Immortal Beloved

by Cate Tiernan

  Alarms went off inside my head. The few times I’d done this, this was how I felt right before the inevitable black death of hope, the sudden horrible crashing of happiness, as if a thousand black, scaly insects had swarmed up out of a gutter and completely obscured the sun. Then would come the pain, the barfing, the despair.

  River was singing again, her eyes closed now, and she traced other symbols on my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks. She brushed her hands down my shoulders and touched my knees. Gradually the tension left me—I was braced for pain but not feeling it yet. I was a seed, bursting open underground, stretching toward warmth. And I was the warmth, I was the light, and it was… glorious.

  I basked for a while, then felt the magick gently fading. If I could have grasped it in my hands, I would have held on desperately. But it ebbed away, a low tide rejoining a vast ocean.

  I opened my eyes. Slowly, dreamily, River opened hers. She looked at me, and I fancied I saw wonder and perhaps fear in her eyes. Then she looked me over and gave a slow, satisfied smile.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  I did a quick systems check. “Uh, not bad,” I said in surprise. “Tired. Relaxed. Sad that it’s gone.”

  “That’s the beauty part,” she said, stretching and breathing deeply. “It hasn’t gone. It’s always there. It’s inside you, and you tapped it. Which is how Tähti do it, remember? It’s a lot harder to tap the power inside you—it takes control, and learning. Much, much learning. Without the spell to harness and control your energy, you’d be your usual sick self, on your knees, vomiting. It doesn’t have to be like that, and now you know it.”

  I didn’t know what to think. A quick elation flooded me—maybe I hadn’t made a ridiculous mistake, maybe this was all worth it, maybe I could actually learn this stuff—

  Only to be just as quickly snuffed out by my refusal to believe that something this good could happen to me.

  River sighed. “I will get you to believe it,” she said, getting to her feet.

  “My face is not that expressive,” I said, standing up. I felt as if I’d just done a bunch of yoga and then run a marathon.

  “It really is,” she assured me, and opened our circles.

  I helped River gather the stones, then glanced to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. Suddenly a face was before me, a shocking face, and I gasped and dropped the stones.

  Whirling, River took my arm. “What is it?”

  Unable to say anything, I pointed to the strange face, the apparition floating in the darkened skylight. My mouth opened, but no sound came out. Instinctively, I ducked down, crouching on the ground to hide.

  River immediately dropped down next to me, her hand on my shoulder. Her face looked both concerned and oddly amused.

  “There’s someone in the window,” I hissed. “Like a ghost.”

  She nodded solemnly and brushed my hair away from my face. “Yes, it is like a ghost.”

  I stared at her.

  There was another small piece of mirror in the cabinet, and River got it out. Watching carefully, she held it up to me.

  The ghost. The ghost was me.

  I tried to swallow. I slumped onto my butt on the wooden floor, unable to tear my eyes away from the mirror. River again smoothed my hair away from my face. My hair that was now all white-blonde, every trace of black gone. My bangs had grown out far enough to tuck behind my ears, and the spiky layers were flattened because I no longer gelled or fluffed or spiked.

  My eyes were dark, the color of a northern sky in winter. My cheeks were fuller and flushed pink. There was no dark eyeliner, no maroon lipstick altering my appearance.

  I looked like a teenager. A healthy, normal teenager.

  “I don’t look like this,” I whispered. “I never looked like this.”

  “Yes, yes, you did,” River said quietly. She knelt next to me, our knees touching. She kept one hand on my shoulder.

  I swallowed again, feeling like I was trying to get down one of the rocks I’d dropped.

  Oh, yes. Yes, I had. A very long time ago.

  “Sunna, you’re marrying Àsmundur Olafson.” My foster mother looked matter-of-fact as she punched down dough in a big wooden bowl.

  I was so surprised I spilled water out of the ladle, onto the smooth table. “What?”

  “Your pabbi has made an agreement with Olaf Pallson,” she went on. “You’re marrying come this laugardagur, this Saturday.” I stared at her, but she didn’t meet my eyes.

  I wiped up the spill with a rag, then finished filling cups with water. Olaf Pallson raised sheep, two farms over. I vaguely remembered seeing Àsmundur Olafson once or twice, on market days. He’d been big and blond, but I couldn’t picture his face.

  When I didn’t say anything, she stopped kneading and looked at me. “Sunna, you’re sixteen. Most maids are wed by now, and some already mothers. Àsmundur is a good lad and will inherit his father’s farm—he’s the oldest son.”

  “I don’t want to get married,” I said pointlessly, already knowing there was no choice.

  “Sunna.” She wiped her hands on her apron. She was barely thirty-five, already middle-aged. “Sunna, we have six other mouths to feed.”

  I nodded, then took the empty pail outside to the well. It had been hard for them to take me in at all, but I had proved useful in caring for the little ones and helping Momer with the housework. The last six years here had been—a respite.

  The following laugardagur was bright and clear, following three days of hard spring rain. It was still cold, but the days were slowly getting longer, and two more months would see the warmth of early summer.

  My foster parents walked with me to the church. The roads were rutted and muddy. I glanced down into one puddle and thought, “This is me, on my wedding day.” My long hair was in braids on top my head. My clothes were clean. Momer had made me a wreath of laurel.

  I looked up and saw Àsmundur and his father waiting for us at the church. So that’s what he looks like, I thought, studying his broad farmer’s face.

  That had been in 1567.

  I had looked like this.

  My young husband had been dead within two years, of smallpox.

  Blinking, I stood up.

  “Let’s go get some tea,” said River, turning off the lamp. “We’ll clean this up tomorrow.”

  With the lamp off, there was no ghost me reflected in the window glass. We walked in darkness down the hall, down the narrow staircase. I kept touching my hair. It seemed softer, without the harsh dye in it. I felt bizarre. I knew every time I saw this me in the mirror, I would flinch. I hadn’t looked like this in a long, long time.

  Outside, River looked up at the sky and said, “It’s later than I thought.”

  I looked at the stars, half obscured by clouds. Constellations moved overhead in an arc, throughout the night. Looking up, I saw that it wasn’t the middle of the night, but it was later than the first hour of night. Say, tennish. The clouds made it more difficult.

  “Is it around ten?” I asked.

  “Yes.” River looked pleased. “You’re absorbing knowledge against your will.”

  I nodded. I felt very unlike me, like I didn’t know what to do with myself. As if the reveal spell had erased actual years instead of just the appearance of years. Everything seemed new and different. I just wanted to go to my room and stare at myself in the mirror.

  The darkness pressed in all around us, and I kept close to River, keeping my eyes on the lights of the house up ahead. Something weightless and cold landed on my nose, and I looked up to see small, fine snowflakes floating down from the sky.

  It was cold and dark and snowing. Just like my childhood, like so many of my earlier years. This is why I preferred warmer places. Even London didn’t get cold like this. Between looking like I did way back then, and then suddenly feeling like the weather was similar, I was flooded and overwhelmed with dark thoughts and nameless dread.

  We approached the kitchen steps, lit by an angular sq
uare of light from the window. I was lunging for the door, wanting to be inside, around other people, when River took my arm, halting me. I looked at her.

  “Back then you were here,” she said softly, marking a place in the air with one hand, out to the side. “Now you’re here.” She held out her other hand, far away from the first. “Time moves forward. You’re not there anymore. Understand?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, though I didn’t.

  She shook her head. “You started here, in 1551.” Again she marked a place in the air. Tiny snowflakes drifted onto her hair and disappeared into the silver strands. “Now you are here. Here.” She chopped her other hand downward for emphasis. Reaching out, she pressed several fingers against my chest. “You. Are. Here. You are now. You are this moment.”

  I must have still looked lost, because she sighed and pulled open the kitchen door. Immediately warmth and light and the smells of leftover cooking wafted toward us. The kitchen was empty, clean, but still lit. I was hungry, which was weird. I didn’t feel sick.

  “Pear crisp, I think,” said River, opening the industrial fridge. “And tea.”

  CHAPTER 21

  When you’ve spent most of your life being a chameleon, changing everything about yourself over and over again, it’s shocking, again and again, to see the original you in a mirror. Through the years I’d had every color of hair from white to black, including blue, green, and purple, and every length from crew cut to down past my waist. I’d been rail-thin, pleasantly plump, big and pregnant, starving and skeletal. I’d had the white skin of a northerner, where we went for months without seeing the sun, and I’d been as dark as a walnut, burnished bronze by an equatorial sun that had soaked through my skin to my very bones.

  Now I looked like the me that the child me had grown up into. It was freakish, disturbing, and I felt horribly exposed and vulnerable. In the morning I layered several sweaters, wrapped a fuzzy scarf around my neck, and tied a kerchief over my hair, which, ironically, only made me look more like how I used to. Peasant wear. Finally I went reluctantly downstairs. I was on table-setting duty for breakfast.

  In the kitchen I muttered a fast hello to Daisuke and Charles, who were making breakfast. I noticed that, typically, the kitchen was neat and tidy, though they were cooking for thirteen people. They were both spare, elegant people who always seemed to be operating from some deep sense of calmness. Brynne made huge messes in the kitchen, and so did Lorenz—and they were both flamboyant, wildly attractive people. Reyn was tidy. Nell was messy. Jess and I were both disorganized, and I’m sure that surprised everyone.

  Anyway, I quickly grabbed the flatware tray and escaped into the big dining room, which was still in predawn darkness. Inside I felt jangly, anxious, wound up in a way that I hadn’t been in… weeks. As soon as I went to work this morning, I planned to disappear into the employees’ restroom with a box of hair dye. Auburn, this time, I thought.

  The door to the kitchen swung open and Solis came in, carrying an armful of cut twigs. I nodded at him, not meeting his eyes. He set a tall vase in the middle of the table and arranged the long twigs in it, making an arrangement maybe three feet high.

  “Forcing blooms,” he said, stroking their bark with gentle fingers. “Not by magick, but simply by bringing them indoors. Is it wrong to force a thing to go against its nature?”

  He almost seemed to be talking to himself, not even looking at me, and I was hoping it wasn’t a real question. There’s only so much existential philosophy I can stomach before I’ve had my first cup of coffee.

  I moved quietly around the table, setting River’s heavy, beautiful sterling flatware from the early eighteen hundreds at every place.

  “What do you think, Nastasya?” he asked, pinning me like a bug collector pins a moth to a velvet tray. “Do you think it’s inherently wrong to force a thing to go against its nature? Is it sometimes all right, like with these branches? And by the way, what plant are they from?”

  I paused, looking at the arrangement. First things first, to buy myself some time. They were light colored, not too woody. More like a shrub. It was something that bloomed early, since it was not quite winter and it could already be forced.

  I took a stab. “Forsythia?”

  He smiled, and I felt stupidly pleased, like a performing seal.

  “Now, the other part of my question. Is it inherently wrong to force a thing against its nature?”

  With a sinking feeling I recognized that an Important Learning Moment had crept up on me when my guard was down. The question had been casually asked; the answer couldn’t be casually given. Responses crawled through my caffeine-deprived mind.

  “Like training dogs?” I tried.

  He smiled patiently. There are few things worse than a patient smile. “The nature of dogs, inherently, is to work. They’ve been domesticated for so many thousands of years that it has become their very nature to accept and even need training. Training works with their nature, not against it. I’m talking about forcing these buds to bloom out of season, for our enjoyment. Just as one example. Or damming a river. Or keeping a person in solitary confinement. Humans are, by nature, social creatures. Not designed to be alone.”

  Daisuke came in quietly and set a basket of biscuits on the table. He glanced at my hair, gave me a slight smile, then pushed through the kitchen door again.

  I couldn’t concentrate. I was upset and uncomfortable, looking like this, and I just wanted to escape until I could change again. I didn’t even have any makeup on. I probably looked like a glass of milk.

  I let out a breath. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  I waited for him to tell me to go meditate on it, or to seek out someone’s help in finding the answer, but he didn’t.

  Instead he brushed his fingers lightly along the twigs again and said, “I don’t know, either.” He turned to me. “Your nature,” he said softly, “is to look this way. This is who you are, and this is what you look like. Please try to embrace it. Remember what Hector Eisenberg said: ‘A woman’s face, naked and unadorned, is as beautiful as the moon, and as mysterious.’ ”

  I just looked at him, feeling like bugs were crawling all over my skin. People began to trickle in and sit down, and Charles and Daisuke brought in more platters of food.

  “Please don’t change again,” Solis said so quietly that only I could hear him. “Continue to become yourself.” He moved away then and picked up a plate, getting in line for breakfast.

  “My face is not that expressive,” I muttered, and the corners of his mouth turned up. I wanted to run to my room until it was time to go to town, but forced myself to get in line, behind Lorenz. His dark eyes were barely open—he must have stayed up late last night.

  “’Giorno, bella,” he murmured, and the patchouli scent of his aftershave wafted down to me.

  Behind me, Charles took his own plate.

  “Well,” he said, his Irish accent coming through with that one word. With his red hair and freckles, he looked like a travel ad for the Green Isle. “So you’ve bleached it, then?”

  “No,” I said, just as a huge crash made us all jump. Our heads swiveled to see Reyn standing in the doorway, looking poleaxed. He’d been carrying an armload of firewood, which now lay scattered across the floor.

  He was staring at me, looking horrified, his face white, his golden eyes wide. He shook his head and said, “No. No.” Then he realized that we were all gaping at him. He looked down at the firewood, looked up at me again, then turned without a word and pushed through the kitchen door. A moment later we heard the back kitchen door slam.

  “What did you do to him?” Nell asked sharply, throwing down her napkin to go after him. River stopped her, taking her arm.

  “I’ll go,” River said gently.

  “No,” Nell said crossly, shaking her hand free. “We’re very close. I know what to do.”

  River shook her head slowly. “Please sit down, Nell. I’ll go after Reyn.”

  Nell opened her mouth to argue,
then caught herself, caught how River was looking at her.

  “I can go,” she said, with much less conviction.

  “Finish your breakfast,” River directed her, then turned and followed Reyn.

  Nell contented herself with glaring at me, shaking her head in disgust. Muttering to herself, she sat down at the table and snapped her napkin open again.

  Now people turned to look at me. I shrugged helplessly, having no idea what just happened. Rachel asked Anne to pass a platter, and slowly people began acting normally. Jess and Brynne quickly picked up the firewood and loaded it neatly in the woodbin by the fireplace. I felt Asher’s eyes on me, and Solis’s, but I mechanically got some food and sat down on the end of a bench next to Jess, who grunted a good morning. I mumbled something in reply, my brain working quickly.

  My kind of white-blonde hair was common in the north, especially among my family and our village. Had Reyn recognized that, understood its significance?

  I pondered that for a fevered minute, then realized that duh, he’d been watching my roots growing out for the past five weeks. I’d hardly been painstakingly dyeing an ever-widening stripe of white at my roots.

  So what had it been?

  As it turned out, I had to go to work before I found out. Reyn and River didn’t come back to breakfast, and finally I drove myself in my old battered car to town.

  Focus on work. Be in the present, live in the now. Worry about Reyn later.

  Old Man MacIntyre gave my hair a sharp look but didn’t say anything. “A new shipment of—ladies’ products came in,” he barked. “Go ahead and put them in your special aisle.” He scowled at me, then turned and stomped away. I laughed wryly to myself. One of the changes Meriwether and I had made was that we’d grouped all the “ladies’ products” in one place. During the process we had learned that a surefire way of getting Old Mac to leave us alone was to hold up a box of Kotex and ask him about pricing.