Heart of Valor - V1 Dec 2004

by Lisa Jane Smith

  Alys digested this moodily. “I suppose there’s no chance Thia Pendriel went back to the Wildworld when the Passage opened for an instant?”

  “Morgana says she did not. Morgana says”—Janie looked down at her clasped hands soberly—“that she will wait until Beltane. That’s May first—Sunday. There’s something else Thia Pendriel has to do before she can leave, and Beltane is the best time to do it. And don’t ask what it is, because Morgana didn’t tell me!”

  “All right, but I just hate not knowing what’s going on. And that reminds me, when I, uh, walked in on Morgana downstairs yesterday, she was doing some hocus-pocus with a green thing that flew. What was it?”

  Janie looked severe. “It was a visioning sphere—like a visioning circle only much more powerful—and you’re not even supposed to know such things exist, much less see them! Any other questions?”

  “Yes.” Alys was tempted to ask Janie what Morgana had been talking about in the library, when she had warned Janie about watching for signs only a sister would note. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. Instead she asked, “So, what’s the bracelet?”

  Janie touched the thick copper band on her wrist. It looked ancient and heavy, like something found in an Egyptian tomb, and had a single white crystal set in the center. “This is the means Morgana left of summoning her if anything terrible happens. She has a bracelet just like it. If I break my crystal her crystal shatters, too.”

  Alys gazed down at the bracelet in silence, trying not to picture what would have to happen before they were entitled to use it.

  Janie saw her face. “I know,” she said softly. “But whatever it is Morgana is afraid of, we’re well protected. The wards are strong. And”—she settled back and spoke very briskly all at once—“I might as well tell you that I’ve thought of a way to make them stronger, and I’m going to do it today. I’m going to get myself a familiar.”

  A disembodied voice came from the hallway. “I hear they have an iguana for sale over at ProPets.”

  Janie and Alys both turned to see Charles and Claudia shamelessly eavesdropping. Alys tried to look stern.

  “You might as well come back in.”

  “You don’t buy a familiar,” Janie added coldly. “You trap it and bargain with it. Or rescue it and gentle it, like Morgana did with the vixen. And then it helps you do magic, like strengthening the wards. Every proper sorceress has a familiar, and it’s high time I did, too.”

  Alys wondered why Janie had waited for Morgana’s departure to decide it was high time, but all she said was, “How?”

  Janie and Claudia exchanged a complicit glance. “There is a fox,” said Janie, deliberately, “down at Irvine Park. In a cage. I’m going down there tonight to let it out.”

  “You most certainly are not!” Alys’s first impulse was to quash this idea of Janie’s entirely. And yet, what harm could come to Janie in the park? They had played there all their lives. And if it were true that another familiar would strengthen the protective wards it was surely a good cause.

  There was another reason for yielding, which Alys would scarcely admit even to herself. In her secret heart she was not sure that she could stop Janie if she tried. In most matters Janie was cautious and prudent almost to a fault— but not in magic. There was something about sorcery that got her blood up. She took mad chances and seemed quite detached about the consequences, as if it were all part of some hypothetical experiment she were conducting. It worried Alys.

  “At least,” she said, coming to a decision, “you’re not going alone.”

  “No; I figured you would want to come. I want you. And I want Claudia, too, to talk to the fox. I don’t particularly care whether Charles comes or not,” Janie added candidly.

  “What? Leave my three helpless sisters running around in the dark by themselves? Never! Charles is coming, all right! Say,” he added thoughtfully, “you don’t suppose they’ve canceled school today? Because of the earthquake?”

  “School’s open,” said Janie. “It was on the radio.”

  “In that case, how about calling in another bomb threat? At the junior high. I could dial for you—”

  “None of us is going anywhere tonight,” said Alys to Janie, ignoring him, “unless the vixen agrees it’s okay.”

  *

  The vixen, surprisingly, had no objections.

  “I’ll come, myself,” she said, when they had gathered in the old house after school to ask her. “It will be something useful to do, anyway. Left behind like this to baby-sit! The only trouble you four are likely to get into is that which you make for yourselves.” She got quite worked up about it, and all Claudia’s soothings could not calm her. But she agreed to meet them after dark.

  *

  Alys usually found some time everyday to spend with her horse; today she simply went a little later and waited for the others to join her. She leaned her forehead dreamily against Winter’s warm neck as she brushed him with the currycomb, remembering what Morgana had said when she had first given him to her as a colt.

  “A small token of my appreciation,” the sorceress had said, and had added, “Every hero needs a horse.”

  Charles had snorted, “But Alys isn’t a hero.”

  And Morgana had replied—what? At the time, Alys had been so enraptured by the idea of having a horse for her very own that she had hardly noticed. Something, she thought, about “And the colt isn’t a horse … yet …”

  Well, the long-legged, skittish colt had grown into a magnificent white stallion: sleek, superbly muscled, with a small, exquisite head. The hero, however, was a different matter. Alys sighed and pressed harder into Winter, sniffing up the comforting smell of clean horse. She felt no more like a hero than she had last year. If anything, she felt less …

  She raised her head at the sound of the others’ voices as they entered the stable, arguing.

  “We can’t all ride one horse,” Charles was saying. “Some of us will have to walk. But if you let me take my bike…”

  Alys tried to imagine something less inconspicuous than Charles riding his dirt bike up the river bed.

  “We’ll borrow Chestnut,” she said, tilting her head toward the next stall, where a bay mare regarded her placidly.

  By the time they started off dusk had fallen. They headed east in the blue twilight.

  At the embankment of the river bed there was a movement in the pampas grass and the vixen joined them.

  “She says it’s a little muddy down there,” Claudia reported.

  The mud softened the noise of the horses’ hooves. Overhead, the first stars came out.

  When they reached the fence that marked the perimeter of the park, they dismounted. Alys tied the horses to the fence while Charles, sweating, went to work with the wire cutters he had brought in his backpack. When he had cut three sides of a rectangle in the fence he pulled it open like a door.

  “After you, Alphonse.”

  It was dark enough now that they needed the flashlight. The river bed here was quite dry, and rocky. Janie spoke to Alys in a low voice as they walked.

  “When I was here last week I asked one of the park rangers about security. She said that a truck drives around patroling once an hour.”

  “That’s all?”

  “She said anybody crazy enough to come out here after dark, what with the rattlesnakes and coyotes and bobcats and all, was welcome to it. I think she was joking.”

  Alys and Charles, who had stopped dead, now started again. They did not seem entirely reassured.

  “Claudia, walk closer to me,” said Alys.

  “Of course she was joking,” said Charles. “There’s nothing out here to hurt us—”

  He broke off, choking, as a scream rose from the darkness. It was unearthly, inhuman, yet it seemed to form words. The flashlight joggled wildly as everyone moved at once; Alys and Charles both trying to grab Claudia, and both trying to run. At last Alys realized that Janie was holding onto all of them, shaking with laughter.
/>   “It’s a peacock,” she gasped weakly, when Alys ceased to struggle. “They keep them in the zoo area. It means we must be getting close.”

  Chagrined, Alys and Charles straightened their clothes and went on. The vixen, who was scouting ahead, returned and led them through wild mustard and elderberry shrubs up the embankment.

  The animal compound was small; a double fence enclosing a deer habitat and some two dozen cages smelling of manure and alfalfa. Claudia was slight enough to slip through the iron bars of the first fence, but the others had to climb. Charles dealt with the second, a chain-link fence, with the air of a professional.

  Squirrels chattered in one cage as the flashlight beam slid over it. Birds fluttered, in a confusion of wings, in another. The beam revealed the vixen sitting in front of the last cage, very upright, almost prim.

  The fox inside was crouched at the back of the cage, watching them unwaveringly with eyes that shone orange in the light. It was bigger than the vixen, with a grizzled back and a breast the exact color of poppies.

  Janie knelt. Claudia, peering in with her mouth slightly open, stood behind her.

  “All right,” said Janie in a slightly strained voice. “Tell him why we’re here.”

  Alys understood every word of Claudia’s explanation. She did not understand a single word of the fox’s reply, but Claudia obviously did. She was nodding.

  “He says,” she translated rapidly to Janie, “that his name is Talisman. He says it’s seven seasons he’s been here— that’s almost two years, I think. He says it’s dead things they feed him. He says he’s hating it.”

  The vixen’s teeth snapped together. “Stillworlder arrogance!” she spat. “To lock up an animal and feed it carrion! Animals are meant to be free, to hunt! Not to be enslaved, to wear collars, to labor over enchantments!”

  Claudia translated this. Alys thought, with alarm, that it was not Stillworlders—humans—who would put a collar on a fox and make it work at enchantments, but she said nothing.

  “But what does he say about being my familiar if I let him out?” persisted Janie. “Does he agree?”

  “He says,” chanted Claudia in a slightly sing-song voice, “that there’s nothing would please him better. He says the highest ambition of any fox is to be a magic worker. He says his great-great-great-great—I can’t say how many greats— grandfather was indentured to a sorcerer, in a land beyond the sea. He says that’s how he got his name. I don’t think he’s telling the truth about that, though,” she added in her own voice. “I think he’s trying to impress you.”

  Janie’s purple eyes were fixed on the orange eyes of the fox. She let out her breath.

  “All right, then,” she said softly. “It’s a bargain.”

  From her own backpack she took out the rowan wand and a packet of leaves. Inside the leaves were two large seeds which she pushed into the keyhole of the padlock on the cage. She blew on the padlock, applied the virtue wand, and murmured something Alys did not catch. There was a spurt of violet dust and the padlock quietly fell open.

  “He says, ‘wondrous,’ ” said Claudia.

  With fitting solemnity, Janie opened the door and held out both hands. The fox bounded to meet her; then, so fast that no one really saw it happen, it bit her thumb deeply and leaped from her arms. It was a flash of silver-gray beneath white alder trees while Alys was still gaping.

  The vixen’s reflexes were faster. She streaked after him, and Alys, collecting her wits, followed. She plunged through the door in the first fence, tearing her sleeve, but the bars of the second fence brought her up short. The vixen might have a chance now; she did not. After another minute of staring through the bars into darkness she walked back slowly to the others.

  Janie almost never cried, but she was weeping now with sheer rage and pain. Claudia was crying in sympathy. Charles, caught between his two soggy sisters, was looking rather desperate and trying unsuccessfully to rip a swath out of his T-shirt for a bandage.

  “Here,” he said at last, pulling the whole shirt over his head. Alys wrapped Janie’s hand and helped her up.

  “Let’s go. Let’s just get out of here,” said Janie, pulling away.

  At the second fence they met the vixen.

  “She says he’s gone,” reported Claudia, drawing her sleeve across her nose. “She says,” Claudia sniffled, “that in her opinion it’s just as well. She says he might be big and handsome, but he’s a liar and a rogue. He would be most unsuitable and unreliable. She says she’s going to stay here tonight and if she catches him she’ll teach him a lesson.”

  Alys gave the vixen a hard look, but she was too tired to argue. It was a morose group that made its way back down into the river bed.

  As they neared the perimeter fence Alys craned her head forward, sweeping the flashlight back and forth. With a stifled exclamation she broke into a run.

  “Alys! Alys! What’s the matter?” cried Charles and Claudia, running after her with Janie limping behind. When they reached the fence they saw for themselves.

  “Well, where are they, then?” said Janie crossly, looking at Alys as if she expected her to pull the horses out of her pocket.

  Charles began, “You must have tied them wrong—”

  “I did not tie them wrong! They broke free. Look, they practically dragged the whole fence with them. Something must have scared them—” Alys stopped.

  There was a silence.

  “Right,” said Alys. “Come on.”

  The ground here was smooth, but covered with thick, coating mud. Soon their shoes were so heavy it was hard to lift their feet. The easiest form of locomotion was a kind of ice-skating. Claudia, of course, hit a liquid patch and fell in it, facedown.

  Alys wordlessly heaved her up and gave her an arm. They trudged on, Charles now in the lead with the flashlight, shivering under Alys’s thin jacket. Janie brought up the rear, still limping, though Alys had no idea why, and viciously swatting off the heads of cattails with the virtue wand in her hand.

  Alys had a bare instant’s warning before the attack. She heard a crackle in the bushes at the bank’s edge and turned sharply. Her first impression was that those yellow eyes were the vixen’s, but something deeper inside her made a lightning calculation and said too big, too far apart, too high off the ground. Charles was far away with the flashlight. Alys seized the first weapon that came to hand and met the creature, swinging hard, even as it sprang.

  The ground slapped her back as the creature knocked her flat. There was a hot, rangy smell in her nostrils. Sharp teeth—predator’s teeth, made for tearing flesh—yawned in her face. She rolled, getting on top of it somehow, and struck again and again with the stick. She aimed for the skull and felt a satisfying reverberation in her arm as her weapon made contact.

  I’ve—never much—cared for—cats, she thought, punctuating each word with a full-armed blow. Razor claws slashed at her leg. The one good thing about this kind of a fight was that she had no time to be frightened, no time to plan or think or worry. She simply reacted, defending against each move of the cat’s as if she were playing a hot game of tennis. And waiting for an instant of advantage. She saw one and brought the stick down with all her force directly between the golden eyes. With a yowl, the bobcat twisted and ran.

  Alys dropped the stick and bent double, gasping for air.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Charles was gabbling to Claudia, who had her arms and legs wrapped around him, having climbed him like a tree. “Alys, did it get you? Are you hurt? Talk to me!”

  But Janie stood frozen, her purple eyes wide with outrage. She bent, stiffly, and picked up the virtue wand.

  “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said to Alys. She was so angry her voice was almost a whisper. “Don’t you ever. Do you understand me? You could have broken it!”

  Alys straightened partway up, still panting, and stared.

  “Are you crazy?” she gasped, chest heaving. “That thing was going to break my head. “
r />   “You never do that again. Never. Never. Understand?”

  Alys clenched her teeth. This was exactly like Janie. Or at least like the old Janie, the before-magic Janie, who had hated almost everything. “Sure,” she said at last, shutting her eyes as a wave of dizziness hit her, and fighting a sudden desire to burst into giggles. Hysteria, she told herself sternly, and squelched it, along with the desire to shake Janie until her teeth rattled. She ran a hand over her leg where the thing had slashed at her and then she and Charles examined it with the flashlight. The skin was not broken, but she had four neat parallel slits in her jeans. Incredibly, that was the extent of the damage.

  “Thank God,” said Charles, letting out his breath.

  Claudia was still trembling. “Alys, I don’t want to stay here anymore. Can’t we go home?”

  “We’d better,” said Alys tersely. “And fast. And quiet. And careful. “

  There were no further incidents on the way back. The horses had found their way back to the stable, blown but unharmed. Alys took care of them silently, then they all went home. At the door Alys prescribed a hot bath and bed for Claudia, and when the others went in she remained outside, staring at the sky.

  She stood with folded arms, gazing fixedly at one spot, as she had in her childhood when waiting stubbornly for a shooting star. Presently the door opened and Charles stepped out onto the porch behind her.

  “I didn’t want Claudia to hear this,” he said quietly, “but I think you had better. That wasn’t a bobcat.”

  “Of course it was.”

  “You didn’t see it. I had the flashlight and I got a good look. It was sort of bobcat-shaped, but—well, bunchier around the shoulders. Bigger. And, Alys …”

  “Well?”

  “I think it … had hands.”

  When the door had closed Alys turned back to the night, but now her eyes were no longer on the sky. They wandered fitfully about the yard, searching.

  The door opened once more.

  “It’s cold,” said Janie, joining her. Alys shrugged.