Witchlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Yet, even while Winter was trying to convince herself to follow this sensible course, a gleam of light in her rearview mirror caught her attention. Turning around in her seat, she saw the warm yellow glow of a lighted storefront. Before she had time for second thoughts, Winter was out of her car. Locking it swiftly, she turned up the sidewalk in the direction of the light, half-running through the spring rain.

  THE GREEN MAN was still a welcoming oasis; Winter did not even stop to remember that this was where she’d had her disastrous interview with Rhiannon as she lunged up the steps and pushed open the door.

  It was warm and dry inside the café, in sharp contrast to the rainy darkness outside, and the air was filled with the smell of baking bread. The stained-glass panels hanging in the windows were dark and glittering now, but the polished wood of the spool tables and oak counters glowed brightly, and the plants hanging everywhere filled the place with life. Winter stopped, blinking a little at the brightness. She brushed her hair back from her face, feeling raindrops spatter beneath her hand.

  Do something. Don’t just stand here like a mooncalf.

  Despite the location, the café had a good following; most of the tables were full, and the murmur of conversation and the clink of tableware formed a lulling cushion of sound. Winter looked around. Rhiannon had seemed to know this place when they had been here before; perhaps they knew her?

  There was a booth free; Winter moved toward it and sat down, grateful to be shielded from the illusion of prying eyes. Nobody had noticed her and nobody cared.

  But in that much, she was wrong.

  The waitress—a young woman with straight blond hair, dressed in tie-dye and a rainbow-colored crochet vest—had barely brought her coffee when a stranger approached the booth.

  “Hello,” he said. “Do you remember me? I’m Paul Frederick; we met the last time you were here.”

  The coincidence did not surprise her; it was as if on some level Winter had been expecting him to be here. She smiled invitingly and gestured.

  “Yes, I remember you. I don’t know if we were ever properly introduced. I’m Winter Musgrave. Won’t you sit down?”

  Frederick smiled. “Actually, I’m here with my wife. Won’t you join us?”

  When Winter collected her coffee and moved to the Fredericks’ table she received another surprise. The petite brunette seated with him was someone she knew.

  “You’re Emily Barnes, aren’t you? The pianist?”

  Husband and wife looked at each other, and Emily laughed. “I suppose you’re right, Frodo, and I should stop pretending that nobody knows.” She rose gracefully to her feet and held out her hand to Winter. “Yes, I am. If you’ve heard of me, I hope you’ve enjoyed my work.”

  Winter took the hand and clasped it gently, out of respect for the talent in those strong fingers. “Very much. I saw you a few years ago in Japan, when you were on tour with the symphony. You opened with Anstey’s Variations on a Theme for Harpsichord.”

  Emily’s smile broadened. “Dear Simon! I always love his work—even though I think he writes some of those transitions just to torment me. He was my teacher, you know.”

  Winter smiled, and the three of them sat down. There was no one who loved music, either classical or modern, who didn’t know the modern-day fable of Simon Anstey and Emily Barnes. At first his protegée, Emily was now coming to be considered the foremost interpreter of his work. The fairy-tale symmetry of the story was marred only by the fact that the legendary musician-turned-composer had married not Emily, but her older sister Leslie, several years before Emily herself had married. But when Winter had imagined the poised, professional Emily’s husband, someone like the elfish Paul Frederick had been the farthest thing from her mind.

  “And this is Winter Musgrave, Em. She was a friend of Cassie’s,” Paul Frederick—Frodo?—said.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Emily Barnes’s eyes filled with genuine sympathy. “I know that saying it was a dreadful tragedy seems so inadequate, but Cassie’s death is such a great loss to so many people. Everyone loved her.”

  And it’s my fault. Mine! Winter felt her own grief as if it were still raw and fresh. “Yes,” she said briefly, lowering her head.

  “It may be more of a tragedy than you realize,” Paul Frederick said soberly. Winter’s head snapped up, and she locked eyes with him challengingly.

  “No,” she said evenly, “I don’t think so.” The warning in her voice was plain.

  “Paul!” Emily’s voice broke into the clash of wills. “If this is business of yours, can’t it at least wait until after dinner?”

  Paul Frederick looked sheepish, and smiled apologetically at Winter. “I’m sorry; I was rude. Have you eaten? The Green Man is table d’hôte in the evening unless you just want a snack, but the food here is very good.”

  “Thanks,” Winter said. “I just flew in, and the food on the plane was pretty ghastly.”

  Paul gestured, and the waitress who’d brought Winter’s coffee came over to the table.

  As THEY WAITED for the food, Emily determinedly kept the talk general. Winter learned that Emily considered herself too impatient to teach, though Simon said she would come to it someday.

  “He said if he could become a teacher, then there was hope for anyone!” Emily said, with such an infectious merriment at her private joke that Winter could not help but smile, too. For a moment her own problems seemed very far away.

  Emily seemed profoundly incurious about Winter’s business in San Francisco, but it seemed to Winter that Emily did not share all her husband’s interests, and wisely kept herself separate from them. The food, when it came, was a poached whitefish with exotic mushrooms in wine sauce—as unexpected in this atmosphere as was the marriage of neat, disciplined Emily Barnes to the exotic, anachronistic Frodo.

  When they had finished dinner and the coffee had been brought, Emily rose to her feet.

  “I am going to go powder my nose for about ten minutes,” she said determinedly. She strode toward the back of the café with the same queenlike carriage with which Winter had seen her cross the concert stage.

  “What’s that all about?” Winter said.

  “Oh, Em isn’t really interested in what she calls ‘my other life.’ She comes to the big Festivals, but music is the most important thing in her life, and we both respect that,” Frodo said.

  Winter felt a pang of wistfulness, wondering if Grey would be—would have been—as intelligent and caring a husband as Frodo obviously was. She had made no time in her life for anyone with whom she could form that level of closeness, and knowing her reasons didn’t make the loneliness any less.

  “And what is ‘your other life’?” she asked deliberately.

  Frodo met her eyes. “I was a member of Cassie’s working group. Her coven,” he said quietly.

  It took a moment for all the ramifications of that simple statement to sink in, and when they did, Winter found herself blushing with shame. If Frodo talked about the circumstances surrounding Cassie’s death Winter did not know if she could bear it. She’d lived her life as if everyone had been put into the world to play a part subordinate to hers, and was only now coming to realize how selfish that had been.

  “So you probably know Rhiannon,” she said evenly.

  “Yeah.” Frodo grimaced. “I guess I really got on her case about the way she treated you—just jumping in with what must have sounded like a bunch of messages from the spirit world delivered by a gypsy con artist, when you’d barely found out Cassie was dead.”

  “Oh, no!” Winter protested automatically. “I suppose I could at least have listened to her,” she added after a moment.

  She regarded Frodo warily. The aloofness she had always cultivated as a defense against the world made her rebel against the very idea of this stranger knowing anything about her personal life—let alone about the monster that had stalked and killed Cassie.

  “It’s hard to know what to do sometimes,” Frodo said diplomatically.

>   Winter set her jaw, choking back the words of self-justification before they were uttered. To have to live with what Truth Jourdemayne called the Unseen World was bad enough, but to talk with someone she hardly knew about things that her mind still rejected even as her mouth formed the words …

  But to her relief, Frodo seemed to be willing to let her lead the conversation, and there was only one thing Winter really wanted to talk about.

  “I need the letter Cassie left for me,” she said. “Unless you know what it said?”

  Frodo shook his head. “No. But Rhiannon can meet us here in about fifteen minutes and bring it with her. If that’s okay with you?”

  “Yes,” Winter said, not trusting herself to say more. It’s going to have to be, isn’t it?

  Frodo got up to make the phone call.

  EMILY HAD RETURNED to the table, and the three of them had finished with dessert, by the time Rhiannon actually arrived. Winter had no idea what Frodo had said to her in the phone call, but Rhiannon looked almost painfully subdued. She wore a light raincoat beaded with moisture over a pink cotton Shaker sweater, tan corduroy slacks, and oxblood loafers. Her frizzy riot of copper-red hair was stifled in a severe braid that could not quite control the rain-sequined halo of frizz. She carried a manila envelope under one arm inside her coat.

  “Hello,” she said unsmilingly, looking at Winter.

  Oh, just give me the damned letter! Winter felt like shouting. Instead, she rose to her feet and held out her hand. “Hello, Rhiannon. I’m pleased to see you again.”

  The other woman’s mouth twisted, preparing a sarcastic retort, then she caught Frodo’s eye and stopped. She took Winter’s hand and shook it briefly, and Winter was sharply glad that her particular psychic kink was psychokinesis, not clairvoyance. It was bad enough suspecting the truth about people’s inner feelings without knowing them for sure.

  With the determination gained through years of practice at keeping emotion at bay, Winter smiled and took charge of the conversation.

  “Thank you for coming. I didn’t have the opportunity before to tell you how sorry I am for your loss; I know Cassie must have meant a great deal to you.” The words were artificial and contrived, but on some level they were true: If Winter had been a better person, she knew, she would have sympathized with Rhiannon’s loss instead of being obsessed solely with her own.

  Surprisingly, Rhiannon accepted the inner truth of Winter’s words, not their calculated motivation.

  “She was your friend first,” Rhiannon said gruffly. “I’m sorry I startled you before. I’m glad you came back.”

  “We so rarely get a second chance in life,” Winter said. “Would you care to sit down?”

  “No,” Rhiannon said. “I mean, I’m on my way to work. I’m working at Capwell’s now, Frodo—it’s just temporary, but it’s better than nothing,” she said in an aside. “Anyway, Cassie’s letter is in the envelope. So’s my address. If you need any help from us—anything—we owe it to Cassie.”

  Honest if not gracious, Winter thought.

  Rhiannon held out the envelope and Winter took it. She stood as Rhiannon crossed the dining room and went out the door into the rain.

  Winter sat down again. The waitress had cleared the table while Rhiannon had been there, and Winter set the envelope on the cleared space in front of her. When it became obvious that Winter was not going to open it, Frodo cleared his throat.

  “I hope you’ll give me a call when you’ve had a chance to read that,” he said. “I’d like to know what I can do to help. Do you have a place to stay?”

  In what she now thought of as her other life, Winter had always stayed at the St. Mark Hotel. She wondered if they’d let her in without a reservation. “I’ll find something.”

  “Will you call me?” Frodo said.

  Probably worried that I’m just going to burn Cassie’s letter. “Don’t worry,” she said obliquely. “I’ve gone through too much to get this.” She forced herself to go on. “I’ll call you.” The waitress came back with the check; Winter grabbed it automatically. “And, please. I hope you’ll be my guests for dinner. I owe you a great deal,” she added reluctantly. It was time to get used to being beholden to people, no matter how much her pride rebelled against it.

  “Well … okay,” Frodo said with a warm smile. He stood up. “C’mon, Em. And, Winter, come and see us when you can, okay?”

  “Sure.” If I can. “Good night, Frodo, Emily. It was a pleasure.”

  When they were gone, Winter put down her American Express card, then signed the slip and left a generous tip. But it was a long time before she could bring herself to slip the envelope into her purse and leave.

  THE ST. MARK HOTEL, that gracious relict of what San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called San Francisco’s Silver Age, still stood, in the words of the famous song, “high on a windswept hill.” Despite the lateness of the hour when Winter finally reached it and the lack of advance warning, the staff was able to accommodate her. It was true that all that had been free on such short notice was one of the Mark’s luxurious suites, but it hardly seemed to matter, and soon she was looking out from the parlor window of her suite over the fog-shrouded Bay. A bottle of wine from Room Service stood on a tray before her, with her briefbag beside it. A corner of the letter poked out from inside the bag, still unopened.

  You have to do it sometime, Winter told herself, trying to ignore the clutching ice in her stomach. She reached forward, but instead of the letter, she drew the cork out of the wine bottle and let the scarlet liquid splash into the glass beside it. You’re drinking too much, she admonished herself, then gulped at the wine angrily. What could it possibly matter now? What could anything matter? She wasn’t going to live long enough to become an alcoholic!

  She sat back and stared morosely out the window as the alcohol worked its way into her bloodstream. Her conscience nagged at her. Whatever pain Cassie’s letter might give her, it was a pain that she deserved.

  Winter poured another glass of wine and reached for the envelope. Her hands shook slightly as she tore off the end, and two things fell out. One was a smaller envelope, business-sized, with her name written on it in Cassie’s scrawling script; the other, the information Rhiannon had said she’d given her. Meticulously, Winter read over the name and address and tucked the slip of paper into the appropriate pocket in her Filofax before putting its binder back into her bag.

  That left only Cassie’s letter. Winter pressed the envelope between her fingers, feeling its thinness. Whatever information the letter contained, it was very brief.

  Gritting her teeth and closing her eyes, Winter ripped the envelope open.

  THE FOG slid in off the water, blurring the boundaries between the ocean and the land. The rain had stopped, but the air was still filled with moisture as the mist claimed the city for its own, sliding over the walls of stark new office buildings, gracious old hotels, and even the sloping sides of the Transamerica Pyramid. In the City by the Bay, the night slid on toward morning.

  In the parlor of the suite in the St. Mark Hotel, time had lost all meaning. Winter stared at the brief paragraph written on the sheet of white paper. She sat cold and silent, unmoving, while inside her mind the screaming had only begun.

  15

  The Winter Heart

  Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

  For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

  The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the

  singing of birds is come, and the voice of the

  turtle is heard in our land.

  —KING JAMES BIBLE

  NORTH OF San Francisco, the coastline runs to small coves floored in silvery gravel, and the remains of the mighty sequoia forests stand along the coast like silent sentinels. Along this wild Pacific headland there are a number of small towns that go on untouched from the days when gold, or timber, or even wine—and not computers—were the principal livelihood of the locals. There are frame houses
in the exuberant fashion of the previous century, and gracious buildings in the Mission style, and the inhabitants hope that the freeway sprawl that seems determined to make Sacramento merely a suburb of San Francisco will miss them entirely.

  She had not slept.

  As soon as it was light, Winter had checked out of the hotel. The Mark’s concierge had been helpful, providing driving directions and even a road map. She reached San Gabriel a little before noon.

  San Gabriel was a sizable town, larger than Glastonbury, though dwarfed by the metropolises surrounding it. By the time she arrived, the early morning haze had burnt off to leave the coast basking in a brilliant, cloudless day.

  Winter did not care.

  When she pulled into a gas station to ask directions, her voice was harsh as a crow’s, her face a stark mask of sleeplessness and psychic pain. She thanked the attendant as carefully as if such worldly courtesies could still matter to her, and drove slowly toward her final destination.

  In some cruel incongruity, the place she sought was almost on the water itself, just as if beauty still had the power to affect those within. The Pacific reflected the sun and the sky as if it were poured of blue enamel, and gulls wheeled and cried above the cove. Winter slewed her car into the parking lot and stopped.

  “I HAVE to see Hunter Greyson,” Winter said to the woman behind the desk. Inside the building it was as if the postcard-perfect day outside did not exist. Tired fluorescents illuminated walls that had been painted a grubby gas-chamber green thirty years before, and the shabby linoleum looked as though it could never really be clean.