The Splendour Falls
My mouth was running now without any sense of self-preservation. I knew Shawn was more calculating than he appeared. But part of me still believed he was just trying to play the odds in his favour and that he would give in easily when I stood up to him.
That was a miscalculation. He proved his viciousness in the grip on my hand. It tightened until I felt the bones grind together, and I gave a surprised gasp of pain.
Rhys jumped forward, but not before Shawn yanked me out of the green circle and up against him, twisting my arm around behind my back until I cried out and went up on my tiptoes, trying to relieve the pressure on the joint.
‘Stop there, English, or we’ll see if you can fix her broken arm.’
I made another sound, this one not of pain but of fear, because when Shawn spun me round, I faced the river. ‘Rhys, look. The lawn. The water.’
He glanced behind him and his shoulders stiffened as he saw what I meant. The water was creeping up towards the summerhouse. And bringing its unearthly entourage with it.
‘I think he’s bringing them,’ I said with horrified awe. I knew Shawn had an uncanny ability to charm and sway people. The spectres would be even easier because they had no will of their own. ‘He’s controlling them. Oh my God. You did make the Colonel’s ghost throw Clara down the stairs.’
‘Shut up!’ Shawn wrenched my arm up higher, twisting a cry of pain from me.
And then, suddenly, he was screaming. Shawn let go of my wrist and I slipped out of his hold, stunned to see a six-pound ball of muddy fluff attached to his leg. Gigi was awake. She’d gotten up under his jeans and clamped onto his Achilles tendon. And she was not letting go.
Rhys didn’t waste the opportunity. He jumped Shawn and they went down with a hard crash into the gravel. Gigi let go, and I scooped her up in my good arm and scrambled out of the way. Rhys’s fists were flying and I had to wonder where a professor’s son had learned to fight like that.
Unfortunately, it looked like Shawn Maddox knew what he was doing, too, as my shoulder could attest. I didn’t even see how he did it – magic? Oh my God, anything was possible – but he threw Rhys into a hedge, then went after him.
My mind was spinning through the past few minutes, checking lost bits of conversation. The council was in the summerhouse, which was going to be underwater in a few minutes. Not to mention overrun by the ghost army. Why weren’t they running and screaming in fear? Where they in a similar thrall?
In a decisive burst of insight, I knew what to do. While the boys tore through my garden and the drowned legion advanced, I ran for the standing stone.
The rock seemed to hold onto the moisture in the air, staying dark and wet the whole day. It should have been cold to the touch, but it felt warm and alive. The stone wasn’t magic, but it was the focal point of something huge and mystical, and I opened myself up to that idea and flung myself off the cliff of reason and logic, into the swirling ocean of I-might-be-crazy-butI-don’t-care.
And I didn’t fall.
A tide of energy rose and caught me. It seemed to carry me to a dizzying height, until I was looking down at the land from far above, a satellite image of this earth. My earth. I could see lines of energy running through it like a net of light, dim and broken in places, shining too bright and hot in others, like a fuse about to go out.
Too high. Too far.
The dancer who flings herself around the stage ends up injured or unemployed. She always places herself. That’s what gives her balance. That’s what gives her control.
I came back down, in my body but still with the extra layer of awareness. I could see the lines of power that connected Shawn to the ghosts. With a wave of my hand, I cut the cords that bound them, surprised at how easy it was. Of course, that was setting things to rights. What I did next was more difficult. I pointed at the grass at Shawn’s feet and tripped him as he ran at Rhys again.
He hit the ground and Rhys grabbed his arm, taking a page from Shawn’s own book, and twisted it up behind his back. Shawn thrashed and cursed, but couldn’t move.
Leaving the stone, I felt the connection stretching along with me, unthinned by distance. I crouched in front of Shawn, grabbed a handful of purple flowers from the herbs beneath him, and dropped them over him, picturing a blanket of sleep. He stopped thrashing.
Rhys looked at me, breathing hard, bleeding from his nose and his lip. ‘You are taking to this rather quickly.’
‘I’m a natural,’ I said, oddly calm. I didn’t think it was shock. I felt too right.
Trusting my spell to hold, Rhys stood and offered his hand to help me up. I stood without it. ‘How could you believe that I would go along with him?’ I accused.
He looked at me levelly. ‘Weren’t you thinking of it?’
‘That’s—’ Completely true. ‘Completely beside the point.’
Screams from the summerhouse interrupted what was probably a dead-end argument. When Shawn had gone unconscious, it must have released whatever hold he had on the council. They seemed to be only now noticing what was going on, and I was amazed at his ability. It must have taken a lot of power to keep nearly a dozen people as complacent as he’d kept the town about the TTC’s activities.
‘Come on,’ said Rhys, and we ran for the spiral staircase at the corner of the balcony, Gigi still in the crook of my arm. I climbed quickly, and Rhys and I assessed the situation from the better vantage point.
The water was already up around the bottom of the summerhouse, and there were still ghosts, milling about as if they had nowhere to go now that they had lost their direction.
Kimberly and the others leaned out the door, but understandably didn’t want to come further as the water swirled and eddied around the steps. That, and the ghosts.
Rhys wiped the blood from under his nose and rubbed his hand on his jeans. ‘This is going to be a big job. Are you up for it?’
‘Are you?’ I asked, since all I’d seen him do tonight was use his fists.
He turned to me, his face beat up, his clothes filthy, his expression wary. ‘We’ll have to really trust each other.’
‘I can probably fake it for long enough.’ It wasn’t really the time for jokes. But it also wasn’t the time for a long discussion on how trust involved telling your ally – that was accurate, if incomplete – everything pertinent before the bad guy forces you to. It wasn’t his error in judgement that made me wonder if I could trust him again, but that he hadn’t told me about it.
‘No, Sylvie,’ Rhys said, urgent, but careful to catch and hold my gaze. ‘I trust you, now more than ever. You have to trust me like you’d trust your old partner not to drop you on your head.’
I studied him for as long as I dared, with the crisis all around us. Then I admitted, ‘I trust you, Rhys. My heart is smarter than my brain, and I should listen to it.’
He smiled, just a quick acknowledgement, and I faced the river, offering him my hand. Rhys took it, my left in his left, and stood behind me. Then he surprised me by putting an arm around my waist, like we were starting a pas de deux. My senses expanded again, my awareness of the world, but this time Rhys’s hold kept me grounded, linking realities, focusing my perceptions like a lens.
I saw the web lines of power, the hot nodes and the sickly dim ones, but now I was able to relate them to where we were. There was a line connecting the ruins of Old Cahawba, the Hill, the church and the town, and all along the line the energy was off. Out of proportion. It skewed the beauty of this unseen, extra?sensory landscape.
With water imagery on my mind, I pictured myself opening dams where the line connected to others, equalizing the pressure. Evening the flow of the earth’s energy.
‘Can we hold back the water so they can get out of the summerhouse?’ Rhys’s voice was low in my ear.
I blinked, and saw that the ghosts had gone. Nothing but shades, they’d disappeared as shadows did when you flicked on the light.
‘OK,’ I said. With our linked hands I made a motion, like pushing back a
curtain. The wave swept back – I couldn’t help a gasp of amazement – and the Teen Town Council made a run for it. They helped one another up the wet and slippery slope, towards the house and high ground.
Defying physics was more difficult than righting the natural order of supernatural energy. My knees began to shake, and Rhys’s arm tightened around my waist, flooding me with strength. Even he was breathing hard, though, when the last boy was out of the gazebo and running for the house.
We let go together, and the water swept forward, taking the summerhouse with it. But everyone inside was safe. And the ghosts were – mostly – laid to rest.
The very last thing was done quickly. But a deal was a deal, and you don’t get something for nothing. As Gigi looked up at me, monitoring everything with a serene doggy calm, I took a sad but resolute breath, laced my fingers with Rhys’s and balanced the last equation.
I knew my leg would continue to heal without help. What I didn’t realize was how much the garden’s energy was keeping me propped up. The night’s worth of stress and running and fighting surged through me, and with a cry of pain and surprise, I went crashing down, neither leg supporting me any more.
It was a good thing Rhys was there to catch me.
Chapter 34
There were some seriously frantic parents by the time things were all over. The sheriff showed up, kids were ferried home, there were a lot of tears on all sides. Now that decades of accumulated imbalance had been reset, Shawn didn’t have the same power to draw on. If I needed proof of that, I found it in Shawn’s face as the sheriff read him the riot act for endangering all the teens with his prank.
None of the kids could recall how they got there. And most of them were also fuzzy on the details of what they did during their normal meetings. Kimberly did remember that Clara was in the hospital, and told me to tell Addie to call her.
Rhys’s dad arrived just as the last car pulled away. The waters were receding almost as quickly as they’d risen, and the state police had opened up the roads that were out of danger. Professor Griffith made tea – naturally – and we ate by candlelight – cold cereal with tepid soy milk – while I gave him the official version of the evening’s events: Rhys had been busy at the archaeological park, I’d been reading in my room, and we had no idea that Shawn Maddox had organized a gettogether of thrill-seeking teens in the summerhouse. That is, until they barely escaped serious injury as the floodwaters knocked down the building.
‘I never had a good feeling about that Maddox boy,’ said the professor. ‘Despite his last name.’
‘What about his last name?’ I asked, recalling the conversation vaguely.
‘Maddox. It’s an anglicization of Madoc. Quite the coincidence, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. But you said it was unrelated.’ I wondered if other people would be realizing things about the Maddoxes that they hadn’t before, now that Shawn’s charm had run out. He would still have his natural good looks, though, so perhaps not.
Rhys held his watch to the light of one of the candles. ‘Isn’t it getting late, Dad? I’ll bet you’re knackered.’
Professor Griffith checked his own watch. ‘Heavens. It feels much later than it is. I’ll bet you youngsters are done in as well.’
‘A bit,’ I admitted in a colossal understatement. I could barely move, and my leg hurt like someone had been hammering on it. ‘I really want a bath, though. Is the water heater gas, do you know?’
‘You could try it and see.’ The professor rose from the table with a stretch. ‘There will be some cleanup to do in the morning, so let’s get an early start. We don’t want Paula to come home to any more of a disaster than she has to.’
I smiled slightly, imagining that Paula would have a lot to say about the mess. Her ordered life had been anything but since I’d gotten here.
The water heater, thank heavens, worked just fine. I sank my aching body into the scalding water and felt every scratch, scrape and bruise sting and protest. I lay in the water, thinking, until it was cool enough to give Gigi a quick rinse. She seemed to have no lingering effects from her adventures, but I didn’t let her paddle or play.
I was startled by how much I didn’t regret my tradeoff. My leg would continue to heal, at its own rate, and if simply working in the garden helped it along, I would take that. But the help I’d gotten tonight – running through the woods, rescuing Gigi, facing Shawn – had been extraordinary. I mean extra-extraordinary, and I didn’t regret giving up that step towards temptation.
Besides soaking my aching body, there was another motive behind my leisurely bath. When I came out, the house was quiet and dark – no flicker of candlelight from downstairs or the professor’s room. Holding Gigi’s tags to keep them quiet, I snuck down the hall to Rhys’s door, but he didn’t answer my quiet tap. Returning to my own room, I wasn’t at all surprised to find him waiting for me.
He sprawled on the bed, looking cleaner than when I’d left him in the kitchen. ‘You took long enough,’ he said, checking out my latest borrowed sleepwear – a set of plaid flannel pyjamas. I practically swam in them, but I was still chilled, and they were perfect and warm. Not to mention modest.
‘I needed the soak.’ I set Gigi on the floor, and she immediately jumped on the bed to greet our visitor.
‘I had to make do with a cold splash in my room,’ said Rhys, bringing all kinds of pictures to mind. He’d left a candle burning on the nightstand, and it cast appealing shadows on his sculpted face.
‘It’s a good thing it’s so dark in the house,’ I said. ‘Or your dad would have wondered about your newest bruises.’
‘Oh, he asked me. I told him I got in a fight over a lady’s honour.’
I pulled the towel from my head and combed through my hair with my fingers. ‘Are we going to talk about what really happened?’
Rhys paused in petting Gigi. ‘We were both there.’
‘Let’s compare notes.’ I sat on the very edge of the bed, unaccountably shy now that we weren’t in the middle of life-and-death crises. ‘Tell me about Prince Madoc.’
He sat up and took a length of my hair between his fingers, toying with it idly as he spun the tale. ‘Once upon a time, there was a Welsh nobleman named Madoc. He had a brother, and both of them were in contention for their father’s throne. Rather than risk a civil war, Madoc went exploring and found new lands to conquer, with no one to contest him. He sailed back to Wales, and gathered up a group of men and women to return with him to this New World.’
‘Simple enough.’
‘You would think so.’ He kept playing with my hair, winding it around his finger. ‘But there was a princess involved.’
‘Of course there was.’ Women always complicate things. That was what made stories, and life, interesting.
‘She was meant to marry the brother, but Madoc persuaded her to come away with him to this undiscovered country. Some say he kidnapped her; others say they were truly in love.’
‘But it’s the same pattern as Hannah and her suitors.’ At his blank look, I had to explain the whole thing from the diary. Then, more reluctantly, I pointed out,
‘And there’s you, and me, and Shawn. Even though you’re not brothers. Is it coincidence? Or were we cast in these roles when we got here? Did we never have a choice in how we felt?’
He caught my anxious gaze with his own steady one. ‘We always have choices, Sylvie. And patterns can be broken.’
‘But’ – I wasn’t done yet – ‘what if we leave here, and I don’t feel this way any more? About you.’
He didn’t look worried. ‘Do you think that’s going to happen?’
I studied his face, which wasn’t impassive at all. With the smallest flickers of expression, I could read his calm confidence in the future. That was different than when we’d met. I’d gotten better at reading him, but he’d also let me in. Maybe not by choice at first. But here we were, sitting on my bed in the middle of the night.
‘No,’ I said, answering his question
, then turning it around. ‘Do you?’
Taking two handfuls of my hair, like pigtails, he pulled me close, laying his forehead against mine. ‘I think I loved you before I ever got here. So no, I don’t think that will change when we leave.’
Wetting my lips, I could feel his breath kissing them, from just inches away. ‘So,’ I whispered, ‘what are we going to do now?’
‘I suggest we stop asking questions,’ he said, and shut me up very effectively.
After a few minutes – by which I mean a blissful, long, unhurried span of undetermined time – we lay on top of the covers of my lumpy bed and exhaustion took over. I fell asleep between kisses, but not so deeply that I didn’t grab Rhys when he tried to leave. He gave in, curled around me and flipped the quilt up over us both.
I woke, freezing cold, despite my flannel pj’s, and being sandwiched between Rhys and Gigi, who’d managed to take her usual place behind my knees. The icy air seemed to creep in under the door and through the keyhole.
The Colonel did not approve. I closed my eyes again against a wave of guilt. I’d forgotten something important. I still didn’t know why Jacob had left Hannah or what had happened to her baby.
The next morning when I woke, Rhys was gone, back in his own room before his lousy chaperone of a father was awake, and before all the excitement began.
When the flood took out the summerhouse, it revealed something else. A ring of standing stones, bluestone, like the one in the garden, each about two feet high. They’d been under the summerhouse. Which, in retrospect, made great sense.
Rhys, once he got over beating himself up for scouring half the county for something right under his nose, was giddy with excitement. Not because of the magical implications, but because Paula gave him permission to take a sample and compare all the rocks to the ones native to Wales, so he could find out if they really had come from there, like the Stonehenge stones.
It wouldn’t mean anything to his father’s research unless he could prove how long they’d been at the Hill, but it was interesting to find out that Rhys was a complete nerd about rocks, for no other reason than that he thought they were cool.