"Mars to Bast," Xharina said.
"Oh, yeah, right. Come on, I'll show you where you can put your stuff."
The room where Deputy Twochuck had been interviewing people was still empty, for a wonder, and had bunks for six. Renny and his ink pad were long gone; I showed Xharina and Goth in to it. Goth dropped the duffel bag he'd been carrying in a comer. It clanked.
"You can crash here; kitchen's around the comer if you want to cook, but it's going to be mobbed," I said dubiously. It's a regular apartment-style kitchen; the fact that almost a hundred people get fed three meals a day out of it each HallowFest weekend is one of Life's little miracles.
"Where are we playing?" Xharina said.
I remembered that I'd seen "Hoodoo Lunchbox Unplugged" on the schedule for tonight.
"If it doesn't rain, probably up at the Bardic Circle, after the Opening Ritual. I think—" 1 closed my eyes for a moment to concentrate on what I'd seen on the program when I'd skimmed it earlier. "Right. Lx)me's scheduling the performers, so you'd probably better talk to him."
"We're going on first," Xharina said. I wasn't the one to argue with her.
"I'll help you unload."
* * * It's amazing how much gear even an unplugged band travels with. Guitars, drums, flutes —all in cases —plus the usual bags, baggage, and unattached leather jackets. Not to mention the giant Coleman ice chest full of beer. I helped them stow everything and copped a brewski for my trouble, which 1 needed by then. Officially HallowFest is a "dry" site; in practice, this means a "don't ask, don't tell" policy on the part of Mrs. Cooper, and keep the bottles out of sight.
Xharina looked at my copy of the program doubtfully. It was a little after two, and according to the schedule we were missing "Fundamentals of Good Ritual," "Raising Pagan Children," and "Worshipping Aphrodite Safely." Maidjene had been ambitious — there was multitrack programming for most of the weekend.
"Um, we aren't really into most of this," Xharina said, looking from the program to me.
"Think of it as a networking opportunity. Some people go to them, some don't. And there's always the shopping."
"Oh, right, I heard Ironshadow was going to be here," Xharina said, picking up my allusion without a dropped beat. 1 wondered where she knew him from; she didn't look like the SCA type.
"Where's Bast?" I heard from outside the room, and, with a parting wave to Xharina, I went to see who wanted me.
It was Maidjene. And despite all probabilities, she asked me to cover Registration from three to five after all.
Half an hour later, I slithered into the registration cabin and shut the door—reasonable enough, as it was chilly outside. The box was still right where it had been when Sabine pointed it out to me.
I wondered what the Sheriffs Department was doing just now. I wondered if Harm'd had any next of kin to notify. 1 wondered who the "everyone" that Fayrene'd said hated him was. I wondered if I could find out.
And I wondered how it had happened that Harm had Iain down and let someone — never mind who —pull open his clothes and stab him through the heart with whatever he'd been stabbed through the heart with. It occurred to me that Ironshadow would be a pretty good man to ask about edged weapons that made a Y-shaped entry wound. I made a mental note.
I knew what I intended to do here, and there was no point in putting it off. The doors of the cabins can be locked from the in-
352 Bell, Book, and Murder
Side, and I pushed the lock button in on the knob. And that single act of commission opened the door for all the rest.
I didn't have to mean to give the forms to the Sheriffs Office, I told myself mendaciously. Just to keep Maidjene from burning them. In case she changed her mind.
But she wasn't going to change her mind. I knew that.
I slid the ribbons off the box. It was sealed with only a couple of licks of tape, and I sliced right through them with the box-knife. The registration forms were inside.
If Maidjene did change her mind before tonight and opened the box—or found out what I'd done in some other way—I would lose her friendship. Guaranteed. If she never found out, all the rest of the years of our friendship would be built on a lie.
What was important enough for me to betray a friend for? A dead man I'd despised?
Yes. Exactly that. Because Jackson Harm had been murdered. And if we do not count murder to be so extraordinary a crime that we will take extraordinary measures to punish it, we devalue human life, and with it, all hope of human dignity.
It was cold in my ivory tower, but I didn't mind it so much now. Because if the Goddess came to me and set a price that / would have to pay for justice, I knew now that I was willing to meet that price.
It is such folly to be wise.
I took the registration forms out of the box and put them in my jacket pocket and put the Tree of Wisdom catalogues into the box and sealed it back up just the way it had been. The ribbons would cover the cuts in the tape, if anyone bothered to look that closely.
I was easing the ribbons back into place when someone rattled the knob and then started banging on the cabin door. I froze like any burglar, clutching the violated box with both hands. Despite my lofty moralizing, I wasn't exactly eager to be caught.
"Bast?" A man's voice, elusively familiar. "Maidjene said you were in here! I've been looking for you all morning." The knob rattled again. "Open the door."
It was Lark.
5
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7—3:00 p,m.
I hadn't seen Lark in about ten years—he'd been the wild liberating fling I'd had in my twenties, when no one knew that sex could kill you and I'd been more willing to collect emotional scars than 1 became after I had a few. I don't know if we'd been in love with each other or just with ourselves—the mind edits memory, looking for the comfort level in history. Eventually, you even forget why leaving seemed to be such a good idea at the time.
I flung open the door and it was like stepping back through time. He'd aged, but not much. Not enough to count.
Lark has blue eyes and long brown hair. He looks like some kind of beardless hippie Jesus, and I've never seen him wear much that wasn't denim. That hadn't changed. He had on jeans and engineer boots and a chambray shirt with a denim jacket over it. He held his hair back with a rolled red bandanna tied as a headband. There was a gold ring in his ear.
"It is you!" I said, which is what people say when the other person still looks the same. People had been telling me for months that Lark was heading back East, but seeing him still came as a surprise.
He hugged me but we didn't kiss—thus the nineties make cowards of us all. Why hadn't I been a cowaird yesterday, when it could have done me some good?
"Yeah. You're looking good, girl—somebody told me this morning you'd got in last night, but every time I went looking for you, you weren't there."
354 Bell, Book, and Murder
"You were here?" I said.
"Since Thursday. I laid low until I saw Phil show up Friday and then I came down and said hello—god, she gets fatter every time I see her," he added with no particular malice.
"If you were married to Larry, you might, too," I retorted, moved to defend Maidjene after what I'd just done to her.
"Hell if I would," Lark said. "I'd give that cocksucker a Smith & Wesson enema and really make his day. Is he up here? Maybe I ought to go say hello?" Lark grinned at me.
"Oh no you don't." I dragged him inside. He flopped down on the villainous plastic couch in the boneless unselfconsciousness that old lovers have with each other.
"So what are you doing here? How long are you staying?" I asked. Did you come to see me? It would be nice to think so.
"Oh, well, looking up old girlfriends and generally hanging out," Lark said, waving a hand. "Just got back from a beer run; want one?"
I did, and he went out to his bike, parked outside. It was a top-of-the-line Harley, all gleaming maroon lacquer and streamlined farings: 25,000 dollars on the hoof; the price of a
car. Lark lifted a six-pack out of one of the glistening steel saddlebags and came back inside. I used his absence to shove the ribbons all the way back into place on the box and dump it more or less where it had been. Crime accompli.
Then we sat there—with the door open, so Lark could watch his bike, which shouldn't be parked here anyway—and talked about people we'd known and things we'd done. I'd had reports of him over the years; probably he'd had the same about me. And it was just about the way it had been, except for the fact that we were both ten years older and everything in the world had changed.
"So I hear you've quit Changing?" Lark said, popping the top on a second beer.
Maidjene would have told him that; it wasn't exactly a secret. Community gossip being what it was. "Sort of," I said cautiously, not wanting to go into all the gory details. This was my second beer in half an hour, and on top of a night of very little sleep, I could feel it hit me hard. Alcohol makes me reckless, which is good in a few situations. A very few. Not this one. Covens are like families; leaving is a combination of divorce and graduation. The impulse, after separation, is to justify your position.
"About time," Lark said, and changed the subject before it
could get awkward. The conversation wandered on easily with no particular direction, untQ Lark remembered someplace else he had to be, and left to be there.
Once he was gone, 1 stared at the door and brooded — about something other than the state of my morals, for a change.
My breakup with Changing had been coming for years; Belle's style and mine had drifted too far apart, and enough had changed so that I was no longer willing to submit to her authority instead of to my intuition. The difference of opinion was irreconcilable and basic: Belle believed that magic was subjective and the Gods were allegories; that evil was a failure of social services and malice was a failure of perception.
It's a popular and comfortable viewpoint, which may be the reason I don't embrace it. Unlike Belle, I believed in the Goddess, Death, and Hell; in both true capital-E Evil and the lazy cowardice that often passes for it in the modem world; and also in a judgment that didn't wait conveniently on the sidelines until your next life.
And I wonder why I don't have more friends. But I didn't need more friends just now. 1 needed a coven, and the only way to get one was probably going to be to run one.
Lark had been Wiccan the last I'd heard, and probably still was if he'd come to HallowFest. He might be looking for cin agreeable coven to join—or even to lead. It would be logical for us to pair off— I could hear the wheels turning in Belle's head from here.
But I didn't want Lark for my High Priest and working partner, I told myself, even if he was one hundred times more plausible material for the job than Julian would ever be (being, to begin with, a member of the same religion). Because Lark hadn't changed. I'd thought that the moment I saw him, and it was true, and seeing him again had reminded me freshly of all the reasons we'd split up.
He was charming. Yes, and thoughtless as well. He was compassionate. And had a violent temper. He was faithful—in his fashion. He was good in bed. And believed in that old double standard: men stray, women pray.
In short, Lark was the sort of person you probably couldn't stand unless you were in love with him.
And I wasn't. But there was enough friendship there to make part of me want to work to tip us back over the line into love—you can do that, if you work at it—and that would be a stupid thing
356 Bell, Book, and Murder
to do, although it would probably feel very good for quite a while. And feeling good would be nice. For a change.
I didn't realize until I'd framed the thought that the emotional disquiet that had been vaguely dogging me all day came from the fact that my little tryst with Julian hadn't left me feeling good, answer to my girlish fantasies though it had been. Oh, not that it had been any species of rape, even by the PC rubber yardstick in use these days, but it had left me feeling unsettled, uncertain of my ground. A nice normal dysfunctional relationship with Lark would at least be something I could understand. That was the thought that led to me wondering how Lark and Julian would react to each other when they met, and the despairing certainty that they would meet, and I would probably have worked myself all the way up to quiet desperation if Glitter hadn't stuck her head in the cabin door.
Glitter is one of my (former) coven-mates in Changing, and a friend (still). In real life, Glitter is a probation officer for the City of New York, a gritty reality she offsets as much as possible by the way she dresses. To call Glitter's clothing "eccentric" is to be far too conservative —I honestly don't know where she comes up with some of her outfits, but clothes aren't clothes to Glitter unless they are purple or sparkly or, preferably, both.
Which meant that for a nature festival at a rural campground. Glitter had chosen to manifest in a deep violet sweatshirt and sweatpants combo liberally decorated with gold and fuchsia fabric paint, sequined rickrack, and the odd rhinestone. She was wearing an outdated down jacket made of metallic purple rip-stop nylon, which, fortunately, coordinated with the other pieces. To see Glitter and Maidjene together is to be aware of what a pallid, colorless world we normally live in.
"Oh, hi," Glitter said. "You're still here."
"Uh-huh," I said. "And if I'm still here in half an hour, I'm going to stick you with it—I'll have to close down the Snake's table for the night." And see Julian again.
"Oh, well, Lark said you were here," Glitter said. She sounded nervous for some reason. It couldn't be the murder, considering what Glitter does for a living, although it's different when it happens on your own time.
"He was right," I said. "Here I am. How are you?"
"Are you going to work with him?" Glitter burst out breathlessly.
In Paganspeak that phrase has only one interpretation: Glitter was asking me what I'd been asking myself: if I intended to take Lark for my working partner if— ld hen—I founded my own coven. That I would have to find someone —and a male someone at that— was something neither of us questioned; it's a basic tenet of the particular branch of ritual magic from which Gardnerian Wicca is descended. Each coven has a High Priest and a High Priestess, male and female to mirror the God-and-Goddess duality that we of the Wicca worship.
"I don't know yet," I said slowly, although a moment ago I'd thought I had.
"Well," said Glitter, a little wistfully, "I thought if maybe the two of you were going to start another coven, I'd like to go in with you."
That was a facer, as they said in the nineteenth century, and I finally gave the logistics of starting my own coven serious brain room. Covens split all the time—I'd separated from Changing—but if I hived off formally, I'd be entitled to ask if any of Changing's current membership wanted to join my new coven. I wondered who'd accept that offer. Not Topper and Coral; they're headed for a coven of their own as soon as they're ready. But Glitter'd just said she wanted in, and maybe Actaeon, which would be good; men are scarce in the Craft.
"I thought you liked working with Belle," I said aloud.
"I do!" Glitter said quickly. "But, you know, she's talking about retiring ..."
"She is?" I said blankly. It was true I hadn't been to a meeting of Changing in almost four months, but I still would have thought someone would have mentioned something.
"Not formally, exactly. But you know, fifteen years is a long time — "
And in the Community, where five years is a lifetime. Belle's decade and a half of activity made her one of the Great Old Ones of our religion.
"I couldn't have a coven meet at my apartment," I said, leapfrogging several intermediate questions.
"She wouldn't mind if we still met there," Glitter said. It was true. In fact, as I knew, she'd revel in it: Belle has been feuding with her landlord, who has been trying to take the building co-op, for years. He considers every visitor she has a potential illegal sublet barring him from reclaiming what is wrongfully his.
But Belle qui
tting? This was a different kettle of fish: if Belle was thinking of retiring from coven leadership, she was either
358 Bell, Book, and Murder
thinking of passing t±ie coven to someone else or freezing its current membership and finding new places for all its members before she stepped down.
I didn't want Changing—it was a basic disagreement with Changing's "corporate culture" that had led to my leaving. 1 could see Topper and Coral taking over the magical entity that Changing had become without amy problem, although if they did, Changing would move with them to Co-op City.
But a new coven . . . Meeting at Belle's but not belonging to Belle. Something different. Something new.
Suddenly it began to seem possible.
"I'll talk to Belle," I said.
Glitter grinned. I felt a heart-clutching pang of responsibility. But I was getting used to it.
So I thought.
Sabine showed up a few minutes later—mostly to tell me I didn't
have to hang out here anymore.
"Anybody needs any registering they can come find us over at
the bam," she said. "Everybody's probably already here, anyway,"
she added. By Saturday at 5:00 they'd better be.
"Okay," I said. "You need any more help, just ask."
Glitter and 1 headed for the bam. The registration forms were
heavy in the pocket of my parka. 1 steeled myself not to look back
at the box.
I found that, in my absence, the rest of the HallowFest merchants had arrived and set up, including another bookseller and someone from the Witches and Pagans Outreach Network (WAPON). We were about eight tables all told, including Ironshadow's and the Snake's. Hallie's tie-dye robes were hung along a cord suspended between two nails driven into the low ceiling beams. At the other tables were a candlemaker, someone with oils and incenses, and a bakery sale table covered with things that looked better than any alternatives I had available for tomorrow's breakfast—or tonight's dinner, come to that.
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