Ysabel Read online

  “That makes sense too,” Kate said. “They were really surprised by it. They didn’t like it at all.”

  “Why?”

  “They want to kill each other,” Ned said.

  Meghan hesitated, then made another tick mark.

  HIS MOTHER HAD other notes, and other questions. None of them triggered anything close to a revelation.

  She asked why Phelan had been going under the baptistry in the first place. What he’d been looking for down there. Ned didn’t know, neither did Aunt Kim.

  “If I was guessing . . .” Ned began.

  “Might as well, honey,” his mother said. “No marks deducted.”

  “He said something about finding him—the other guy—in time. And never being able to do it.” The world will end, he’d actually said. “Maybe he wanted to kill Cadell before the summoning.”

  “But then she’d never appear,” his father said, “if I understand this at all.”

  “I know,” Ned said. “That’s why I’m just guessing. I think . . . I think he’s really tired.”

  There was a short silence.

  “‘Who could have foretold that the heart grows old,’” Aunt Kim said. Then added, “That’s Yeats, not me.”

  The air I breathe is her, or wanting her. That didn’t sound like a worn-out heart.

  “I think it’s really complicated,” Ned said.

  “Uh-huh, I’ll buy that,” said Greg.

  Ned’s mother made a dash this time on her sheet, not a tick mark. She asked about when the sculpture underground had been stolen, and when it might have been made. The theft, they knew, was recent. The work, they had no idea. A tick mark, a dash.

  Meghan wanted to know what had happened at Béziers. God will know his own. Kate answered that one. Good student. Another tick. More questions, varying marks on paper, the moon rising outside. Ned felt a sudden rush of love for his mother. Against the weight of centuries—against druids and skulls and wolves, rituals of blood, fire, and men who could grow horns from their heads like a forest god, or fly—she was trying to bring order and clarity to bear.

  He saw her put down her pen, take off her glasses and fold them. She rubbed her eyes. This would have been, he thought, a long, amazingly hard day for her.

  Kate excused herself to call Marie-Chantal’s house and report she was spending another night away. Ned had the feeling they didn’t worry a whole lot about their guest there, but he didn’t ask questions. He was glad she was staying. There were—by now—a variety of reasons.

  In the absence of anything close to a better idea, they decided to stay with today’s plan: do the same searching tomorrow. Kate had been right—they arranged three groups.

  “I want to go back to Aix,” Ned said suddenly.

  He hadn’t planned to say that, but it was interesting how everyone simply accepted it, deferring to him. Even his mother. That went beyond “interesting” and reached “surreal,” actually.

  Veracook had gone home. Greg went into the kitchen to make another pot of tea. Kate and Kim and Uncle Dave stayed at the table, bent over a big map, sorting out routes. Ned’s parents put on sweaters and went out on the terrace together. He could see them through the glass doors, their chairs close. His mom touched his father on the shoulder once, as Ned watched.

  Steve had put on the television, a soccer game. Ned went and joined him on the couch. Eventually Greg brought his tea and sat with them. On the screen one team got a corner kick and someone headed the ball into the net. The player became very excited, so did the announcers and the crowd.

  When it was time for sleep things got interesting in another way, since they were now short a bed. Ned had the two singles in his room, but he somehow didn’t think Kate would switch up there.

  Good call on that one. Uncle Dave came upstairs with Ned, Kate stayed in the main-floor bedroom with Aunt Kim.

  Ned thought he might talk with his uncle a little. He had his own really long list of questions. Mostly about his family. But he was also flat-out exhausted and he fell asleep pretty much as soon as they turned out the light.

  He woke in the middle of the night again.

  Not jet lag this time. He felt disoriented, afraid. He sat straight up in bed, his heart pounding. After a minute he rose quietly and went to the window. He looked out over the grass and pool. Nothing there that he could see. He checked his watch. It was past two in the morning.

  “Ned, what is it?”

  He hadn’t been as quiet as he’d thought. “Don’t know. Something woke me.” His head was hurting.

  That was what made him do the inward search.

  Another good call. He found his own aura, and Aunt Kim’s downstairs. But there was a third presence registering, gold as well, but shaded towards red now—and pulsing, bright and dim, bright and dim, like a signal beacon.

  “I got it,” he said to his uncle in the dark room. “Cadell’s out there, not too far, and I think he’s calling.”

  “Why?”

  “How would I know?”

  That was unfair, even if he hated these questions . . . And then, in fact, he realized that he did know, because he remembered something.

  “I bet he’s hurt. Kate and I saw him trying to fly when he left.”

  His uncle stood up, a large figure in the darkness. “Ned, he couldn’t have. He’d had a knife in his shoulder muscle.”

  “Go tell him that.”

  There was a silence. His uncle sighed. “All right,” said Dave Martyniuk. “Let’s do that. You able to find him?”

  “Don’t know, but if he’s actually calling me, I have a guess. Why do . . . why do we want to go out there?” He was scared, he’d admit it if asked.

  His uncle was dressing. “Because we’re adrift here, no good ideas.”

  “He is too. That’s why they came to us.”

  Martyniuk shrugged. “Sometimes the blind do lead the blind.”

  “Yeah,” said Ned. “Straight over cliffs.” But he started pulling on his jeans and a shirt. “We should bring Aunt Kim. If I’m right, he’ll need a doctor again.”

  “Kim, and your mother,” his uncle said.

  “Mom?”

  His eyes had adjusted enough that he could see his uncle nod. “She still feels outside all this. Afraid of it. The story of your family. The reason we never met before today. You have to draw her in, Ned. Has to be you.” He hesitated. “You might not have thought about this yet, but what’s happened to you here isn’t going to go away after we leave.”

  Ned hadn’t thought about that.

  They went quietly down the hall and Dave knocked softly on the master bedroom door.

  His mother was a light sleeper. “What is it?” they heard.

  “We need you, Meghan. I’m sorry. Can you come downstairs?”

  They went down without waiting. Same knock at the bedroom below.

  A few moments later there were six of them in the kitchen, with the stove light turned on, for muted light. Ned had had a quick, subversive thought that Kate would come out all T-shirt and legs again, but she’d pulled on jeans and his McGill sweatshirt.

  Uncle Dave briefed the others.

  “We can all get in the van,” Ned’s father said. “I’ll drive.”

  Dave Martyniuk shook his head. “Too many of us, and no reason. I’ll take Ned and the doctors. Edward, there’s really nothing you can do up there, and certainly not Kate.”

  “I did have four years of karate?” Kate said optimistically. “Till I was twelve.”

  Ned smiled, so did the others.

  Edward Marriner looked as if he was about to protest. Aunt Kim forestalled it. “Actually,” she said, “Dave can drive us, but he stays by the car. Ned will take us up.”

  “That makes no sense,” her husband said quickly. “Kim—”

  His wife held up an index finger. “One, you can’t even walk properly, cher. I’ll wrap your knee again later. That was a bad landing.” She lifted another finger. “Two, even with that, you could very
easily start or be provoked into a fight. I saw the way you two were circling each other.”

  “I was not circling!” her husband exclaimed. “I, um, have a bad knee!”

  His wife didn’t laugh. “Dave, listen. If he flew it was to be defiant, show that Phelan couldn’t stop him, and our orders not to didn’t matter. But the wound did stop him.”

  “Of course it did,” Meghan said.

  “I know. But Y chromosome, remember. Male idiocy. And so he may be up there spoiling for a fight because he’s had to ask for help.”

  “Perfect logic,” Dave said. “So you leave me behind and he picks on Ned?”

  “He won’t,” Ned said.

  Again that new response after he spoke, the unexpected deference.

  “I’ll get my bag,” his mother said briskly. “Ned, take a jacket, it’ll be cold out there.”

  The kitchen emptied of adults. Kate lingered a moment. “Want the sweatshirt back?”

  He managed a crooked smile. “What’s under it?”

  “Me, I guess. But a T-shirt, too.”

  “Drat. Only reason I woke everyone was to see if you’d flash your legs again.”

  “I figured.” She cleared her throat. “I’d feel stupid saying, ‘Be careful,’ you know.”

  “Go ahead, I won’t tell anyone.”

  “You scared?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked at him. “Be careful.”

  He nodded.

  UNCLE DAVE PARKED THE CAR where Kim pointed, by the barrier that separated the road from the jogging path. He turned off the engine and they all got out.

  “Keep your cellphones on,” he said. “I’m right here.”

  “Ready to limp to the rescue?” his wife said.

  “Kim, don’t be funny.”

  She smiled at him, the moonlight caught it. Ned saw his mother watching as Aunt Kim gave her husband a hug and lifted her face for a kiss. “Sorry, love,” she said. “But I’m right about this and you know I am.”

  Dave still looked like he wanted to argue.

  Ned walked around the barrier with his mother and aunt, following the beam of his flashlight down the path. It was farther than he remembered. The moon was ahead of them as they went. Clouds moved quickly, obscuring and exposing it, and stars. None of them spoke. This would be, he realized, the first time the two sisters had been together since his mother was a teenager.

  In a way, it made him wish he weren’t here. Then he realized something: he didn’t have to be. There was nothing important he brought to this, once he’d woken up knowing that Cadell was calling. Aunt Kim could sense the man as easily as he could.

  He was here as a buffer, he decided. To let them be together. Or maybe to hold a flashlight.

  He kicked a pebble on the path, heard it skitter away. His aunt, on his right side, said quietly, “Not usually a good idea to talk about kids when they’re there, but I haven’t had a chance to tell you I really like my nephew.”

  His mother, on Ned’s other side, made no reply. Ned kicked another stone. It was quiet up here, and cold. He kept expecting to see the tower ahead, round and roofless.

  Meghan said, “None of your own. Was that a choice?”

  Something difficult seemed to have entered the night.

  “Not directly,” his aunt said finally. “Result of a different kind of choice, back when. I would have liked children. So would Dave. Teach them basketball, whatever.”

  She was talking in a clipped way. Not her usual tone, Ned thought. As if she was controlling her voice.

  The silence that followed made him nervous. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, post-up moves and all that, I guess.”

  “That’s it,” Aunt Kim said. Her voice was almost inaudible.

  “Adoption was a no?” his mother asked.

  Another dozen steps. Ned played the beam ahead of them. He really did wish he were somewhere else now.

  His aunt sighed. “Oh, Meg. This was all so long ago. It would have felt like dodging something, sneaking around it.”

  “What? You thought you deserved to be childless?” His mother’s voice was sharp.

  “I deserved something for a decision I made. This was it.”

  “And you know that, Kim? You know that’s why you couldn’t?”

  “Oh, sweetie. Meg. Yes, I know it.”

  His mother swore in the darkness. She didn’t apologize, either. Ned kept his mouth shut.

  He heard a snorting, scuffling sound to the right. Shone the beam quickly that way, but there was scrub and brush off the path, and he saw nothing.

  He looked ahead again, and there was the tower at the end of the path, with the moon behind it and empty space beyond, where the land fell away.

  His mother stopped, staring at that roofless ruin, the ghostly solitude of it. He and Aunt Kim had been here before; she hadn’t.

  “I could quote Browning,” he heard his mom say.

  “I thought of that too, Meg, first time,” his aunt murmured.

  “I didn’t,” Ned said. “Mainly ’cause I have zero idea what you’re talking about.”

  Both of them smiled, exchanging a glance. “You will one day,” his mother said. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”

  She called Cadell’s name, loudly, and walked straight up to the barrier that ringed the tower.

  Ned was wondering what they’d do if he wasn’t here, when a darkness on the far side moved and became a shape. He saw the Celt come over to them, on the other side of the makeshift fence.

  “Why here?” Meghan Marriner asked. No other greeting.

  Cadell shrugged. He was holding his left arm. “I thought I’d rest. It is a place I know. Then I realized it could be a problem to go down into the city like this.”

  Ned shone the beam on his shoulder, and winced. The bandage had ripped apart. The shirt was soaked in blood. There was blood on the hand holding his shoulder, too.

  His mother said nothing.

  “Ned, bring the light over. You’ll have to hold it for me.” Aunt Kim sounded angry. “You, on that rock, sit down. If I do this again you will undertake not to fly?”

  The big man looked down at her. Ned saw him smile. He knew what was coming before the man spoke.

  “No,” Cadell said. “I can’t do that.”

  “So we do this now, and then do it again?”

  He stepped over the low fence and went to sit, as instructed, on the rock. Ned remembered wolves here, the last time.

  The Celt said, quietly, “I expect nothing of you. I am grateful you came.” He looked at the three of them. “Only the boy? Where is the warrior?” Amusement in his voice.

  “Dave? Waiting in the car.”

  Cadell laughed aloud. “You feared for his life. Wise of you.”

  Aunt Kim had been reaching for his shirt. She stopped.

  “Truthfully? My fear was that he would have killed you, even if he tried not to. And as I understand this, we’d have lost Melanie when he did. Next comment?”

  She sounded like his mom, Ned thought. Really precise.

  The man sitting on the boulder stared up at Kim, as if his eyes could penetrate thoughts through the dark. Ned kept the flashlight beam on his shoulder; he found himself breathing faster.

  “You actually believe that? What you said?” Cadell murmured.

  “I do.”

  The Celt seemed amused again. “You don’t understand what you’re dealing with yet, do you?”

  “I think I do. I think we all do by now. I think the failure’s yours.”

  She had taken a pair of scissors from her sister’s hand and began cutting away the shirt. Uncle Dave’s shirt this time. Cadell’s had been sliced away in the villa the first time this was done.

  His deep voice was quiet. “Not every man who fought at Waterloo or Crécy or Pourrières was a warrior. Being at a battlefield doesn’t mean anything in itself.”

  “True. You begin to sound less of an idiot,” Kimberly said. Her hands were busy as she spoke. “There ar
e even men I have known—three or four of them—who could certainly best my husband, but I am not persuaded you are one, with a wrecked shoulder, especially.”

  “You make me want to test him, for the joy of it.”

  “I know I do. That’s why he’s by the car. This is about Melanie.”

  “Melanie is gone,” Cadell said. “You must accept that. It is about Ysabel. Everything always is.”

  “No. For you and the other one. Not for the rest of us,” Meghan Marriner said. She handed Kim sterile wipes to begin cleaning the wound again.

  “We’re sure he missed the brachial?” Ned’s mother asked.

  Her sister nodded. “He couldn’t have moved the arm. There’s no major muscle implicated. This is just an infection risk. The knife was in his boot.”

  “You up to date with your tetanus shots?” Meghan said. “Got your immunization record?”

  Aunt Kim laughed. Cadell said nothing. Ned watched his aunt’s hands moving quickly, exposing the wound. “I can’t suture out here, obviously, and I still don’t think he needs it.”

  “Clean, debride, antibiotics.”

  “Yes.”

  Cadell remained silent through all of this, sitting very still. Moments passed, the wind blew. It really was cold. Then, softly, the man who’d called them here said, “You have never seen her. You have no way of realizing what this is. What she is. You will say you understand, but you do not. The boy knows.”

  The air I breathe is her, or wanting her.

  Aunt Kim looked at Cadell. She hesitated, choosing words, it seemed. “Yours,” she said finally, “is not the first love I have known to last for lifetimes. It isn’t even the second. You will forgive me if I value one of us more than your passion.”

  Ned blinked. It wasn’t what he’d expected. Cadell took a breath. Then the Celt smiled again. “I begin to wonder if I should pity your husband.”

  “He’d say yes, but I don’t think he suffers so much,” Kimberly replied, her hands packing the wound with gauze. She looked into her patient’s eyes again. “And he could give you the same answer I did.”

  Ned watched Cadell gaze at his aunt. Then the Celt turned and stared at Meghan, and finally at Ned himself. Aunt Kim wrapped the wound in silence. Ned held his light steady and looked up above it at the tower and the stars.