by Jane Stain
He kept asking her pretty much the same thing: why was she here. Each time he asked, he would be near the door, looking like he was going to leave as soon as she answered.
Leave and go report back to Sulis.
For all Amber knew, Sulis had sent Tomas in here to ask her that very question. The thought enraged her, made her want to get up and go find that woman and tell her to mind her own business — and to admit that Tomas had friends and family who deserved to spend time with him.
But all of Amber’s instincts told her to keep Tomas here in this room with her as long as she could.
So each time he asked why she’d come here, she scrambled her brains for a more interesting way to answer. Her aim was to keep adding more layers of meaning and connection and common history to her answer, yet to always be truthful. And she always emphasized that she was Kelsey’s true friend — and by extension, she hoped she was reminding Tomas that she was his true friend.
She cared about him, and this was the hardest thing she’d ever done: telling him she cared about him without appearing to be doing so. Because again, her gut told her that the slightest appearance of her reaching out to him would trigger some sort of fear his faker of a girlfriend had implanted in him. Because Kelsey was clearly right: this was not the real Tomas. That woman had used magic or hypnosis or threats or something in order to charm him into submission to her.
And Amber had to keep telling herself his distance was a product of whatever spell Sulis had put on him, that it wasn’t his decision to be like that. But his coldness hurt nonetheless.
By the fourth time he asked, he had been there in the secret room alone with Amber an hour — and she was blinking back tears when she answered his ‘why are you here’ question.
“A bunch of memories came back to me when Kelsey called, and I couldn’t wait to see her and Tavish and you and everybody else again.”
He wandered around some more. Was it her imagination, or was he staying closer and closer to her the longer he was here?
He asked it again, but this time he was definitely closer to her. And looking her in the eye. And rather than cold and distant, he looked … lost. Confused. His voice sounded that way, too.
“Why are you here?”
She longed to stand up and give him a hug, to remind him who she was and how much she had missed him. To ask why he had disappeared from her life. To tell him she still loved him and ask didn’t he love her? But what did she dare do but answer his question?
Well, she could drag as much connection to him into her answer as possible, that was what.
“I’ve had a great time working at digs in Mexico and South America these past six years, but remember how all of us wanted to come to Scotland together — you & me, Tavish & Kelsey, John & Jaelle, Jeff & Ashley, Gabe & Lauren, and Mike & Sarah — how we would plan it out together, dreaming of some day when we’d all be here?”
He froze there, after she said that. It happened so abruptly that it broke her resolve not to look at him. There he was, still healthy and hale and handsome as ever, but shut down inside. It was as if someone had put opaque contact lenses on his eyes. He just wasn’t all there.
But right this second, something different was happening. He had stopped and he was looking at her, right into her eyes. And she was looking into his, desperate to see him recognize her the way he had last night. She imagined she could see the wheels turning behind his eyes.
She imagined she was watching his very psyche battling the spell that held it captive.
After a long time as thinking goes — a minute or more — he nodded his head.
And now that she had drawn Tomas out a bit in the direction she truly wanted to, she didn’t dare ask him about the white robed guy last night — whether he was a druid or not, and especially whether Sulis was a druid or not.
No. That would trigger some defensive part of the spell and undo all she had done over the last hour. She just knew it would. She had to keep things light, easy, unchallenging — or he would leave. She could get through to him if he would only stay awhile. She knew it. Just knew it.
There was one question she felt she could ask.
“What have you been doing with yourself these past seven years? Anything new?”
He paused, and the look on his face was heartbreaking. He looked like he couldn’t remember the past seven years. But he kept quiet for a few moments, just looking into her eyes. Ever so gradually, his own eyes grew softer with recognition after a while.
When he spoke, his voice sounded almost normal. It reached deep inside of her and drew her to him, made her want to hug him and hold him close and love this blockage out of him.
But she knew she couldn’t. Or else.
And it was so hard to see him like this. His face was not as animated as it normally was. Not nearly. He looked her in the eye though. That counted for a lot and relieved some of her hurt feelings.
“I’ve been taking some business classes,” he said, “now that Mom and Dad and Vange and Peadar are talking about leaving me, Mike, Gabe, and Jeff in charge of the fair. They want to get Tavish and John more involved in the antique business.”
She smiled at this.
Ha! So Sulis didn’t know what she was talking about when it came to the antique store after all. It would be Tavish and John, not Tomas, who inherited the antiques business. Amber stopped working on the runes and settled back, leaning against the wall and really looking at Tomas.
“You get to be in charge of the fair? That’s so cool.”
He smiled. Actually smiled. It reached his eyes and everything.
She kept her smile up, careful to keep it friendly, though that was tough when his sudden joyous smile made her body want to tackle him like she would have seven years ago and...
She made herself focus on drawing his personality out, as if he were a stranger she was just getting to know.
“Have you and Mike and Gabe and Jeff worked out who will be in charge of what?”
He smiled again and nodded yes.
“I’m the only one taking business classes, so I’ll be in charge of the money.”
They laughed together, and it was the most wonderful feeling Amber’d had in years.
But never mind what her body wanted. That was tough enough, but her own psyche was begging her to reach out to him and hug him and tell him how much she’d missed him — and to demand that he tell her why he had left her — why he’d disappeared from her life seven years ago.
Seeing how vulnerable he was, how hard he had to struggle just to remember his own life these past seven years, she told her psyche to shut up. This had to be about him. First. She promised the little abandoned girl inside of her that they two of them would get their turn. That once Tomas was himself again, she would insist on getting the answers they needed.
When he finished his brief laugh, Tomas continued talking.
“It’s more complicated than that, of course. I’ll be the business guy, which will include marketing the fair as well as the accounting and making sure vendors are licensed...”
She nodded.
“That’s a lot of responsibility.”
He let out a sigh.
“I know. It’s much more responsibility than running an antique store.” He looked at her with an ‘oh yeah’ look on his face, and then gestured toward her inclusively. “Well you know.”
She smiled a goofy smile at him and nodded yes. Good. He remembered at least that she’d worked at the fair with him. Did he remember the rest? She was dying to ask him, but he still wasn’t himself. Not by half.
“Yep, I know.”
He relaxed a little and smiled, and she could have sworn he kicked some imaginary dust on the floor.
“Yeah, that’s right, you did the fair with me for four years, so you know there’s thousands of people involved who work there and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who look forward to attending the fair every year…”
To draw his attention away
from his embarrassment at forgetting she’d been there, she stood up. It worked. He watched her.
She smiled at him kindly.
“Yeah, that’s a lot of responsibility you’ll have. What are Mike, Gabe, and Jeff going to do?”
He chuckled at her joke about him doing everything.
“Well, seriously, there’s still scheduling all the shows, and outreach to all the participants, getting the insurance — well I guess that’s a business thing, so it’s mine, too…”
She chuckled at his joke and then used one of the gestures they had used at the fair in their shows together, hoping the familiarity would draw him out more.
“Back up a minute. Did you say there were people all over the world looking forward to attending the fair every year?”
He had stayed by her side without wandering away for a good ten minutes now. This was working. Hope blossomed in her heart. And her body told her to grab him and kiss him and make him hers again. But her mind warned her that would be disastrous.
He stayed with her and nodded.
“Yeah.”
She gently shook her head no, smiling at him incredulously.
“I didn’t know that. I thought your fair was just in our town.”
He scratched his head.
“Well, no. We have three different locations in the US while it’s warm up there, and then when it’s winter there, it’s summer in Australia, so we have three locations down under, too.” He wrinkled his nose up and twinkled his eyes at her. “Okay, I guess two countries isn’t really all over the world.”
She opened her mouth as wide as she could and let her jaw hang, bending her head forward a bit to show how shocked she was.
“And so you’re going to be managing this whole thing? I guess you’ll have business licenses to renew in six different locations — not to mention all the different taxes you’ll have to file…”
He pushed his lips together and raised one eyebrow while nodding just a little in acknowledgment of a good summation of the scope of his duties.
“Mmhmm. But we have a good accountant and a good manager who will help train me before they retire — oh, you know them. Remember Edgar? Not Edgar the pickle monger, but Rowena’s cousin Edgar?”
Her heart pounded in her chest with renewed hope. He was remembering!
She smiled and whirled her eyes around.
“Oh my gosh, don’t tell me he’s an accountant now? He could barely sit down, he was so hyper. But it was good for the show when he walked on stilts all the time!”
They laughed together.
He closed his eyes tight and lowered his head and stomped his foot, he was laughing so hard.
“Ha! No. No. No. He’s our business manager, and he‘s really good at it. He gets us good deals from the vendors and even from the insurance company, with being so entertaining and how personable he is — and the way he never sits down, he gets more done in a day than the rest of us would in a week, it seems like.”
Ever so gently, ever so slowly, she continued to draw out his personality by encouraging him to talk about his work.
Ever so gradually, he participated more and more in the conversation.
After a few hours, he seemed almost normal. Almost warm. Almost alive.
Hope blossomed in Amber’s heart. Here alone with her, he was himself again and not that sycophantic zombie following after Sulis. Maybe he would see his way out of her influence. Maybe Amber would get her second chance with him after all, despite the difficulty and all the weirdness. She nourished the hope. She let it convince her things would be okay, that everything would work out.
Until Sulis barged in.
The perfectly coiffed blonde stormed over and grabbed Tomas’s hand, pulling him to her and whispering in his ear, the whole time staring daggers at Amber.
Immediately, Tomas zombied up again.
The twinkle left his eyes.
The sense of camaraderie they’d been sharing disappeared — worse, all signs of intelligence or even autonomy left his whole countenance. He was like a walking rag doll. Blank. Empty.
Without saying anything, Sulis dragged him away, casting a furious glance at Amber behind her.
Cursing, Amber threw her tools down and left the room to follow them.
Còig (5)
Amber ran quite a ways down the carven stone corridors lit by strings of white Christmas lights, thinking to at least hear Tomas and Sulis if not see them after rounding each corner. But it was as if the living rock walls of the ancient underground castle had swallowed them up.
She finally had to admit that Sulis had won this round. She couldn’t find them.
So she sought out Kelsey instead, and joined her and Tavish for lunch at the crew’s lunch truck. Amber was dying to tell them she had connected with Tomas again and Sulis had ruined it, but with all the people around, they could only talk shop. They did so for several hours, with Amber supplying mostly answers and Kelsey asking a thousand questions. And then Kelsey excused herself and Tavish to do some errand or other, and Amber went back to her room with the tree carved in the floor and worked, alone.
Just after sunset as everyone was headed back to their trailers, Amber was still alone when she saw Sulis walking out in the grassy field in a white robe, singing.
Amber headed off into the grass to follow the druidess.
Sulis headed toward the cliffs.
Amber followed, growing more and more curious what the woman would do when she got there. Did she know Amber was following? Did she hope to make Amber fall off the cliff the way her fellow druid had failed to?
Yeah, Sulis knew Amber was following, because she waited at the edge of the cliff. She had no other reason to do that. But Amber wasn’t sure how Sulis knew she was coming. She was hiding under a bushy tree, peering through some branches, so she should have been invisible from over there on the cliff. Oh well.
Wait, what!
Amber rubbed her eyes.
Sulis was going over the edge of the cliff.
Amber took off running as fast as she could.
“Wait! I don’t mean to hurt you. I just want to tell you to release whatever unnatural hold you have on Tomas. Don’t jump. We can work this out. It’s not too late!”
But Sulis only laughed and slowly lowered herself over the cliff on a rope that must’ve been hidden from Amber’s view.
Sure enough, when Amber got to the cliff, she noticed a rope ladder that was tied to a tree stump. Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, she took hold of the top rung and tugged on it, unsure if it was sturdy even after watching Sulis go down it.
Don’t be a coward, she told herself. However else the two of you are different — which is pretty much in everything down to the smallest detail — you look like you weigh about the same.
Before she could lose her nerve, she planted her foot on a lower rung and swung her butt over the edge of the cliff. Whoa, looking down was a mistake. There were the waves crashing violently against the rocks.
Heart beating rapidly, Amber made herself put one foot down, then the other, then both hands — until she saw a cave there in the side of the sea cliff.
Wow.
She stepped off the rope ladder into a tunnel. This one was down deeper than those she and Kelsey had been working on, but the failing sunlight penetrated the cave somehow up ahead, so it wasn’t dark.
Taking confidence from this, she entered the cave, keeping on guard in case Sulis jumped out at her. This was a natural cave, rough and dirty, not a carved out corridor — though her mind told her it would connect to the network of those eventually, or why would there be a ladder to it.
After a few seconds, it was tempting to call out Sulis’s name, it seemed so desolate down here. At least it didn’t stink like some of the ruins where she’d worked. These cliffs under Dunskey Castle were open to the ocean air, so there was a pleasant nautical scent.
Oh, she could hear footsteps up ahead, now that she was deeper into the tunnel and out
of earshot of the waves.
Speeding up to a run, Amber followed the sound of Sulis’s footsteps through ancient rooms full of secrets. She longed to linger down here, exploring. Nothing was as she expected it to be in a castle. This was old. A relic from a much different time. The Iron Age, Kelsey had said.
Sulis led her on a merry chase up one level and down the next, around this bend and over that set of stairs. Amber ran down a hallway where she’d thought she heard Sulis’s footsteps only to hit a dead-end.
When she stopped to turn around, Amber reasoned that she must’ve run really fast down that particular hallway, because she felt so dizzy she had to stop and put her hands on her knees and wait for the vertigo to pass.
It took an unusually long time.
It took so long that once she had recovered, she could no longer hear Sulis’s footsteps.
Amber crept down to the beginning of that dead-end corridor and looked around, listening. Still no sound of Sulis, but at least she was pretty sure she knew where she was now. Checking on her theory, she walked toward her and Kelsey’s work area.
Well that was strange. She was sure this was the area where the big table should be with all the artifacts they were cataloguing and everybody’s pouches of tools, but someone had turned out the lights. She got out her phone to use as a flashlight. Maybe this wasn’t it after all. But it sure seemed to be. There was the crevice which looked like a dog. And that was the spot she was always having to duck sideways to miss as she made the last turn into the room.
Well, maybe everybody had moved their things out while she was chasing Sulis?
Including the lights?
What the heck was going on? Kelsey would know. Amber went over near one of the small drafty side caves where she had used her phone this morning successfully.
But now there was no signal.
Kelsey had better have a good reason why all their stuff had been moved — and where was it? Had Mr. Blair brought in yet more trailers?
Suddenly needing to know if her tools were still on the floor where she had thrown them, Amber headed over that way. But she stopped abruptly. The secret door to the room she had been working in two hours ago was closed. And there were cobwebs in front of it.
