Shadows Cast by Stars (8 page)

He stows the paddles, ignoring his mother altogether.

Paul gives me a questioning look. We stand side by side, waiting awkwardly. Finally Bran wades up onto the shore, wipes his hands on his shorts, and sighs. “Mother, this is Paul and Cassandra Mercredi. They’ve taken the place with the boathouse on the northern side of the lake.”

Her eyes fall on me. They’re blue, but not like any blue I’ve ever seen—almost crystalline, pale, translucent. Unearthly. “Cassandra, Cassandra,” she says, rolling my name about in her mouth, the words catching on the odd
lilt of her voice. “The entangler of men?” She looks me up and down and gives me a withering smile. “No, I suppose not. Well, come up to the house, then.” She doesn’t move, peering at Paul for a long moment before clapping her hands. “Call me Grace, darlings! Come along!”

Bran trails behind me, and though I’m not sure, I think I feel his fingers brush my arm.

Grace watches me from the corner of her eye. “You don’t say much, do you? Well, Bran has that effect on girls sometimes.” She stops, twirls around, and plants a kiss on Bran’s cheek before he can escape. “Darling, why don’t you and Paul go find something to do? Take him to your workshop, maybe. I’m sure he’d like that.” She eyes me. “I want Cassandra all to myself for a little while.”

Paul mouths
Sorry
to me as they take off.

“Don’t be late for tea!” Grace calls after them. “Boys. They’ll always come back for food.” Her laugh is a brittle sound that sets my nerves on edge. “Now, my dear, tell me about yourself.” A queer smile crosses her face. “I imagine you’re from the Corridor, yes?”

I duck my head rather than answer, letting her guide me toward the house. She wants something.

“You do have a voice, don’t you? Are you a mute?”

“No.”

“Ah. Good. I was afraid you were damaged. Well? Tell me about your family.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Well, you’re native. I can tell that just by looking at you—those cheekbones, you see.” She stops and cups my chin with a hand, turning my head one way, then the other, inspecting me. “Let me guess. Cree?”

I am stunned by this. How dare she inspect me like I’m a fatted calf? When I find my voice, I take care to sound polite. This is Bran’s mother, after all. “No. We’re Métis.”

“Hmm.” She sniffs, releasing her grasp. “Your father’s side, or your mother’s?”

“My father.”

“And your mother?”

“She died five years ago.”

“Ah, my dear.” Grace clasps her hands to her breast, but the gesture is hollow. “I
am
sorry. Was it Plague, then?”

My eyes glide to the placid waters of the lake. That is one question I will not answer.

She takes my silence as an affirmation. “You should have moved to the Island a long time ago. The Band would have made sure your mother was safe. Ah, well!” She draws me into an embrace, only to push me back,
holding me at arm’s length. “That can’t be undone now. So, do you like to read? Please tell me you like to read, because if you do, I have just the thing for you. A job, you know. Everyone needs a job, don’t they?”

I want to snap at her, or flee, or something—anything— but I can’t. I just stare at my feet and mutter “I guess” before sullenly following her inside.

My father says a home is a reflection of a family. Our home on the mainland was always spartan clean, and nothing ever went to waste. What was broken, we mended. What was dirty, we scrubbed.
Waste not, want not
, my father also says, though it’s pretty hard to waste not when there’s nothing to waste in the first place.

He’d be horrified by Bran’s house. Grace leads me through a maze of unwashed dishes, decaying food, tables and chairs that block doorways, boxes of bric-a-brac, and everywhere, dirt. I search for Bran’s presence in this mess, but I can’t find it. It’s like he doesn’t live here.

Grace chatters at me like a squirrel, saying things that I don’t really hear. I peer through the cracks of doors, hoping to spy Bran’s room. Darkness stares back at me.

“Don’t mind the mess,” she says, waving her hands as if the disaster will magically disappear. “There’s plenty of time to clean when I’m dead.”

I wonder if she’s dead already. I haven’t seen a hint of her shade. Sometimes that happens with those who aren’t native, but I expected something considering what follows her son around.

She pushes her way through heavy cock-eyed doors. “The library!” she announces, only to whirl around, her eyes comically wide. “You aren’t a prophetess, are you?” She laughs before I can say anything. “What? You don’t know your own mythology? That’s something we’ll have to rectify immediately. I know something about these things, you see. Come along, darling. I’ll be your teacher.”

I step into the room. Rows of books line three of the walls. Sunlight peers through the dusty curtains, staining the room sepia, casting the masks on the fourth wall in an unearthly light. They are old, these masks, carved a long time ago. I recognize some of them: Crooked Beak, with his deadly snapping jaws. Eagle, the one who soars the highest. Thunderbird. Bear. Sisiutl, the double-headed serpent. These are the masks of Bran’s people, of the tribes from this coast. Spirit is thick on them, carved right into the wood, steeped into the paint.

“So,” Grace says as she creeps up behind me, “you like them? They’re from the old times, back when people remembered how to dance, how to carve. They say if you put one on, you become the creature the mask
resembles. Would you like to try? Who would you like to be, Cassandra, my young prophetess?”

“I’d like to be myself,” I murmur as I force my eyes closed. The masks are reaching out, whispering that it’s safe here, that they will protect me, but I know better.

That’s when Grace crosses the room and shuts the doors behind us. “Well then,” she says, smiling a smile so sweet that I know better than to trust it, “you don’t know who you are. I think we should fix that. Open the blinds. We need light!”

I do as she asks, pulling the drapes back so that sunlight spills into the room, breaking the spell of the masks. I’d like to open the windows, too, and release the old spirits trapped here, but I don’t dare. This is Grace’s home, and I can tell she expects me to do as I’m told, nothing more.

She browses the bookshelves, her fingers tracing the spines, until at last she says, “Aha, this is the right one!” and gestures for me to sit down on the floor. I don’t want to. The carpet’s filthy, but my father has taught us to respect our elders, so I do as I’m told.

“Let’s see here,” she says as she paws through the pages. “Oh yes, here we are. Cassandra. Your namesake. Daughter of King Priam. Twin sister to Helenus. She told her father that Troy would burn if they opened the
gates to the wooden horse, but he wouldn’t listen to her. Apollo gave you the gift of prophecy by licking your ears, you see, and then took it away when you refused to sleep with him. Not nice, that Apollo.” She holds the book out toward me so I can see an illustration of a man of great beauty. On his shoulder sits a raven.

“Why is that there?” I say, pointing at the raven as my heart thuds. I don’t like how Grace assumes that the legendary Cassandra shares more than my name.

“The raven? Oh, that’s a guise Apollo was known to take, but not this version of Apollo. This is the Hellenized version, the clean, pretty one. The old version, the primal one, was a wild man, king of the hunt, king of the land, before the Greeks got ahold of him and made him a god in their own image. That’s what people do, you see. If a god doesn’t fit with what they want, they rewrite the myths until they’re more to their liking. But the raven, that’s a symbol older than time. Did you know that almost all the cultures of the world feature the raven in their mythology?” She smiles down at the bird. “This is what I used to be, once upon a time, long before I came here, a scholar of myth.” Her voice takes on a melancholy note, and just as I think she’s about to say something more, something important about me, she snaps the book shut and tosses it aside. “Enough of that. There are other stories you should hear.”

The next book she pulls from the shelf is thick and old, though gilt still trims its pages. She opens it to a ribbon marker and then hands it to me. “Read,” she says. “Aloud.”

The first story is about a man with a shrunken arm, which includes a poem that she makes me skip over. It’s followed by a tale about a long-dead king, and then a story of a man who tries to bring his wife back to life, but doesn’t trust her to follow him, and so he fails.

She interrupts me to wave at the rest of the books. “Bran’s father brings me these,” she says. “He’s such a generous man, always thinking of me and Bran, always making sure we have everything we need. Did you know, when he first brought me here, back when I wasn’t much older than you, he brought me flowers every day? And made sure I had real tea? And when Bran was born, the look on his face! He knew his son would grow up to be as strong as him, a real leader, someone who had the fortitude to walk in his footsteps.”

I glance at her, wondering why she speaks of Arthur Eagleson in the present tense, but her gaze is elsewhere, as if she’s listening to something that I cannot hear. But then she blinks, like she thought I was someone else. “Continue,” she says.

So I do. When my tongue stumbles over a Latin
passage, Grace corrects me, eyes closed, hand dancing in the air as if conducting a symphony. “Repeat after me:
Hic jacet Arthurus …
”

She knows the book by heart, and yet I’m still required to read?

This is a test. I’m acutely aware of that, and if I pass, Grace will permit me to spend time with her son. Fail, and I will be deemed unfit.

Am I worthy stock? Are my cheekbones arched high enough? Is my hair the right color? My breasts supple enough to feed the hungry sons I will bear, sons destined to become warriors for the Band?

Her answer to those questions? I may never know. But I care. I shouldn’t, but I do.

Just when I think I can’t bear it any longer, Bran and Paul burst through the door like tempests, breaking the oppressive atmosphere. Paul leans against a bookcase while Bran flops down next to me and tugs at my shoelace. He smells of varnish and sawdust. “Why are you making Cassandra read to you, Mother?”

“Because, my son, reading aloud is a cultured pastime. We may live in the wilds, but we are not savages.”

“Speak for yourself,” he says, giving me a wicked grin. “I like being savage. When’s tea? We’re starving.”

Grace glares at him. “When I make it.” She sighs
dramatically, then takes the book from my hands, places it on a shelf, and drifts away.

Bran nods at Paul, who turns and tiptoes after Grace. “She’s outside, smoking,” he says when he returns.

“Never smokes in the house. She’s afraid she’ll damage my lungs or something. She didn’t give you too much of a hard time, did she, Cass?”

“A bit,” I say as I find my way to my feet. “But I managed.”

“You shouldn’t have to manage,” he says. “Sorry about that.” He steps past Paul into the hall, then quietly opens a door leading into a darkened corridor. “This way,” he whispers. “Time to get out of Dodge.”

W
e walk into town. Cicadas rise up before us like gilt-winged heralds, singing of our approach. I carry a book under my arm. Bran ran back to get it for me. He and Paul want to play football, and he was worried I’d be bored.

We pass a garden so beautiful I can’t help but stop and stare. Sunflowers in full bloom reach to the sky. Apples dangle from their trees, green and glossy and waiting to ripen. Cabbage. Tomatoes. Squash. Pole beans dotted with scarlet blossoms, and everywhere, the sound of bees. I haven’t heard a bee sing since I was a little girl. I’ve always had to fertilize our plants by hand, going from flower to flower with a tiny paint brush.

The garden is full of women working, bent backed,
their heads bobbing up and down between the rows. I look for Helen, the girl from the store, among them, but she’s not there. A few of the women look up as we pass, and the resentful glares on their faces leave me wanting to tell them I will work, I will work hard. I know that the Old Way takes care of those who toil, but I suspect, even if I spoke the words, they would not hear me.

Bran doesn’t say anything when I start walking again, but he does smile.

When we reach the town, I settle in the shadow of an ancient chestnut tree while Paul and Bran jog across the park, hollering at the boys who sit in the shade on the other side.

Bran immediately takes charge. He divides the players up—Bran and Paul on one team, with the stout, dark-haired boy I first saw at the store captaining the other. The opposing team strips off their shirts and uses them to make goal lines while Bran and Paul talk strategy. I sigh wistfully and open the book. At least I’m spared from seeing Bran without his shirt. His mother’s words still sting my ears.
An entangler of men? No, I suppose not
.

Something drops on the ground near me and I look up to see the stout boy throwing shirts not far from where I’m sitting. His shade, a muskrat, peeks its head out from behind his shoulder. The boy has a coarse face and his
body is heavy with muscle.
Strong like bull, smart like rock
, my father would say. The boy glances at me, then jogs away.