Mortal Fire

  “Your thesis is that Southlanders are afraid of the immaterial in our lives, and that makes us lose our feeling for the material too so that, as a people, we’re a vague and soggy lot with no passion or conviction. An example of yours that I liked was how no one here can talk seriously about justice without trying not to call it ‘justice,’ because ‘justice’ is too grownup and grand for us. So that, when they were trying to ban the use of convict labor at the beginning of the century, we had senators saying they wanted to fix ‘inconsistencies in the application of our laws.’ Can’t you see that you did the very same thing just now? You said I’m a tragic loss because my brains were useful.”

  “I’m a hypocrite,” Sholto said. “Or I know when I’m beat. Take your pick. But I guess I should have said that you’re a tragic loss because your brains were yours and yours alone. You were the one who could pull the sword out of the stone. And you gave it all up.”

  “Not on purpose,” Canny said. Then she sighed and added, “I’ll miss you.”

  Sholto glanced at her, almost shy. Then he recovered. “The old Canny wouldn’t have said that.”

  Canny reflected that the old Canny might have said that she’d be lonely without him. The new Canny wouldn’t be lonely, not with her fellow students at the Teachers Training College and the hiking club. She said, “The old Canny was a cold fish, apparently. One of my friends decided to tell me that the other day. She was congratulating me on how much I’d changed.”

  “You were never a cold fish.”

  “No. I was a proportionality symbol, the one that looks like a fish.”

  “I’m amazed to hear you mention something mathematical.”

  Canny’s head felt tender. The afternoon was hot and dry, but there was a thunderstorm feeling in the room. That would be her last mention of anything mathematical. “My teachers tried to tell me to pay more attention to what other people wanted. But I remember watching others only so I could work out how to outwit them. I had no time for anyone but Marli. I clung to her from the moment we met, and when she ended up in the hospital, I think I made myself see only her. As if by visiting her every day, and thinking about her first thing in the morning and last thing at night, I could make her stay alive.”

  “You were trying magic. Performing a ritual so that something miraculous would happen. That’s what Susan would say.”

  Canny squeezed his hand. “Susan is interested in what goes on under what we all think. And while she was with you she encouraged you to look deeply too.” Then she quoted his book at him. She could still quote from memory. “‘We have floated our material culture over a sea of folktales and ghost stories nobody respectable will tell.’ The Professor and snarky Founderston book critics tried to turn you into that ‘nobody respectable.’ The Professor thought he was mocking you when he said that you were so in love with the big questions. But that was a good thing.”

  She left him to think about that. She went downstairs and poured two glasses of milk and carried them and a bowl of ripe apricots back up. She broke an apricot open for Sholto and showed him the stone, clean and untouched in its capsule of air. “I love it how apricots practically stone themselves,” she said, and flicked the stone free. Something about the sight of that apricot pit—hidden, essential to the fruit, but no longer even touching its flesh—moved Canny and meant something to her, though she couldn’t think why.

  Sholto spat out his stone, then pulled a chair over to his wardrobe and stood on it. He began rummaging through piles of old clothes and comics. He said, “The Professor didn’t like my spoiling his work with the little questions either. Like how did Ghislain Zarene escape from the Bull Mine without a speck of soot on him?”

  “I don’t know that story,” Canny said, and put down her partly eaten apricot. She had the blurry feeling she got when one of her migraines was coming on. The room was beginning to look as if she were seeing it through frosted glass.

  Sholto was peering at her. “Are you all right?”

  She rubbed her forehead.

  “Mind your makeup,” he said.

  Canny closed her eyes. When she got scattered like this, as a preliminary to the pain she’d find herself making puns, as if she’d lost the ability to take words as they were actually meant. She said, “My makeup is like numbers—one of those mysteries I’ve learned not to ask questions about.”

  “You don’t mean paint and powder.”

  “I mean my parentage.”

  “The clay and the fire,” Sholto said, and Canny heard his feet thump as he jumped off the chair. “Hey, Canny?” he said. “How offended would you be if I didn’t keep this? It was the only artwork you ever made me.” He held something out to her. “It’d be pretty hard to pack.” The thing made a dry, papery sound.

  Canny opened her eyes.

  It was yellowing a little, and almost certainly no longer smelled of Zarene Valley apples, but there, in Sholto’s hands, lay Canny’s Master Rune.

  * * *

  SHOLTO KNEW HIS SISTER had never been a sentimental person, so he was surprised to see tears. Tears, a tremulous smile, then, “Thank you, Sholto,” she said, and accepted what he held out to her, that odd artwork he’d thrown up on top of his wardrobe three years ago and forgotten about. “You kept it for me.” Her voice was shaking.

  “Mmmm,” he said, ashamed.

  She got up, and he took an involuntary staggering step backward. It was as if she had turned into a cascade, a waterfall that flowed upward, or a big bright Founders Day firework. She looked exactly the same as she had a moment before, tall, shapely, dark, very good-looking—but that was just her outside. Just her clay. He had handed her the old artwork, and she caught fire.

  The room was quiet. The evening was hot, the birds stunned by heat. The traffic was still light because the day was long and no one had to hurry home. The world went on as usual. But Sholto took another step back. The first step he’d taken was from fear, the second was to give her room, as if she were about to break into dance, or wind up for a shot-put throw. But she only continued to stand, straight and still, with the artwork between her bookend palms.

  Then something happened. Sholto thought there was a flash of light so bright that he was forced to turn his face away. When he opened his eyes, still looking away, he could have sworn he saw, for a moment, the room as it might look in fifty years if no one bothered to look after it. He saw a water-stained ceiling, and wallpaper sagging off the walls. He was dizzy, so he covered his eyes.

  Canny said quietly, “I only needed to be reminded. I don’t have to keep this. What it represents—I don’t know how to use it yet. But I do know I won’t be making foundation stones.” There was a clink, and more papery rustling.

  Sholto made himself look. His sister was rotating the artwork in her hands, as if seeking a way into it.

  “I guess I’ll need pliers,” she said. “I have to retrieve Granddad Afa’s compass from inside it.” She gave a little merry laugh and met his eyes. “I don’t want to keep secrets from you anymore, Sholto.”

  Sholto was covered in cold sweat. “Not even if I want you to?” His voice was tight with nerves.

  “Pliers?” she said.

  “You’ll find some in the toolshed. But, Canny, what is that thing?”

  She put the artwork to her ear and shook it. “It’s a kind of codex. A key to all my magic. I made it on our last day in the Zarene Valley. It was the only thing I could think to do. I sent my spirit back in time and gave it to you for safekeeping. It’s made from Granddad Afa’s compass, which Ma lost in 1942, and newspaper, tissue paper, and galvanized chicken wire from around a sapling by the sign to Iris Zarene’s guesthouse.”

  There was a bit of silence, made mostly of Sholto’s speechlessness. Then Canny said, in quite a different voice, and not a pleasant one, “Ah yes—Iris Zarene.”

  21

  IT WAS AFTERNOON, and most of the children were shut up with Lealand in the schoolroom at Orchard House, learning their Alphabet. Cyrus ha
d been building some new beehives out of dismantled apple crates but was interrupted by Iris, who had walked over to seek some of his bee venom ointment.

  They were in his kitchen. He’d made nettle tea and was spooning some of the waxy ointment out of the big crock he kept it in, into the crystal container Iris had brought with her. The container had been a present from their mother, on the occasion of Iris’s twenty-first. It was meant for jewelry, but in the life she’d lived, Iris hadn’t had any use for jewelry.

  “You really should have electricity put in,” Cyrus said. “And get a washing machine with a wringer. You can’t keep using that old-fashioned mangle with your rheumatism.”

  “It’s the first time my hand has troubled me in summer,” Iris said. “So it’ll be arthritis, not rheumatism.”

  Cyrus put the crock away and sat down at the table. He scooped a dollop of ointment out of the crystal box and began massaging it into Iris’s scarred hand.

  “Hello?” someone called from the front door. It was a young voice, but not a child’s.

  “Why can’t those hikers keep to the trails?” Iris muttered, exasperated.

  “The beehives usually discourage them,” Cyrus said, and got up to see what the hiker wanted—honey, honeycomb, or mead.

  The hiker was a young woman. Cyrus took in her hiking boots, khaki shorts and white polo shirt, and her movie star sunglasses. Then she removed her glasses and he saw that it was Agnes Mochrie.

  It sometimes happened that young Zarenes would venture back. The less talented ones could manage a short visit before falling ill. And they could tolerate another bout of withdrawal when they left again. The real magic users never returned. But here she was—the girl who should have lost so much of herself that Cyrus would have sworn that she wouldn’t even know where to go looking for what she’d lost.

  “Hello, Cyrus,” she said. “How are you keeping?”

  “Ah…”

  “You are keeping at least, aren’t you? It’s what jailers do.”

  “I see. I’m going to get sarcastic wordplay rather than thundering wrath. That’s a relief.” Cyrus was really annoyed—and elated. She’d beaten it somehow, the thing none of them had been able to beat. He felt frightened and, at the same time, absurdly proud, as if she were his protégé, not Ghislain’s.

  “May I come in?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  “I’m not a brute,” she said, offended. “If you tell me to leave I’ll just go straight up to the house. I only came here to give you a heads-up. I’m going to free Ghislain, and you might like to start thinking about how you’re going to handle that.”

  Cyrus saw she’d grown up—and it wasn’t just a matter of the three years that had passed. He stepped aside and invited her in. “We’re in the kitchen,” he said. “Do you remember your way?”

  “We?”

  “Myself and Iris.”

  “Iris,” said Agnes Mochrie. “Good.”

  * * *

  ALL THOSE YEARS of being awkward and on the outside of things stood Canny in good stead. She wasn’t embarrassed, self-conscious, or nervous. She turned her attention outward to absorb the moment and savor it.

  Iris Zarene stared, then levered herself up from the table, knocking over her chair.

  “Easy,” warned Cyrus.

  Iris’s burned hand glistened and made a sticky whisper as her fingers flashed. Her other hand was faster, and silent.

  The dust motes in a shaft of sunlight were suddenly funneled into a transparent tube of air, and then became invisible, moving in a speedy vortex as the air formed into a force rope.

  “Oh, come on,” Canny said, and began mimicking Iris.

  Before Iris could throw her force rope—casting off first, as if it was a bit of knitting, Canny saw—Canny had finished her own. Hers wound itself around Iris’s like a big constrictor around a smaller snake. Silvery-blue light crackled in the ropes like a thunderstorm contained in a snow globe. The surrounding air gave a few glassy screeches, and then the shaft of sunlight was empty of movement and dust. The vacuum between Iris and Canny collapsed with a thump, and Iris’s crystal box jumped a foot sideways, its lid suddenly covered in starbursts of cracks.

  Cyrus seized his sister’s arms and forced them down to her sides. “Would you both just cut it out! This is my kitchen.”

  “Sorry. But she drew first,” Canny said.

  Cyrus pulled out a chair for his sister, and another opposite for Canny.

  She didn’t take it. “I’m going on up the hill. I only came to let you know.”

  Iris was pale and wavering. Cyrus helped her into her seat. She managed one word. “How?”

  “Ghislain had built a Spell Cage,” Canny told them. “Something like your great-aunts’ Spell Veil. He knew the house would keep him alive. He planned to escape back into his own past, presumably not the parts when he was a suicidal solitary prisoner.” Canny spoke in a flat, bored way, then paused to study Iris. She was looking for some sign of remorse but saw only self-righteous fury. “In other words he’d just got to the point where slow starvation and atrophy seemed better than what he had.”

  “We couldn’t release him,” Iris said.

  “Because you were afraid of him.”

  “No!” Cyrus protested. “Because our spell had become so strong we hadn’t any hope of breaking it.”

  “He deserved what he got,” Iris said.

  Her brother rounded on her. “He’d served his time! The only thing that made it bearable to me that he was trapped there was that the house was so peaceful and beautiful.” Cyrus looked pleadingly at Canny. “He’s been in a kind of heaven.”

  “Alone in a kind of heaven,” Canny said.

  Cyrus dropped his face into his hands.

  “So, you’re his champion,” Iris said to Canny.

  “It wasn’t like that. At first I only tried to get up the hill because the hill tried to stop me. I was just solving a problem. And then I realized it was magic, and I wanted to do something for my friend Marli, who was trapped too, in an iron lung. I wanted to cure her.”

  Iris had her color back, and her haughtiness. Her voice was acid. “That’s your story. That you didn’t steal anything. You didn’t trespass and poke your nose in where it wasn’t wanted. You simply found something you were looking for—for unselfish reasons. Well of course that’s your story.”

  Canny looked away. She pictured her Master Rune—saw it clearly, the beautiful, lunar smoke of it. It was every part of the life she’d lived so far, open to every other part. It held all that and could hold much more. Every passing minute gave her more places she could go. Go back, see, learn, understand everything better. But that was all she could do—better her understanding. Oh—and be there. She could be there.

  * * *

  ONCE CANNY HAD PULLED the model of her Master Rune apart and retrieved her grandfather’s compass, she knew there was a first thing she must do. To do it, she didn’t even need to take off her beautiful bridesmaid’s dress. She just left her body, standing in the dress, as inanimate as a dressmaker’s dummy, and floated to the door of Marli’s ward.

  She waited there, watching a nurse working in the light at the head of the iron lung.

  The nurse slipped a straw into Marli’s mouth and encouraged her to drink. Then she washed Marli’s face with a steaming flannel and dried it for her. She spread a salve on Marli’s cracked lips. She promised to be back in a minute or two, and then went out past Canny without seeing her.

  Canny floated into the room. One thing that she’d particularly loved about her dress was the sound it made when she walked. Now Canny discovered that the spirit of a dress made no sound.

  Marli saw her of course. The blanched, sweat-beaded face reflected in the chrome-edged mirror lit up on seeing her. “Canny!” Marli whispered.

  Canny had to concentrate in order to pick up the hairbrush. But taking hold of the brush was inevitable—because she’d done it already—and so she reached for it, and closed her i
mmaterial fingers on its handle. And there it was, in her hand. “Would you like me to brush your hair?”

  “Yes.” Marli turned her head one way to let Canny start on that side, and to watch her in the mirror.

  “I’ve brought some hair ribbons, I thought I’d weave them into a plait.”

  “That really is a beautiful dress,” Marli said, gazing at Canny in the mirror. “Though Mum would say ‘Do you need to show quite so much of your lungs?,’ meaning breasts.”

  They both giggled; Marli wheezing.

  Canny fanned her friend’s hair out and brushed it till it was sleek. Then she began to make a French plait, weaving the ribbons into it—green and white. Marli closed her eyes, basking while Canny worked. Once Canny was done, she opened them again and said, anxiously, “Will you come tomorrow?”

  Canny carefully put the hairbrush back on the tray on the top of the iron lung. Her hands didn’t tremble. Only bodies suffer the poisonous venom of fear. She’d lied so often, and none of the things she wanted to say could be said. This couldn’t be a valedictory visit, only a loving farewell. She said, “I’ll come the day after tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  Canny stooped and touched her lips to her friend’s hot cheek. “Sweet dreams, dear. Try to get some rest.”

  Marli obediently shut her eyes again. Through the thick glass of the porthole in the wall of the iron lung, Canny watched as Marli’s good right hand found her crabbed and atrophied one and gripped it tight. Marli held on to herself.

  Canny left her friend. The way she went—the way that worked—there was no place where she could pause and look back.

  * * *

  IN THE KITCHEN OF THE APIARY Cyrus Zarene said, “Agnes, telling us why you went up Terminal Hill still doesn’t explain how you come to be here, memory, magic, and all.”

  Canny laughed. “Well, I used Ghislain’s Spell Cage. I thought he shut me in it, as if the only real use he had for me was as a guinea pig.”

  Cyrus drew breath to ask another question, and she held up a hand. She was pleased to see Iris flinch. “I had an anchor,” she said. “So I went all the way back to my beginning, found my Master Rune, and returned.”