by Sharon Lee
“You’ll notice he never did say what he was looking for,” I pointed out.
“He is looking,” a voice spoke from the dark, “for that which he must not find.”
I came to my feet, and Borgan rose beside me. A shadow moved against the dead black cinder that was Googin Rock. Yellow hair blew like sparks in the star-breeze; dark coattails swelled.
He walked toward us, lithe and luminous, clad all in black leather, and a dark-winged bird on his shoulder. When he was six steps out, he stopped, and lifted a pale hand to stroke the bird’s chest feathers. His face was smooth and ageless, his mustaches red as fire. Azure flames danced in his eyes.
My throat closed, and my ears rang; my chest ached. The dark bird cocked its head to a side and considered me out of one bright orange eye.
“Good morning, Katie dear,” the Ozaliflame said, and his voice, God help me, was the same that had soothed my childhood fears. “How’s my favorite black-hearted pirate?”
“Mr. Ignat’,” I whispered, and then shook my head. “No, I guess that’s not your name, is it?”
“It’s near enough,” he said softly, and extended a hand. “I’m sorry, Katie.”
“Sorry.” I stared at the offered hand—so smooth; so pale and shapely. An Ozali’s hand, that had never known work or weather. I drew a hard breath.
“You’re sorry that Ramendysis has my mother and, for all we know, Gran, in his keeping? Sorry that Archers Beach is about to be flooded with vandals, the land poisoned, and the trees knocked down? You’re sorry, are you? Well, that’s just dandy.”
He sighed, and raised his hand to scratch the bird again, his fingers glowing like pearl against the sooty feathers. I felt the jikinap stir at the base of my spine, questing—and forcibly reined it back.
“Sorrier than you know,” he said. “Bonny and I took a risk, doing what we did. We knew it was a risk, but I’m afraid we only thought in terms of risk to us, and to those who had willingly aided us.” He smiled, wry beneath the flaming mustaches. “We thought the innocent would be protected by their innocence.”
I stared at him. “Like that ever happens.”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes, it does.”
“Right.” I shook my head. “Do you know now why you gave me that whiskey?”
“It was the least I could do for my granddaughter,” he murmured, his fingers nimbly dodging an irritable peck from his avian companion.
Shock, cold and bracing. I might’ve gasped, because he sent me another wry look.
“How—” I raked my fingers through my hair, trying to order the hundred or so questions that were crowding my brain. “You were never in the Rock.”
A real smile this time, blue eyes sparkling. “As it happens, a good bit of me was in the Rock. I’d given my soul into Bonny’s keeping. She drew out the jikinap, just like we’d done to make the whiskey, only . . . a great deal . . . more—and sealed it in a casket made from the wood of her own tree. What was left after that was done was—a man of the Changing Land, no longer young, and not quite right in the head.”
I shivered. “Did you know? I mean—”
“I suspected that I would be diminished, but it would only be for a few hundred years, at most. And, truly, Katie, it was a boon. I’d been Ozali for a long, long time.”
Meaning that the jikinap had begun chewing holes in his brain, and every heartbeat brought a new struggle for domination. I shivered again, and tucked my hands into the pockets of my jacket. My fingers touched something smooth and cool. Foreknowing, I sighed and pulled the gloves out.
They were cunningly crafted of supple red leather, the wide blue cuffs lavish with embroidered golden flames. I held them out to . . . Mr. Ignat’.
“I’m guessing these are yours.”
He nodded, making no move to take them. “They were. Keep them. They become you.”
I considered him, uneasily aware of the questing hunger held in check by my will. It came to me that I could take him, absorb his jikinap, thereby growing in power and—
I gagged, exerted my will and dominated the insidious whisperer. Gasping, I shook my hair out of my eyes, and found Mr. Ignat’ watching me with grave sympathy.
“I’m sorry for that, too, Katie,” he said. “But you’re strong enough to handle it.”
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered—and gasped, my head suddenly filled with the land’s shrieks and horrific images—trees burning like brands in a conflagration too vast to contain.
“Smoke!” Borgan said sharply, and then, “Gas, too.”
“They’re firing the Wood!” I yelled, and ran, Borgan and the Ozaliflame on my heels.
THIRTY-FOUR
Wednesday, April 26
High Tide 10:33 a.m.
Sunrise 5:42 a.m. EDT
Flames leapt against the dawn-pearled sky; fire swirled amid the tree trunks, feeding on twigs, acorns, pine cones, saplings—
Inside the conflagration, trees screamed, sap boiled, and new leaves went to ash. I ran until the heat stopped me, Borgan and the Ozali who had been Mr. Ignat’ somewhere back and behind me, forgotten in the gibbering of the land, the agony of the trees.
Power was churning in my blood; more power than I had a right to—and so very little, against the rapacity of the flames.
My first thought was to smother them, but no Word rose to my tongue, the speaking of which would transform an inferno into a candle flame to be pinched out at my leisure. I would need to create a working, then—and I didn’t know how.
A tongue of flame licked upward, and the land brought me the sound of laughter from further up the hill. Joe Nemeier’s boys and girls, having themselves a party by the bonfire.
I raised my right hand, noting distantly that, sometime during my headlong bolt up Heath Hill, I’d pulled on the Ozaliflame’s gloves. There was only one thing that I knew I could do.
Centering myself, I extended my will, seeking a connection with the fire.
“Katie!”
Black wings beat against my face. I threw my right arm up, concentration shattered, feet tangling in the unruly grass.
“Kate!” Borgan grabbed my left arm, keeping me on my feet by main force.
“Katie.” That was Mr. Ignat’, coming up on my off side. “Wait.”
“Wait? Can’t you hear the trees? They’re dying in there—”
“I hear them,” he said mildly. “And you’ve forgotten something.” He lifted his hand, and the big black bird came to his fist, orange eyes sparkling.
“What did I forget?” I demanded, while seedlings died in torment.
Mr. Ignat’ smiled. “I’m a fire elemental,” he said, and snapped his arm skyward, releasing the bird in an explosion of wings.
It soared, silhouetted against the flames, spiraling against the pale stars until it was well above the blaze. There it hung for a long moment or three, as if assessing the situation.
Then, it folded its wings and plummeted into the heart of the fire.
I screamed and jerked forward, held back at first by the iron grip on my arm—and then by unadulterated wonder.
Between the trees, the flames leapt, the bird a fleet shadow dancing ’round them. Slowly, at first, and then more quickly, the flames began to die back, the panic of the trees began to ease.
The black bird made a tight turn amid the trunks, and was lost to my outer eyes. Inside my head, the land showed me a flash of brilliant orange wings weaving between the trees. Secret tongues of fire guttered as the bird swept past, consuming them like a barn swallow chows down mosquitoes.
I breathed, and looked to Mr. Ignat’, standing cool and calm at my side, watching the progress of his pet.
“A phoenix?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he answered, absently.
Right. Well, that seemed to be under control. I turned my attention uphill, where quite a number of folks were gathered on the patio, watching the show, occasionally enlivening the proceedings with a catcall or a shouted obscenity.
/> I stepped Sideways and took a good look at the densely worked protections enveloping the house. They were not only dense, I saw after a moment’s study, they were . . . bloated. Power fairly dripped from them, like grease from a roasting pig.
A blink and I was back in my body, taking a deep breath. “Borgan.”
“Yep.”
“I’m going to rip a hole in the protections over that house. Would you ask our friend the fire elemental if he’d do me the favor of igniting the roof when he has a couple seconds free?”
“Hmm,” said Borgan. “Check me. From what you said yesterday morning, seems to me that tearing up his works would only make Mr. Wonderful that much stronger, not to say even more irritable than he was when he left us. Did I get that wrong?”
Ah, hell, I thought, and gave myself a brisk mental kick. Honestly, Kate. You can’t even keep track of your own theory?
“No,” I told Borgan, “you got it right. There’s a hell of a lot of power tied up in that working. It’s probably to our benefit to leave it right where it is.”
“I can see where it might’ve relieved your feelings,” he said sympathetically, and I laughed.
The not-exactly-phoenix had been busy while I’d been considering an assault on the house. The woods were dark, and though the trees were still quivering in horror, they were already taking stock among themselves. The land, too, had quietened; I had a sense of it collapsed in a corner of my head, like a puppy worn out with the excitement of the day.
I was beginning to relax myself, when a flicker of orange threaded rapidly through the woods, shooting up, up, above the tree tops—and turned lazily in the sea breeze.
To say it was beautiful would be as inadequate as saying that the ocean is wet. Every feather was a distinct, tiny flame, gold and scarlet; its crest scintillant. Six times it turned over the wood, then Mr. Ignat’ thrust his arm up.
It folded those marvelous wings and fell out of the sky, taking control of its dive at the last possible second and landing light as a mother’s kiss on the outstretched fist.
Mr. Ignat’ brought it down to shoulder height, and there it sat, preening.
“Pirate Kate?” Mr. Ignat’ said quietly. “Do you know who dared to defile your grandmother’s Wood?”
“I do,” I admitted, perversely pleased by this evidence of shared bloody-mindedness. “They’re right up the Hill, there. But. Ramendysis has gone to a lot of trouble and expense to protect the house and the men, and as Borgan points out, it might be best for the moment to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Indeed,” Mr. Ignat’ murmured. He turned his head and glanced up to Joe Nemeier’s house. I had a momentary feeling of absence as he slipped Sideways; then he was back with us, sending a quizzical blue glance into my face. “That working is dangerously over-powered.”
“Noticed it myself,” I told him. “Still, while it’s all twisted around the house, it’s power he doesn’t have access to.”
“True.” He turned and caught Borgan’s eye. “I am afraid, since we cannot return the gift, that it must go somewhere, before it again becomes an active danger. May I impose?”
Borgan tipped his head slightly, eyes narrowed, as if he were hearing something no one else could hear. Which he probably was.
After a moment, he blinked and gave Mr. Ignat’ a nod. “We’ll take it.”
“Thank you.” He brought the bird close, and stroked the brilliant head with a gentle forefinger. The bird cocked an eye—and was gone in a boom of fiery wings, climbing into the dawn.
At the very edge of my vision, when it was only a glittering orange speck against the pale pink sky, it suddenly flared, and fell, a gaudy orange meteor, challenging the dawn; outpacing it for brilliance and beauty—until it was extinguished by the sea.
I sighed, in mingled regret and admiration.
“Useful bird.”
“In fact, he is,” Mr. Ignat’ said. “I wonder, Katie dear, if I might have your attention for a moment?”
I eyed him. “What now?”
“It occurs to me, since we are presently denied the pleasure of dealing with our enemies as we would like, that the Wood requires protection. Attend me and I will teach you what you must do.”
“Why me?”
“Because I cannot,” he said crisply. “Now, attend.” He raised a slim, white forefinger.
“What I would like you to do is lay a line of power in the pattern I will show you. Can you do that?”
Surprisingly enough, I could, since this was the usual way of teaching neo-magicians basic spellcraft.
“We’re weaving a protection for the Wood,” I said, to make sure we were both on the same page. “Nothing else.”
“That is correct.”
“All right, then.” My blood was still hot with power; it wasn’t raising it that was going to be the problem. “I’m ready when you are,” I said.
The pale finger moved. Keeping the jikinap ruthlessly in check, I laid it down as I’d been bid, taking some small pride in the evenness of the thread.
It was a deceptively simple pattern, and probably it didn’t take more than five minutes to lay out. Subjectively, though, we worked for an hour, and I was sweating and shaking by the time Mr. Ignat’ said, “That’s very good, Katie. Now tie it off.”
Tie it off I did, and tripled the knot, too, on the theory that you can never be too careful; then stood panting as I waited for my next instructions.
“Bold lass. The worst is behind you, Pirate Kate. All that remains is to seal it. After, I swear to you, we’ll all three of us go down to Bob’s for breakfast.”
My memory of sealing a work was dim, but I retained the strong feeling that it wasn’t nearly as easy as he was making out—which just goes to show how wrong childhood memories can be. All I had to do was step Sideways and raise the working until it hovered over the Wood. A snap of insubstantial fingers and the spell expanded, accommodating itself to the physical parameters of that which it had been crafted to protect.
“Well done!” Mr. Ignat’ applauded as I stepped back into my body. I let myself sag against Borgan, who put an accommodating arm around my waist while continuing to stare uphill.
“They went into the house, but I’m thinking they’ll try again, sooner rather than later,” he said.
“Which is what the protection spell is for,” I pointed out. Absurdly, I felt lighter, as if the jikinap in the spell were an actual weight that I had put aside.
“Hmm,” said Borgan.
“We may only do what we can do,” Mr. Ignat’ said. “Now, I don’t know about the pair of you, but I could use a grilled blueberry muffin.”
“Breakfast sounds good,” Borgan said. “Bob’s oughta be open.”
“Excellent.”
“What I could use,” I said, as we turned and headed down Heath Hill on the easy side, “are some explanations.”
“Explanations, Katie dear?” asked Mr. Ignat’ as we cut across the vacant lot next to Gentleman Johnnie’s. “What explanations would those be?”
I looked over to Borgan, who was politely walking on my left hand, next to the empty street. “Fork over. Why did Ramendysis think it was Nerazi who helped Gran with the binding?”
He looked down at me with a smile. “To be fair to the man, it was Nerazi who went through the shield curtain with your Gran and Ozali Belignatious, here—they’d set the curtain in place to protect the common folk from the working, see?”
And also, I was betting, to somewhat obscure what was happening on the other side. Except—“Ramendysis and the other Ozali of the posse—they ought’ve been able to see through the curtain.”
“In the normal way of things, that’d be the case,” he agreed. “But there was so much power in the air that night I could hardly see my hand in front of my face, much less be certain of something going on fifty yards away and on the other side of a shield. No reason to think there was anybody else on the Rock than the three who’d started out.”
I chewed on that a
minute while we continued walking up Grand Avenue. The street lights were going out, one by one, as we approached each, like a special effect in a cheesy horror flick.
“Okay,” I said eventually. “I’ll buy that. I imagine it was a pretty wild night.”
“Right. So, it was your gran and Nerazi and the Ozali who went out to the Rock. But even Nerazi can’t be in two places at once, and she was needed at the Boundary Stone to take things in hand there. Once they cleared the curtain, she went into the sea and I came out, with no one on shore the wiser.”
I thought about that, turning it this way and that to look for holes and omissions as we cut across Fountain Plaza. “What did Nerazi have to take care of at the Boundary Stone?” I asked.
“She had to catch old Ignat’ and keep him from doing himself a hurt,” the Ozali Belignatious said quietly. “It was quite a working we’d embarked upon, Katie. We’d planned as well as we could, but we still might have failed that night without Borgan’s help.”
“Really?” I flicked a look up into Borgan’s face. The side of his mouth quirked.
“Wicked rough seas that night,” he said, and then, “Here we go.”
Mr. Ignat’ opened the door for me and the two of them stood back and let me walk into Bob’s first. The heat was blasting down from the overhead, which was a blessing and a mitzvah, and on WBLM, Ric Ocasek was crooning “Magic.” Four guys who looked to be regulars were having an earnest conversation over their coffee and pancakes in the first booth; they didn’t even look up when I went past, heading for the back.
I slid into the shadowed booth nearest the kitchen. Borgan took the seat next to me, and Ozali Belignatious sat across.
“All right—” I began, then closed my mouth as Bob popped out of the kitchen, a bowl of baked beans in hand.
He paused and shot me a quick glance over his shoulder.
“Everything okay, Kate?” he asked.
“Working on it,” I told him.
He considered that briefly; nodded.
“Be right with you,” he said, and went on down to the front. I leaned back in the booth, rested my head against the vinyl and closed my eyes. Despite having had what anybody might call a full couple of days, and not a shred of sleep for more than twenty-four hours, I was feeling—good. Frantic, but good. On WBLM, “Magic” segued into “My Best Friend’s Girl.” Great, a Cars block.
