by Tiger Gray
"Well," Serwin said in his clipped accent, taking the cigarette from his mouth, "and here I thought you might not recognize me. Mortars scramble your brain, Pinecroft?"
He was too baffled to come up with a witty retort. "What in hell are you doing here?" He said instead of being clever, rushing over as much as he was able to catch Serwin in a bear hug. "Tabloids got a hold of you again?" Serwin was the son of a nobleman, and his bad-boy persona made him the darling of the yellow press. Occasionally Serwin sent him clippings from his favorite editions.
Serwin made a breathless sound and Ashrinn let him go. Serwin grinned, showing a row of perfect white teeth to rival his own. "Hardly, old boy. Turns out God has a smashing sense of humor."
"Oh no. Don't tell me."
"That's right, my friend. I'm here to give your Order a good bollocking."
"Nice of you to assume we need it." He studied Serwin, thinking about what in hell could have made him experience his moment. Even as close as they'd been over the years, it didn't seem right to ask. "I can't believe it."
"Neither can I," Serwin shrugged, taking another artful drag from his slender cigarette, "but here I am."
"Didn't want to join any of the orders in Britain?" Ashrinn knew there were several, but the Order of the White Eagle didn't have the time or resources to worry about what paladins across the pond were up to.
"Those posh fucks?" Ashrinn laughed. As if Serwin wasn't posh. "Too tetchy for me. Besides, I'd wither away for want of your company."
"Uh huh. I can see you wasting away right now. Good job you got here when you did." He tugged Serwin up the hill by his arm, as excited as a child. "Malkai will want to meet you."
"That's your mate from the Army, isn't it?" Serwin said, letting himself get towed. "I remember your letters."
"Yes," He said as they neared the farmhouse. He realized how hungry he was, and he lead Serwin inside with the intent of finding them some lunch. "Remember that story I told you about my teammate running through a fire fight to lob a grenade into an enemy building? That's him."
"Got a little Hollywood in him, does he?"
"Oh, hell no. If anything the man is too serious. You want to talk Hollywood, you should see the idiot on my current team."
"This hush hush thing you're doing. I'll take my chances with the bare infantry, thank you ever so much."
Either Serwin had found the recruitment call or Randolph had trusted enough to tell him solely on their association. "What, have a thing against werewolves?" Ashrinn put on his best innocent face.
Serwin paled. "Well. Give him a good beating and he'll straighten out."
Ashrinn let Serwin avoid the topic of non-humans. "I'm trying to avoid sinking to his level, Serwin." he said, fetching bread and honey.
Serwin sat at the table, eyeing the mismatched crockery. "That's your problem, Ashrinn. Too much the gentleman. I'd best get back to Randolph after this. He's teaching me magic, if you can believe it. Ha! I love God, making a fool like me a paladin!"
Ashrinn sat and passed Serwin the bread. He saw the haunted look lurking behind the good humor and a little part of him shriveled up and died. He never got used to seeing that traumatized look on a new paladin's face, and seeing it on irrepressible Serwin felt worse than usual. "What are you good at, anyway?"
"Me?" Serwin's eyes gleamed, as if he had a delicious secret and knew it. He paused for maximum effect. "I'm a ruddy healer."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"What if I told you I could make the nightmares stop?"
Liu stared at Sarah like Sarah had lost her mind, and skepticism colored her thoughts. This wasn't going to be some crazy wrapped-in-a-blanket primal scream thing, was it?
"I'd probably think you were crazy," she said, comfortable enough after months of appointments to say so. She didn't think Sarah knew what she was dealing with. Sarah wasn't a magical, and Liu wondered whether a spell had something to do with the illnesses, the images that hung in her mind hours after waking. Then again, she couldn't think of anyone who would bother with her long enough to waste a spell on her.
Sarah laughed. "Well, maybe. But a lot of great people get called crazy."
She knew Sarah was trying to encourage her. It made her feel warm inside. Still, she cringed at the thought of telling Sarah about what she really was. What Mom and Dad were. She knew about the Order of the White Eagle, of course, though only what Dad had told her. He'd been his usual self, keeping secrets for her own good but joking with her until she forgave him. She could imagine Sarah rejecting her for repeating what she did know. The possible scenarios played out in her head as clear as a movie. Maybe she'd even be committed, slapped in a strait jacket like in the fifties.
"Can you meet me tonight?"
Liu understood it was a totally weird question for her school counselor to ask, but she couldn't help but be interested. A possible end to her misery? Sneaking around on Mother? Not to mention, some secrets of her own to keep. "Where?"
"Do you know Lake Washington? Down by Seward Park?"
She did. "Bailey Peninsula," she said. She remembered because a teacher had once described the area as having noses at both ends. She hadn't grasped its geography until that example had gotten her to picture it. Lots of forest there, and a big section of lake. She didn't really think Sarah would hurt her, though, even if it was a good place for it. Anxiety made her chest cold and tight for another reason; there was a bus that went out there till as early as four in the morning, but taking it by herself into the rough part of town, at night, scared the living daylights out of her.
She met Sarah's eyes. She never did that, but she needed Sarah's faded, kind gaze. She didn't want to be afraid or sick anymore, didn't want to feel as though she were struggling to breathe through a full body slick of red-black oil.
She trusted Sarah.
"I'll come."
She wanted to ask why Sarah hadn't offered to pick her up, but she felt a rush of pride and understood that the point was getting there on her own.
"Good."
She knew their session was over and she stood to head for the door. Something made her pause and look back.
"You really think you can help me?"
"I reckon so," Sarah said, the same way Grandma sometimes did. Her eyes paled in the dim office. Liu froze. No pupils. The locks on her magery burned and she felt something akin to a static charge crawl all over her.
Magic.
* * *
Liu stood on the dock for a long time, but that was all right. She had a sweater on, and Coren's field jacket over that, and while her gloves were fingerless they were better than no gloves at all. They helped with the chills that had started that evening. She liked the sound of the water and the way the moonlight hit the black surface. She could have watched the spots of bright against shadow all night.
Somewhere between the bus stop and the sloping road that lead down to this section of Lake Washington she'd forgotten about being afraid, even when she left the street behind and the trees closed in on either side of the foot trail. She hadn't passed anyone on her way to the dock Sarah had told her about, a dock that was square instead of long and narrow so whole families could crowd on to it at once and watch the water like she was doing now. Maybe her fearlessness had to do with it being summer, though it was a cold night; it was hard to be too nervous when nocturnal birds chattered and the smell of flowers hung heavy in the air. She felt light headed with elation. She could count the times she hadn't felt anxiety in her life on her hands, and with that to buoy her she hardly felt sick, even.
She'd managed to sneak out too, past Mother's wards, like a thousand strands of silver wire wrapped around and around each other until there was no telling where they started and ended. They weren't designed to keep her and her siblings in, after all.
"I knew you'd make it."
Sarah's voice without the reserved note she associated with counselors sounded off in Liu's ears. She had to force herself to look away from the lake, still mesmeriz
ed by the moonlight. She turned to see Sarah on the path, outline made fuzzy by a glow she recognized as an aura. Images of her mage instructors flickered through her mind, those early lessons about how to detect a person's aura and shields, and what they might mean. Liu thought of a show Rosi had been watching earlier that morning, where a cartoon rabbit's heart had pounded out of its chest so that its skin pulled and its body distended. She felt so much like that, realizing that she'd been right about Sarah being a magical, that she had to resist the urge to look down and make sure her heart was still where it belonged.
"You're a magical!" Liu blurted, before she lost the thought in the whirlwind of puzzle pieces crashing through her mind. When she was little she'd made traps for Santa Claus, hoping to catch him in the act of leaving presents. This felt like she'd laid one of those traps and it had worked.
"Yes," Sarah said, conjuring a globe of green-gold energy that rested in her palm like a songbird's egg. Liu pressed her hands to her mouth, startled. Such an open display of magic outside of mage school took her aback. Even with her own power crippled she could still sense Sarah's as well as see it, like the bursts of static between radio stations.
"Are you a paladin?" Liu asked. She'd only ever seen that pale gold magic around paladins, though every individual changed and colored it according to their personal signature. She couldn't parse the green, either.
"As you'd figure it." Sarah walked over to stand beside her and gaze into the water too. Liu thought that Sarah's profile showed a hint of peace, and she felt a stab of envy. She wanted to feel that way all the time. It took her awhile to make sense of Sarah's words, and when she did she realized the accent had returned.
"You sound just like my Grandma." Her dad lapsed into a Texas drawl more often than not, but this was different. She usually had a hard time telling people's voices apart if they had similar qualities, but she knew both Dad and Sarah well enough to tell.
"What if I also told you we're kin?"
Liu covered her shock by being sarcastic. "This isn't going to be like Star Wars, is it? You can't be my mother; I know I'm part Fae." She tweaked one of her long ears to prove it.
"Nothing like that, girl. Even if I wish you were."
Liu didn't know what to make of that. Sarah wished she was her daughter? Sarah wanted her to be even closer family than she was claiming they were? Sarah looked over at her, and Sarah's eyes changed just like the last time Liu had seen her. Blank. Liu stumbled back the way she would have if she'd moved a rock and found a rattler underneath.
"Liu!" Sarah said, low but intense. "You have to trust me."
Liu trembled like a spooked horse. She wondered if the whites of her eyes were showing like a horse's would. It sure felt like it. "What's going on?" she said, trying to be as forceful as she knew how to be. She glanced around for someone, anyone. The path stood empty and black.
"Did your Grandma ever tell you where she was from?" Sarah's magical globe, still clenched in her fingers, gave off a pleasant haze. Liu tried to focus on that.
"Arkansas, I think."
"The Arkansas-Tennessee border, yeah," Sarah said, not bothering to hide the accent at all now. "Esmeralda and my mother are sisters."
Liu had never told Sarah Grandma's name.
"Why didn't you tell me before?" She knew she was on the verge of wailing like a stupid little kid, but she was sick of secrets. Never tell anyone about magic, never ask too much about the Order, never work any spells.
"Not to lie to you, Liucy." Sarah's expression was so wild and earnest that Liu couldn't help but believe it. She fell silent, and a moment later Sarah's words marred the surface of the quiet like skipped rocks. "I had to be sure."
Sarah went to the edge of the dock once more and sat there, drawing her legs up to her chest and winding her arms around her knees. It made her look young and sad --- though if what Sarah said was true, she was probably Dad's age --- so Liu came and sat next to her.
"Sure of what?"
"I told you I was a paladin." Sarah's tone confused her. Dad and Ashrinn were paladins and it had always seemed like a good thing to Liu, but Sarah didn't sound like she wanted to be one.
"Well," Liu said, the same way she sometimes tried to reassure Rosi, "that's a good thing, right?" Liu tucked a length of hair behind her ear and tried to school her expression into something encouraging. She ran down the list of characteristics in her mind: big eyes, raised eyebrows, slight smile. Check, check, check.
"I thought so at first. When I was little, Mamma and Daddy handled serpents to show they were right with God. If God saw you were righteous, no poison could kill you, and a big ol' copperhead could be as gentle as a kitten in the hands of a believer." Liu listened, half aware of mimicking Sarah's pose.
"One day," Sarah continued, "the house was packed with folk that wanted to get touched by God. The Spirit was on them quick. Some of them got down on all fours and barked like hounds, to let the Devil know he ought to stay away. Mamma pulled a rattler from its box, the biggest one I'd ever seen. She held it up, so everyone could see how the Lord had protected her, made that mean serpent as mild as a lamb."
Sarah stopped, and the quiet went on so long Liu thought maybe Sarah wouldn't speak again. Just when she was trying to come up with something to say, Sarah continued.
"But Daddy didn't like that none. Didn't think anyone should have the favor of the Lord more than him, so he tried to snatch that rattler. Well, wasn't nothing going to keep that serpent gentle then. It hit the ground and opened its mouth, and I thought it might just swallow me up. It bit me instead."
Liu gasped and her stomach flipped.
"No, Liu." Sarah said, reaching out to pat her hand. That was just like Grandma, too. "They treated it like a bad thing, but that's just because they couldn't accept that they'd gotten it wrong, that their God was the false one. They almost had it right, with Jesus and how He suffered on the cross, but it was the serpent that showed the way. I just didn't figure it out for a long time after, and that let false power corrupt me, before the true Lord could find me. But you? You're like me. Only better."
Liu found religion frightening. It always seemed like a lot of rules, and the way they contradicted each other and changed over time sent her brain for a loop. She'd gone to church a few times when Grandma wanted, but she always got lost trying to figure out how she could possibly be good enough with all of those restrictions. How could she stop imagining? Or wanting things? Or envying people who did better than her, which felt like everybody who'd ever been born?
Sarah had tears on her cheeks and Liu didn't know what to make of it, bringing out someone else's feelings like that.
"I know what you're thinking." Sarah said, and Liu thought that was probably true. "That I'm trying to convert you to some kind of mystical nonsense like old ladies talk about. Or that you ought to bow down to some god figure who doesn't care about you. But that's not it. I can show Him to you, Liu. All I have to do is ask and the Suffering God will welcome you. Can you say that about any other god in story books?"
"The Suffering God?" She'd heard the term once or twice, picked up from Ashrinn and Dad's whispered conversations. "You can make a god just...show up?" Sarah stood, and Liu felt as though the earth beneath them were breathing. She scrambled to her feet too, afraid. "You're not going to just do it here, are you? What if there are people?"
"Then they will dream of Him." The orb in Sarah's palm grew and expanded. She let it go and it floated in front of her. Liu knew Dad and Ashrinn had a friend who was a werewolf, and what was happening around her felt a little bit like when Jericho started thinking about changing forms. "And be saved."
Liu grabbed Sarah's arm, though whether to stop her or just have something to hold on to she didn't know.
"It's only going to be a shadow," Sarah said. "The real God can't come through yet."
Liu gulped, trying to breathe past a throat that seemed way too tight. The water rippled despite what Sarah had said about the God not bein
g the real thing; it had some kind of physical presence anyway. Her head started to throb, the locks on her powers straining.
"Why?" she asked, in an effort to distract herself from what was happening to the lake. It took her a long moment to realize that the muscles under her hand were changing, that Sarah was changing. Sarah had her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, so nothing hid the green-gold scales creeping down her arm, and when Liu looked up at her face the same scales arched over her brows and down the bridge of her nose. She wanted to run but couldn't, could only stand there with her fingers clamped around Sarah's arm.
The lake rippled and agony exploded behind Liu's eyes, the mage locks threatening to come apart.
"He can take it from you, Liu." Sarah said, raising her other hand as a shadow came to the surface, a great coiled body that tested the limits of what she thought of as reality, even with the mage training that had helped her expand that perception far beyond a normal human's. "He can take that pain from you. Heal you. Heal your sister. All things will be possible, when He is made manifest."
Liu went to her knees and crawled for the edge of the lake before she knew she was doing it. A dragon, made of bones and animated by a kind of deep and old magic she'd never felt before? No, the biggest snake she'd ever seen, so big she couldn't even conceive of where it began and ended, many heads with many mouths. The scenery bent around her. The first of the mage locks burst open. She screamed, and all those mouths opened and screamed, too.
She hadn't felt the thrum of her magery since she was a child, deemed unfit for her studies and unworthy of Mother's love because of that failure. Her panic became rage, a hot rivulet of molten metal that hardened her insides and roused the wild magic in her blood. The power, the anger, filled in all of her broken places. For once, she could feel all the mysterious connections other people took for granted, between mind and body, between feelings and actions. She could feel the God, how He wished to be one with her. What had Sarah said? That she was special?
