The bond between Maruman and myself had been the catalyst through which I had discovered the full extent of my telepathic powers. He said it had been destiny, but I doubted it.
I had been seated right next to the statue of the founder when it happened. A scraggy-looking cat was stalking a bird. I would have ignored them both, except that I was so struck by the carelessness of the bird. I thought it almost deserved its fate. As I concentrated on the pursuit, I suddenly had the sensation of something moving in my head. It was the queerest feeling, and I gasped loudly.
Startled, the bird flew off with an irritated chirp. I had saved the wretched creature’s life, and it was annoyed! It did not yet occur to me to wonder how I knew what the bird felt. Instead I noticed that the cat seemed to glare indignantly at me with its bright yellow eyes. I shrugged wryly, and it looked away and began to clean itself.
I had the notion it was only pretending to ignore me. Then I laughed, thinking I must have sat too long in the sun. The cat turned to face me again, and for a moment I imagined a glint of amusement in its look. I wondered if maybe Jes was right and I was going mad.
“Stupid funaga,” said a voice in my head. I somehow knew it was the cat and stared at it in shock. “All funaga are stupid.” Again I had heard what it was thinking.
“They are not!” I answered without opening my mouth. Now it was the cat’s turn to stare.
That first moment of mutual astonishment had given way to a curiosity about each other that had in time grown to an enduring friendship. Once we had overcome our initial disbelief and began to pool our knowledge, Maruman revealed that all beasts were capable of mindspeaking together as we did, sensing emotions and images as well as brief messages, though typically not so deeply or intimately. He said animals had been able to do so in a limited way even before the holocaust, which, interestingly, he, too, called the Great White.
I told him my one piece of knowledge about the link between animals and humans, gleaned from a Beforetime book my mother had read. It had claimed humans evolved from some hairy animals called apes, which no longer existed as far as I knew, but neither Maruman nor I could feel that was more than a fairy tale.
I had heard many stories about the Great White from my parents as a child, which were different than the stories told by the Herders once I entered the orphan home system.
I remembered little from my childhood, but Herder lessons about the Great White and Beforetime were driven into us during the daily rituals and prayers, exhorting us to seek purity of race and mind. The priest who dealt with such matters at Kinraide was old, with a sharp eye and a hard hand. His manner of preaching often reduced new orphans to screaming hysteria. He made the Beforetime sound like some terrifying concoction of heaven and hell, woven throughout with sloth, indulgence, and pride: the sins suffered by the Oldtimers. The holocaust itself was paraded as the wrath of Lud in all its terrible glory.
This fearful picture was tempered by the stories one heard from other sources, gypsies and traveling jacks and potmenders, who presented the Oldtimers to us as men who flew through the air in golden machines and could live and breathe beneath the sea. Those stories left little doubt that the Beforetime people had possessed some remarkable abilities, however fantasized and exaggerated the details had become.
Maruman had little to offer about the Beforetime. He had more to say about the Great White. Dismissing the Herder version, Maruman said the beastworld believed that men had unleashed the Great White from things they called machines—powerful and violent inanimate creatures set deep under the ground, controlled and fed by men. Beasts called them glarsh.
I questioned him as to how inanimate things could be violent or fed, but he could not explain this apparent paradox.
Maruman said he “remembered” the Great White, and though that was impossible, he wove remarkably frightening pictures of a world in terror. He spoke of the rains that burned whatever they touched, and of the charnel stench. He spoke of the radiant heat that filled the skies and blotted out the night, of the thirst and the hunger and the screaming of those dying, of the invisible poisons that permeated the air and plants and waters of the world. And most of all, he spoke of the deaths of men, children, and women, and of the deaths of beasts, and when I listened, I wept with him, though I did not know if he had imagined it all or if he was somehow really able to remember something he had not seen firsthand.
According to the orthodox history of the Great White, only the righteous were spared. But Maruman said those spared had the luck of living a long way from the center of destruction and that was all. If he was right, then all that the Herders had told us were lies, and the Council, supposedly devised by Lud, was more likely man-made, too.
It was then I had begun to understand what my parents had been fighting for with more than blind loyalty.
Maruman bit me, bored with my musings; then he licked the place as demanded by courtesy. I looked fondly at him, wondering where his wandering had taken him this time.
“Where have you been? I missed you,” I told him.
He purred. “I am here now,” he answered firmly, and I knew better than to question him further. He did not like to be questioned, and when he did not want to talk, the worst course was to press him. Gradually, over time, he would give me enough information to work out the rest, but for now I noticed a few places where his fur had rubbed off and assumed he had been to tainted land. If that was true, he would almost certainly undergo another of his mad periods. I resolved to feed him up, because he did not eat at such times and was already too thin.
“She is coming,” he sent suddenly, and looking at his eyes, I saw that he was already half into a fey state, and his words were probably only raving.
Nonetheless, I asked, “Who is coming?”
“She. The darkOne,” he answered. “She seeks you but does not know you.” A thrill of fear coursed through me. His thoughts seemed to tally with my own persistent visions of being sought. “She comes soon. The whiteface smells of her.” Maruman spat at the moon, which had risen in the daytime sky. It was full. I wondered why he hated the moon so much. It had something to do with the coming of the Great White, I knew.
He snapped at nothing above his injured ear, then yowled forlornly.
“When does she come?” I asked, but Maruman seemed to have lost the thread of the conversation. I watched his mind drift into his eyes. He growled and the hackles on his back rose, then he shook his head as if to clear it of the fog that sometimes floated there.
“When I was on the dreamtrails, I met the oldOne. She said I must follow you. It is my task. But I am … tired.”
“Follow me where?” I asked. Then I gulped, for a horrible notion had come to me. “Where does the darkOne come from? Where will she take me?”
“To the mountains,” Maruman answered. “To the mountains of shadow, where black wars with white, to the heart of darkness, to the aerie above the clouds, to the chasm under-earth. To the others.” Suddenly he pitched sideways, and a trickle of saliva came from his mouth.
I sat very still, because none lived in the mountains save those at Obernewtyn.
A keeper from Obernewtyn would come; if Maruman was right, it would be a woman who would find out the truth about me.
4
LIKE EVERY CHILD, I had heard stories about Obernewtyn. Parents and orphanage guardians used it as a sort of horror tale to make naughty children behave. But, in truth, very little was known about it.
In its early days, the Council had been approached by Lukas Seraphim, who had built a huge holding in the wilds of the northern mountains, on land ringed by savage peaks and only just free of the Blacklands. He had offered this holding as a solution to the problem of where to send the worst-afflicted Misfits and those who were too troublesome for use on the Councilfarms.
In the end, an agreement had been made to send some Misfits to Obernewtyn, where they would be put to work. A few generations later, the agreement still stood. Some said it was just li
ke another Councilfarm and that the master there only sought labor for an area too remote to interest normal laborers. Others said the Seraphim family was itself afflicted in some way and pitied the creatures, while still others claimed they practiced the dark arts and needed human subjects.
Those Misfits taken there were never seen again, so none of these stories had ever been authenticated properly. But such was the legend of Obernewtyn, grown over the years because of its very mystery, and it was feared by all orphans, not the least because in more modern times, it sent out its keepers to investigate the homes, seeking undisclosed Misfits among us.
It was said these keepers were extraordinarily skillful at spotting aberrations, and that the resultant Council trial was a foregone conclusion.
If what I feared was true, Maruman’s garbled predictions and my own premonitions could only add up to a visit by a keeper from Obernewtyn. In the past, I had been fortunate enough never to have been present at a home under such review, but it was an occasion I had dreaded, particularly as my abilities made me far more deviant than any Misfit I had ever heard of.
When official word of an Obernewtyn keeper’s imminent arrival was circulated, my worst fears were realized. All the omens implied disaster.
Jes was worried enough to catch me alone in the garden and advise me to be careful. His warning itself did not surprise me, but he looked scared, and that made him more approachable. Impulsively, I told him of my premonition, but that only made him angry. “Don’t start that business now,” he said.
“I’m afraid,” I said in a small voice.
His eyes softened, and to my surprise, he took one of my hands and squeezed it reassuringly. “She can’t possibly know what you are unless she is like you.” I stared because that was the first time in many years he had mentioned my secret without bitterness.
He went on. “Look, why do you think everyone finds out she’s coming before she gets here? They do it deliberately, to scare people. If people are nervous, they’re more likely to give themselves away.”
Wanting badly to please him, I nodded in agreement. He looked surprised and rather pleased; we had done nothing but argue for a long time.
We smiled at each other hesitantly.
The keeper arrived three days later, and by then, the atmosphere in the home was electric. Even the guardians were jumpy, and the Herders’ lectures had grown longer and more dogmatic. A keeper could not have wished for more.
Like me, many of the orphans had never seen an Obernewtyn keeper. I was amazed to see how beautiful she was, and not at all threatening. It was impossible to look at her petite, fashionably attired form and credit the Gothic horror stories that abounded in connection with Obernewtyn.
She was introduced to us at a special assembly as Madam Vega, head keeper of Obernewtyn.
The orphans who met her spoke of her beauty and sweetness and gentle manner. Nothing was as we had imagined, and nothing happened in those few days to cast any suspicion on me. I was even able to convince myself that both Maruman and I must have been mistaken. Even so, I greeted the morning of her departure with a kind of relief.
I was working in the kitchen when one of the guardians instructed me to prepare a tea tray for the Kinraide head and her guest. It was an innocent enough request, but as I wheeled the laden tray to the front interviewing chamber, I felt uneasy. I took a deep breath to calm myself.
The head was standing near the door when I entered and gestured impatiently for me to transfer the tea things from my tray to a low table. I did this rather awkwardly, wondering where Madam Vega was. I reached out with my abilities to locate her, an act that always made me feel oddly exposed because it required me to unshield my mind. Sensing that she was at the other end of the room, I turned to see her standing at the purple-draped window, her back to the room as she looked out over Kinraide’s broad formal gardens.
Then, slowly, she turned around.
When she turned, it seemed she went on turning for an eternity, gradually showing more of herself. Struck with the dreadful curiosity of fear, unable to look away, I became convinced that when her movement was completed eons from now, I would be looking into the face of my most terrible nightmares.
Yet she was smiling at me, and her eyes were blue like the summer sky. She hastened to where I stood.
I swallowed, too scared to move until the Kinraide head gestured for me to pour the tea. My hands shook.
“My dear child,” said Madam Vega, taking the teapot from me with her own lovely white hands, “you’re trembling.” Then she turned to the head with a faint look of reproach.
“She has been ill,” the other woman said with a shrug. I prayed she would dismiss me, but she was sugaring her tea.
The keeper looked at me. “You seem upset. Now, why would that be, I wonder? Are you afraid?”
I shook my head, but of course she did not believe me.
“You need not fear me. I’m aware of all the silly stories. How they began, I really don’t know. I am simply here to take away those children who are afflicted with mental problems. Obernewtyn is a beautiful place—though cold, I admit,” she added confidingly. “But there is nothing there to frighten anyone. And my good master seeks only to find a cure for such afflictions. He thinks it is possible to do this before the mind is full grown.”
“A noble purpose,” murmured the other woman piously.
Madam Vega had been watching me very closely as she spoke. I felt as if I were drowning in the extraordinary blueness of her eyes. There was something almost hypnotic in them.
“I know a great deal about Misfits,” she said.
I wanted to look away but couldn’t, and an urge grew within me to find out what she was thinking. I let the edge of my shield fade.
In an instant, a dozen impressions pierced me like blades, but beneath the blue compulsion of her eyes, they faded.
“Well, well,” she said, and stepped away from me.
I stood for a moment, half dazed.
“Well, go along, then,” said the Kinraide head impatiently.
I turned on shaking legs, willing myself not to run. As I closed the door behind me, I heard Madam Vega’s sweet voice utter the words that spelled my doom. “What did you say that girl was called?”
5
“JES!” I STUMBLED into the kitchen, sending out a cloud of panic and urgency. “Jes. Jes. Jes!”
I almost fell over the astonished Rosamunde, who was working there. “Elspeth?” she said disbelievingly.
Jes charged through another door, his face contorted with fury. “What are you doing?” he shouted. Noticing Rosamunde, he stopped to stare at us in confusion.
“For Lud’s sake, Jes, don’t yell at her. It’s one of her fainting fits again.” Rosamunde looked uncertainly at me. “That water must have been tainted, despite what the Herder said.”
“Water?” Jes whispered incredulously.
“Of course,” she said sternly. “And stop glaring at her. She’s just been in with the Obernewtyn keeper. I’ll get a powder,” she added, and departed.
“Is it true?” he asked, fear in his eyes.
I nodded numbly. “I was only meant to serve tea. But she knows now.”
“How can you be sure?” he pressed. “Tell me what they said. Did they speak of me?”
“They said nothing. But at the end, when I was leaving, she asked who I was.”
He gaped. “That’s all?”
I shook my head. “She knows, Jes.”
The light died in his eyes. He might despise my powers, but he did not doubt them.
“Jes!” It was Rosamunde. She frowned at him from the veranda. “Don’t stare her down like some idiot guardian. Help her outside. Some fresh air will revive her.”
“She’s all right,” Jes snapped, but he carried me onto the veranda and set me on a couch. Ignoring him, Rosamunde handed me a powder. I swallowed it without demur, hardly noticing its bitter aftertaste.
“I am sorry,” I told Jes, suddenly remo
rseful.
He made no reply. His face was grim. I could not blame his hatred of my abilities. At that moment, I hated them myself.
Rosamunde had noticed the look on Jes’s face and sat on the couch beside him. “What is the matter? Tell me. You know you can trust me. I’ll help if I can.”
He looked at her, and to my astonishment, I could see that he did trust her. Lying to this girl would not come easily to him. I studied her properly. She was a plain, sensitive-looking girl, pale as most orphans were, with a mop of brown curls neatly tied back. I wondered how I had been so blind as to miss the thawing of my self-sufficient brother.
Jes turned to face me. “Are you all right, Elf?” he asked. That had been his pet name for me in happier days, but he had not used it for a long time. How odd that it had taken a disaster to show me that there was still some bond of affection between us. His face was thoughtful, and as I had often done before, I wished I could read his mind. He was not like me, yet his was one of the rare minds that seemed to have a natural shield.
Rosamunde gazed at us both in consternation. “Tell me, please,” she urged.
“Elspeth will be declared a Misfit,” Jes said tiredly.
“You poor thing,” Rosamunde whispered.
“Elf … has begun to have unnatural dreams,” Jes said slowly.
I stared at him. Occasionally I had true-dreamed, but that was the least of it. Why was Jes lying?
“It was the tainted water,” Jes continued, his eyes evasive.
I gaped openly now.
“But … everyone knows that sometimes happens when someone comes into contact with tainted water,” Rosamunde said incredulously. “She was normal before the accident, and I am sure that will temper their judgment. She might only go to the Councilfarms, and you could petition for her once you have your own Normalcy Certificate.”