“I’ll come with you.” Maggie got up, wishing the robe had pockets so she could stash some food. She joined Laura on the threshold of the pantry and stared at the floor again.
Laura stooped. “Climb on my back,” she said.
“You sure? I—”
—Maggie?
—Ianthe! Come on in.
She felt the Presence settling into her. Under the nudge of Ianthe’s explorations, she curled her toes and wiggled her fingers. “Rise,” said Ianthe to Laura, who stood and stared at her with wide eyes.
“Maggie, do you still have your safeguards?” Laura said.
Ianthe gave her back her voice. “Uh-huh,” she said. “She says I’m the only one who can spiritspeak right now, but she says she’ll only stay as long as it’s safe.”
“Maggie?” said Carroll from behind her.
—Say hi, Maggie thought to Ianthe.
Ianthe turned and studied Carroll. “You are an earth power? Have you healing skill? Look to this wounded ground,” she said, pointing to the floor.
“What?”
“Is it not a good servant, who has given years of service to the Family? The time has come to give back.”
He stared at her with narrowed eyes for a long moment, then looked at the floor, frowning.
“That is my message,” she said quietly. “The time has come for healing.”
He sighed and went out to the center of the floor, kneeling in a clear spot and putting his hands against the ground.
After the Great Unbinding had been tamed to nothing the night before, Miranda Locke, eighty-two and still the best healer in the Hollow, had consulted with Michael, who was sign earth and had more energy left than Carroll. Under her direction he had built two incubators in the large cavern, bubbles in the rock that could hold a person each and would remain a constant temperature and tend as best they could to body needs. Weavers brought the softest cloth they had; one of the gardeners supplied cotton for softening the surface. Everybody who could heal had done what they could.
Laura looked into Tom’s bubble, stared for a while at him, naked, pink, hairless, curled half under a sheet, lashless eyes closed, breathing sleep-slow. She reached into the warmth of his safeplace, touched his head. She sensed no response, not physically, and not in the new spectrum of the nonphysical she had been learning to perceive.
—Tom?
In the midst of weaving the night before she had realized that of course she could talk underneath. It was strange, as if she suddenly realized she had had two arms all along, when she’d been using only one.
—Tom? You in there somewhere?
After a long time, the thinnest thread of whisper responded:—Is it morning yet?
A laugh bubbled out of her, shocking her.—No! No, go back to sleep, and get better.
First came the scents, sun-baked rock and clean sheets.
Tom’s stomach hurt; he felt like he had been kicked several times in the gut. He opened his eyes. The world swam in a haze. Everywhere he looked all he saw was a yellow-orange blur, until he glanced toward his hand, a pink blur, and saw he was half enmeshed with something else, a pale lavender blur. He blinked. Nothing got clearer, and Othersight did not kick in. He touched the lavender with hypersensitive fingertips, felt linen, fine rough texture like the lightest lick of a cat’s tongue. Reaching out to the orange, he felt the rough grit of warm rock. He lay and listened to his own breathing; it was the only thing he could hear. It sounded soothing. He fell asleep again.
Somebody smelled like violets. He opened his eyes and looked up at what was probably a face, though it was too blurry for him to be certain. It was a tan-pink blur, with gray above it, and two dark spots where eyes should be. “Aunt Rose?” he asked, and the deep voice of a stranger came out of his mouth.
“Tom? Are you awake?”
“You’re not Aunt Rosemary,” he said. Listening to himself, he realized he was no longer thirteen, and the stranger’s voice in his mouth was his own. “Is this a really weird dream?”
“No. Are you all right?”
“I can’t…see very clearly. Aunt Agatha?”
“Yes.”
“Wait.” He lay and thought his way down to the tips of his toes, working upward along the arched bones of his feet. For a moment he contemplated his ankles, then moved on to consider the rest of his body piece by piece, rebuilding it in his mind, touching himself to assure himself that he existed. His stomach and his gut were still very tender, the muscles slack. He touched the top of his head and felt stubble, and found more on his chin.
“We did what we could to heal you, but that doesn’t seem to include hair,” said Agatha. “And we can tell eyes to heal, but we can’t tell them what to see.” Then she said, in a gentler voice, “How old are you?”
“Thirtee—thirty.”
“Do you know where you are?”
He glanced up at the orange above him and realized he didn’t have a clue. “Nope.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
He closed his eyes and took inventory. While he was trying to figure it out, though, a young voice answered. “I’m only eight but I can fly already, and I’m going into town! We’re going to steal newspapers from Tycho’s Pharmacy and find out about the war. A German submarine sank the Lusitania. Alexander says we have to care about what happens in the world beyond, but I’m not too sure. It doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?”
Silence answered the voice. After a moment, Agatha said, “Tom?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“What was that?”
“Probably a ghost.” Ghosts sometimes spoke through him, though he usually didn’t admit it to people. He closed his eyes.
“Whose?”
“Fayella’s,” he whispered, then sat up, galvanized. His head brushed the ceiling but didn’t bump it. “Aunt! The Unbinding?”
“Stopped. It’s over. Do you remember?”
He pressed his hands to his chest, where his heart was hammering.
“We owe you a debt we probably can’t repay,” Agatha said. “We’ll give you whatever we can. Is there anything you want right now?”
“Information,” he said. “What happened to her?”
“She’s asleep, and we’re not letting her wake up. We haven’t figured out what to do with her yet. Jess has been ferreting out information for us. Tommy, this thing went a lot deeper than any of us realized.”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you ready for an extended discussion? This is the first time I’ve been sure your mind is still in there, though Laura told us two weeks ago you could think.”
“Two weeks ago?” He blinked, frustrated by the blurry vision. “Aunt, where am I?”
“In the Hollow.”
“Not a part I’ve seen before.”
“Michael crafted this for you. It’s a recovery room.”
“Oh.” He leaned back against the wall. It was warm and sandy against his back, and it gave a little. “Nice.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No. Laura. You said Laura. Is she all right? Is Maggie all right? Are Bert and Trixie?”
“The living all survived. Ianthe says we have lost many Presences to the Unbinding.”
“I remember,” he whispered. They had pressed what little self they had into the light, trying to stop its spin, and instead it had splintered and fractured them.
“One Presence I’m worried about.”
“Who?” asked Tom, then wondered what had become of Peregrine.
“Fayella. How can her ghost speak through you when she’s still alive?”
“At the end, her memories got mixed up in mine. I don’t think it’s really a ghost.”
“Oh, good. Wait. Does that mean you might act like her?”
He could hear the fear edging her voice, and it worried him.—Peregrine!
No response.
—Peregrine? Peregrine, please wake up.
“Tom?” said Agatha.
“Jess found some diaries Scylla must have hidden, dating way back to when she and Fayella were girls. Scylla was worried about Fayella. She wrote a lot about her.”
“Fayella was in love with Scylla’s brother Alexander.”
“What? How did you know?”
“More of the memory mix. Go on.”
“Scylla cast klish stones for Fayella and got skulls and snakesheads, sure portent of something gone wrong. But she doesn’t seem to have warned anyone else about it. Scylla said Fayella did abominable things, and that she was trying to contain them, but then, all of a sudden, the diaries stopped talking about Fayella altogether. Jess reminded me of an old discipline, a minor unbinding, one of the tangles, which makes people forget you. We’ve been wondering how much Fayella practiced that one on all of us. Nobody alive in the Hollow remembered the Nightwalker story until Beatrice told it to us, and there’s evidence that Beatrice is tangled about it, too.”
“There’s things in my head that support what you say.”
“About what’s in your head, Tom.”
“Yes?”
“Is Peregrine there?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t found him yet, but I haven’t been awake long.”
“Are you tired?” Her voice was instantly soothing.
“No. I need to see Laura soon, though.”
“Of course. I’ll go get her. You look for Peregrine, all right?”
“Why?”
“His daughter is driving us crazy.”
When she was gone, Tom lay back down on soft floor and pulled the sheet up around him, closing his eyes. He realized he was tired after all. He focused all the energy he could dig up, and sent out a summons.—Peregrine?
For a long time he felt no response. He wondered if Peregrine was one of the Presences who had been swallowed in the vortex of the Unbinding. Then came a faint stirring in his bones.—Tom? Are you alive?
—Yes. Are you?
Peregrine’s laughter felt like the gentle skim of butterfly’s wings on skin.—Not really. Not for a long time.
—Peregrine, if I die, what happens to you?
—I don’t know. Just now I’m glad we don’t have to worry yet.
—I guess we almost did. I’ve been asleep two weeks. And watch this.
Tom opened his eyes and looked around, at blurs.
—Hmm, said Peregrine.—Maybe we can heal it. Or perhaps you need spectacles. At least we have some vision, which is surprising, since we have stared into the heart of Oblivion.
—Tom?
—Huh? he thought. It was a new voice in his head. For a moment he was afraid it might be Fayella.
—You awake now? Is it morning?
No. Not Fayella. He had heard that voice before, but not since the day he drove Laura to the Hollow in the cab.
—I think I’m awake.
He looked toward the opening in the orange egg and saw a head-shaped blur. A moment later it was coming closer, followed by a blur that had to be a body. He pulled the sheet up over his head.
—What are you doing? she asked, lying down beside him and tugging at the sheet.
—I don’t have any hair.
—Neither do I. It better not matter to you.
—It doesn’t, since I can’t see.
—That better be a joke.
She pulled the sheet down and put her arms around him. He hugged her tight, eyes closed, and wondered if he had finally found someone who wouldn’t leave him when he got too strange.
After a long moment, he figured he couldn’t get any stranger than he was right now, and here she was, her arms warm around him, her mind snuggled beside his, her scent wild and enticing and familiar. The last guardian of his heart put down its shield, and he let Laura all the way in.
She laughed against his chest.—Anyway, she thought,—hiding in a sheet won’t protect you from me. It’s impossible to escape this Family: I know. I’ve tried.
The Thread that Binds the Bones Page 30
