Persuasion (7 page)

Until that moment, Seven had always been a little larger than life to Barrie. He’d always seemed so self-possessed
and intimidating that she’d never imagined that he could look so . . . undone.

“Eight will still have to abandon whatever life he has built for himself once I’m gone,” Seven said, “but at least he will come back to Beaufort Hall knowing that he has done his best to live the kind of life he wanted. That’s why you have to let him go.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Barrie asked in a strangled voice.

“By realizing there’s no scenario in which you two can have a future together. You are bound to Watson’s Landing, and Eight will be bound to Beaufort Hall. The distance across the river might not seem very far, but it would always be there between you. One or the other of you would always be in pain. That would only get worse. The bindings will force you back to your responsibilities, and people in both families have gone crazy from the pain of that. They’ve committed suicide to escape it. If you let Eight give up his scholarship when you have no hope of a future together, he’ll have given up his dreams for nothing.”

He finished speaking, and Barrie heard the staccato rush of her own heartbeat in her ears. An hour ago, she wouldn’t have let herself think about marrying Eight. The idea that she couldn’t, though, made her realize how much heartache she was in for.

While she was alone upstairs, the quiet of the house wrapped around Barrie like a comfortable shirt. Comfortable, not comforting. She had too much pent-up frustration to let herself be consoled.

Emerging from the shower in a billow of steam, she felt weighed down by gifts and obligations, by fear and loss and fury. She needed to try to speak with the Fire Carrier again. What Seven had told her made it even more important than before that she find a way to understand what was expected of her and what the binding meant.

Wrapped in a towel, she stopped at the balcony door on her way to get her clothes. It was almost midnight, but several of the boats were still there, bobbing in the moonlight
that reflected across the water. The scene was too similar to her memory: a boat and the Fire Carrier approaching, flames shooting across the water, the boat exploding, the smell of fuel burning, Wyatt and Ernesto screaming.

Logically, Barrie knew there had been other boats before and the Fire Carrier hadn’t done anything to them. Logically, she knew he had saved her. But logic didn’t trump the memories.

She’d had days to come to terms with how she’d seen him that night, not as the shadowed spirit of an ancient Cherokee witch but as something more. As someone real. And all along, he’d had something he wanted to tell her that he didn’t know how to communicate.

Since that night, she’d been thinking about trying to speak to him again, but thanks to the boats and Eight, who was asleep in the room beside hers, the Fire Carrier would have to wait. After dressing hurriedly, she slipped outside to the balcony. Treading lightly to avoid the creak and groan of weathered wood, she crossed to the railing.

The darkness whispered with night birds calling and insects droning, and the air settled around her, heavy with the sweetness of honeysuckle and magnolia and damp, cloying heat. All these things had been here when she’d first arrived at Watson’s Landing. Since the night the spirit in the fountain had bound her, though, sight and smell and hearing, all her
senses, were more intense, as if her skin had melted away and left her raw and beating in time with the landscape.

She didn’t need the chime of the grandfather clock downstairs to warn her.

Orange tongues of flame appeared in the woods, the flickering glow marking the Fire Carrier’s progress to the river. He emerged in the marsh with the sphere of fire in his outstretched hands. Bending low, he unraveled it a thread at a time until the entire surface of the water had ignited and the blaze ran upriver the length of the island, and down to the creek on the far side of the Watson woods.

Barrie held her breath, waiting for the boat to catch, to explode and send up a spray of smoke, fumes, and sharp fiberglass shards. She let the memories hit her, and they came in waves and waves.

Nothing exploded. The boats on the river never moved, and whoever was in them showed no sign of being aware that anything magical was happening around them.

The Fire Carrier turned to face Barrie. He gave her a silent nod, and she raised her hand and waved.

“What does he look like?” Speaking behind Barrie, Eight made her jump.

He stood in the doorway, shirtless with his golden skin shining with moon and flame. His hair fell across his forehead, making Barrie want to reach over and brush it away. Brush
away all her doubts and the things she wished she didn’t know.

She concentrated very hard on
not wanting to talk about any of that
.

“He’s our age,” she said. “Your age, maybe. Wearing a red-and-black mask of war paint and a dark feathered cape. Not what I’d expect a witch to look like.”

“Then maybe he’s a warrior. Or a war priest, or one in training.” Eight’s lips kicked into a lopsided smile. “Yes, I’ve been trying to read up. The Internet’s a wonderful thing.”

“What does your dad say about him?”

“Nothing much except that he’s yours. You’re supposed to protect the island and keep it safe, which is why you see him, and we’re supposed to know what people want so that we can guess their intentions and keep our side of the bargain.”

“What kind of bargain?”

Eight gave a tight and impatient shrug. “Dad claims that’s all he knows.”

“Do you believe him?”

Eight turned to look at her more fully. “What do you mean?”

Barrie took a moment to choose her words, because family relationships were like rubber bands, liable to snap back against anyone who tried to stretch them. And despite the questionable choices he had made, Seven was still Eight’s father.

“The gift has never been interrupted in your family,” she
said. “So why wouldn’t all the knowledge and the reasons—the whole instruction manual for the bargains the Fire Carrier made—have been passed down to Seven? Since Pru doesn’t know anything, your father is our best chance for finding out the truth.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried to get him to tell me? He doesn’t want me to know.”

“You’re not a kid. Maybe it’s time you stopped asking, and demanded that he give you answers.”

Eight had gone still again, that uncanny stillness he wore like a mantle. The silence filled with the too-loud sounds of frogs and insects and the drum of Barrie’s heart. She waited for him to speak, to yell at her, to tell her to mind her own business.

Instead, he said, “What is it that you are trying so hard to hide? I can’t get a read at all—except that there’s something you don’t want to tell me.”

He crossed the balcony and leaned down beside her. With his forearms braced on the railing and his shoulder brushing hers, they were millimeters and miles apart. When she looked up, his eyes shone green and deep.

Barrie couldn’t tell him. She had already said too much. On the other hand, the fact that he couldn’t read her gave her a little hope. Evidently, she couldn’t lie to him about what she wanted, but she could mask her wants, or at least layer them with other things she wanted.

She turned back toward the river.

“There are these things called boundaries,” she said. “From now on, if I don’t want to tell you something, maybe you could try respecting that. You clearly accept it with your dad. And maybe I don’t even know what I want. People frequently don’t.”

“I can’t help knowing, any more than you can help feeling something lost. What you want is just
there
, like seeing colors when some people are color-blind.”

“You told me once that you don’t like your dad’s sense of ethics. That he manipulates people—”

“I’m not manipulating you—”

“That’s not what I’m trying to say.” Barrie picked at a shard of cracking paint on the balcony railing and watched the boats drifting on the water. “You told me once that you didn’t want to live the way your father does, using the gift to bend the rules and maneuver people into doing what you want. I know he doesn’t do anything illegal. But what if he did something bad in another way, something you didn’t like, except he did it for good reason?” She made herself watch his reaction. “Could you forgive him?”

“What’s this really about?” Tugging the chain of her necklace, he pulled the three Tiffany keys from beneath the baby-doll tee Barrie had thrown on with her sleep shorts. He used the chain to draw her closer. Then he slid his arms around her
waist. “What did my father say to you while you walked out to the gate together?”

“What if it was
me
who’d done something you didn’t like?” she said a little desperately. “Would you forgive me?”

“Are we still being hypothetical?” Eight tipped her chin toward him and pushed her hair behind her ear, smiling to soften the words. “I suspect I could forgive you almost anything, but you were right earlier about being honest with each other. I should have told you about what was going on here when I found out. That wasn’t fair. I’ll try to be more open with you, and I hope that whatever you’ve got going on in your head—whatever happened between you and my dad—you’ll trust me enough to tell me.”

Down on the river, the Fire Carrier had recalled the flames from the surface of the water, reeling them in and spooling them back into a fiery ball. He didn’t glance up toward the balcony again. Barrie held her breath, and felt like her lungs were burning, too. As the Fire Carrier turned to go back into the Watson woods, she used the excuse to get away from Eight. Moving to the end of the balcony, she watched while the wavering orange glow of spirit fire lit the trunks of cypress and oaks that soared toward the star-pricked sky.

Eight came up beside her and pulled her down to sit against his lap. With his chin resting on her hair, he waited quietly while she watched the light moving deeper into the
woods. Long after it had vanished and the boats on the river were all that remained to disturb them, she still didn’t want to move, or speak, or do anything to break the beauty of sitting there with Eight. Their breath came in sync, and even their hearts beat together, as if Eight could sense how hers sped up whenever they touched like this.

She knew if she brought up Seven again, it would ruin things. Maybe it was wrong not to tell Eight, but maybe she had already said enough to make Eight go back to get answers from his father. It couldn’t hurt to wait another day and see whether that worked before she told him about the binding.

Eventually, they both returned to their rooms.

In the small hours of the night, Barrie woke to find flashlights moving on the shore near the charred remains of the Colesworth dock. But Cassie’s treasure was the last thing that Barrie wanted to worry about. She rolled over and went back to sleep.

All the boats were gone the next morning when Barrie and Eight set off to meet Seven for Cassie’s hearing. They climbed into the
Away
, Eight’s pretty sailboat, with her sleek lines and the name that was a promise of his intent to get out of Watson’s Landing. Eight started the motor for the trip to Watson’s Point. A short distance below the creek, a bald eagle plummeted from the sky to snare a fish in his talons, then flew off in a rush of wings and bubbling water. Barrie imagined she knew how the fish felt. In addition to the usual migraine, she had the same sense of impending doom at the thought of seeing her cousin.

“Don’t worry about the hearing,” Eight said after ten minutes of making small talk and getting one-syllable answers. “Dad says the judge will ask us a few questions about how
Cassie left us locked inside the tunnel and how we feel about her going to jail versus getting community service. We’ll tell him jail is good, and then we’re done.”

Barrie would have preferred not to be going at all. Pru had remained at Watson’s Landing to have the motion detectors installed, and Barrie would much rather have stayed to help.

After tearing off the faded orange life vest, she stowed it into the storage compartment beneath the seat. Eight bumped the
Away
gently against the floating walkway in the marina. He jumped out to tie off the line, and the boat rocked wildly. Barrie grasped the mast, but her fear of the water wasn’t as overwhelming anymore. The small flash ebbed as quickly as it had come, and her brief gasp was drowned in the cry of a pair of gulls squabbling over a french fry a few feet away.