The Heart of the Phoenix

by Brian Knight

  In the end Tynan would not be persuaded, so many young ladies who had half-fallen in love with the brooding new star, Tynan the Red, had left disappointed.

  By the time they had reached Dogwood, the sole reason for their intrusion into a world that had long ago replaced its lost magic with science and technology, Torin’s only wish was to avoid his brooding older brother, and to find the auburn-haired beauty he’d stolen a kiss from on his first visit, the reason he kept returning.

  Torin watched as Tynan and the troupe leaders directed the set up crew, and while his kin was busy watching the big tent go up in front of a line of Traveling Reds trailers, he was busy watching Main Street for Diana and her friends. Bowen’s rock shop was a favorite haunt of theirs, though Torin didn’t dare to expose his interest in a certain girl to the old heretic. Torin had always liked the old man, his treasonous writings aside, but Bowen was in his father’s hands, and as far as King Brom of the House of Fuilrix was concerned, Diana Sinclair and her friends were the enemies.

  Torin himself had considered the Phoenix Girls enemies until his first chance encounter with them on his first trip to Dogwood, when they had caught him in Aurora Hollow.

  He spotted Susan, the youngest of the group, her long blonde hair blowing out behind her as she left the bakery and walked two doors down to a place called Sullivan’s with a brown paper bag in one hand and two cups cradled to her chest in the crook of the other arm. The old man who owned the shop met her at the door and held it open for her, and she disappeared inside. None of her friends were with her.

  He saw a familiar wild tangle of auburn hair and the woman it belonged to exit Home Fries a few minutes later, walking away from the traffic on Main Street and the frenzy of activity in the park. She turned the corner around the building, and after a furtive backward glance at his family, Torin ran to catch her.

  He was conspicuous leaving the park, his bolt of fiery red hair made him stand out in any crowd, and the traditional black suit and cape of the Traveling Reds marked him as an outsider, but the people of Dogwood had grown accustomed to his people over the many years they had come here to perform. He received a lot of stares, but also many nods of recognition and even a few friendly words. A honk of irritation as he plunged out into the street without looking turned into a friendly wave when the car’s driver recognized him for what he was. By the time he’d reached the corner she had vanished around, he was more or less forgotten.

  He followed the empty sidewalk around to the back of the building and found her, waiting in the shade of an awning, still turned away from him. The back alley was deserted, the parking lot on the other side of it only half full of cars, but there were no pedestrians in sight.

  Torin smiled and crept forward to surprise her.

  She was dressed exactly as he had come to expect, a light, white blouse and knee-length floral printed skirt, bare feet in sandals, and a flower in her hair, tucked behind one ear.

  He stopped behind her, scenting the flower before he put his arms around her. Before she could react to the unexpected embrace he kissed her cheek.

  “I have missed you, flower child,” he whispered.

  Her reaction to the embrace, the kiss, the whispered endearment, nearly knocked him off his feet.

  She drove an elbow into his stomach and twisted out of his arms as he doubled over. The flat of her palm rocked him backward again, meeting his cheek in a painful smack, and his arms were grabbed from behind, twisted painfully behind his back.

  “Di... what?”

  A kick to the back of his legs brought him to his knees, and before he could even think to struggle a face bent down close to his, a wand-tip pressed to the underside of his chin.

  The face before him was Diana’s, but the expression was hard, angry.

  “Hello, Red,” Nancy Sinclair said. “I remember telling you I didn’t want to see your face around here again.”

  “I didn’t think you really meant it,” Torin said, reaching for the easy charm that had served him so well with the people of this world, and missing it. “I was planning to keep my face as far away from you as humanly possible anyway. I thought you were Diana.”

  “That is what you were supposed to think,” Nancy snarled, and Torin saw the trap for what it was. While Diana favored light colors and dresses, Nancy almost always dressed herself in darker clothes, and Torin had never seen her in a dress. Even the sandals were out of character for her. She favored boots or heavy shoes.

  Nancy’s wand never left his throat as he was yanked to his feet and held from behind.

  “Is that Tracy and...?” He couldn’t remember the other girl’s name.

  The other girl stepped around to face him, her own wand drawn.

  “Janet,” she said, and despite being rather mild and mousey in appearance, she showed no apprehension. She was small, with dark hair almost as long as Susan’s, and wore thick spectacles that magnified her eyes. She stared unblinking at him, looking a bit like a skinny owl.

  Torin spoke in his native tongue, smiled.

  The grip on his arms tightened, and Tracy shook him.

  “Speak English, Red.”

  “I simply wished you a good day,” he said, which was a lie. What he’d actually said might have earned him a brisker shaking.

  “Hurry up,” Nancy said, looking around to be sure they were still unnoticed. “Open that door so we can get outa here.”

  With all of the excitement on the other side of the building, no one was witness to their assault on him, but that could change at any moment.

  Janet tapped the door beneath the awning, he thought it was the back entrance to the eatery, and pulled it open on a familiar scene.

  It was not the kitchen of a restaurant.

  Janet stepped aside as Tracy shoved him through into Aurora Hollow. Janet followed with her wand trained on him, and Nancy followed her, slamming the door shut behind her.

  * * *

  “They didn’t like you much, did they?” Penny rose from the stone floor and stretched. Fascinated as she was by her father’s story, hearing about her mom, her aunt, and their friends, she was on the verge of nodding off. The morning had fallen behind them, it was noon or very near she guessed, and apparently there was no coffee to be had in her cell.

  “No,” Torin said, dismissing Penny’s words with a wave of his hand. “They just didn’t know me.”

  “They didn’t trust you,” Ronan corrected.

  “You were spying on them,” Penny said. “Right?”

  Torin cleared his throat and pretended not to hear her.

  “Smart ladies,” she said, but then remembered her mother, who clearly had trusted him. “Except for my mom.”

  Torin turned to Penny and smiled.

  “She didn’t trust me completely, if that makes you feel better,” he said. “She saw me as more a puzzle than a threat.”

  A bang from above startled Penny, and she looked up to see three pairs of inhuman eyes staring down. She screamed and stumbled backward as the first of the homunculi dropped down in front of her. It watched her with dark brown eyes, the eyes of its master, a bag hanging from one over-large fist. It reminded her of the homunculi under the junkyard in Dogwood, bag and all, except that they had the bright golden eyes of the snakeman, Turoc. Two more dropped down beside him, watching her with identical eyes and holding identical bags.

  “Oh good,” Torin said. “Lunch.”

  The homunculi dropped their bags and leapt up, catching the edges of the trap door and pulling themselves up into the room above. Penny waited for the door to clang shut before she dared to move again.

  “Calm down, Little Red,” Torin said, grabbing up a bag and peering inside. “Those guys are harmless. They belong to the cook.”

  Ronan retrieved the other bags and handed one to Penny.

  “It’s a shame your Rocky isn’t with you now,” Ronan said. “It would be good to have a friend on the outside.”

  “Rocky?” Torin asked. “What’s a
Rocky?”

  “My homunculus,” Penny said. She opened her bag, dreading what she might find inside. She found a leg of some aromatic meat that might have been chicken, except that she’d never seen a chicken leg that large, and half a lumpy loaf of bread.

  “Your homunculus?” Torin said, forgetting the giant chicken leg in his fist for the moment.

  “It was a birthday present from Ronan,” Penny said.

  “It was the runt of Turoc’s litter,” Ronan said. “I found it unhatched and gave it to her.”

  Ronan tore into his giant chicken leg, and a few seconds later it was gone, bone and all. He bent low over the trench of slow moving water and drank from it.

  Penny grimaced. “Is that water clean?”

  “As clean as it gets down here,” Torin said. “You still haven’t told us how you ended up here.”

  “You still haven’t told me how you ended up here,” Penny countered.

  Ronan stepped between them and took Penny by the shoulders. She glared up at him, her food forgotten in the bag at her feet.

  “We’ll tell you, Penny, but your story might have more bearing on our present predicament,” Ronan said.

  “And it may help us figure out how we’ll escape,” Torin said.

  Penny didn’t see how, but any possibility of escape was a chance she couldn’t ignore, so she told them. She told them everything. The dreams, the other part of herself that turned out to be the sister she’d never known, the sharing of memories, and the confrontation in her mother’s tomb.

  For a while Torin said nothing, only sat in deep thought, nibbling thoughtlessly on his lunch, and Ronan watched him in silence.

  “Well?” Penny spoke to him, bringing him out of his thoughts.

  “Two bodies, one mind,” Torin said.

  “It was a deep sharing,” Ronan said.

  “And a link not easily broken,” Torin said with a small smile. “If the link is still there we could teach you to get inside her head.”

  “But not down here,” Ronan said. “Not unless we can break that ward.”

  “And how can we break the ward?” Penny asked the question knowing she probably wouldn’t like the answer, and she was right.

  “To do that,” Ronan said, “you need a wand.”

  “And our jailers are not likely to supply us with one,” Torin said.

  He settled with his back to the wall where his chain lay and began to eat in earnest.

  Ronan wasn’t quite ready to settle back into hopelessness.

  “When did you last see Rocky?”

  “When I went down into your cave,” Penny said. “He tried to follow me and I told him to stay put.”

  Ronan nodded and dug into his own meal, but looked thoughtful as he ate.

  “So what happened after they dragged you into the hollow?” Penny was anxious to hear more, and since they wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon, her father had no reason to deny her.

  “When I’m finished eating,” he said.

  Penny dug into her own meal, but unenthusiastically. She ate only a little of the strange meat, which wasn’t bad, and a bite or two of the bread.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Penny said, and scanned the cell again, hoping she’d simply overlooked the facilities on her last inspection.

  “The what?” Torin regarded her curiously.

  Ronan said something in their native language, and Penny swore he was smiling.

  “Oh… that,” Torin said. He pointed at the hole in the floor behind him, then down the wall at all the other holes. “Take your pick.”

  Penny groaned.

  * * *

  Flanna sat cross-legged on Penny’s bed, gazing into the Conjuring Glass in absolute absorption. She’d started with the first and oldest photograph in Penny’s picture book: a black and white photo peopled by two rows of young girls, and behind them an old woman and two younger women. She learned more from the inscription on the back of the photo, Clover Hill Home for Girls - 1938, than she did from the participants when she watched them lining up for the captured moment in time inside the magic glass. The only thing to interest her happened as the children were dispersing.

  The old woman sent one of her helpers back to the house, the very house she now sat in from the look of it – a quick consultation of Penny’s memories confirmed the suspicion – with most of the children. Others she called back to her.

  “Alia, Sue, Penelope, Danielle.” Her voice was a cracked ruin, but it carried well enough, and the girls flocked to her side. “Go with Miss West. I’ll meet you at the hollow.”

  Conversation stopped as a young man with a tripod and camera stepped into frame, and the silence held until he vanished.

  “Should we start without you, ma’am?” Miss West asked as she shepherded the girls into line.

  The old woman nodded and said, “The Phoenix is...”

  And there the memory ended, the photo floating back to the surface of the glass.

  They were Phoenix Girls, Flanna thought, but with no real surprise. She didn’t know what a home for girls was, maybe a place where the people of this world sent their unwanted daughters, maybe a school of magic, though that seemed unlikely given what Tracy had taught her over the years. This world didn’t have magic, except for special places like Aurora Hollow, and those people who did have magic had learned long ago to hide it.

  Tracy’s family name is West, Flanna remembered, and wondered if she was kin to the Miss West in the photograph. It seemed a possibility, since Tracy had once been a Phoenix Girl. She wondered if her father knew that detail of Tracy’s past, and decided he must. She would have to ask him. She would have to ask them both the next time she saw them.

  Flanna followed the history of young Penelope Johnson and her family, and realized that it was her family. She discovered her mother’s twin, and wondered where Nancy Sinclair was now, and if she had played a part in her own sister’s death.

  She was reaching for another photo from Penny’s old family picture book when she heard the sound of Susan’s van pulling up to the house. She quickly tucked the picture book and the Conjuring Glass back beneath Penny’s bed, and reluctantly descended into the house below to greet them.

  The day’s investigations into her family’s past had given her a lot to think about, and much of it troubling.

  Chapter 10

  Memory Lane

  Torin stumbled as he crossed the threshold, dropping several inches from the concrete of the back alley sidewalk to the dirt of Aurora Hollow. Janet had already taken up a seat on one of the great old ash tree’s lower limbs. She appeared comfortable but alert, her wand aimed at Torin.

  Tracy’s grip on his collar kept him upright, and once she was sure he wasn’t going to fall on his face, she gave him a shove.

  He stumbled again, and this time he did fall. The landing was soft, seasons of duff cushioned the fall, saving him a lot of pain as his knees and the palm of his left hand struck. His right hand had started moving for the wand hidden in an inner pocket of his cloak the moment of the shove, and by the time he was pushing himself upright again he had hold of it. He was still rising when he began his draw, and he heard the door slam shut behind him.

  “No you don’t,” Janet said, but her spell missed as he dove and rolled to the side.

  He fired at Tracy, but she was quick to block. The force of the colliding spells rocked her backward, but Nancy had slipped from behind her, and Torin felt the wand tugged from his grip and watched it fly into the air. Tracy caught it on its way back down, smiling.

  “Can I give it back, Nancy?” Torin wasn’t sure if Tracy was joking or serious. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “I wanna play with him some more.”

  “No time to play,” Nancy said. There was no playfulness in her voice, no fun in her face or eyes. She clearly wasn’t in a playful mood. “Di is already looking for him. I think we should finish up here before she finds us.”

  “That sounds rather ominous,” Torin said, raisin
g both hands in surrender. “I should warn you though, my family may take it personally if you kill me.”

  “Save your warning,” Tracy said. She now had two wands aimed at him, he was irritated to see, hers and his. “If we planned to kill you then we would have last year.”

  “Well, if you’re just here to welcome me to town, consider me good and welcomed.” He gave a sharp little bow and started back toward the door. “If you’d be kind enough...”

  “I’m nowhere near kind enough,” Nancy said, stepping to block his path. She pulled a piece of folded paper from her pocket and shook it open. It was a thick cream stock, hand-written in a practiced, flowing style. “I know you’ve been writing her, it’s clear this infatuation you have isn’t a passing fancy, and I accept that she feels the same way about you.”

  “What we don’t accept is your creepy level of knowledge about us,” Janet said. “You claim to be from... where?”

  Janet looked to Tracy and Nancy.

  “Brittany,” Nancy said. “Funny, you don’t sound British.”

  Torin rolled his eyes.

  “I think Brittany is in France,” Janet said.

  “Doesn’t sound French either,” Tracy said.

  “Whatever,” Nancy said. “How do you know so much about us?”

  “Because my family has been coming here for generations,” Torin said, which was true enough. “You’re not the first Phoenix Girls we’ve met.”

  “And how did the Reds get along with them?”

  “Well enough,” Torin lied.

  “So your family wouldn’t mind if we all showed up and introduced ourselves before the show tonight?” Nancy smiled as Torin’s cocky demeanor crumbled around the edges.

  “Well, overall I’d say, probably not.” The truth was that his father would probably throw him in the deepest cell in Galatania if he found out Torin had been romancing one of the Phoenix Girls, but his father was nearing the end of his days, and it was still not clear which of Brom Fuilrix’s sons would assume the leadership. It was true that Tynan was the elder, but it was the family who would decide, and his uncles, aunts, and cousins had liked Torin better. Even if Tynan won the seat of power, it was to be hoped that he would be more open minded than their father.