Legacy (41 page)

I wondered if his gift had actually been helped in some way by the Darkness itself—strengthened, somehow, by having to push through that cloud of evil inside him. It made sense, in a way. Steel that’s been welded is stronger than newly forged metal. It was just a thought. I would never know for sure, unless Eric learned to talk.

But I’d be gone by then. Everything seemed to come around to that: Life was short. It would be shorter for Peter and me than most, but it was never long enough for any of us. Perhaps
one day, in the Summerland, where only the truth is heard, I would learn the secret of Eric’s great gift.

Which, incidentally, Mr. Haversall knew nothing about as Eric waved his arms at him frantically.

“I think he wants to touch you,” Peter said. “To find out what’s wrong.”

“With me?”

“With your body,” Peter said.

“Shoot, practically everything,” Mr. Haversall said. He looked inquiringly at his dog. “What do you say, Dingo? Should I let the doctor here have a look at me?”

Dingo sat down with a dignified nod of his head.

“Well, all right,” he said with a sigh. “I’m an old man. I’ve lived my life.” He swallowed, then stepped forward bravely into Eric’s embrace.

“Oo,” Eric cooed, slapping Mr. Haversall in the center of his chest.

The old man winced, but stuck out his chin, prepared for another onslaught.

There was none. Dingo barked once.

“Is that it?”

“I guess so,” Peter said.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” Mr. Haversall admitted. “To tell the truth, my chest feels like a hundred-pound weight’s been lifted off it.” He bent down and patted Dingo on the head. “But you knew that would happen all along, didn’t you, fella?”

“Woof,” Dingo said.

Eric’s next stop was in front of Gram. “Mmm,” Eric said, taking her gnarled hands in his.

“Land sakes!” she exclaimed as her swollen knuckles shrank before her eyes. “Look at this!” She opened and closed her fists. She swiveled her neck, swung her hips from side to side, and hitched up her dress to show her shapely knees.

“Grandmother!” Agnes whispered.

“My arthritis! It’s gone!”

Then an odd thing happened. People began to emerge from behind the trees and rocks, looking curiously at Eric. Some of them looked astonished, hopeful. Others had closed, careful faces, their bodies hidden behind crossed arms and tightly held children. Around Livia Fowler was a group of young men. I recognized some of them from school. They must have been the ones I’d heard about, the ones Gram said were just some sports team. From the arrogant looks on their faces, though, I kind of doubted that.

Boldly, a young man wearing a cast on his leg—I think he was Gram’s mailman—limped up to Eric with a what-have-I-got-to-lose attitude. He left with his crutches under his arm.

After that, a crowd began to form around Eric.

“Get away!” a woman called, her voice shrill and cutting. “Get away from him. Now!” Livia Fowler pushed her way to the front of the assembly. Defiantly, she took a gaudy brooch from the front of her gown and raked the pin across her hand. Her face never registered the slightest discomfort as the blood welled and spilled across her fingers.

“Heal that,” she demanded, thrusting her hand at Eric.

He touched her with infinite gentleness. The wound healed perfectly.

“It’s the Devil,” she hissed.

“It’s Eric, Mrs. Fowler,” Peter corrected.

“A trick to win us over to the Darkness. We know how you work.”

“Hey, he
helped
you!” I put in. “Which is more than I would have done, considering you scratched yourself just to see what would happen.”

“Katy, please,” Peter said.

There appeared at his side a small boy with dirty hands and matted hair. His lips were blue. Aside from that, everything about him was gray, from his gray face to his gray ragged clothes. Eric reached out for him.

“No!” a woman screamed, rushing through the crowd. “Don’t you touch him!”

Eric’s hand remained poised in the air as the woman grabbed the child by the collar of his shirt and dragged him back among the onlookers, who slowly slid back to widen the circle around the three of us. There was an odd silence as people decided whether or not to allow Eric to help them.

Then the boy with the blue lips broke free and ran back into the circle, wheezing and panting, his arms outstretched. He touched Eric as if he were playing a desperate game of tag.

Instantly his face transformed. The gray cheeks grew pink, the blue lips reddened. The line of his mouth softened, and the pinched look of his eyes vanished, replaced by a clear green-blue gaze.

He smiled once, briefly, then ran back. On the way he tripped on a stone and lay sprawled and surprised on the ground, his scraped knee reddening before him.

His mother let out a blood-curdling cry that caused the little boy to look up in alarm. “See what they’ve done!” she shrieked. “My boy! They’ve killed my boy!”

The boy tried to scramble to his feet, but the crowd—led, not surprisingly, by Mrs. Fowler’s cadre of young thugs—closed around him.

“Nothing’s wrong with the boy,” I heard Gram shout as loud as she could, but I doubt if anyone heard her.

Suddenly the air seemed charged with danger and terror as the little boy cried out in panic. The crowd murmured, its collective voice rising and falling, occasionally bursting with hysteria, but always with an undertone of suspicion and fear. Once merely curious, they had turned into a swarm.

“Now!” Livia Fowler screamed. “Now!”

And the swarm came for us.

Livia’s vanguard appeared at the front of the crowd, moving purposefully. Three of them grabbed Peter and Eric and me, while others acted immediately to subdue anyone who might have objected, strong-arming Hattie and Agnes and Jonathan, and taking wands from the others.

This was all planned, I realized. Orchestrated down to the last detail.

Mrs. Ainsworth screamed as two burly boys threw a cloth over Miss P’s head and carried her out of the Meadow.

“Djinn!” I shouted. “You can make them stop! You can—”

“She can’t work unless her mind is clear,” Peter said. “They’re going to make sure she can’t think straight.”

In response, the men holding us yanked our arms behind our backs. Eric whimpered in terror as they wrenched him from Peter’s arms.

“She trained them,” I said quietly, wishing it weren’t true. Wishing that everything that was happening wasn’t real.

A separate group of Livia’s boys scurried behind the trees, emerging with armloads of wood. It was dry, despite hours of torrential rain. The wood had been kept dry. And I knew why.

Three tall stakes were placed into the ground. The holes for them had already been dug. The three of us were dragged over to them.

“Kaaay!” Eric sobbed. “Kaaay!”

“It’s okay, Eric,” I said, although I could feel my heart breaking. This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen.

And yet it was the way it
had
happened, again and again. Through the centuries, people as innocent as we were, as young as Eric, had been put to death with the explicit consent of righteous people who thought they were acting for the good of humanity. Those smirking thugs who were tossing the firewood at our feet were all calling themselves agents of God, or warriors in a good cause, or the swords of justice. Every one of them.

“No!” Peter shouted. “Not them! Katy doesn’t have anything to do with this!”

The saddest thing about human beings, I realized, was that no matter what terrible things we did, what horrors we committed, none of us ever thought of ourselves as evil.

“Please!” Peter begged, even though I think from the way he was standing that one of his legs might have been broken. “I can take Eric’s place! Just me, not them! Listen to me!”

Listen.
That was a joke. These people weren’t going to listen to anything. They’d already made up their minds about what they wanted to hear. I should have known better than to think the truth would matter to them.

“Through love’s unbreaking tie,”
Mrs. Fowler warbled.
“Unmake the Darkness, do not die . . .”

The wrong song. Again. Dingo started barking, evading kicks from all directions. As Livia sang, if you could call it that, her boys stacked firewood hip deep all around us.

For the first time ever, I hoped that the Darkness would make an appearance. It would at least give us a chance to get out of there.

But Eric only looked up at me with his trusting eyes and smiled as he sank into the ropes that bound him, blinking away his tears.

Livia sang louder and more horribly as she drew a binding circle around us with her wand. A magic circle that no one could enter or leave. The three of us were truly alone now.

“No death shall come, good soul, to thee . . .”

Who was she kidding, I thought. Plenty of death was going to come. Just like it always did.

Tears filled my eyes. Nobody ever learned anything.

“Bring the torches!” Livia commanded. She hadn’t even finished the song.

It was crazy. If this were anywhere else, the police would have been all over the place. You didn’t burn people at the stake anymore. But this wasn’t anywhere in the world. This was the Meadow. To anyone passing on the street, this would look like nothing more than an empty construction site.

Mrs. Fowler’s boys rushed up with torches and stood around us in formation. Also part of the plan, I guessed, to make the spectacle as entertaining as possible for her audience.

Tomorrow they would all shake their heads and say how sorry they were that those three young people had to die, as if
they had played no part in it. As if by doing nothing, they had not given permission.

I knew why Eric was not manifesting the Darkness. He didn’t have to. It was all around us.

Black smoke curled up from the torches slowly, like fog. Like evil.

“Katy.” It was Peter. He was straining to hold his hand out from beneath the ropes that bound his wrists. Quietly he asked, “Will you be handfasted to me?”

I wasn’t expecting that. Being burned at the stake can wreak havoc on your love life. But that was Peter. He always knew what was really important.

I smiled. “Okay,” I said.

He spoke first, words of sanity in a world gone mad long ago. “I, Peter Prescott Shaw, declare my love for thee, and offer thee my heart for a year and a day, that thou may love me as well.”

It was my turn. It was so hard to breathe. The wood at our feet hadn’t yet been lit, but the heat from the torches was warm enough to make me sweat, a hint of the agony to come. But that was later, I told myself. Another time, a universe away. For now, there was only Peter and Eric and me, and what we had together.

“I, Serenity Katherine Ainsworth, declare my love for thee, and offer thee my heart for a . . .” I pressed my lips together. “Forever,” I said. “I love you, Peter.”

“I love you, Katy.”

Forever.

“Light the fire,” Livia ordered.

I wished I could have held him then, held both of them, through the coming ordeal.

Eric started to cry. There was nothing I could do to comfort him, nothing at all. Against my will, a lightning bolt of fear shot through me. I swallowed and stood up as straight as I could, but my body was trembling like a leaf in the wind as the first tendrils of hot smoke snaked into my lungs.

“Sing, Katy,” Peter said.

“What?” I looked around wildly. “Now?” Who would hear me now? The trees weren’t singing. The wind wasn’t blowing. There was no music. Not anywhere. “I can’t even hear the song,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not there,” Peter said.

I was shaking like crazy. “It doesn’t?”

“Just listen,” he said.

“Do you hear it?”

He smiled. “No, but you will.”

Listen.

All right. Maybe it was somewhere beyond my hearing.

Somewhere.

I began to sing.

“Lady of Mercy . . .”

My voice quavered pitifully, and was all but lost in the cacophony that filled the meadow.

“Save us from our madness . . .”

Only Dingo heard me. Softly, sitting respectfully in front of us, he began to howl. One of Mrs. Fowler’s boys kicked him. Dingo yelped and scurried away, limping.

I coughed, choking.
“Let us see the truth . . .”

I sobbed. I couldn’t. Just couldn’t.

Then, from far away, I heard Dingo singing again, giving me the melody.

“Of our sublime divinity,”
I croaked.
“Lady of Mercy, save us
—
”

It came like cannon fire from everywhere at once: the music, sudden, unexpected, magnificent. And at that moment, I remembered.

“They’ve come,” I whispered as the spirits from the Summerland rushed around us. The trees bent double and the wind began to sing along with the ghosts who had come to keep their promise. Together, their music was as loud as the
birth of a planet, and as perfect as the formation of a flower. It was a force of nature, stronger than a hurricane or a tsunami.

Livia Fowler was blithering around trying to control things, issuing commands that no one heeded, chattering like a magpie while her followers stood dumbstruck, blinking at the awesome power that had been unleashed around them. Her army—a puny bunch of adolescent boys, I saw now, willing to sell their souls for a few moments of false authority—were quaking and looking for places to hide, behaving like the cowards they really were.

Hattie pushed past them and stood before the fire that contained Peter and Eric and me, raised her arms in the manner of the high priestess, and spoke the words of Ola’ea’s spell:

Love’s unbreaking tie
Unmake the Darkness, do not die
No death shall come, good souls, to thee
For by the sacred fire set thou free.

A brilliant blue light suddenly surrounded us. The fire around us leaped up, twenty feet tall. I screamed reflexively before I realized that the fire was no longer hot. The ropes binding us fell away. I reached out my hand to touch the flames, blue and cool and comforting as a mother’s arms.