Illusion

by Martina Boone

  “You see?” Kate interrupted herself again. “Eliza’s already starting to fall in love with Robert, but her brother doesn’t want to be at Watson’s Landing, and her father can’t be, so she feels like she needs to stay.”

  “I got that from the letter, thanks,” Barrie said dryly. “Is there more?”

  “Not about that, but listen.”

  Since last I wrote, I have spoken to Inola, the woman from across the river, on several occasions. It seems that she, like her mother before her, comes to our island to learn medicine and wonder work from our small fey Spirits, whom she calls the Yunwi Tsunsdi. She assures me that they are great Magicians and wise enough for Cherokee healers to think it worth traveling many miles to study with them in the mountain Caverns where they are customarily found. She is reluctant to trust me fully yet, but I shall continue to assure her that I mean her no harm. I believe there is a great deal more that she can tell me.

  Dear Sir,

  Your most dutiful and affectionate Daughter,

  E. Watson

  The yunwi had drawn closer around Barrie as Kate read, and she studied them with an odd sensation of seeing them for the first time, as if the word “magician” had peeled back a transparent layer of fabric from across her eyes.

  “Is that it? Was there anything else about Inola and the yunwi?” Barrie asked.

  “Eight made me call you instead of going on, and on top of that, he keeps insisting on stopping so he can look things up on the Internet.”

  “What’s the point of reading if you don’t understand what something means?” Eight asked defensively. “Inola and Ayita were risking a lot, sneaking over to Watson’s Landing every night—they could have been punished as runaway slaves. So I looked up Cherokee medicine people and the yunwi again, thinking I hadn’t paid enough attention to the legends the last time I did that. Eliza was right; it usually took decades for a medicine person to learn all the botany, sacred formulas, dreamwork, and psychology that they studied, and some of the old myths and legends mention that medicine people went to study with the yunwi in caverns inside Blood Mountain in Georgia, and Pilot Mountain in North Carolina. Or sort of inside, because according to another legend, there were whole endless villages inside the caves, in layers on top of one another.”

  “What does that have to do with Watson Island? Or are you saying that’s where the yunwi came from?” Barrie asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. The point is that Inola and Ayita couldn’t get to Blood Mountain or Pilot Mountain to study with the yunwi, but they didn’t have to. All they had to do was get across the river to Watson’s Landing.” Eight’s voice hummed with excitement, and Barrie could imagine the way he would have glanced away when he said that, the small tightening of accomplishment at the right corner of his lip.

  She fell in love with him even a little bit harder.

  “Ayita must have discovered that the yunwi were here when John Colesworth made her come over and translate for the Fire Carrier,” Eight continued. “Doesn’t that make you wonder what was so important about what they learned that she and Inola kept coming back? Once they took the risk and left Colesworth Place to come here, why didn’t they keep going? Why didn’t they escape?”

  “Escaping wasn’t so easy,” Barrie said. “Where were they going to go? The Colesworths would have hunted them down or hurt their families—not to mention there were potential consequences for anyone who gave them shelter. You’re right, though. The yunwi must have been teaching them something important.”

  Throughout the conversation, the yunwi had been pressing closer and closer to Barrie. Now one of them tapped her knee and pointed to where another stood near the wall of the chapel where Barrie intended to eventually bury Mark, Luke, and Twila. The second yunwi stooped to touch a wild rosebush that had taken root near the wall, and as Barrie watched, the bush sprouted new green branches and fresh leaves, and roses climbed the wall and sprang into bloom.

  Chest tight and eyes stinging, Barrie sat with the phone forgotten in her hand. Because she had known the yunwi were magic—of course she had—but she hadn’t known.

  Beside her foot, a fox squirrel scampering along the ground sat up to watch the roses growing, exposing its black mask and soft, pale underbelly. Barrie gave a faint shake of her head.

  Bringing the phone back to her ear, she spoke into it again. “What happened to Inola? Does it say?”

  “Not so far, at least up to where we’ve gotten in the book. Eliza wrote about being frustrated because she tried to buy Inola and the rest of her family to get them away from the Colesworths, but the more she was interested, the more Daniel Colesworth refused to sell.”

  Barrie felt nauseous all over again. “Did she mean to free them? Or only move them here?”

  “She doesn’t mention which,” Eight said.

  As if they were trying to comfort Barrie, or distract her, more of the yunwi went over to the chapel wall, and soon the entire surface was covered with a tangle of wild climbing roses and moonflower vines. Barrie’s skin tingled, and her eyes welled with tears.

  “Bear?” Eight asked, his voice dropping. “Are you still there?”

  “Y-yes,” Barrie answered.

  “I thought I lost you. Look, I’m not defending Eliza or any of the slaveholders. But it wasn’t that simple back then, at least not for Eliza. Whatever her own feelings were, and whatever apparent power she might have had running Watson’s Landing and her father’s other plantations, they were her father’s plantations. The slaves didn’t belong to her. Even her own clothing didn’t belong to her. Women didn’t have any rights back then.”

  In so many ways, for so many people, freedom was still an illusion. Barrie thought of the statistics she had read about how many women and children were still enslaved all over the world. Now—not three hundred years ago—and she wondered how it was possible that so little could change. Sometimes it seemed like the world was sliding backward and no one was noticing. And she thought of Ayita and Elijah, still chained by John Colesworth’s hate—still enslaved.

  “Eliza was the one who reinforced the tunnel that Thomas built from Watson’s Landing to the Beaufort side of the river. Did you know that?” Kate said. “She did that to make it easier for Inola to come and go. She did do something to help.”

  Even knowing that didn’t make Barrie feel better. She wondered what the yunwi had thought of all that they must have seen over the years. How long had they been on Watson Island before Thomas had arrived? Had they come all the way from Georgia, or from Pilot Mountain up north? Or somewhere else entirely? And why?

  She had known and accepted that the garden here was magical. It was magic that kept the chapel and the buildings protected, and she and Pru had both accepted the yunwi’s help taking care of Watson’s Landing. But she hadn’t really ever wondered exactly how the yunwi did all that. She had seen them working, seen the evidence of their theft of screws and nuts and nails when they had wanted her attention, and the restoration of those same objects when she had accepted the binding. They had helped her remove the wheels from a baby carriage to make a chandelier, even though iron clearly bothered them. They had helped her clean the stalls and care for the horses.

  And what had she done? She had regarded them as mischievous and helpful children, like Eliza’s early description of fairies and brownies. All of that shamed her, when they were clearly so much more.

  They were oddly subdued now, standing around her with uncharacteristic stillness. Some of them—those who had grown the roses maybe? Barrie couldn’t be certain—had faded out until, even when she looked at them directly, they were barely visible, and their eyes had dimmed to the gray of dying embers.

  “Can you and Kate bring the letterbooks when you come over here?” Barrie said into the phone, her voice coming out strange and strangled. “I have something you have to see.”

  “What’s the matter, Bear?”

  “I don’t think I can begin to explain it,” she said, but when she’d
hung up, the words of Eliza’s letter seemed to twine around her the way the roses climbed and twisted up the chapel wall. Inola had come to the yunwi to learn wonder work. The perfection of that word struck Barrie mute. Was it possible to have magic without wonder? Without awe? Without respect?

  What were the yunwi, really? More important, where did their power come from?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  All three Beauforts arrived at Watson’s Landing to help with the open house preparations, and Seven’s presence was as awkward as it was unexpected. The tension between him and both his children made Barrie worry about having them together in a room filled with sharp, pointed objects. Within the first fifteen minutes, he had offered so many nuggets of “helpful” advice that Barrie would have cheerfully stabbed him with a chef’s knife herself.

  Pru dug an apron out of the drawer and threw it at him. Hard. “It doesn’t matter how things get done, as long as the desserts look and taste good—and as long as everyone had a good time making them. So, here. Instead of telling the rest of us how to do the jobs we’re already doing, why don’t you put this on and come and stir the chocolate in the double boiler?”

  “But—”

  “But nothing.” Pru exchanged a look with Mary and Daphne and shook a wooden spoon at him. “If you’re not going to let us have fun, then close your mouth and get out of our way.” She shoved him toward the stove.

  Barrie caught Eight’s eye and tried and failed to bite back a smile. While Seven was distracted, shaking out the black-and-white pin-striped apron and wrapping it around his waist, she took the opportunity to pull Eight aside.

  “Did you bring the letterbooks?” she asked quietly.

  He tipped his head in his father’s direction. “I couldn’t, since Dad insisted on coming with us. And I guess his being here means you’ll have to wait to show us whatever you wanted us to see. We’ll sneak back over later, once Dad’s gone to bed.”

  Swallowing her impatience, Barrie glanced at Seven, who was staring bleakly down at the chocolate chips that were just beginning to soften in the boiler. “Tell me again why we’re doing this,” Seven said to no one in particular. “We should have our heads examined. Do you think for a minute that the Colesworths are up late tonight cooking and working? I’ll give you odds they’re sitting comfortably in front of a television set with their feet propped up.”

  “That’s it.” Pru spun around to face him with her hands on her hips. “I’ve had enough. No one invited you, Seven Beaufort, so you can leave anytime. You know, I remember when you used to complain less and have a lot more fun!”

  She was breathing a little fast, her face tilted up to his and her hair curling in the humid heat. Seven looked down at her with the chocolate-tipped spoon still raised, and the music in the room abruptly seemed to grow too loud. No one had ever turned the volume down after Barrie and Eight had danced, and the song shifted from Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is” to “I Can’t Help Myself” by the Four Tops. The shake of the tambourine counted out the moments like a metronome while Seven’s bemused expression suggested he wasn’t sure whether to shake Pru or storm out of the house. Instead, he gave a sudden grin and held his hand out with his palm turned toward the ceiling.

  Pru stared at it and shook her head.

  “Come on. You just told me I used to be more fun.” Seven moved his feet in the up-two-three, back-two-three, right, left rhythm of a Shag basic pattern. “If we’re going to have beach music at this open house, don’t you think we’d better practice? It’s been a few years since you and I danced together.”

  Pru’s cheeks flushed a pretty pink. She glanced at Barrie, who nodded encouragement, and then slowly she put one hand in his. Seven dropped the spoon into the pot, switched off the stove, and pulled her into the space between the counter and the kitchen table.

  At first, Pru mirrored Seven’s movements the way Eight had shown Barrie the night before. But then the movements shifted, easing into a series of intricate steps and turns, each one slightly different. It became a completely different dance, and it struck Barrie that it reflected the two relationships, the breathlessly stumbling one that she and Eight were just beginning, and the tension and the push and pull of the years and baggage between Pru and Seven, all the attraction that drew them toward each other, and the moments of hesitation in between. Step-together-step, step-together-back, and the rock-step of indecision. The way Pru and Seven did it was as smooth as butter, their hands barely moving, and no obvious signals between them.

  “It’s practice,” Eight whispered into Barrie’s ear. “You and I just need to keep on dancing.” Taking Barrie’s hand, he pulled her toward him. The song changed again, and the Embers sang “Hold Back the Night.”

  Barrie did her best to remember the steps as Kate, laughing, pulled Mary out onto the floor beside them, and Daphne watched, smiling, from beside the avocado refrigerator with a bowl of cake batter held in the crook of her elbow. It was only the yunwi, who would normally have been the first to dance and make their shadowy mischief underfoot, who held back. They were all subdued, and several of them were still barely visible, as if whatever energy they had expended growing the roses hadn’t all been replenished yet. For Barrie, the realization made the dancing and the laughter lose their luster, and it occurred to her that moments of pure joy were sweeter than a soufflé straight from the oven, all puffed with steam, warmth, and the hope that enough love and faith might keep them from falling. The fact that there was laughter at all despite what hung over them was a miracle, and she wished it could last more than a brief instant at a time.

  She couldn’t help wondering, once it was finally over, how many of them would be happy by this time tomorrow. Not all of them could have what they wanted, or even needed.

  Perfect moments never stayed unchanged. Maybe it was enough that they existed occasionally at all, or maybe they were sweeter because of the awfulness sandwiched in between.

  She made herself keep smiling as Eight squeezed her hand. They danced through two more songs, and the third was so slow that she lost the count and Kate lost interest and Pru and Seven got so lost in each other that it seemed they had forgotten there was anyone in the kitchen apart from themselves.

  • • •

  After returning to Beaufort Hall at ten thirty, Eight and his sister were supposed to come back through the tunnel to meet Barrie as soon as they could. Barrie waited inside, pacing and counting her footsteps, and at last the beam of a flashlight bobbled toward her. Instead of going out to meet it, she stayed with the yunwi at the invisible demarcation line of the Fire Carrier’s magic. As weak as the yunwi were, she didn’t have the heart to leave them. Only two had even followed her inside into the tunnel, and they were so faint that Barrie could barely make out their shadowy forms.

  For all her impatience as she waited, the tunnel seemed less daunting now that Barrie knew it had been Eliza who had finished and reinforced it. Memories still lurked there among the shadows, coiled to strike at unexpected moments, but maybe at least at some point in its long history, it had been a place of hope or even happiness. Barrie wondered if Inola had felt safe using it to come and go as she met with the yunwi. And had the marriage between Eliza and Robert been a good one? It would have been nice to think that at least once in three hundred years, a Beaufort and a Watson had found a way to be happy when they’d fallen in love. Barrie wished that the yunwi would, or could, tell her that much at least.

  “Do you remember Eliza?” she asked them. “Did she get to know all your secrets? Did she write them down in the letterbooks? Don’t try to talk—just nod if she did.”

  Their eyes flashed in the darkness as they dipped their heads, but Barrie didn’t know which question they were answering. Maybe all along, it wasn’t that the yunwi hadn’t been able to communicate with her. She was the one who hadn’t known how to listen.

  She didn’t even know their names. That suddenly seemed ridiculously wrong. Names held power, but they were more than tha
t. Names were a shorthand for emotion, the shortest form of story. How could Barrie feel so much for the yunwi in general, when she didn’t know who they were as individuals?

  “Can you show me what to call you?”

  Their hands brushed hers, and once again, touching them made her senses sharper. Not only were they now easier to see, but the yellow glow of Eight’s approaching flashlight grew brighter, and the sound of his footsteps grew louder. That seemed to be a function of energy. Any infusion of energy had done it: the energy from the spirit path, the death of the rabbit. But it had been the binding, too. Obadiah had touched Eight once to allow Eight to see him when he’d been invisible before, and more recently, he had touched Berg to dispel whatever magical hypnotism had sent the dig crew and the sheriff’s deputies back to their tents.

  What would happen, Barrie wondered abruptly, if she touched Eight and wanted him to see the Fire Carrier and the yunwi? Did he still have enough of his gift for that to work? Maybe Kate could want to see the Fire Carrier enough for both of them.

  Unfortunately, when Eight finally reached Barrie, Kate wasn’t with him. She caught him by the arm and towed him up the branch of the tunnel that led to the Watson woods. “Where’s your sister?”

  “Good to know you’re not in a hurry or anything,” Eight said after stealing a quick kiss. “Where are we rushing off to?”

  She kissed him back with a warm rush of exhilaration. Standing on her toes, she claimed his mouth, claimed him, because she suddenly felt hope hovering in the damp and musty long-still air. The hand holding the flashlight dropped to his side, and the beam pointed down to the ground. Her own flashlight shone at the wall, from where her arm was wound around his waist beneath the backpack he had slung over one shoulder.

  Pulling away, she placed a finger against his lips. “That’s another bookmark. We can come back to this activity later. I’m a fan of this activity, but I’ve got an experiment I want to try. A couple of experiments, actually—provided that I can get the first one to work.”