’t leave. Not without knowing. What he found. How he found it. And there are unknowns everywhere. Stay and help me.” She gazed at him, still expressionless. He added, “Please.”

“No.” She shook her head again; leaves whirled away on a sudden wind. “I can’t. I’m going back to buckets and beer, mops and dishwater and voices — ”

“But why?”

She backed a step closer to the door. “I don’t want a silent shining path of gold. I need the imperfect world broken up into words.”

He said again, barely listening to her, hearing little more than the mute call of the unknown, “Please. Please stay, Cerise. ”

She smiled. The smile transformed her face; he saw fire in it, shadow, gold and silver, sun and moon, all possibilities of language. “You are too much like your father,” she said. “What if you accidentally succeed? ”

She tore her notes out and left them with him, and then left him, holding a mystery in his hand and gazing after her while she took the path back into the mutable world.

 

 

 

 

The Lion and the Lark

 

 

There was once a merchant who lived in an ancient and magical city with his three daughters. They were all very fond of each other, and as happy as those with love and leisure and wealth can afford to be. The eldest, named Pearl, pretended domesticity. She made bread and forgot to let it rise before she baked it; she pricked her fingers sewing black satin garters; she inflicted such oddities as eggplant soup and barley muffins on her long-suffering family. She was very beautiful, though a trifle awkward and absent-minded, and she had suitors who risked their teeth on her hard, flat bread as boldly as knights of old slew dragons for the heart’s sake. The second daughter, named Diamond, wore delicate, gold-rimmed spectacles, and was never without a book or a crossword puzzle at hand. She discoursed learnedly on the origins of the phoenix and the conjunctions of various astrological signs. She had an answer for everything and was considered by all her suitors to be wondrously wise.

The youngest daughter, called Lark, sang a great deal but never spoke much. Because her voice was so like her mother’s, her father doted on her. She was by no means the fairest of the three daughters; she did not shine with beauty or wit. She was pale and slight, with dark eyes, straight, serious brows, and dark braided hair. She had a loving and sensible heart, and she adored her family, though they worried her with their extravagances and foolishness. She wore Pearl’s crooked garters, helped Diamond with her crossword puzzles, and heard odd questions arise from deep in her mind when she sang. What is Life? she would wonder. What is love? What is man? This last gave her a good deal to ponder, as she watched her father shower his daughters with chocolates and taffeta gowns and gold bracelets. The young gentlemen who came calling seemed especially puzzling. They sat in their velvet shirts and their leather boots, nibbling burnt cakes and praising Diamond’s mind, and all the while their eyes said other things. Now, their eyes said. Now. Then: Patience, patience. “You are flowers,” their mouths said, “You are jewels, you are golden dreams.” Their eyes said: I eat flowers, I burn with dreams, I have a tower without a door in my heart, and I will keep you there . . .

Her sisters seemed fearless in the face of this power — whether from innocence or design, Lark was uncertain. Since she was wary of men and seldom spoke to them, she felt herself safe. She spoke mostly to her father, who only had a foolish, doting look in his eyes, and who of all men could make her smile.

One day their father left on a long journey to a distant city where he had lucrative business dealings. Before he left, he promised to bring his daughters whatever they asked for. Diamond, in a riddling mood, said merrily, “Bring us our names!”

“Oh, yes,” Pearl pleaded, kissing his balding pate. “I do love pearls.” She was wearing as many as she had, on her wrists, in her hair, on her shoes. “I always want more.”

“But,” their father said with an anxious glance at his youngest, who was listening with her grave, slightly perplexed expression, “does Lark love larks?”

Her face changed instantly, growing so bright she looked almost beautiful. “Oh, yes. Bring me my singing name, Father. I would rather have that than all the lifeless, deathless jewels in the world.”

Her sisters laughed; they petted her and kissed her, and told her that she was still a child to hunger after worthless presents. Someday she would learn to ask for gifts that would outlast love, for when love had ceased, she would still possess what it had once been worth.

“But what is love?” she asked, confused. “Can it be bought like yardage?” But they only laughed harder and gave her no answers.

She was still puzzling ten days later when their father returned. Pearl was in the kitchen baking spinach tea cakes, and Diamond in the library, dozing over the philosophical writings of Lord Thiggut Moselby. Lark heard a knock at the door, and then the lovely, liquid singing of a lark. Laughing, she ran down the hall before the servants could come and swung open the door to greet their father.

He stared at her. In his hands he held a little silver cage. Within the cage, the lark sang constantly, desperately, each note more beautiful than the last, as if, coaxing the rarest, finest song from itself, it might buy its freedom. As Lark reached for it, she saw the dark blood mount in her father’s face, the veins throb in his temples. Before she could touch the cage, he lifted it high over his head, dashed it with all his might to the stone steps.

“No!” he shouted. The lark fluttered within the bent silver; his boot lifted over cage and bird, crushed both into the stones.

“No! ” Lark screamed. And then she put both fists to her mouth and said nothing more, retreating as far as she could without moving from the sudden, incomprehensible violence. Dimly she heard her father sobbing. He was on his knees, his face buried in her skirt. She moved finally, unclenched one hand, allowed it to touch his hair.

“What is it, Father? ” she whispered. “Why have you killed the lark?”

He made a great, hollow sound, like the groan of a tree split to its heart. “Because I have killed you.”

In the kitchen, Pearl arranged burnt tea cakes on a pretty plate. The maid who should have opened the door hummed as she dusted the parlor and thought of the carriage driver’s son. Upstairs, Diamond woke herself up mid-snore and stared dazedly at Lord Moselby’s famous words and wondered, for just an instant, why they sounded so empty. That had nothing to do with life, she protested, and then went back to sleep. Lark sat down on the steps beside the mess of feathers and silver and blood, and listened to her father’s broken words.

“On the way back . . . we drove through a wood . . . just today, it was ... I had not found you a lark. I heard one singing. I sent the post boy looking one way, I searched another. I followed the lark’s song, and saw it finally, resting on the head of a great stone lion.” His face wrinkled and fought itself; words fell like stones, like the tread of a stone beast. “A long line of lions stretched up the steps of a huge castle. Vines covered it so thickly it seemed no light could pass through the windows. It looked abandoned. I gave it no thought. The lark had all my attention. I took off my hat and crept up to it. I had it, I had it ... singing in my hat and trying to fly. . . . And then the lion turned its head to look at me.”

Lark shuddered; she could not speak. She felt her father shudder too.

“It said, ‘You have stolen my lark.’ Its tail began to twitch. It opened its stone mouth wide to show me its teeth. ‘I will kill you for that.’ And it gathered its body into a crouch. I babbled — I made promises — I am not a young man to run from lions. My heart nearly burst with fear. I wish it had . . . I promised — ”

“What,” she whispered, “did you promise?”

“Anything it wanted.”

“And what did it want?”

“The first thing that met me when I arrived home from my journey.” He hid his face against her, shaking her with his sobs. “I thought it would be the cat! It always suns itself at the gate! Or Columbine at worst — she always wants an excuse to leave her work. Why did you answer the door? Why?”

Her eyes filled with sudden tears. “Because I heard the lark.”

Her father lifted his head. “You shall not go,” he said fiercely. “I’ll bar the doors. The lion will never find you. If it does, I’ll shoot it, burn it — ”

“How can you harm a stone lion? It could crash through the door and drag me into the street whenever it chooses.”

She stopped abruptly, for an odd, confused violence tangled her thoughts. She wanted to make sounds she had never heard from herself before. You killed me for a bird! she wanted to shout. A father is nothing but a foolish old man! Then she thought more calmly, But I always knew that. She stood up, gently pried his fingers from her skirt. “I’ll go now. Perhaps I can make a bargain with this lion. If it’s a lark it wants, I’ll sing to it. Perhaps I can go and come home so quickly my sisters will not even know.”

“They will never forgive me.”

“Of course they will.” She stepped over the crushed cage, started down the path without looking back. “I have.”

But the sun had begun to set before she found the castle deep in the forest beyond the city. Even Pearl, gaily proffering tea cakes, must notice an insufficiency of Lark, and down in the pantry, Columbine would be whispering of the strange, bloody smear she had to clean off the porch. . . . The stone lion, of pale marble, snarling a warning on its pedestal, seemed to leap into her sight between the dark trees. To her horror, she saw behind it a long line of stone lions, one at each broad step leading up to the massive, barred doors of the castle.

“Oh,” she breathed, cold with terror, and the first lion turned its ponderous head. A final ray of sunlight gilded its eye. It stared at her until the light faded.

She heard it whisper, “Who are you?”

“I am the lark,” she said tremulously, “my father sent to replace the one he stole.”

“Can you sing?”

She sang, blind and trembling, while the dark wood rustled around her, grew close. A hand slid over her mouth, a voice spoke into her ear. “Not very well, it seems.”

She felt rough stubbled skin against her cheek, arms tense with muscle; the voice, husky and pleasant, murmured against her hair. She turned, amazed, alarmed for different reasons. “Not when I am so frightened,” she said to the shadowy face above hers. “I expected to be eaten.”

She saw a sudden glint of teeth. “If you wish.”

“I would rather not be.”

“Then I will leave that open to negotiation. You are very brave. And very honest to come here. I expected your father to send along the family cat or some little yapping powder puff of a dog.”

“Why did you terrify him so?”

“He took my lark. Being stone by day, I have so few pleasures.”

“Are you bewitched?”

He nodded at the castle. Candles and torches appeared on steps now. A row of men stood where the lions had been, waiting, while a line of pages carrying light trooped down the steps to guide them. “That is my castle. I have been under a spell so long I scarcely remember why. My memory has been turning to stone for some time, now. ... I am only human at night, and sunlight is dangerous to me.” He touched her cheek with his hand; unused to being touched, she started. Then, unused to being touched, she took a step toward him. He was tall and lean, and if the mingling of fire and moonlight did not lie, his face was neither foolish nor cruel. He was unlike her sisters’ suitors; there was a certain sadness in his voice, and hesitancy and humor that made her want to hear him speak. He did not touch her again when she drew closer, but she heard the pleased smile in his voice. “Will you have supper with me?” he asked. “And tell me the story of your life?”

“It has no story yet.”

“You are here. There is a story in that.” He took her hand then and drew it under his arm. He led her past the pages and the armed men, up the stairs to the open doors. His face, she found, was quite easy to look at. He had tawny hair and eyes, and rough, strong, graceful features that were young in expression and happier than their experience.

“Tell me your name,” he asked, as she crossed his threshold.

“Lark,” she answered, and he laughed.

His name, she discovered over asparagus soup, was Perrin. Over salmon and partridge and salad, she discovered that he was gentle and courteous to his servants, had an ear for his musicians’ playing, and had lean, strong hands that moved easily among the jeweled goblets and gold-rimmed plates. Over port and nuts, she discovered that his hands, choosing walnuts and enclosing them to crack them, made her mouth go dry and her heart beat. When he opened her palm to put a nut into it, she felt something melt through her from throat to thigh, and for the first time in her life she wished she were beautiful. Over candlelight, as he led her to her room, she saw herself in his eyes. In his bed, astonished, she thought she discovered how simple life was.

And so they were married, under moonlight, by a priest who was bewitched by day and pontifical by night. Lark slept until dusk and sang until morning. She was, she wrote her sisters and her father, entirely happy. Divinely happy. No one could believe how happy. When wistful questions rose to the surface of her mind, she pushed them under again ruthlessly. Still they came—words bubbling up — stubborn, half-coherent: Who cast this spell and is my love still in danger? How long can I so blissfully ignore the fact that by day I am married to a stone, and by night to a man who cannot bear the touch of sunlight? Should we not do something to break the spell? Why is even the priest, who preaches endlessly about the light of grace, content to live only in the dark? “We are used to it,” Perrin said lightly, when she ventured these questions, and then he made her laugh, in the ways he had, so that she forgot to ask if living in the dark, and in a paradox, was something men inherently found more comfortable than women.

One day she received letters from both sisters saying that they were to be married in the same ceremony, and she must come, she could not refuse them, they absolutely refused to be married without her; and if their bridegrooms cast themselves disconsolately into a dozen millponds, or hung themselves from a hundred pear trees, not even that would move them to marry without her presence.

“I see I must go,” she said with delight. She flung her arms around Perrin’s neck. “Please come,” she pleaded. “1 don’t want to leave you. Not for a night, nor for a single hour. You’ll like my sisters — they’re funny and foolish, and wiser, in their ways, than I am.”

“I cannot,” he whispered, loath to refuse her anything.

“Please.”

“I dare not.”

“Please.”

“If I am touched by light as fine as thread, you will not see me again for seven years except in the shape of a dove.”

“Seven years,” she said numbly, terrified. Then she thought of lovely, clumsy Pearl and her burnt tea cakes, and of Diamond and her puzzles and earnest discourses on the similarities between the moon and a dragon’s egg. She pushed her face against Perrin, torn between her various loves, gripping him in anguish. “Please,” she begged. “I must see them. But I cannot leave you. But I must go to them. I promise: no light will find you, my night-love. No light, ever.”

So her father sealed a room in his house so completely that by day it was dark as night, and by night as dark as death. By chance, or perhaps because, deep in the most secret regions of his mind he thought to free Lark from her strange, enchanted husband and bring her back to light and into his life, he used a piece of unseasoned wood to make a shutter. While Lark busied herself hanging pearls on Pearl, diamonds on Diamond, and swathing them both in yards of lace, Sun opened a hair-fine crack in the green wood where Perrin waited.

The wedding was a sumptuous, decadent affair. Both brides were dressed in cloth of gold, and they carried huge languorous bouquets of calla lilies. So many lilies and white irises and white roses crowded the sides of the church that, in their windows and on their pedestals, the faces of the saints were hidden. Even the sun, which had so easily found Perrin in his darkness, had trouble finding its way into the church. But the guests, holding fat candles of beeswax, lit the church with stars instead. The bridegrooms wore suits of white and midnight blue; one wore pearl buttons and studs and buckles, the other diamonds. To Lark they looked very much alike, both tall and handsome, tweaking their mustaches straight, and dutifully assuming a serious expression as they listened to the priest, while their eyes said: at last, at last, I have waited so long, the trap is closing, the night is coming. ... But their faces were at once so vain and tender and foolish that Lark’s heart warmed to them. They did not seem to realize that one had been an ingredient in Pearl’s recipes that she had stirred into her life, and the other a three-letter solution in Diamond’s crossword puzzle. At the end of the ceremony, when the bridegrooms had searched through cascades of heavy lace to kiss their brides’ faces, the guests blew out their candles.

In the sudden darkness a single hair-fine thread of light shone between two rose petals.

Lark dropped her candle. Panicked without knowing why, she stumbled through the church, out into light, where she forced a carriage driver to gallop madly through the streets of the city to her father’s house. Not daring to let light through Perrin’s door, she pounded on it.

She heard a gentle, mournful word she did not understand.

She pounded again. Again the sad voice spoke a single word.

The third time she pounded, she recognized the voice.

She flung open the door. A white dove sitting in a hair-fine thread of light fluttered into the air, and flew out the door.

“Oh, my love, ” she whispered, stunned. She felt something warm on her cheek that was not a tear, and touched it: a drop of blood. A small white feather floated out of the air, caught on the lace above her heart. “Oh, ” she said again, too grieved for tears, staring into the empty room, her empty life, and then down the empty hall, her empty future.

“Oh, why,” she cried, wild with sorrow, “have I chosen to love a lion, a dove, an enchantment, instead of a fond foolish man with waxed mustaches whom nothing, neither light nor dark, can ever change? Someone who could never be snatched away by magic? Oh, my sweet dove, will I ever see you? How will I find you? ”

Sunlight glittered at the end of the hall in a bright and ominous jewel. She went toward it thoughtlessly, trembling, barely able to walk. A drop of blood had fallen on the floor, and into the blood, a small white feather.

She heard Perrin’s voice, as in a dream: Seven years. Beyond the open window on the flagstones another crimson jewel gleamed. Another feather fluttered, caught in it. On the garden wall she saw the dove turn to look at her.

Seven years.

This, its eyes said. Or your father’s house, where you are loved, and where there is no mystery in day or night. Stay. Or follow.

Seven years.

By the end of the second year, she had learned to speak to animals and understand the mute, fleeting language of the butterflies. By the end of the third year, she had walked everywhere in the world. She had made herself a gown of soft white feathers stained with blood that grew longer and longer as she followed the dove. By the end of the fifth year, her face had grown familiar to the stars, and the moon kept its eye on her. By the end of the sixth year, the gown of feathers and her hair swept behind her, mingling light and dark, and she had become, to the world’s eye, a figure of mystery and enchantment. In her own eyes she was simply Lark, who loved Perrin; all the enchantment lay in him.

At the end of the seventh year she lost him.

The jeweled path of blood, the moon-white feathers stopped. It left her stranded, bewildered, on a mountainside in some lonely part of the world. In disbelief, she searched frantically: stones, tree boughs, earth. Nothing told her which direction to go. One direction was as likely as another, and all, to her despairing heart, went nowhere. She threw herself on the ground finally and wept for the first time since her father had killed the lark.

“So close,” she cried, pounding the earth in fury and sorrow. “So close —another step, another drop of blood — Oh, but perhaps he is dead, my Perrin, after losing so much blood to show me the way. So many years, so much blood, so much silence, so much, too much, too much . . .” She fell silent finally, dazed and exhausted with grief. The wind whispered to her, comforting; the trees sighed for her, weeping leaves that caressed her face. Birds spoke.

Maybe the dove is not dead, they said. We saw none of ours fall dying from the sky. Enchantments do not die, they are transformed. .. . Light sees everything. Ask the sun. Who knows him better than the sun who changed him into a dove?

“Do you know?” she whispered to the sun, and for an instant saw its face among the clouds.

No, it said in words of fire, and with fire, shaped something out of itself. It is you I have watched, for seven years, as constant and faithful to your love as 1 am to the world. Take this. Open it when your need is greatest.

She felt warm light in her hand. The light hardened into a tiny box with jeweled hinges and the sun’s face on its lid. She turned her face away disconsolately; a box was not a bird. But she held it, and it kept her warm through dusk and nightfall as she lay unmoving on the cold ground.

She asked the full moon when it rose above the mountain. “Have you seen my white dove? For seven years you showed me each drop of blood, each white feather, even on the darkest night.”

It was you I watched, the moon said. More constant than the moon on the darkest night, for I hid then, and you never faltered in your journey. I have not seen your dove.

“Do you know,” she whispered to the wind, and heard it question its four messengers, who blew everywhere in the world. No, they said, and No, and No. And then the sweet South Wind blew against her cheek, smelling of roses and warm seas and endless summers. Yes.

She lifted her face from the ground. Twigs and dirt clung to her. Her long hair was full of leaves and spiders and the grandchildren of spiders. Full of webs, it looked as filmy as a bridal veil. Her face was moon pale; moonlight could have traced the bones through it. Her eyes were fiery with tears.

“My dove.”

He has become a lion again. The seven years are over. But the dove changed shape under the eyes of an enchanted dragon, and when the dragon saw lion, battle sparked. He is still fighting.

Lark sat up. “Where?”

In a distant land, beside a southern sea. I brought you a nut from one of the trees there. It is no ordinary nut. Now listen. Thus is what you must do . . .

So she followed the South Wind to the land beside the southern sea, where the sky flashed red with dragon fire, and its fierce roars blew down trees and tore the sails from every passing ship. The lion, no longer stone by daylight, was golden and as flecked with blood as Lark’s gown of feathers. Lark never questioned the wind’s advice, for she was desperate beyond the advice of mortals. She went to the seashore and found reeds broken in the battle, each singing a different, haunting note through its hollow throat. She counted. She picked the eleventh reed and waited. When the dragon bent low, curling around itself to roar rage and fire at the lion gnawing at its wing, she ran forward quickly, struck its throat with the reed.

Smoke hissed from its scales, as if the reed had seared it. It tried to roar; no sound came out, no fire. Its great neck sagged; scales darkened with blood and smoke. One eye closed. The lion leaped for its throat.

There was a flash, as if the sun had struck the earth. Lark crouched, covering her face. The world was suddenly very quiet. She heard bullfrogs among the reeds, the warm, slow waves fanning across the sand. She opened her eyes.

The dragon had fallen on its back, with the lion sprawled on top of it. A woman lay on her back, with Perrin on top of her. His eyes were closed, his face bloody; he drew deep, ragged breaths, one hand clutching the woman’s shoulder, his open mouth against her neck. The woman’s weary face, upturned to the sky above Perrin’s shoulder, was also bloodstained; her free hand lifted weakly, fell again across Perrin’s back. Her hair was as gold as the sun’s little box; her face as pale and perfect as the moon’s face. Lark stared. The waves grew full again, spilled with a languorous sigh across the sand. The woman drew a deep breath. Her eyes flickered open; they were as blue as the sky.

She turned her head, looked at Perrin. She lifted her hand from his back, touched her eyes delicately, her brows rising in silent question. Then she looked again at the blood on his face.

She stiffened, began pushing at him and talking at the same time. “I remember. I remember now. You were that monstrous lion that kept nipping at my wings.” Her voice was low and sweet, amused as she tugged at Perrin. “You must get up. What if someone should see us? Oh, dear. You must be hurt.” She shifted out from under him, made a hasty adjustment to her bodice, and caught sight of Lark. “Oh, my dear,” she cried, “it’s not what you think.”

“I know,” Lark whispered, still amazed at the woman’s beauty and at the sight of Perrin, whom she had not seen in seven years, and never in the light, lying golden-haired and slack against another woman’s body. The woman bent over Perrin, turned him on his back.

“He is hurt. Is there water? ” She glanced around vaguely, as if she expected a bullfrog to emerge in tie and tails, with water on a tray. But Lark had already fetched it in her hands, from a little rill of fresh water.

She moistened Pernn’s face with it, let his lips wander over her hands, searching for more. The woman was gazing at Lark.

“You must be an enchantress or a witch,” she exclaimed. “That explains your — unusual appearance. And the way we suddenly became ourselves again. I am—we are most grateful to you. My father is King of this desert, and he will reward you richly if you come to his court.” She took a tattered piece of her hem, wiped a corner of Perrin’s lips, then, in afterthought, her own.

“My name is Lark. This man is — ”

“Yes,” the princess said, musing. Her eyes were very wide, very blue; she was not listening to Lark. “He is, isn’t he? Do you know, I think there was a kind of prophecy when I was born that I would marry a lion. I’m sure there was. Of course they kept it secret all these years, for fear I might actually meet a lion, but — here it is. He. A lion among men. Do you think I should explain to my father what he was, or do you think I should just — not exactly lie, but omit that part of his past? What do you think? Witches know these things.”

“I think, ” Lark said unsteadily, brushing sand out of Pernn’s hair, “that you are mistaken. I am—”

“So I should tell my father. Will you help me raise him? There is a griffin just beyond those rocks. Very nice; in fact we became friends before I had to fight the lion. I had no one else to talk to except bullfrogs. And you know what frogs are like. Very little small talk, and that they repeat incessantly.” She hoisted Perrin up, brushing sand off his shoulders, his chest, his thighs. “I don’t think my father will mind at all. About the lion part. Do you? ” She put her fingers to her lips suddenly and gave a piercing whistle that silenced the frogs and brought the griffin, huge and flaming red, up over the rocks. “Come, ” she said to it. Lark clung to Perrin’s arm.

“Wait,” she said desperately, words coming slowly, clumsily, for she had scarcely spoken to mortals in seven years. “You don’t understand. Wait until he wakes. I have been following him for seven years.”

“Then how wonderful that you have found him. The griffin will fly us to my father’s palace. It’s the only one for miles, in the desert. You’ll find it easily. ” She laid her hand on Lark’s. “Please come. I’d take you with us, but it would tire the griffin— ”

“But I have a magic nut for it to rest on, while we cross the sea— ”

“But you see we are going across the desert, and, anyway, I think a nut might be a little small.” She smiled brightly but very wearily at Lark. “I feel I will never be able to thank you enough.” She pushed the upright Perrin against the griffin’s back, and he toppled facedown between the bright, uplifted wings.

“Perrin!” Lark cried desperately, and the princess, clinging to the griffin’s neck, looked down at her, startled, uncertain. But the thrust of the griffin’s great wings tangled wind and sand together and choked Lark’s voice. She coughed and spat sand while the princess, cheerful again, waved one hand and held Perrin tightly with the other.

“Good-bye ...”

“No! ” Lark screamed. No one heard her but the frogs.

She sat awake all night, a dove in speckled plumage, mourning with the singing reeds. When the sun rose, it barely recognized her, so pale and wild was her face, so blank with grief her eyes. Light touched her gently. She stirred finally, sighed, watching the glittering net of gold the sun cast across the sea. They should have been waking in a great tree growing out of the sea, she and Perrin and the griffin, a wondrous sight that passing sailors might have spun into tales for their grandchildren. Instead, here she was, abandoned among the bullfrogs, while her true love had flown away with the princess. What would he think when he woke and saw her golden hair, heard her sweet, amused voice telling him that she had been the dragon he had fought, and that at the battle’s end, she had awakened in his arm? An enchantress — a strange, startling woman who wore a gown of bloodstained feathers, whose long black hair was bound with cobweb, whose face and eyes seemed more of a wild creature’s than a human’s —had wandered by at the right moment and freed them from their spells.

And so. And therefore. And of course what all this must mean was, beyond doubt, their destiny: the marriage of the dragon and the lion. And if they were very lucky—wouldn’t it be splendid — the enchantress might come to see them married.

“Will he remember me? ” Lark murmured to the bullfrogs. “If he saw me now, would he even recognize me?” She tried to see her face reflected in the waves, but of the faces gliding and breaking across the sand, none seemed to belong to her, and she asked desperately, “How will he recognize me if I cannot recognize myself?”

She stood up then, her hands to her mouth, staring at her faceless shadow in the sand. She whispered, her throat aching with grief, “What must I do? Where can I begin? To find my lost love and myself?”

You know where he is, the sea murmured. Go there.

“But she is so beautiful—and I have become so — ”

He is not here, the reeds sang in their soft, hollow voices. Find him. He is again enchanted.

“Again! First a stone lion, and then a dove, and then a real lion—now what is he? ”

He is enchanted by his human form.

She was silent, still gazing at her morning shadow. “I never knew him fully human,” she said at last. “And he never knew me. If we meet now by daylight, who is to say whether he will recognize Lark, or I will recognize Perrin? Those were names we left behind long ago.”

Love recognizes love, the reeds murmured.

Her shadow whispered, I will guide you.

So she set her back to the sun and followed her shadow across the desert.

By day the sun was a roaring lion, by night the moon a pure white dove. Lion and dove accompanied her, showed her hidden springs of cool water among the barren stones, and trees that shook down dates and figs and nuts into her hands. Finally, climbing a rocky hill, she saw an enormous and beautiful palace, whose immense gates of bronze and gold lay open to welcome the richly dressed people riding horses and dromedaries and elegant palanquins into it.

She hurried to join them before the sun set and the gates were closed. Her bare feet were scraped and raw; she limped a little. Her feathers had grown frayed; her face was gaunt, streaked with dust and sorrow. She looked like a beggar, she knew, but the people spoke to her kindly and even tossed her a coin or two.

“We have come for the wedding of our princess and the Lion of the Desert, whom it is her destiny to wed.”

“Who foretold such a destiny?” Lark asked, her voice trembling.

“Someone,” they assured her. “The king’s astrologer. A great sorceress disguised as a beggar, not unlike yourself. A bullfrog, who spoke with a human tongue at her birth. Her mother was frightened by a lion just before childbirth, and dreamed it. No one exactly remembers who, but someone did. Destiny or no, they will marry in three days, and never was there a more splendid couple than the princess and her lion.”

Lark crept into the shadow of the gate. “Now what shall I do?” she murmured, her eyes wide, dark with urgency. “With his eyes full of her, he will never notice a beggar.”

Sun slid a last gleam down the gold edge of the gate. She remembered its gift then and drew the little gold box out of her pocket. She opened it.

A light sprang out of it, swirled around her like a storm of gold dust, glittering, shimmering. It settled on her, turned the feathers into the finest silk and cloth of gold. It turned the cobwebs in her hair into a long, sparkling net of diamonds and pearls. It turned the dust on her feet into soft golden leather and pearls. Light played over her face, hiding shadows of grief and despair. Seeing the wonderful dress, she laughed for the first time in seven years, and, with wonder, she recognized Lark’s voice.

As she walked down the streets, people stared at her, marveling. They made way for her. A man offered her his palanquin, a woman her sunshade. She shook her head at both, laughing again. “I will not be shut up in a box, nor will I shut out the sun.” So she walked, and all the wedding guests slowed to accompany her to the inner courtyard.

Word of her had passed into the palace long before she did. The princess, dressed in fine, flowing silks the color of her eyes, came out to meet the stranger who rivaled the sun. She saw the dress before she saw Lark’s face.

“Oh, my dear,” she breathed, hurrying down the steps. “Say this is a wedding gift for me. You cannot possibly wear this to my wedding — no one will look at me! Say you brought it for me. Or tell me what I can give you in return for it.” She stepped back, half-laughing, still staring at the sun’s creation. “Where are my manners? You came all the way from — from—and here all I can do is —Where are you from, anyway? Who in the world are you?” She looked finally into Lark’s eyes. She clapped her hands, laughing again, with a touch of relief in her voice. “Oh, it is the witch! You have come! Perrin will be so pleased to meet you. He is sleeping now; he is still weak from his wounds.” She took Lark’s hand in hers and led her up the steps. “Now tell me how I can persuade you to let me have that dress. Look how everyone stares at you. It will make me the most beautiful woman in the world on my wedding day. And you’re a witch, you don’t care how you look. Anyway, it’s not necessary for you to look like this. People will think you’re only human.”

Lark, who had been thinking while the princess chattered, answered, “I will give you the dress for a price. ”

“Anything!”

Lark stopped short. “No—you must not say that!” she cried fiercely. “Ever! You could pay far more than you ever imagined for something as trivial as this dress!”

“All right,” the princess said gently, patting her hand. “I will not give you just anything. Though I’d hardly call this dress trivial. But tell me what you want.”

“I want a night alone with your bridegroom.”

The princess’s brows rose. She glanced around hastily to see if anyone were listening, then she took Lark’s other hand. “We must observe a few proprieties,” she said softly, smiling. “Not even I have had a whole night in my lion’s bed —he has been too ill. I would not grant this to any woman. But you are a witch, and you helped us before, and I know you mean no harm. I assume you wish to tend him during the night with magic arts so that he can heal faster.”

“If I can do that, I will. But — ”

“Then you may. But I must have that dress first.”

Lark was silent. So was the princess, who held her eyes until Lark bowed her head. Then I have lost, she thought, for he will never even look at me without this dress.

The princess said lightly, “You were gracious to refuse my first impulse to give you anything. I trust you, but in that dress you are very beautiful, and you know how men are. Or perhaps, being a witch, you don’t. Anyway, there is no need at all for you to appear to him like this. And how can I surprise him on our wedding day with this dress if he sees you in it first?”

You are like my sisters, Lark thought. Foolish and wiser than I am. She yielded, knowing she wanted to see Perrin with all her heart, and the princess only wanted what dazzled her eyes. “You are right,” she said. “You may tell people that I will stay with Perrin to heal him if I can. And that I brought the dress for you.”

The princess kissed her cheek. “Thank you. I will find you something else to wear, and show you his room. I’m not insensitive — I fell in love with him myself the moment I looked at him. So I can hardly blame you for —and of course he is in love with me. But we hardly know each other, and I don’t want to confuse him with possibilities at this delicate time. You understand.”

“Perfectly.”

“Good.”

She took Lark to her own sumptuous rooms and had her maid dress Lark in something she called “refreshingly simple ” but which Lark called “drab,” and knew it belonged not even to the maid, but to someone much farther down the social strata who stayed in shadows and was not allowed to wear lace.

I am more wren or sparrow than Lark, she thought sadly, as the princess brought her to Perrin’s room.

“Till sunrise,” she said; the tone of her voice added, And not a moment after.

“Yes,” Lark said absently, gazing at her sleeping love. At last the puzzled princess closed the door, left Lark in the twilight.

Lark approached the bed. She saw Perrin’s face in the light of a single candle beside the bed. It was bruised and scratched; there was a long weal from a dragon’s claw down one bare shoulder. He looked older, weathered, his pale skin burned by the sun, which had scarcely touched it in years. The candlelight picked out a thread of silver here and there among the lion’s gold of his hair. She reached out impulsively, touched the silver. “My poor Perrin,” she said softly. “At least, as a dove, for seven years, you were faithful to me. You shed blood at every seventh step I took. And I took seven steps for every drop you shed. How strange to find you naked in this bed, waiting for a swan instead of Lark. At least I had you for a little while, and at long last you are unbewitched.”

She bent over him, kissed his lips gently. He opened his eyes.

She turned away quickly before the loving expression in them changed to disappointment. But he moved more swiftly, reaching out to catch her hand before she left.

“Lark?” He gave a deep sigh as she turned again, and eased back into the pillows. “I heard your sweet voice in my dream ... I didn’t want to wake and end the dream. But you kissed me awake. You are real, aren’t you?” he asked anxiously, as she lingered in the shadows, and he pulled her out of darkness into light.

He looked at her for a long time, silently, until her eyes filled with tears.

“I’ve changed,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “You have been enchanted, too.”

“And so have you, once again.”

He shook his head. “You have set me free. ”

“And I will set you free again,” she said softly, “to marry whom you choose.”

He moved again, too abruptly, and winced. His hold tightened on her hand. “Have I lost all enchantment?” he asked sadly. “Did you love the spellbound man more than you can love the ordinary mortal? Is that why you left me?”

She stared at him. “I never left you —”

“You disappeared,” he said wearily. “After seven long years of flying around in the shape of a dove, due to your father’s appalling carelessness, I finally turned back into a lion, and you were gone. I thought you could not bear to stay with me through yet another enchantment. I didn’t blame you. But it grieved me badly — I was glad when the dragon attacked me, because I thought it might kill me. Then I woke up in my own body, in a strange bed, with a princess beside me explaining that we were destined to be married.”

“Did you tell her you were married? ”

He sighed. “I thought it was just another way of being enchanted. A lion, a dove, marriage to a beautiful princess I don’t love —What difference did anything make? You were gone. I didn’t care any longer what happened to me.” She swallowed, but could not speak. “Are you about to leave me again?” he asked painfully. “Is that why you’ll come no closer?”

“No,” she whispered. “I thought — I didn’t think you still remembered me. ”

He closed his eyes. “For seven years I left you my heart’s blood to follow ...”

“And for seven years I followed. And then on the last day of the seventh year, you disappeared. I couldn’t find you anywhere. I asked the sun, the moon, the wind. I followed the South Wind to find you. It told me how to break the spell over you. So I did — ”

His eyes opened again. “You. You are the enchantress the princess talks about. You rescued both of us. And then — ”

“She took you away from me before I could tell her — I tried — ”

His face was growing peaceful in the candlelight. “She doesn’t listen very well. But why did you think I had forgotten you?”

“I thought —she was so beautiful, I thought —and I have grown so worn, so strange —”

For the first time in seven years, she saw him smile. “You have walked the world, and spoken to the sun and wind ... I have only been enchanted. You have become the enchantress.” He pulled her closer, kissed her hand and then her wrist. He added, as she began to smile, “What a poor opinion you must have of my human shape to think that after all these years I would prefer the peacock to the Lark.”

He pulled her closer, kissed the crook of her elbow and then her breast. And then she caught his lips and kissed him, one hand in his hair, the other in his hand.

And thus the princess found them, as she opened the door, speaking softly, “My dear, I forgot, if he wakes you must give him this potion — I mean, this tea of mild herbs to ease his pain a little — ” She kicked the door shut and saw their surprised faces. “Well,” she said frostily. “Really.”

“This is my wife,” Perrin said.

“Well, really.” She flung the sleeping potion out the window, and folded her arms. “You might have told me.”

“I never thought I would see her again.”

“How extraordinarily careless of you both.” She tapped her foot furiously for a moment and then said slowly, her face clearing a little, “That’s why you were there to rescue us! Now I understand. And I snatched him away from you without even thinking — and after you had searched for him so long, I made you search—oh, my dear.” She clasped her hands tightly. “What I said. About not spending a full night here. You must not think — ”

“I understand.”

“No, but really —tell her, Perrin.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Perrin said gently. “You were kind to me. That’s what Lark will remember.”

But she remembered everything, as they flew on the griffin’s back across the sea: her father’s foolish bargain, the fearsome stone lion, the seven years when she followed a white dove beyond any human life, the battle between dragon and lion, and then the hopeless loss of him again. She turned the nut in her palm, and questions rose in her head: Can I truly stand more mysteries, the possibilities of more hardship, more enchanting princesses between us! Would it be better just to crack the nut and eat it! Then we would all fall into the sea, in this moment when our love is finally intact. He seems to live from spell to spell. Is it better to die now, before something worse can happen to him? How much can love stand?

Perrin caught her eyes and smiled at her. She heard the griffin’s labored breathing, felt the weary catch in its mighty wings. She tossed the nut high into the air and watched it fall a long, long way before it hit the water. And then the great tree grew out of the sea, to the astonishment of passing sailors, who remembered it all their lives, and told their incredulous grandchildren of watching a griffin red as fire drop out of the blue to rest among its boughs.

 

 

 

 

The Witches of Junket

 

 

Granny Heather was out on the lawn digging up night crawlers by flashlight when she saw the black spot on the moon. She heard the tide, though the sea was twenty miles away, and she saw the massive rock just offshore south of Crane Harbor open vast black eyes and stare at her. Three huge birds flew soundlessly overhead, looking like pterodactyls, glowing bluish white, like ghosts might. She didn’t know if she was in the past or future. In the future, the sea might eat its way through the wrinkled old coast mountains, across the pastures where the sheep grazed, to her doorstep. In the past, those dinosaur birds might have flown over Junket, or whatever was there before the town was. She stopped tugging at a night crawler that was tugging itself back into its hole, and she turned the flashlight off. She made herself as small as possible, hunkering down on her old knees in the damp grass. Her hair felt too bright; she wondered if, under the moonlight, it glowed like the ghost birds. She heard her thin blood singing.

“So,” she whispered, “you’re awake.”

For a moment she felt stared at, as if the full moon were an eye. It could see into her frail bones, find the weakest places where a tap might shatter her. She felt luminous, exposed, her old bones shining like the bones of little fish down in the darkest realms of the sea.

Then it was over, she was disregarded, the moon was no longer interested in her.

She stood up in the dark, tottery, her heart hammering, and made her way back into her house.

The next morning, she took her pole and her night crawlers and her lawn chair down the road to where the old pump house straddled a branch of the Junket River, where the bass liked to feed. She pleated a worm onto her hook and added an afterthought: a green marshmallow. No telling, she thought. She cast her line into the still water.

A trout rose up out of the water, danced on its tail, and said, “Call Storm’s children.”

It vanished back into the water as she stared, and took the worm clean off the hook, leaving the marshmallow.

She reeled in, sighing. “It’s easy, ” she grumbled to the trout, “for you to say. You don’t have to put up with them.”

But she had to admit it was right.

Still and all, Storm’s children being what they were, she got a second opinion.

She drove her twenty-year-old red VW Beetle over to Poppy and Cass’s house, adding another 3.8 miles to the 32,528.9 she had turned over in twenty years. Cass was in the yard, polishing a great wheel of redwood burl. His work shed, which was a small warehouse left over from when the nearly invisible town of Raventree actually had a dock for river traffic, was cluttered with slabs of redwood and smaller, paler pieces of myrtle. He smiled at Heather, but he didn’t speak. He was a shy, untidy giant, with hair that needed pruning and a nicotine-stained mustache. He jerked his head at the house to tell Heather where Poppy was, and Heather, feeling damp in her bones, creaked to the door, stuck her head inside.

“Poppy?”

Poppy came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Why, Heather, you old sweet thing. I didn’t hear you drive up. Come on in and sit down. I’ll get us some tea.” Turning briskly back to the kitchen, she caused whirlwinds: plants moved their faces, table legs clattered, framed photos on the wall slid askew. Heather waited until things quieted, then eased into one of Cass’s burl chairs. It had three legs like a stool and a long skinny back with a face, elongated and shy, peering out of the wood gram. A teakettle howled; Poppy came back again carrying mugs of water with mint leaves floating in them. Heather preferred coffee, but she preferred nearly anything to Poppy’s coffee. Anyway, she liked chewing on mint leaves.

Poppy settled into a chair with wide arms that had holes for plant pots; delicate strings-of-hearts hung their runners over the sides almost to the floor. Poppy was a tall, big-boned woman who wore her yellow-gray hair in a long braid over one shoulder. Her eyes were wide-set, smoky gray; her brows were still yellow in her smooth forehead. She favored eye-smacking colors and clunky jewelry. Abalone, turquoise, hematite, and coral danced on her fingers. She wore big myrtle wood loops in her ears; a chunk of amber on a chain bounced on her bosom. She was the age Storm would have been, if Storm hadn’t skidded into a tree on a rainy night. Heather had looked to Poppy after that, someone for her bewildered eyes to rest on after Storm had vanished, and Poppy had let her, coaxing her along as patiently as if Heather had been one of her ailing plants.

Heather took a sip of tea and spent a moment working a mint leaf out from behind one tooth, while Poppy meandered amiably about her married daughter and her new grandson. “Chance, they named him,” she said. “Might as well have named him Luck or Fate or —Still and all, it’s kind of catching.”

“Poppy,” Heather said, having finally swallowed the mint leaf, “I got to send for Storm’s children.”

Poppy put her mug down on the chair arm. Her brows pinched together suddenly, as if a tooth had jabbed her. “Oh, no.”

“I’ve been told to.”

“Who told you? ”

“A trout, under Tim Greyson’s pump house.”

“Well, why, for goodness sake?”

Heather sighed, feeling too old and very frail. “You know what’s inside Oyster Rock.” Poppy gave a nod, silent. “Well, it’s not going to stay there. ”

Poppy swallowed. She stared at nothing a moment, her sandal tapping —she preferred the cork-soled variety, which lifted her up even taller and slapped her feet as she walked.

“Oh, Lord,” she muttered. “Are you sure? It’s been down there for eight hundred years, ever since that Klamath woman drove it back into the rock. You’d think it could have stayed there a few more years.”

“You’d think so. But — ”

“Maybe we don’t have to send for Storm’s children. Maybe we could handle it ourselves. Still, Annie’s up north with her daughter and Tessa has to get her legs worked on, and Olivia’s at the mud caves in Montana, rejuvenating her skin — ”

“That leaves you and me,” Heather said dryly. “Unless you’re busy, too.”

“Well–”

“The point is, that thing’s not going to ask us if we have time for it. It’s not going to wait around for Annie to get home or Olivia to get the mud off her face. It’s coming out. I felt it, Poppy. I saw the warnings. None of us was around eight hundred years ago to know exactly what it does, so if a trout says get help, how’re you going to argue with it?”

Poppy drew a breath, held it. “Did you catch the trout? ” she asked grimly.

“No.”

“Pity. I’d like to deep-fry it.” She kicked moodily at the planter again; the ficus in it shivered and dropped a leaf. “Are you sure what’s inside the rock isn’t the lesser of the two evils?”

“Poppy! Those are my grandchildren you’re talking about. Besides, ” she added, “they’re older now. Maybe they’ve settled down a little. ”

“Last time they came, they threw a keg party in the church parking lot.”

“That was seven years ago, and, anyway, it was at Evan’s funeral,” Heather said stubbornly. She kicked at the planter herself, feeling the chill at her side where Evan wasn’t anymore. “And it was more like a wake. Even I had a sip of beer.”

Poppy smiled, patting Heather’s hand soothingly, though her brows still tugged together. “Evan would have enjoyed the party,” she said. “It’s a wonder he didn’t shuffle back out of his grave. ”

“He always was an irreligious old poop. Poppy, I got to do it. I can’t ignore what I saw. I can’t ignore advice given by water.”

“No.” Poppy sighed. “You can’t. But you can’t bring Storm’s children back here without explaining why, either. We’d better have a meeting. I’d like to know what we’re dealing with. Inside the rock, that is. It had another name, that rock, didn’t it? Some older name . . . Then people settling around Crane Harbor renamed it; the old name didn’t make any sense to them.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, of course it was years before even you were born — Mask. That’s what it was. Mask-in-the-Rock.”

Heather felt her face wrinkle up, in weariness and perplexity. “Mask. They were right — it doesn’t make much sense.” Her legs tensed to work herself to her feet. But she didn’t move. She wanted to stay in Poppy’s house, where the chairs had shy faces and lived in a green forest hidden away from anything called Mask. “Things get old,” she said half to herself. “Maybe this Mask-thing got a little tired in eight hundred years.”

“More likely,” Poppy said, “it had an eight-hundred-year nap.” The door opened; Cass came in, and her face changed quickly. She rose, smiling, flashing amber and mother of pearl, chattering amiably as she picked up Heather’s mug. “Heather and I are going to take a little ride, honey. Maybe do a little shopping, go watch some waves, have a bite to eat at Scudder’s. Is there anything you want me to pick up for you?”

“I don’t think so,” Cass said, smoothing his mustache. His hand, broad, solid, muscular, like something he might have carved out of wood, moved with deliberation from his mustache to Poppy’s purple shoulder. He smiled at her, seeing her a moment. Then his eyes filled up again with burls, boles, shapes embedded in wood grain. He gave her shoulder an absent pat. “Have fun.”

“Fun,” Poppy said, grim again, as she fired up Heather’s VW and careened onto the two-lane road that ran along the Junket River into Crane Harbor. “Heather, I feel like I’m sitting in a tin can. Is this thing safe? ”

“I’ve had it for twenty years and I never even dinged it,” Heather said, clutching the elbow rest nervously. “You be careful with my car, Poppy McCarey. If you land us in the river — ”

“Oh, honey, this car would float like a frog egg.”

“Maybe,” Heather said grumpily. “But you don’t got to go so fast — that thing’s been in there for eight hundred years.”

The road hugged the low, pine-covered mountain on one side and gave them a view of the Junket Valley on the other, with the slow river winding through green fields, the sheep on them white as dandelion seed. Occasionally, they passed small herds of cows, which made Heather remember the old farm back in Nebraska, before the drought boiled the ground dry as a rusty pot.

“There’s that Brahma bull,” she said as they rounded a curve. She liked looking at it, humpy and gray among the colored cows.

“There’s llamas,” Poppy said, “over by Port James. Have you seen them?”

“Over by the cranberry bogs?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Poppy weighed down on the gas suddenly to pass a pickup pulling a horse trailer, and Heather closed her eyes. She must have taken a little nap, with the sun flicking in and out of the trees, light and dark chasing each other over her face, for when she opened them again, they were passing the slough, and there were no more hills left in front of them. Then there was no more land left; they had come to the edge of the world. She put her window down to smell the sea.

The air was chilly; the sea, its morning mist rolling away in a dark gray band across the horizon, looked turquoise. The tide heaved against the pilings along the harbor channel; foam exploded like bed ticking into the bright air.

“Tide’s in.” Poppy turned away from the harbor onto a road that ambled along the cliffs and beaches toward Oyster Rock. Fishers stood at the edge of the tide, casting into the surf.

“Bet the perch are biting now,” Heather said wistfully.

Poppy, who hated to fish, said nothing. They passed the Sandpiper hotel, pulled into a viewpoint parking lot behind it. Poppy turned off the engine.

They sat silently. From that angle on the cliff, they could see the grassy knoll on top of Oyster Rock, and the white-spattered ledges where the cormorants nested. The tide boiled around the rock, tried to crawl up it. Gulls circled it, like they circled trawlers and schools of fish, wheedling plaintively. To Heather, their cries seemed suddenly cries of alarm, of warning, at something they had felt stirring beneath their bird feet, inside the massive rock.

“Looks quiet enough,” Poppy said after a while.

“Maybe,” Heather said, feeling small again, cold. “But it doesn’t make me quiet in my bones. Always did before, always whenever we’d drive here to look at it — me and Evan, or me alone after Evan died —in the morning, in the moonlight. You watched the waves, curling around that old rock with the birds on its head, and you feel like as long as that rock stands there, so will the world. Now, it don’t feel that way. It just feels — hollow.”

Poppy nodded, the myrtle loops rocking in her ears. “The cormorants have all gone, ” she said suddenly, and Heather blinked. So they had. The dark shadows on the splotched wall where the birds had nested for years were nothing but that — splits in the rock, or maybe shadows of the birds that the birds had left behind, escaping. Poppy’s mouth tightened; her ringed hand fiddled nervously with amber. She reached out abruptly and started the engine.

“We’ve got to make some phone calls.”

“Where we going to meet?”

“Your house, of course. Nobody but the cats there to listen in.”

“You better get me home then. I got to dust.”

Poppy spun to a halt in the gravel. She stared at Heather a second before she laughed. “Listen to you! I swear you wouldn’t go to your own funeral unless you cleaned out your refrigerator first.”

“I probably won’t, ” Heather retorted. “Now, between this and that and Storm’s children coming, I’ll never get my tomatoes planted.”

“That’s another thing you have to do.”

“What?”

“Call Storm’s children.”

“Oh, fiddle,” Heather said crossly. “Damn! ”

Sarah Ford came that night, and Tessa, walking with her canes, and Laura Field, who was even older than Heather, from the Victorian mansion across the street, and Dawn Singleton, who was only nineteen, and Rachel Coulter, who always found the thread on the carpet, the stain on the coffee cup, the dust on the whatnot shelf. Heather took oatmeal cookies out of the freezer and jars of Queen Anne cherries from her tree out of the pantry. Olivia Bogg was out of state, Vi Darnelle was down with the flu, and Annie Turner had gone to Portland to visit her daughter. But, considering the notice they’d been given, it was a good gathering, Heather thought. She watched Rachel turn a cookie over to examine a burned spot on it, and she wanted to take one of Tessa’s canes and smack Rachel in the shin. Rachel bit into the cookie dubiously; her heavy, frowning face quivered like custard. How Poppy, in an orange sweater, orange lipstick, tight jeans, high-heeled sandals, and what looked like half the dime store jewelry in Junket, managed to look remotely glamorous at her age was more than Heather could understand.

They finished their coffee and dessert and gossip; little pools of silence spread until they were all silent, curious faces turning toward Poppy, who was perched on the arm of the sofa, and toward Heather, who was gazing at an old oval black-and-white picture of Evan as a little boy, wearing a sailor suit and shoes that buckled like a girl’s. How, she wondered, always with the same astonishment, did he get from being that little long-haired boy to that old man in his grave? How does that happen?

Then the cuckoo sprang out of its doorway nine times, and Heather blinked and saw the faces turned toward her, waiting.

“Who called this meeting?” Tessa asked in her deep, strong voice.

“I did,” Heather said.

“For what reason?” Dawn Singleton’s young voice wavered a little out of nervousness; her black high-tops stirred the nap on Heather’s carpet.

“I’ve been warned.”

“By what?” old Laura Field asked, her voice as sweet and quavery as Dawn’s. Poppy almost hadn’t got her; she’d been on her way out the door to visit her husband, who had been in a coma at the Veterans Hospital in Slicum Bay for nine years.

“By the moon. By birds. By water.”

There was a short silence; even Rachel was looking a little bug-eyed. Then Rachel cleared her throat. “What warning was given?”

“The thing inside Oyster Rock is coming out.”

Even the cuckoo clock went silent then. It seemed a long slow moment from the movement of its pendulum back to the movement of its pendulum forth. Dawn’s high-tops crept together, sought comfort from each other. Poppy moved, fake clusters of diamonds sparkling in her ears. It was her turn to ask one question.

“What must be done?”

They came to life a little at her voice. Rachel blinked; Laura Field cleared her throat softly; Sarah Ford, her mouth still open, shifted her coffee cup.

“I have been advised.”

“What advice was given?” Sarah asked faintly. Middle-aged, plump, pretty, she looked constantly harried, as if she were trying to catch up with something always blown just out of reach. Having half a dozen boys would do that, Heather guessed. The cuckoo clock stretched time again, suspending Heather’s thoughts between its tick and its tock.

“I got to call Storm’s children.”

Somebody’s cup and saucer crashed onto the floor. Heather opened her eyes. Dawn’s hands were over her mouth; her eyes looked half-shocked, half-smiling. Rachel, of all people, had dropped her coffee on the floor. Luckily she was sitting over in the kitchen area, where there was nothing to spill it on. Laura Field’s eyes looked enormous, stricken; she was patting her hair as if a wind had blustered through the room. Tessa closed her own eyes, looking as if she were praying, or counting to ten.

“Who in hell, ” Tessa demanded, “gave that advice? ”

Rachel, standing beside Poppy while Poppy wiped up the mess, gave Tessa a reproving glance. But no one else seemed to think the profanity unjustified. Heather sighed. Storm had been born out of blistering sun, dust storms, blizzards so thick they had swallowed houses, barns, light itself. But Storm had been the aftermath, the memory of what had passed. She had swallowed the storms, had them inside her, returned them as gifts her children carried — lightning bolts, icicles, streaks of hot brown wind — across the threshold of the world.

“A fish,” Heather said.

Tessa pressed her lips together. She was ten years younger than Heather, but heavy and slow; the veins in her legs nearly crippled her. She had kept books for the lumber mill for thirty years. Whenever it closed down, depending on whether the political outcry was for live trees or lumber, she fiddled with an article about how things got named up and down the river between Junket and Crane Harbor, along the coast between Port James and Slicum Bay. She’d be fiddling in her grave, Heather thought privately; she viewed bits of information as suspiciously as she might have viewed something furry in her refrigerator.

Dawn opened her mouth, her young face looking perplexed, as well it might. “What is inside Oyster Rock?” she asked. There was a short silence.

“Don’t know; nobody knows. Mask, it’s called. Legend is a woman from over Klamath way faced it down and drove it inside the rock. ”

“If one woman did that,” Rachel said tartly, “why do we need to send for Storm’s children?”

“Because the trout said,” Heather answered wearily. “That’s all I know. Advice given by water.”

Poppy, rattling fake pearls in one hand, asked Heather resignedly, “Where are they?”

“South,” Heather said. “Somewheres. California. Texas. Lydia called me a year ago on Evan’s anniversary. She gave me a number to call if I needed them. Said she changed her name to —oh, what was it? Greensnake. She never said where she was calling from exactly. Number’s in my book . . .” She leaned her head back tiredly, closed her eyes, wanting to nap now that she’d fed and warned them. She lifted her head again slowly at the silence, found them all watching her, as still and intent as cats. She shifted. “I suppose — ”

“Quit supposing,” Rachel said sourly. The phone on its long line was making its way toward her, hand to hand. “Do it.”

 

 

“Call me Lydia again,” Lydia said sweetly. Her hair was green; she wore a short black dress that fit her body like a snakeskin and black heels so high and thin she probably speared a few night crawlers on her way across Heather’s lawn. Georgie, hauling bags out, turned to give Lydia a sidelong glance out of glacier-cold eyes. Georgie had hair like a mown lawn, quick-bitten nails, flat, high, craggy cheekbones like her grandfather’s, and a gold wedding band on her left hand that flashed like fire as she heaved a suitcase into the porch light. Poppy had driven her old station wagon to pick them up at the airport in Slicum Bay. Joining Heather, she seemed unusually thoughtful. Heather, counting heads anxiously in the dark, said, “Where’s — ” And then the third head came up, groaning, from between the seats.

Lydia said brightly, “Grace is a little shaken.”

Grace hit the grass hands first, crawled her way out of the car. She was skeleton thin, with hair so long and silvery she looked a hundred years old when she stood up, haggard and swaying. “I threw up,” she whispered.

“In my car?” Poppy said breathlessly.

“Georgie’ll clean it up. I can’t travel in anything with wheels. Not even roller skates. It’s because I’m so old.”

Poppy’s agate necklace clattered in her hand. “Oh,” she said, and stuck there.

“You can’t be more than twenty-five,” Heather guessed, calculating wildly.

“Twenty-nine,” Georgie said succinctly, and clamped her thin lips together again.

“I mean older than the wheel. Deep in my ... in my spiritual life.”

Lydia hiccuped in the silence. “Oh, I beg,” she said. She leaned down from a great height, it seemed, to kiss Heather’s cheek. As she straightened, Heather caught a waft of something scented with oranges. Her head spun a little: Lydia seemed to straighten high as the moon, as long as the Junket River in her black stockings and heels.

They settled in the living room finally, cups of coffee and tea fragrant with that smell of oranges from Lydia s flask. Heather had some herself; a sip or two, and she could swear orange trees rustled at her back, and she could almost see the fire within Georgie’s cold, granite face. In his photo, the last taken, Evan seemed to smile a tilted smile. Poppy, who never drank, had a healthy swig in her cup.

“Oyster Rock,” Lydia mused, sliding a heel off and swinging it absently from her toe.

“Mask,” Poppy said, “they called it back then.” She tapped an agate bead to her teeth, frowning. “Whenever then was, that you call back then whenever they were.”

“Uh,” Grace said with an effort. She held on to her cup with both hands, as if it might leap onto the carpet. A strand of her white hair was soaking in it. “I’ll find out.”

“Tessa might know more.”

“Tess the one sounds like a sea lion in heat?”

Poppy pushed the agate hard against a tooth. “You might say.”

“Uh. She goes back, but not as far.”

“As far as — ”

“Me. She goes back to when it had a name. I go back to when it didn’t.”

Grace started to sag then. Lydia reached out deftly, caught her cup before she fell facedown on the couch. Lydia ticked her tongue. “That girl does not travel well.”

“She all right?” Heather asked, alarmed.

“Toss a blanket over her,” Georgie said shortly. “She’ll be back before morning.”

Lydia watched Grace a moment. She looked dead, Heather thought, her face and hair the same eerie, silvery white, all her bones showing. Lydia’s green head lifted slowly. She seemed to hear something in the distance, though there wasn’t much of Junket awake by then. She made a movement that began in her shoulders, rippled down her body to end with a twitch that slid the shoe back on her foot. When she stood up, she seemed taller than ever.

“That place,” she said to Heather. “What’s its name? Tad’s. That still alive?”

“Tad’s?” Heather sought Poppy’s eyes. “I guess.”

“I left something there.”

“You — But you haven’t been here for seven years!”

“So it’s been there seven years. I like a night walk.”

“Honey, you can’t go in Tad’s! You can’t go among truckers and drunks with that hair and them shoes. Whatever you left, let it stay left.”

“I left a score,” Lydia said. She flicked open a gold powder case, smoothed a green brow with one finger, then lifted her lip to examine an eyetooth. “I left a score to settle at Tad’s.” She snapped the powder case shut. “Coming, Georgie?”

Heather closed her eyes. When she opened them and her mouth, there was only Grace looking like a white shadow on the couch and Poppy wandering around collecting cups. She stared, horrified, at Poppy.

“We got to do — We can’t just let — You call Cass, tell him to get down to Tad’s and help those girls — ”

“No.” Poppy shook her head; shell and turquoise clattered with emphasis. “No, ma’am. Those aren’t girls, and they don’t need our help, and I wouldn’t send Cass down there tonight if Tad was singing hymns and selling tickets to heaven. Stop fussing and sit down. Have some more tea.”

Heather backed weakly into her rocker, where she could keep an eye on Grace, who looked as if she had bought a ticket and was halfway there. Heather dragged her eyes away from the still face to take a quick look around the room. She said hopefully, “Don’t suppose Lydia left her flask ...”

Poppy gave her a tablespoon of Lydia’s elixir in her tea; she was asleep and dreaming before she finished it.

Grace sat upright on the couch. The house was dark. It wasn’t even the Junket house, Heather realized; it was more like the old farmhouse where Storm had been born.

“Shh, ” Grace said, and held out her hand. She had color in her face; her hair glowed in the dark like pale fire. For some reason she was wearing Heather’s old crocheted bedroom slippers. “You can come with me but don’t talk. Don’t say a word ...”

Heather took her hand. Grace led her into the bedroom where she and Evan had slept over fifty years ago. The bed, under its thin chenille spread, glowed like Grace s hair. Then it wasn’t a bedspread at all — it was the sea, foaming pale under the moon. Heather nearly stumbled at a blast of wind.

She opened her mouth, but Grace’s hand squeezed a warning; she put a finger to her lips. She turned her head. Heather looked in the same direction and nearly jumped out of her skin. The old rock heaved out of the ocean like a whale in their faces, as black against the sea and stars as if it were an empty hole.

Then she knew it wasn’t an emptiness. It was something looking for its face. It was a live thing that couldn’t be seen — it needed a face to make it real. Then its eyes could open; then its vast mouth could speak. Heather clung like a child to Grace’s hand, her mouth open wide. The wind pushed into her so hard she couldn’t make a noise if she’d wanted.

Heather, the emptiness said. Heather.

She jumped. She opened her eyes, saw Grace rising up on the couch, her hair glowing like St. Elmo’s fire, her eyes white as moons. Then her hair turned red. Then blue. Heather, too stunned to move, heard Poppy say, “Guess they finished at Tad’s.”

It was after one in the morning. Flo Hendrick’s son Maury was standing on Heather’s lawn talking, while his flashing lights illumined her living room through the open curtains. She couldn’t move. Then she heard a strange sound.

Laughter. From Maury Hendrick, who hadn’t smiled, Flo said, since his pants fell down in a sack race in the third grade.

Poppy sucked in her breath. Then she grinned a quick, tight grin that vanished as soon as Heather saw it. Maury’s car crunched back out over the gravel. Lydia strolled in, carrying a beer bottle.

“Well, ” she said lightly. “I feel better. Don’t you feel better?”

“What happened?” Poppy asked.

“Where’s Georgie?” Heather asked.

“Oh, Georgie’s still down there helping Tad. Georgie likes tidying things. Remember how she cleaned up the church lot after Grandpa’s funeral?”

“What happened?” Poppy asked again. She was so still not a bead trembled; her eyes were wide, her mouth set, the dimples deep in her cheeks. Lydia looked at her, still smiling a little. Something in her eyes made Heather think of deep, deep water, of dark caves hollowed out, grain by grain, by the ancient, ceaseless working of tides.

“A lot of women in Junket suddenly had an urge to drink a beer at Tad’s tonight. Funny. There was some trouble over comments made. But as I said, Georgie s helping clean up.”

Poppy moved finally, groped for her agates. “Did Tad call Maury in?”

“Nobody was called. It was a private affair. Maury was just cruising Main. He stopped to chat about open containers on public sidewalks. Then he gave me a ride home.”

“What’d you say to make him laugh?” Heather demanded. Lydia’s smile slanted upward; she turned away restively to Grace, who was sitting motionless on the couch. Heather followed Lydia, still not finished about Tad’s, wanting to comb through all the details to get the fret out of her. The wide, moony look in Grace’s eyes chilled her.

Lydia stood in front of Grace, gazed down at her silently. Evan, in his sailor suit, looked innocently at them both. Heather wondered suddenly if Evan could have seen them coming, his storm-ridden granddaughters, he would have passed on down the road to peaceable Mary Ecklund and married her instead.

“Grace,” Lydia said, so sharply that Heather started. “Where are you?”

“In the dark,” Grace whispered. “Watching.”

“Watching when? Then? Or now?”

“Shh, Lydia. Whisper.”

Lydia softened her voice. “How far back are you?”

“Then. Tide’s full. Rock was bigger then. Moon’s behind clouds. Seagulls floating on the high tide, little cottony clouds you can barely see. Now — they’re all flying. They’ve all gone. It came out.”

Heather’s neck crawled. Poppy, walking on eggs, came to stand beside her. Heather clutched at her wrist, got a charm bracelet that clanged in the silence like cowbells. The faint, reckless smile was back in Lydia’s eyes.

“What is it?”

Grace was silent a long time. She whispered finally, “I know you.” Heather’s knees went wobbly. “I know you. I saw you under a full moon ten thousand years ago. You were sucking bones.”

Heather sat down abruptly on the floor. For a moment the house wavered between light and shadow; the light from the kitchen seemed to be running away faster and faster. The cuckoo snapped open its door, said the time, but time seemed to be rushing away from her as fast as light. Dark was the only thing not running; it was flowing into the emptiness left by light and time, a great flood of dark, separating Heather from the little, familiar thing that counted off the hours of her life.

Cuckoo, said the clock.

Heather, said the dark.

Cuckoo.

Her eyes opened; light was back in bulbs and tubes where it belonged. “It’s two in the morning,” she protested to Poppy, who was lifting up the phone receiver. “Who’re you waking up?”

Poppy hesitated, receiver to her shoulder, and gave Heather a long look. “I was calling an ambulance.”

“I’m all right. I got to go to bed is all.”

Lydia was kneeling beside her. Heather groped wearily at her proffered arm. Thin as she was, Lydia pulled Heather to her feet as if she were made of batting.

“Don’t be scared, Granny.”

“It was eating up everything.”

“That’s why you called us. We’ll handle it, me and Grace and Georgie. But we need you to help.”

“I’m too old.”

“No. We need you most of all. It’s old, too. So’s Grace. You get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow you call everyone, tell them to meet us at Oyster Rock at sunset. Georgie, you’re back.” She smiled brightly at Georgie, who, carrying a couple of empty cans, a flattened cigarette carton, and an old church bulletin, looked as if she had started to tidy up Junket. “Have a good time?”

“Smashing,” Georgie said dryly, and did so to a soda can.

“Good. We’re about to make another mess.”

 

 

Between Tessa hobbling on her canes and Lydia wobbling on her spikes, they looked, Heather thought, about as unlikely a gathering as you might meet this side of the Hereafter. They stood on the cliff overlooking the beach and Oyster Rock; they had chosen the Viewpoint Cliff because the sign was so well hidden under a bush that nobody ever saw it. Poppy, wearing stretch jeans and a bubblegum-pink sweater and enough makeup to paint a barn, had driven Heather in the VW. She hovered close to her now, for which Heather was grateful. Georgie had just driven up. She had borrowed Poppy’s station wagon earlier and asked directions to the dump. Heather wondered if she had spent the afternoon cleaning it up.

In the sunset, the rock looked oddly dark. The birds had abandoned it; maybe the barnacles and starfish had fled, too. The grass on its crown was turning white. Heather shivered. The sun was sliding into a fog bank. The fog would be drifting across the beach in an hour.

“You all right? ” Poppy said anxiously for the hundredth time.

“I’m all right,” Heather kept saying, but she wasn’t. Her hands felt like gnarled lumps of ice and her heart fluttered quick and hummingbird-light. She could feel the ancient dark crouched out there, just behind where the sun went down, just waiting. It was her face it wanted, her frail old bones it kept trying to flow into. She was weakest, she was easiest, she was closest to the edge of time, she was walking on the tide line. . . .

Maybe I should, she thought, clutching her windbreaker close, staring into the sinking sun. It’s about time anyway, with Evan gone and all, and it would save some fuss and bother. . . . Wouldn’t get much out of me anyway, I’m so slow; it wouldn’t have a chance between naps. . . .

She felt an arm around her, smelled some heady perfume: Lydia, her hair a green cloud, her eyes narrowed, about as dark as eyes could get and not be something other.

“Granny?” she said softly. “You giving up without a fight? After all those blizzards? All the drought and dust storms and poverty you faced down to keep your family safe and cared for?”

“I was a whole lot younger, then. Time ran ahead of me, not behind.”

“Granny? If you don’t fight this, you’ll be the next thing we’ll all have to fight. You’ll be its face, its eyes, you’ll be hungry for us. ” Heather, stunned, couldn’t find spit to swallow, let alone speak. “Am I right, Georgie?”

Georgie picked up a french fry envelope, shook out the last fry to a gull, and wadded the paper. She didn’t say anything. Her eyes burned through Heather like cold mountain-water. Then she smiled, and Heather thought surprisedly, There’s Storm’s face. It’s been there all along.

“Granny’ll be all right, ” she said in her abrupt way. “Granny’s fine when she’s needed.”

The sun had gone. The fog was coming in fast. Waves swarmed around the base of the rock, trying to heave it out of the water or eat it away before morning. But the rock, black as if it were a hole torn through to nothing, just stood there waiting for the rest of night.

Tessa banged on the VW fender with her cane, which must have brought Evan upright in his grave.

“Gather, ” she commanded in her sea-lion voice, and Poppy snorted back a laugh. Heather poked her, glad somebody could laugh. They circled on the rocky lip of the cliff: Tessa in one of the bulky-knit outfits she wore so constantly that Heather couldn’t imagine her even in a nightgown; Dawn chewing gum maniacally, wearing a skirt as short as Lydia’s and high-tops with red lips on them; Laura, fragile and calm, wearing her Sunday suit and pearls; Sarah in a denim skirt and a windbreaker, looking like she was trying to remember what was on her grocery list; Rachel, dyspeptic in sensible polyester; Poppy, her hand under Heather’s arm; Lydia in red lipstick; Georgie in jeans; and Grace, who looked like she just might live after all, her hair blown wild in the wind and livid as the twilight fog.

Storm’s children revealed what they had brought.

Lydia fanned the assortment in her hand and passed around the circle, giving them to everyone but Heather.

“I don’t know what this is, ” Dawn whispered nervously, holding up what looked to be a size J.

“It’s a crochet hook.”

“But I don’t know how.”

“It’ll come,” Lydia said briskly, handing Laura the daintiest. Poppy was looking dubiously at hers. Tessa gave one of her foghorn snorts but said nothing. Lydia surveyed the circle, smiling. “Are we all armed? Granny, you’re empty-handed. Georgie, give her your fishing pole. ”

“I can’t cast in this wind,” Heather said anxiously. “It’s only got one little bitty weight on it. And the water’s way over there. And it’s too dark to see — ”

“Oh, hush, Heather, ” Tessa growled. “Nobody came here to fish. You know that.”

“Granny did,” Lydia said sweetly. Her green hair and scarlet lips glowed in the dusk like Grace’s hair; so did Georgie s hands, paler than the rest of her, moving like magician’s gloves through the air. The sky was misty, bruised purple-black now, starless, moonless. They could still see something of each other —an eye gleam, a gesture —from the lights in the motel parking lot. “Granny’s going fishing. It’s Georgie s favorite pole, so whatever you catch, don’t let go of it. You just keep reeling in. We’ll take care of the rest. Ready, Grace?”

Grace held a bone between her hands.

It was some animal, Heather thought uneasily. Cow or sheep shank, some such, big, pearly-white as Grace’s hair, thick as her wrist. Thick as it was, Grace broke it in two like a twig.

She held both pieces out toward the rock. Her eyes closed; she crooned something like a nursery song. Heather felt her back hairs rise, as if some charged hand had stroked the nape of her neck. The bone dripped glitterings as hard and darkly red as garnet.

Dawn bit down on her crochet hook. Poppy held hers upright like a candle; her other hand gripped Heather as if she thought Heather might take to the air in the sudden wind that pounced over the cliff. Heather heard it howl a moment, like a catfight, before it hit. It smashed them like a high wave. Heather wanted to clutch at the sparse hair she had left, but Poppy held one arm, and she had the pole in her other hand. She tried to say something to Poppy, but the wind tore her words away and then her breath.

Heather, the dark said, a mad wind crooning in Grace’s voice. Heather, it said again, a wave now, rolling faster and faster in the path of the wind. Heather, it said, sniffing for her like a dog, and she froze on the cliff while it stalked her, knowing she had no true claims to life or time, nothing holding her on earth, even her bones were wearing down, disappearing little by little inside her while she breathed. The circle of shadowy faces couldn’t hold her; Poppy’s hand couldn’t protect her; she was a lone, withered thing, and if this dark didn’t get her, the other would soon enough, so what difference was there between them?

“Granny?” Lydia didn’t even have to shout. Her voice came as clear and light as if her red neon lips were at Heather’s ear. “You can cast anytime, now.”

She could feel Poppy’s hand again, hear Grace’s meaningless singsong. But Poppy’s hand felt a thousand miles away; she was just clinging to skin and bone, she could never reach deep enough to hang on to anything that mattered. She couldn’t anchor onto breath or thought or time.

“Granny?”

And time was the difference between this dark and death. This thing had all the time in the world.

Heather.

“Granny?”

“Honey, it’s just no use —” She heard her own cracked, wavery voice more inside her head than out, with the wind shredding everything she said. “I can’t cast against this — ”

“Granny Heather, you get that line out there, or I’ll let this wind snatch you bald.”

Heather unlatched the reel, caught line under her thumb, and flung a hook and a weight that wouldn’t have damaged a passing goldfinch into the eye of the dark.

The line unreeled forever. It took on the same eerie glow as Lydia’s lips, Georgie’s hands, and it stretched taut and kept unwinding as if something had caught it and run with it, then swam, then flew, farther and farther toward the edge of the world. It stopped so fast she toppled back out of Poppy’s hold; Poppy grabbed her again, pulled her upright.

What she had caught turned to her.

She felt it as she had felt it looking out of the moon’s eye.

She went small, deep inside her, a little animal scurrying to find a hiding place. But there was no place; there was no world, even, just her, standing in a motionless, soundless dark with a ghostly fishing pole in her hands, its puny hook swallowed by something vast as fog and night, with the line dangling out of it like a piece of spaghetti. Lightning cracked in the distance; fine sand or dust blew into her face. The wind’s voice took on a whine like storms that happened in places with exotic names, where trees snapped like bones and houses flung their rafters into the air. The line tightened again; Heather’s arms jerked straight. She felt something fly out of her; the end of her voice, her last breath. She heard Georgie say, “Don’t lose my pole, Granny. Grandpa gave it to me.”

Evan’s old green pole he caught bluegill with, this storm aimed to swallow, along with her and the cliff and most of Crane Harbor. It sucked again; she tottered, feeling her arm sockets giving. Poppy, crochet hook between her teeth, was hanging on with both hands, dragged along with her.

“Heather! ” It was Tessa, bellowing like a cargo ship. “Quit fooling around. You’ve been fishing for seventy years —bring it in!”

She was breathless, her heart bouncing around inside her like a golf ball, smacking her ribs, her side. The line tightened again. This time it would send her flying out of Poppy’s hold, over the cliff, and all she could do was hang on, she didn’t have the strength to tug against it, she had no more strength, she just didn’t —

“Remember, Granny,” Lydia said, “not long after Storm was born, when you walked out into the fields with her to give Grandpa his lunch, and halfway back, all the fields lifted off the ground and started blowing straight at you? You couldn’t see, you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t move against the wind, but you had to get Storm in, you had to find the house, nothing — not wind or dirt or heat—was going to get its hands on Storm. You pushed wind aside to save her, you saw through earth. And then, when you got to the house, the wind shoved against the screen door so hard you couldn’t pull it open. You didn’t have any more strength, not even for a screen door. You couldn’t pull. You couldn’t pull against that wind. But you did pull. You pulled. You pulled. You pulled your heart out for Storm. And the door opened and flew away and you were inside with Storm safe.”

“I pulled,” Heather said, and pulled the door open again, for Storm’s children.

It gave so fast Poppy had to catch her. Line snaked through the air, traced a pale, phosphorescent tangle all over the ground. For a second Heather thought she had lost it. Then she saw the end of the line, hung in the air at the cliff edge just above them. She sagged on the ground, her mouth dry as a dust storm, her blood crackling like lightning behind her eyes. She felt the wind change suddenly, as if the world were going backward, and startled, she looked up to see Lydia’s blood-bright, reckless smile.

“Georgie?”

Georgie reached behind her to Poppy’s station wagon and pulled open the back end. Half the garbage in the Junket dump whirled out, a flood of debris that swooped in the wind and tumbled and soared and snagged, piece by piece, against the thing at the cliff edge. Old milk cartons, bread wrappers, toilet paper rolls, styrofoam containers, orange peels, frozen dinner trays, used Kleenex, coffee grounds, torn envelopes, wadded paper, magazines, melon rinds skimmed over their heads and stuck to the dark, making a mask of garbage over the shape that Heather had hooked. She saw a wide, lipless, garbage mouth move, still chewing at the line, and she closed her eyes. Dimly, she heard Lydia say, “Tessa will now give us a demonstration of the basic chain stitch.”

“Dip in your hook,” Tessa said grimly. “Twist a loop, catch a strand on the hook and pull it through the loop. Catch a strand. Pull. Catch. Pull.”

“Funny,” Heather said after a while. Lydia, green hair and lips floating in the dark, knelt down beside her.

“What’s funny, Granny?”

“I never knew crocheting was so much like fishing.”

“Me, neither.”

“You catch, then you pull.” She paused. She couldn’t see Lydia’s eyes, but she guessed at them. “How’d you know about that dust storm? About how the screen door wouldn’t open? I never remembered that part. You weren’t even born. Your mama was barely two months old.”

“She remembered,” Lydia said. “She told us.”

“Oh.” She thought that over and opened her mouth again. Lydia’s red floating lips smiled. Might as well ask how she could do that trick, Heather thought, and asked something else instead.

“What’s going to happen to it? ”

“Georgie’ll clean it up.”

“She going to put it back inside the rock?”

“I think she has in mind taking it to the dump with the rest of the garbage. It’ll take some time to untangle itself and put the pieces back together. ”

“Will it?”

“What, Granny?”

“Put the pieces back together?”

Lydia patted her hand, showing half a mouth; she was looking at the huge clown face that was loosing bits of garbage as the flashing hooks parted and knotted the dark behind it. She didn’t answer. Poppy, at the cliff edge, drawing out a chain of dark from between a frozen orange juice can, an ice-cream container, and a fish head, looked over at Heather.

“You all right, honey?”

“I think so.” Beside Poppy, Laura was making a long fine chain, her silver needle flashing like a minnow. Waiting for nine years for her husband to open his eyes gave her a lot of time on her hands, and she could crochet time faster than any of them. Sarah, with a hook as fat as a finger, was making a chain wide enough to hold an anchor. Dawn did a little dance with her high-tops whenever she missed a beat with her hook. Rachel, of all people, broke into a tuneless whistle now and then; Heather didn’t know she could even pucker up her lips.

“Nice fishing,” Tessa boomed. “Good work, Heather.”

“I had help, ” Heather said. “I had my granddaughters.”

Georgie lifted her head, gave Heather one of her burning smiles, like spring wind blowing across a snowbank. Grace had gone to sleep against Georgie’s knees, looking, with her hair over her face, like a little ghostly haystack. Heather leaned back against Lydia’s arm. She closed her eyes, listened to her heart beat. It wouldn’t win any races, but it was steady again, and it would do for a while, until something better came along.

 

 

 

 

Star-Crossed

 

 

FIRST WATCH: Sovereign, here lies the County Paris slain;

And Romeo dead; and Juliet, dead before,

Warm and new-kill’d.

PRINCE: Search, seek, and know how this foul murder comes.