Illusion

by Martina Boone

  He gave her a soft laugh. “I’m saying people all have layers, and no one wants an unfrosted plain vanilla piece of cake. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still furious that you kept secrets from me. I’m still trying to work out how to be second place, and I wish you trusted my intelligence enough to let me help you—”

  “I need you to help me. You’re the one who’s been on the right track about what Obadiah is, and I don’t even want to think about how much you must have read to find out about Raven Mockers. But that’s my point. You take the time to look for facts and think a situation through. I’m too impulsive, and sometimes, maybe, you’re too logical. That’s a good balance, though, isn’t it? As long as we can be honest with each other.”

  “Can you be honest with me? Can you let me make choices for myself? Part of loving someone is letting them make their own mistakes.”

  “I don’t know. I never had to make those kinds of choices before I came here,” Barrie confessed. “Mark was the only person I could really confide in, and I told him everything except the small, hurtful things people said or did—the things he couldn’t do anything about. I thought that was kinder, but it never occurred to me to wonder how he would feel if he found out I’d kept secrets from him. Not until I did the same thing to you.”

  “A mistake stops being a mistake after a certain number of repetitions.”

  Eight jumped down into the Away, and Barrie hesitated on the dock. Something about Watson’s Landing seemed off-kilter, but she couldn’t pin it down until she finally realized that the perspective from the Beaufort dock was different from the more familiar view farther down at Colesworth Place. From here, the cemetery and a bit of the chapel were visible. That was the way it was too often—discovering what was missing was harder than seeing what was there.

  Trust was like that too. You took it for granted while you had it. But when it disappeared, it left a hole in the fabric of a relationship that was impossible to ignore.

  She had been so careless with Eight’s trust, and with Pru’s. Not because she had meant to deceive them—not all the time, at least, and only for the best of reasons. But when mistakes hurt someone, do the reasons really matter?

  “I’m not going to make you promises I can’t keep,” she said. “I’m not always good at thinking things through before I act, and I can’t promise to always put your priorities ahead of the binding. But we both have responsibilities. You didn’t think twice before cutting your hand and putting it into the fountain after Kate was bound, even if it meant you would end up bound to Beaufort Hall yourself. Even if it meant you and I couldn’t be together.”

  “I still have to find a way to take the binding back from her.”

  Barrie should have known that was coming, so it shouldn’t have surprised her. It shouldn’t have pulled a lump up into her throat. “She’s going to be furious if you do that. Especially now that she knows how it feels.”

  “I can’t let that matter.” Holding out his hand, Eight helped Barrie down into the Away. His callused fingers were gentle, and dabs of blood showed through here and there on the bandages across his palm. His voice had softened with regret. “She has to go to college. She needs to finish high school without worrying about migraines while she sits in class. She has to have a chance to go out and be normal, and then come back here and choose to be bound—if that’s what she wants. It has to be a choice. If that means I have to take the binding from her to make that happen, then I have to find a way.”

  “But you’re taking away her choice if you do that. Don’t you see? What if you take the binding and can’t give it back?”

  “That’s a risk I have to take.”

  “She’ll hate you for it.”

  “I know that.”

  The Away swayed, and the dark water lapped the hull and slipped on beneath them. Barrie watched it go.

  “You’re choosing what you see as your duty over our relationship, which was the same thing you blamed me for doing,” she said.

  “Yes, but the difference is that I’m telling you openly what I’m going to do, so that we can try to work around it. If you can’t accept that, then we really don’t have a future.”

  “And what about Ernesto? Since we’re being open, when were you going to tell me that he might still be alive but that you didn’t tell me because you wanted to be certain before you worried me? If we’re going to be open with each other, then shouldn’t we be really open?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Thanks either to the wind or the yunwi, the kitchen door blew shut behind Barrie faster than she had expected. Her aunt wasn’t there. The avocado kitchen appeared bare without the old table and chairs, and the crisp linen cloth was folded on the counter beside the crystal bowl of roses. Beach music trickled quietly from the radio on the counter, the Drifters singing “Under the Boardwalk,” reminding her of Lula.

  Barrie crossed through and pushed through the swinging door out into the mahogany-paneled corridor. “Aunt Pru? Are you here?”

  The words echoed in the stairwell, and several yunwi peered down at her from the second floor. Barrie stopped to poke her head into the library, unsettled by the empty spaces where her grandfather’s desk and chair had been and by the lack of any sense of anything lost or missing. She pushed at her senses, walking up and down in front of the shelves, but she felt no tug of loss, and there were no books helpfully labeled History of the Watson Family or Magical Bindings 101. Giving up after a few minutes, she let the yunwi herd her toward the front door and around toward the stables.

  Pru was out in the paddock, trotting Batch in an even circle. She sat tall and quiet, so much a part of the horse that her hands barely moved. Batch’s white stockings flashed in a perfect rhythm, his steps seeming to skim the ground instead of trotting over it.

  Thinking that Pru didn’t realize she was there, Barrie climbed up onto the white-painted fence and hooked her feet through the rungs as she settled in to watch. A row of yunwi came to sit around her.

  Pru shifted her weight, and Batch’s trot melted into an equally elegant walk, remaining on the same circle until Pru finally loosened the reins and his neck and stride both lengthened. Stopping beside Barrie, she dismounted and held out a stirrup. “Hop on,” she said. “It’s time you had a lesson.”

  “What happened to the movers? Aren’t they coming any minute?”

  “The phone’s in my pocket. I’ll know when they reach the gate—and I was desperate to get out of my head for a while after what Seven told me.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “That’s not what I want to talk about. Get on up here,” Pru said tightly, and for the first time, Barrie realized how upset she was, and that it wasn’t entirely about Seven. Pru gestured and held out the stirrup, her tone brooking no argument.

  Barrie mounted awkwardly. She held her hand out for the reins, but Pru picked up a lunge line and a long whip from beside the fence post instead, did something complicated to fasten the rope to Batch’s bit on either side, and tied the reins securely out of Barrie’s reach.

  “Were you and Eight able to get anything resolved between you on the way over here?” Pru asked as she adjusted the length of the stirrups and nudged Barrie’s legs and seat into the proper position.

  Barrie would have been more optimistic about their relationship if he hadn’t been trying to force Kate to give up the binding. Or if he had kissed her when he’d dropped her off at the dock. He had looked like he was going to—looked like he wanted to—but then he hadn’t. He had apologized about Ernesto, though, and at least they had cleared the air.

  “We need to keep talking,” she told Pru, “but he has to go out to Columbia to finish the rest of the paperwork with the baseball coach and the university admissions people. He’s coming over later.”

  “Beaufort men are complicated, aren’t they?” Pru smiled at Barrie sadly. She clucked and, snaking the whip along the ground, scattered the yunwi and urged Batch out into the same wide circular pattern he had been
following earlier. “Now concentrate. Keep your weight in your heels, keep your back loose, and look forward between Batch’s ears. You need a strong foundation, or you’re eventually going to fall and hurt yourself. And if you watch the ground, that’s where you’ll end up.”

  Sensing Barrie’s discomfort, Batch walked cautiously, his neck stretched long and his ears flicking back between Barrie and Pru as if he weren’t quite sure who was giving orders.

  “What do I do with my hands?” Barrie asked.

  “You’re going to hold them out at your sides, shoulder level, until the balance is second nature. In the meantime, you’re going to have to trust Batch—and me. We’re a team, the three of us. If one of us lets the others down, anything could happen. You could fall. Batch could get frightened. I could get trampled. We work best when we communicate. You understand?”

  She narrowed her eyes at Barrie in a way that made it clear she wasn’t speaking just of riding, and Barrie tensed. The gelding took a couple of shortened steps.

  “Relax,” Pru said. “You’re making Batch nervous. Just like you make me nervous when I expect you to be in your room asleep and instead I get a call telling me you’re at Beaufort Hall sacrificing blood into the fountain.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, ‘oh.’ This is where that teamwork comes in. You don’t have to ask my permission before you go out, but with all that’s happened these past weeks, I’d have thought you would let me know before you disappeared—not to mention that if we had talked things through, maybe we could have headed off some problems.”

  “Kate texted me to hurry, and I didn’t stop to think.”

  “Well, you can’t do that anymore. Don’t go racing off by yourself, do you hear me? I was going to tell you this morning that the sheriff called last night. There’s a chance someone spotted Ernesto down in Port Royal yesterday. It’s probably nothing—a bald guy with a face tattooed on the back of his skull. That’s unusual, but not definitive. The good news is that if it’s Ernesto, he’s heading south like we thought. Still, even without Ernesto, Lord only knows what else is going on around here. You don’t know who might be sniffing around after the gold and hanging around in the woods by Cassie’s house. The sheriff’s patrols aren’t necessarily going to keep everyone away from there, and we still don’t really know what Obadiah is up to.”

  “I can’t argue with any of that,” Barrie said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I realize that you being bound to Watson’s Landing when I’m not is an awkward situation. Watson’s Landing chose you, and I’ll do my best to accept that you have a role to play that I don’t have. That’s a lot of change and adjustment for both of us. But even if I don’t have the magic that you do, I am your guardian. You’re my family. My only family. I love you, and I can’t bear the thought of you being hurt, not to mention that what affects Watson’s Landing concerns me, too. So from now on, you have to at least talk to me before you put yourself in danger, all right?”

  She clucked again before Barrie could answer, and Batch picked up an easy trot. Barrie’s arms dropped to grip the slight rise in the saddle above the gelding’s withers. Her nerves translated to Batch, who jigged sideways, sending the yunwi who had been running alongside diving back for the fence. Barrie closed her eyes and made herself relax, and the horse’s gait immediately smoothed out.

  “You see? Trust is a chain reaction,” Pru called as Barrie brought her arms up again. “Now, why don’t you try telling me what you’re up to. Whatever you’re planning. Full disclosure.”

  Barrie wondered if she was the only one who continuously underestimated Pru. She didn’t mean to—Pru had such a quiet demeanor that it was easy to lose track of her competence and intelligence, but Barrie was done making that mistake.

  “I wish I were up to something,” she said, “but I’m at a standstill and out of ideas. There’s nothing in the library, and Seven doesn’t know anything, and we can’t talk to the water spirits. I guess I can try the Fire Carrier again, though I don’t know what good that will do. I’d love to get a better look at the Beaufort library. I’m going to try to talk to Eight about that, but Seven isn’t exactly going to be eager to have me poking around there.”

  “He’ll come around eventually.”

  “Yes,” Barrie said, “but is eventually going to be too late?”

  • • •

  Barrie tried to focus on the work at hand while she put the horses away and then supervised alongside Pru and Mary all afternoon while the movers brought in Lula’s things. Though Mary managed, as she usually did, to do the lion’s share of the effort and keep the rest of them organized, they were all bone tired by the time the empty truck rolled away down the driveway between the oaks. Mary left soon after that. Retreating back into the house with the yunwi, Barrie couldn’t help looking at Lula’s inlaid mahogany table in the center of the foyer and wishing she could bang the edge of the heavy vase down a few times on its mirror-polished surface. There must have been dents in it once, back before it had been restored. Dents and scratches and signs of living that Lula would have considered too ugly to bring into her house in San Francisco. Here at Watson’s Landing, its smug perfection made everything else look shabby by comparison.

  “Keeping this instead of the old one was a mistake, wasn’t it?” Coming to stand at Barrie’s elbow, Pru looked down at the table with a critical eye. “It fits here and it doesn’t, and all I can think is how sad it is that Lula was trying to erase all the imperfections from her childhood. But I almost made the same mistake yesterday myself.”

  “I’ve been angry with her for so long. I was mad because she locked herself away. Because I thought she didn’t want me. Because she died. I suspect I didn’t want to stop being angry, because now it hurts more when I think about everything she lost. What I lost by not knowing her well enough.”

  Pru tipped her head against Barrie’s and rested it there. “I’ve been angry with her too, and she didn’t deserve any of what happened to her. Even so, I can’t understand the choices she made. Why run off with someone she knew was dealing drugs? Violence—disrespect of any kind—is a cycle that’s hard to break, and she had our father’s legacy, I know that. Thinking of her makes me examine myself and my relationship with Seven. I have to question the way I tend to look for reasons to excuse his choices and the way I want to overlook his mistakes, not just to forgive them.”

  “That’s what we do when we love people, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but each time we do, we lose a piece of ourselves. I did that with my father, and Lula did it with your father, and Seven and I will need to have many long conversations before there’s anything except a wide river standing between us. Love makes us want what’s best for people, but half the time, it’s hard to see what that will be. It’s why you need to be careful with Eight.” She sighed and pivoted toward the door. “Have you read your mother’s letters yet?”

  “I did last night. It was like seeing a Lula I didn’t know existed. I always thought she hated me a little.”

  Pru’s eyes softened, but her voice was firm. “Learning to love yourself is easier when you have someone to show you how. She should have told you a thousand times how much she loved you. The fact that she didn’t left you without a foundation, so count each one of those letters as an ‘I love you’ and read them a million times over. And never forget that I love you too.”

  Barrie’s vision blurred behind a veil of tears.

  “Come with me,” Pru said. “There’s something I haven’t done in much too long.”

  They walked into the kitchen, where sometime in the course of the day, Mary had managed to make up a pot of fish stew that simmered on the back burner. She had also left a neatly printed note by a pair of blue willow bowls on the counter.

  Don’t forget to eat! Neither of you have a lick of common sense.

  Pru smiled and switched the burner off. “Mary doesn’t approve of me lately. Changing my mind about furniture. Letting you take Daphne to see Ob
adiah. Feeding the yunwi. Bringing the horses back. ‘Impulsive’ and ‘illogical’ are both dirty words in Mary’s book, and I feel like I’m letting her down if I don’t work until eleven o’clock every night. I’m tired to my bones, though. Tired in a different way than I used to be before you came. A wide-awake kind of tired.”

  “I’m worried about Daphne,” Barrie said. “I know Mary said she was fine, but it bothers me that she didn’t come back over here today. They all worry me.”

  “I think it’s just what Mary said: more problems with Brit.” Pru smiled faintly. “I do wish Mary would let us do something for them.”

  “What if we offered something that wasn’t a loan or charity? Mary’s helping us plan the restaurant, which is management, and she’s had great ideas. And once I go back to school, you’re going to need even more help running things. It’s a lot of extra work—”

  “Don’t feel guilty about that. I love the restaurant, and so does Mary. It’s given us both a whole new lease on life.”

  “Then what if we made her the restaurant manager? Or a partner. In essence, she is one already since she’s been with us every step of the way. What do you think?”

  Pru regarded Barrie so long that Barrie flushed and shifted from foot to foot. Then Pru laid both hands along Barrie’s cheeks and kissed the top of her head. “That’s perfect. You’re right, and she more than deserves it.” She vanished into the butler’s pantry and emerged a moment later carrying a pair of scratched sterling silver spoons and a Tupperware tub glazed in frost. “And since we’re already doing what Mary would consider frivolous and irresponsible, we’ll save her stew for tomorrow and celebrate with dessert for dinner.”

  “My favorite meal,” Barrie said, laughing.

  “Tonight it’s peach ice cream, and I’m going to teach you the best way to eat it.” Leaving Barrie to follow, Pru went down into the garden and out onto the lawn. Halfway between the woods and the house, she lay down on her back, gesturing for Barrie to join her. She wedged the lid off the tub and held out a spoon. “I like to come out here when I need perspective. When things seem too big.”