The Thread that Binds the Bones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “I witness it,” said Michael.

  “Do any challenge?” Agatha asked.

  Fayella hissed. Agatha stared at her and she subsided. “Carroll’s information stands unchallenged,” said Agatha. “Thank you, Carroll. Is that all?”

  “No. I am living in town now, and I pass my service to Family to Perry, Alex, and Arthur, if they are willing.”

  “How can you separate from Family and live in town?” asked Agatha, her voice thawing into her normal tone. She sounded worried and sad.

  “I have lessons to learn and little to offer.”

  “But we have contracted for Talitha Keye—”

  “No,” said Carroll. “Send her my regrets.”

  “But Carroll—”

  “Miksash is the highest status I can aspire to, and I have achieved it, Aunt.”

  Perry stopped chewing on a sneaked heel of bread. Everyone sat silent, all motion suspended.

  Agatha pushed back her chair and stood up. “I call conference,” she said. Everyone, including the fetches, cleared dishes and utensils off the table. People stood up and retreated, fanning out around the edges of the kitchen. Carroll and Laura shooed the rest of Tom’s contingent toward the kitchen area; Tom found himself standing beside the Henderson sisters, Delia, and Chester, with Maggie next to him. “Hi,” he said, but they shook their heads and stared at the plates and bowls they held.

  Agatha crooned and struck the rock floor with a stick, sang, and gestured. The regular table and benches sank level with the floor, which moved in low waves like a slow-motion sea. In place of the previous furniture, a round table with a hollow center appeared, ringed with rock stools.

  “Presences, Powers, I call you, entreat you,” she said in the other tongue; Peregrine translated for Tom. “Powers and Presences, bless us and aid us to see, hear, and think, to decide and to choose; give us the clarity to choose the right way; make clear the winding ways buried in hearts; help us to heal what is ailing or ill; help us to strengthen the good in our Family; and help us to listen to each with respect. By earth and by air, by fire and flood, by all force and objects, seen and unseen. By blood and by ties that bind us together, help us to seek for the truth and the right.” People repeated the words with her. Then they all stood silent, feeling a strange thickening of air that was almost a sound, a pressure on the skin and in the ears. It touched and then lessened.

  “All right,” said Agatha in English. “Thank you. All come and join me.” She sat on one of the stools she had created, and people came to join her around the table, bringing the remnants of their meals with them. Tom waited, glancing at Delia, who touched Maggie’s shoulder.

  Maggie looked at her.

  “Did you get away? Are you your own, or has Mr. Carroll recaptured you?” whispered Delia.

  “Mine,” Maggie said. “Mostly. You ready to leave yet?”

  “No,” said Delia softly. “I’ve been here nearly sixty years; I was sixteen when Miss Leah took me, her so sick in childbirth with Miss May, and I helped raise the babies ever since. They’re more real to me than my own family. I’m sure my mother is dead by now.”

  Maggie touched her hand, then followed Carroll to the table, Tom trailing after. “Have you eaten?” Agatha asked the newcomers, and they shook their heads. “Well, no harm in it now.” She glanced at the business end of the kitchen. Chester came and handed out plates, napkins, and silver. “Float whatever you want,” said Agatha, gesturing toward stewpots, bowls of steaming vegetables, and plates of buttered bread people had brought back to the table.

  “But Aunt,” said Jess, “not during conference! Never in the past three hundred years—”

  “Thank you, Jess. I’m Arkhos now, and I’ve just changed that rule. First question. Why have these Presences gathered without our summoning them? Tom?”

  —Peregrine?

  —How did Bert perceive them?

  —Don’t confuse me with that just now. Help me, please. Why so many ghosts tonight?

  —Ianthe and I summoned them to conference. It is time for an updwelling, a face-to-face confrontation with history…

  “It is time for an updwelling,” Peregrine said aloud.

  “What?” said Agatha.

  “An updwelling!” said Jess. “Spirits taking a hand in our affairs, an interest in us, teaching us. We haven’t had an updwelling since the Old World.” He blinked. “Spiritspeak. I need spiritspeak. Think of the treasures of history they hold. Damn!” He banged his fists on the table, then looked at his hands.

  “Ancient? Please explain,” said Agatha to Peregrine.

  “We have slept too deeply, and let things slip too far out of balance. We have let this generation be poisoned. We must work toward a remedy before the Family frays any further.”

  “Have you traced the source of this poison, Honored? We have all noticed its effects, I think,” said Agatha.

  Carroll, Laura, Michael, Alyssa, Bert, Trixie, Maggie, and Tom looked at Fayella. “She spoke the truth about me,” said Tom, “but she was describing herself.”

  “But—” Agatha began.

  “How can you people take a woman too dangerous to let come into town, where we know you, and put her in charge of your children?” asked Trixie.

  “Wait for recognition, Beatrice,” said Agatha. “I recognize you.”

  “Miz Agatha, you remember what she did in 1940.”

  “No, Beatrice. I was in Southwater then, married to Charlie, and I lived down there till he died in ’69. When I came back, Fayella was our teacher, and had been for more than a decade. Cousin Israel said she had a better command of the disciplines and forms than any other living member of the Family, and when the children passed plakanesh and she taught them, they were very capable. Fayella is the only master of more than one sign in this generation, and she was eager to teach as her service.”

  Trixie said, “She taught ’em, Miz A. She taught ’em how to hurt each other and themselves. Tommy’s ghost calls it crippling.”

  “Ah ha,” said May, in a “Eureka” voice.

  Fayella sat thin-lipped, motionless. Her eyes could have started fires.

  “How do you answer these accusations, Fayella?” Agatha asked.

  “I do not speak to trash. I do not listen to trash. I have heard nothing since conference was called.”

  “Descendant!” Peregrine said, his voice ringing against the rock walls, floor, and ceiling.

  “I do not recognize you. I see only a hateful poisonous stranger who has deceived all the weaker members of my Family and will corrupt the fabric of the Way if allowed a voice. I alone resist. I expect to perish for it, but I will be vindicated in death.”

  “Fayella!” said Agatha.

  —How can we answer that? Tom asked.

  —Grant me the use of you and I will speak to her in the language of the Root.

  —What? Wait, her hands—

  Tom blinked, staring at the glow growing around Fayella’s hands. She worked her fingers in her lap. No one else seemed to notice the searing light she was generating beneath the table except Bert, who squinted, then shielded his eyes with his hands.

  —Oh, Thomas, let me—no, you must do it, I haven’t the control—but you don’t understand what she’s doing—grant me the voice—

  —Yours.

  Peregrine cried, “House! She spins the Great Unbinding!”

  Everyone leapt up; many ran for the doors. Agatha turned on Fayella, grasped her arms, tugged at her, but Fayella only laughed and wept and worked her fingers. “Before I let corruption take us, I will cleanse and purify you all,” she whispered, her whisper strong as a desert wind.

  —Stop her, Tom!

  —How? What is it?

  —She unknits the forces that hold together our shared reality, the castings that let us exist. Stop her or she will destroy the hall and everyone in it, and who knows what beyond.

  —How!

  Peregrine had no answers. Tom saw Presences gathering around Fayella, reaching o
ut intangible limbs in an attempt to smother the searing light she was making. It pulled them apart and absorbed the pieces and grew brighter, a bright beyond white, a bright so strong it could melt the back walls of one’s eyes. Tom closed his eyes and still saw it.

  Laura. Maggie. Trixie, he thought, and then he cast aside all thought of them and went to work.

  He wove the best, strongest net he had ever made, weaving steel and glass amongst the silver, reaching for everything he had learned since he met Laura: how to change another’s shape so the other retained identity; how to slide past things without disrupting them or self; how to ride earth waves into the sky; how to spin threads to connect with a person or place and pull oneself there; how to speak with people from the past; how to perceive the lights of Presences and selves; but most of all, how all the world was bound to all the rest of the world, brothers to sisters, parents to children, children to parents, friends to friends, friends and enemies to each other, the healer and the hurt, the wanter and the desired, teacher and taught, victim and persecutor, lover and lover, observer and observed. Ties everywhere. He wove it all into his casting and sent his casting out to encompass Fayella.

  From the core between her dancing fingers, light leaked out, curves and squiggles, colors and darkness, and wherever it touched, it melted and dissolved. Presences pressed against it, trying to block it, but it changed them instead, their light scattering and fading, their shapes dissipating. The air tasted thinner. Pencils of light strobed out to Tom’s great tapestry of casting, and everywhere they touched, the threads frayed and untwisted. With a tearing pain that shook him, the net he had woven ripped to shreds and vanished in splinters of thread down into the vortex between her hands.

  “No!” he said. “No!”

  In the eerie destructive silence, Fayella sang as she untied the knots in the fabric of reality. Her voice sounded like a young girl’s. “The water is wide, and I cannot get o’er,” she sang. “Neither have I wings to fly…”

  Tom walked toward her, eyes shut, pressing against a tide of heat that pulsed from the center of her casting. He felt sweat seeping out of his skin, only to evaporate immediately, leaving a kiss of cold that vanished in the onslaught of more heat. He smelled scorched rock and the sizzling of human hair. The rock table and chairs had melted into pooling puddles around Fayella, so that the floor he walked was liquid. Everyone else had gone beyond the range of his senses, except Laura and Maggie; when he glanced over his shoulder, opening his eyes a slit, he saw them wading blind after him into the rage of light. Their hair and clothes caught fire. “Go back,” he screamed, surprised that his voice emerged at all, its loudness startling, though Fayella’s spellcasting was silent. “Go back! Have a future! Save the child!”

  At his words, Laura turned back, pulling Maggie with her.

  Tom faced the heat of the sun and felt his brows and eyelashes flare, burn, and ash. His skin blistered.

  Then he was close enough to embrace her, and he did, hugging her with the core of the unbinding pressed against his stomach; at least he stilled her busy fingers, though he could smell his own body cooking. The pain was a scream in his head that attacked his thoughts. Then the heat grew so strong that after a moment, he felt nothing at all. He reached for threads to tie the world back together with, and felt a sluggish response in the part of him that spun. Slender silver threads—he sent them out to snag whatever he could before the unbinding devoured them. He felt them take root in some of the presences, which still pressed in around them like a cocoon made of moths, fighting to press their hearts to the light.

  And in the terrible silence of a world about to dissolve, he touched something else: Fayella still sang, though she had stopped spinning. “Build me a boat that can carry two, and both shall cross, my true love and I.”

  The unbinding ate its way up between them until it spun between his face and hers. Its light no longer burned so bright he could see the shadow of his skull with his eyes closed. He wondered if it were dying down, having unbound so much of the room and of their bodies.

  Then it tugged at the fragile threads of thoughts and pulled his mind apart.

  Tatters of Tom’s and Fayella’s memories unspun:

  After midnight, he stood beside his cardboard suitcase at the bus station, with the cracked, fading picture of his mother, his last memento of her, in his shirt pocket where he always kept it. He felt as if his life before age nine would cease to exist when the picture turned to dust. The air was full of exhaust fumes and the scent of deep-fried food cooked hours earlier. As usual, he was waiting for new relatives to come pick him up. The last new relatives; he had worn all the others out somehow, though they never seemed to be able to tell him what he had done wrong. He knew it was his fault, but what was it? He had tried to stop doing everything he could think of that had bothered anyone before. Would he figure out what not to do before he upset Aunt Rosemary and Cousin Rafe? If he didn’t, where would he go from here?

  Fayella lay on her bed and stared at Cousin Alexander. His face was gold and peaches, his dark hair curled like a cherub’s, and his eyes shone bluer than the sky after sunrise. He smiled at her and his smile raised shivers in her. He was coming closer to the age of the wall test. She imagined him breaking free of the rock, scattering it everywhere in an acclaim of his power and joy, stepping out ready to father children as beautiful as he was, turning to her, though she was only eight, saying he would save his precious seed for her; of course, she would pass the wall test when her time came. At eight, she had already passed the little plakanesh, and gifts had started to manifest themselves, granting her the earliest passage in Family history. Mistress of water and earth, two signs: nobody had been able to do that in three hundred and fifty years. Together she and beautiful Alexander would found a new dynasty.

  “Of course you didn’t mean to hurt him, Tommy.” His mother touched his hair, then pulled him into her embrace, stroking his head and rocking. He rubbed his tears off on her sweater, smelling her perfume, which was like flowers that bloomed after dark. “Nobody ever means to hurt anything,” she whispered, her hand patting his back again and again. He cried because he felt scared, and he felt scared because he knew she was, she had that gray color around her she got when something scared her. The color was in her eyes and in her voice. He cried because he could still feel the sting of the red scratches on his arms. And he cried because the cat wouldn’t move or purr anymore, ever.

  “No,” said Fayella, but only to herself. Adults didn’t like it when children said no. She watched the white sky-light descend to bathe Alexander and his promised bride, Gwenda Bolte. Presences and Powers blessed the union. Fayella had cleaned and purified herself before the ritual, like everyone else, but she knew a dark spot stained her unseen self no matter how hard she scrubbed, which prayers she prayed. This was wrong, wrong; how could the Presences and Powers betray her this way? Alexander was hers, and no tanganar Southwater Clan girl could claim him. He belonged to Fayella; hadn’t they lain together in the grass on long spring nights, sipping Gramma Betsy’s cinnamon wine, exploring each other’s bodies and spinning their futures out of moonlight and mist? He was precious and perfect and promised to her.

  She did not join in the thanksgiving casting that followed. She stood silent and blocked all the praise and joy from invading her; she cut the thread that binds the bones and set herself apart.

  “What I want you to remember, honey,” said Aunt Rosemary, waving her half-empty wine glass at Tom, “what I want you to remember is the best thing you can do is get forgotten. You want to work on that, Tommy, because once people start remembering you, they won’t let you alone. You’re too special. I used to be special too—not the same way you are; I was going to be an artist, a good one. I was so special I shone, and Jim found me, and he wanted me because I was special, and he locked me up in this house like treasure, and I haven’t touched my paints since. Now, Rafe—well, he’s special, but it’s another kind of special. He’s what everybody asks San
ta for. He’ll be all right. But nobody asked Santa for you, Tommy. You be careful.”

  Alexander’s sister Cousin Scylla was spiteful and mean. And bossy? She wanted to tell everybody how to hold their forks, even adults. Curious? She went around ferreting out everybody’s point of conception so she could do a figurement on them. She did star-casting and consulted auguries no one had addressed in ages. She had a pet Presence that answered her questions sometimes if she fed it crystallized ginger. She found out things about you you didn’t know yourself, and certainly didn’t want anyone else to know.

  When Fayella woke to see drifts of silver and blue sparkles in the air above her, she knew she would find Scylla beside the bed when she rolled over. Only Scylla had mastered krifting; she was a whiz-bang at testing people to see where their potential lay. Fayella basked in a nest of her own warmth and stared up at the dancing points of light, charmed at first because of the strength and number of the sparkles, then slowly alarmed as she realized what the colors revealed.

  No orange of earth or green of growing. No babies, ever. That most important part of her was dead.

  She screamed. When her voice gave out, the scream went on and on in her head.

  Uncle Jim’s ghost showed up on Thanksgiving, when the house was warm from baking and smelled of turkey, fresh bread, and pumpkin pie. Tom watched Uncle Jim’s ghost walk in through lie closed kitchen door, sit at the head of the table, and reach for the ghost of the electric carving knife. Rafe came in then, carrying the turkey, and went to the head of the table. He sat on the ghost; neither seemed to notice the other. Rafe reached for the carving knife. In a weird ballet, the ghost’s hand carved the turkey, Rafe’s hand following each slice with unnerving precision, as if he had studied his father’s every move in years past, memorized the classic turkey attack. Tom watched the hands follow one another. He felt dizzy. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he told Aunt Rosemary, and ran from the room.

  “Bad stuff in that boy,” Tom heard Rafe say as the door closed behind him.