by Anne Bishop
He filled Lynnea’s plate, since Sparky was perched on her wrist and didn’t seem interested in going anywhere—and smiled at her when the stiff silence of the other two people at the table finally broke through her enchantment with the bird.
They didn’t linger over the meal. When Jeb pushed his chair back, thanked Nadia for breakfast, and offered to take care of a few of the chores, Sebastian said, “I’ll give you a hand”—and ignored the sharp look Nadia gave him as he followed Jeb out the door.
Lynnea kept her eyes on the bird dozing on her wrist. Such a small creature, but joyful and loving. What would it be like to have something that would love her just for being there, just for loving it in return? A companion that wouldn’t criticize or think her inadequate?
She’d felt the tension during breakfast, but she hadn’t known the cause. She hadn’t known what to do or say. And she’d been afraid that the tension would change to anger funneled toward her if she didn’t stay quiet.
But now Sebastian was outside helping Jeb, and a tigress wouldn’t cower at the thought of saying something to a nice woman.
“You have a lovely home,” she said, looking around the kitchen. And it was lovely. Comfortable and warm. Welcoming. It reminded her of Sebastian’s cottage. A place she’d probably never see again.
“Thank you. It’s been in my family for several generations.” Nadia stood up and began scraping the remains of their meal onto a single plate.
“Can I help?”
Nadia smiled and looked at Sparky. “You are.” She stacked the plates. “Have you known Sebastian long?”
“Not long. And, I guess, not for much longer.”
“What makes you say that?”
Her face burned with the shame of failure—and the shame of wanting. So she kept her eyes on the bird when she said, “He won’t have sex with me.”
Nadia bobbled the dishes, almost dropping the stack. “What do you mean, he won’t have sex with you?”
“He won’t. He says he can’t, but he could if he wanted to. I may not know a lot about…sex things…but I know enough to know that when a man’s…stuff…sticks out like that, he wants sex.”
Nadia set the dishes back down on the table. “And Sebastian’s…stuff…sticks out when he’s around you?”
Lynnea nodded. “But he won’t do anything, even though I’m a trollop.”
Nadia sank into the chair. “Trollop?”
“I’m a bad person. That’s why I ended up in the Den. If I’m a bad person, why can’t I have sex with a man who makes my heart feel so strange? When he kissed me, it felt wonderful. I felt wonderful. Like the tigress spell he put on me was still working, and I was still strong and powerful.”
“I think,” Nadia said slowly, “that I should put on another pot of koffee. Then you can tell me the whole story of how you came to the Den and about this spell Sebastian put on you.”
Sebastian waited until they’d fallen into the rhythm of filling the watering cans from the buckets drawn from the well.
“So,” he said while he watched Jeb carefully soak the ground in one of the flower beds, “how long have you been sleeping with Aunt Nadia?”
Jeb hesitated a moment, then moved over to the next part of the bed. “Don’t rightly know that it’s any of your business.”
“What about Lee? Is it his business?”
“No, I don’t reckon it is. Nadia is a grown woman, well able to make up her own mind about such things.”
“So you just sneak over here a couple times a week for some—”
Jeb dropped the watering can and straightened up. “You’ve no call to be saying things that would shame your auntie. No call. She’s a fine woman. The best I’ve ever known.”
Sebastian gauged the anger in Jeb’s eyes. Not the bluster of a man caught doing something he shouldn’t but the anger of a man defending something—or someone—that mattered to him. “Do you love her?”
“I do.” With a mild curse, Jeb reached down and righted the watering can, which had spilled out too much water on that flower bed. “I’m content with the way things are between us. I’d like more, but until Nadia’s ready, I’m content with how things are.” He took off his cap, slapped it against his thigh, then settled it on his head again. “I can’t say what Lee does or doesn’t know, but if it sets your mind at ease, Glorianna is…aware…of how things stand between Nadia and me.”
“And you’re still here,” Sebastian murmured.
“I’m still here.”
It wasn’t that he objected to two people—two humans—having sex without marriage. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t know what men and women did together—and why. But he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around Aunt Nadia panting and moaning under a man—or over a man.
“What about you?” Jeb demanded. “You sleeping with that girl?”
Already off balance, he felt as if the question mentally knocked him on his ass. “We slept together,” he stammered. “There was only one bed in the room, so we slept together. But we didn’t…we haven’t…” He raised a hand as if to gesture, then let it fall back to his side. “Daylight,” he muttered. “I never thought I’d be having this conversation.”
“Comes as a surprise to me, too,” Jeb admitted. He scratched the back of his neck. “Thought you were an incubus.”
“So did I.”
“Ah.”
Flustered and embarrassed, Sebastian looked around the garden…and remembered why he’d come here.
“You live far from here, Jeb?”
“Just a few minutes’ walk along that path,” Jeb replied, pointing in the general direction. “Have a nice little cottage. Too small for someone thinking of raising a family, but it suits me. And I took it on because the barn makes a good workshop, gives me plenty of room to store my wood and build things.”
“But it’s still a distance from here.” Sebastian hesitated. Jeb had a bit of a drawl, which indicated that he’d come to this landscape from another place at some point in his life. But his manner still said “country” rather than “city,” and folks from a country landscape could be earthy and easy or as prim and starched as an old spinster’s knickers when it came to men and women. “You should move in with Nadia. You should live here.”
“Now, wait up a minute.”
“Trouble’s coming.” Sebastian glanced toward the kitchen windows and lowered his voice. “Bad trouble. Landscapers have died. That’s what I came to tell Aunt Nadia.”
“And you think something will try to hurt Nadia?”
He nodded. “Not only is she a strong Landscaper in her own right; she’s Belladonna’s mother. So I’m asking you, Jeb. What if being a few minutes away is too far away?”
“I…I have my work. Wouldn’t be easy to move my workshop. At least, not quickly. And Nadia has to tend her landscapes. I can’t be with her then.”
“But at night,” Sebastian persisted. “Here, at night.”
Jeb looked uncomfortable. “Aurora is a small village. What people suspect and what they know can make a difference. It’s your auntie’s reputation we’re talking about.”
“It’s my aunt’s life we’re talking about.”
Jeb nodded. “All right, then. I’ll talk to Nadia. That’s all I can promise to do.” He paused, then added, “What about you and the girl?”
“I belong in the Den. She belongs someplace else.”
“And you can live with that?”
“I have to live with that,” he snapped.
Jeb took off his cap and turned it round and round in his hands. “You asked me a question, and I know how my heart wants to answer. So I’ll ask you the same question. If you send her off to some landscape you think is the right place for her, someplace that’s more than a few minutes’ walk down a path…”
“This is different. The Den isn’t safe!”
“Will any place be safe?” Jeb asked quietly. “How will you feel if this trouble skips over the Den and lands square in the middle of this place you
think is so safe and you can’t reach her?”
The thought made him sick. “I’m trying to do the right thing.”
“I can see that. But Sebastian? Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t the right thing to do.”
“Here,” Nadia said, caging the keet between her hands. “It’s time for him to go back in his cage.”
“Oh,” Lynnea said. It had been easier to tell Nadia about her life with Mam, Pa, and Ewan while she kept her eyes on the bird. Much easier to admit the thing Pa had tried to do that had led to her being sent away. When she’d told Nadia about the water and the sand, the older woman’s hands had trembled. But what had her stumbling was talking about Sebastian and those hours when he’d made her a tigress and she’d seen what it could be like to live without fear.
But even Sebastian was trying to send her away. He’d wanted her to stay in Sanctuary. He hadn’t argued when she’d told him she wanted to go with him to his aunt’s house, but he’d made it clear enough that he didn’t want her going back to the Den with him.
“Now,” Nadia said, returning to the table, “what do you want, Lynnea?”
I want Sebastian. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re free of the life you had. You have a chance at a new beginning. Where would you like to go?”
“I want to go back to the Den.” She didn’t have to think about that. It was a dark place, and a strange place, but she felt safe there. “But Sebastian doesn’t want—”
“Darling, Sebastian does want. That’s what has him tangled up in knots where you’re concerned.” Nadia smiled. “Don’t you see? If you’d been nothing more than a woman who had aroused his body, he would have been your lover by now.”
“But he knows I’m not…that I haven’t…”
“He’s an incubus. That wouldn’t have mattered in the least. But you’ve done more than arouse his body, Lynnea. You’ve touched his heart, and that’s something I’ve hoped would happen to him—that he would find someone who touched his heart.” Nadia patted Lynnea’s hand. “Frustrating for you, I know, and doubly so for him, I imagine.”
“He still doesn’t want me to go back to the Den.”
“That’s not his decision, is it?”
Lynnea looked at Nadia. She’d always been told where to go and what to do. “But—”
“Your life, your journey, your choice. Your opportunity.” Nadia leaned back. “Have you ever tossed a coin into a wish well?”
“Once. Just a penny.”
“The amount doesn’t matter,” Nadia said. “It’s how much heart is put into the wish.”
“But nothing happened.”
“Oh? And just how do you think the wish wells work?”
“You hold a coin, make a wish, toss the coin in the well as a tribute to the Guides. And then if you’re meant to have it, your wish will come true.”
Nadia sighed. “Yes, I suppose that’s how most people think it works. This is how it does work. You make a wish and toss a coin in the well as a declaration of your intention to have something in your life. Then what do you do?”
Lynnea shook her head to indicate that she didn’t know.
Nadia’s voice took on the tartness of impatience. “You roll up your sleeves and you work to make it happen.”
“But I don’t know how to make it happen!”
“Opportunity and choice, Lynnea. What the heart truly desires doesn’t come to you overnight, and it doesn’t always come in the way you imagined.”
Lynnea nibbled on her thumbnail. “Maybe I could find work in the Den. Maybe I could work for Philo. I know how to cook and bake. I know how to clean, wash dishes. I’d need to find a place to live.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem,” Nadia said dryly. She pushed her chair back and stood up. “I’d better put something on under this dress before I shock my nephew more than I already have. Then, I think, it’s time to find out why Sebastian is here.”
Thank all the Guardians of the Light, Sebastian thought when he saw Nadia and Lynnea walk out of the house. Nadia had put something on under that dress. He’d already seen more of his aunt than he wanted to.
“Jeb?” Nadia called. “Why don’t you show Lynnea the flower gardens?” After giving Lynnea a friendly push, she walked off in the opposite direction, toward the back of her personal garden.
Figuring that was his cue to have a private talk with Nadia, Sebastian set the watering can down and followed his aunt. He caught up to her when she stopped at the fountain and frowned.
“The statue is gone,” she said, sounding annoyed and resigned but not terribly worried.
“Statue?”
“The statue the three of you bought me for my birthday one year. It’s gone.”
Being related to Nadia and Glorianna, he knew more about how the Landscapers’ magic worked than most people. His heart raced as too many awful possibilities leaped through his mind. “Someone stole it?”
“‘Stole’ is a harsh word, since I know Glorianna took it. I told her it wasn’t necessary, but I think she’s going to alter the landscapes to bring Aurora and all my other landscapes into her garden.”
His heart still raced, but the feeling of relief that swept through him left him shaky. “Good. That’s good.”
“It’s not good. She has enough to deal with without taking on more.”
“Aunt Nadia. There’s something I have to tell you.”
Nadia stared at the fountain. “The Eater of the World is loose among the landscapes. I know, Sebastian. Glorianna already warned me.”
“Does she know about the school?”
Frowning, Nadia looked at him. “What about the school?”
He rested his hands on her shoulders, offering silent comfort. “The Eater has taken over the school. The place is crawling with Its creatures.” Even through the thin material, he felt her skin growing cold beneath his hands as her face paled. “The Landscapers are dead, Aunt Nadia. The Bridges are dead. Everyone who was at the school—”
“Lee?”
“We saw him in Sanctuary. He knows. He said he was going to break the bridges that linked Glorianna’s landscapes to any others.”
Nadia sank to the ground. Sebastian dropped to his knees with her, holding her upright while she swayed.
“Aunt Nadia?” he asked sharply. He wouldn’t like it if she fainted, but he could deal with it. What brought him close to panic was the fear that he’d shocked her so much she was having some kind of attack.
“We’re the only ones left?” Nadia whispered. “Glorianna and I are the only Landscapers left?”
Sebastian rubbed her arms. “Maybe not. Plenty of Landscapers would have been traveling, checking up on their landscapes, so—”
“But they don’t know!” Nadia’s voice rose.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sebastian saw Jeb look in their direction and take a step toward them. Saw Lynnea reach out and stop him.
“The Landscapers who are traveling won’t know about the danger.” Nadia sounded panicked.
“If the Eater tries to connect one of Its bad landscapes to a daylight one, people will notice. Word will spread, right?” He wasn’t sure why he was arguing, since Lee had already told him what could happen to Ephemera without the Landscapers, but seeing Nadia distraught had him grasping for anything that might steady her.
Then something occurred to him. “Even if the surviving Landscapers have to use bridges to avoid going back to the school, and even if the Eater has been in a landscape, the Landscaper who controls that piece of Ephemera will be able to alter it back to—”
“No.”
“Glorianna did it,” Sebastian insisted. “The Eater had connected one of Its landscapes to the Den, and she altered the Den to break that connection.”
Nadia looked at him, her dark eyes full of despair. “Glorianna is the only Landscaper who can alter landscapes like that. The only one who can rearrange pieces of the world, bringing them together to form a new pattern. The only one, Sebast
ian.”
He sat back on his heels. “Then she’s the only real enemy this thing has, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is. And the landscapes she holds will be islands connected with one another but no longer quite part of the world, like a reflection you can see in a pool of still water, but when you turn to look at it directly, it isn’t there.”
Food, clothing, metal for tools, wood for building and fuel. How many of those things were in Glorianna’s landscapes?
“Well,” Nadia said. “There’s nothing we can do right this moment, so we’d best get on with the business of living.”
Rising swiftly, Sebastian helped her to her feet.
“Aunt Nadia, about Lynnea…”
“She wants to go back to the Den.”
“No.”
“Her life, her journey, her choice.”
“I won’t take her back to the Den.”
“Then she’ll have to find her own way back.”
Let Lynnea stumble around trying to find a bridge back to the Den? Unthinkable. Even if Nadia escorted Lynnea to the bridge he’d always taken to go back home after visiting here, there was no guarantee Lynnea would arrive at the Den.
Doing his best to look and sound menacing, he said, “If I take her back, I’ll take her.” Surely Nadia understood that message.
“It’s about time you stopped dithering and got down to it.”
His mouth fell open.
Amused, Nadia patted his cheek, then headed toward the part of her garden where Lynnea and Jeb were pretending to admire the flowers.
He ran to catch up to her, then grabbed her arm to slow her down.
“Aunt Nadia, I don’t think you understood—”
“I’m a grown woman, and I’ve had my share of lovers. I know exactly what you meant.”
“Lovers? Lovers?”
“Well, no one else since Jeb and I—”
“Have pity on me.”
Nadia laughed. “Very well. If you don’t ask about my sex life, I won’t ask about yours.”
“Right now, I don’t have one.”
She stopped before they got close enough to be overheard. “Tell me something, Sebastian. How long has it been since you’ve walked in daylight?”
