The Golden Thread

  In fact he had already gone, and he never came back, and I couldn’t figure out what had happened but I knew it had to be because I’d done something so awful that Mom couldn’t even talk about it. Even now that I knew it hadn’t been my fault at all, just remembering how I’d felt then made my eyes smart.

  I heard Bosanka say bitterly, “So, good, they like that I track them, I find them. This is done. Should I die now, go crazy, what?”

  Joel played the night that Paavo Latvela died, or anyway that’s what I heard. Other people in the boat cried over private meanings of their own.

  The boat turned lazily surrounded by the riot of clicks and hoots and whistles that answered.

  Barb spoke like an oracle announcing a decision of the Fates: “Listen. They say, ‘The choice you were born for is bright with this moon, join us or leave us, be swimmer or runner or hand-folk or fin-folk. Our powers are cast off, except for a small part, we saved it for you, child, to alter your form. Your lone swim is over. You drew these young handed-ones here as our voices, and now this is ending. Your questing is over, your worth is well proven. You are our daughter, and we are your people. Land-choice or sea-choice, we love you forever, we sing you forever, you live in our songs.’ ”

  Bosanka, her mouth drawn down like the mouth of a theatrical tragedy mask, blurted out, “I don’t come all this way to be—to be animal!” She pointed shakily at me. “When we are on land, Balentena, I will kill you for this low magic that turns my people into—into—”

  “What is wrong with you?” Barb said fiercely. “They want you! Which is more than you deserve, girl!”

  “You don’t know, witch of the dark!” Bosanka spat. “This is beasts! I don’t want them!” She shook her fists over the water. “Go away, leave me! I, Horn’s Breath, First Hunter of the High Forests, the last of my true people, I don’t want you!”

  “Bosanka, don’t!” Lennie said, over the howl of the violin.

  The sea-people answered once more.

  Peter nudged Lennie’s back with his foot. “Leave it, man, it’s over. They’re going. They’re saying good-bye.” He paused, looking embarrassed. “I can’t do it like, you know, poetry.”

  “Just say it out,” Barb said impatiently, and Mimi said, “Don’t worry, Peter, it’s not a contest!”

  Peter stood up with the easy balance of somebody used to boats. With a sort of formal stiffness he recited what he heard the whales and dolphins say.

  “ ‘The choice is your choosing, sad for us, it sinks our hearts. But our tides still call us’—uh, something about they have maps to make and places to put in their songs still—uh—‘We sing the seas’ heartbeat, our currents spin onward—’ They don’t want you to feel bad, though they know you will. ‘In dreams you may hear us, we’ll be singing your choosing, farewell and remember, remember, recall.’ ”

  He stopped, bowed a ridiculous little bow, and sat down.

  Joel had lowered his bow and the violin at last. His shoulders loosened and his head dropped back a little so that the moon shone on his face. He had done real magic tonight, magic that Paavo himself would have been proud to do. This was Joel’s triumph, and he glowed with it.

  Nobody could stay like that for long. I didn’t want to see his brightness dim, so I made myself look away.

  All around us the water swirled silently as one by one the islands of the whales’ backs slipped under the surface. But one shape began to rise and rise and rise alongside the boat, as if we were in an elevator going down. More and more of the moon-washed sky was blotted out by this living wall lifting out of the sea.

  “Yo!” Peter said softly. Nobody told him to shut up.

  The giant rolled slowly past our boat in a curve like the curve of a whole planet’s horizon, turning back downward toward the deeps: a salute, a farewell.

  My throat closed up and my eyes teared.

  I had one clear thought out of total left field, or maybe out of some of the memories that Joel had roused up: if only my mom was here—she would finally understand what it was about magic that called me! I wished she could see this: it belonged to her, too, by family right.

  Twenty feet away over the empty water, a lone dolphin leaped and did what trained dolphins do in shows. With a whiplash movement of its whole body, it threw something it had been holding in its mouth.

  I grabbed my silver pencil out of the air, the token of my wish. The slim cylinder burned like ice in my palm. A cool flood of knowing rushed up my arm and through my mind.

  I had wished blindness on my mother, and that had blinded me as well. All wishes that try to force other people turn back on the wisher. Now, with the dolphin’s help, I had canceled the wish that bound my mother—and my own mind cleared. I could “read” a final message from the pencil as clearly as if the dolphin had delivered a telegram. The pencil was, after all, an instrument of communication.

  “Bosanka,” I said. “They ask that since you choose to be hand-folk, like us, you try to use your hands only for helping and healing. They hope you’ll teach us to do that, too, for their sakes and our sakes and the sake of everything living on this world.”

  “Shut up!” she screamed at me. “Shut up, shut up!” Her face was twisted with fury and tears streamed from her eyes.

  Facing that mask of fury, I saw how hopeless the sea-people’s wish was. I saw Bosanka’s future as an exile living as one of the clumsy, technological hand-folk she despised.

  She would become a bitter, miserable, destructive person, cut off from everyone else by her own choice, reaching deeper and deeper into the meanest, angriest, most hurtful parts of herself. She would struggle to hang onto the raggedy bits of the power she remembered having had, once. That old life on a lost and ruined planet would grow more glorious with time, making the present uglier and more repulsive by contrast.

  She would become what my mother had always feared becoming, and what maybe I could have become too, without Mom, Gran, Paavo, Joel, or the whole Comet Committee for that matter: hateful, cold, hoarding the warped ruins of half-remembered powers—a wicked witch.

  I thought of my Gran, the most unwicked witch there ever was, and how one time I saw her hold out her hand to an evil sorceress in a last attempt to win her away from black magic. Great young talent gone bad and lost, Gran had said later, mourning her enemy. “Sister,” Gran had appealed to Ushah. “Daughter, mother, friend.”

  Well, I wasn’t Gran and I couldn’t go that far. But I had to do something, because Bosanka’s future was unbearable to contemplate.

  Even she deserved better.

  “Hey, Bosanka,” I said. “It’s not the end of the world. I won’t leave you twisting in the wind. I’m just a talented lowborn, but I am your student host.”

  And I put out my hand toward her, but it stopped in midreach, while a whispery voice crawled in my mind where nobody could hear it but me, “Very generous, but it’s the people close to her who’ll bear the brunt of her anger—and whatever power she has left. She wants to destroy you right now, like a drowning person pulling her rescuer under!

  “Gran offered Horrible Ushah her hand—and remember what happened! Ushah tried to kill her! And besides that, who are you, anyway? You are not your Gran!”

  For a second, I thought I had been turned to stone, by the fear of what I’d already done and what I was about to do.

  But I knew that voice now. Fear, go away, I thought, as fiercely as I could. No, I’m not Gran. I’m Valentine Marsh, and I will do my will!

  Suppressing a shudder of pure panic, I reached toward Bosanka, trying not to think of what I would or could do if she tried, literally, to drag me over the side of the boat and drown me in vengeful fury.

  What she did was go stiff as a board and clamp her eyes shut, but she let me close my fingers around her icy hand.

  Somebody took my other hand—Lennie, that was his chunky mitt. It would be him, I thought, going all sloppy inside with gratitude and relief; warm hand, warm heart, a real softy.

 
The others took their cue from him. They shuffled around arranging themselves. Tamsin reached for Bosanka’s other hand, completing the circuit.

  I saw a faint golden glow on Bosanka’s wet face—was the sun coming up?

  I thought of the round-cheeked Sun card in Gran’s tarot deck—the card that Gran said stood for the heart’s desire. We all knew the desire of Bosanka’s heart. She had come a long, cold, lonesome way for it, but she would never have it now.

  We all knew it, and she saw that we did, and I think that was as hard on her pride as anything.

  I tried to make it easier. “I know we’re not your people, but we’ll do what we can, okay?”

  She threw back her matted hair with that gesture I had always thought of as contemptuous. She looked me in the eyes and I believe she read my mind, read her future there, and understood it. A sobbing breath whooshed out of her.

  In a low, painful tone she said, “No, you are not. I have done a mistake, many mistakes. Balentena, will you make the light you made on New Year’s? Maybe they come back for me. Will you show me to my people?”

  Well, we’d come this far, hadn’t we? I was willing—but what about Peter and Mimi, who had torn around the park as a couple of deer, and the rest of the committee, forced to the lake by Bosanka’s power lines and hunted almost to death?

  I said, “You’ve got the whole Comet Committee here, just as you wanted. Ask them all.”

  Bosanka resolutely raised her head to face them. “Committee, will you show me to my people?”

  There was an awkward silence.

  Then Tamsin said irritably, “Well, why didn’t you just ask like that in the first place?”

  Peter laughed nervously.

  And then, by God, we made a comet.

  The boat filled with light that seemed to shine from inside the crooked circle of our linked bodies and hands. A weird, giggly tingling made me feel weightless and insubstantial, as if I were part of one of those skydiving teams, holding hands and falling together.

  But we fell upward, toward the sky.

  We were brighter than the moon, brighter than the sun. There was nothing anywhere that shone like us as we fell without moving, all the motion existing inside us.

  Bosanka sat taller, stretching, shimmering with light caught from us. Her hand squirmed and changed in mine. With a tremendous muscular twist she pulled free and leaped up and outward, tearing out of our circle with a painless parting of pure energy.

  The rushing in my ears became a tidal roar that was as much light as sound. The brilliance we had been holding among us streamed after Bosanka as she arced through the air backward, over the stern of the boat.

  Her joined legs and feet, now dolphin flukes, hit the water a terrific wallop, dousing me in a freezing drench.

  While I still had my eyes squeezed shut and was gasping for breath, I heard my mom’s voice saying, “Valentine? You’d better come with me now. We have to go.”

  18

  The Golden Thread

  I OPENED MY EYES. I was sitting half-frozen in the bottom of a rowboat grounded on the littered shore of the rowboat lake, right by the little wooden pavilion. The sawhorses with their Danger signs made shadows that glimmered on the iced lake surface under a cold, moonlit sky.

  “The hospital called,” Mom said. She was standing in the pavilion dressed as she had been when she’d left for the day: gleaming silk blouse tucked into her good black pants, with her camel coat hanging open. Her hair spilled in a tangle over her collar.

  “They called me out of the writers’ conference,” she said. “I’ve been with your Gran since noon. We have to get back there.”

  Nobody else was in the rowboat except Joel. He crouched in the bow, hugging a bulky object that had to be the violin, inside its battered case again.

  “Where’d everybody go?” I asked him. My lips tasted of salt, my clothes were still damp, and I was beginning to shiver.

  Joel shrugged. “People came for them,” he said in a carefully neutral tone. “Like your mom, here, for you.”

  But nobody had come for him, obviously. One of the really annoying things about Joel was that he was so prone to feeling sorry for himself, and that he usually had a perfectly good reason to feel that way.

  I gathered myself up to climb out of the tilted boat, stumbling over the oars that were lying in the bottom. “You’d better come with us, then. Mom, can Joel come with us to the hospital?”

  “Yes,” she said. I couldn’t see her face too well, which was okay.

  I really wasn’t up to explaining why I was in a rowboat with Joel in the middle of the night. Or whatever else the lifting of my silver wish had let her understand.

  “That’s okay,” Joel said remotely. “You go ahead with your mom.”

  He meant that he wanted to sit there alone until he froze to death or until someone came for him. I knew who he was waiting for, and I didn’t think the chances were very good.

  “Joel,” I said, “come with me to see my Gran. Please.”

  After a minute he came, trudging along behind us through the nighttime park until we reached the cab Mom had left waiting outside on Central Park West. We all piled in. I was too tired to talk any more. Nobody else said anything either, thank goodness. At the hospital we went to Gran’s room, and Mom sat down with a sigh beside the bed.

  “She was awake for a few minutes this morning,” Mom said, “and then her vital signs started dropping. So they called me.”

  Gran was not awake now. She barely looked like a living person, she was so still and sort of yellowish in the face, which scared me. I needed to get out of there for a minute and catch my breath.

  “I’m starved, Mom,” I said, keeping my voice down. “I’ve got to go find something to eat.”

  “Bring me something, too, will you,” she said. She handed me some money from her coat pocket.

  Joel put the violin case across the arms of the other chair in the room, and he and I walked down the hallway. The nurse at the station told us there was a candy machine near the water fountain. We went around the corner she had pointed out.

  Someone was there.

  I stopped Joel and stared.

  “Joel,” I whispered. “That’s my Gran. Do you see her?”

  “By the fountain?” he said. “Checking out the candy machine?” He saw her.

  She looked small and shapeless in a blouse and skirt, summer clothes, with clunky beige sandals. She looked up with a wry half-smile.

  “It’s all stale,” she said loudly. “And no shortcake, of course. I’d skip it if I were you, lovie.”

  Then she sat down on the beat-up brown couch between the candy and the soda machines and patted the cushion next to her. “We need to talk, Val. Don’t be alarmed, it’s nothing terrible! On the contrary, congratulations are due—you’ve done very well indeed, you and your friends. It could have gone so badly that I hate to think of it. But your instincts are good. You’ll do.”

  “Joel,” I croaked. “Come on!”

  He shook his head violently and stood rooted like a tree, so I walked over alone to sit with my Gran. She radiated a faint warmth, but I noticed that where she sat, the grubby seat cushion didn’t sink and crease as if under a solid weight.

  I was afraid she would vanish before I could get to ask her all the things I wanted to ask, so I started right in. “Gran, is Bosanka really gone?”

  Gran nodded. “Gone to her own, with your good help.”

  “Well, I hope her people have a better time with their highborn princess than we did,” I said. “She was a royal pain, if you ask me.”

  “She got left behind, remember,” Gran said, “and all that the rest of her folk learned from the terrible dying of their world, she missed out on. She’s got a lot of catching up, a lot of maturing, now that she’s found her own again. They’ll help her. They love her, the more so because of what they put her through—for the good of all of them and all of us, mind, but still, there’s a great deal owed!

&nbs
p; “Of course, that’s what a highborn was born high for, among them as they used to be—and from her earliest years, she consented to be tested. And what a test! Hers was to be not just any spirit journey, but a special one, a great one, as indeed it was.”

  I could still hear the echoes of the sea-creatures’ voices clicking and whooping in my thoughts, and the mimicry of Joel’s violin. Light dawned.

  “She heard the fiddle, that first time Joel played it in Boston, because it sounded like whales’ voices, right?”

  “Oh yes, it played their calls,” Gran said. “Not that you or Joel or even Lennie would have recognized them. You’re used to those sounds as they come out on recording equipment designed for human ears, or wind instruments imitating the sea speech.

  “The cetaceans don’t actually sing, though, not with their breath. It’s something to do with vibrating the bones and oils in their bodies; more like the purring of a cat, really. At any rate, the violin played her people’s calls to her because those calls were stored in it.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking over at Joel. “Then Paavo knew about Bosanka?”

  Gran sighed. “We’ve all known for ages, lovie. The question was what, if anything, to do about her. Paavo was thinking of playing those calls for her when he got finished with your kraken, if he could get the agreement of the sea-people first, of course. It’s all been an epic of theirs, remember. But it was so very hard on her! And he never had the opportunity to try to help.”

  “You hear that, Joel?” I called.

  Gran said, “You don’t have to shout, lovie. He’s listening.”

  “But how come Bosanka saw our comet on New Year’s Eve?” I said. “That was ours, not Paavo’s or anybody else’s. I was thinking about you, not some royal savage from space! The other people there had stuff of their own in mind. Nobody was trying to get Bosanka’s attention.”