Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  Luckily, Josiah was a lot less subtle than he thought he was, and she was beginning to be able to read him. Just for instance, she had known for the past twenty-six days that Josiah remembered exactly how long they would be spending here. She had known because he had been going off with Ji or the male villagers every day, leaving her with Ling and the women. He hadn’t even been living in the same hut as Freddy; Ji had his own, and Josiah was staying there with him. He remembered them spending a certain amount of time here, so he wasn’t going to worry about them being sucked away to another place until that time was up. She was sure that if he had been uncertain how long they would spend here, he would have been sticking to both Ling and Freddy religiously. She didn’t think they had to be that close to Three for the sympathetic resonance to work, but it was possible it might not apply if one of them got too far away.

  On the morning of the twenty-sixth day, Josiah sauntered into Ling’s hut unannounced and said with forced nonchalance, “I’m bored with hunting. I’ll help with the crops today.”

  “What time are we leaving?” said Freddy, picking up the pouch in which she now kept her keys and the little sewing kit Ling had given her and slinging it over her shoulder.

  Josiah spent what he may not have realised was a bit too long standing in the doorway, glaring at her. He said, “I never said we were going anywhere. There is no conceivable way you can claim I did.”

  Freddy shrugged. She found she was hiding a smile. It was funny how twenty-six days in prehistoric China had made her feel better about, well, spending twenty-six days in prehistoric China, plus who knew how many days to come jumping semi-randomly all over space-time.

  “I liked you better when you were in shock,” said Josiah. “Don’t think you know what we’re in for just because you’re good at harvesting rice. Congratulations on gaining a useless new skill, by the way.”

  “You’re just jealous because you don’t like skinning deer,” said Freddy, who had spent several gruesome but instructive hours watching the men prepare the meat. No one stopped her from going where she wanted here.

  Josiah shuddered. “No one in his right mind likes skinning deer.”

  “Well, then,” said Freddy.

  He moved farther into the hut. Ling handed him a bowl of rice and gave Freddy another. They had been living primarily on rice for weeks now. Ling said something to Josiah.

  The carriage missed Freddy by about two inches. “Imbecile,” cried somebody somewhere, and a hand yanked her backwards by the collar. The bowl of rice, steaming, tumbled onto the cobblestones and smashed.

  Freddy blinked up at a large, angry man in a frock coat and enormous curled wig. He was shouting at her in a language that, to her bewilderment, she more or less understood. “Excusez-moi, s’il vous plaît,” she said, only just stopping herself from bowing. The angry man drew himself up to a great height and poured a torrent of indignant French down upon her.

  “Allons-y, idiote,” said Josiah, who hadn’t missed a beat. He was even still holding his rice. He took her hand and dragged her away into what seemed to Freddy to be a huge throng of people.

  “When?” she managed at last, shouting above the noise of the crowd. It was a very French noise. She recognised words here and there, though the accent was different from her Québécois dad’s.

  “Seventeenth century. Paris,” said Josiah. “Come on … you’ll want to see this.”

  The streets were narrow and dark and grimy. Buildings towered above them on either side, seeming to lean inward. Freddy thought they were moving into a grittier neighbourhood. There were no more gentlemen in wigs. The crowd smelled … well, like hundreds of people who hadn’t washed in some time, and that was before you took the odours of rotting food and waste into account. Freddy found herself flinching away from everything. After weeks in a village in Stone Age China, this was all just a bit much. She thought of Ling, then had to force herself not to grope for her key. She had liked Ling. Ling had been dead for thousands of years.

  Josiah handed his bowl of rice to a filthy, bearded man with no legs who huddled beside a doorway. Freddy looked away from him quickly.

  “Here.” Josiah tugged her into an alleyway.

  It was occupied, though it looked as if it shouldn’t have been. There were windows and doors in the walls, all of them boarded up. Freddy saw a girl of about Mel’s age, dressed very badly in a ragged frock. Her feet were bare. She was spitting angry French at the other two people in the alley, a middle-aged man and a boy wearing worn but neat clothes. The boy was Josiah. Freddy glanced at the Josiah beside her, who shrugged. “He’s called Josiah, too. The other one is Jean-Claude Lachance this time, and the girl is Claire Girard … Three.”

  French Josiah had noticed them; he favoured them with an irritated nod. Freddy saw Claire follow his gaze, pause for a fraction of an instant, and start her tirade again, even more passionately.

  “What’s she saying?” Freddy whispered.

  Josiah raised an eyebrow at her. “Your last name is Duchamp.”

  “It’s some kind of dialect,” said Freddy, though she could feel herself going pink. She had vague memories of speaking to her father in French. It had been a long time ago. All she had left now was a knack for the language that came in handy in French class. A lot of the vocabulary and most of the grammar had gone.

  “Parisian street slang,” said Josiah, relenting. “The gist is that she hates the whole world, doesn’t believe anything Monsieur Lachance has told her, and doesn’t understand why the thing with the choice is such a big deal. This is her choice. She’ll be making it in a few minutes. Some of them do react like this.” He waved a hand dismissively.

  Freddy watched the girl rave for a bit. She could hear almost no words she recognised. The dialect, the accent, and maybe even the century rendered the French all but incomprehensible. But she wasn’t sure she needed to understand the exact words. There was something … not right … here. Josiah had told her the choice was something Three had to do. He had implied it was no big deal, just a way of shifting the balance between Cuerva Lachance and Josiah slightly. Claire seemed very upset, though. Struggling, Freddy thought she caught the word rêve.

  “‘Dream’?” she said. “Is she one of the ones who dream about you?”

  “Sure. Maybe. I wasn’t paying attention,” said Josiah a little too loudly. Freddy narrowed her eyes. Josiah may have been one of the worst liars she had ever met, which was surprising, considering.

  “You could translate,” Freddy pointed out.

  “It isn’t interesting,” said Josiah.

  M. Lachance was speaking now. “I don’t care,” said Freddy. “Translate.”

  Josiah heaved a hugely exaggerated sigh. “If you insist.” Freddy caught a hint of triumph under the petulance. Evidently, the part of the conversation he hadn’t wanted her to hear was over.

  “He’s telling her, ‘Well, that was very eloquent,’” said Josiah, “‘but not very relevant. Have you made your decision?’”

  Claire glowered. “Why should I?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” asked M. Lachance, fluttering his hands in the air in a way Freddy recognised. “Do you think everything will go poof if you do? I ask out of curiosity, you understand. I don’t think everything will go poof if you do.”

  “You don’t make any sense,” said Claire.

  “What fun would that be?” said M. Lachance.

  “If I choose,” said Claire, crossing her arms, “what do I get?”

  M. Lachance and French Josiah exchanged glances. “‘Get’?” said French Josiah.

  “What’s in it for me?” said Claire.

  He shrugged. “Clearly, there’s something you want. Name it.”

  “I want you to leave me alone,” said Claire.

  French Josiah muttered something Josiah didn’t translate because M. Lachance was saying simultaneously, “I did think she was going to be one of the difficult ones.”

  “We can’t leave you alone. That’s th
e whole point,” said French Josiah irritably. “You’re stuck with us forever. It’s very sad. Could you just choose now, please?”

  “Fine,” said Claire, her voice high and sharp with fury. She slapped a hand over her eyes, spun around in a circle, and flung out her other arm. “I choose you!”

  Freddy had to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep from smiling. Claire was pointing right in between the two Josiahs.

  “Well, that’s ironic,” said M. Lachance, though he didn’t explain why. “It’ll do, though.” He turned to Freddy and added in English, “Hello, curly-haired one. Did you enjoy the show?”

  Claire peeked suspiciously out from between her fingers. Freddy bit the insides of her cheeks harder. The girl seemed to Freddy to be a seething ball of anger packed tightly into a frame hardly bigger than Freddy’s own. Is that what I look like sometimes when I’m busy hating the whole world? Why do I hate the whole world, anyway? She blinked. Did she? The anger was still there, lurking deep inside, but it had been out on the surface before. It had retreated inward at some point during those twenty-six days.

  What had made the difference? She had been yanked brutally off into the past for no particular reason, bundled helplessly from time to time. Why wasn’t she miserable any more?

  Roland, she thought, testing herself. The anger barely twitched. Oh, come on … he was the whole reason I was mad about everything. I can’t just not be mad because he’s not around. He came into our house. He’s suddenly part of our family. He … Mel likes him. He’s always sulking about something. He’s not our brother. Everything changed when he came …

  Inexplicably, the image of Ling patiently guiding her needle down the length of the tear floated into her mind. Freddy shoved it away.

  Claire was glaring openly at Freddy now. She didn’t seem very much like either Bragi Boddason or Ling. They had been calmer, for one thing. She spat something; Freddy thought she heard the word anglais. “She hates you. Don’t take it personally,” said Josiah. “She hates everyone.”

  To Freddy’s surprise, French Josiah nodded. “We have our hands full this time,” he said in English. His accent was hard to identify, but he sounded relatively fluent.

  The slightly condescending tone set Freddy’s teeth on edge. Both Josiahs were treating Claire like … like a misbehaving pet. What was it with the Threes, anyway? All Freddy really knew about them so far was that Josiah and Cuerva Lachance forced them to choose, then followed them around for the rest of their lives. They clearly thought the choice was important, but Claire’s approach seemed to indicate that it didn’t matter how or why it happened. And there was something about it that Josiah didn’t want Freddy to find out.

  She was going to be travelling with Josiah for some time. She would figure out the Threes; she would figure out the choice. If she was Three, she would eventually have to make it herself. She didn’t think Claire’s method was going to do it for her. Maybe it’s good I’m stuck doing this. At least it gives me some extra time. Mel would come over all private investigator. She would look at the whole situation as a puzzle, and she would slot the pieces together one by one. She wasn’t Mel, but perhaps she could think like her for a while.

  M. Lachance was beaming at her. “This is near the beginning for you, isn’t it?” he said. “I can tell. You still look as if you would rather like to bite Josie’s face off.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Freddy. It was true. The anger was draining away. She thought … it was because of Three, though she couldn’t have said why. The closest she could get was to think that finding out the truth about Three had given her something to work towards. Was that why she had been angry all the time before? Because she hadn’t had anything to work towards? Because she had been meandering through life being discontented about everything without really being able to understand why or do anything concrete about it?

  No, that was stupid. Roland, she thought again, almost willing back the anger, and then, unexpectedly, I wish I could discuss this with Roland. She blinked. She had never wanted to discuss anything with Roland before. She knew he was the one who had been making her angry.

  “Really?” said Josiah. “You’re not going to go catatonic or try to strangle me or do something else insane?”

  Freddy shook her head. She thought it would have been obvious by now. “I want to go home. But I won’t get there any faster if I panic every time we jump. Strangling you won’t help, either,” she added belatedly when she had thought about it for a few seconds.

  “I really hope you’re Three,” said Josiah. “You’ve chosen me already.”

  I haven’t, thought Freddy. She didn’t know what the choice meant yet; there was no way she could have chosen. She wasn’t like Claire. But he didn’t have to know. “Maybe,” she said, doing Mel’s wide-eyed innocent look. She hadn’t noticed Josiah being all that good at figuring out when people were lying.

  Claire flapped her hands at them in what may have been disgust, then darted around the two Josiahs and out into the street. The Josiahs shared a superior smile before turning to follow. “It will all seem much less maddening soon,” said M. Lachance. “Say hello to me for me.”

  Freddy nodded. She had no idea what was going to happen next. She couldn’t quite understand why she didn’t particularly mind.

  11

  “That is not the pointy bit of the gun. Point the pointy bit of the gun away from my head,” hissed Josiah, cringing as another volley of bolts arced by overhead.

  “The safety’s on,” said Freddy, “and it’s set on low. The worst it can do is knock you out for a few hours.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Josiah in his best exasperated tone, “I do so long to be knocked out for a few hours here. Have you been paying attention?”

  “Cut the blorkery, you twain,” said Filbert Cardongay, who was a) Three, b) female, and c) not very good at English. No one was in the thirty-second century, though everyone learned it in school. From what Freddy had been able to gather through the weird grammar and the flood of what she thought of as nonsense words, the language had evolved rapidly and strangely after the Second Oil Plummetry, then died out. The dead version schoolchildren were forced to learn was based on English as it had been spoken in England in the twenty-fourth century.

  They were in Mexico, currently a colony of New France. No one had explained this. Freddy had long since stopped asking for explanations. Mexico was still called Mexico. The rest of North America was now called Canada. Again, no one had explained this. Freddy hadn’t even considered asking why the language people did generally speak here was a mixture of Greek and Afrikaans.

  Freddy and Josiah had been to their future nine times by this point. The furthest they had gone was the ninety-second century, which had been distinctly unpleasant, largely because of the algae. Josiah was always edgy when they ended up in the future. He tended to go on about how the past was more comfortingly boring, but Freddy had gradually gathered the two real reasons the future bothered him: he never knew what was going to happen while they were there, and he hadn’t yet run into himself or Cuerva Lachance in any future time and place. It was worrying him quite a bit, though Freddy was almost certain she knew what was going on.

  “It’s your own fault,” she’d told him a month or so ago on her personal timeline and about four thousand years ago on the timeline of the universe. “You’re avoiding yourself. It’s the opposite of what keeps happening in the past. This time, it’s the future you who knows where you’ll be. You have this thing about not wanting to know the future.”

  “It would make more sense if it weren’t for Cuerva Lachance and Three,” Josiah had said.

  Cuerva Lachance, who didn’t obey rules, hadn’t turned up in the future, either. And though Three always seemed to know who they were and had even been expecting them several times, he or she would never say anything about Josiah’s other self. It all made Josiah uncharacteristically nervous, though maybe it wasn’t that uncharacteristic. Josiah was not the sort of person wh
o dealt well with change. When Freddy pointed out how ironic this was, he could only glower at her.

  Filbert pulled a phone the size and shape of a bobby pin out of her hair. “I attempt callen goodbrethren again stat,” she explained. She breathed on the phone, which activated instantly. Freddy, peering through a gap in the barricade, hoped the goodbrethren were planning on responding soon. There were figures advancing through the rubble, flitting in and out of sight amidst the plumes of smoke from the last lightning grenade.

  “Pointy end,” said Josiah.

  “I know,” said Freddy. “Don’t get your shorbel in a knotten.”

  “Oh, please do not start talking like them,” Josiah moaned. “It was bad enough when you picked up Sumerian temple slang.”

  Freddy shrugged. “We spent a month and a half in a Sumerian temple. What was I supposed to do, twiddle my thumbs?” She aimed her microgun through the gap and squeezed the trigger. The bolt crackled harmlessly against a fallen pillar.

  It was funny how easy it was to get used to never getting used to anything.

  The clothes she had started out in were long gone. She had lost even her shoes and her underwear; all she had left from her old life were her keys and her watch. The keys had come in handy several times, especially whenever she had ended up in the Stone Age. Just having something stabby made of metal could be an advantage in certain situations. The watch was useless, practically speaking, but sometimes she thought it was the most necessary thing she owned. She hadn’t adjusted it once. It ran on and on, counting off the moments of her personal timeline, which had nothing to do with actual time. It counted off the days, too. She didn’t look at it all that often, as her stomach tended to flip over when she did. It was knowing it was there that was important.

  The day she and Josiah had walked through the back door of the house on Grosvenor Street and into ninth-century Scandinavia, the date on her watch had read “Sept. 27.” Now it read “Feb. 25.”