Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver)

by Hiatt, Bill

  Once I had gotten Dan, Stan and I all back together as friends, Dan had started acting like his old self, and I had forgotten the whole thing. But tonight he had been fighting to kill, his violent response to Alcina’s commands much different from what mine had been. Somehow that darkness within had played a role in making him the berserker who nearly made Gordy and Carlos into hamburger—would have, in fact, but for David’s intervention.

  When Alcina controlled me, I hadn’t known who my friends were and certainly fought some of them, but I never entertained the idea of using deadly force. Hell, I would have if Alcina had directly ordered it, probably, but I was pretty sure Dan was acting without any direct kill orders.

  Talk to Nurse Florence about it! Don’t try to fix it yourself on impulse.

  I knew I should do exactly what part of me was thinking. Besides, I wasn’t in the habit of probing around more than necessary in my friends’ minds.

  Still, if that darkness was the product of some external force operating on Dan, it wouldn’t hurt to figure out what it was. The presence of an alien force all that time suggested a currently unknown enemy, someone who had been around as long as Ceridwen had been getting ready to kill me, maybe even before. Didn’t that possibility demand some quick investigating? On the other hand, if the darkness was somehow an inherent part of his mind, I could easily withdraw and discuss the problem with him later.

  My mind slid toward the darkness, but the thing had a thick skin, and my gentle probe bounced off of it. I couldn’t remember seeing anything quite like this in anyone else’s mind, but that didn’t prove it wasn’t natural in Dan’s. Again I probed, this time somewhat more forcefully, and again I was repulsed. Either magic was involved, or this part of his mind was something that Dan himself wanted desperately to hide.

  Yeah, I know—I should have backed off, but I had the idea that I was probably dealing with hostile magic, and I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it would work toward some evil purpose. Perhaps it would even kill Dan. How could I risk my friend’s life over squeamishness about probing too deeply? Surely he would understand.

  Gently but firmly, I turned all my strength toward piercing the darkness’s defenses, and this time they cracked before me.

  God! If I had one do-over for my life up to that moment, I would use it to make myself back off before it was too late.

  Within the darkness, I saw in searing clarity the memories that Dan was trying to keep under lock and key, memories of four years ago. I saw him convincing Eva to stop visiting me. Yeah, my condition had been bad enough in real life, but here was Dan, luridly exaggerating it, making me seem hopeless, making me seem like someone who would just drag Eva down with me. The memory was so hauntingly real I could even look into Eva’s eyes and see her heart breaking as he went on with his malicious fictions.

  I also saw scenes of Dan poisoning her parents against me. When I got out much faster than his stories had suggested was possible, he worked on Eva again, convincing her that I was not as well as I seemed, that I was on a pharmacy full of meds just to seem vaguely normal, that I could go over the edge at any time. My changes in interests probably lent just enough color to what Dan was saying to make his stories seem more plausible. Then he added the finishing touch, just for good measure: he said I no longer loved Eva, didn’t really remember our relationship in fact, and when Dan had tried to remind me, I had become very upset and had another relapse. “If you really care about him, Eva,” I could hear him saying, “you will leave him alone. If he has any hope of becoming more stable, we can’t afford to upset him again.”

  How could Eva have believed all that trash? I had to remind myself that she was twelve at that point, just as I was, and Dan was the sagacious thirteen-year-old—and, next to Stan, my best friend. Yeah, she believed him because of how close to me he was! And all the time he was stabbing me in the back; he was twisting the knife deeper and deeper. Stan was staying in the hospital until someone physically removed him, and Dan, my other best friend, where was he? Stealing my girlfriend, that’s where! Using her love for me to make sure she stayed away from me! You would think she would have realized he was lying when she found out the truth about my situation, but that happened four years later, and somehow she didn’t make the connection.

  Now so many things made sense. When Nurse Florence had dream-walked him while vetting him as a possible ally for me, what she had seen had convinced her that he felt betrayed by me, that when I abandoned common activities like soccer that we used to do together, I was abandoning him. I had no doubt that was what he told himself on days when he couldn’t look himself in the mirror. He was somehow twisting the whole thing around in his head, making it my fault, disliking me as a pathetic attempt to cover the cesspool of guilt at the core of his soul. That also explained his outbursts when he thought Stan was stealing Eva. Yeah, everything was as clear as a bloody, bloody auto accident, but not one I was watching. No, it was my guts strewn all over the freeway.

  Dan saw the change in my eyes, in my face, even before I said anything. I wasn’t looking in a mirror at that moment, so I don’t exactly know what friendship dying looks like, but I bet Dan could tell me—if I didn’t rip out his tongue first!

  “Tal,” he said shakily.

  “You bastard!” I shouted. “All these years I thought…I didn’t understand what had happened. I thought it was about me. And all this time it was you!”

  “Tal, what’s wrong?” asked Nurse Florence.

  My response was to punch Dan as hard as I could in his handsome, all-American-boy face. He reeled backward, and everyone was in motion, either to support him or to grab me.

  “What are you doing, man?” asked Gordy. By now he and Shar had my arms, though I was struggling mightily against them.

  “What am I doing? You really want to know what’s going on? Here, let me show you!”

  “Tal, no!” shouted Dan. Despite the volume, there was a note of begging in his voice. I ignored it. I still had the images of Dan’s betrayal in my head. It was child’s play to blast them into everyone else’s minds, together with enough of my hospital experience to reveal how much he had lied and to show that, far from having any insight into my condition or even any excuse for misunderstanding it, he had never set foot in the hospital at all.

  The restraining hands dropped away from me. Everyone looked stunned, some even as blank as zombies, but once what I had showed them soaked in, surely they would all turn on Dan. He had tried to isolate me, and now he would be the one who would be isolated. But I wasn’t through yet. Oh no, not by a long shot!

  “You used the worst thing that ever happened to me, Dan! You exploited it. You profited from it. I want you to know how I was feeling then. Crazy, huh? Full of meds, huh? You have no idea. But you will, my friend, you will!” I raised my left hand, now cloaked in bloody red light. “You will know it exactly.”

  I could see Dan cringing away, but he could never run fast enough to outrun the awakening spell.

  “Tal, you mustn’t!” exclaimed Nurse Florence. I could feel Shar a half a second from knocking me down when I dropped my hand.

  “No, Dan, I’m not really going to do that to you. Destroying lives is your specialty, not mine.”

  I could tell Dan wanted to say something, but the human brain can only process so much so fast, and his was clearly overloaded. Well, I couldn’t imagine anything he could say that would be worth hearing ever again. However, nobody else jumped in either, leading to an awkward silence of epic proportions.

  Vanora recovered first and started barking orders at the security men, who had frozen in the middle of moving Morgan and Alcina into two of the nearby vans. Nurse Florence pulled herself together then, gave me a quick shot of healing, and then went to heal Dan’s more extensively damaged face. I could hardly believe that, but I had to remind myself she was a healer and would probably have done the same for Morgan if necessary.

  By that point I was beginning to focus on Eva, whose expression wa
s such a mix of guilt, revulsion and longing that it was effectively unreadable. Angry as I was with Dan, I was not so out of control that I would invade her mind. She looked at Dan then, and I could read the condemnation in her eyes, and so could he. He did not even attempt to explain himself, perhaps still tongue-tied. But what could he have said, really?

  Then she looked at me. I don’t really know what I was expecting, maybe a lingering embrace and roll credits, standard movie happy ending. That was not what I got. I could tell she was feeling guilt for having fallen for Dan’s stories and for not realizing, even when she learned more of the truth, that Dan had lied to her. That was all I could tell with certainty. I did not see old love rekindled. I did see a tear slide down her cheek, then another, then another. I think she whispered, “Sorry!” to me, and then she turned away, moving toward the parking lot. I wanted to follow her, but David unexpectedly blocked my path when I tried to move in that direction.

  “Taliesin, have you not more than once tried to convince me that I needed to let go of the past and that I needed to forgive myself for what I have done.”

  “What you did was about three thousand years ago,” I muttered.

  “To me, it was like yesterday,” he said quietly. “And my sin is far, far worse than his. I stole a man’s wife. He stole your childhood girlfriend. Then I killed the man. He did not kill you. If God has forgiven me, then surely you can forgive him.”

  “God can forgive Dan if He will…but I never will!”

  David wanted to say something about the importance of following God’s example—I bet he was aching to. Yet he did not, probably realizing that his words would be wasted at that point.

  Khalid was crying somewhere nearby. Yes, crying and wrapping his arms around Shar’s neck.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, feeling a hint of my protective emotions toward him reviving.

  “I want…I want things to be like they were before, like they were yesterday.”

  Yeah, kid, you and me both!

  I should have said something comforting. He was just a kid, one who had a really rough life, one who deserved better than to get sucked into my drama.

  Yeah, I should have, but I didn’t. Instead, I said something like, “Yesterday was just a lie. Today is the truth.” Khalid wept even more bitterly, and Shar gave me an intensely angry look.

  In a short time, the security detail had Morgan and Alcina tucked away somewhere, the mess cleaned up, and space found for anyone who was without wheels, Eva in particular. Our raw emotions, however, could not be so easily swept away.

  I became aware that Dan was getting up and moving in my general direction. Would he have the nerve to try to apologize? I looked into his unreadable eyes and could not tell—and I had no intention of plunging into that garbage heap of a mind.

  Dan said nothing. Instead he unsheathed his faerie-forged sword, laid it quietly on the grass in front of me, turned quietly and walked away. I guess that was his lame attempt at resigning as one of my warriors…or, more likely, a way to avoid the embarrassment of being thrown out.

  Nurse Florence appeared at my side, her professional detachment feeling pretty frayed. “Tal, we have to talk. Guys, I’d say you’re all too tired to drive. We can find space for you in one of the vans, and some of the security men will drive your cars home. Let’s do that now. We are getting dangerously close to sunrise, and your parents won’t stay asleep too long after that.”

  The guys, except for Shar, who was clearly angry with the way I had handled Khalid, mumbled a good-bye and disappeared so fast I would have thought they had all suddenly acquired magic. The way my view of reality was changing, that scenario almost seemed plausible.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself!” snapped Nurse Florence as soon as everyone else was out of earshot.

  “What? I should be ashamed? I think you have me confused with Dan,” I replied, my voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “Shut up, and listen!” Nurse Florence was practically spitting the words at me. I had never seen her quite like this. The surprise was enough to get me to stop talking, at least for a few seconds, and she took immediate advantage of the opportunity.

  “Tal, you threatened to use dark magic on someone tonight! Do you know what that means? It means you are half a step from becoming just like Morgan or Ceridwen!”

  “I would never really have done that!” I protested.

  “You didn’t really intend to carry out the threat, but on some level, you wanted to. I could feel the emotions radiating from you.”

  “You can’t read minds as I can, and we both know it, so don’t pretend you can for the purposes of lecturing me.”

  “I don’t have to be able to read minds as you do to pick up that intense a burst of raw feeling. But let’s pretend you really didn’t want to do it. Calling up that kind of power is dangerous: dangerous to the people around you, and dangerous to your very soul.”

  I knew I shouldn’t be angry with someone who had practically died helping me tonight, but I had been through too much in too short a period of time to have patience for this kind of criticism when I knew I was right. “I know what I’m doing, and I have no intention of walking the left-hand path, now or ever.”

  “Have you ever stopped to consider that Morgan may have thought the same thing in the beginning? You love Eva, and you feel justifiably outraged that Dan kept you from her. Morgan loved Lancelot, but he had an unlawful passion for Guinevere, over which Morgan felt justifiable, if somewhat self-serving, outrage. But Morgan did not consider the consequences for everyone else of trying to bring their illicit passion to light. Nor did she stop at that. Instead, she ended up trying to destroy everyone connected with them, including her own half-brother Arthur, including all of Camelot.

  “Lancelot and Guinevere had done wrong, to be sure. So has Dan. Do you see where I am going with this? You can be Morgan and make a justifiable grievance into the first step toward the apocalypse, or you can follow David’s suggestion and find a way to forgive Dan or, if not that, at least find a way to move on yourself.”

  “If you ask me,” said Vanora, who had just walked up behind Nurse Florence, “forgiveness is not the issue. Whatever Taliesin and Dan do personally is up to them, but Dan is now a liability as a warrior. He cannot remain part of Taliesin’s force any longer.”

  Without waiting for a response from Nurse Florence, who seemed surprised by her unexpected interference, Vanora turned to me and said, “Taliesin, you, just like your warriors, are too tired to drive home. Ride with me, and I’ll have one of my men get your Prius home. Viviane, you do the same. There’s room in van two. Let’s not have any more disasters tonight.”

  With manipulative skill worthy of the real Carrie Winn, Vanora deftly separated me from Nurse Florence, who I could tell was not at all happy about that, and I ended up effectively alone with her, at least in the sense that I suspected she would erase the memory of our conversation from any security man within earshot.

  “Taliesin, I must say you are surprising me,” Vanora said as the van pulled out. I braced myself for another lecture, though her tone actually sounded positive. “You are becoming a real leader.” That could have been the first direct compliment that Vanora had ever given me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, half-suspiciously.

  “It takes a real leader to do what needs to be done. Dan needed to be gotten rid of, and you did it, quickly and effectively.”

  “I’d rather not talk about that situation.”

  “OK, we won’t. Let me just say, though, that I think I have been too hard on you in the past. You may sometimes act in ways I wouldn’t advise, but you always seem to end up being successful.”

  Right at that moment I didn’t feel successful, but I didn’t feel like opening up to Vanora either, so I just nodded in acknowledgment.

  “It gives me renewed faith in the prophecy,” she continued.

  Little as I wanted to talk, I had to ask. “What prophecy?”

  Van
ora looked puzzled. “Surely you know. You wrote it down yourself…or rather, the original Taliesin did. The poem in The Tale of Taliesin when Maelgwn is questioning him.”

  I almost snorted in disbelief. “That old thing. It isn’t any part of Taliesin 1’s memories, so he probably didn’t write it. A lot of scribes reworked those stories over the years. Anyway, it’s silly.”

  “Never doubt yourself!” said Vanora with sudden intensity. “That poem, whoever wrote it, I believe to be a genuine reflection of your history…and your future. Think, Taliesin, think! Think what it would mean for a being to have been with God at the beginning of the world, to have been the instructor of the universe in some way, and to be with God again at the end. What would that make you?”

  It would make me someone sitting next to a crazy person!

  “Vanora, there is no evidence any of that is true.”

  “The poem makes it clear that you were with King David of Israel, and as it turns out, now that Stan’s earlier life as David has been revealed, that statement is true.”

  “Yeah, I couldn’t remember the lives before the original Taliesin in very great detail, but I had actually remembered that much before Stan got awakened.”

  “If that detail is true, why could they not all be true? And don’t you think it is a pretty unbelievable coincidence that among all the billions of people Stan could have been in an earlier life, he just happened to be King David? For that matter, what are the odds of Carla being Alcina? And you knew both of them in earlier lives!”