The Thread that Binds the Bones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “You don’t think I’ll get any more fares?”

  “Right.”

  Tom fished the car keys out of his pocket, held them out to Bert. “It was nice while it lasted. Thanks for giving me the chance. I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be in town anyway, Bert. As soon as Laura gets back, we’ll probably leave.”

  “No.” Bert pushed the keys back. “Keep the cab. Use it for a car. And please don’t leave yet, Tommy. I’ll give you some other job if you want. Clerk at the Overnighter, if you like—strangers won’t be bothered by your status. We need you here until the next event.”

  “The Overnighter Inn is yours, Bert?” Trixie asked.

  “Mm,” said Bert. Distress crinkled the outer corners of his eyes, the skin above the bridge of his nose. “Didn’t mean to let that slip. Don’t tell, Trixie, okay?”

  “But how could that be? I thought Dale Holloway owned it.”

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it? Tommy?”

  “Boss, I don’t get this. What do you mean, the next event?”

  “I don’t know what it will be, but there’s bound to be repercussions. You set things in motion by bringing Maggie and Eddie out. Things are coming to a head. Please stay.”

  Tom stared at Bert, whose brown eyes looked dead serious. It wasn’t a mood Tom had seen Bert in before. “I don’t know. It will depend on Laura,” Tom said at last.

  “Before you take off, give me a chance to talk with her. Can you at least promise me that?”

  Tom thought. Bert had been unfailingly kind to him, and more than generous. Bert was one of the best things about Arcadia. “I’ll do what I can,” Tom said.

  “Good,” said Bert, his face falling back into lines of good cheer. He shook his head. “Can’t get over that damned angel suit, Tommy.”

  Tom looked down at himself. The clothes were still spotless, though he felt a little gritty and sour inside them. They didn’t absorb sweat at all. “Pretty wild, huh? Maybe I ought to change. All my clothes are back at the garage, though.”

  “Could you fly over and pick ’em up?” Bert asked, his tone mild. Tom narrowed his eyes and studied Bert, who buried his hands in his yellow windbreaker pockets and waited, then smiled.

  “Testing?” Tom asked.

  “Curious,” said Bert. “I’ve seen a lot of the Hollow folks in action; can’t help wondering how you measure up. Kind of an important question at this stage.”

  “Can you fly?” Maggie asked Tom.

  “Did you make these kids fly?” asked Trixie, waving the scrap of newsprint.

  “I’ve never flown except in planes. I’m not sure what I did to those kids. Grabbed a piece of sky, used it like a safety net. Not exactly flying. That story chased me out of town. That’s how I ended up here. Kids always coming after me, saying, ‘Fly me, fly me.’”

  “Could you—could you fly me?” Maggie asked. She stood up, pushing her chair away from the table.

  “I—” Tom’s wedding ring burned on his finger. He looked at it. It was glowing like a spark of sun. “I have to go!”

  “‘Ring calls to ring’?” asked Maggie.

  “Yes. Laura must need me.”

  “Take Number Two,” said Bert.

  “I’m afraid I have to move faster than that.”

  —Peregrine? How does a person travel quickly without modern technology?

  —Will you grant me the use of your abilities?

  —They’re yours.

  He felt Peregrine seep into his mind, and waited. It was different from the previous possessions, more intimate to have Peregrine twining so closely among his thoughts instead of just occupying his body. Then he had the sense that Peregrine moved deeper down to regions Tom had not yet explored.

  —Oh, Peregrine murmured.

  “Oh, wonderful!” He flexed his hands, grinned an un-Tom-like grin, and sent out a silver seek-strand along the connection between the rings.

  Chapter 13

  Silver strands spun out and cocooned him in light; they came from the ends of his fingers, which Peregrine moved, using unknown muscles and spinnerets to form the threads. Where the silver touched his bare skin, he felt it, a kiss of breeze, a sleeping breath: faint and pleasurable, an invisible caress, a beckoning. Where skin touched silver, it resonated, matching harmonies with the strands. He could feel the silver’s invitation exciting his clothes into matching frequencies, and then his body being drawn into the song. Trixie’s kitchen disappeared into blackness. Wrapped in silver, he was a vibrating shadow traveling through a lightless night.

  Then color washed across surfaces around him, first deep brown, then overlays of ochre and yellow, finally touches of green and blue; and sound started again, a trickle of water in the distance, arguing voices closer to him. He stared at his hands, pleased and surprised that they were hand-shaped. The rest of his body looked normal as well. He tried breathing, and tasted stew and wood-smoke. He rubbed his eyes and looked around.

  He was in the kitchen at Chapel Hollow. Though he could smell the simmer of meat and vegetables cooking, and the undertone of cave, the walls didn’t have solid weight: they looked like lace work traceries of red, orange, and gold that reminded him of plastic overlays in anatomy books depicting the circulatory system in human bodies. He could see between the light lines into caverns and tunnels beyond, darknesses embraced by the curling smoke of stone skeletons. Glancing up, he saw constellations of living light. Over in the food-preparation part of the kitchen, webs of dim lavender and baby blue light shifted about. Nearer were three glowing webs, two reddish-orange and one blue and yellow and half-swallowed by the wall’s copper embrace. He shook his head, confused, uncertain whether this was a side effect of the method of travel, or even whether Peregrine were still in charge.

  He blinked, hoping maybe Othersight would help, and then his vision settled into normal. Where he had seen a yellow and blue web, Laura stood, her eyes wide and angry. She was partly entombed in the kitchen wall, which had grown out over her forearms and calves. Facing her were twin ruddy-haired boys of about seventeen.

  Tom glanced toward the business end of the kitchen. The Henderson sisters were chopping vegetables—still, or again?—and keeping their gaze on their work. He focused on Laura. “Is there a point to this?” he asked.

  The twins noticed him. “Hey!”

  “Get out of here.”

  “This is a test.”

  “She has to solve it herself, or she gets cast out, thread cut, and her name gets stricken from the Family tree.”

  “Oh?”—Peregrine, is there any truth to this?

  —The wall test is legitimate, but it is supposed to be held prior to the wedding. It is immaterial now. Powers greater than I have matched and approved you, and there is no longer any question of your or Laura’s abilities.

  Tom walked over to the wall and put his hands flat on it. He felt anger simmering inside him, but he smiled up at the Presences or Powers on the ceiling. The wall was almost liquid beneath his hands, plastic, flowing, telling his hands that it was used to being shifted and shaped, indeed, longed for it as muscles longed for massage, and would respond to suggestion. He glanced at the twins, then at Laura. “Laura, would you like some help? Is there etiquette to cover this? Since we’re married, doesn’t that make us one person?”

  “Yes,” said Laura. “And I, the person, am coming out of this wall.”

  Tom let energy from his hands sink into the wall and speak with it. The rock shifted away from Laura, freeing her. Rubbing her wrists, she stepped away from the wall, walked over to Tom, and put her arms around him. “I, the person,” she said, after hugging him, “am going to turn Alex and Arthur into toads.”

  Tom looked down at her, dismayed, but she was serious. He spun silver nets, flung them over the twins, and whispered, “Toad. Toad,” to the nets. It was getting easier; he felt only a fraction of the fatigue he had felt while spinning his first net.

  “I, the person, am not going to make a habit of this, am I?” he
asked her as Alex and Arthur collapsed into small warty toads with golden eyes. As they changed, he saw an odd flickering around them, as if their original shapes were still present, but not quite. He blinked and the vision went away. The toads’ pale throats thrummed, expanding and contracting. Arthur hopped closer to the wall. Alex’s tongue shot out, captured a fly, and vanished back into his mouth.

  Laura stooped, her hands fisted on her knees, and studied the toads. A contented smile started at her mouth and reached her eyes. Her dimple flashed. She watched Arthur eat a moth. She gave a long, happy sigh, then glanced up at Tom. “No,” she said. “I, the person, don’t need to do this often. Once we’re away from here, I don’t expect to need it at all. But I love this. Okay. Enough.”

  Tom relaxed his nets, but left them in place, as he had with Carroll. Alex and Arthur turned back into themselves. Both gasped and began hawking and spitting. Alex doubled over.

  “What’s the matter?” Tom asked, taking two steps toward them.

  “They ate bugs,” said Laura. She grinned.

  “Toads generally do.”

  “See how trapped their minds are? They should feel they’ve just had nice crispy hors d’oeuvres, but they choose to get upset.”

  “How would you feel?”

  “I learned to like whatever I happened to eat,” she said. “Flexibility was one talent I actually had. It kept me sane…if you could call it that.”

  “Oh,” said Tom. He looked into her sandy eyes, saw strange depths there, unsettling evidence of a rocky past. She waited.

  “Did you get a chance to spend some time with your parents yet?” he said at last.

  She reached for his hand. “Not really. The celebration’s just winding down. Come with me?”

  “All right.”

  The way they took through the tunnels this time was different, twisting deeper into the underground. Beyond the kitchen, they walked through one enormous cavern where a sheet of dark water lay, shimmers from witchlight in that windless place reflected sparks on its surface. A drop fell from a stalactite, making a plink that shivered beautiful concentric ripples in the surface of the water, sending the green sparks dancing. The air was cool and smelled faintly of some buried spice, a rock version of cinnamon.

  Tom and Laura followed a flat path through the cavern between upthrusts and downshoots of sepia and sand-colored stone. Beyond the spiky, beautiful formations, Tom saw light trails leading to other rooms, other galleries, some edged with stone fangs, some with gardens of stone flowers. Distances held mysteries. And everywhere there were the firefly stars of strange small presences, hidden in coves and crannies in ceilings, wall, and floor. Tom took one look in Othersight, then blinked out of it. The colored haloes were strange and intricate, in shades of light he hadn’t seen before, and they were distracting.

  On the other side of the cavern they followed a short dry tunnel that sloped upward, ending in open air above a vista that showed green pasture, home to black and white spotted cows and a few Appaloosa horses, and fringed by forest. The first strongest stars showed as the sky stained darker blue. Tom wondered if he and Laura had somehow walked to another state; this was not the high desert south of Arcadia. Laura stopped a moment, drawing in deep breaths. Tom drew in air too, tasting clean, cool sky spiced with pine and earth and grass.

  They walked along a broad ledge to the right, toward the forest, and came to another cave entrance, with a tanned cowhide stretched across it. Flickering light shone faintly through the skin, and muted voices spoke beyond it.

  “Hoy,” Laura said.

  “Come in, come in.” Hal pulled the doorskin aside, showing a narrow tunnel that opened out to light and warmth and beauty: tapestried walls, Persian rugs overlapping each other on the floor, a wide bed buried under all sizes and shapes of embroidered cushions, most of them earth colors. Knobs of rock between tapestries glowed red, giving off heat, and votive candles in myriad colored and clear glasses sat in shallow niches’ all over. A samovar steamed against the far wall, adding the comforting odor of English tea to the scents of melting wax and sandal-wood incense. May sat on a square-edged red velvet couch.

  “Oh,” said Hal, looking at Tom, “welcome.”

  “Thanks.”

  “May has questions for you.”

  “This is Laura’s visit,” Tom said. “We’re leaving soon, and we probably won’t be back in the near future.” He glanced at Laura, wondering if he should have left after rescuing her from the wall. He could not fathom her expression. It hit him again how fast everything had happened. He knew nothing about her, and she seemed to be his future. “She said she wanted to talk with you,” he said.

  “All right,” said Hal.

  “Come in. Sit down. Have some tea,” May said.

  They walked in and Hal pegged the curtain shut behind them.

  “Sit down,” said Hal, gesturing toward the bed. Laura and Tom sat among the cushions, and Hal sat on the couch beside May. Tom watched teacups complete with saucers float to the samovar’s spigot, pause long enough to fill, and come toward him through the air. He caught the first one, and Laura caught the second. The cups were fragile porcelain, pure white; the saucers were about the size of his palm.

  “Sugar? Cream? Lemon?” asked May. “You still take cream and sugar, Laura?”

  “Yes,” Laura said, and set cup and saucer on her knee so she could catch the tea tray as it flew to her.

  “Tom? May I call you Tom?” May asked.

  “Sure.”

  “You’re taking all this very well, you know. With tanganar we either have to enchant them into believing it’s all normal, or let them scream a lot the first few days. Are you from a branch of our family?”

  “I don’t think so. I never knew who my father was, though. Which method do you favor, May, screaming or enchanting?”

  “I would rather we didn’t fetchcast at all; we didn’t do it when I was young, not the way the younger members are doing it these days. But if they must fetchcast, I prefer the screaming. Much better if people have their own minds. Hal is a good enchanter, though—he can pick just the smallest piece of a mind to change, without disrupting anything else—it’s a lot quieter and less distressing than screaming.”

  “I heard Mr. Hal was more of a beguiler than a spoiler,” Tom said. “I heard a lot of things in town people never talked about before. You were right, Laura. The town runs on talk. Mr. Hal, did you really work on cars at Pops’s Garage?”

  “Yes. Pops! I’d forgotten that.” Hal looked at his hands, then up at Tom. “There’s thin blood in my line,” he said. “Before my plakanesh, I wasn’t sure what would become of me. I thought I’d better have a trade in case I didn’t come into power. Pops was terrific. He didn’t think poison of me or edge away. Straightforward.”

  “Did you know that Eddie was his adopted son?”

  “Eddie?” Hal frowned. “Who’s Eddie?”

  “Gwen’s fetch,” said May.

  “Oh.” Hal stood up. “Well, she can’t keep him. Pops must be getting old now. We can’t take his son away. Gwen is so—careless.”

  “It’s already taken care of, Daddy,” Laura said. She offered the tea tray to Tom, who declined. She set it on the floor.

  “Are you sure? Gwen’s tenacious.”

  “I’m sure,” said Laura. “Besides, what could you do to her? Dance to her measure, that’s all.”

  “I could do something,” Hal said. “I think I could enlist some of the others; I’m not the only one who’s tired of her tactics. You’d help me, wouldn’t you, May?”

  “I suppose, if I had to,” she said, smiling at him. “Apparently I don’t. Did you do something about this, Tom?”

  “Yes. I took two of them with me when I left.”

  “Whose was the other?”

  “Carroll’s.”

  May stared at him, her face troubled. “No small steps for you, are there?”

  “I don’t think your family appreciates small steps.”

&
nbsp; “True.” May looked at Laura. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I was so happy for you, Laura. Presences blessing a union for you—I wasn’t sure I would ever see that. I thought you were wise to leave when you did. But now…”

  Laura leaned against Tom and smiled. “Don’t worry, Ma. I’m happy.” Tom put his arm around her shoulders.

  “But—still wingless?”

  “I’ve always been wingless,” she said. “Ma, are you and Daddy going to spend the rest of your lives here in the Hollow?”

  “Is Outside so much better?”

  “For me it is.”

  “Which reminds me,” said Tom, thinking about the differences between Outside and Inside. “What about that wall test, anyway? What was it supposed to accomplish? Are there more of those?”

  “It’s an old test of breeding—” Laura began.

  “Wall test?” asked Hal. “What wall test?”

  “—Breeding suitability,” Laura said. “It used to be everybody who wanted to get married was tested by earth, air, fire, and water, and if they failed, there was some ritual to render them barren.”

  “Nobody’s done the Elements Tests in more than thirty years,” said Hal. “Did someone try to wall test you, Laura?”

  “The A-twins,” she said.

  “Great-aunt Scylla declared all such testing void in the fifties,” May said. “The blood’s too thin to survive it. Those brats! The only test we still do before weddings is Purification.”

  “Did we cheat on the wall test?” asked Tom.

  “No, not really,” Laura said. “Two people can act as one. The twins couldn’t have moved rock like that if they were apart from one another. What right did they have to test me? Only might right, which is the way it works around here a lot of the time. Tom, I’m so glad we’re married.”

  “Might makes us right?”

  Laura sighed. “It may not reflect well on me, but I like feeling right for the first time in my life.”

  “Laura, please explain,” said May in a no-nonsense voice. “Alex and Arthur took it upon themselves to test you?”