Ysabel (38 page)

“He’ll . . . he’s going to have to land,” Kate said. Her voice was rough. “Change back.”

Ned nodded. “I know. He’ll wait till he’s out of sight if it kills him.”

They were silent, watching the bird struggle. They lost it, then Ned saw it again. Its left wing seemed to be hardly moving, though it was difficult to see in the last light, and that might just have been his knowing where the blade had gone.

After another moment the owl passed from sight, cresting the hill.

“He didn’t have to do that,” Kate Wenger said softly.

“Yeah, he did,” Ned replied.

She glared at him again. “Your aunt,” she said, with more anger than seemed called for, “was right, then. Men are idiots.”

“I try not to be,” Ned said.

“Don’t even start with me, Ned Marriner.”

A presence, a voice behind them. “Be fair. He hasn’t done too badly.”

Phelan walked up.

“We didn’t hear you,” Kate said.

The man they’d first seen in the baptistry shrugged a shoulder. The other would be bandaged, Ned knew, under the jacket. The jacket would be torn. It was too dark to make that out.

“I’ve had time to learn how not to be heard,” Phelan said. “I came to say goodbye.”

“Well brought up?” Kate said.

“Once, yes.” He hesitated. “In Phocaia.”

“I know. I looked it up. Eastern Greece. But your name wasn’t Protis?”

He shook his head.

“You can remember being young?” Ned asked.

Another hesitation. He was being kind to them, Ned realized. “You never forget being young,” he said. Then, “Do you have anything for me? Anything at all?”

A great deal of pride being overcome to ask that. Ned shook his head. “I’d have told you both, if I had.”

He thought the other man’s expression was pained, but that was probably his imagination. The bands of colour were almost gone in the west.

“I thought you might . . .”

“Be on your side?”

Phelan nodded. “You were, in the café.”

“You didn’t need me,” Ned said. “You said I was stupid to come out, remember?”

“I remember.” His teeth flashed briefly. “Men are idiots?”

“Yeah. You heard that?” Kate said.

He nodded again. “Inside and out here. A body of opinion, it seems.”

“How’s your shoulder?” Kate asked.

“Same as his, I imagine.”

“But you don’t need to fly.”

“I don’t, no.”

“You do the screening thing, though, right?” Ned said. “You told me about that. Then you did it at Entremont.”

“I did learn it, eventually, yes. As he learned the shape-changing.”

“Why him, not you?”

A hint of impatience for the first time. “Why did they have druids and keep their elders’ skulls, and their enemies’, and believe the sky would fall to end the world?”

Ned said nothing.

“Why did we build aqueducts and cities? And theatres? And arenas and baths and the roads?”

“I get it. Why did you conquer them? Make them slaves?” That was Kate.

“Why were we
able
to do that?”

“What are you saying? Different ideas of the world?” Ned asked.

Phelan nodded. He turned to Kate. “He isn’t an idiot, by the way.”

“Never said
he
was,” she retorted.

Phelan opened his mouth to reply, but didn’t. He looked at Ned again. “Different ideas, different avenues to power. You’ve learned how to screen yourself ?”

Ned nodded. “Just now.”

“Remember to let it go unless you need it. You’re still hidden. You don’t need to be. It will kick back on you if you hold too long. You can harm yourself. I learned the hard way.”

“Seriously?” Dumb question.

Phelan nodded. “It drains you, takes a fair amount of energy, though you don’t even know it.”

Hesitantly, Ned closed his eyes, looked within again, saw the silver light that was the man he was talking to and the green-gold of his aunt up in the house. Cadell’s presence was too far away now, or blocked.

He released his own, like opening fingers in his mind, and saw his own pale hue reappear inside.

“Ah,” Phelan said. “There you are. I’ll leave now. This is”—he looked from one of them to the other—“farewell, I suspect. I will say that I am grateful—for the café, for Entremont.”

“You saved us up there,” Kate said.

He shook his head. “He was unlikely to have hurt you, with Ysabel watching.”

“The others might have, and it was Beltaine,” Kate said stubbornly.

Phelan shrugged again, with one shoulder. “So be it. I saved your lives. Doesn’t make me a good man.”

“I know that,” Ned said.

Phelan looked at him for a long moment.

“You must understand, I have . . . no balancing in this,” he said quietly, in the near-dark. “The air I breathe is her, or wanting her.”

Ned was silent. He felt something pushing from inside himself, a kind of wish, longing. Last encounter, an ending, a world touched and receding.

He heard himself say, “I sensed her in the cemetery. No idea from when. It might have been long ago like
the other place, but I did feel her.”

Phelan’s attention was suddenly absolute. “Ysabel herself, not just a sensation?”

Ned nodded. “Ysabel.”

Saying the name himself.

The man’s head lifted. He was looking down the valley, as if trying to see as far as Arles. He was a grey shape in moonlight, going away from them. The villa’s lights were across the grass, up the stone steps, gleaming through windows, far away from where they stood.

“That would have been her now, if so. She knew Les Alyscamps. We all did.”

“What does it tell you?” Kate asked, an edge in her voice.
She knows he’s leaving, too
, Ned thought. This world they’d found.

“One thing or two,” Phelan said. He looked at Ned. “Thank you, again.”

“I’m not sure why I did that.”

“Neither am I,” Phelan said. “Because he cheated?”

“I cheat on things,” Ned said. “I even took an essay from . . .” He didn’t finish. It seemed too dismally stupid a thought.

He saw white teeth in the darkness. “Perhaps I charmed you with my sweetness?” Phelan laughed. He shook his head. “I’m away. Remember me, if this is the end.”

He turned and started back across the grass. Ned discovered he was unable to speak.

“How are you going to . . . How did you get here?” Kate again.

Ned had a sense—same as in the cloister—that she was trying to keep him here, hold him with questions, not release him into the night.

“You’ll hear,” Phelan said, without turning back. He hadn’t turned back in the cloister, either.

They watched him go past the pool and the lavender to the iron gates. They were closed and locked. The motion sensors kicked on as he approached, so they had a sudden view as he put both arms—one would be bandaged, with a blade wound—on the bars, and then propelled himself over without fuss, with an ease that seemed absurd, in fact.

They stood listening.

A moment later there came a motorcycle’s snarl out on the dark road, and then they heard it going down and away. Ned reached inside, but eventually the silvertinted light there faded, somewhere—he guessed—near the bottom of the lane where it met the main road and the streetlights.

“Ned? Kate? You two okay?”

His mother, from the terrace. He could see her in the glow there.

“We’re fine, Mom.”

“Come on in. We’re going to eat something, then talk.”

“Coming.”

His mom turned and went back in.

Ned had an image, like an old photo, of himself as a child playing with friends at dusk in summer, the light fading, his mother’s voice—faint but clear—
summoning him home. Bath and bed.

“Why did you tell him?” Kate asked, softly.

“Don’t know. Maybe because he can’t fly.”

“Cadell can’t either, now.”

“I know.”

Kate was quiet a moment. “I don’t think you’re an idiot, by the way.”

He looked at her. “I can be.”

“We all can,” Kate Wenger said, and kissed him on the mouth in the windy dark.

Ned closed his eyes, but by then she’d already stepped back. He drew a breath.

“Um, was that Marie-Chantal? You possessed again, like before?”

She hit him, pretty hard, on the chest. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “Idiot.”

“We going through that again?”

“If we have to.”

“You . . . you taste of peppermint gum,” he said.

“Is that good?”

His pulse was racing. “Well, I’d have to taste it again, you know, to give a proper opinion.”

She laughed softly, and turned away, starting back up towards the villa. Over her shoulder she said, “The management has received your application and will consider it in due course.”

Ned had to smile. Before following, he looked back out over the slanting field. It was fully dark now. The lights of Aix gleamed, sprinkled across the valley bowl. Above the city, Venus was brilliant, low in the sky. He
turned back towards the house, saw Kate going up the stone steps to the terrace.

He shook his head, mostly in wonder. How did you move so fast from being uncertain and fearful about everything to this sudden feeling of happiness? And then back: because the image that came to him right then was of Melanie, on the shaded grass at the Roman theatre in Arles, speaking of how hard it could be to find love.

He thought of her, he thought of Ysabel. He went back up to the villa. His mom had called him for supper.

CHAPTER XVI

“I
think,” said Meghan Marriner, “it is time for me to get up to speed here. Who’ll start?”

They had eaten, the dishes were cleared. Veracook was at the sink washing up. The kitchen doors were closed, and they were speaking in English. Vera hadn’t—apparently—seen the knives earlier. Ned hadn’t checked, but it seemed that Steve had. He’d gone towards the kitchen when the blade was thrown, and closed those doors.

Ned hadn’t noticed any of that. It would have been awkward to have their cook gossiping about weapons, he thought. Greg’s injury—scratched by an animal—was one kind of event in the countryside; violence in the villa would be something else.

Ned watched as his mother took some sheets of printer paper from beside the telephone and set them in front of her beside a cup of tea. She had her reading glasses on.

He usually had a decent idea of what his mother was thinking—it was important in life to have a read on your mother—but this was all new terrain. He kept glancing from her to his aunt, the red hair and the white. He saw his father doing the same thing,
which made him feel better. Sometimes he didn’t think they looked so much alike, then he’d realize they did, a lot.

Meghan looked around the table now, waiting.

Ned cleared his throat. “It’s my story, I guess. Mostly. Kate and Aunt Kim can help as I go.”

Kate was still wearing his sweatshirt, and fiddling with a pen. They hadn’t called her mother in New York. Ned didn’t know what she’d said to his own mom—he’d seen them talking before dinner—but it had evidently been enough. She was still here.

He saw Aunt Kim, at the far end of the table from her sister, smiling a little. “I remember that note-taking,” she said, looking at Meghan. “You had these green notebooks with you all the time.”

“Blue. Someone,” Meghan replied, “needs to be organized here.”

“Melanie was,” Greg said.

“Then I’ll try to be,” Ned’s mother said. “So we can get her back.” She uncapped her pen.

Ned started in. He expected her to interrupt, challenge him. She didn’t. Not at the skull and sculpted head, not at the rose in the cloister or Phelan jumping from the roof. Not when Ned was sick by the mountain or fought the dogs outside the café.

She took notes. She did look hard at her sister when Ned told of his aunt’s phone call.

“I’d driven to London and flown down that morning. I’d become aware of Ned the day before,” Kimberly said. “In my garden. Nothing like that has
ever happened before, Meg. Not even back when. I knew who he was and where he was, a kind of explosion in my head. Then he was gone. But I was pretty certain what had just happened. He’d crossed into the space where I am.” She looked at Ned, then at her sister. “I think . . . I
know
it has to do with our family, Meg. Blood ties. It can’t be anything else.”

“Your grandmother?” Edward Marriner asked quietly, from the middle of the table, opposite Ned.

“Great-grandmother, if this means anything.” It was his wife who replied. “The story was she had the second sight. And her father before her. People in Wales, Ireland, the west of England, they all tell those stories.”

No one said anything.

“Go on,” Meghan said to her son.

He told his own story. His mother wrote, neat handwriting, straight lines on the unruled paper. No challenges, no comments. He spoke of meeting his aunt by the roofless tower and Cadell and the wolves attacking there.

“What did you say? To make them stop?” It was Steve.

Kimberly glanced at her husband. “Some things about me, a place I’d been when I was younger. Someone I knew.”

“And it scared him off ?”

“Didn’t scare him. Made him think. Gave him a reason to back away. He wanted Ned out of the story, didn’t have any particular desire to kill him.”

“But he would have, if he had to?”

Meghan, looking at her sister.

Kim said quietly, “These two have caused a lot of damage over the years, honey.”

“Collateral damage?” Steve said.

“That’s about it,” Dave Martyniuk said. “It’s all about the two of them, and Ysabel.”

“Brys didn’t think so,” Ned said.

“Back up, Ned. You’re still at that tower.” His mother looked at him.

Ned backed up to the tower. Moved on towards Entremont. He was going to skip the walk up there, but Kate didn’t let him. She held up a hand, like a good student in class, and he stopped.

“I was feeling weird all day,” she said. “Like, as soon as I woke up.”

“Weird, how?” Meghan asked, looking over the top of her reading glasses, a doctor in her office.

Kate flushed. She lowered her gaze. “That gets embarrassing.”

“You don’t have to—” Ned began.

She held up her hand again.