Ysabel Read online

  “Oh, God. What happened to you?”

  “Got whomped by the druid guy. Good thing I’m way tough. Viking blood, all the way back.”

  Ned shook his head. “Cadell blocked it.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No.”

  “Why’d he do that?”

  “Scared of our telling Phelan, Ysabel learning they were down here. Or maybe he’s . . . not so bad.”

  “You mean I’m not way tough?”

  Aunt Kim managed a smile. “I think you’re tough as horseshoe nails, Gregory. But let’s go up to the house. I don’t like it out here after dark. Not tonight.”

  “Hold it,” Ned said.

  His hearing seemed to be sharper, too. But a second later the others heard it. Then they all saw the bobbing flashlight beam above them on the roadway.

  “Ned? Greg?” It was his father.

  “We’re here!” Kimberly called. “It’s all right.”

  The searchers appeared a few seconds later: his dad, Steve, Kate, hurrying down the slope. Ned saw that his father was carrying a hoe. Steve had a shovel. Kate held the flashlight . . . and a hammer.

  “We saw the van’s lights, then they stopped,” his father said. “We got nervous.”

  “And charged to the rescue? Like that?” Greg said, standing up carefully. He was still rubbing his chest. “Jeez, you look like extras storming the castle in Frankenstein. All you need’s a thunderstorm and accents.”

  Ned’s father scowled. “Very funny, Gregory.”

  Kate giggled, looking at her hammer. “I couldn’t find a stake,” she said.

  Dracula wasn’t that far from the truth here, Ned thought, with risen spirits abroad.

  This was all release of tension, and he knew it. They’d been scared, now they weren’t—for a while, anyhow.

  “Ned, you okay?” his father asked.

  Ned nodded.

  It occurred to him that no one had seen what he’d done to Cadell. Greg had been flat on his back, out cold. Ned decided to keep that part to himself. He looked at his aunt.

  “What was the name of that figure?” he asked. “The one you mentioned. With the horns. From when we met Cadell.”

  Aunt Kim hesitated. “Cernan. Cernunnos. Their forest god.” Her expression changed. “He had them again?”

  “Yeah.”

  She shook her head. “So much for my powers of intimidation.”

  “He left when we felt you coming.”

  “As an owl?”

  Ned nodded. “I think he was worried about you, or at least unsure.”

  Aunt Kim made a wry face. “Probably scared of Peugeots. Famous for bad transmissions.”

  They were trying to calm him down, Ned realized. He must look pretty freaked out. He managed a smile, but he didn’t seem to be fooling anyone. He kept remembering what he’d done, the feeling of it.

  “Let’s go up,” Kimberly repeated. “You two can tell us what happened, but in the house.”

  His father said, “Right. Greg, I’ll drive. You can ride shotgun with this.”

  Greg eyed the hoe. “Thanks, boss. That’ll make me feel so protected.”

  He had to be in considerable pain, Ned thought, remembering Greg flying backwards and that crumpled landing. He wasn’t letting on, though. People could surprise you.

  Ned wanted to smile with the others, joke like them, but he couldn’t do it. He stared at his hands again. What he was feeling was hard to describe, but some of it was grief.

  This time, when he came downstairs in the middle of the night his aunt was in the kitchen, sitting at the table in a blue robe. He hadn’t expected anyone—she startled him. The only light was the one over the stove-top.

  “You get insomnia too?” she asked.

  Ned shook his head. “Not usually.”

  He went to the fridge and took out the orange juice, blinking in the sudden light. He poured himself a drink.

  “Kate sleeping?”

  She nodded.

  He walked to the glass doors by the terrace.

  “Did you go out? It looks beautiful, doesn’t it?” He saw the moon above the city.

  “We’re better off inside, dear. It isn’t a night for wandering.”

  “But I did go wandering,” Ned said, looking at the pool and trees. The cypresses were moving in the wind, which had picked up again. “And because I did, Melanie’s gone. If we hadn’t gone up—”

  “Hush. Listen to me. The two of you went because Kate was halfway inside the rites already. She said so. You said so, how different she became. She was starting for the fires when Melanie came.”

  It was true. It wasn’t a truth that made you happy.

  “I could have said no.”

  “Not easy, Ned. Not in this kind of situation. You were in it too.”

  He looked at her. “Did you ever say no?”

  His aunt was silent for a time. “Once,” she said.

  “And what . . . ?”

  “Long story, Ned.”

  He looked away, towards the moon in the window again. He crossed back and sat at the table with her. He said, “Did you see that Veracook put rowan leaves on the window ledge?”

  Aunt Kim nodded. “Probably outside all the doors, too, if we look. The past is close to the surface here, Ned.”

  “Which part of the past?”

  She smiled faintly. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Right now, from what you’ve said? I’d guess a lot of it, dear.”

  He drank his juice. “We’re not going to get her back, are we?”

  His aunt raised her eyebrows. “Oh, my! And which part of what family did that come from? Not ours, that’s for sure. Is your father like this?”

  Ned shook his head.

  “Then stop it right now. We haven’t even begun looking. You go get some rest. This is three in the morning talking in you. And remember, we have six good people here, and two more coming.”

  Ned looked at her. “Well, yeah, but if my mom kills you we’re down to seven.”

  His aunt sniffed. “I can handle my baby sister.”

  He had to smile at that. “You think so?”

  She made that wry face. “Maybe not. We’ll see. But really, go back to bed. We’re starting early.”

  They’d made their plans. Both cars, two groups. Aunt Kim, with Kate in her best geek mode, had chosen the destinations. It had seemed hopeless, even ridiculous when they’d discussed it. It seemed more so now, in this dead-quiet of night.

  He said, “There’s something I didn’t tell you, from before.”

  She sat still, waiting.

  “When the druid slammed Greg I thought he’d killed him. I got . . . I lost it, I guess. I’m really not sure how, but, like, I slashed sideways with my hand, from at least four, five metres away, and I . . . I cut Cadell’s horns off. Halfway up. Like, with a light-sabre, you know?”

  She said nothing, absorbing this. Her expression was strange, though. She reached out, almost absently, and finished his orange juice.

  “You aimed for the horns? Not him?”

  He thought about it. “I guess. I don’t think I actually aimed at all. I had no idea I could even . . . ” He stopped. It was pretty hard to talk about.

  “Oh, child,” Aunt Kim said.

  “What do I do about it?”

  She squeezed his hand on the tabletop. “Nothing, Ned. It may never happen again. It was Beltaine. You’d seen the boar, a druid, the fires. You were pretty far along that road. And you have our family’s link to all of this. Maybe more than any of us. But you probably aren’t going to be able to control it, and maybe that’s just as well.”

  “So I just forget what happened?”

  She smiled again, sadly. “You’ll never forget it, Ned. But there’s a good chance it’ll never come back. Keep it, a reminder that the world has more to it than most people ever know.”

  “My dad said something like that.”

  “I like your father,” she said. “I hope he likes me.”<
br />
  “You need my mom to like you a lot more.”

  “Meghan? She loves me. Like a sister.”

  Ned actually laughed.

  “Go to bed,” his aunt said.

  He did, and to his surprise, he slept.

  Up in the wind at Entremont, middle of the night, he is remembering other times, watching the torches burn down. He is thinking about the forest, the first time he came here.

  He’d been afraid of dying that day, so many lives ago, walking through black woods, following the guides, no idea where they were taking him, if he’d ever get back to the shore and sea, and light.

  Even half lost in reverie, he is aware when the other man returns to the plateau, in his owl shape.

  It isn’t as if Cadell is making a secret of anything.

  Phelan is looking away south, doesn’t bother turning to see the other man change back. He keeps to himself at the end of the ridge overlooking the lights of Aix below. The sea is beyond, across the coastal range, unseen. He feels it always, a tide within, and the moon is full.

  He is undisturbed by the other man’s disregard of the rules she has given them. It isn’t as if such behaviour is unexpected.

  She is not going to make her choice because one of them has sought some advantage. They have fought each other or waged wars here for millennia. She is as likely to see Cadell’s flying as evidence of a greater desire for her. Or not.

  It is never wise, he has learned, to believe you know what Ysabel will think, or do. And this newly devised challenge is unsettling.

  Cadell will be feeling the same way, he knows. (They know each other very well by now.) The Celt might even—the thought comes—have returned here because he’s actually afraid she might let a transgression have consequence. She is capricious, almost above all else, unpredictable even after more than twenty-five hundred years. And she has altered their duel this time into something new.

  Sometimes when he thinks the number, the length of time, twenty-five hundred, it can still catch him in the heart. The weight of it, impossibility. The long hammer of fate.

  They never change, the two of them. She always does, in small, telling ways. She must be rediscovered, as a consequence, each and every time. Endlessly different, endlessly loved. It has to do with how she returns—through the summoning of someone else. The claiming of another soul.

  His back to the other man and the spirits, looking out from the edge of the plateau, he is entirely unafraid. Cadell will not attack him here. That far he would never go.

  He expects the Beltaine dead to be gone—as commanded—before sunrise, though the druid might not be. Brys is a wild card of sorts in this, always has been, but there is nothing to be done about that, really.

  What he cannot alter he will ignore, for the next three days.

  What he needs to do is find her. First.

  He needs to concentrate on possibilities and there are too many. He reminds himself that she wants to be found. Tries to grasp what that means, in terms of where she might be.

  It is possible that she’ll move around, not stay in a single chosen place. They have done this return so many times, the three of them. She will know how to change garments, hide her hair, find money if she needs it. She cannot fly, but there are trains, taxis. This world will not frighten her any more than it has unsettled either of the men, returning to changes. There are always changes.

  She is not limited, except by the range, the ambit of their history here, and that is wide, east and west and north, and to the margin of the sea.

  In the moonlight, the land below, unfurling south, is bright enough for shadows. He holds the sound of her voice inside him and gazes out towards the changed, invisible coastline, remembering.

  He was so afraid, that first time here.

  Arriving with three ships to establish a trading post on a shoreline known to be inhabited, and dangerous. You made your fortune in proportion to the danger. That was the way of it. If the goods on offer were difficult to obtain back home, the rewards were that much greater.

  He was young, already known as a mariner. Unmarried as yet, willing to take risks, shape the rising trajectory of a life. Not an especially genial man, by reputation, but no obvious enemies, either. A habit of command. They had made him leader of the expedition.

  They put ashore, he remembers, on the coast a little west of here. The shoreline has silted up, is greatly changed in two millennia: logging for timber, wood burned for fires, irrigation systems, flood barriers. The sea is farther away now than it was.

  He remembers seeing the trees from the boat, the forest coming right down to where they made harbour. A windbreak cove, small, stony beach. Looking from the ship at those oak woods, wondering what lay beyond. Death or fortune . . . or nothing of significance.

  After all, it didn’t have to be one or the other.

  The Celts came to them two days later. Appearing silently out of the woods as they were putting up their first temporary structures.

  Fear returning, the sheer size of them. They had always been bigger people. And the wildness: half naked, the heavy gold they wore, the long hair, bright leggings, weapons carried.

  He knew how to fight, some of his seamen did. But they were traders, not truly soldiers. They had come in peace, in hope and greed, to begin a cycle: a rhythm of trade, seasonal, enduring.

  To stay, if they could, eventually.

  There was no language in common. Two of his men had been here before, farther east along the coast; they had twenty or thirty words between them in the barbaric tongue men spoke here. And it would have been laughable to imagine one of these giant savages speaking Greek. The tongue of the blessed Olympians.

  Of civilized man.

  They were far from civilization on that stony shoreline by the woods.

  The Celts accepted gifts: cloth and wine, and cups for the wine, jewelled necklaces. They liked the wine.

  And they made an overture, a promising one. From their gestures on the second encounter, two days after the first—motions of drinking, eating, pointing inland beyond the trees—he understood what they were conveying. He was being invited to a feast. No thought of not accepting.

  You couldn’t allow fear to control you.

  He left, with one companion, the next day when they came for him. They followed ten of the Celts into the trees, darkness dropping like a cloak, immediately, even on a sunny day, the sea disappearing behind them, then the sound of it gone.

  He remembers, on this high, open, moonlit ground, how frightened he was as that day’s long walk went on. He had thought, for whatever reason, that this tribe lived by the water, but there was little reason for them to do so. These were not fisherfolk.

  The woods seemed endless, enveloping, unchanging. A journey from his world into another one. A space out of time. Forests could be like that, in the stories, in life.

  They heard animals as they went; never saw any. He was lost almost immediately as they twisted to follow a barely seen path, mostly heading north, he thought, but not invariably. He realized he was at their mercy; the two of them would never find their way back alone.

  Your profits were in proportion to the risks you ran.

  Towards sunset, end of a full day’s travelling, the trees began to grow thinner. The faint path widened. The sky could be seen. Then torches. They came out of the forest. He saw a village, lit with fires for a festival. He didn’t know, at that point, what the celebration was.

  How could he have known?

  They led him into that torchlight, across a defensive ditch, past bonfires, through an earthen wall, then a gauntlet of men—and women. Not hostile, more curious than anything.

  They came into a circle, a wide space at the centre of small houses made of wood. A tall man, silver-haired, not young, stood up to greet them. They looked at each other and exchanged gestures.

  He had liked the man from the first moment.

  He was given a cup, one of their own. He lifted it in salute, drank. A harsh,
burning liquor, unwatered. Fire down his throat. An effort (he remembers) not to shame himself, insult them, by coughing, or spitting it out. No civilized man would take liquor this way.

  He was far from civilized men. He’d felt the drink affecting him almost immediately. A deep breath. A brief smile. He handed the cup back; a man of restraint, moderation. Chosen for these things as much as for courage and skill. A leader, responsible for his companion here and the others on the shore. The need to be diligent, careful.

  He saw her then. First time.

  The world changing, forever.

  Really that, he thinks, on the plateau of Entremont, two thousand six hundred years after: as near to forever as a man might know.

  For good or ill, joy or grief, love or hatred, death or life returning. All those things. As much as a man might know.

  He hears a sound now, someone approaching, stopping. He turns this time. He knows the footfall as he knows his own, very nearly.

  “Did you enjoy watching?” Cadell asks. “Hiding down below?” He smiles.

  “The bull?” He shrugs. “I never enjoy it very much. You’ve improved. The kill was clean.”

  The Celt continues to smile. “It always is. You know it.”

  “Of course.”

  They look steadily at each other. He wants to kill the other man. He needs to kill the other man.

  The Beltaine spirits and the druid are a distance away, by the sanctuary and the still-burning torches. He and the other one might easily be alone here in the night. The wind had lessened earlier but has returned now. Clouds and stars overhead.

  “I know where she is,” Cadell says.

  “No you don’t,” he replies.

  CHAPTER XII

  In the brightness of morning, driving west again with his father and Greg in highway traffic, Ned was fighting a heavy-eyed lack of sleep and the sense that he was a useless, irresponsible person.

  He was trying to make himself concentrate on what they were doing, on all that had been discussed last night, but he kept thinking about Kate Wenger as she’d looked before going to bed.

  Ned had been alone at the dining-room table leafing through a guidebook—the section on the history of Provence—amid the scattered notes and papers they’d put together earlier.