“I remember this,” she said, slowing down after a few minutes. “We took the path that curved around this big stone to go back to the Den, so”—she pointed—“Nadia’s house must be that way.”
After a few more minutes that felt like forever, they reached the wooden gate in that part of the stone wall that surrounded Nadia’s personal gardens. Through the gate, over the lawn, and there she was, pulling open the screen door so she could pound her fist against the closed kitchen door.
“Nadia?” she called. “Nadia! It’s Lynnea! We have to talk to you!” She looked around the gardens, trying to spot something out of place, something that meant trouble had come here. Nothing looked wrong to her, so she went back to pounding on the door.
“Give her a minute,” Teaser said.
“Why isn’t she answering?” Lynnea cried, feeling the frustration welling up inside her. “Where could she be?”
“Maybe she’s…occupied. You know.”
Lynnea paused, fist raised, and stared at him. “You think she’s not answering the door because she’s having sex?” She pounded on the door with more vigor. “Nadia!”
“Not sex! I didn’t say sex. Daylight, Lynnea. You’re talking about Sebastian’s auntie. I just meant…ladies take longer to answer a call of nature.”
It took her a moment to work that out. Teaser was turning into a prude. Why couldn’t he just say what he meant? “Well, why is she sitting on the toilet when we need her to answer the door?”
“It’s not like she knew we were coming.” He took a step back and looked up at the house. “Besides, I don’t think she’s here. With you making all that racket, she would have answered by now, no matter what she was doing.”
Lynnea sagged against the door for a moment, then stepped back to let the screen door slap shut. “You’re right. She isn’t here.”
What was she supposed to do? She hadn’t considered the possibility of not finding Nadia. Her eyes fixed on the broken part of the wall, the part she and Sebastian had stepped over when they’d come here from…
“We’ll go to Sanctuary. People there know Lee, so they might know how to find Glorianna.”
Teaser backed away. “No. I’m not going to Sanctuary. I can’t go to Sanctuary. I’m an incubus.”
“So is Sebastian,” Lynnea snapped. “If he could go there, so can you.”
“But—”
“Stay here then. Or go back to the Den, if that’s what you want. But stop stalling!”
She pressed a hand over her mouth and stared at him, feeling as if she’d glimpsed the person she might have become if she’d stayed on the farm with Pa and Mam. Mam’s tone of voice. Mam’s harshness. Mam’s way of cutting at a person with words, even when she didn’t reinforce it with a blow. Teaser’s fear was real—just as her fears, as a child, had been real. And harsh words that implied inadequacy, when it wasn’t said outright, had never done anything to extinguish the fear.
“Teaser…I’m sorry. That wasn’t kind.”
For a moment his blue eyes were sharp with a predatory anger, reminding her that, no matter how he acted or how distant he was from the roots of his kind, he still came from a race of creatures that could kill you with your own emotions.
Then he looked away and was back to being the Teaser she knew.
“Doesn’t matter,” he mumbled.
“Yes, it does.” She walked up to him and took his hand. “My…the woman who raised me…she sounded like that. She would have said things like that. I don’t want to be like her. I don’t want to sour the world that way.”
He gave her hand a friendly squeeze and let go. “You’re scared. So am I. So we’re both acting like we’ve got half a brain between us. Time’s passing. Let’s do this if we’re going to.”
When they reached the clearing that held the bridge, she felt the difference. This was a resonating bridge. They had as much chance of reaching Sanctuary as they had of dancing on the moon.
Teaser huffed. “We’re doing this for Sebastian, right?”
“Right.”
“We’ll be able to get to Sanctuary because we’re doing a good thing, right?”
“Right.”
“And if we end up in a snake-infested pit of a landscape, it was your doing because you were mean to me, right?”
She sighed and took his hand. “Right.”
That said, they walked to the spot in the clearing that would let them cross over to…
Sebastian sat on the floor, his back against the wall under the broken window. With the shutters closed, not much air came through the fist-sized hole in the glass, but he told himself the air smelled fresher in this part of the room.
He couldn’t keep the voices out, couldn’t do anything to block the relentless whispers.
No one will come for you. No one loves you. No one ever did. You don’t deserve to be loved. Dreaming of daylight, incubus? There’s no daylight for someone like you. There’s no daylight in someone like you. Your heart is stone and barren earth. That’s all you are. All you can ever be. That’s all you deserve. A hard life. A barren life. A cold life. That’s all you are, Sebastian. That’s all you’ll ever be. No one will come for you. No one loves you. No one ever did.
So many voices, all whispering the same thing. Some sounded cruelly gleeful, and those, by themselves, he might have been able to fight. But it was the gentle voices, the sad voices, saying the same words that wore him out and rubbed at his heart, sanding away the feelings that would have shown the words to be lies.
He was bleak. He was barren. He was cold.
He couldn’t save himself from those relentless, whispering voices. So he put his strength into hiding the shining warmth that lived deep inside his heart.
Peace.
Lynnea breathed it in and felt her body relax. Despite the warmth of the day, there was an autumnal feel to the heat. Warm days, cooler nights. Did the leaves change and fall in Sanctuary? Did people walk through gardens that slept beneath snow? Or was it always summer here? No, not always summer. There would be a different kind of peace in seeing this landscape wearing its winter shades of gray.
“We’re here,” she said softly. She looked at Teaser, who had his eyes squeezed shut. “We reached Sanctuary.”
His eyes opened enough to squint at the gardens that stretched out around them. Then his eyes popped open as a man strolling through the gardens noticed them and turned in their direction.
“It’s all right,” Lynnea said to Teaser as she moved forward to meet the man. “I met him the last time. Greetings, Yoshani,” she added, raising her voice.
“Hey-a,” Yoshani replied, smiling. “You have come back. And you have brought a friend.” His brown eyes, so gentle and dark with wisdom, focused on Teaser.
Trying to ignore the tension building in Teaser, Lynnea shifted just enough to draw Yoshani’s attention.
“We need to find Glorianna,” she said. “Something bad has happened. She needs to be told.”
Yoshani studied them and nodded. “Peace is cherished more after one has tasted sorrow. Come with me. Glorianna will not be hard to find.”
And she wasn’t. Glorianna was among a handful of men and women tidying up the flower beds in one part of the garden. Her initial smile of greeting faded as she looked into their eyes. By the time she read the message from the Wizards’ Council that Lynnea gave her, her own eyes were green ice.
“Yoshani will take you to the guesthouse,” Belladonna said as she folded the paper back into a packet. “I need to think.”
For the first time since they’d arrived at Sanctuary, Teaser spoke. “Sebastian wouldn’t want you going to Wizard City.”
“I know,” she replied softly. Then she walked away.
Before Lynnea could voice a protest, Yoshani laid a hand on her arm.
“She needs time to think,” he said gently. “You need time to rest.”
“What’s going to happen?” Lynnea asked.
“What needs to happen,” he replied. ??
?If they had not closed their hearts, the other Landscapers could have learned much from Glorianna Belladonna. It is so easy, so seductive, to think that choosing the Light is always the right thing to do. But sometimes it is not. She has never chosen the easy path. She will do what needs to be done…no matter what it costs.”
You are nothing, Sebastian. No one worth remembering, worth loving. Bleak. Barren. Empty of all Light. Cruelty birthed you. Misery suckled you. That is all there is for you. All there can ever be.
Hour after hour, they raped his heart, stripping away every memory of warmth and affection.
Helpless to stop the whispers, he curled up around the secret place inside him, keeping the shining warmth hidden, protected. He would never let them touch it. Never.
Glorianna sat on the bench near the koi pond. The heron had been by earlier that morning, and the fish were still hiding under the water plants. The message from the council was in her lap, held just firmly enough to keep the light breeze from snatching it away. It was tempting to let the air have the paper and take that taunting message somewhere else. Anywhere else.
When she heard the footsteps coming toward the bench, she didn’t look away from the pond. She waited until Lee sat on the bench beside her, then handed him the message.
“Sebastian wouldn’t want you to save him, not when it means bringing you within reach of the Wizards’ Council,” Lee said after he’d read the message.
“It’s not Sebastian’s choice.”
“This is a trap. He’s the bait. You know that.”
“I know.” Could she do this? Was she strong enough? What she was considering had never been done before, so the wizards would have no reason to think it was possible, let alone that it might prove dangerous to them. It also would mean putting things in motion and then leaving Sebastian’s life in someone else’s hands, but the strength and courage were there—if Lynnea didn’t falter when the time came. And it would have to be Lynnea’s choice. Every step of the journey would have to be Lynnea’s choice. But it could be done, leaving her free to seek justice for other hearts—and deal with the wizards.
She looked at her brother. “Are you with me, Lee?”
He put one hand over hers. “Always.”
“Then we have work to do. Talk to Teaser. Find out everything you can about where Sebastian was headed when he left with the wizard. We need to find the bridge that connects my landscapes with Wizard City. And then we need to deliver a message to the wizards.”
“Glorianna…it’s a trap. That’s why they wanted Sebastian.”
“It’s a trap,” she agreed. “But Sebastian isn’t the bait.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Glorianna watched Lee raise a hand in thanks as the demon cycles raced back to the Den.
“Well,” he said, “that was clear thinking on Sebastian’s part to ask the demon cycles to linger in this landscape to show us where the bridge was located.”
She sniffed because, somehow, being miffed seemed like the right thing to do. “I’m sure he didn’t tell them it was all right to chase the waterhorses.”
“They didn’t chase the little ones. They made a point of telling you that.”
“Oh. Well. That makes it all right. What?” The last because Lee was grinning at her.
“We’re squabbling.”
“We are not.”
“Are too.”
“Are—” She stopped. She always felt as if she were ten years old when they started one of these arguments. “Maybe. So what if we are?”
“We only squabble when something has been wrong and we know it’s going to be all right again. So I guess this idea of yours isn’t so daft after all.”
“It’s not daft.” Risky, certainly. And dangerous if it didn’t work as well as she thought it would. But not daft. “Why did you have the demon cycles leave us here?” She waved a hand at the stand of trees.
“Because I can feel the bridge.” Lee headed in a westerly direction and continued talking over his shoulder. “And I figured if we’re moving at a walking pace, you’d have a better feel of the land and more warning if the Eater left any nasty surprises in this landscape.”
Since she hadn’t found the anchor the Eater had established in the waterhorses’ landscape, and nasty surprises were a distinct possibility, she hurried to catch up to Lee and link her arm through his—both as a sign of sisterly affection and because, if there was danger, she could take them both back to her gardens in a heartbeat as long as she was touching him.
“Do you remember that time when Mother was sick for a whole week?” Glorianna asked.
“I remember.” Lee smiled. “I was about nine and you were eleven.”
She nodded. “Neighbors brought soups and broths for her, but we pretty much fended for ourselves—and survived my cooking.”
“You went to the butcher’s and the grocer’s for food—”
“—with you helping to pull your sled, since it was too snowy to use anything else.”
“The grocer was impressed that we were buying vegetables instead of sweets.”
“And oranges, remember? They came from the south and traveled through a dozen landscapes before they got to Aurora, and each one cost more than the spending money Mother gave me for a week.”
“You bought six of them,” Lee said softly. “And each day you peeled one and divided the sections three ways because you said the oranges would keep us from getting sick and help Mother get well.”
“We didn’t squabble at all during those days,” Glorianna said just as softly.
“We were afraid she was going to die. It had been a hard winter. Other people in the village had died of influenza or pneumonia. We were half-grown and so scared. She’d never been that sick before.”
“So we didn’t squabble. We kept the house orderly and did the lessons our teachers brought over so we wouldn’t fall behind in school…and we didn’t squabble.”
“Until Mother was well again.” Lee laughed. “And then we drove her halfway mad with it because we’d argue over the least little thing.”
“Yes.”
They walked in silence for a while. Then Glorianna said, “I love you, Lee.”
“Don’t.” His voice got sharp. “People start saying things like that when they think they might not have another chance to say them.”
“It’s not that. I’m just…having a sentimental moment.”
“Oh. In that case, I love you, too. I—” He tensed when she stopped walking. “What is it?”
“Dissonance. Up ahead. There’s something there that doesn’t belong in this landscape.”
“The bridge is up ahead too.”
They moved cautiously, Lee scanning the area around them for signs of some kind of creature, while Glorianna kept her eyes focused on the ground, looking for any telltale warnings that they were about to step into another landscape.
Small. Much smaller than the pond. She’d been able to sense the dissonance in the pond from her gardens on the Island in the Mist, but this alteration of the landscape had eluded her until she’d gotten close to it.
Lee led them to the bridge, then stopped two man-lengths away. “The ground is torn up around the left side of the bridge. Looks like a struggle took place here.”
Glorianna nodded. “But Ephemera stripped the grass and wildflowers around that circle of dead grass in response to whatever happened here. And that circle looks slightly higher than the rest of the ground.”
“An access point to an underground den?” Lee asked.
Thinking about the creatures Sebastian had seen at the school, it came to her. “Trap spider. That’s its lair. But…the dissonance doesn’t feel strong enough. I don’t think the Eater’s creature is there anymore.” She slowed her breathing, waited for her heartbeat to settle. She could feel the currents of Ephemera’s power all around her, wanting to respond to a heart—and reluctant to respond with a piece of the Eater’s landscapes so close. The currents of power were tangled up, knotted.
Without direction, there was no telling what the world would manifest.
She walked a circle around the trap spider’s lair, careful to stay a hand-width outside of the barren ground.
Hear me, Ephemera, she called as she circled. Listen to my heart. Tapping into the currents of Light and a single thread of the Dark, she altered the landscape, sending the trap spider’s lair into the place of stones that she had already taken out of the world when she’d blocked the Eater’s attempt to anchor the bonelovers’ landscape to the Den.
The trap spider’s lair and the barren ground around it disappeared, leaving a deep hole—a hole the world wanted to fill.
Listen to me. Listen to my heart.
It knew her. She was like the Old Ones who had known when to play with the Light and when a place needed currents of the Dark.
Soil, Glorianna thought, keeping her mind focused on the task, letting her heart beat with the promise of pleasure. Rich soil to fill the hole. Soil that matches the earth here.
Ephemera hesitated, then manifested what the heart desired. Pleasure filled the heart—and the other heart nearby. Its currents of power began to untangle. Was there more to play with?
Stone, the heart commanded. Not the stone of anger, the stone of strength.
It resonated with the heart, resonated with the land around it to find the stone the heart wanted and make more of it.
Stone formed around the back half of the circle, gray and strong. Not high. Not big. It stopped when the heart said “enough.”
Smaller stones to shape a border. And a circle of stones where the Bad Thing had made a place for Itself.
Flowers, the heart said. The breath of living things. So it manifested flowers that liked to live in this part of itself.
And one more. This time the heart resonated so strongly, there was no choice but to manifest exactly what the heart wanted. But it knew this plant. This had come from the Old Ones’ hearts to help the world heal. Wherever it grew, the Bad Thing could not change the world into something completely terrible, because hearts that could feel the resonance of the plant would always hold a little Light.