Ysabel Read online

  Then he heard her laughter. “I see. You will say that you did hear, and so came to me first?”

  Phelan was looking at the other man, his eyes cold as wilderness, waiting. The light in his face was gone. There was no reply from the Celt. Phelan said, precisely, “She asked him if his mother gave the bracelet to him. Shall I tell now his reply that you also did not hear?”

  Wolf on a mountain peak.

  Cadell’s blue gaze, returning, was as hard, though, unyielding. It never had yielded, Ned knew.

  “It makes no matter how and where you climbed or what you heard below. You were not here to find her first.”

  A silence in that high place. It felt like the last silence of the world, Ned Marriner thought.

  Ysabel ended it. Ended more than stillness.

  “He was not. It is true,” she murmured. “But neither were you, my golden one. Alas, that I am unloved, but neither were you.”

  And as she stopped, as that voice fell away, the three of them turned to Ned again.

  It might have been the hardest thing he’d yet done, to stand straight, not draw back. Face them, breathing hard, but controlling it. He looked from one man to the other, and ended with Ysabel. The long travel of her gaze, how far it seemed to go, to reach him.

  “He is not part of this,” Cadell said.

  “Untrue,” she said, still softly. “Did he not lead you here? Will you say he did not? That you found me yourself?”

  “The boar guided him,” Phelan said. “The druid’s.”

  No fire or ice now. A sudden, intense gravity that was, in its own way, more frightening. As if the stakes, with what she’d said, had become too high for fury or flame.

  “It isn’t the druid’s boar,” said Cadell. “Brys served it, not the other way around.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Phelan said. “I thought—”

  “I know what you thought. The beast is older than any of us.”

  Phelan’s thin smile. “Even us?”

  Cadell nodded. The light from the south caught his golden hair.

  The woman remained silent, letting them speak across her, to each other.

  “And so it was the boar . . . caused this?”

  Cadell shook his head. “It made this possible, at best. The boy could have died at Entremont, in Alyscamps, by the round tower. I could have killed him in Glanum where I killed you, once.” His turn to smile, lips closed. “You could have killed him many times. Is it not so?”

  Phelan nodded. “I suppose. I saw no reason to have him die. I helped them get away, when the needfires were lit.”

  “Perhaps a mistake.” The deep voice.

  The other man shrugged. “I have made others.” He looked at Ysabel, and then at Ned again, his brow furrowed now.

  Cadell said, “We could have been here ahead of him. I saw him fall, twice. The boar made this harder for him, showing us where he was going.”

  “And your meaning is?”

  Cadell’s teeth flashed this time. “My thinking is too hard for you? Really? You said the boar caused this. It isn’t so.”

  And still the woman did not speak.

  She stood as if barely attending to them, withdrawing even as she remained. Ned thought of the sculpture again, sunlit in the sheltered cloister. It was cold here now, so far above the world.

  Phelan said, “There is another way to see it, if you are right—the animal bringing us both.”

  “Yes. I also have that thought.”

  “I killed you once here, did I not? With some others.”

  “You know you did. They were lost in the chasm.”

  “Not you.”

  “They were lost,” Cadell repeated quietly.

  Phelan’s wintry smile. “You cling to that, among so many deaths.”

  “It is more than dying, there.”

  “Not for you, with me alive to hold you to returning. You would have known it even as you went down.”

  “They didn’t. They were lost there.”

  “Yes. Not you.”

  “So I owe you my life?” The bite of irony.

  They actually smiled at each other in that moment. Ned would remember that.

  “As you said,” Phelan murmured. “We could have arrived ahead of him.”

  “As I said.”

  They both looked at Ned again.

  He said, in a small voice, “I’m sorry, I think.”

  Cadell laughed aloud.

  “No, you aren’t,” said Phelan. “You’ve been refusing to leave this from the outset.”

  A small, maybe a last, flare within. “You don’t know me well enough to say what I feel,” Ned said.

  A moment, and then Phelan—stranger, Greek, Roman—nodded. “You are right. Forgive me. It is entirely possible to need or want something, and be sorry it is so.” He hesitated again. “It appears I did more than I intended when I brought you into this. I could not say, even now, what made me do it. What I saw.”

  “No? I can,” said Ysabel, breaking her stillness, returning to them. Then she added, with sudden passion, “Look at him!”

  The two men did so, again. Ned closed his eyes this time, his mind racing, lost. He opened them. And saw, in both men at the same moment, a dawning as of light—and then a setting of the sun.

  Neither spoke for a long time.

  Cadell made one quick, outward gesture with his good hand that Ned didn’t understand. Then he pushed fingers through his long hair. He drew a deep breath. Lifted the hand, and let it fall again. He turned to Phelan.

  “You truly didn’t know,” he said to the other man, “when you drew him in?”

  Phelan hadn’t moved. Or taken his gaze from Ned. He still didn’t. “I knew something. I said that. Not this. How would I know this?”

  Know what? Ned wanted to scream. He was afraid to speak.

  Cadell, quietly, said, “We might have realized, when we saw the mother and her sister.”

  Phelan nodded. “I suppose.” He was white-faced, Ned saw. Shaken to the core, trying to deal with it.

  Cadell pushed a hand through his hair again. He turned to Ysabel. She was standing very straight now, extremely still, gathered to herself: a beauty near to stone, it might seem, but not truly so.

  The big man looked at Ned for a moment, and then back to her. He said, wonderingly, the deep voice soft, “The mother has your hair, even, near enough.”

  At which point, finally, very late, overwhelmed as if to a cliff’s edge of stupefaction, feeling that waves were crashing there against his mind, Ned Marriner understood.

  Who are you?

  The repeated question, over and again. The one he’d hated, having no answer. Now he did. Ysabel had given it to the three of them.

  The world rocked and spun, unstable and impossible. Ned made a small, helpless sound; he couldn’t stop himself. This was too vast, it meant too many things, too many to get your head around.

  He saw Phelan looking at her.

  The wide, thin mouth quirked sideways. “When?” he whispered. And then, “Whose?”

  Ned stopped breathing.

  She smiled, grave and regal, not capricious or teasing now. She shook her head slowly. “Some things are not best told. Even in love. Perhaps especially in love. Is it not so?”

  More questions than answers in the world, Ned thought.

  Phelan lowered his head.

  Her smile changed a little. “You knew I would say that?”

  He looked up. “I never know what you will say.”

  “Never?” Faint hint of irony, but a sense she was reaching a long way for it.

  “Almost never,” he amended. “I did not expect this. None of this. Not the searching you decreed, forbidding battle. Not the boy being . . . what you say he is. Love, I am lost.”

  “And I,” Cadell said. The other two turned to him. “You altered the story. He led us here. The boar guided him, and us. This means?”

  This means?

  Ysabel turned to Ned. The clear, distant gaz
e. The eyes were blue, not green, he saw. And something was unmistakable now. You would have to be blind, or truly a child, not to see it: the sadness that had come. She looked steadily at him and said, more softly than any words yet spoken, “What must I answer him, blood of my blood?”

  He didn’t reply. What could he possibly say? But he saw now—he did see—an answer to the one question, about his being here and his aunt and his mother, and their mother and hers, fathers or mothers back to a distant presence of light down a long tunnel from the past.

  Where the woman before him waited in a far, faint brightness.

  She turned from him, not waiting for an answer. Looked to one man and then the other. “You know what it means,” she said. “You know what I said beside the animal that died to draw me into the world again. Neither of you found me first. You know what follows. The chasm is here. It is still here.”

  What will follow, you should not see.

  Phelan had said that to him, at Entremont. But Ned had stayed, and seen, and led them here to this.

  “You never said there was a child,” Cadell murmured.

  And Ysabel, quietly, echoed him. “I never said there was a child.”

  “Only the one?” Phelan’s eyes never left her now.

  “Only the one, ever. One of you killed the other, and then died himself, too soon, leaving me alone. But not entirely so. That time. I was carrying a gift.”

  “You do know what it will mean, love, if we go down together there? Both of us.”

  Cadell, the deep voice soft, but unafraid. Making certain.

  She inclined her head gravely. “We all know what it will mean. But neither of you found me, and the boy is in the story.” She had never seemed so much a queen as she did then, Ned thought, staring at her.

  The two men turned—he would remember this, too—to look at each other. Fire and ice subsumed in something he wasn’t smart enough—hadn’t lived nearly long enough—to name.

  Phelan turned back to her. He nodded his head slowly.

  “I believe I see. An ending, love?” He hesitated. “Past due, must we say?”

  Ysabel shook her head suddenly, fierce in denial. “I will not say that! I would never say that.”

  She turned to the bigger man. One and then the other. One and then the other. Ned wanted to back away, against the cave wall, feared to draw attention by moving.

  She said to Cadell, “Do you still believe our souls find another home?”

  “I always have, though perhaps not all of us. We have had a different arc, we three. I will not presume as to my soul. Not from that chasm.”

  “You will search for me? Wherever I am? If there is a way?”

  Ned was crying now. He did back up until he bumped into the cold stone wall by the opening to the south. He could feel the wind here.

  Cadell said, in that voice men and women might follow into war and across mountain ranges and through forests and into dark, “Wherever you are. Until the sun dies and the last wind blows through the worlds. Need you ask me? Even now?”

  She shook her head again, and Ned heard her say, “No, I didn’t need to ask, did I? My shining one. Anwyll.”

  Beloved.

  Cadell stood another moment looking at her, memorizing her, Ned wanted to say it was, and then—not reaching out, not touching her—he said, “It is time to go, then, I believe.”

  He turned and came this way towards the opening.

  At the edge of the drop he paused beside Ned and laid a hand upon his shoulder. No words.

  Nor for the other man, though he did turn and they exchanged a glance, grey eyes and blue. Ned, weeping in silence, felt as if he could hear his blood passing through the chambers of his heart. Blood of my blood.

  Cadell went down then, jumping over the edge to the steeply sloped plateau. Ned saw him in the late sun’s shining, the very last of the day’s light, as he walked over to the low, dark green bushes that surrounded the chasm that was a place of sacrifice, said in the tales to be bottomless.

  He did pause there, but not in anything like fear, nothing of that at all, for when he looked up and back, past the two men to the woman, he was smiling again, golden and at ease.

  And that is how Ned Marriner last saw him, through tears that would not stop, when he took a final step and went over to his ending without a sound.

  Ned looked at emptiness where a man had been. He turned his face away. He saw a pair of birds wheeling to the south, across the mountain’s side. The sky was not falling, though this was a time and place where you could imagine it doing so.

  He turned back, to Phelan. That one stood another moment, looking down at the chasm. Then he came forward towards the drop to the plateau. He passed close, as Cadell had. He didn’t touch Ned, though. Instead, he slipped out of his grey leather jacket and laid it, lightly, on Ned’s shoulders.

  “It will be cold when the sun goes down,” he said. “There is a tear, I’m afraid, in one shoulder. Perhaps it can be repaired.”

  Ned couldn’t speak. His throat was aching, and his heart. Tears made it difficult to see. Phelan looked at him another moment, as if he would say something else, but he didn’t.

  He went over the edge, lightly down as always, landing easily, and he went to the chasm’s brink as the other man had done.

  Ned heard Ysabel behind him. He didn’t turn. He was afraid to look at her. The man below them did, though. He did look.

  “Anwyll,” Ned heard her say, again.

  The man so addressed smiled then, standing on a mountain so far from the world into which he had been born, claimed there by sunlight, which had not changed in all the years.

  He looked past Ned, to where she would be. He spoke her name.

  “Every breath,” he said to her, at the end. “Every day, each and every time.”

  Then he stepped over the rim and down into the dark.

  AFTER A FEW MOMENTS motionless against the cave wall, Ned had to sit down. He lowered his legs over the edge of the drop, looking out on the end of day and at the slanting ledge where no one stood any more. He hadn’t known it was possible to feel this much sorrow, so hard and heavy an awareness of time.

  Until the sun dies.

  The sun was going down, would rise in the morning—people had to make themselves believe that it would each time nightfall came. He remembered Kate Wenger, only last night, talking of how sunset had never been a moment of beauty or peace in the past. Men and women fearing that the dark might come and not end.

  He had stopped crying. He was drained of tears. He wiped at his cheeks, felt the bite of wind swirling. Two more birds, or the same ones, wheeled down and east and out of sight again. Phelan’s jacket lay across his shoulders. He looked over at the chasm, half hidden by bushes. He wished he knew a prayer to speak, or even think.

  He heard a sound behind him, but didn’t turn.

  He was afraid, too achingly aware of what role he’d played here. He didn’t think he could look at what would be in her face. His mother, Cadell had said, had her hair. Her great-grandmother was said to have had the second sight. There were family stories further back.

  And his aunt . . .

  Ned sighed, it seemed to come from so deep inside it felt bottomless. He had been in this, after all. It was his family, and Phelan seemed to have been aware of something—without knowing what—from that beginning in the cathedral, first day.

  Ysabel stepped nearer. More a presence than a sound. He was painfully conscious of her. The two of them alone now. She would be looking down and remembering two thousand six hundred years. How did you come to terms with something ending after so long? Who had ever had to deal with that?

  Because it was over. Ned knew it as keenly as the three of them had. They had collided with a wall—with him—and the intricate spinning had come to a close on this mountain.

  He shook his head. So many ways it might have been otherwise. Brys had tried to kill him in the cemetery. He could have been too sick to climb when he got here. Ei
ther of the two men might have been quicker than Ned. Both had said these things. It was not preordained, what had just happened, not compelled.

  Did that mean he had killed them? Or set them free?

  Did the choice of words make a difference? Did words matter at all here?

  “Oh, God. Ned, you did it,” were the words he heard.

  They mattered. They mattered so much they powered him to his feet, whirling around.

  Melanie stood in front of him. With her black hair and the green streak in it, and a smile so wide, through tears, it seemed it could light the shadows of that cave.

  “I don’t believe it!” he said. “It . . . she . . . you’re back!”

  And Ysabel was gone.

  He had been right, then, to see her as going away even as she stood there. Joy now, fierce and searingly bright, mixed with something that might never leave him. Someone returned, was rescued, someone was gone. Was this the way it always was?

  She said, “You brought me back.”

  “I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my life.”

  “Is that so?” she said, and he heard a note, of irony, that echoed someone else, not Melanie.

  He couldn’t speak. He was stunned, buffeted. She stepped close and put her hands behind his head, lacing her fingers there, and she kissed him, standing on the edge of the plateau in the wind. She didn’t actually rush it. There was a scent to her he couldn’t remember from before. It was dizzying.

  She stepped back. Looked at him. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, maybe with the tears. “I probably shouldn’t be doing that.”

  He was still having some trouble breathing. “Only reason I came to France,” he managed.

  She laughed. Kissed him again, lightly this time. It felt, impossibly, as if it was Melanie doing that, but also not quite Melanie. Or maybe it wasn’t impossible. Not after what had happened here. He suddenly remembered Kate, walking up to Entremont, the change in her, with Beltaine coming on.

  “Thank you,” Melanie said, still very close.

  “Well, yeah,” he said, light-headed from the feel of her and her scent, and the strangeness of his thoughts. Then something else registered, really belatedly. He stepped to one side, looking more closely at her.

  He felt himself beginning to grin, despite everything. “Oh, Lord!” he said.