The Heart of the Phoenix (16 page)

“Our way back is arranged,” he said, his voice coming through a crack in this world that led to another. “We will come back soon. “

“I’ll be ready,” she said.

And she would be.

Her work in this world had begun.

They would destroy the Phoenix Girls.

For killing her mother, she would help end them forever.

* * *

Flanna turned away from the glowing oval of the portal, toward the door Penny had come here through. While her back was turned, a gray shape darted from the shadows and toward the shrinking portal. When it snapped shut and sealed itself a moment later, Flanna was alone.

* * *

Flanna pulled Penny’s strange, twisted wand from her pocket and performed a spell that she knew from the shared memories that Penny had only just learned, but that she herself had known for a long time. She opened the extra-dimensional space in the air above her head and slid the blood opal box inside of it. The hidden space contracted as she withdrew her empty hand and closed.

It was time to go now. She had to get back to Penny’s home before that friend of hers, that Phoenix Girl Zoe, awoke and noticed her absence. She removed her cloak and unbuttoned the vest beneath, revealing a plain white spun shirt, not clothing of this world, but close enough not to look out of place if Zoe saw her wearing it upon her return.

With her own wand and vest wrapped up in her cloak, she tapped the door that stood at the edge of Aurora Hollow, and opened it on her sister’s home and life.

* * *

Penny awoke with the feel of cold stone beneath her. She tried to move, tried to push herself off the ground, but her arms wouldn’t support her, and the only movement her legs were capable of were weak twitches. After a brief and futile struggle to get her limbs back under her control, she settled for rolling over onto her back.

She opened her eyes, hoping for the green willow canopy and starlit night of Aurora Hollow, but not expecting it. She remembered being underground, finding...

“No!” She bolted upright, remembering everything. Her mother, dead for years and hidden away deep in Ronan’s cave, then the girl from her dreams, her rouge reflection had shown up in the flesh. Not just a part of herself as she’d thought, but a girl who called her sister.

But this was not the chamber where her mother’s body lay. This was somewhere else. She had no wand to light the darkness, but a weak light fell through a bared opening in the high ceiling. It was the flickering glow of firelight, and it illuminated no more than the patch of floor where Penny had awakened.

She heard a rattling behind her, like the clanking of chains, and spun to see what was behind her. Whatever made the noise was too deep in darkness to see, but something on the chamber floor caught her eyes. A bolt of thick red hair lay on the floor.

She reached up tentatively, felt her head, and screamed again.

Her hair was gone, all of it, and her scalp had the texture of old leather, aged and nerveless. She ran both hands over her head, top and sides, front to back, and felt the back of her head, tufts of short hair and bare scalp crisscrossed by tight leather straps. She found rough edges around her eyes, nose, and mouth, and rediscovered sensation when her fingertips brushed her lips.

She was wearing a mask of hard, rough leather, fit perfectly to the contours of her face, snug beneath her chin. Her fingers clawed at the straps, for a way to take the thing off, but there was none.

Her clothes were different too; plain gray blouse and pants that stopped at her knees, well-worn and raggedy.

Someone had kidnapped her, cut off her hair, put this mask on her and dressed her in rags, and thrown her into a dark hole.

She ripped and tugged where the mask closed around her throat, clawed at the straps, shrieked in frustration and fell to her knees on the hard stone floor.

The rattle of chains came again, and a voice with it. It called out in a language she didn’t understand. It advanced from the shadows far enough for her to see its shape, then stopped.

“Who are you?” Penny screamed and stumbled to her feet, reaching down automatically to her pocket for the wand that wasn’t there. She backed a step away, braced herself to run. “Where am I?”

The chain rattled as he took another step forward. His shape was clearer, a tall man, scrawny.

He laughed.

“I am a prisoner, same as you.” He took another step forward. He was dressed in rags, his face, somehow familiar, was gaunt, the cheeks sunken. His hair fell down over his shoulders in tangles. He took another step, and the shadows fell off him like a shroud. His hair was bright, fiery red, his face lightly bearded, dirty, and very familiar.

“You!” Penny screamed and restrained the desire to charge the man, to attack him with her bare hands.

Tovar the Red.

“Yes, me. And who do you imagine I am?”

“Tovar.” Penny spat the word out like something nasty. “You’re the Birdman.”

“Him? The feathered fellow who blundered into the sepulcher last year?” He laughed again. “He’s dead.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re lying!”

“His head is currently decorating the sepulcher wall from what I’ve heard.”

He took another step forward, and Penny matched it with one backward.

“Stay back!” Penny wished she were able to muster a little strength to match the volume in her voice.

“Calm down, you strange little thing. If you take off running you’ll hit a wall.” The man tugged on the chain clamped around his ankle. “I won’t be chasing after you.”

He sat down cross-legged on the floor and put his face in his hands.

Penny began to relax, just a little, when a renewed rattle of chains sounded behind her, and a pair of huge, powerful hands gripped her shoulders.

“But my friend has your blind side, an inquisitive nature, and a longer reach.” He looked up again and Penny saw the grin he’d been hiding in his hands. “Ronan, what do you make of our small visitor? I’m thinking spy. Only high servants of the household speak English, and someone doesn’t want us to see her face.”

Ronan
? Surely she’d misheard.

“She’s no spy,” the voice was a low rumble, but familiar. “Turn around. Let me see your eyes.”

The hands loosened their grip and Penny shrugged free. She almost bolted, any courage that remained to her had fled when those large hands had clasped her from behind, but where was there to run?

She turned slowly, and the first thing she saw was a thick, muscular chest covered in thick reddish fur. She raised her eyes, and somewhere far above she saw the creature’s head, a long canine face atop a muscular neck. The head was definitely familiar, even if it was on an unfamiliar body.

Suppressing the lingering urge to scream and run away, Penny opened her mouth and attempted to speak. A dry croak came out, and the red-haired man behind her saved her from having to ask the question stuck to the tip of her tongue by asking one of his own.

“If you know something, old friend, I sure wish you would educate me.”

The thing standing in front of her remained silent, seemed to be waiting on her.

“Ronan?” She managed speech at last. “Is that you?”

“Indeed, and may I ask how you ended up here, Penny?”

Penny heard the man behind her rise, rattling his chain.

“Penny?”

“Yes,” Penny and Ronan said together.

“My dead daughter who turned out not to be dead?” The red-haired man’s voice dripped with skepticism. “The one I still don’t believe in?”

“Yes, Torin,” Ronan said.

“
What
?” Penny goggled at the man and mentally compared him to the few photos she had seen of her father. “
What
?”

* * *

“It’s a pity I can’t see her face,” Torin said. “It would prove that you’re not a fool, and that she’s not a spy.”

“I’m not,” Ronan said, his patience straining at the edges, but holding.

“I’m not,” Penny said, her patience already exhausted. She’d dreamed about some day meeting her father, and this filthy, bitter man was a letdown. Penny had too many other worries, she wanted to know what had happened to her mom, wanted to know why she’d been left to rot in some dark cave, and why Ronan had kept that from her. She wasn’t going to waste her time trying to convince this man she was who she said she was. She had Ronan. She didn’t need him.

“I wasn’t there when my daughters were born,” Torin said, looking straight past Penny, as if she wasn’t there, “but Tynan told me what happened. Twins, one alive, the other dead.”

“I know that,” Ronan said. “I arrived after you were gone, before the others. Susan resuscitated Penny, helped her breath again. Diana was able to hold a living child in her arms before she died.”

“And my brother never tried to take her?” Penny knew a rhetorical question when she heard one. His mind was made up, and he still thought he could change Ronan’s. “Tynan would never have left a living heir on Old Earth.”

“Your brother never knew. The traitor did one honorable thing before she switched sides and returned with your brother. She covered up Penny’s continued existence and arranged for her to be taken away. She’s the reason I lingered in Dogwood. The magic that bound the Phoenix Girls is strong. I knew it would bring her back someday.”

“And you never attempted to enlighten me,
old friend
?” Torin rose and lunged in Ronan’s direction, stopping only when the chain that bound his ankle pulled tight. “Flanna is lost to me, Tynan claimed her as his own daughter and convinced her I betrayed her mother to her death. She came down to see me once, just once. She snuck past the guards and broke in one morning. I woke up, and there she was. I knew who she was, and when I tried to speak she struck me down with her wand. I thought she might kill me, but she didn’t.”

Penny stood between them, but might have been invisible. She did nothing to call attention to herself. She listened in utter absorption to this strange family history.

“What did she say to you?” Ronan asked.

“She called me a traitor.” Torin slumped where he stood, seemed almost to shrink. “Then she spat on me and walked away.”

He finally looked at Penny again.

“And now you tell me I have another daughter, miraculously returned from the dead after fourteen years.” Penny watched as his stony expression began to crumble. His anger wasn’t gone, but muted by a stronger emotion. Sorrow. “I would never have believed you capable of such casual cruelty.”

“I never would have believed you capable of such willful ignorance,” Ronan spat back at him. “I came to you under no obligation but that of friendship. I came to tell you about your returned daughter, and to free you if I could...”

Torin barked laughter at Ronan.

“Do you think I’d be foolish enough to risk my own imprisonment if I were not certain?”

After long and thoughtful consideration, Torin answered. “We are parted by many years, and they have not been kind years to me. I am not foolish enough to presume to know your mind.”

They sat in silence for a time, Torin bound to his side of the dark cell, Ronan to his, and Penny in between. Some of the terror of awaking in unfamiliar darkness, her hair cut off and imprisoned as much by the inescapable mask as the walls around them, had fallen away from her. But any comfort she might have taken in Ronan’s company, or by a reunion with her long lost father, was mitigated by Ronan’s anger and her father’s refusal to acknowledge her existence.

She was kept from exploring her prison by the darkness around them, only the dim light from above kept the darkness from crushing her, allowing for the dim circle where she sat and waited for what would come next.

What came next was light in slow stages, growing brighter so slowly that she didn’t notice until the cell’s walls were visible. She searched the ceiling for the source of the new brightness and spotted a half dozen openings shining light down into the cell.

Penny stood and paced, ignoring both Ronan and her father as they watched her. She stood beneath one of the openings and looked up, squinting at the sudden brightness of sunlight.

“It’s done with mirrors,” Ronan said. “One of Erasmus’s ideas. Every room in the citadel is lit this way in daytime.”

Torin laughed.

“I wonder what the old fool is up to. I haven’t seen him since before…” He shook the chain hanging from his ankle, as if it was the dividing line between one life and another. Probably it was. “I hope he made it out alive. I always liked the old man.”

“You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Ronan said.

Thinking about Erasmus and remembering one of his other mirrors, Penny recalled the scene she’d witnessed in the Conjuring Glass, her laughing mother dragging her father into frame, what she’d called him.

“Mom called you Big Red,” Penny said, turning to face her father. “My nickname is Little Red.”

He stared down at her, into her eyes, then cleared his throat and turned away.

Penny rolled her eyes and turned from him. She searched the rest of her prison, taking in its dimensions, looking for an obvious weakness she could exploit, which she quickly realized was a ridiculous exercise, since it was a prison and she had no experience breaking out of them.