Authors: Margaret Ronald
“She knew I’d failed,” the thief said, and I remembered in time to keep my attention on him. “If I’d brought her with me, maybe … but I wouldn’t risk her. Not if it meant I’d lose her.”
He paused on the path. My feet didn’t quite touch the flagstones, but his did, and he scuffed one against the edge of a stone. “I’d never say these things to another were I alive. So I must be dead.” He glanced back at me, the first notice he’d really taken of me, and smiled again.
And now I recognized some of what was going on. I was haunted, to put it shortly. This was an imprint, like the ghost rooms left in houses or the emotional remnants left by some great event. But unlike those,
this was a purposeful, driven imprint. A skilled magician had constructed this imprint, this haunting, to latch on to whoever came looking.
Meda knew much, all right.
A shadow in the water flexed, then configured itself into a tiny house, its shutters stained red. Someone had painted a set of symbols over the door as well: Greek, I thought, but not the kind that either a modern or ancient Greek would decipher. I took a step closer to the door, then paused. Somewhere within, a woman’s voice recited, quiet and steady, without the watery echo that followed every other sound down here.
Careful, Evie, I thought. You might not have enough breath to get back to the surface if someone yanks the spell away.
With that in mind—and with a worried glance at the roof of the house; would it disappear in time for me to get out?—I stepped inside.
The house was small, only two rooms, with a swept-dirt floor and furniture dark with age and use. A low fire burned in the hearth, pale against the brightness of the day (and, beyond it, the darkness of the Quabbin loomed), and a rack above it held a small pot that made bubbling noises as it slid further into reality. The smell from it was thin and unappetizing: chicken broth, spiced with onion. Strange fare for this temporary summer day, and stranger for it to be unattended. The whole thing looked a little like an illustration out of my fifth-grade history textbook, or one of the photos our teacher had taken from the class trip out to Old Sturbridge Village. (I’d missed the trip—detention for making Jimmy Parkinson eat the dead caterpillar he’d tried to put in my lunch.)
I turned away from the kitchen (and parlor, and living room, it looked like) to the only other room, from which the woman’s voice continued. “Each saw by turns,” she read as I entered, her speech broad with an accent I didn’t recognize. “And each by turns was blind.”
She was in a rocking chair by the window, a book on her lap that was so well-worn it could easily have been mistaken for the Bible in other households. I was pretty sure it wasn’t, even though the language sounded about right. And she was definitely the same woman I’d seen under the North End, holding aloft a lantern at the end of a smuggler’s tunnel, her dark skin a contrast to the faded pink cotton of her smock. Years had softened the proud line of her chin and bleached her hair to a salt-and-pepper frizz, bound back under a sagging kerchief. For the first time I caught her scent, muted in this envelope of the past: sparks of fireworks, wound about with sage and baking bread. The two latter scents seemed to neutralize the mark of magic on her, not because they were domestic but because they were uncorrupted, benign.
For a moment I thought of Katie, of what I’d told her about inviting magic into one’s home. This woman could prove me wrong, I thought, and felt a pang for how much I’d scared Katie. I owed her an apology.
Ignoring the woman, the thief slid his hand out of my grasp. For a second I groped after it, fumbling through air and water both. But he had faded, and a second later I saw why.
Now the man I knew as the thief lay on the bed, tucked under a quilt of faded red cloth. But that epithet no longer quite applied to him: here was a farmer, a worker, a husband or father maybe. He was very old; his hair was gone entirely, the dome of his skull spotted by age, and the collar of his nightshirt revealed a tuft of white hair at his throat. His hands lay folded on his lap, one whole, the other long twisted into a broken, three-fingered claw.
And he was looking straight at me.
I halted in the door, losing my footing slightly and hovering a moment between steps. Hesitantly, I looked behind me on the off chance that I’d timed my visit to coincide with another’s. Nothing. I turned back, and he met my eyes, and nodded, smiling. “Eh,” he said,
his voice creaking but not unhappy, “it’s been forty-odd years, and I expected long before now that someone would come looking for it.”
The woman glanced up, and her gaze passed over me without the slightest hitch. “Colin?”
“Peace, Meda. It’s naught but sight.” He smiled at me, and I could see that a cataract glazed one of his eyes. “Go back to your reading, and see it through for me. You will do that, at least?”
She smiled at him, a fond and regretful smile, and leaned over so that she could reach across the counterpane and pat his leg. She had her own pains, though; she grimaced and pressed one hand against the small of her back as she sat up. “That I will,” she whispered, and turned the page.
It was a short exchange, but something about it felt terribly private. But the two of them seemed not to care that I watched, and the only effect was to make me supremely uncomfortable about appearing in front of them in a—I checked; the past might hold me, but it had changed nothing about me—red-striped monstrosity of a swimsuit. I started to cover myself, realized how little that would help, and made myself stand like the ghost he thought I was.
Colin saw the movement, and his smile widened briefly, became for a second both wicked and joyous. “Sit,” he said, raising one hand to gesture to the bed. “I’ve visited with angels enough in these last few days, ‘twill do me good to know if one has substance more than what’s in my mind.”
I smiled and shook my head, but came to stand between him and Meda. Meda, not seeing me, kept reading, and continued even when he began to speak over her, perhaps used to it. “We knew,” he said slowly, his piebald gaze coming to rest on me, “that it wasn’t gone. After the shipwrecks on Lovells, the lovers frozen by the stones, I knew—but I did cripple it, and I did hurt it, and that was enough for these on forty years. No more dead men lingering on Nix’s Mate.
No more that claimed more dead. That, at least, we accomplished.” He sighed, long and slow. “There was naught we could do but hide, and hide we did, out away from the ocean, where the sun would not go dim and the eyes not find us.”
I opened my mouth to try to speak, but for just that fraction of a second the air I tasted was heavy with water and weeds. Meda’s magic was weakening under the pressure of water and time.
Colin looked at me, still smiling, then at the woman. “Eh, Meda, and we did have a good run of it, didn’t we?” She, either used to these outbursts from him or patiently tolerant, turned the page and didn’t look up. “I once thought it could be hidden forever,” he went on, not much louder than her recitation. “But Meda knew better, and I’d bled on the eye, after all I’d seen.” He brought his mutilated hand up to his face, pointing to his cataract-white eye. “Such sight doesn’t go from me, even when I’d have it gone. Meda wove this mantle of dreams for who came seeking, that only one strong enough to do what must be done would find it. And you, now, you know some of that, don’t you?”
Not really,
I thought. But he was an old man, and dying, and sometimes it was better to comfort than to cajole. “I do,” I said, and though the sound never made it past my lips, he understood.
“Then you know as I that some things stay unhidden, if their owners want them back.” I nodded, touching the flat, shiny scar at my throat where the Horn had been. “It’d have to come out in time, though we buried it deep. Even if we’d hidden it beneath water—” I looked up involuntarily at that, at where the low roof of their house faded into blackness. “Water, then? How long?”
Another question I couldn’t quite answer, partly since I didn’t know when this had taken place. “Two centuries,” I said, but had to swallow as water trickled in between my lips. I didn’t have much time left.
“Hundred years,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was repeating me, or if he’d misheard, or just guessed from reading my lips. “That’s worth this loss, then,” and he raised his maimed hand. “Worth it and more. Ay, Meda, the world will last another hundred-ought years and more, and we did our part to keep it living. Not what the town council thought, when the sun went out, was it?” He chuckled, and I caught the last flicker of a smile on Meda’s face when I glanced over my shoulder.
For a long moment Colin lay silent, slumped back into the pillow. Meda kept reading, and tranquil as the scene was, I still lacked any scent of the sunstone. Was there a trace of Dina in this room, maybe? An echo of its former owner? I’d need to seek it more diligently, and I didn’t dare if taking my attention away meant that the water would come back—
“The hearth,” Colin said without opening his eyes. “We thought that fire would keep it hidden, and it did, and if you are no phantom then water too has kept it hidden. And now you come seeking it, and if Meda has brought you this far, then she has seen that you are capable of the last step.” His eyes flickered open, and he stared unmoving at the ceiling. “Have no fear. It—the gray ones, they love fear, and it is not enough to be a thief. It is not enough.”
Valuable advice, maybe, but I was already at the other end of the room, scrabbling at the hearth. This one had no fire, maybe since the quilt kept him already too warm, but when my fingers touched it they didn’t touch stone. They sank into muck and weeds, silt drifting up past my face in the negative, grimy twin to fairy dust. The room warped around me, Colin fading and reforming as memory held him in place, but Meda’s voice never ceased. “And stole their mutual light,” she read, her words holding me in this one place, keeping me in the space where I could breathe.
I dug deeper, yanking fronds out of the way, tearing my nails across stone. The flat stone of the hearth
was still intact under water, though slick with slime and lake-bottom muck. I scrabbled around till I found an edge, and pried, my fingernails giving way with a twinge and the muscles of my back echoing them. The hearth-stone—still to my eyes dry and clean, chiseled around the edges with more of the bastard Greek that lined the lintel—creaked and shifted, finally sliding away from me and sinking edge-first into the mud.
My fingers skated over what felt like the skin of a corpse. I steeled myself to look as I got a better grip on it—and saw, lit as if from a stray beam of light that had made it this deep, a greenish pouch, disintegrating from its time under water.
With that, the walls of the house started to fade first into memory, then into the scraps of foundation that were all that remained. Meda’s voice continued, a low drone like a guiding thread. “And not one serpent by good chance awake,” she said, her voice drawing closer, almost in my ear. “Do what we could not, despite our names and our intent. This I cannot bind you to, this only I beg you—be not thief but murderer.”
I turned, but something struck me hard on the right shoulder, digging into my skin. A puff of blood danced up, hovering in the water, and I yelled—but Meda was gone, and now the house was too, and I only had time for a fraction of a breath before the waters of the Quabbin slammed in around me.
I’d say it was like being struck by a bat—the pressure was that strong—but it hit me on every side at once, and so it wasn’t so much a slap as a crush, all over me. Had I any room for it, I’d have collapsed. As it was, I didn’t even have space enough for any of these thoughts, pushing off the bottom and kicking toward what I hoped was the surface. Green water blurred over my eyes, the dim sky above doing nothing to indicate which direction was up or even if there was an end to this water.
With every stroke, the sunstone got heavier and something jarred against my back. Very faintly,
through the water, I caught the scent of my own blood, drifting through the Quabbin. There weren’t such things as freshwater sharks, right? Or snapping turtles … hell, in another ten seconds I wasn’t going to care about either of those, because I was going to drown. I fumbled with the sunstone, trying to keep it from sliding out of my grip and back down to the bottom of the reservoir (and this time I’d have no friendly advice telling me where to look), then gave up the last of my breath in a shout as whatever was stuck in my shoulder dug in deeper.
I burst through the surface in mid-yell, choked, gargled water, and spat. The Quabbin was as it had been when I dove under: still, gray, unchangeable. I took deep, searing breaths, blessing air for its existence and water for its limits and earth for being there for me to swim to in time.
The sunstone’s bag, slick and greasy in my hands, rotted away further as I lifted it. I tore the sack off, treading water frantically, letting it sink back to the foundations of the house where it had lain for so long, and raised the stone. “Yes!” I yelled, and a fresh flock of geese startled, honking in reply. “Got it! Hound of Hounds can even hunt under fucking
water!”
The stone didn’t respond, of course, and there was no celestial applause from deities who’d bet on my success or failure. But I knew I’d won, and that was enough. I held the stone up, looking through it at the sky, and sure enough, when I turned it toward the west, it brightened, showing where the fading sunlight was strongest. I drew the stone a little closer, still treading water, then hissed as the pain in my shoulder flared.
It wasn’t until I had reached the shore, shivering so violently I could barely see straight, and staggered up onto the bank that I could reach back. Something was jammed between my suit and shoulder, digging in with every movement. I dropped the sunstone onto the grass, where it gleamed an unhealthy gray, and
reached back, fumbling like someone trying to get that one itchy spot. My fingers brushed cold metal, cooling faster in this air, and a fresh flow of blood spilled down my back as I withdrew what Meda had used to attack me: a fisherman’s hook as long as my hand, cruel and curved, black iron unstained by rust. It was not meant as a weapon, but it settled easily into my hand, the hook emerging between my fingers, the haft cool against my palm.