Illusion

by Martina Boone

  “You’re not up to anything crazy again, are you, Buffy? Maybe as a favor to me, we could lay off the spirit-slaying until tomorrow night.”

  “No slaying. But where is Kate? Didn’t she come with you? Did you bring the books?”

  “Yes, I brought them. But Kate’s not coming.” Eight hurried beside Barrie as she headed toward the shorter tunnel that branched off the main one and led up to the Watson woods. The backpack he had brought tapped against his shoulder blade like a nervous twitch. “Dad discovered that the books were missing when we got back. He found them in Kate’s room, along with the cell phone he had confiscated earlier, so he didn’t believe me when I said that I was the one who had taken them. Or he didn’t care. Short of shimmying down a trellis, Kate’s locked up tight for the next few days.”

  The beam of Barrie’s flashlight jiggled erratically. “How did you get the books back to bring them over here?”

  “I told Dad that Eliza was both a Watson and a Beaufort, which makes you just as entitled to read them as we are. I also pointed out that he’d promised to read them this afternoon and he hadn’t even tried. If he had, he would have discovered earlier that they were missing. Also . . .” Eight’s brow knitted, and he shot Barrie a searching, sideways look, as if trying to gauge her reaction even before he said whatever was coming next. “Also, I told him about Obadiah and the lodestones and the open house.”

  “You told him everything?” Barrie stumbled to a stop. “What happened to worrying about him doing something stupid?”

  “I never meant to tell him. One minute we were yelling at each other, and then all our feelings erupted and came flying out. For both of us,” Eight said, his voice sounding neither worried nor angry.

  “Is that good?” Barrie asked dubiously. “Or bad?”

  Eight dropped another quick kiss onto her lips. “Good, I think. He and I have both argued—yelled—about the same things many times before, but after what you said to me about Ernesto, I thought about some of them differently. Not telling him about Obadiah wasn’t fair or helpful. He swears he’s not going to make any decisions without talking them through, and at least now I know how scared he’s been. He’s afraid of losing me and Kate the way he lost his father, and Pru, and my mother. The people he loves keep leaving him. Or dying.”

  Barrie knew that feeling. It scared her, too.

  Stopping at the thick iron door that led out to the edge of the Watson woods, Eight held the flashlight while she looked at her watch and pulled the keys from her pocket. “It’s almost midnight,” she said. “We’re going to have to hurry.”

  “Your experiment has something to do with the Fire Carrier?”

  “Partially,” Barrie said, unlocking first the door and then the padlock on the grating above the stairwell.

  Outside, the unnatural hush that preceded the Fire Carrier’s coming was already present, the air so still that the sound of Barrie’s own pulse was like a tide in her ears. No insects, no frogs, none of the usual night sounds from the small creatures that loved the darkness. Turning toward the trees, she found the first faint glow of fire tinting the trunks in flickering variations of amber and red and saffron. Along the edge of the lawn, the yunwi ran more slowly than usual, the firelight reflecting in their eyes.

  Barrie walked through the woods and down toward the river, heading for the bank where the Fire Carrier waded in when he emerged from the trees. It was the same place where she had dragged herself out of the river on the night of the explosion, and she couldn’t help looking over at the Colesworth dock. Her limbs felt numb and alien all over again. Finding out that Ernesto hadn’t died had ripped open all the scars.

  “I’m glad that your father knows about the open house,” she said. “We’ve all been keeping too many secrets.”

  “The more we love someone, the more we try to shelter them,” Eight said. “That’s normal, but it doesn’t make it right. We can all do better.”

  The two yunwi who had gone into the tunnel darted through the open door and grating and sprinted away from the woods—as if it had taken all that time to work up their courage, or maybe their strength, to pass that close to a large amount of iron. Other yunwi met them, and they stopped some yards away and stood watching Barrie. Just watching.

  The Fire Carrier walked down the bank. The sphere of flames in his arms reflected on the water, as round and full as a second moon, and he waded out amid the trembling marsh grass and spilled fire out onto the river.

  Clasping Eight’s forearm, Barrie held tight and wished that he could see the Fire Carrier. She wanted him to see what she saw. If any bit of his gift remained, his compulsion to do what she wanted, she needed it to apply at this moment, while the river burned. Because he had never felt the Beaufort binding, and now probably never would, the only way he would ever understand her, fully understand why she had kept secrets and why she had to put Watson’s Landing first, why she couldn’t give up her binding, was to experience the magic through her eyes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The air crackled with electricity. The Fire Carrier turned his head and looked straight at Eight, who was looking straight at the Fire Carrier. Eight went rigid.

  Barrie squeezed his arm more tightly. “Can you see him now?”

  “What did you do?” Eight asked, sounding both awed and bewildered. Which was an answer in itself.

  Relief and an almost giddy joy rushed through Barrie, but then the Fire Carrier shifted his attention back to her, and as always there was a silent plea in the way he watched her, a request and a sadness. A longing. Seeing the spirit up close the first time on the night of the explosion, she had thought he wasn’t much older than Eight, but seeing them together now, she had no idea how old he looked. Both youthful and much older. Older in years and not just living.

  She needed to stop making assumptions. That seemed to be the lesson she was destined to keep relearning. Every time she assumed something based on what she knew, she discovered she knew too little.

  “What do you need us to do?” she asked the Fire Carrier. “We want to help you, but we don’t know how.”

  The Fire Carrier only nodded silently as always. Turning back to the river, he spread his hands and called the flames back to himself, then spooled them in gold and fiery strands until they had balled up tightly again. He climbed out onto the bank and vanished among the trees.

  “Well, that was unexpected.” Eight pried his hand away from hers, rubbed his eyes, and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “That’s my first actual ghost, if I don’t count Obadiah. I have to admit, I pictured him differently. I need to go look up that headdress. It’s more of a cap with feathers than a war bonnet.”

  “I never said it was a war bonnet.”

  “But you said ‘feathered headdress,’ and that’s where my head went. Movies, I guess. Now we have something specific to work with. Maybe what he’s wearing will help us figure out who he is and where he came from—or at least when he came from.”

  “Were you able to read what he wants?”

  “It’s a shame we didn’t think of this earlier when my gift wasn’t so weak.” Eight half-closed his eyes in concentration, and his expression grew distant. “I don’t think what I felt was a want, exactly. Nothing that specific. It was more like a concept—like peace, or rest, but also duty, as if all three of those had nearly the same meaning. I know that doesn’t make sense.”

  “But you couldn’t read Obadiah properly, either, remember. You said that what he wanted had been with him for so long that it had sunk down like bones in a tar pit. The way you described it makes me think of the binding. After a while, the ache becomes enough a part of you that you’re able to think about other things.”

  The stillness that was partly a Beaufort trait and partly Eight’s own thoughtfulness settled over him, the narrowing of focus that made Barrie feel like she was the only person in the world who mattered at that moment. He smiled at her. “Damn, it’s sexy that you listen to me.” But then h
e glanced back in the direction of the woods. “You’re right, though. Whatever the Fire Carrier wants is old and painful, but it’s not like Obadiah. It’s not buried deep—it’s urgent. But if he wants us to understand him, why doesn’t he just use magic again? If he was the one who gave the families the gifts in the first place, you’d think he could conjure up some convenient method of communication.”

  “Like what? A radio? The yunwi aren’t as strong as they once were, either. Maybe the magic is fading. Maybe that’s the problem . . . or maybe it wasn’t his magic in the first place.”

  “What do you mean?” Eight peered at her and rubbed a hand along the back of his neck.

  The truth of what Barrie had just said ran through her like an electric charge, as if she’d tapped into a vein of energy herself. Because suddenly, it was as if things were finally making sense. Maybe, at last, they were getting close to the answers.

  “That’s exactly what I need to show you.” She reached for Eight again, laced her fingers with his, and gestured to where the yunwi had wandered down to the edge of the water, as far from the woods as they could get while staying close to her. “What about them?” she asked, wishing he could see them, too. “Can you tell what they want?”

  Eight went tense again. The yunwi stared back at him, their eyes burning more brightly now that the flames had gone from the river. Head tilted and brow furrowed in concentration, Eight drew Barrie closer to where the yunwi waited. Then he stopped where he could almost have touched them. They came to him instead, reaching for the same hand that Barrie was holding.

  “Can you feel anything?” Barrie asked.

  “Nothing at all. It’s like they’re not there.” Eight held tight to Barrie’s hand and peered more closely. Then he gave a befuddled shake of his head. “That’s not only because they’re spirits—even the Fire Carrier still gave me an impression.”

  “I need to show you something else, too. Something they did today.”

  After locking up both the tunnel grating and the iron door, Barrie led Eight out to the edge of the woods toward the chapel and the living tapestry of roses and blooming moonflower trumpets that the yunwi had created on the wall. The scent of the flowers was elusive, the promise of sweetness with undertones of something tart and clean.

  “This is what the yunwi grew while I was talking to you and Kate about the letter,” she said. “It was as if they wanted me to know they could still do what Eliza called ‘wonder work.’ It took all their strength, weakened them, and afterward I could barely see the ones who had performed the magic. But they’re clearer again, now that the Fire Carrier has finished his ceremony, as if whatever he did recharged them.”

  The brightly burning eyes of the yunwi watched Eight from around the garden, peering from behind benches and gravestones and trees as he walked up to the wall of the church. He plucked a moonflower blossom from a vine, and his expression held a mixture of reverence and panic. He’d taken ghosts, skeletons, and exploding speedboats—even Obadiah—in stride, but moonflowers made him falter.

  “Whatever the Fire Carrier does, it’s not just keeping them on the island,” she said. “It must also give them energy. Or strength or power, or some combination of the three. Maybe it’s all the same thing.”

  Eight twirled the moonflower between his fingers. “That’s more in line with the stories I read. If the Cherokee medicine people were the ones who worked magic, and if at least at some point, some of them went to the yunwi to learn, it wouldn’t make sense to think that the Fire Carrier could keep the yunwi here against their will. Hopefully, there’s something about that in the letterbooks somewhere.”

  Pulling Barrie toward the bench, Eight shrugged out of the backpack and unzipped it before he sat down. He handed Barrie the first of the books and took the second for himself.

  “Give me a starting point,” he said. “What should we be looking for? Just any reference to magic, the yunwi, or the Fire Carrier?”

  “Or the Scalping Tree and the lodestones, your fountain, the spirit path, vortexes . . . also ravens and energy.”

  They settled side by side. Barrie held the flashlight under her chin and tried to simultaneously hold the book and turn the pages as she skimmed.

  “How about you read while I hold the flashlight?” Eight suggested, scooting closer.

  Their arms were close enough that current shimmered between them like summer heat on asphalt. The hair on Barrie’s skin ruffled each time she flipped a page, and the butter-yellow beam trembled across Eliza’s narrow writing as Eight held it. Eight’s breathing grew rough, and Barrie’s grew shallow.

  She told herself to concentrate. She scooted away a tiny shift at a time so that Eight wouldn’t notice her leaving. One of the yunwi clambered up onto the bench, scrambled over Eight to wedge between them and peer at the writing, then jumped down again and darted behind the chapel.

  Eight shivered, as if caught in a sudden draft. “What was that?”

  “A yunwi. He—or maybe she, I don’t know, I can’t tell gender—was curious, I think. I wish there were a better gender-neutral pronoun. It’s hard to think of the yunwi as individuals when I have to think ‘they’ or ‘it’ all the time instead of ‘he’ or ‘she.’ ”

  “I wonder what they call themselves,” Eight said. “ ‘Yunwi’ is the Cherokee name for them, but a lot of different Native American tribes believe in some kind of Little People. And not just here; there are stories about them all across the world.”

  “Maybe it’s like energy. If ch’i, or moyo, or prana are all basically a variation on the same concept, and spirit paths are similar to dragon lines and ley lines, then why couldn’t yunwi be the same as Eliza’s English fairies or fey? If the yunwi are real, what if every culture who encountered them has reshaped the stories about them—seen them through the lens of their own culture and beliefs? It’s easy to lose sight of the common denominators, to focus on the differences instead of the more important similarities. It’s like pronouns. Once you put a convenient label on something, it’s easier not to examine it very deeply. That’s human nature.”

  “Maybe. Partly. But there are Old English documents that used genderless pronouns, and that never kept women from being dismissed as less important.”

  “When did you look that up?” Barrie forgot the book she was holding, and it began to slide off her lap again.

  Eight reached out and steadied it, his face reddening and his eyes avoiding hers. “When I found out you called Mark a ‘he’ even when he wore dresses. I figured that was what he wanted, but it made me curious.”

  How could Barrie not love him when he said things—did things—like that? Something must have shown in her expression, on her face, because he tilted the flashlight to look at her more carefully. “What’s wrong, Bear?”

  “Nothing.” She shook her head. “Mark used to have arguments with people about what he should or shouldn’t call himself. His theory was that anybody who stuffed themselves into Spanx and learned how to go through life wearing six-inch heels had a right to call himself any damn thing he pleased.”

  Eight grinned at that, his teeth flashing, white and even. “I wish I could have met him.”

  “He would have loved you.”

  “Do you?” Eight asked, his eyes searching hers.

  She didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. No more secrets.

  “I do,” she said.

  He kissed her then, long and slow and deep. It was a promise of a kiss, a beginning.

  It was perfect.

  They sat in silence afterward, reading side by side with the flashlight shining down on the pages and the kiss still shimmering between them. The night, the very air, resonated with all the timelessness, possibilities, truth, and gold dust of a Klimt painting.

  Barrie tried to concentrate, but her thoughts were distracted, and with her attention broken, snippets of stories she had heard and read kept creeping in, stories about fairies, and brownies, elves, dwarves, and goblins. He
r eyes grew tired from reading the small, ornate script in the dim light, and it was late—past one thirty, according to her watch—but they needed answers, and she didn’t want the night to end. Suppressing a yawn, she turned the page.

  “Did you find something?” Eight asked as she bent lower to read more carefully.

  “Listen,” she said. Backing up to the start of the letter she’d been skimming, she read aloud:

  [To my Father]

  Honored Sir,

  Your recent news of James’s illness is met here with much concern. I trust that he will soon find himself on the mend and can return to his Duties, although I would, of course, wish him to return here instead to take up the Responsibilities that he seems determined to avoid. I cannot in honesty understand his Aversion to all the wonders here. Doubting his Bravery is impossible when he does not hesitate in battle with His Majesty’s Regiment, and so I must attribute it to some other Failing of his character. You will plead with me to be more charitable toward him, I know. But how can I when his willful disregard for my own happiness causes both me and my dear Robert such great Pain and prevents us from being together? We make do, in the meanwhile, as best we can. I shall not give in, however you entreat me, to consider another suitor. Indeed, even if Robert had not so firmly won my affections with his gentleness and kindness, the very unhappy Mr. Boil whom you addressed to me is such a man as I would wish upon no Body, for he thinks—and speaks!—only of himself.

  To this end, I hope that you will once again entreat with James when next you see him. If you will not, then I will have no recourse but to consider ways in which to convince him to take up his duty to his Family and to preserve the spirit of the bargain that Great-Uncle Thomas pledged with his blood on the Fire Carrier’s Serpent Stone. Inola has assured me that the consequences of risking the felling of the woods and the great Tree would be so dire that they do not bear envisioning. If James will not voluntarily take up his duties here, perhaps there are ways to Compel him to do so! Unlike my brother, I shall not forsake my Honor and my great-uncle’s promise.