"Man's soul is like a tidal pool, child... connected to the sea by a submerged channel. To the casual observer it appears landlocked, yet the water rises and falls with the universal currents. Your soul is connected to the world soul; your energy to the Universal Energy; thus do we all rise and fall with the cosmic tides, even those who never know such tides exist."
"Could you heal any ailment with these crystals, Magda? Even the hopeless ones?"
"Crystals are merely energy generators, Fancy. Each different stone supplements the energy of the human it contacts in a special way. There is no magic to it, only an enhancement of life-force. Crystals can help open a chakra to reveal the problems hidden there... but then the true 'healing' rests in the hands of the seeker. What will he do with the new knowledge of his own ailment? Will he believe what he has seen, and modify his life? Will he let go of the fear that constricts, or the greed that imbalances, or the lust that endangers? Will he pay the price of health, which is unflinching self-knowledge? Will he choose to live in harmony with Universal Law? Or will he blunder on just as before?"
Fancy shook her head. "What else can the crystals do?" She tried very hard to reattach herself to reality, but her sense of that had been altered and she felt disoriented.
"Some crystals are star seed, Fancy. They were programmed with information only the Initiate can read. Some were programmed by the high priests in Atlantis, before the last inundation, so that all arcane knowledge would not be lost. The same priests placed this knowledge in the brains of dolphins, too, but it cannot yet be retrieved, except by skilled shamans. Some crystals were programmed on far distant stars."
"How do you read the future in your crystal ball?" Fancy's voice was hushed; she could no longer disbelieve.
"That is a complex matter, child, even I do not know precisely how it empowers me," she said. "The crystal is a focusing point for the clairvoyance of the mind... but it is something more. A doorway through the Crack Between the Worlds, where all realities meet, all time, all space. The power of the scrying crystal is sacred—were I to misuse it, not even the Goddess could save me from my doom. And, too, the crystal ball I carry with me has been used by priestesses down the corridors of time, since the Dawning. It vibrates to their energy as well as mine, and thus it amplifies my powers. When I die, a priestess will be sent to retrieve it."
Fancy sat up, blinking in the sun, and Magda watched her nearly naked body, perfect as only youth is perfect, full-breasted, narrow of waist, flat-bellied, and long-limbed, all in exquisite proportion to her size.
"You will need no magic to bind a man to you, Fancy," she said solemnly, "the Goddess has given you other enchantments." Then she rose from her kneeling place and hooked the bag of crystals onto her belt again. "Come. I must cleanse the crystals now."
"How do you do that, Magda?" Fancy asked, tugging on her shirt. "How do you bind a man so he desires only you?"
"Foolish girl! Would you repeat Magda's stupidity and pay the same price?"
Fancy put her hand on Magda's arm. "I want to know, Magda. I really want to know."
Magda's eyes flashed malevolently. "I am not ready to give you the gift of the sword that could cut your throat. And you are not ready to receive it." She turned and strode off down the hillside and Fancy, feeling stronger than she had in months, watched her go-
Chapter 43
Fancy had kept in touch with Jewel, throughout her pregnancy; she felt kinship for the woman who'd saved her life. She'd decided to write her of the decision she'd made, and hoped Jewel would understand.
Dear Jewel,
I have a baby daughter—she is so beautiful I sometimes think she can't be real. Her hair is black as a raven's wing and her eyes the most gorgeous blue-violet you've ever seen. She looks entirely too exquisite for this imperfect world.
She has changed me, I think, into a woman. I feel unselfish as I never have before and find myself wanting things, not simply for ambition's sake, or because I feel I deserve them, but in order to make a life for my child—to keep her safe, as I never was myself. Now I can fully understand how much you love Dakota.
I have decided not to return to Oro just yet, but to head for New York City to try my hand on the stage—so I'm afraid I'll need the money I left in your keeping. I hope you'll forgive me and understand that I must try to make something of myself—I don't want to grow old wondering if I might have won the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, if only I'd tried harder and made the right sacrifices. Does that make any sense to you?
I want you to know that I haven't forgotten the notion of starting a theatre in the Crown, so after I've learned my trade, I may be back on your doorstep. Meanwhile, I'll try to keep in touch. I'm excited at the prospect of finally being on my own and scared to death too—I'll let you know how New York treats me and my precious Aurora.
Give my love to the girls and to Bandana when you see him. Tell him I miss him more than I can say.
Your loving friend,
Fancy
Jewel put down the letter, a thoughtful expression on her face. The only person she'd ever met with black hair and violet eyes was Chance McAllister. My, my, my! So that was why Bandana had bid so high at the auction. She wondered if he knew about the baby or if she should tell him. Probably not... Fancy's secret was her own business. She shook her head and walked toward the bar where Rufus stood guard over the money she would send today.
Jewel knew as she did so that she had not seen the last of Fancy Deverell.
Magda stood quietly in the doorway of the tiny room, watching Fancy. She moved stealthily as one of her great cats, and frequently surprised the girl with her presence.
"Fancy," she said softly. "I have decided to give you the gift of strengthening before you go. Come... we will go outdoors and I will show you."
Fancy followed, grateful for the respite from packing. Magda planted her feet wide and bent her knees slightly; she looked like an athlete in training.
"Do as I do," she commanded. "Remove your shoes and ground yourself by greeting the earth barefoot.
"Straighten your spine and drop your hips... let the flesh and muscle hang gently from your bones... draw energy from the earth below and from the sky above as if you were a tree... center this energy in your spine."
Fancy attempted to emulate Magda's stance.
As she had with the crystals, Magda directed Fancy's concentration up the body, chakra by chakra, color by color. An electrifying energy swirled through the girl, enlivening every cell. Her arms began to tingle and swell, as if all the heightened energy was collecting there.
"My hands, Magda. My hands are on fire!"
"Wonderful, Fancy! Bravo. The power is collecting in your hands... you could use it to heal. Were you to touch someone now, he would be filled with your energy."
"My God, Magda! I've never felt anything remotely like this... it's a kind of ecstasy."
They began the walk back to the cabin and Fancy had to restrain the urge to run, leap, frolic; she felt free in an unaccustomed way.
"Magda, you are absolutely incredible! You know everything... more than everything. Oh, Magda, tell me how to bind a man. I want to know what you know."
"You are drunk on unaccustomed energy, you ninny. You have touched the life flow, that is all. Now you think your wings are grown great enough to fly! You are a baby girl, first learn to walk." She laughed as she left Fancy to finish her packing, but the girl was so filled with rapture that nothing could mar the day.
Gitalis and Wes were silent in their sorrow, Magda hid hers in movement.
Tomorrow Fancy would go, and the baby with her. The little cabin that had rung with their laughter and tears would be still again. Magda had been brooding through the night... what had she left undone, untaught, unprepared? The rock-strewn path of Fancy's life had spread before her in her dreams, and she had awakened sick with anxiety. What a curse it was to know so much.
She threw back the covers and arose. She pulled the ancient grimoire
from its Chinese chest, and thumbed the pages of the magical book of spells nervously, for what she sought. The Binding Spell. Anguish flooded over her, unleashed by those potent words.... Fancy had begged again to be taught, but how could the girl withstand the temptation of the snaring spell, if she herself had been undone by it?
In the west I stand,
at the Hierophant's station.
By the virtues of the Cup,
I seek the aid of the Elder Ones.
Lend me Thine hand, ye Great Ones
beyond and behind my being...
The words and their intonation reverberated in her soul, thrusting her back into the abyss, sucking her down to her own doom.
This trap I set, this snare I lay
to bind his heart to me this day...
Tighten the magic girdle, circumambulate deosil to the west, place the object-link to the man upon the altar. The ritual lived in her, as it always had. She swayed with the memory thick as incense, seductive as sin itself.
You are my quarry,
You, the unwary...
Her head throbbed with the ancient music of the spheres...
Evohe! Evohe! Evohe!
Magda snapped the book shut. No! Fancy would be destroyed by knowing, Magda would not be the instrument. She yanked open the drawer and buried the grimoire under a mound of clothing. It was hidden knowledge that should damned well stay that way.
Fancy looked about her nervously before she pulled the grimoire from the drawer. Her heart pounded as she opened the magical journal and she ceased to breathe. She'd known for years of the book, seen Magda pore over it, been forbidden ever to read it....
The bold scrawl on the pages was Magda's; Fancy thought the spidery scratching must be Tatiana's. It looked ancient, mysterious, the pages smelled with the must of ages.
Nervously, Fancy copied down the binding spell... she hated doing it behind Magda's back, but the idea of the spell had obsessed her ever since she'd heard it could be done.
If it was true... if you could truly influence a man to love you, or even to be captivated by you, perhaps you could use the same magic to seduce an impresario or an audience... or a man who was uncertain of his love for you. Hastily, Fancy scribbled down what she could understand. The old woman's scrawl was in a foreign tongue, but Magda seemed to have recopied it in English later on. She wrote furiously, glancing nervously out the window. Who knew how long they'd be away on their shopping mission?
What in heaven's name did deosil mean, or widdershins? What was the "Opening Exercise of the Temple Rite" that was called for... it was easy enough to find the proper phase of the moon, as the instructions said to do, but there were other instructions that made no sense at all and half the Names of Power were unpronounceable.
Fancy thrust the book back into its cubby and pushed the drawer shut, relieved. Even if she never used the spell, or if it really had no magic, she was reassured by having it. Practical information had always appealed to her most of all.
Magda sniffed the air of her room and let her senses snake out in all directions. The force-field has been disturbed—there was a ripple in the protective shield that warned of an intruder. She sighed. So Fancy had taken matters into her own hands. So be it. One cannot keep another from her destiny. Magda would not mention the deception unless Fancy did; if the girl asked for an explanation of the grimoire's instructions, she would teach her, but to do so Fancy would have to own up to the theft. How subtly the universe lets us weave our own noose. Magda shook her head at the stupidity of the girl's deception.
Without instruction Fancy could never work the spell properly anyway. There was nothing to do for now but let the whole incident pass by.
PART VI: HEADING TOWARD SUNRISE
Fancy Goes East
"You better go armed against the Philistines."
Bandana McBain
Chapter 44
"Get them off the stage!" The jeers outshouted the theatre company's Hamlet. "Give us burlesque or give us our money back!" After the kidney-jostling ride in an overnight stagecoach, the derision of the audience was infuriating.
"Cretins!" Hamlet hissed under his breath to Ophelia. "We give them the Bard and all they want is slapstick."
"It's better than the apathy in the last town," Fancy murmured through clenched teeth. "At least we know they're alive out there."
Life since leaving Magda, Wes, and Gitalis had been a bitter, backbreaking experience. She'd found quickly enough that before an actress conquered Broadway, a great many other obstacles had to be mastered, most of them in backwaters like this one. Three years of hardship already separated her from Denver. Three years of the almost impossible task of motherhood, under the particular constraints the theatre imposed. Three years of rattrap hotels and hunger, of numbing cold in unheated railroad cars, of the hostility of boorish audiences like this one, who demanded burlesque instead of Shakespeare.
At least this repertory company meant steady work for thirty weeks, even if it also meant dragging from town to town, all over Christendom. The bad news was that each "jump" seemed to take her farther from her dream of New York; the good news was that the years of practice had made her a professional again. Shakespeare, variety, burlesque, music hall, comedy, tragedy... there wasn't any role she couldn't tackle now.
Having Aurora to provide for made life harder, but it also gave Fancy's ambition both impetus and sanction. No effort was too overwhelming, no sacrifice too great, no obstacle too impossible, because she strove not only for herself but for her daughter. Eventually the struggle, the ambition, would pay off, she told herself doggedly when life was its bleakest; when the right opportunity came along, she would have suffered more than enough to know how to grab hold of it with both hands.
Fancy sighed and tried to remember her next cue. When you performed a different play every other day, you sometimes found yourself substituting Lady Macbeth for Ophelia, not that it would matter to those farmers beyond the footlights.
Fancy stared in loathing at the rapidly moving black spots on the gray sheet in the boardinghouse bedroom. Bedbugs! Roaming the sheets in frenzied squadrons. She yanked the little girl back from the bedside and crushed her dark head against her thigh to hide the sight.
"Bugs, Mommy," the words came through the muffling. "I hate bugs!"
"I hate them, too, darling," Fancy whispered. And I hate the cold and the hunger and the poverty, she thought savagely, but she couldn't frighten the child by saying any of that aloud.
"Make them give us another room, Mommy. Please!"
Fancy steadied herself to say no to her daughter—this room was all she could afford, maybe all there was in this fleabag town. And she was too exhausted to drag her trunk downstairs again, to look for another place to stay.
"Mommy will fix the bed, Aurora," she said, steady as she could. She picked up the bar of soap from the washstand and wet it into stickiness with the water in the bedside jug; she would do what the burlesque dancer in the last town had taught her. Taking a deep breath for courage, Fancy Deverell, of Beau Rivage, slammed the soap bar down onto the dirty sheet a dozen times in rapid tattoo to capture as many little black specks as possible so she and Aurora could find some fitful sleep before the light of morning.
The nightmare sweated Fancy into wakefulness. Terror, stark and unabated, filled the nooks between her bones. It was forever the same dream. Torn, ravaged. Images of rape and violence. Then the running. Until her breath was sucked from her lungs and her legs could carry her no more, and she would fall down screaming. Down, down to the Predatory Dark Thing that laughed as it pursued her. Down, down to that horrific place where there was no justice or even mercy. Hell. That's what it must be, she always thought, as she fought for breath and turned up the lights and changed her soaking nightclothes and peered into all the dark corners of the room to be absolutely certain it had been a dream.
When had the nightmare come to stay? After her mother's death, or with Atticus on the road, or after she'd been r
aped? Sometime, so long ago that the Predatory Dark Thing seemed always to have lurked there on the fringes of her sanity.
Aurora heard her mother scream herself awake and peered at her, confused and angry. Mothers were not supposed to be afraid of anything. Fancy tucked the little girl in with soothing words.
She pulled a dry nightgown on over her shaking body and got back into bed, avoiding the sweat-soaked sheets as best she could. She reached out for the lamp on the bedstand and turned down the flame to a tiny glow. But she didn't turn it out.
Chapter 45
"Ever notice how we don't seem to talk about our dreams for the future since Fancy's gone, bro? Like we used to, I mean?" Chance asked, riding next to his brother up the gorge. The overgrown bracken to right and left, and the loose stones underfoot, made the passage with pack mules arduous.
"Ever notice how saddle sore you can get after three days riding like this?" Hart replied.
Chance laughed and Hart found it hard not to respond to his mirth for it always seemed as genuine and free as an act of nature.
"Why don't you like to talk about her, bro? We three had a lot of good times together."
"That we did." There weren't many weeks that went by when Hart didn't ache with remembrance of those times. Try as he would to forget, Fancy was always there inside him, tucked into some sacrosanct place that time did not erode.
"I've still got those dreams, you know, bro. There's a feeling inside me that I was meant for something special—rich and maybe famous, too. I never really felt like I'd been born in the right place. Even when I was a kid I was sure I was destined for fame and fortune." He glanced over at his brother to see if Hart understood.