Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (21 page)

“So?”

“You don’t nurse grudges, do you?”

“Mamie, I’m not going to let my feelings about Ru contaminate our friendship. I’d like you to come to Sisters Beach
in the new year. We can visit a dressmaker together. We can pick patterns for our Presentation Ball gowns.”

“Oh, I can see that happening—after your father has chastised my brother.”

“My father doesn’t need to know a thing—if
your
father knows his business.” With that Rose strode off toward the house holding her head high.

Mrs. Doran came into the library. “I have Rose Tiebold,” she said.

“I asked Mamie to fetch her,” said Doran.

“And Mamie did so. Then she went back to her room. I can’t have her creating scenes at the breakfast table, even in defense of her friend’s honor.”

“Very well,” said Doran. “Mamie can remain in her room. But only until this evening.”

“That Tiebold girl likes attention,” Mrs. Doran said, in a warning tone. She opened the door, ushered Rose into the library, and left, closing the door after her.

Doran got up and gestured the girl to a seat near the window. She sat, and he remained standing, his back to the bright sunlight. “Well, Rose,” he began, “you want to leave us early?”

“I think I must,” she said.

“Mamie tells me that you’re upset.”

Rose began to fiddle with her hair—picking up the ends and inspecting them. “Um. Not so much now,” she said. “Now I’m feeling fairly resolute.”

“May I ask what you mean by ‘fairly resolute’? Do you mean that you’re approximating resolution? Or that you’re being fair?”

“Mamie gets it from you,” Rose said.

“Gets what?”

“Hairsplitting.” Rose was frowning at the ends of her hair. She dropped the crackling golden mass and looked up at him. She began to tell the story—her side of it. “I went for a walk last night and saw some rangers shifting the surplus rails and ties. I wondered what was In from the Awa Inlet and why you were building a railroad there.”

“I see.” Doran blinked and rubbed his jaw. He felt his scalp prickle as blood pumped up into his head. He said, “To put you right on that score—directly In from here are The Pinnacles, a range of steep, crumbling hills. They are by far the most extensive known barrier in the Place. Last year a group of rangers built a gate to block the entrance of the only pass through The Pinnacles. They did all the welding here, on the shore; then they carried the gate In and set it up. The gate is often locked because the pass through The Pinnacles is unstable and unsafe. Rangers struggle to keep it in reasonable repair. Lately the Body has had rangers building retaining walls on the worst cliff faces in the pass. As it happened, I had surplus rails and timber, and thought they might like to make use of them.” Doran spread his hands. “So there you go,” he said.

Rose had listened, but toward the end of his speech her face had gone taut with watchfulness. She looked ten years older and superbly intelligent. Cas Doran regarded her with wonder. He thought, “What on earth is she thinking?” He began to check his story for faults. In a moment he had it. Of course, there were new rails all the time, the pile almost always refreshed the moment a load was removed. The rails never sat there long—so they didn’t rust. Rose Tiebold could guess he was lying—but Doran didn’t feel in the least uncomfortable. He only felt very alert. He had a strange urge to ask her what she thought of his explanation, and an even stranger
desire to know what she’d think of his whole plan. He put these odd ideas aside and prompted her. “You were watching the rangers and …”

“And when I came back to the house, I met Ru, and he said I shouldn’t be wandering around at night.”

“And you shouldn’t.”

Rose frowned at this interruption and went on in a rush. “And then he said I was different from other girls, and that it was because my mother was a dreamhunter and I’d been exposed. That was his word—‘exposed.’ Then he squashed me into the wall and grabbed my wrist. I told him to let go. He was laughing. Then I told him that Da would take care of him, and then that
you
would. He got a mean look—so I stomped on his foot and got away.”

Doran was as intrigued by the similarities in Rose’s and Ru’s stories as by the differences.

The sun had moved, and Rose’s eyes were now no longer in a strip of shade formed by the window frame. They were watering. She got up and stepped out of the patch of sunlight. She remained standing. “I hope you believe me,” she said, dignified.

“Ru has a very different story.”

“I’m amazed he feels he needs a story.”

“Do you think it’s at all possible that you’re taking this too seriously?” Doran asked.

“I’ve been thinking about that. When I talked to Mamie this morning, I was very angry. Then I took a step back. Now my head tells me it wasn’t really serious, I wasn’t in any danger, I was just being nervous. He did keep laughing as if he hoped I’d get the joke.”

“Well, I’m relieved to hear you say that.”

“Wait,” Rose said. She held up her hand. “Ru made me feel bad. My head may say that I’m being oversensitive. But my
head is timid. It wants to hide itself in the sand. My gut tells me that Ru might have taken his teasing as far as he wanted, even if he thought of it as only teasing.”

Doran listened, nodding.

“I hope you believe me,” Rose said again.

Doran turned away from her and thought—disconnected thoughts. He thought that his son must learn how to behave. Ru must not break the law. No child of his could be a criminal. Then he thought that he’d send Rose back to her home. His wife had said the girl was a troublemaker. It was better simply to remove her. “I’ll have Ru apologize to you,” he said, after a silence.

“Must I be embarrassed further?”

Doran looked at Rose sharply. “You haven’t mentioned embarrassment before. And—Rose—when you told Mamie your story, she caused a scene. You must have known she’d do something. You say, ‘I hope you believe me,’ but really you’re asking me to
do
something. You want to exercise your power, but only up to a point, apparently. You don’t want to be embarrassed. But I think that you are obliged to hear my son’s apology.”

He watched her grow pale.

“Rose, I think I can rely on you to be reasonable.”

Rose burst into tears and sank to her knees. She pressed her face into the seat of the chair she had been sitting in. She wept, totally abandoned—as if in an ecstasy of misery.

Doran was startled. “Come now,” he said, hovering ineffectually over her. Then, “Do you want me to fetch my wife?”

“No!” Rose howled. Then, “Why do
I
always have to be reasonable?”

“Well, think how you’d feel if I’d said I depended on you to be unreasonable,” said Doran. He was gratified by the result of this remark. Rose stopped crying to think, as tantrum-throwing
tots will if some imaginative effort has been made to distract them. He added, “It’s a compliment, you know.”

Rose wiped her eyes and hiccuped. “People are always trying to control me with compliments.”

“I’m not trying to control you. I’m trying to do right by you. I’ll have Ru apologize, and you’ll hear his apology. It might do him some good to see how upset you are. You will listen to what he has to say, then I’ll arrange for you to get home.”

“Can Mamie come and stay with me after Christmas? Even if her mother is angry at me?”

“I’m sure that can be arranged.”

“Thank you.”

“And I’ll deal with Ru. I’m sure you’re right that he doesn’t really see how he troubled you. But I’ll make him see.”

Rose muttered something that Doran didn’t catch. He told her to dry her eyes and compose herself. “I won’t be too long,” he said, and left her.

Alone in the library, Rose considered blowing her nose on the curtain—its nice brocade. It was a spiteful thought. As she considered it, Rose thought of Mamie’s mother’s rich skirts and imagined the curtain was the hem of Mrs. Doran’s skirt. She seethed with fury till she felt she was breathing smoke. Her nostrils were pricking and stinging.

Rose got up and paced. She laughed at herself, at what she’d nearly said said aloud when Cas Doran had said of Ru “I’ll make him see.” “Yes—I bet there’s a nightmare for that,” she’d muttered. Thank God Doran hadn’t heard her.

Rose was annoyed with herself for crying. But she’d wanted to go home without having to see Ru Doran again. She longed
to be with her family at Summerfort. They would all be there for Christmas. Uncle Tziga too. Rose wanted so much to put her arms around them all—Uncle Tziga, Laura, her ma and da—that she could almost smell them, the different smells of their clothes and hair. She felt like an animal—simple, and crazy with homesickness.

In her agitated pacing, Rose had stopped before the desk. She stood awhile in a trance, then happened to notice what she was staring at. In the angling sunlight, she could see that the leather inset surface of the desk was printed with different-sized circles. Many circles, like raindrops in a puddle, except only some of them were overlapping. And, as she had only a short while earlier, listening to Doran’s story about the use of steel rails for retaining walls, listening and thinking “That’s plausible” and also “But why is there no
rust
on the rails?” Rose found herself of two minds. One—the mind on top—was uncomfortable and unhappy and worried about having to face Ru Doran. The other mind, the one underneath, was shouting like a siren, “Look! Circles!”

There were other things on the desk: piles of papers, folders, an inkwell, and a jumble of pens, pencils, geometry instruments. There was also a large rolled canvas. Rose saw that the roll was embossed with curved lines, like scales, marks that showed clearly in the low sun.

She swooped on it, unfastened the string that kept it closed, and let it fall open.

It was a map of Founderston. A detailed map, with a scale of six inches to a mile. Rose saw that the central city was covered in circles, some drawn in pencil, some in ink. In the middle of each circle, in neat, particular handwriting, was a street address. Rose read, “121 Courtesy Street; 15 Fuller Grove …” Some of the circles with street names and numbers
also had surnames. Some of these names seemed vaguely familiar to Rose.

As her eyes roamed over the map, she heard footsteps in the hallway. She hurriedly rolled the map, twisted its string around it several times, and set it back at the side of the desk. Then the door opened and she spun around to put her back to the desktop and her face to the window.

The setting sun was hot on her cheeks. She heard Cas Doran say, “Rose?” and turned around, her face burning, to peer blindly through a fog of green, the afterimage of the bright window. In her head she was reciting the few facts she’d gathered. “121 Courtesy Street. 15 Fuller Grove.” And the names, “Langdon, Polish, Swindon, Pinkney.”

“Ru,” said Doran, cuing his son.

Rose saw a shadow step forward. She could scarcely see Ru through the haze of afterimage. He looked like a monster floating in a jar of brightly colored spirits—methanol stained by the monster color leached into it. Rose continued to recite silently, “121 Courtesy Street, 15 Fuller Grove …”

Ru said, “I’m very sorry I frightened you, Rose. It wasn’t my intention to cause you any distress by my clumsy teasing.”

“Rose?” Doran said, as if he wanted her to make an argument or ask something. He was prepared to let Ru make light of what had happened, but he was still offering her a chance to put up a fight.

Ru said, “It was only supposed to be a bit of fun. It was thoughtless of me.”

“All right,” Rose said. She wanted to get out of the room. Her sight was clearing. She’d felt concealed by her temporary blindness. Now she could see Ru’s smirking, false humility, and his father’s searching stare.

Rose realized that the names—Langdon, Polish, Swindon,
Pinkney—were those of dreamhunters; she was sure of it. Gavin Pinkney was Maze Plasir’s apprentice. And she was sure that the circles represented penumbras. Overlapping penumbras, covering much of central Founderston.

“May I go now?” she said.

“Yes, of course,” Doran said. But as she walked by him, he put out a hand and touched her arm. “Thank you for hearing him.”