Legacy (40 page)

She looked hurt. “But the words don’t matter,” she said sullenly.

“What? What do you mean,
the words don’t matter
? It’s a
spell.
The words are everything!”

She shook her head. “No, child,” she said. “Magic has nothing to do with words. Haven’t you figured that out? It is like love, or faith, or anything that matters—saying it does not make it so. The magic lies within. Always.”

“So how does it work? The ‘Song of Unmaking’?”

She seemed to be practicing spirit tricks, vanishing to a golden point of light and then reappearing. “The Darkness feeds on fear,” she explained. “And the living are very fearful—of pain, loss, death—any change at all, really. Unfortunately, all of life is change, nothing
but
change, if you think about it. So they live in constant fear.”

That sounded right, as far as it went. “So?”

“So if you can set your fear aside and hear the music of the
earth, feel the magic within it . . . If you can become a part of All That Is . . . then anything is possible.”

She dimmed until she looked like a real person again, a girl about my age who had hitched a ride on a sailing ship and journeyed, despite being scared to death, to a distant land. “I could not teach the ‘Song of Unmaking’ because it is true magic. It is not a spell. It is about being a part of the perfection of the universe. The words in the
Great Book of Secrets
are what I spoke as the spell unfolded. It is how I explained to the others what happened.”

I turned away.

“What is it?” she asked.

“If that’s the only way it works, then it can’t be duplicated,” I said, crestfallen. “It only worked one time, for Henry Shaw, and that’s because you were there to hear the music. Everyone who was infected with the Darkness before and after him ended up being burned to death.”

Ola’ea made a little miserable movement. “All they had to do was listen,” she said in a small voice. “The music was all around them.”

“They couldn’t hear it,” I said. “They can’t hear it now. They won’t hear it when Peter walks into the fire. They don’t know how.”

Ola’ea looked away. We stood in silence for a long time.

“So my friends will die for nothing,” I said. “Like I did.”

Her eyes grew gentle. “No one dies for nothing,” she said softly. “We all sing our little song for just a moment, and then fall silent. But that music echoes. Long after we are gone, the song of our soul moves on to the farthest stars of the Milky Way. That is true for each of us, even if we live only one hour.”

I looked down at the people in the Meadow. My family. My friends. I understood now how precious they all were, how valuable. Even people like Becca and her mother, troublesome as they had been, were necessary strands in the fabric of our world. We all learned from one another. We all helped each other to understand ourselves. We all mattered.

Ola’ea and I passed the vigil and moved deeper into the Meadow, toward a cluster of fairy-tale cottages. People dressed like Pilgrims emerged from their squat little doorways.

“Is this the land of the dead?” I asked.

“A morbid appellation,” Ola’ea said. “We call it the Summerland.” Oddly, these spirits were more solid than the living people carrying candles. Already the Whitfield residents seemed like specters, or dreams, visions that were a little bit less than real.

We stopped, and an old woman made her way through the growing crowd toward us. She looked a little like my great-grandmother. “Ola’ea!” she called, perfectly executing the African stop in the name.

“Dear Serenity, my sister!”

My head snapped in a double take. “Serenity Ainsworth?”

“Look who I have brought you!” Ola’ea shouted.

“Good gracious, it’s my namesake,” the old woman gushed, hobbling over to me.

“She calls herself Katy,” Ola’ea said.

“Nonsense. We heard her speak her name.”

“You did?” I asked.

“The truth is all we hear,” another woman said.

I knew her, too. “Zenobia,” I whispered. “Henry Shaw’s wife. You walked through the fire.”

She nodded. “I did.”

“Was it worth it?” I blurted out before I could stop myself. “I mean . . . was that a mistake?”

Zenobia smiled. “There are no mistakes,” she said. “Regret is only for the living.”

“But why are you here, child?” Serenity asked. She really was a lot like Gram, down to the doily on her head.

“I failed. I couldn’t help Peter. I couldn’t help Eric.”

There was a lot of whispering among them.

“Oh, stop, all of you,” Ola’ea scolded. “The girl was suffering.”

I blinked as I began to understand. “Are you saying—can it be—that I’m not really dead?” I asked.

“You shouldn’t be,” Serenity said, looking sternly toward Ola’ea, who swallowed.

“I took you before your time,” Ola’ea explained. “I thought I would be sparing you.”

I blinked. “Then you have to send me back,” I demanded. “I need to save Eric.”

“By doing what?”

“By singing the ‘Song of Unmaking’.”

“They will kill you first,” Ola’ea said.

“Maybe not.”

“Of course they will!” she countered. “It would not matter what you did. You were right: Ordinary witches cannot hear the song.”

“
I
heard it. I just didn’t recognize what it was.”

“Well, you would not recognize it if you went back, either. You would not remember this conversation, or the key to the spell, or anything about your time with me here.”

“Then you have to help me.” I looked around. It was my only chance. “All of you.”

“What is it you need, child?” Serenity asked.

I took a deep breath. “The witches in Whitfield are waiting to burn a little boy to death,” I said. “Because no one can hear the ‘Song of Unmaking’.”

“Fools,” Ola’ea said. “It is everywhere, all around them! All they ever had to do was listen!”

“Nevertheless, I doubt if we would have heard it ourselves if you hadn’t been there to point it out,” Serenity observed.

“That’s what I’m asking,” I said. “Will you come to the ritual? Teach them the song?”

“I have told you, it cannot be taught!”

“It can be
heard
,” I said. “Let them hear it. That’s all I ask.”

“But . . . They can hear it from you.”

“They could if they would listen.” I looked at my feet. “But they won’t. I mean, who am I? Why should they think I know something they don’t?”

Serenity looked nonplussed. “Why, because you’d be telling the truth,” she said.

Ola’ea shook her head. “You forget, my sister. These people cannot tell truth from lies. They think that because they are witches, they are enlightened beings. But in the end they are all just human.”

“In that case, they wouldn’t listen to us, either,” Serenity said.

“Would you try, though?” I begged. “Please, to save Eric?”

“To save you from your madness,” Ola’ea said.

There was a long silence. Then Serenity took my hand. “We will try,” she said. “That is all we can do.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling the most tremendous relief of my life. “I can go now,” I said.

Ola’ea took my elbow. “All right, then, come,” she said. “Quickly, before you rot.” We took off, moving too fast to see anything. “You realize, of course, you won’t remember any of this.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Not to mention that you may die a horrible death at the hands of those idiots before anyone ever hears the song,” she muttered. “And for what? For nothing.”

“No one dies for nothing,” I reminded her.

She looked into my eyes then, and my heart filled with her sadness and compassion. “We are almost there,” she said.

“Good.”

“By the way, what was said in the Meadow was true. None of this has been a mistake.”

“I know.” I held out my hand in farewell.

“Try to listen,” she said as she fell away like a veil into the wind.

I felt something brush against my lips. A kiss. From Ola’ea? I wondered. No, of course not. What had given me that idea? It was Peter. Who else would kiss me with such tenderness, such perfect, healing love?

I opened my eyes. Eric’s face—Eric’s, not Peter’s—was poised above mine.

I shivered involuntarily when I thought that I might be looking straight at the Darkness. Then I saw that the eyes were really Eric’s, happy, open, guileless. It was Eric who had kissed me, I realized. That was a first. I tried to smile at him, but I don’t know if I succeeded or not.

The second thing I saw was Peter’s arm wrapped around me. Overhead, the moon shone full. The rain had stopped. In the distance, the horseshoe cliffs of Whitfield Bay stood out in silhouette against the white moon, and beyond them, the dark shape of Shaw Island.

“We made it,” I said. At least that had been my intention. My throat was so parched and dry that my words just sounded like mush.

As soon as I spoke, though, I felt Peter’s knees jerk upward beneath me. “Did she . . . you . . .” he stammered.

“Kaaay,” Eric crooned sweetly. He kissed me again. I smiled.

Peter’s face, tearstained and filthy, came into view as he craned his head over his arm. He stared at me, blinking incredulously, for a long time. Finally I reached up to touch his mouth.

“Sometimes you don’t need magic,” I said. I’d literally come back from the dead to tell him that, even though all that came out was “Some.” I tried again. “Love,” I managed. He could figure out the rest.

Peter’s eyes flooded. He held me against him so closely that I felt as if we were melting together into one person. For as long as I could, I let myself be where I was, next to him in that moment and nowhere else, with nothing else in my mind, feeling his strong body beneath his clothes, taking in his heat, his scent, his aliveness.

I was happy. For the first time in my life, I wanted nothing more than I already had.

Then he pulled away from me, holding me at arm’s length, his expression a mask of amazement. “Your face,” he whispered.

Oh. That. But then, did I expect that he wouldn’t notice that I’d been torn to pieces? “That bad, huh?” I raised my hand to my face.

Then I saw it: my
hands.
The thumb had nearly been cut off one of them. But it wasn’t cut anymore. It looked as if it had never been injured. I held up the other hand then, the one that had been flayed to bare flesh. It was clean. Unmarked. I moved my fingers. The moon gave me a good light. The wound was gone, healed without a trace. “Just like your wrists, Peter,” I said, astonished. But Peter was still staring at my face. I reached up to touch it. The skin was smooth and warm, as if it had never been marred.

How could that be? I wondered. My face had been scraped against rocks, kicked, slashed open, packed with mud and pebbles, and smashed by falling debris.

“My eye?”

“It looks fine. Can you see?”

I nodded.

Then we both looked at Eric. He patted my cheek.

“Mrs. Ainsworth didn’t heal my wrists,” Peter said, dazed. “It was my brother.”

“And the eagle on the island. That was Eric, too.”

Peter bit his lip. “Katy, when we got to shore, you had no heartbeat.”

“I know.” I was going to try to explain.
No, it wasn’t a miracle, it was Ola’ea’s ghost who took me to the Land of the Dead by mistake, and then . . .

But of course that wasn’t possible, I realized. I must have been in some sort of demented dream that, even now, was falling away.

“We have to get to the Meadow,” I said.

Eric touched my face, and I felt the peace of eternity wash over me. Everything about this moment was right. Right, and inevitable, and perfect. This was how real magic worked, I now knew, when all the parts of the universe worked together perfectly, at the perfect time.

“You’re a healer, Eric,” I said. I turned toward Peter. “More than a healer. He’s stronger than death. Stronger than the Darkness.”

We looked at one another, we three who we knew now stood at the center of the magic.

Let us see the truth
Of our sublime divinity

All of it was perfect. No matter what happened to any of us from now on, we would always know who we were.

“Let’s go,” Peter said.

They were waiting, their candles making dots of light, hanging in the night like accusations.

We walked in silence. Finally, as I began to make out the first faces in the moonlight, I asked in a small voice, “Are you scared?”

He squeezed my hand. “Yes,” he said.

“Do you think maybe they’ll spare . . .” I was going to say
us
, but I didn’t want an argument now. “. . . you?”

“No,” he said. “How could they? But they’ll spare Eric. They’ll have to.”

If the Lady of Mercy really can save us from our madness
, I thought.

As we approached, I got a look at the faces of our friends. None of these people wanted to see Eric killed. I’d even have bet that every one of them, except maybe for the Fowlers, would have traded places with Eric if they could have.

At least we had that alternative, I told myself. Someone
would be able to take Eric’s place. Peter thought he would be the one, but I would make sure it was me.

It was Eric himself who told us when to begin. I hadn’t even known where we were going, and I doubted if Peter knew, either. But Eric started fidgeting and kicking his legs just about where Mr. Haversall was standing.

The old man took an uncertain step backward. I didn’t blame him. The last time anyone had seen Eric, he was sending knives flying through the air.

Well, the ones who wanted retribution for that were going to get it. But Mr. Haversall wasn’t one of those. He was a little disconcerted at the attention Eric was giving him, but he didn’t walk away from us.

Trying to be unobtrusive about it, I checked out Eric’s face. I thought I was sufficiently acquainted with the Darkness to be able to recognize it in Eric’s eyes. It hadn’t appeared since the three of us had made it back to Whitfield, but you never knew. Just because the real Eric had come through didn’t mean the Darkness was gone. Not by any means. Until his talent as a healer emerged, the Darkness had been growing steadily stronger in him.