Sara shook her head. “No, thank you.” She paused, then added: “It’s never happened to me before.”
Kieran shrugged and dropped his hand. He still felt weak. Just the effort of holding out his hand had drained him.
“How did you get us out of the restaurant?” he asked. Looking around, he added: “And where did you get us to?”
“Me? I didn’t have anything to do with it. I thought it was you. You or those weird drummers. Don’t you know what’s going on?”
Kieran seemed to be accepting all of it fairly calmly, Sara thought. But then, after what she’d seen him do in the restaurant . . . why shouldn’t he?
“Who are you?” she asked. “I mean, I know your name—it’s Kieran Foy—but who is Kieran Foy? Why are the RCMP looking for you—for you and that old man?”
“You seem to know as much as I do already.”
“I don’t know anything. All I know is that in the last couple of days, my whole world’s been turned topsy-turvy and I haven’t a clue what’s going on.”
Kieran wasn’t prepared to go into anything with her, at least not until he understood a little more himself. But he saw that Sara wasn’t going to be satisfied with some vague answer.
“Let’s start with this,” he said. “You know who I am. Who are you? Maybe if we pool what we know, we can come up with something.”
It wouldn’t hurt, she decided. “My name’s Sara Kendell.” She had a faint flash of her dream harper as she spoke. She almost wished she was back under the Rock with him. At least then she’d known she was dreaming. Right now she wasn’t sure of anything.
Kieran regarded her strangely. Sara Kendell. She was Jamie Tams’ niece. He recalled the feeling he’d had looking at Tamson House the other night—was it only last night?—that sense of some evil presence that had showed up again at Patty’s Place. He couldn’t sense it now, so perhaps it wasn’t directly tied to her, but she was still involved. In some way. Now all he had to do was discover in what way.
“The ring,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
Sara looked down at her hand. She traced the ribbonwork with a finger, then glanced up.
“I think that’s where it all began,” she said. “It’s an inheritance of sorts, I suppose. A man named Evans—Aled Evans—left it to my uncle in a box of other junk. I found it a few days ago and that’s when it all started.”
A few days ago, Kieran thought. That was when the old man had disappeared. Her involvement, no matter how involuntary, was becoming more certain. But so far he only had pieces to try and fit together, and the full picture still eluded him. He listened to her tell of what she’d found in the box, of the RCMP Inspector, her feelings. Once started, the whole story spilled out of her, as though the simple telling of it to him would somehow make it all better, make all the strangeness go away.
“Sounds to me,” he said, “as though it’s just a matter of your being in the wrong places at the wrong times.”
Sara shook her head. “It’s all real, isn’t it? This is all really happening! And if it’s real—then my feelings are real too. I can’t just step away from it now.”
“You have to. You’re totally unprepared for . . . for anything. Look at you! You’re shaking like a leaf.”
“Do you think I wanted to be involved? I haven’t been given a choice in the matter. I’d jump at the chance to have it all just go away.”
Or would she? She realized that, for all that she was scared, really scared, she was also feeling very much alive.
“How did you get involved?” she asked.
“It seems I’ve been involved in this for all my life,” Kieran replied.
What was he to do now? Tell her how he first met Tom in St. Vincent de Paul? How he’d studied and trained since then? There was no way she could understand.
“That doesn’t tell me much,” she said.
“There isn’t anything to tell, really.”
“Oh? What happened to pooling our knowledge?”
“None of this concerns you,” Kieran said. “You’re just an innocent bystander that somehow got pulled into the action. Get out while you’ve got the chance.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
Kieran rubbed his temples. This wasn’t going right at all. He didn’t even know where they were. Her recollections of what had happened in the restaurant were much clearer than his own. His pain blocked out a lot of it.
The strange beings with their drums—they were what Tom called manitous. Elves. If they were a part of whatever was going on, it made sense that, for whatever their reasons were, the manitous had brought Sara and him into their own realm. The Otherworld. Now all he had to do was figure out a way to get Sara back. When that was done, he could get on with his own business.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Understand,” he said. “Things aren’t the same here as they were before—in our own world.”
“Our own world? What do you mean—”
“Let me finish. You’re in over your head here. You’ve been very protected, living as you have in Tamson House. You and your uncle are rich. You can go slumming when you want, because if the going ever gets rough, you can just step away from any problems that might arise. Money does that. Well, in what you’re involved in now, money doesn’t mean shit.” He pulled out what he had left of the three twenties that Johnny Too-bad had given him and tossed it onto the pine needles between them. “You can’t buy your way out of trouble here. It just won’t work. What’s required here are skills that you simply don’t have. Nor is there the time to train you in them.”
Sara stood up and glared at him.
“Of all the pig-ignorant things I’ve ever heard! Slumming? Buying our way out of problems? What do you know about us? Here you are, nothing more than some common thug that’s wanted by the police for God knows what crimes, and you’re telling me I don’t run my life properly? What about you? I didn’t choose to get involved in this. But you say you’ve been involved in it for most of your life and where’s it gotten you? You don’t seem to know any more than I do about what’s going on.”
“You don’t understand,” Kieran tried to explain. Nom de tout. You’d think he could take one foot out of his mouth before he put the other in.
“You’re right!” Sara said. “I don’t understand. But at least I’m willing to admit it.”
With that she turned and started to walk away.
“Where are you going?” Kieran tried to stand up, but a lance of pain ran down his side.
Sara paused to give him a scathing look.
“I’m not as stupid as you obviously think I am,” she said. “It’s plain enough you don’t want me around, so I’m going where I won’t bother you.”
“But you don’t know what you’re getting into. You—”
“I didn’t know before, but that didn’t stop things from happening to me. I think my big mistake was trying to find you. God knows why I bothered. Don’t you worry about me, Mr. Know-it-all-wizard or whatever it is you think you are.”
“Wait a second!”
“Piss off!”
With that she ran off into the trees.
Kieran tried to get up again and managed to make it to his knees. He called out after her, but there was no reply. Fine, he thought, settling weakly down. His side throbbed. Take off if you want. That just gets rid of one problem for me. Except, he realized, he hadn’t been at all fair to her.
He didn’t really know anything about her. And just because she and her uncle were loaded, that didn’t automatically make them useless as human beings. He pounded a fist into the ground. Lord lifting Jesus! Why couldn’t he have tried to be just a bit more reasonable? She’d seemed like a sensible enough person. She’d handled the bizarreness of this situation rather well—maybe better than he had when he’d first been introduced to the strangeness that lay side by side with the more mundane world of the here and now. If anything happened to he
r now, it’d be his fault. He was responsible for her being here.
Wearily, he made his way to the bole of a tall pine and leaned against it. This was great. Just great. So where did he go from here? He could hardly take a step, yet somehow he had to make sure Sara didn’t get hurt and find the old man. No problem. All he had to do was hike into the woods after her and then the two of them could blithely go tripping off to find Tom. Sure. How did the old song go? And if apple trees grew in the ocean. . . .
God damn!
Her cheeks streaked with tears of frustration and anger, Sara ran until she thought she could run no more, then forced herself to run further. Low-hanging boughs slapped her in the face, tree trunks seemed to jump into her way, roots reached out to trip her, and she kept rushing down corridors that ended abruptly in impassable thickets. It wasn’t at all like her dream. There was none of that sense of liquid gliding, the effortless passage of moving through the forest like a ghost.
When she tripped over a root and went flying headlong onto the thick carpet of mulch, she stayed where she fell. Sitting up, she rubbed a bruise on her knee and a lump on her head, and looked around.
This had gotten her nowhere. Not only did she have no idea as to where she was, but she no longer knew how to get back to where she’d come from. She’d half a notion that if she ran hard and far enough, she’d find herself on that beach where she’d met Taliesin. Why not? If dreams could be real—or at least dreamworlds seemed to be—why couldn’t she pick the one she was going to be in? Which was all well and good in theory, but hadn’t quite panned out like she’d hoped it would. There was probably some trick to it that she didn’t know. Yet. She’d learn. And then she’d show Kieran Foy who could handle themselves and who couldn’t.
Having caught her breath, she suddenly found herself wanting a cigarette. Funny. She hadn’t thought about smoking for what seemed ages. Now she had a craving that wouldn’t stop. She patted her pockets half-heartedly and was happy to find her tobacco pouch nestled in the back pocket of her jeans, safe and sound, if a little flat. Taking it out, she rolled a cigarette and . . . no lighter. Typical. Maybe if she rubbed two sticks together? Sure. Or maybe a convenient bolt of lightning would drop from the sky and give her a light.
Sighing, she stuck the tobacco pouch back in her pocket. She was about to throw her cigarette away, then thought better of it and stuck it behind her ear. Trying not to think of smoking or cigarettes, she drew up her knees and rested her chin on top of them. It didn’t do much good. She thought of Taliesin and could only see his fire.
A light, a light. A kingdom for a light! I’m sinking, she thought, irrevocably into a state of madness brought on by nicotine withdrawal. They’ll find me here someday, white bones lying in amongst the pine needles, skeletal fingers holding the remnants of a cigarette. . . .
Sense of humor—intact. Shall we do a quick check on the rest of me? Better not. Hate to find out I was missing something. Quick shift of gears: seashore and harper. And how do I get myself there?
She was here due to some sort of magic. Obviously, to get from here to where Taliesin was would require more of the same. How spells work was the next question. Having until very recently not even believed that they existed, it was hard to work with the idea now. The best way to start, she supposed, was to look at what magics she’d actually seen work.
When Kieran had killed the monster, what had he done? There hadn’t been any incantation or waving of hands. One minute he’d just been standing there and the next . . . But just before that moment . . . he’d been so still. Then his eyes’d begun to glow and when she laid her hand on his arm, she’d felt . . . stillness. He’d been like silence itself, inside.
That had to be it. Like an actor or musician preparing for their moment on stage, or a martial artist’s motionless concentration. A gathering of inner forces. Because whatever the magic was, it had come from inside. And it made sense that you had to be completely absorbed in it. Kieran, seeing how he claimed to be some sort of adept, probably could tune into a previously attained state where he was keyed into the power. It had to be something like that. Unless you were born with it and just had to snap your fingers?
Sara shook her head. Nope. That just didn’t . . . feel right.
She remembered reading a discussion in one of Jamie’s books on the differences between natural or intuitive magic and ritual magic. Kieran hadn’t gone through any ritual. She started to feel excited, as though she was on the brink of some great discovery.
If it was intuitive . . . if she could just focus on where she wanted to be and will herself there as forcefully as she could. . . . Well, it was worth a try. Better than running through the woods and ramming her head against trees. So how did she start?
The silence . . . the inner quiet . . . was probably the most important thing. And meditating, like with TM, was probably the best way to attain it. Although her TM instructor had told her that position wasn’t important, she’d always liked to assume a half lotus and pretend she was a Buddha. It made it all seem more . . . important somehow. So, with a grimace of effort, she pulled her legs into position.
Okay. Hands on knees. Relax. Eyes closed. Her mantra, individually chosen for her by her instructor and never to be revealed—because then they wouldn’t get the $45 from some other hopeful initiate—rose up from her memory. She concentrated on the mantra, repeating it silently to herself.
Gai-eng-ga. Gai-eng-ga.
($15 a syllable. . . .)
Gai-eng-ga.
(I wonder what Jamie’s thinking right now. . . .)
Gai-eng-ga.
(What if I get stuck in this half lotus? Who’s going to get me out of it?)
Gai-eng-ga.
The extraneous little thoughts kept intruding and ruining her concentration. Every time that happened she got a little more frustrated, then remembered that she was supposed to be relaxing, found herself thinking about that instead of concentrating on what she was supposed to. . . .
After fifteen minutes or so, she sighed and opened her eyes. This wasn’t going at all the way it should. How was she supposed to work up some magic if she couldn’t even relax? She looked down at her ring and traced the design with her finger, frowning.
Kieran was probably right. This sort of thing required skills that she just didn’t have. And she certainly didn’t have the time to learn them. Who’d teach her anyway? Kieran? Not likely. If she could even find him again.
She twisted the ring back and forth on her finger. The touch of its metal was soothing. She leaned her head back against the tree and closed her eyes again. She thought of the Rock. And the ocean. The fire. The harper and his dog. Taliesin. Harp music like Stivell’s. Liquid notes falling, one by one into the tide.
A Breton tune filled her head, one of those gavottes that didn’t have more than a dozen notes all told and just went on and on, and she found herself humming it. Back and forth she twisted the ring, a half smile playing on her lips. In amongst the tune she heard the ocean, wave against wave against shore.
After a while, she was no longer thinking of going anywhere. She drifted in a dreamy state. Her breathing eased. The air passed between her lips like the gentlest of breezes. She smelled the sea in the air. Heard the cry of a distant gull.
The souls of sailors take the form of gulls, she thought, but the thought was a distant thing.
Her chin dropped to her chest. She heard the murmur of waves breaking against a shore . . . stronger now. Felt the wind in her hair. Tasted it. Tangy. Salty. The forest around her dissolved and she was—
—drowning.
For a moment she panicked. She was over her head in water. The weight of her jeans and sweatshirt was dragging her down. Her legs, still assuming the half lotus, were a dead weight and felt like they were glued together. Flailing her arms, she fought her way to the surface. As her head broke from the water, she managed to disentangle her legs. Air! She gulped lungfuls, then paused, treading water, to look around.
What she saw stunned her. She’d done it! She’d actually done it!
A moccasined foot touched bottom just then and she realized that the water she was in wasn’t all that deep. The tide had come back in and she’d plunked herself down in the middle of it. But that didn’t matter—she’d done it. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t remember how; it was enough for now that she was here.
She stood up, feeling like a drowned rat, and stared up at the bulk of Percé Rock as it reared high in the morning skies. Turning, she looked shoreward. There was no village of Percé. No statue of a saint on top of the cliff. The trouble was . . . She looked back at the base of the Rock where the tide waters were foaming around the limestone. The trouble was there was no harper either.
She half swam, half waded closer to shore. The tidal current, though not strong, still worked hard at drawing her out into the ocean. When the water was up to her waist, it kept trying to tip her over. The shingle made an uneven footing and wet jeans had to be the heaviest things in the world. The water sank to her thighs, to her knees, her ankles.
She shivered when she was standing on solid ground once more; it wasn’t exactly balmy this morning. She tried to wring herself dry, but it was impossible. Pushing her wet hair back from her face, she shaded her eyes and looked right, then left. Where was her harper?
Far along the left shore, under an overhang of limestone overgrown with black spruce, she saw a thin tendril of smoke that could only come from a fire. It had to be his. She took a few soggy steps in that direction, made out both man and dog by squinting her eyes, and broke into a run. Her moccasins squished unpleasantly with each step and she knew she must look a sight, but she didn’t care. All she could think of was that the fire meant warmth and a chance to dry out. It wasn’t until she was a half dozen yards from the fire that she gave a thought as to what her welcome might be.
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