“I remember it,” Esmeralda said. She smiled, hearing the old familiar room names of the House dropping so casually from Tim’s lips. “After the long drive from the airport, some tea would be lovely. But first I have to talk to someone.”
Tim followed her gaze as it went into the Postman’s Room. “There’s a phone in the kitchen,” he said.
“The person I want to talk to is in here,” she said.
“But there’s no one in—”
“You go ahead and put the water on—I shouldn’t be long.”
Tim gave her an uncomfortable look. He hesitated in the hallway, flinching slightly as she entered the study. When nothing happened, he moved to the doorway and looked in.
Esmeralda didn’t look up as she sat down in front of the computer. “I won’t be long,” she repeated.
“Okay,” Tim said. “I can take a hint. But Blue’s—”
“Just going to have to live with it,” she said.
She waited until she sensed him walking down the hallway before turning her attention to the words that were still on the screen.
THANK YOU FOR COMING, they said.
“Not even a hello, Jamie?” she asked.
The chimes by the window tinkled again, and then a new series of words spilled out from behind the cursor as it dropped two lines and sped across the screen.
4
Smoor had changed in the months since his mistress had been slain. Unlike his brothers, who had fled into the hills the night of her death, fled not to return, he had crept back into the glade once the humans were gone. He took up the ashes of his mistress and her human puppet in his hands and spat on them, then smeared some of the mixture on his face and torso. More of it he had swallowed, and then the convulsions dropped him to the ground, pain like a fire inside, burning behind his eyes, shrieking as it swept like lava through his nervous system. He wept and tore at the grass, howling and gnashing his teeth, until finally, with the dawn, the pain left him.
And he was changed.
No longer the simple squat gnasher, with a face like a toad’s and a mind so simple it could only follow, never lead. Like a phoenix, knowledge had risen up from the ashes of the dead to wing into his mind. The woodwife knowledge of his slain mistress. The human knowledge of her pet.
Autumn sped by and the long months of winter. By the time spring touched the Gatineau Hills, he was ready to leave the solitary holt where he’d hidden away for half a year. In that time he had assimilated what the ashes had given to him.
And he was changed.
He could bide the touch of iron now and understood the ways of men—that a gift from his mistress’s human puppet. From the ashes of his mistress herself, he had acquired a woodwife’s Faerie lore. He could farsee. He could change his shape to walk among men or Faerie as one of their own. His own strengths were undiminished.
There was only one price set by the shades of his mistress and her puppet: in payment for what they had given him, the Autumn Heart and her friends must die. It was an easy debt for him to discharge for he had his own score to settle with them.
So now he walked in human form down a corridor of Ottawa’s General Hospital. He paused at the doorway of a private room and looked inside. The woman on the bed lay very still, an IV tube in one pale arm, the lights of monitoring units blinking behind her. The man sitting by the bed looked up, eyes bloodshot and haunted.
What the man saw was an orderly in hospital greens, pausing at the door. What Smoor saw were two victims, one already half-dead. He gave the man a solemn nod, then moved on down the hall, a thin smile touching his lips once he was out of sight.
Soon, he thought. Within hours, the Autumn Heart would belong to him.
5
It was a bizarre tale that Jamie related, the words appearing on his screen almost faster than Esmeralda could read them. Some of it she had known already. She had been there at the beginning—three thousand miles away, but aware enough to send her warning across the Atlantic. And she had been there at the end. Briefly. Like a murmur of wind, fanning the spark of Emma’s Autumn Gift into a glow. But she hadn’t known the details that fell between her warning and the tale’s resolution. She hadn’t watched the glowing ember subsequently fade, the spark die, the darkness return.
The first she knew that all was not as it should be came to her in a waking dream that showed Emma’s familiar face, the features now pale and drawn, the promise of the gift that lay within no longer hidden, but fled. Then the letter arrived at her Chelsea flat, a letter from a dead man, and she knew that it was too late for warnings and that words could not be enough.
And so she had come. Returned to the city of her youth. To the strange rambling house that now served as the body of one of her dearest friends.
She read the last of what was on the screen, then leaned back in the chair, absorbing what she’d been told. Her gaze strayed, not quite focused, until it fell upon a small leather bag that lay on the desk’s blotter. Here were the Weirdin that Blue had brought back from the glade.
Blue, she thought. Who was this man? Jamie’s friend, Emma’s lover. She felt as though she should know him, but knew they’d never met. Not on this turn of the world’s wheel.
The bone discs clicked against each other with a muffled sound when she picked up the bag. She’d found references to them in druidic texts, studied the meanings of the symbols inscribed on either side, understanding them with a familiarity that had long since ceased to surprise her. It was often that way for her with old things—ancient languages, the placement of stone circles, the bardic calendars of the trees, oracular devices. She’d always had an instinctive grasp of their meanings, their relationships with the past, and with the world as it was now and might come to be.
The bones were worn and smooth to the touch. She could feel the ridges of their inscriptions, smoothed as well. By time. And much use. Their age tingled against her fingers, the years rising up from them through the pores of her skin to spark and flicker in her mind.
A quick glimpse, she thought. Not a full reading, just a glimpse into where we are. Where we’re going.
She drew three of the bones out of the bag and laid them out in a row on the blotter.
Secondary, First Rank: The Acorn, or Hazelnut. For hidden wisdom and friendship.
That was Emma. Or herself. Perhaps both.
Secondary, Second Rank: The Forest. A place of testing and unknown peril.
The peril was Emma’s... unless... It depended on who was being tested, she realized.
Tertiary, Mobile: The Eagle. Release from bondage.
Who was imprisoned? Emma in her coma? Or were the bones riddling deeper than that? Release could mean many things. A release from a way of life. Release from life itself.
The computer beeped and she looked at the screen. It went blank for a moment; then Jamie’s words appeared.
THE TROUBLE WITH ORACULAR DEVICES IS THAT WITHOUT A CLEAR QUESTION THEY TEND TO MUDDY THE ISSUE.
Esmeralda nodded. “And sometimes the best thinking is done when you’re not thinking at all.”
EXACTLY.
“What do you think this means?” she asked, pointing to the bones.
THAT THEY ARE TELLING US SOMETHING VERY PRECISE WHICH WE AREN’T CLEARHEADED ENOUGH, OR WISE ENOUGH, TO UNDERSTAND AT THE PRESENT.
“In other words, ’What was the question?’”
WHEN YOU DON’T DO A FULL READING, IT HELPS TO BE VERY SPECIFIC.
Esmeralda looked at the bones for long moments, clearing her head of all thoughts to let an intuitive leap come if it would, but she had too many questions tangled up inside her to be able to attain the required inner quiet. Sighing, she replaced the bones in their bag.
“I need to think,” she said, “without thinking. A cup of tea with a playwright sounds about right at the moment.”
YOUR OLD ROOM’S WAITING FOR YOU.
She smiled. “The Blue Dancer’s Room,” she said softly. “High in the southwest tower. I used to dre
am about princes in there, Jamie, and they all looked like you. Did you know I had a crush on you? I think half the women staying here at the time did.”
UM...
“An embarrassed computer. A blushing house.” Her smile widened as she rose from the chair. “I’ll talk to you later, Jamie.”
Her good humor lasted all the way down to the Silkwater Kitchen and through her visit with Tim, but when she finally took her carpetbag up to her old room in the southwest tower, not even the room’s familiarity could stop its fading. Instead, it added to her growing sense of disquiet.
The Blue Dancer’s Room, like the rest of what she’d seen of the House so far, hadn’t changed at all. By now she shouldn’t have been surprised, but the room was almost too familiar. The books she’d left behind when she went away were still on the bookshelf. One of Emma’s watercolors hung above the mantel. Below it was a clay South American whistle in the shape of a bird that she’d borrowed from Jamie one night before she left. The patchwork quilt that her grandmother had given her was still on the bed. The room was neat, and dust-free. And it looked as though she’d just left it this morning. As though all the intervening years were just a dream. Pages in someone else’s journal that she’d read instead of lived.
She felt dislocated from herself. Talking to Jamie had woken old feelings that she’d thought she’d forgotten. And the House, this room... She had traveled three thousand miles to help a friend. Now she felt as though she’d traveled through time as well. Into the past.
She stayed long enough to put away the contents of her carpetbag, then went back downstairs, troubled by more than what had initially brought her here.
6
A deep quiet lay inside Migizi. He dreamed awake, his gaze traveling far beyond the confines of his conjuring lodge. He tapped his water drum and chanted. He spoke to his totem through the fingering of the dream objects of his skibdagan. West his gaze ranged, and farther west, beyond the sight of his soul. He lit the spirit pipe again, but Nanibush remained hidden, refusing the invitation of smoke that Migizi offered.
The deerskins of his lodge finally shook in response to his seeking, but it wasn’t the ruler of the west approaching. He heard a puckish laughter. His eyes flickered open in time to see the head and upper torso of a small, thin, brown figure poke into the lodge. Its wizened face, bewhiskered like a cat’s, flashed a grin in his direction as it drew the sacred smoke into its lungs; then the little being was gone, and the deerskins lay still.
Memegwesi, Migizi thought. The sound of their laughter diminished as the little band of mischievous manitou left the area of his jessakan. He lifted a deerskin flap in time to see the last of them slip away into the woods.
“Choose another old man to play your tricks on!” he called after them. “This one has serious business to conduct.”
There was no response, but he hadn’t expected any. He retied his medicine bag to the beaded belt at his waist and replaced his pipe and tobacco pouch in his bandolier. As he left the lodge and stood erect, muscles still supple despite his sixty-three winters, he caught another glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye.
Like the memegwesi, the strange manitou was leaving as well.
“I will try again,” Migizi told it. By the honeysuckles, his soul stirred and drifted down toward the lodge. “Dreams walk quicker by moonlight, following Nokomis’s light west. I will ask her to bear our message to her grandson.”
The strange manitou paused as though listening to him, then faded in among the trees and was gone. But it would be back. Whether he spoke to the west or not, it would return. Troubled and alone. The discord within it setting up an echoing disturbance that distressed the balance of bird and animal, plant and stone, in ever-widening ripples.
It was the manitou’s presence that kept him from reaching Nanibush, Migizi realized. He would need a stronger medicine to overcome its influence—a medicine he didn’t have, unless the moon’s light would add enough strength to his call. Wabigwanigizis would be her aspect tonight—a moon of blossoms. Not the strongest moon, but strong enough if she would help.
He walked up the slope to the hilltop and sat down cross-legged, his shadow resting beside him, his soul ranging in the shadows of the woods at his back. Birch and pine, maple and cedar. Their sap could already hear the call of Nokomis’s light, edging the eastern horizon, waiting for old man Mishomis to set in the west.
Migizi touched his medicine pouch and closed his eyes. He would try again.
7
Esmeralda waited for Blue in the garage where he kept his motorcycles. She sat on the ’67 Chevy car seat that was bolted to the floor across from his workbench and looked around at the organized mess of tools and machines. She found it odd that Emma would have ended up with a biker, though he had to be more than that if he was also a trusted friend of Jamie’s.
She tried to imagine what he’d look like, talk like, who he was. She pictured the kids in their leathers in London’s East End, then the stereotypical bikers from B-movies, and finally gave up trying. Closing her eyes, she leaned her head back against the car seat and looked for the silences hidden within. Not to dream. Just to be quiet.
She was so successful that when the garage door suddenly opened, she started upright, disoriented. A gust of wind fluttered some litter at her feet, then rose to wind her hair about her neck and face. The roar of the big Harley-Davidson as it entered only served to confuse her more. It was followed by a second machine.
Esmeralda pulled the hair from her face and forced herself to sit quietly. When the two machines were turned off and the garage door had rumbled shut again, she let out a sigh of relief for the blessed silence that followed. She watched the riders as they removed their helmets.
The man had to be Blue. He was big, broad shoulders bulging tightly in a black T-shirt, long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. His features were roughly chiseled. Gold earrings glinted in each earlobe. The woman looked tiny compared to him. She was all in black leather with a cloud of frizzy blond hair and delicate birdlike features. She was the first to notice Esmeralda sitting there watching them.
She touched her companion’s arm. “Blue?”
He turned to look, a frown creasing his face when he saw Esmeralda. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
“I could be a friend.”
He balanced his helmet on the seat of his Harley and shook his head. “Friends are people you know. And they don’t show up in your space, hanging around like they owned the place.”
This was Emma’s lover?
“I’m a friend of Jamie’s,” she said. “An old friend.”
Some of the suspicion left his face. “Well why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“You never really gave her any time,” his companion told him.
“Sweetness and light here is Judy,” Blue said, motioning to his blond woman with a thumb. “But she’s right. I’ve never had a whole lot of patience and I’m wired a little tight these days, but that’s no excuse. It’s just that people don’t usually come in here. The House knows it’s my...” His voice trailed off. “I guess you haven’t been around for a while, right? It’s just that Jamie—”
“I know what’s happened to him. He told me.”
“He...?”
“He’s the one that said I should wait for you here.”
From the way Tim had acted earlier that day, Esmeralda had already gathered that not too many people were aware of Jamie’s continuing presence in Tamson House. Blue’s confusion now confirmed that.
“I’m here about Emma,” she added. “My name’s Esmeralda.”
“Esmeralda? You’re the one with the poems who sent Emma that warning?”
She nodded.
He looked at her with an expression that she couldn’t read. “Let’s go grab a beer,” he said, “and I’ll fill you in.”
After picking up a six-pack of Millers from the fridge in the Silkwater Kitchen, they went up to the Postman’s Room to talk. Esm
eralda and Judy sat in the club chairs, while Blue pulled the swivel chair away from the desk, positioning it so that he could comfortably talk to them and look at Jamie’s screen at the same time.
“After it all went down last year,” he said, “Emma and I ended up together. It wasn’t the quickest romance on record, and not the smoothest at the start, but I’ve screwed up enough relationships in my time. This time I was going to stick it out—it was that important to me, you know?
“Anyway, things were going good, except for one thing—Jamie filled you in on what happened with Glamorgana and everything, right?”
Esmeralda nodded.
“Well, what happened was, Emma acted like it never went down. Not any of it. She just couldn’t remember anything about splitting into two different people, about Glamorgana—none of it. It’s like it went right out of her mind. What she remembered was getting messed up by some bikers and me and Judy and Hacker just happened to show up to pull her out. I mean, she sees Taran here around the House—Glamorgana’s bard, right?—and she honestly believes that the first time she met him was here.”
“That kind of thing happens,” Esmeralda said. “It’s a defense mechanism of the mind. When events are too disturbing, or they simply don’t fit into one’s worldview, the mind convinces itself that they never happened.”
Blue nodded. “Yeah, Jamie said something like that. It’s just weird. Because I remember. Taran’s living proof that it went down...”
“What about you, Judy?” Esmeralda asked.
Judy shrugged. “I wasn’t there—not for the weird stuff.”
“So what do you make of it?”
“I keep an open mind.”
“It happened,” Blue said flatly.
“I believe you,” Esmeralda said. “In a way, I was there myself.” Judy’s eyebrows lifted questioningly, but Esmeralda simply went on. “What happened after that?”
“Well, I stopped going on about it to her,” Blue said. “I figured, what’s the point? What difference does it make? But then she started getting more withdrawn over the winter. Moody, first. I thought maybe it was cabin fever—Ottawa winters can do that to a person.”