Agent of the Crown (56 page)

“I knew you were the right one for it.” She
tried to hold back a yawn. “Excuse me. I’m more tired than I
thought.”

“You should sleep,” Telaine said. “And
tomorrow I want to show you everything. The lake is so beautiful
this time of year.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing it. Goodnight,
children.”

She hugged them all, then walked the short
distance to Zara’s house with her sister. Sunset came early in the
mountains, and the snows on the top of Mount Ehuren were tinged
faintly pink from the rays of a sun that had already dipped beyond
the western peaks. To the east, stars glittered against the indigo
sky, more than anyone could see in Aurilien, which glowed in the
light of a million Devices every night. “How much longer will you
stay here?” she asked.

Zara didn’t respond. She stayed silent until
they reached her back door and entered the kitchen. “Until the
first snows fall. Can’t afford to stay longer. Been here too long
as it is.”

“I can see why you wouldn’t want to
leave.”

“Never hated this magic so much as I have
these last two years. I almost wish she’d never come here. It hurts
like hell, leaving ‘em all behind, but…” She reached into a
cupboard and took out a bottle of wine. “I say we get drunk and
tell old stories. If my heart’s goin’ to break, I want it to break
in company.”

She lit a dozen candles and they sat at the
kitchen table, talking and laughing and even crying, but just a
little. “Doyle never gave away the secret,” Alison said. “I miss
him sometimes—he died about twenty-five years ago, probably from
all the drinking. I thought he’d outlive me.” She took a swallow of
wine. “I thought a lot of people would outlive me.”

“I wish I’d been there for you when Anthony
died.”

“It was horrible. Waking up to that, him
lying there so…it’s still hard to remember. It was a long time
before I could think of him without crying.”

“I never wanted to hurt you, love,” Anthony
said.

“I know,” said Alison.

“Know what?” Zara said.

“It’s nothing.” Alison yawned again. “I think
I’m ready for sleep now.”

They climbed the stairs together, and at the
top, Zara embraced her. “I’m glad you came,” she said.

“So am I,” Alison said. “Good night,
Zara.”

Alison sat on the bed in her nightgown,
watching the stars.
The stars will be my blanket
, she
thought. Would it be a warm blanket, or a cool one? How would it
feel to be decked in those lights, wrapped in them so you took
their brilliance with you wherever you went? She leaned out of the
window and looked up the street to where lights still burned in the
house by the forge. Did they still look up in wonder, or was all
this beauty just a commonplace for them?

The sky was growing darker; there was no moon
to ruin the brilliance of all those twinkling diamonds. It felt as
if heaven were drawing closer, though no one knew what it looked
like or where it was, just that it was bound to earth by the lines
of power and populated by the dead. When she was a young child,
she’d seen her grandfather’s body before his burial, and for months
afterward she’d pictured heaven as full of motionless gray people.
Now the idea of heaven held no fear for her.

She lay back in the bed and closed her eyes.
It was a good mattress, nearly as good as her bed at home, but she
hadn’t slept well for weeks. Possibly it was something that
happened as you got old, needing less sleep. Some nights, she sat
up reading, or walked through the Library tidying up, but mostly
she lay awake in her bed feeling guilty that she couldn’t sleep
like a normal person.

The wine was relaxing her body but not her
mind, which went around in fuzzy circles touching on half a dozen
things she had to do when she returned. Possibly it was time for
her to resign as Royal Librarian, spend more time with her family,
but that would only give her fewer things to fill her nights with.
And her body might have slowed down, but her mind was as sharp as
ever, thank heaven.

Her circling brain began to slow as she
drifted closer to sleep. The faint scent of pine tickled her nose.
Maybe she should close the window, but it smelled so good, and the
coolness of the air relaxed her further.
Finally
, she
thought, and slept.

It felt as if she’d only slept for minutes
when something woke her, a sound she couldn’t remember upon waking.
She knew immediately she wouldn’t be sleeping again anytime soon,
cursed under her breath, and sat up. There was no point lying there
staring at the ceiling, so she dressed and went carefully down the
stairs, not wanting to light a lamp and possibly wake Zara, hoping
she wouldn’t trip and fall and break her damned hip again. Bright
moonlight came through the kitchen window, enough to help her avoid
the table and its single chair.
Oh, Zara. How lonely you must
be.

She stepped out into the back yard, which
looked pale and barren despite the new growth of spring sprouting
around the edges of the sheds. The high creaking sound of she had
no idea how many crickets filled the air, an invisible choir
singing a series of notes all in the same key. A breeze brushed her
face, bringing with it the now-familiar scent of pine and the
unexpected smell of water. There was a lake, or a river, somewhere
around here, and she wanted to see it.

It wasn’t hard to find the road that led
westward out of Longbourne toward the smell of water, but the road
tapered off as it entered the forest of evergreens and then
vanished, and Alison stood at its end and contemplated the woods.
She ought to go back, but for what? More hours lying awake in
Zara’s spare room? And it wasn’t as if she could get very lost out
here. She left the road and continued walking, following her nose.
A tune came to mind, and she hummed along, though she couldn’t
remember the words. It was beautiful, and fitted the night
perfectly.

It was much darker beneath the trees, dark
enough that she had to feel her way between the trunks. It took
only a few minutes for her to realize this had been a bad decision.
She stopped with her hand on the rough bark of a pine tree whose
branches brushed the top of her head and thought about turning
around.
No, you’ll just get confused and end up wandering these
woods until morning. At least if you move forward you’ll end up
lost somewhere interesting.
That didn’t make much sense, but
the idea of finding the river, or the lake, had taken hold of her,
and she knew she was looking for an excuse to keep going.

Feeling her way, conscious of the dangers of
falling and injuring herself here in the dark, she kept moving. The
cool, damp breeze came to her now and again, leading her in what
she hoped was the right direction. With every step, that hope
turned into something more certain, until she was walking quickly,
knowing her path as surely as if it were picked out by bright
daylight. She breathed deeply and let the smell of clear water fill
her lungs. She was nearly there, she could feel it.

She came out of the woods so abruptly she
almost fell over, having anticipated more trees where there were
none. And there, spread out before her, was a vast black lake that
glittered under the moonlight with hundreds, no, thousands of tiny
waves stirred up by the breeze. Short grass covered the ground
between her and the shoreline, which was shrouded in rushes that
remained still despite the wind.

The smell of water filled the air, but now it
was mingled with the green scents of growing things that surrounded
the lake, hidden by the rushes. The sound of crickets was quieter
here, she didn’t know why, and the low bass rumble of bullfrogs
joined the choir. It was so beautiful it made her heart ache. She
felt as if she could hear the tune now, as if it wound itself
around the high thin creak of the crickets and the deep, echoing
beat of the frogs. It was so familiar, and yet she still couldn’t
remember where she’d heard it.

Movement off to the right drew her eye.
Someone stood about a hundred feet away, near the shore, someone
who wasn’t more than a black smudge in the moonlight. He, or she,
stood almost motionless, and for a moment Alison thought it must be
a stub of a tree trunk, burned and broken—but no, it was definitely
a human figure, and although Alison couldn’t make out a face, she
was certain the person wasn’t looking at the lake, but at her.

The whole scene seemed odd somehow—surely the
moonlight should light up the person’s features?—but then this
whole night had taken on a surreal quality. What had possessed her,
and it did feel like possession, to leave her bed and go wandering
in a strange land at what must be nearly midnight? She must be more
drunk than she imagined.

She began walking toward the figure. Part of
her considered that it might be dangerous, that whoever it was
might not be friendly, but she was eighty-three years old and death
no longer frightened her, if it ever had. And perhaps this person
had been drawn to the lake the way she had, and maybe knew
something about what that impulse was, and why it had taken hold of
her.

The person didn’t move as Alison approached,
though she was still convinced that he—she was close enough now to
see it was male—was watching her closely. She was also,
irrationally, convinced she knew him, though the only man she knew
in Longbourne was Ben and he wouldn’t stand there silently waiting
for her to reach him.

She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t see
his face clearly. It was as if the moon was moving to put him in
shadow, trying to deceive her. It made her angry, though she knew
it was ridiculous to be angry with the moon. So she turned her
anger outward, toward the silent man. “Who are you?” she said.

In response, he whistled a phrase of the
tune. “Who do you think I am?” His voice was unfamiliar.

“I have no idea. Why did you come here?”

“Who do you think I am?”

Alison’s temper flared. “I can’t even see
your face. If the moon—”

She stopped. There hadn’t been a moon before,
just the starry blanket over Longbourne. And this moon was too
bright, too large, and it lit everything except the stranger’s
face. Alison looked back toward the woods. Nothing of Longbourne
was visible, but she was absolutely certain that if she were to
retrace her steps, she’d never find Longbourne again. “Show me your
face,” she said.

The man turned, and in that moment she knew
who he was, and before he could do more than say her name she flung
herself at him, throwing her arms around his neck and sobbing,
“Anthony, Anthony, I didn’t know!”

His arms, those familiar arms, went around
her waist, and then his lips were on hers with a passion she had
never forgotten, gentle and insistent and offering her his whole
heart if she’d only do the same. She smelled the spicy scent of his
cologne and felt the faint roughness of his cheeks, and her forty
years of loneliness vanished, swallowed up by the lake.

Anthony brushed tears from her eyes, kissed
her forehead, then drew her into his embrace while she cried, not
knowing whether she was happy or confused or grieving all over
again. “It’s forever now, love,” he whispered to her. “Forever, and
past forever.”

“Were you speaking to me, these last weeks?
Was that real?”

“No. But it is now.”

“I woke up that morning, and you were lying
there—”

“I know. I’m sorry you had to endure that. It
hurt so much knowing you were suffering and I couldn’t comfort
you.”

“It doesn’t matter now. You won’t leave me
again?”

“Never.”

She heard the music again, and this time it
made sense: the old lullaby Ben had sung, now filling her with joy
instead of sadness. “Is this why I came to Longbourne? To make one
last goodbye?”

“I don’t know. There’s a lot about this place
no one understands. Like why earth is as invisible to us as heaven
is to them. Or what we leave heaven for, when it’s time. We only
know there’s no more pain, no more sorrow, just ourselves and our
loved ones until we, too, pass beyond. Together this time.”

She stepped away and clasped Anthony’s hand,
and saw instead of the wrinkled, blue-veined, age-spotted claw she
was used to, firm, smooth skin. He, too, was young, as young as
he’d been when they first met. It pained her a little that he
wasn’t the forty-five-year-old man whose memory she’d carried all
these years, but she’d have been just as happy if they’d both been
eighty. “When does that happen?”

He shrugged. “When it’s time. Whenever that
is. When we decide.” He tugged on her hand. “Come with me. There
are so many people who want to see you.”

“Just a minute.” She turned to face where
Longbourne would be, on earth, and took in a deep breath of
green-scented air. “You won’t hear this,” she said quietly, “but it
has to be said. You won’t be lonely forever, Zara. And we’ll wait
for you. However long it takes.”

Her words floated away into the distance, and
the lullaby came back to her, so quiet it was impossible to tell
who was singing it, or to whom.
Promise
, said the wind, and
Alison held Anthony’s hand and let it follow her all the way to the
mountains and beyond.

Melissa
McShane is the author of the novels of Tremontane, including
SERVANT OF THE CROWN and RIDER OF THE CROWN, as well as EMISSARY
and THE SMOKE-SCENTED GIRL. After a childhood spent roaming the
United States, she settled in Utah with her husband, four children,
three very needy cats, and a library that continues to grow out of
control. She wrote reviews and critical essays for many years
before turning to fiction, which is much more fun than anyone ought
to be allowed to have. She is currently working on the next
Tremontane novel. You can visit her at her website
www.melissamcshanewrites.com
for more information on other books and upcoming releases.