“You’re lying,” Iris said.
“No. Look. You’ll understand at least as much as I do once you know that, all those years ago, when Ghislain was sitting on the veranda of the house waiting for you to shout at him, or beat him about the head, and then begin to forgive him—all those years ago, while you and Lealand wound your imprisonment spell around him, he wasn’t alone. His Found One was with him. After it caused the second fire in Bull Mine it didn’t burn out and disappear. It wasn’t consumed. Fire was just something it mimicked. That’s what it does best—mimic.
“Remember when I was missing overnight and everybody was looking for me? You came up to the house, Cyrus, to ask Ghislain if he’d seen me. While you were out in the front talking to him, I was around the back climbing down from the veranda roof. I got stuck and was helped by someone I thought was Ghislain. And a few days later someone I thought was Ghislain shut me in the Spell Cage. But both times it was the Found One, mimicking Ghislain. If I’d had any idea how strong Ghislain was supposed to be I’d have been more suspicious. Ghislain could tie me up with, well, with one of those force rope things we just made. But I was twenty yards away from the person I thought was Ghislain when he caught hold of me to make sure I didn’t take a hard fall off the first terrace. He—it—held me and put me gently down. The reason that the great-aunties’ ‘Repair, Restore’ spell can actually resurrect Ghislain, and your imprisonment spell leaches the magic from everyone who didn’t make it, is because Ghislain’s Found One is there, making the magic stronger. It’s the stone in the fruit—and the next tree in the stone.”
Iris looked furious and tearful, but Cyrus was smiling at her.
“Why are you smiling at me?”
“You understand the magic. What it means.”
“I understand that, at its heart, it’s resurrection magic and has something to do with time,” she said. “Ghislain told me all that. But when you climb in a Spell Cage and close its doors and go back, it’s even easier to understand. I don’t just have a past, present, and future. I have an always-present present that’s made up of my whole life so far. At the end of my life I think all that rolls back into the magic. The twin Zarenes are still there, in the magic. I can feel them. They’re the stone in the fruit.”
“She hasn’t explained herself at all,” Iris said to Cyrus, aggrieved. “She just says ‘I had an anchor’—but how could she have an anchor?”
Cyrus got up and started opening cupboards and assembling tins and packets. Canny saw that he was putting together some stuff that she could take to Ghislain. She could smell coffee beans. She said, “Don’t grind those. There’s a grinder on the wall by Ghislain’s bench.”
“I know,” Cyrus said. “And it’s always better freshly ground.”
“You’re both being ridiculous!” Iris said.
“It’s my specialty,” Cyrus said. “You’ve always said so.”
“That, and being a turncoat.”
Cyrus paused, didn’t turn around, but when he replied his voice was hard. “You and Lealand made all the decisions. I made all the visits.”
“So,” Canny said, “you must know about the jeep crashed in the forest?”
“It appeared in 1942. It’s a U.S. Marine jeep. The road down from Fort Rock was still drivable then, at least to a jeep,” Cyrus said.
“One of the marines died in the crash. A guy called James. Lealand put the body in a window seat in the house, just to play spiteful games with Ghislain.”
“Lealand never said anything about that. He’s a dark one.”
“He told me,” Iris said.
Cyrus heaved a sigh.
Canny said, “Don’t give me too much stuff, Mr. Cyrus. I may be magical, but I’m not a mule.”
Cyrus began judiciously removing a few things from the flour sack he was giving her to carry.
“My mother, Sisema Afa, was with those marines,” Canny said. “Perhaps Ghislain’s Found One saw a female and seized its opportunity. It made twins. Not me and a sister. It copied my mother—but inside her, as a baby. Copying was something it knew how to do. So I’m my mother’s twin. My mother was my anchor. I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and that’s the only thing I can come up with. Maybe the Found One meant to make an anchor—but then how could it know I’d come back? I think it might just have wanted to escape by sending some of itself out beyond your imprisonment spell. By becoming a kind of father. But it wasn’t human, so instead of being half my mother and half my father, in the normal way, I’m almost all my mother—her twin—with just enough Found One so that the magic answers me. That’s how the magic works for me. I might understand the Zarene Alphabet because I’m a math genius, but it answers me because the Found One is my father.”
Canny paused and watched with great satisfaction as Iris’s eyes grew wide and her face pale.
Cyrus said, “I must say, Agnes, you’re taking this very calmly.”
“I’ve had some time to think about it, and it makes sense of things that have troubled me in the past. I always felt misshapen. Now I understand why. I’m much happier to think that I’m not completely human than to go on feeling that I’m a human being with something missing. And, believe me, it’s better to think I’m not completely human than the alternative. When I learned that my mother had been in the house in 1942 I had a moment where I thought that Ghislain might be my father. You can imagine how that made me feel! But he’s not. If he was, I wouldn’t have a twin, and my spirit could never have found its way back to my body.”
Cyrus shook his head and then laughed. “It got lucky, didn’t it? The Found One.”
“Yes! I might never have come to the valley. If my mother had known I was coming here she would have absolutely forbidden it. She never really got over what happened to her here. She was partly responsible for two deaths—the marine, Jim, and Ghislain. And the other marine died shortly afterward, at Tarawa—Alex Creech.” Canny gave his full name as a way of honoring him. “When Alex died there was no one left in the world who shared the blame for those deaths. But of course it was only ever one death. Ma wasn’t to know that Ghislain has probably lost count of how many times he’s died.”
“Ghislain makes things up,” Iris said, dismissive.
Cyrus rounded on her. “One day you’re going to have to face that it was a terrible thing we did to him. We should have released him years ago, when we still could.”
The siblings glared at each other. Then Cyrus said to Canny, “How are you going to free him?”
“I don’t know. He and I can work it out together, with the Found One, I guess. And”—she smiled—“you can keep us supplied with coffee.”
* * *
WHEN CANNY CAME INTO THE LIBRARY of the house on Terminal Hill, Ghislain barely glanced at her. His face was sad, resigned, and vulnerable. He immediately looked away, at the book before him on the desk, and didn’t say anything to acknowledge her.
Canny said, “It really is me.”
No answer.
“But I guess that’s the sort of thing your imagined Canny would say.”
He shook his head. He wouldn’t look at her.
“And that’s probably another thing your imagined me would say. That is, if you’re really imagining me properly.”
He gave her a shy look. “I couldn’t have imagined that,” he said. “That’s too convoluted for me.” Then, his voice shaky, “Please let that really be you.”
She went to him, draped her arms over his shoulders, and laid her cheek against his.
His body remained tense. “My imagined Canny can sometimes make herself felt,” he said. “Though, when she does, she never speaks, only sings like the dawn chorus.” Then, apologetic, “I’m quite mad, and my hallucinations are very strong.”
She kissed the hair at his temple. “When you see me, it might not be a hallucination, Ghislain. It might be your Found One taking my form to try to comfort you. It’s been with you for thirty-three years, and it has learned a lot about bei
ng human. But there are still things that it just can’t understand. When it makes itself look like me I’m sure it means well, even if it makes you crazy.”
The library clock whirred and a larger number appeared in the little window at the top of its blank face.
Canny could only see the side of Ghislain’s face, but she thought she detected the beginnings of relief, if not hope.
“Why didn’t it do it before now?” he said. “Not pretend to be you but—say—pretend to be Cyrus, who has been visiting regularly for a long time. How come it perfected you, when it would have had much more practice at Cyrus?”
She said, delicate, “Maybe the last time you felt this desperate it hadn’t got the hang of having a believable body—being seen and felt.”
Ghislain turned to take her in his arms and pull her down into his lap. He held her hard, buried his face in her hair, and inhaled deeply. “You have your own scent,” he said.
Canny brushed back his free-spirited forelock.
“You left me lying on the lawn and melted away through the bars of rain. I think that was the moment when my prison was most visible.”
“Your Found One shut me in the Spell Cage. I thought it was you. And you had Granddad Afa’s compass. I put two and two together and got four when, all the time, there was another number in the equation that I couldn’t see.”
“But, Canny, I know I’m not your father. I’m not anyone’s father. I may have had a bad moment, and horrible suspicions, because of all the holes in my memory, from all the times when I was dead. But I know you’re not a Zarene.” He shivered and looked into her eyes. “Beyond that, my imagination fails me.”
“The other number,” she said, trying not to sound school-teacherly. She didn’t quite manage it.
He drew back more to get a better look at her. She watched it dawn on him. “That explains a lot.”
She nestled close to him, and patiently and happily explained the rest of it. How one of her parents really was some kind of monster.
When she’d finished and was waiting for questions, he surprised her. He asked, “What happened to your friend, Marli?”
“She died, three years ago.” Canny put her hand on his cheek. “Thank you for remembering.”
“I’ve gone over every moment of our time together. Every touch, look, conversation. And at night when I get into bed I leave my shoes beside yours.”
“I was always leaving my shoes behind.” She laughed, and then said, very gently, “I’m not going anywhere now, Ghislain. I’m going to stay here with you, and we’re going to discover how to break the imprisonment spell. I don’t think it’ll be too difficult since I have my Master Rune. Getting up the hill would have been easy this time, except they’ve killed the pigs and the paths are overgrown. But the spells all gave up the ghost when I got near them. It wasn’t violent. It was just like—‘Okay, Boss, over to you now.’”
“Leaving isn’t urgent. At the moment I just want to be alone with you.”
“Yes.”
He kissed her again, a long, lingering, caressing kiss.
* * *
LATER, WHEN THEY WERE LYING in the sun on the lawn, Ghislain drawing aimless squiggles (or possibly runes) on her bare stomach, he asked, “Does Iris know you’re here?”
“Yes.”
“How are we going to deal with her?”
Canny was glad he’d thought to ask and grateful she’d have weeks, and maybe even months, to work some changes in him. She sat up and he did too. He began idly pulling grass out of her hair.
Canny said, “Before I left Castlereagh I looked in the phone book for Middleton and gave Lonnie Zarene a call. He’s the boy who was forced to leave the valley when I was last here. He was grief-stricken about it, and I promised him I’d do something to fix things for him and the other Zarene kids. I called him to tell him that I was setting off to try. We were talking about Iris, and I realized that he’s very fond of her. That made me change my mind about what she deserved. Who loves who—that has to be important. I mean, it must be anyway, no matter what we think and feel, if there are things in nature just longing to be spoken to. Things that, when you call them, respond with love, like your Found One.”
“Are you sure it’s love?”
“Yes, love, I’m sure it is.”
“When the spell is broken do you think it will leave us?”
Canny considered. “It made me and loves you, so I think it’ll stay with us. But if it does go—if it wants to, or needs to—how much can that matter? You and I have enough strength to live our lives, don’t we?”
“Love enough,” Ghislain said. “I’m tired of strength.”
ALSO BY ELIZABETH KNOX
Dreamhunter: Book One of the Dreamhunter Duet
Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet
The Vintner’s Luck
Black Oxen
Billie’s Kiss
Daylight
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
175 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010
Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Knox
All rights reserved
First hardcover edition, 2013
eBook edition, June 2013
macteenbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Knox, Elizabeth.
Mortal fire / Elizabeth Knox. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When sixteen-year-old Canny of the Pacific island Southland sets out on a trip with her stepbrother and his girlfriend, she finds herself drawn into enchanting Zarene Valley, where the mysterious but dark seventeen-year-old Ghislain helps her to figure out her origins.
ISBN 978-0-374-38829-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-374-38831-7 (e-book)
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. Stepbrothers—Fiction. 4. Islands of the Pacific—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K7707Mor 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2012040872
eISBN 9780374388317
Elizabeth Knox, Mortal Fire
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