Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

  At last it did, and she opened her eyes to see a ring of blurred faces staring down at her. As if from a mile away, she heard a voice querying her, the tone insistent and anxious. "Ham eh orh ehery?"

  She clutched her head, shook it as little as she dared, squinted up at the blurry white ovals.

  Another distantly echoing query. "Da ngor ta ting beah rah?"

  She closed her eyes again and breathed slowly. Her ears still rang, and the thudding of her own heart and the rushing hiss of blood through her veins drowned out most other sounds. Her head howled with a pain worse than any migraine she'd ever experienced. Her own thoughts, fragmented as the green fire that still blazed in spots behind her eyes, scrambled for meaning, logic, a direction, and found none. She felt little arms wrap around her, and tiny fingers patting her, and she managed to hold Jake close while the pain screamed inside of her.

  She shuddered and willed herself to stand inside the worst of the pain, to become the pain. She'd learned that trick when coping with the migraines shortly after Brian's death; it served her well again. The pain lessened and receded, a coward challenged and faced. She moved after it, and it fled still farther.

  At last she opened her eyes, and the faces were no longer ringed by the haze of a storm moon. She drew a careful, shaky breath and gave Jake a little kiss on the cheek and said, "What just happened?"

  "You've been curled on the floor for almost half an hour. Are you okay?"

  "I am now. Mostly," she added, for she could feel the headache lurking, almost as if waiting for a chance to attack again when she wasn't prepared.

  "You reached into the mirror, your face turned white as a fish belly, and you popped out sweat all over. I thought you were having a heart attack," Nancine said. "That's how Ernest looked when he had his first one."

  "I broke the path behind us. They'd followed us in."

  "You broke a path with someone on it?" June Bug Tate looked horrified.

  "It was that or let them follow us here."

  "I wasn't questioning you doing it," she said. "I just didn't think it could be done at all. I'd always believed once any of us set foot on the paths, nothing could turn us away from our destination."

  "It…hurt," Lauren said. "A lot. I don't think it's something anyone would do except in desperation."

  "It's something only a gateweaver could do," Eric said. He reached down and offered her a hand. The Sentinels stared at her.

  "She's a gateweaver?" June Bug asked.

  "We'll get to that," Eric said. "We'll get to the explanations in a bit. But we need to talk—all of us. We have a couple of serious problems, not the least of which is the possibility of the traitors coming after us and killing us all."

  "If we don't stop the plague, they won't need to," June Bug reminded him. "That will take care of everything for them."

  Someone had turned on Lauren's television in the living room, and she realized that she could hear a newscast droning on. Statistics—death tolls. She rose, moved through the group clustered in her foyer, and stepped into her darkened living room.

  She'd come in at the top of CNN's hourly update. The newscaster was pointing out red dots on a world map—breakout zones, he explained. The first known deaths from what he referred to as Carolina flu were in the Rockingham, North Carolina area—but Lauren had already known that from Eric. What she hadn't known was that the disease had jumped. Not just the Carolinas, which were showing deaths in the high six figures, but California, New York, Canada. Which each had deaths in the high five figures.

  In quick succession, the newsman pointed out fresh outbreaks in Great Britain, Germany, Zaire, and as far of as Alaska, Western Russia, and Hawaii.

  Any hope of containing the disease had died on the vine. The current worldwide toll of confirmed deaths, the newscaster reported, had already reached a million people, and he noted that this was only confirmed dead. The true number had to be much higher, and would continue to climb hourly as new outbreak zones reported in and more bodies came to light.

  A cold spot in the room moved through her, and for an instant, she felt lost, and trapped, and an almost as if she were an alien inside her own head, as if she were seeing the devastation through the eyes of another. Then the cold spot disappeared, and with a shiver, Lauren turned off the television set.

  Copper House, Ballahara

  Seolar could not contain his fury. His captive wizards had escaped to the gods alone knew where; the traitors were out of reach in their castle, though at least watched by their complement of servant/spies; Molly still knew nothing of magic; and all his plans and hopes for the survival of his people and the world he loved were come at last to naught.

  But he still had Molly. Molly, who stood now beside him on the ramparts above Copper House, watching the sunrise burn its way through a cold, tearing fog.

  "I'm sorry I couldn't stop them," she said.

  "You found out that the keth was no keth. That was enough. The burden of stopping them fell on my shoulders, and those of my men. We failed—not you."

  "So what do we do now?"

  "We wait. I have one last tiny shred of hope. It will probably come to nothing—the veyâr have been begging help from the Sentinels for more years than I can count, and the only humans who ever agreed to help us were your parents. But one of my men managed to go through their gate during the heat of the fighting. He's there now, and perhaps he can find something that will help us."

  "Who is he?"

  "His name is Yaner. He's done special tasks for me for years—he found you. He's very good at not being noticed, and very clever. You met him, actually."

  "I did? I don't remember a Yaner."

  "He's not memorable. But you healed his daughter in the back of the wagon, when you were on your way here."

  Yaner. For whose sole surviving child a hundred men had consequently given their lives. One hundred men whose sacrifices would come at last to nothing if he failed. There was a man with incentive to succeed.

  She turned to him and said, "So we wait. I'm not going to just sit in my room and paint pictures, Seo. I'll learn magic somehow. I'll find a way to make a difference—to do what I need to do to mediate between the veyâr and the Old Gods."

  He was staring at her. "You called me Seo," he whispered.

  She nodded.

  "If you can help us, Molly, I will be the happiest man on Oria. If you can't—at least I will have found you. Something good will have come of this, no matter what happens in the future." He reached over and touched her cheek with one finger. "You are so brave. So strong. So beautiful. No matter what happens to me, to my people, I will love you forever," he whispered.

  She smiled up at him, face radiant and young and full of faith and hope. And love. "It is because I love you that I will find a way to do what I must do." She shook her head, and he could see that she was somehow amazed. "I love you. I have never in my life loved anyone. Never. I could never get past the pain of it—but with you, there is no pain. There is only this miracle; that I love you, and that I am free to love you."

  He pulled her close, and held her. No matter what Yaner found, no matter what Molly learned, at least he could experience this. He had never been in love before either. Molly McColl was his miracle as much as she was his world's.

  Cat Creek

  "The plague happened because those people were tampering with magic in the other world," Pete said.

  Lauren, still shocked by the news she'd just seen on the television, jumped. She hadn't realized that he'd come in behind her, or that he'd been standing so close.

  "I know."

  "Eric told me they might not have even intended to do this—that these things could just happen if people were careless with their magic."

  She nodded and rubbed her hands over the goose bumps that had come up on her arms. A draft from somewhere kept finding her, even as she moved around the room, and she felt cold all the way to the bone. "We have to find out what they did." She turned and saw the way he looke
d at her, the curiosity and the admiration tinged with something else, and she backed up a step.

  The thing that she'd seen in his eyes that made her wary vanished instantly, and instantly, he was Eric's loyal deputy on the job again. "It seems like such a ridiculous thing to me," he said. "Even the idea of magic, but the idea that magic could turn around and destroy a world—and not even the world it was used on. A stupid, silly thing. I think of magic, and I think of a white rabbit pulled out of a black hat; of some girl in sequins climbing out of a box after I just saw the man in the tuxedo saw her in half; of cheesy card tricks and silk handkerchiefs and doves flying over my head and me hoping they don't shit on me when they go over. I don't think of touching a dying man and seeing the holes in his chest just close up. And I sure as hell don't think of a million dead and millions more to die. Of our world burned up to ashes because someone somewhere said, 'Abracadabra' the wrong way." His eyes then were bleak and old and haunted.

  "It wasn't what I expected," Lauren agreed. "Hell, when I came back here, I didn't even remember any of it."

  "No?"

  She shook her head. "I almost fell through the damned mirror that first time. Almost—like Alice through the looking glass, but then I didn't wake up." She stared at the blinds pulled over the windows and carefully taped along the edges to prevent any stray light in the house from leaking out and betraying the presence of the Sentinels to the people who sought them. "It's a terrifying feeling to step through the looking glass and find out you're already awake."

  He laughed—a small, dry, humorless sound. "Shit. I'm still hoping this is all one big nightmare."

  She smiled. When he talked to her alone, his easy Southern drawl fell away, replaced by the sharper vowels and harder consonants used north of the Mason-Dixon line. Touches of the South remained, but they were faint. "Funny thing," she said. "I know you're a local boy, and when you're talking to anyone else, I'd think you'd spent every day of your life around here. But when it's just you and me…" She tipped her head and studied him. "…when it's just you and me, I get the feeling you've had a whole lot of the Southern rubbed off—and that if you wanted, you could make it just plain disappear."

  She watched his eyes, caught the quick flicker of shock and wariness shuttered over fast by gentle amusement. He didn't say anything. He just smiled.

  But she knew what she'd heard, and she knew what she'd seen. She shrugged and said, "I'm going into the kitchen to check on Jake and see if those people are going to shoot us, or if they're going to teach us their secret handshake and let us join their club. How 'bout you?"

  He kept smiling at her as she brushed past him, but she could feel his thoughtful gaze fixed on her as she went through the foyer and around the corner, out of sight.

  * * *

  "We're going to have to set up our base of operations right in Oria," Eric was saying. "We don't dare stay here—we've already lost Granger to the plague, and as long as we're here we stand the chance of contracting it and dying. And we need every one of us if we're going to win against this thing."

  "It seems cowardly to run." Terry Mayhew looked both embarrassed and a little angry.

  "It would be stupid to stay here and die," Eric said. "If we die, everyone else dies with us. We can't afford to stand bravely in the face of danger. There aren't enough of us."

  "Then the question remains: What do we with do with them?" Jimmy Norris asked. His white-linen Mark Twain suit was rumpled and soiled, but his thick white hair and white mustache had been carefully combed. The result was a sort of down-at-the-heels elegance that Lauren found almost touching. Or would have, if she hadn't wanted to punch the man.

  "I really don't like being referred to as 'them,' as if we're inconvenient baggage or some awful mistake," Lauren said stiffly. "I'm the only gateweaver you have, since yours turned traitor. And Pete is with me. Without him, Eric would have been dead a couple of times."

  "But you aren't Sentinels." That from Bethellen Tate, who never had liked Lauren, and who hadn't bothered to hide that fact when Lauren was a child. She didn't bother to hide it now, either.

  "You want to swear us in or whatever you do, that will be just fine," Lauren snapped. "In spite of what happened to my parents, I'll be a Sentinel. The world is more important than any grudges I might be holding, no matter how deserved those grudges are." She felt she was watching a bunch of bureaucrats fiddle while the world burned, and her blood boiled for a fight. "You want us to say the magic words? Will that clear your consciences?"

  "If you aren't Sentinels and you know about the Sentinels, you're supposed to…ah, have your memories altered."

  "Been there," Lauren growled. "Done that. I'll kill the person who tries it again."

  She and Pete, outsiders both, stared across the kitchen at the people who had seated themselves around her kitchen table as if they owned the place. Jake slept tucked into his nest of blankets, blissfully unaware of the tension and the anger and the distrust that crackled through the air around him.

  "I vouch for both of them," Eric said. "I've known Pete for years. I knew his family, as did most of you. He's solid and dependable, he's one of ours, he's a good ol'boy like the rest of us. He follows orders, he listens, and he's a reliable man to have at your back."

  That seemed to Lauren to be only the surface of what she was beginning to see in Pete, but pointing out that he looked like a lot more than "just a good ol' boy" from where she stood would have been tactically unwise. She kept her mouth shut.

  "And what about her?" Bethellen pushed. "Her with her traitor parents, and her gateweaver talents, when according to everyone, she didn't even have the talent to walk a gate, much less create one? Are we supposed to trust her with the secrets of the Sentinels, too?"

  June Bug Tate had gotten a funny, almost guilty look on her face at the mention of Lauren's parents, and it didn't go away when she glanced quickly at Lauren and then looked down at her hands. Now, studying her out of the corner of her eye, Lauren realized June Bug had a secret. The old woman knew something about Lauren's parents, or about Lauren—something that she wasn't telling the rest of her precious Sentinels.

  Interesting. Lauren resolved to get June Bug alone at her earliest opportunity.

  In the meantime, she glared at Bethellen.

  Eric said, "Yes. You're supposed to trust her. I'll vouch for both of them. If I vouch for them, you treat them as you would treat me. Unless you want to take an extended vacation in Charlotte."

  "We voted you to lead us. That don't make you God. We can unvote you at any time."

  "Yes, you can," he told her. All of them, really. "You all want to do that?"

  He looked around the table, and no one was nodding yes.

  "Fine, goddammit. Let me lead."

  They caved. They had to, Lauren knew. They had to have her, and they weren't getting her without getting Pete. She was in, Pete was in, Eric still led, and everyone was going to work from a base in Oria.

  "We have one other problem, aside from the big ones," June Bug said, and again she was staring at her hands.

  Lauren leaned forward, suddenly expectant though she didn't know why.

  Eric looked at her without letting any expression leak across his face. "Problem?"

  "Molly McColl. We left without her, but we're going to have to go back and get her."

  His face bleached white. "She was there? She's alive, and she was there, and you didn't tell me so that I could get her out, too?"

  Molly McColl, Lauren thought, oddly disappointed. The woman who'd disappeared right when she'd moved to Cat Creek. Nothing to do with her after all.

  "That's not the whole problem," June Bug said, and her head still hadn't come up to meet anyone's eyes. "All of us saw her. She's…changed. She, well, she partly belongs there. Seems her mother was Marian Hotchkiss, and her father was some veyâr. Her mother went away to have her, and gave her to some distant relatives or friends or somesuch to raise, and Molly only moved back here when she found out who her r
eal parents were. Her real mother, anyway."

  Lauren ran that through her head a couple of different ways, realized what it meant, and sat down on the floor, abruptly too weak and shaky to keep herself balanced on her own two feet. It meant that Molly McColl was her sister—or half sister, anyway. That she and Jake weren't alone in the world. That they had family, and from the sound of things, family that would be happy to meet them, too, because if Molly had nothing better to do than move back to the town where her mother had once lived, just because she'd come from there, she plainly didn't have a lot else going on in her life, either.