Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (38 page)

“Taliesin, have you not more than once tried to convince me that I needed to let go of the past and that I needed to forgive myself for what I have done.”

“What you did was about three thousand years ago,” I muttered.

“To me, it was like yesterday,” he said quietly. “And my sin is far, far worse than his. I stole a man’s wife. He stole your childhood girlfriend. Then I killed the man. He did not kill you. If God has forgiven me, then surely you can forgive him.”

“God can forgive Dan if He will…but I never will!”

David wanted to say something about the importance of following God’s example—I bet he was aching to. Yet he did not, probably realizing that his words would be wasted at that point.

Khalid was crying somewhere nearby. Yes, crying and wrapping his arms around Shar’s neck.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, feeling a hint of my protective emotions toward him reviving.

“I want…I want things to be like they were before, like they were yesterday.”

Yeah, kid, you and me both!

I should have said something comforting. He was just a kid, one who had a really rough life, one who deserved better than to get sucked into my drama.

Yeah, I should have, but I didn’t. Instead, I said something like, “Yesterday was just a lie. Today is the truth.” Khalid wept even more bitterly, and Shar gave me an intensely angry look.

In a short time, the security detail had Morgan and Alcina tucked away somewhere, the mess cleaned up, and space found for anyone who was without wheels, Eva in particular. Our raw emotions, however, could not be so easily swept away.

I became aware that Dan was getting up and moving in my general direction. Would he have the nerve to try to apologize? I looked into his unreadable eyes and could not tell—and I had no intention of plunging into that garbage heap of a mind.

Dan said nothing. Instead he unsheathed his faerie-forged sword, laid it quietly on the grass in front of me, turned quietly and walked away. I guess that was his lame attempt at resigning as one of my warriors…or, more likely, a way to avoid the embarrassment of being thrown out.

Nurse Florence appeared at my side, her professional detachment feeling pretty frayed. “Tal, we have to talk. Guys, I’d say you’re all too tired to drive. We can find space for you in one of the vans, and some of the security men will drive your cars home. Let’s do that now. We are getting dangerously close to sunrise, and your parents won’t stay asleep too long after that.”

The guys, except for Shar, who was clearly angry with the way I had handled Khalid, mumbled a good-bye and disappeared so fast I would have thought they had all suddenly acquired magic. The way my view of reality was changing, that scenario almost seemed plausible.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” snapped Nurse Florence as soon as everyone else was out of earshot.

“What? I should be ashamed? I think you have me confused with Dan,” I replied, my voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Shut up, and listen!” Nurse Florence was practically spitting the words at me. I had never seen her quite like this. The surprise was enough to get me to stop talking, at least for a few seconds, and she took immediate advantage of the opportunity.

“Tal, you threatened to use dark magic on someone tonight! Do you know what that means? It means you are half a step from becoming just like Morgan or Ceridwen!”

“I would never really have done that!” I protested.

“You didn’t really intend to carry out the threat, but on some level, you wanted to. I could feel the emotions radiating from you.”

“You can’t read minds as I can, and we both know it, so don’t pretend you can for the purposes of lecturing me.”

“I don’t have to be able to read minds as you do to pick up that intense a burst of raw feeling. But let’s pretend you really didn’t want to do it. Calling up that kind of power is dangerous: dangerous to the people around you, and dangerous to your very soul.”

I knew I shouldn’t be angry with someone who had practically died helping me tonight, but I had been through too much in too short a period of time to have patience for this kind of criticism when I knew I was right. “I know what I’m doing, and I have no intention of walking the left-hand path, now or ever.”

“Have you ever stopped to consider that Morgan may have thought the same thing in the beginning? You love Eva, and you feel justifiably outraged that Dan kept you from her. Morgan loved Lancelot, but he had an unlawful passion for Guinevere, over which Morgan felt justifiable, if somewhat self-serving, outrage. But Morgan did not consider the consequences for everyone else of trying to bring their illicit passion to light. Nor did she stop at that. Instead, she ended up trying to destroy everyone connected with them, including her own half-brother Arthur, including all of Camelot.

“Lancelot and Guinevere had done wrong, to be sure. So has Dan. Do you see where I am going with this? You can be Morgan and make a justifiable grievance into the first step toward the apocalypse, or you can follow David’s suggestion and find a way to forgive Dan or, if not that, at least find a way to move on yourself.”

“If you ask me,” said Vanora, who had just walked up behind Nurse Florence, “forgiveness is not the issue. Whatever Taliesin and Dan do personally is up to them, but Dan is now a liability as a warrior. He cannot remain part of Taliesin’s force any longer.”

Without waiting for a response from Nurse Florence, who seemed surprised by her unexpected interference, Vanora turned to me and said, “Taliesin, you, just like your warriors, are too tired to drive home. Ride with me, and I’ll have one of my men get your Prius home. Viviane, you do the same. There’s room in van two. Let’s not have any more disasters tonight.”

With manipulative skill worthy of the real Carrie Winn, Vanora deftly separated me from Nurse Florence, who I could tell was not at all happy about that, and I ended up effectively alone with her, at least in the sense that I suspected she would erase the memory of our conversation from any security man within earshot.

“Taliesin, I must say you are surprising me,” Vanora said as the van pulled out. I braced myself for another lecture, though her tone actually sounded positive. “You are becoming a real leader.” That could have been the first direct compliment that Vanora had ever given me.

“What do you mean?” I asked, half-suspiciously.

“It takes a real leader to do what needs to be done. Dan needed to be gotten rid of, and you did it, quickly and effectively.”

“I’d rather not talk about that situation.”

“OK, we won’t. Let me just say, though, that I think I have been too hard on you in the past. You may sometimes act in ways I wouldn’t advise, but you always seem to end up being successful.”

Right at that moment I didn’t feel successful, but I didn’t feel like opening up to Vanora either, so I just nodded in acknowledgment.

“It gives me renewed faith in the prophecy,” she continued.

Little as I wanted to talk, I had to ask. “What prophecy?”

Vanora looked puzzled. “Surely you know. You wrote it down yourself…or rather, the original Taliesin did. The poem in
The Tale of Taliesin
when Maelgwn is questioning him.”

I almost snorted in disbelief. “That old thing. It isn’t any part of Taliesin 1’s memories, so he probably didn’t write it. A lot of scribes reworked those stories over the years. Anyway, it’s silly.”

“Never doubt yourself!” said Vanora with sudden intensity. “That poem, whoever wrote it, I believe to be a genuine reflection of your history…and your future. Think, Taliesin, think! Think what it would mean for a being to have been with God at the beginning of the world, to have been the instructor of the universe in some way, and to be with God again at the end. What would that make you?”

It would make me someone sitting next to a crazy person!

“Vanora, there is no evidence any of that is true.”

“The poem makes it clear that you were with King David of Israel, and as it turns out, now that Stan’s earlier life as David has been revealed, that statement is true.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t remember the lives before the original Taliesin in very great detail, but I had actually remembered that much before Stan got awakened.”

“If that detail is true, why could they not all be true? And don’t you think it is a pretty unbelievable coincidence that among all the billions of people Stan could have been in an earlier life, he just happened to be King David? For that matter, what are the odds of Carla being Alcina? And you knew both of them in earlier lives!”

I didn’t like Vanora’s tone of voice. It was too intense, too fanatical. I didn’t much care for the gleam in her eyes either.

“I have wondered about that myself,” I admitted, “and Gwynn and Nurse Florence alluded to it while we are in Annwn. But supposing it is not a coincidence, what does it mean?”

“It can only mean one thing,” said Vanora, conviction like iron coming through in her voice. “Your mission on Earth is coming to an important point. Maybe not its conclusion, which would imply the end of the world, but at least something pivotal. Old allies are emerging to help you, and old enemies to oppose you. Ceridwen, Morgan, Alcina, King David, even the half-djinn child, Khalid, perhaps…in Santa
Brígida. Hardly a place one would expect to find any of them, let alone all of them.”

“Ceridwen built Santa
Brígida to lure my parents here, so she could try to take back the wisdom I accidentally took so long ago as Gwion Bach. You know that as well as I do. She pulled in Morgan as an ally. David and Alcina were awakened—”

“You were about to say by coincidence, weren’t you?” asked Vanora triumphantly. “Only you couldn’t say it, because you know how ridiculous it is.”

I had a hard time believing that God had somehow arranged my life in a different way than He presumably arranged everyone’s life, but I did thank Him nonetheless that the van was pulling up in front of my house, giving me the opportunity to escape from Vanora. I thanked her as fast as I could, and luckily the security man driving the Prius pulled in at just that moment, so I grabbed the remote from him, thanked him also, and hurried inside as fast as I could, consistent with being quiet.

I half expected to find my newly psychic mother sitting in the living room, waiting to confront me, but fortunately Nurse Florence’s spell had apparently held. By now it was nearly five o’clock in the morning, and I doubted I would get any sleep, but I slipped out of my clothes and into pajamas so Mom wouldn’t wonder why I had slept in my clothes. In the few minutes before my alarm went off, though, I lay down and actually did fall asleep, though it was no restful sleep.

I might have expected my exhaustion would plunge me into dreamless sleep, but instead I started having a very vivid dream. I was surrounded by mist thicker than Annwn’s, a mist that obscured almost everything. Out of that mist came a figure. I recognized him as Jimmie, Dan’s dead brother, but Jimmie had died at age nine, and the figure before me looked as Jimmie would have looked at age sixteen, like Dan, but certainly not identical to him, a little thinner and a little taller—more of a basketball build than a football one. Yet he also sometimes looked oddly like me, as if he were my brother, too. Well, we had been like brothers when he was alive, so my subconscious mind must have been working overtime to make that visual connection. However, that couldn’t explain why he sometimes looked like other brother figures: Stan, Gianni, even Khalid. For being an only child, I certainly had enough people who were like brothers to me. Only twenty-four hours ago, Dan would have been on that list too.

“Jimmie!” I shouted, running toward him. He hugged me warmly, but then he pulled back. I could tell he was upset, actually on the verge of tears. “Jimmie, what’s wrong?”

“Tal,” he said, his faltering voice sounding almost like Khalid’s. “I need to ask you to do something for me.”

“Anything, Jimmie, just name it.” Aside from Jimmie’s morphing physical appearance, this could have been a real conversation from when he was alive. I really would have done anything for him in those days or for Stan…or for Dan. Even in the dream, the thought of Dan cut through my heart like a chain saw.

“Tal, you have to forgive Dan.”

I took a step back from him, just as shocked as if he had slapped me across the face. “Jimmie, if you are asking me to forgive him, you know what he did.”

Jimmie nodded.

“How can I forgive that?”

“It was bad,” Jimmie agreed, “very bad. I know it was. But Tal, I need you to be there for him. I need it…because I can’t be.” His flesh suddenly lost all color, and in the dream, I remembered that he was dead. For a split second I actually wanted to be whatever kind of weird Celtic messiah Vanora thought I was so that I could sing life back into Jimmie, perhaps even erase the years since he had died, make everything different, everything better. Then I sat up in bed, the dream shattered by the alarm ringing in my ears, my whole body shaking.

Yeah, no doubt about it—today was going to be wonderful!

CHAPTER 14: YOU CAN’T TELL THE PLAYERS WITHOUT A SCORECARD

As had happened so many other times recently, I showered and got dressed mechanically, not really caring much what I put on, just wanting to get through the daily ritual without falling apart. I did glance in the mirror and made some effort to comb my hair, but I couldn’t do much about my red eyes and weary-looking face. Well, actually I suppose I could have done something, but who the hell cared what I looked like at this point?