Ysabel Read online

  Not truly angry, Ned thought, but he wasn’t sure.

  “I only said that it was so, upon a time and more than once,” the man murmured. He didn’t lower his head. “You must not imagine I forget.”

  Kate Wenger made a small sound beside Ned. No one moved on the plateau. The torches burned, smoke streaming on the wind.

  “More than once,” the woman agreed finally. “Named so, or not. Before that scar and after. By the sea and from the waves.”

  And Ned Marriner, hidden in the darkness of their downslope and hearing this, thought that if, before he grew old and died, a woman spoke to him words like these, in such a voice, he might say he’d lived a life worth living.

  The woman named Ysabel was gazing upon the man. She shook her head, slowly.

  “‘Anwyll’ must be earned again, surely, by one of you. Or neither, perhaps. But I will not name you Donal here: not a stranger again after so long. Little one, lean and alone, clad in grey, you shall be Phelan one more time. My wolf.”

  “This is all Celtic,” Kate whispered.

  “I know,” Ned murmured.

  He was thinking wolf, how it suited.

  The moon was high, so much sooner than it should have been. But what did should have been mean tonight? He watched the woman, who was not Melanie any more, turn to the other man.

  “Gwri for your hair?” she said, that teasing tone again. “Allyn, or Keane, handsome one? Briant, for strength . . . Would you like one of those?”

  It was as if she was testing, tasting names on her tongue. Playing with them. One long leg was thrust out to the side, a hand on her hip, head tilted, looking him up and down.

  “You have cause to remember that last,” he replied, and threw back his head, laughing at his own jest. Ned thought she’d be angry again, but he was wrong. She laughed too. He didn’t understand her at all, he realized.

  “Let me kill him here,” he said, gesturing with his hand in a wide sweep. “Grant us leave to fight. This is a sacred place tonight.”

  Ned couldn’t see her face, but he heard the smile in her voice. “Ah. And so we are given your name,” she said. “Take it. Cadell you are and have always been, my warring one.”

  Wolf and warrior. There was a silence where they stood, like figures in a tableau. Ned saw a shooting star, a fireball, streak slowly across the western darkness of the sky beyond and disappear. Like a child, in need, he made a wish upon it.

  “Very well. That is done. Thank you, my lady. If we are to battle now, might someone be good enough to offer me a blade?”

  It was the lean one speaking, brisk, matter-of-fact, the man they could now call Phelan. Ned swallowed, hearing that, the crisp courtesy of the words. But there was so much beneath them. The night could explode right now, a red, electric violence.

  Go now! an inner voice was crying.

  “A sword? Of course. With joy,” said the one called Cadell. “I cannot tell you how much joy.” He paused, then added, almost gravely, “You know that I will kill you.”

  “I know that you will try.”

  Someone—the small figure in the white robe, Ned saw—stepped forward holding an unsheathed sword across his palms like another offering. He’d handed the stone bowl to someone else. It was as if he’d been waiting for this, as if he’d known it would come. Perhaps he had. Phelan came forward to claim it and begin.

  But in that moment a very long dance—the torment and the glory of it—was altered on that plateau. It would be a while before Ned Marriner realized that this was so, and longer still before he understood why, and by then it was almost too late.

  “No,” said Ysabel.

  Phelan stopped, a hand extended towards the hilt of the offered sword. He didn’t touch it. Both men looked at her.

  She said, quietly, “Not a combat. Not this time. And not by armies gathered to you. It pleases me not.”

  “I need to kill him, love,” said Cadell. There was urgency in the words. He pushed a hand through his hair again. “Now that you are among us it is on me as destiny, as a longing.”

  “Then master it, if you are a man,” she said bluntly.

  His head snapped back, as if the words had been a slap to the face.

  “My lady, we are brought back to fight for you,” said Phelan softly. “We have always known this. It is what we are.”

  She wheeled on him this time. Ned could see her again, the fury in her.

  “You are brought back to be deserving of me—the one more than the other—in my eyes! Will you deny that? Will you challenge it?”

  He shook his head. “You know I will not.”

  Silence again. It was time to go, Ned knew. It was past time. He didn’t want to die here.

  He heard her say, “I have another test, of love and worthiness. Of . . . longing.” She glanced towards the bigger man on the last word, and then back. “Tell, how do you long for me, my wolf?”

  “I have told you,” he said.

  “Hai! Listen to the Roman! I will say it as many times as you are willing to hear my voice,” the one called Cadell cried. “Our people—yours and mine!—do not squeeze words as coins from a miser’s hoard.”

  The Roman. Yours and mine. Pieces of a puzzle, Ned thought. If he lived long enough to work it through.

  Ysabel looked at Cadell and then back to the smaller man. She didn’t smile this time. It was as if, Ned thought, she was waiting, expecting something now, because of what had just been said.

  It came. Phelan spoke, looking across her at the other man, ice suddenly in his voice. “Words, did you say? I know your words. I remember some of them. Do you? These, perhaps: Kill them all. God will know his own.”

  He stopped, letting the sound fade, drift like the smoke. Then he added, softly, “A hoard, is it? What sort of piled-up treasure, tell us all? Dead women and babes? Charred flesh? Blackened bone? A hoard such as that, perhaps?”

  “Oh, God,” Ned heard Kate whisper hoarsely.

  Ned didn’t get it. No time to ask.

  The bigger man was smiling, even in the face of this—golden, beautiful, unshaken by that rage. Ned could see a wolf in him, too, suddenly.

  Both of them, he thought.

  “Poor little man,” Cadell said mockingly. “My victory that time, wasn’t it? I do think it was. A difficult memory? Can’t escape? Trapped within walls? With those who so foolishly trusted you? And I never spoke those words. You know it.”

  “You acted upon them. You killed because of them.”

  The other man shook his head slowly, in elaborate mock-pity, then took a stride forward. “Will you chide me—will you do so—for deaths? Will you, Marius? For women and children? You will do that here? In sight of it?”

  And with that name spoken, Ned understood.

  Because of what Melanie had said before, beside the mountain. Telling of Pourrières, below Sainte-Victoire, and the world-changing battle there. An ambush behind the Celts, the supply camp, their families, wives, children . . .

  Two hundred thousand bodies rotting. A redness in the world.

  I am not a good man.

  Two wolves here. Ned felt sick again. It occurred to him that these two could make a conflagration of the world in their war. That they already had.

  But even as he shaped the thought, in sudden fear, Ysabel said, “No blades, no armies. It shall not be so. Hear my will. Hear me carefully for I will say this once. I am going to leave this place. You will not fight each other here. Cadell, you will release the druid and his spirits to their rest again when the needfires die. I have been summoned. They are not a part of this any more. Say to me now that you will release them.”

  She stared at him.

  “I will release them,” he said, after a pause.

  “You will not change shapes to seek me. Swear it.”

  “I swear it. But what does ‘seek’ mean?”

  Ned’s question, too.

  She looked from Cadell to the other man. “When morning comes—with sunrise and not before—t
he two of you will begin to look for me.”

  Phelan stared at her, said nothing.

  She went on. “Call it a quest. Pretend you are gallant, honourable men, unstained by any sins. Who finds me first will prove his worth by doing so. I will be hiding and not easily found. Trust me in this. I do not choose to be easily found, or idly claimed.” She paused. “You have three days.”

  “And if . . . we do not succeed?” Phelan’s voice was low.

  “Then do whatever you wish to each other, it will matter not. You will have failed me, both of you. I will have been shown to be unimportant to you.”

  She stopped, looked from one to the other, then added, in yet another tone, “I would prefer to be found.”

  First uncertainty in her voice, Ned thought. There was a silence up where the torches were burning.

  “This is . . . you offer a child’s game, my lady. I need to kill him.” Cadell’s voice was anguished.

  “You like children’s games, I thought.” The hint of vulnerability gone, as soon as it had come. “And you are forbidden to kill now. It is my will. But there is this: who finds me first may sacrifice the one who fails. With my consent. And by my desire.”

  Dear God, Ned thought. By my desire.

  “Swear to this, to all of this, then I am gone.”

  “You have only now come,” Phelan said, barely loud enough for them to hear. “Am I to lose you so soon?”

  “Find me,” she said coldly, “and so keep me, if it matters so very much. Or wander off to make another carving. Stone instead of flesh, as you choose. But swear now, both of you. Three days. Find me. The loser is a sacrifice, for his failure.”

  She turned back to Cadell. “Will you call it a game?”

  She was so hard, Ned thought. She was tall, and crimson as a fire, and terrifyingly cold. He felt small, inadequate; a child, listening. And he was all those things, in almost all the ways that mattered.

  He heard the two men swear to her, one and then the other.

  “Ned, we have to go,” Kate whispered. “Before she leaves and they start looking around.”

  It was true.

  I will never see her again, he was thinking.

  “I need to get her back,” was what he whispered, repeating himself, feeling stupid again even as he formed the words. I need to. What were his needs in this?

  “Melanie? We’ll try. We’ll think how. But not here. Come on, Ned!”

  Her hand was still in his; she tugged and he followed and they went from that place. From the woman whose name was in his head now, singing itself in that elusive, changing voice, never to leave. He knew it, even then, first night. That it would never leave.

  It wasn’t very hard to get away, in the event, slipping back north through the meadow past the wall. Phelan had been right.

  When they were outside the site, on the gravel path again, the sky began to grow lighter as they ran. By the time they reached the iron gate and passed through it was late-spring daylight again, bright and fair.

  Windy, the sun in the west, ahead of them, as if it had been waiting. The van was in the lot, the only car there. Ned stared at it. It seemed an alien, unreasonable object.

  He walked over. Melanie’s tote lay on the front passenger seat. It was difficult, confusing, seeing that. They had just been looking at swords and a sacrificial axe, a bull lying in the pool of its own blood after passing between sacred fires.

  How did a Renault van come to exist in the world? How could Melanie not be here? He felt very shaky, thinking about that. And afraid.

  Neither of them could drive and the van was locked; they’d have to walk. Ned heard traffic below, a strident car horn sounding. That, too, so impossibly strange. Kate tugged again and they started down.

  It was difficult, his steps seemed to drag, even as she pulled him by the hand. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to go back into the lost moonlight behind them. Find me, she had said.

  Ysabel.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER X

  He began to cry walking back to Aix. Amid the traffic noise and chaos as they approached the city came a delayed, after-the-nightmare feeling of horror. It was difficult to keep moving. He just wanted to stop somewhere by the side of the road; a bench, anything. He couldn’t stop thinking about Melanie, the idea that she was gone. Like that. Taken over. And what was he going to say to his father and the others? How did you tell something like this?

  Kate said nothing, which was a blessing.

  Out of the corner of his eye, as they came to the ring road, Ned saw that she was biting her lip again, staring straight ahead. He thought about her, and what had so nearly taken place. Kate had been a heartbeat away—hardly more than that—from what had happened to Melanie. She had been leaving him, going up into the ruins. She would have walked between those Beltaine fires.

  She is too young, the man they knew—Phelan—had said.

  It would have made no difference. And fifteen wasn’t that young in the days when this story seemed to have begun. You could be married by fifteen, have children. People had grown up faster once.

  If he’d had Greg’s phone number in his auto-dial, Ned thought, if Melanie hadn’t come with the van instead, then Kate Wenger wouldn’t be beside him now.

  It didn’t help anything, to think about that.

  Above them, the sky was still bright with the late-day light. The mistral had died down, the sun was low. Traffic buzzed and rasped, mopeds whining through it.

  Ned checked his watch. A quarter after seven. It had been night up at Entremont. How did you deal with that?

  They crossed the ring road at a light and then stopped and looked at each other. Kate’s eyes were puffy.

  “What do we do?” she asked. People were all around them on the sidewalk, walking to wherever they had to go, wherever their lives required them to be.

  She didn’t call him babe. She wasn’t going to do that any more, he knew. He also knew why she’d done it before: how Beltaine, like a tide, had been rising within her. She’d already been shifting towards becoming someone else when they’d met outside Cézanne’s studio. Before that, even.

  Then Melanie had come. And then Ysabel.

  A car horn blared, and another in angry response. There was a traffic jam where they’d just crossed, Ned saw; the ring road was clogged, lanes blurred by cars undecided which one was quickest. Three buses were stacked in a row in the bus-and-taxi lane. The scooters darted dangerously in and out. Life in the twenty-first century.

  “I don’t know what we do,” he said to Kate. “But I have to tell my dad.”

  She nodded. “I figured. I’ll come with you. If you want? I mean, he may . . . he should believe it more, with two of us, right?”

  Ned had had the same thought.

  “You sure? It’s okay? I’d appreciate . . .”

  She shook her head. “Nothing’s okay at all, but I’m not walking out on you. Two’s easier for this.”

  It was. But that made him think of something.

  “Three’s better,” he said, and took out his phone.

  He turned it on, tabbed to the memory screen, scrolled, and had the cell dial automatically.

  One ring only. “Ned? What’s happened ?”

  She’d know there was something. He wouldn’t have called, otherwise.

  He cleared his throat. “Something bad,” he said. It was tricky, controlling his voice. “I need . . . You think you can come up to the villa? I have no idea what to do.”

  Aunt Kim had the most reassuring voice. “Of course I can. Are you there now?”

  “In Aix. Walking home. With Kate, the girl I met.”

  “Walking from where?”

  “Entremont.”

  There was a silence. “Oh, Ned,” she said. “All right, I’m west of the city, but not far, it won’t take me long.”

  “Thanks. Really.”

  “Get yourselves home. It’s the last house on that road? Where I dropped you?”

  “Uh-huh. Vi
lla Sans Souci. Melanie put . . . there are these Canadian flags. On the little signs.”

  “On my way.”

  He hung up. Kate was staring at him, waiting.

  “That was my aunt,” he said.

  She blinked. “Because?”

  He said, awkwardly, “She’s . . . been here, done this kind of thing.”

  Kate’s expression changed. “You’re kidding me. And you knew that? Like, in the cathedral?”

  He shook his head. “Met her for the first time in my life two nights ago. We saw . . . we ran into the big guy. Cadell? The one who killed the bull.”

  Kate bit her lip. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I know. Complicated family story. Didn’t want to start it on the side of a highway. And you were . . . in a pretty funny mood, you know.”

  She flushed. “That wasn’t me,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I mean, it was me, but I’d never do . . .”

  “I know.”

  She smiled a little, first time since they’d come back down. “For a guy, you think you know a lot.”

  Ned tried to smile back and couldn’t quite achieve it. “I don’t know,” he said.

  She nodded slowly. “Okay. But, this is good, isn’t it, about your aunt? I mean, she’ll know what to do, right?”

  “For sure,” he said.

  Maybe, was what he thought.

  He wasn’t at all certain there was anything they could do. He wondered about Melanie’s family. He knew nothing about them. Imagined a conversation.

  Hi there. Called to tell you your daughter’s disappeared. She turned into some woman from more than two thousand years ago. Red hair. She’s taller.

  He took a deep breath. They started walking again, curving around to the left, beside the stop and start of the ring-road traffic, as if swimming upstream through time.

  TIME COLLIDED HARD with the present when they reached the slope leading to the villa. Ned found his footsteps slowing between the trees, and not from fatigue. It was reluctance, resistance, a childlike wish that this state of in-between—when something had happened but it hadn’t yet been told and made real, with consequences—might go on forever.