A Fistful of Sky (39 page)

“Miles,” said Altria, rubbing her fingers against her thumb and drawing up another spiral of flame. She blew it toward him, and he frowned as it

melted into his eyes.

“Oh.” He sounded more interested than upset.

I closed my hand into a fist and stared at Altria. She touched my lips so that I tasted the memory she had sent to Dad. It was me walking into Hermina’s house Friday morning, to find her trapped in a welter of plants and computer. Just what Dad had asked for.

“What’s she doing?” Jasper asked.

“Want to see? Open up, Gyp.” Altria teased my fist open and stirred fire on my palm again, flicked a shred toward Jasper—the time he sneaked a girlfriend home when he wasn’t supposed to, and I was on the couch and saw him before he saw me, and he sent me silence and invisibility and froze me until he was ready to leave again. He left me tongue-tied so I could never tell anybody. Not that I would have. He could have just asked.

“Oh,” Jasper said, his tone dismayed.

“Stop it,” I said to Altria.

“This won’t get us very far,” Altria said. “It’s too incremental. Knowledge. Hmm.”

“What is she doing?” asked Flint.

“Just what she said,” Jasper answered. “Gyp’s memories. Not the happy ones. Sorry, Gyp.”

Beryl leaned forward. “You could curse yourself with the knowledge of what to do with your curses.”

Altria turned to me, her eyes wide and glowing, her hair a flaming halo around her head and shoulders, her hands raised to shoulder height, each hand swallowed in a red cloud of light, my power, rendered untwisted and less limited by its passage through her. “Gyp… .”

“Personality bending,” Tobias said. “It could change you beyond recognition.”

Altria’s hair lifted, alight with a wind and power she was generating from material I had given her.

I heard the footsteps of my heart in my ears. All along, what had bothered me most about my power was not knowing what to do with it. Maybe—

“Come on,” I said to Altria. “Let’s do it.”

She leaned into me, gripped my head in her glowing hands, pressed her forehead to mine. Her hair wrapped around us, snaky and full of static

and heat. All I could see were her eyes, glowing golden now, and all I could taste was her breath, so close to mine, chocolate chip cookie and woodsmoke. Something grew like a mushroom inside my head, swelling, pulsing, rising like bread dough, and all the while we were wrapped in robes of red heat together. The mushroom burst, a thousand thousand spores of spinning facts and speculations, a shuffle and fall of stacks of images, a supple squirm of memories and imaginings, only a few of them mine. Altria released me and I sagged back against the couch, my eyes tight shut, as things snapped and snorted and sorted in my brain. Too much of everything.

So much. Was that what Mama had been like when she was fourteen? Had her older sisters really done all those mean things to her? And her mother-—that wasn’t Grandmere. Who was it who had left the house when Mama was only six and never come back? Who had left a hole in Mama’s heart so big that she never wanted to let anyone else leave her that way? Left fears that stirred her sleep with terror every night? Left a hurt that lasted so long Mama had spelled us all to stay home, not to leave her?

Was this really Dad at eighteen? Standing in the front hall of a house I had never seen, talking to two cold-faced people I had never met, saying if that was how they felt, he would say good-bye now. If they ever wanted to see him again, they would have to call him. The door closed behind him with a sound like the crack of a continent falling into an ocean.

This must be Tobias, in his twenties, hiding on an adobe rooftop with a brother, spying on the hated father in the courtyard below, the father who had protected himself against all forms of spellcasting applied directly, and with reason, so many of his children hated him; Tobias, thinking of shifting stones beneath his father’s feet—

A young and beautiful Hermina, standing in family council beside a stork-awkward young man, watching as one after another of her parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, shook their heads no, denying her petition to marry, the youngest of her elders holding out a cup of forgetfulness to the prospective bridegroom—

A shuffle and fall of humiliating, disturbing memories from my brothers and sisters: Opal at fifteen, pre-transition, smiling at someone who misread her, caught her, trapped her, tore off her shirt, grabbed at her breasts; Jasper turning away from the hopeless love in his best friend’s eyes; Flint staring down at a dead, spellmarked squirrel in his hands; Beryl covering her ears so she wouldn’t hear something she had hidden to listen to—And this, a strange oily memory full of hunger, the slide of coil on coil, unblinking golden eyes, a long forked tongue that slid out, tasting and

testing for the wine of fear, the nectar of terror, which could be pressed out of almost any moment, induced if not already present, the finest taste there was, and never enough of it—

The sea song, below everything, still whispering that all things came from it, all things could return to it, changed and unchanging—

A strange matrix spun in darkness before me, lines visible and invisible, colored threads of light weaving through it, a diagram of kinds of power and how they acted on each other. If I could focus long enough to learn it, I could change everything.

“Gyp? You okay?” asked Opal. I felt her near me, her energy, her heat, her scent. “Wait,” said Tobias.

I lost the grid, though I had printed some of it on my memory. I frowned and opened my eyes, stared up toward the ceiling. Altria’s face eclipsed it, her eyes still golden, her mouth sad, her hair hanging in my face. She touched my cheek.

I lifted a finger, aimed it at her. Her hair twisted around itself, retreated from her front to lie against her back. She smiled: dimples in both cheeks. I thought of the ancient hungry serpent I had seen, alert for terror, tried to fit it into my image of her, could not make them match. She touched foreheads with me again, and then there were layers over layers, shifting and shining, wider than I had known, and older, darker, yet with tasty red rivers running through them, touch points and desires and connections, new and ancient currents flowing, mixing, washing some things in and some things away.

Here was the spell we had said before we came down to the meeting, restraining some of her appetites and changing the course of others, suffusing her with feelings she had never known before. Here were all kinds of new marks on her, each contact she had had with me, cuts and colors, shocks to the system one after another, new desires—

Altria sat back, her face troubled.

“Gyp?” said Opal.

I blinked and rubbed my forehead. I pushed up from the back of the couch. Altria gripped my shoulder and helped me sit up. Her touch had echoes and magnifications. I clutched her hand, afraid she would slip away before I could find out who she was now.

The world looked different. Strange, ghostly colored cobwebs draped everything. “Do you see that?” I asked Altria.

She stared at my face, then toward where I was looking—at Mama,

actually, because so many of these cobwebs had strings that led to her. Altria lifted an eyebrow.

“What did the nightmare do to you, Gypsum?” Hermina asked.

“Bent my personality, probably.” I touched the nearest web, a green string that led from Mama to me. It melted. I felt a click in my head, and realized there was nothing to stop me from moving out of the house.

Well, except sense, love, lack of money, and fear of the unknown.

I reached out for a green string that ran from Mama to Jasper. My fingertips glowed red as I touched it. It snapped-I glanced at my big brother “What?” he said.

I checked Mama.

“What are you doing, Gypsum?” Her voice was midway between fear and anger.

What you perceive, you can affect.

Even if I didn’t know what it was, apparently. What this had to do with curses, I wasn’t sure.

Mama signed something on her palm, flicked her fingers. Green lines spun from her to me and Jasper. When the line touched me, I felt the faintest flow of soothing, comfort, and even fainter, the persuasions. Don’t leave. Never leave me. Stay young. Stay unsure. Let me take care of you.

I wondered how Opal had gotten away from home. I looked, saw that there was no green line from Mama to Opal, but there was a turquoise line unlike any of the lines she had bound the rest of us with.

“Gypsum,” said Tobias.

“Uncle.”

“What are you doing?”

‘Just looking.” I stared at him. He was wrapped in a cocoon of silver and gold lines. Faintly through them I saw a skeleton. I rubbed my eyes, but the vision didn’t go away: I couldn’t see his face any longer. I grabbed Altria’s hand again. “What kind of knowledge did you give me?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.”

I studied Dad. Dad looked like himself—the only one in the room who wasn’t tangled up in strangeness. Mama had lines to him, but they went to

his hand, where he held the ends. Mama’s other lines plunged from Mama right into our hearts.

Then there were cross-lines between us.

Some of it resembled the grid I had seen in the darkness, but mostly it just looked tangled and messy, as though it would take a lot of time to figure out.

I looked down at my chest, and saw the deep pool of red power at my core, saw that there was a matching pool in Altria, that it traveled between us in another kind of connection.

Something inside her puzzled me, a small black invitation that was also a doorway. I reached in and touched it. Everyone in the living room except Altria gasped or cried out loud. Altria just studied my hand. Then she smiled.

The door described itself to my fingertip. It led somewhere wide open and vast, where power could wait safely without suffering, without hurting anything. Maybe it was the same place power came from.

I lifted my finger from the door and touched my sternum. An image of the door printed there, sank into my center, turned from thought to reality. The door opened, and more power rushed out. I was breathing hot red light, swimming in it, drowning in it. Yet it was intoxicating, too.

I tapped my chest. “Reverse,” I said.

The red ran down into the doorway as though it were a drain. Before it was all gone, I tapped once more, and the door closed, leaving me with a small pool of power.

When I looked up again, the cobwebs were gone: everybody looked normal. Well, horrified. But they had faces instead of webwork.

“Gyp,” Beryl said.

“What?”

“You stuck your hand in her heart!”

“What?” I glanced at Altria.

She smiled at me.

“It was disgusting!” said Opal. “You stuck your hand right into her chest.”

I stared at my hand. I stared at Altria’s chest. “Did it hurt?”

“No.” She took my hand and kissed it. “You went insubstantial.”

“What did you do, Gyp? Suddenly the threat potential dropped,” Tobias said.

“Altria taught me a technique for managing power.” Was that what had happened? She said she had developed a new way to store power today—

“Did the curse work, Gyp?” Beryl asked.

“I guess it did. I’m not sure.” I opened the inner door and called some power out, let it gather in my hands. In the course of the curse, I had seen and shelved a thousand thousand dark memories and torments. It felt different, this power, still red and strong, but somehow tamer, as though we had domesticated each other. “Mama, may I curse you?”

“What did you do to me before? It hurt.”

“This won’t be the same. I’ll limit it, so you can see what it’s like and decide if you want it to be permanent.”

She sighed, looked at Dad. He took her hand. They both faced me. Mama’s free hand was a fist. “I guess it’s time I let you curse me, after the way I cursed you. Go ahead,” she whispered.

I didn’t speak to my power. I formed specific intent, thought it through three times, and sent the power down into her memories, told it to eat out the night terrors and leave her free of them, save them unhurt behind the door where I could retrieve them and restore them if she wanted them back. It was delicate and intricate; everything connected to everything else, so each cut had to be considered carefully.

At last I finished. Altria’s arm was warm around my shoulders, and my forehead was wet. I had no heat in my chest, and I had taken all the heat she had on the surface, too. I glanced at the others, wondering how much time had passed. They all stared at me.

Mama drew a deep breath. “I feel so strange,” she whispered. Her face twisted, settled into a new shape, the edges softer.

“What did you do?” Dad asked me.

“Mama? Did it hurt?”

“No.” She put her hand over her heart. “I feel—so light.”

“Gyp,” said Tobias.

“I cursed the things that make it so she can’t sleep at night,” I said.

“Bent her personality,” Hermina said.

“Yes.” I wiped my forehead with my red pirate sleeve. “I’m keeping them safe for you, Mama. Tell me if you want them back.”

“All right.” She let out a shuddering breath. She straightened. “All right. Sounds like you’ve learned control.” She stroked her knuckles across her chest, frowned. “Feels like you’ve learned control.”

“Yes. I think so. Yes.”

“Tobias?” Mama said.

Tobias shook his head. “I don’t understand it, but I think you’re right. She doesn’t broadcast dangerous anymore. Gyp, you’ve settled?”

I stared down inside myself to the door where power waited. Nothing knocked. I felt comfortable, almost normal. “I guess so.”

“Good,” said Mama. “The Gyp Factor part of this meeting is over, then. Let’s move on. Jasper, have you written us a carol yet?”

BY the time the meeting ended, we all knew what we were supposed to do in the two days until Christmas. We broke up around ten-thirty. Altria followed me upstairs, her hand warm on my shoulder. Things were still shifting around in my brain: I kept noticing new and strange information, and trying to deal with it.

“Phone, Gyp!” Beryl said as I walked past her in the sitting room.