Heart of Valor - V1 Dec 2004

by Lisa Jane Smith

  “What happens if Morgana goes back into the Wildworld?”

  “Morgana,” said Janie, “is not that dumb.”

  Alys chewed her lip meditatively. “How come Thia Pendriel hates her so much?”

  “That,” said Janie severely, “is gossip.” After a moment she added, “Maybe because Thia Pendriel is a councillor, and the Council has been very down on Morgana these past five hundred years.”

  Alys snorted.

  “All right. Because Thia Pendriel is a councillor, and a magistrate, and a flipping Silver Guildmistress, and she doesn’t care beans about any of it. She wanted the Gold Staff when she was an apprentice and Morgana won it instead. Thia Pendriel was from one of the greatest houses in Findahl, and she knew she was better than any of the other contenders. But what she didn’t know about was Morgana, who was half a human and half a Quislai and I bet Thia Pendriel doesn’t know which she hates more. And ever since then Thia Pendriel has risen higher and higher in the politics of the Wildworld, but the one thing she always wanted she can never have.”

  “Uh,” said Alys, remembering something. “So you think she was serious when she said she’d fight Morgana alone, one-on-one, to win the staff honorably?”

  “Who knows what goes on in her mind? But, yes, I think maybe she was serious, just for that moment. Just for that one instant she was willing to put away whatever other rotten plans she had, for the chance of gaining the Sun Gold honorably.” Janie frowned a moment, then added reluctantly, “Anyway, there may be something else behind her feud with Morgana. I don’t know any of the details, but the vixen let it slip once that there was some kind of cheating involved in the Competition when Morgana took the Gold.”

  “What kind of cheating? What do you mean?”

  “I told you I don’t know anything about it. I don’t even know who was supposed to have cheated, and I’m not sure I believe the vixen anyway. She hasn’t always been exactly truthful with us herself, you know.”

  Alys, who had not known this, or even suspected it, blinked and felt stupid. “Anyway,” she said finally, retreating to safer ground, “we know that Thia Pendriel has got one of the lost Gems of Power and that she’s willing to hurt us or even kill us to get Morgana off her back. And Morgana may or may not know about it. So where does that leave us?”

  “Sitting in a purple pop bottle,” said Janie shortly. There were shadows under her eyes and her face was puffy with tiredness. “Look, Alys, I don’t know. Whatever Thia Pendriel is doing, Morgana thought it would be over by Beltane. Which is Sunday. Which means that maybe we can decant ourselves by then with some sanguinity of success.”

  “English, please.”

  Janie rubbed her temples. “I wonder,” she said in a colorless voice, “if you have any idea how hard it is to always have to translate things into English-please. I said maybe we can come out then.”

  “Huh. Okay.” Alys looked at her sister thoughtfully. “You’d better get some sleep.”

  Janie made some sort of protest, but since she could hardly keep her eyes open long enough to formulate a sentence, Alys won easily. When Janie was curled up beside the others Alys sat alone and gazed through the wards. She did not feel sleepy in the least; she needed to think.

  Janie had explained everything—and nothing. Watching the play of light on the savagely transformed living room, Alys made a mental list of the questions that plagued her.

  First of all, of course: what was Thia Pendriel doing? If one only knew that, the rest might be easy. But Janie, who was in the best position to know, refused even to speculate. And then there were the earthquakes, earthquakes which rocked the Passage. Thia Pendriel’s work? If not, whose?

  Too, Morgana had said that something had come through the Passage. It wasn’t the bobcat or the soft black hands or the frog-creature; they were all manifestations of some ordinary animal that had been changed. It wasn’t the boojums, which had been made, from the elements of earth. So, what? Something they had not even seen yet?

  And then there was the rainbow. Alys’s stomach tightened and a deeper feeling of unease flowed over her. The beauty and the wrongness of that sight disturbed her in a way she could not define.

  Charles stirred in his sleep, muttering. Alys looked at him, sprawled unselfconsciously on his back, and at Janie curled almost into a ball, and at Claudia with the bunny beside her. She found herself looking at them appraisingly, almost as strangers, evaluating their strength and courage and endurance, although she had no idea what she was measuring them against.

  She picked up the sword and gazed at it.

  Charles stirred again, tossing and rubbing his arm in his sleep, and she felt a sharper flicker of concern. She watched him for some time until he settled down and slept quietly. And then she simply sat, while the violet jet stream flowed around her and the night wore itself away.

  TWELVE

  Journey North

  The three younger Hodges-Bradleys woke stiff and cranky. Alys was stiff, too, but cautiously optimistic.

  “I want you to look out the wards, Janie,” she said. “You see? I haven’t seen one of them for over an hour, not since it got light. Can you explain that?”

  “Easy,” said Charles, with a ghastly smile. “They had to go back to Transylvania to sleep.”

  “Shut up!” said Janie. She glared through the wards for half an hour before admitting there were no boojums in sight. Then she put her head down and clutched fistfuls of black hair in distraction. At last she looked up.

  “Charles is right,” she said, with an even ghastlier smile than he had given. “No, Alys, don’t. I’m serious. There’s only one possible solution: they’re night runners. They only had so much power, probably enhanced by the moon, and they have to fly back up to get… recharged. It’s not funny. As soon as it’s dark again they’ll be back.”

  “But for the time being we’re free.”

  “No,” said Janie. “Alys, I could probably take the entire octagon of wards down so we could get out. I couldn’t put it back up. I’m a first-year apprentice, not a Guildmistress!”

  Alys sighed. “Okay. So. What are our options?”

  “As I see it, we have four. One, we can stay here inside the wards and hope to outwait the boojums. Two, we can drop the wards and head for the hills—literally. Like San Diego. Aunt Eleanore would put us up and there’s at least a chance the boojums couldn’t find us there. Three, I could collapse the wards completely.”

  “I thought you’d already done that.” “Not completely, no. The nested octagon is an intermediate state. But in an emergency it’s possible to bring them right down on top of us—skintight, so to speak. We’d be knocked unconscious and stay that way until someone came to get us out, but we would be absolutely safe. We wouldn’t even notice time passing.”

  “All right,” said Alys. “What about number four?” “Four … well, four, we could summon Morgana.” Charles and Claudia brightened at the very mention of this, but Alys simply looked expressionlessly at the heavy twisted bracelet on Janie’s wrist.

  “And she would really come? Morgana? She’d let Thia Pendriel get away with whatever she’s trying to get away with just to come rescue us?”

  Janie’s voice was equally expressionless. “She’d come.” There was a silence. Charles scratched his collarbone and looked hopefully at the ordinary pale daylight coming in the sliding glass door. Claudia cuddled the bunny and rocked a little. Janie sat and stared at Alys, and Alys sat and stared at the sword. It threw back dazzling flecks of light, like the swarming sparks in Morgana’s staff, only blue-violet instead of gold. The light nudged at her memory, stirring things which would not come to the surface.

  She wasn’t aware she’d been holding her breath until she let it out.

  “Well,” she said. She took the sword and her palm tingled with warmth. “I’ve got another idea.” She hefted the blade and met two pairs of trusting blue eyes and one pair of wary purple. “I want to go north and help Morgana.”

&nb
sp; It took a moment for this to sink in. “Round the bend,” said Janie flatly when it finally had. “Bats in the belfry, but nobody’s home.”

  “Yes. Still.”

  Charles, looking a good deal more awake than he had a few minutes ago, exchanged a glance with Janie. “Morgana,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully as if to a lunatic of great strength and unknown temperament, “does not need help, Alys. We are the ones who need help. And some of us need it more than others,” he added under his breath.

  “I know,” admitted Alys. “It doesn’t make sense … but somehow I feel that she needs us. In my dreams …” She broke off and hefted the sword again.

  Charles and Janie exchanged another glance during which each tried to hand the problem over to the other. At last Janie spoke.

  “Just what is it you propose to do? You wouldn’t even know how to find Morgana.”

  “No, but you would, wouldn’t you? Of course, once we find her she may send us home for all I know. But it’s better than sitting here waiting for those things to come back, and it’s better than running and hiding. I don’t want to run and hide anymore. I want to fight.”

  “I see,” said Janie crisply, her eyes purple slits. “The coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but one, eh? The boy stood on the burning deck and all.”

  Alys flushed, but shrugged. She did not relinquish her grip on the sword.

  Janie, after another moment of fierce silence, suddenly snorted and rested her forehead on her hunched-up knees. “Right-ho. When do we start, boss?” she muttered.

  “What?”

  said Charles. Claudia looked up from the bunny to Alys, her face stern. “Where am I going to be,” she said, “while you’re doing all this fighting?”

  “With us,” said Alys promptly and unemotionally. “You can talk to animals. We need you.”

  Claudia nodded, once. Charles looked from her to Janie in disbelief.

  “Both of you. I thought you had better sense, Claude. Janie just wants the chance to do more magic, because she’s so good at it. She doesn’t care what happens to the rest of us, as long as she can write it up. And Alys has gone off the Orange Plunge. But you.”

  “You don’t have to come,” said Alys quietly.

  “That,” said Charles, bitterly, “is where you’re so wrong. Good ol’ Charles always comes.” He stood up, and, because there was no place to go, turned his back on them.

  Janie looked at Alys, then stood, herself. “Charles,” she said. She and her twin, however dissimilar in appearance, were precisely the same height, and when he turned back she was looking him directly in the eyes. “We need you,” she said. “And not just to ‘come along.’ “

  Charles stood quite still a moment, then nodded stiffly.

  Alys stared at each of the twins in wonder, and even Claudia looked as if she were suddenly confronted with a pop spelling quiz on a list of words she’d never seen. It was as uncharacteristic for Charles to be seriously angry as it was for Janie to show this frightening maturity.

  “There is a minor technical problem,” said Janie, sitting calmly down again. “You said I would be able to locate Morgana, Alys. And that’s true—as long as I steal some things I shouldn’t even lay hands on and have a familiar to help me focus. The stealing I can deal with, that’s about par for the course. But the familiar isn’t so easy.” She made a great point of not looking at the Ace bandage around her thumb.

  “The vixen …” Charles began, then stopped as Alys shook her head at him. His gaze shifted apologetically to Claudia. It lingered there, and the slightest shadow of a bemused grin appeared on his face. Claudia, chin on bunny, frowned back. Alys looked at Charles in puzzlement, then at Claudia, and then she felt the corner of her own mouth twitch.

  Janie glared at them. “Oh. No. Absolutely not.”

  Charles began to chuckle. Alys bit her lips.

  “I won’t, ” said Janie. “You don’t understand, I’d be responsible for it for life. I won’t do it, I tell you.”

  Claudia, after looking at the other two, beamed suddenly with understanding. “He’s very smart.”

  “He’s a rabbit,” said Janie. “I’d never live it down.”

  “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” said Alys serenely. “Pride goeth before a fall.”

  “I’ll bet he won’t even do it. Rabbits are scared of everything—”

  Claudia bristled, then looked at Benjamin with sudden doubt. She bent to whisper into the white ear.

  “He will do it,” she said, raising her head after a minute. “He is scared, but he will.”

  - “That’s it,” said Charles encouragingly to Benjamin. “Be a devil.”

  “I will get you for this,” said Janie to Charles, “if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

  *

  The wards were down. Outside, the clouds began to thin out and scatter, but it was still gray and chilly as Janie pedaled back from Morgana’s house with a backpack filled with sorcerous instruments.

  Alys, Charles, and Claudia had packed a sort of picnic lunch comprising most of the earthquake kit supplies and all the granola bars they could find. The house looked, as Charles pointed out, even worse in the daylight than it had at night. There was little they could do to straighten it up or minimize the damage. When Janie arrived they gathered their provisions and tramped outside.

  “Oh, God,” said Alys, striking a palm to her forehead as they stepped onto the driveway. She had forgotten. They would have to drive the Swinger.

  They all looked at it, gloomily, except for Janie, who suddenly grinned.

  The Swinger was a standing joke among Alys’s classmates at the high school. Her parents owned two other cars: a Jaguar, which was always at the shop waiting for the arrival of obscure British parts, and a station wagon, which was presently at the airport. Her father had bought the Swinger because it was cheap, and big, and wouldn’t take much harm from any scratches a beginning driver might add. The problem was Alys scarcely dared to drive it. It tended to change gears of its own volition and the brakes either jammed or wouldn’t work at all. Her father said there was nothing physically wrong with it, but Alys noticed he wouldn’t drive it either.

  Opening the garage door revealed it in all its splendor, flamingo pink where it was not primer green; and Alys felt a familiar sinking at heart. Every encounter with the Swinger was a battle.

  And today it was in one of its more cantankerous moods. The engine refused to turn over, and when it finally did, it flooded. When Alys tried to release the emergency brake it stuck. When it unstuck the steering wheel locked. After several minutes of swearing and wrestling the wheel moved, but the oil and the alternator lights went on. At last, on the corner of Center Street and Taft Avenue, there was a sound of rending metal and the Swinger abruptly shut down altogether.

  “That’s it,” said Alys, dealing the front tire a vicious kick as she walked around to put up the hood. “This is the last straw. It’s nothing short of suicide to go out in this thing.”

  She and Charles had both taken auto shop, but had long ago realized that the inner workings of the Swinger bore absolutely no resemblance to anything they’d seen there. It was far too ancient, “What we need,” Charles said in feeling tones, “is a hot bran mash to feed it.”

  “What we need,” said Alys bitterly, “is an exorcist.”

  Despite all their proddings and reconnectings, the engine remained uncooperative. The afternoon wore on, and overhead the clouds parted to allow the sun to shine bravely on them. Above the smell of wet concrete and raw gas rose the smell of hot metal and singed rubber.

  “Having a little problem there?”

  Alys, behind the wheel listening to Charles yell “Try it now,” looked up. It was Bliss Bascomb, with her older brother Brent. In a convertible. A red convertible. A Beamer.

  Brent Bascomb looked a lot like his sister. He had the same one-sided smile, the same fine, light hair, the same year-round tan. Alys looked over the hood at
Charles, who, if he had washed since last night had not washed much, and at Claudia sitting in the backseat clutching the rabbit, and at Janie beside her. Janie was looking ahead, expressionless, hands folded tightly in her lap.

  “Did you run out of gas? Or does that thing run on rabbit pellets?” giggled Brent. Alys looked at him with fascinated disgust. It was bad enough when girls giggled. Janie went strawberry-colored, but didn’t move. Alys looked at her, then back at Brent.

  “No offense,” he said, turning his own engine off and climbing out to stand beside Alys’s door. “I bet I can give you a hand—maybe even two. Hey, what’s that on the seat? Your kid brother’s sword?”

  He gave Charles a brilliant comradely smile. Charles stared back, his mouth slightly open. Alys looked at Janie again, then back at Brent, then at the brand-new Beamer, and then she fixed her own eyes straight ahead.

  “Right,” she said distinctly to Janie. “Do it.”

  Janie’s hands unclasped, then reclasped tremulously in her lap. She shut her eyes for a moment and sank down in her seat, a beatific smile lighting her face. Then she straightened back up.

  “Come over here, Brent,” she murmured huskily, her purple eyes dilated and dreamy. “I’ve got something I want you to smell.”

  *

  “I thought you said stealing you didn’t have a problem with,” said Charles.

  “It’s just more fair this way,” said Janie, shutting the passenger door of the Swinger gently on her classmate. “Like an exchange, see? You understand, don’t you, Bliss?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bliss sincerely. She did, in fact, understand. After one deep breath of crushed Worldleaf she and her brother understood more about the Wildworld than any other mortal beings on the planet—except the four who had just explained it to them. The virtue of Worldleaf was that it enabled the listener to perceive the truth in its purest form, sweeping the mind free of the clouds of old prejudice or misapprehension. And the truth was that the Hodges-Bradleys needed the convertible more than the Bascombs did. No reasonable being could deny that. The Swinger was payment in kind, if not in quality, as Janie pointed out.