Persuasion (34 page)

He watched her, but she didn’t move to stop him. Instead, she followed while he carried his burning sphere into the river and unspooled threads of fire onto the water like a ball of yarn unrolling across a floor. The flames spread upriver as far as Barrie could see, and downstream to the creek opposite the Colesworth dock, where the fire turned and raced toward the left branch of the Santisto River on the other side of Watson’s Landing. Rather than watching the ceremony, Barrie hid in the darkened woods and watched the occupants of the canopied speedboat. The men were drinking beer, their feet splayed, backs braced against each other as if they were too bored to even sit up straight. Once again, nothing changed when the flames sped past them. Despite the fear that leaped into Barrie’s throat and tied knots in her lungs, the boat didn’t burn.

She had known that. Boats had been here several times during the Fire Carrier’s ceremony without burning, and the dock and the marsh grass didn’t burn every night when the spirit spun his magic. Seeing it up close was different. Barrie
could no longer pretend that the Fire Carrier hadn’t changed his spell or changed his intent the night of the explosion, changed it because he’d tried to save her.

She was grateful. And her gratitude frightened her.

The fact of Wyatt’s death, and Ernesto’s death, two deaths on her conscience, frightened her. Yet looking back at the Fire Carrier, she felt no fear.

He finished his ceremony and recalled the flames to himself, spun them back into a ball of fire, and turned toward the Scalping Tree at the center of the Watson woods. Now Barrie did step out onto the path to stop him.

“Tell me what you need. What do you want from me?” she asked. “I know you want something. I feel it, but I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do, and I need to know about the bargain you made with Thomas. All the bargains.”

He watched her, and as real as he was, as clearly as she saw the definition of his muscles and the tracing of veins beneath his skin, he was also transparent. Through him, the Santisto rolled inevitably toward the ocean.

His eyes were as sad and solemn as the night that he had saved her, and he remained just as silent. But he raised his hands and blew on the sphere he carried. It split in two, and as he continued to blow, the fire in each hand took the shape of a small person, or a child—no, a
yunwi
. Even as Barrie made the connection, the shapes changed, melted together again, first
into a circle of flame and then into a bird. A raven?

“What does that mean?” The tug of frustration that knitted Barrie’s brows together was becoming all too familiar. “Are you trying to warn me about Obadiah?”

The Fire Carrier didn’t answer. He gathered the flames into a ball again and walked back toward the Scalping Tree.

She ran beside him, peppering him with questions. When he didn’t so much as look at her, she reached out to grasp his arm, needing to hold him back. Her hand passed through him, and she felt only a thickening of the air, a slight resistance and a cooling of temperature. She stopped walking, her mind clouding as if the cold had made her lethargic, and by the time she looked up again, the Fire Carrier had gone.

Eight took forever to come over the next morning, long past breakfast. Barrie picked up her phone eight or nine times with her finger poised to press his number. But she chickened out. Because as much as she wanted Seven to have gone with him, to have told him everything . . . What if Seven
had
told him, and Eight was furious that she had kept it secret?

The delivery trucks came with the sweet feed and hay and salt blocks for the horses, and another truck dumped a big pile of wood shavings behind the stables. Barrie waited until the driver packed up. Then she left the
yunwi
happily shoveling the shavings into the stalls.

Back in the kitchen, she concentrated ferociously on washing mesclun greens and prepping shrimp instead of checking her phone every couple of minutes. When she finally looked
up through the kitchen window and saw Eight walking down the shallow Beaufort hill toward the dock, she half-hated herself for the surge of relief that ran through her. He was carrying a cooler, and the yellow Labrador retriever bounded happily around him.

The knife slipped, slicing into Barrie’s finger. She ran her hand under the tap while Pru fussed at her.

“Hydrogen peroxide and a bandage,” Pru insisted. “I don’t want to hear any arguments about how it’s just a little cut. You don’t know where that shrimp has been.”

“I’d be more worried about the salad these days,” Barrie said, more to distract Pru than out of genuine concern.

“That’s true,” Pru called as she ducked into the butler’s pantry for the cardboard box of first aid supplies. “There’s probably a thousand and one different bacteria in organic fertilizer.” She bandaged Barrie’s finger and paused, looking out the window to where Eight was tying the
Away
to the Watson dock.

Barrie cringed inside, dreading another argument, but Pru only gathered up the Band-Aid wrappers to take to the trash and said, “If you’re going somewhere, be sure to be back by three—unless you want to miss the horses.”

“We won’t be long.” Barrie curled and uncurled her finger to take the stiffness out of the bandage. “I want to hear how Eight’s trip went, and we’re going to run over and see the archaeologists.”

Pru tightened her lips momentarily. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Barrie scraped the shrimp from the cutting board into a storage container with the edge of the knife before popping on the lid. “I promise to be careful, and I won’t trust Cassie.” She kissed Pru’s cheek. “Thank you for being a sweetie.”

Pru blushed a faint pink, then fluttered a hand at her. “Well, go on, then. No need to have Eight walk all the way up here only to turn around again.”

A few minutes later, Barrie met Eight below the fountain. Grabbing the crook of his elbow to spin him around, she dragged him with her.

“Keep walking,” she said. “I barely got out without a lecture on the evils of Cassandra Colesworth. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Yes, Highness.” Eight inclined his head. “As you wish.”

Barrie grinned up at him. “Never mind the
Princess Bride
jokes. What happened with your baseball thing last night? Did you get on the team? Did you take your dad with you?”

The tails of Eight’s yellow oxford billowed out behind him as he walked, and his boat shoes crunched in a steady rhythm, a rhythm that was almost in time with Barrie’s heartbeat. His smile fell away. “They’ll give me a spot on the team, but they’ve already given away the scholarship they had originally offered. There’s a small chance they’ll be able to put together
something, but I’m not holding out much hope. They’re going to try to let me know tomorrow.”

“And your dad? Did he change his mind about the money?”

“Dad? He doesn’t change his mind when I want something. Which is disturbingly ironic, isn’t it?” Eight’s sigh held more outrage than resignation. “And it’s not like parents don’t have enough tools in their arsenals already—guilt, love, and a lifetime of lectures—they get to hold the money card, too. So many different forms of blackmail and all perfectly legitimate just because they’re parents.”

Pulling him to a stop, Barrie wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her forehead in his shirt, offering silent comfort and at the same time, hiding her shame. She wished she could help him.

“You’re helping right now,” he said. His breath was warm against the top of her head, and when she tilted her face up, he kissed the corner of her mouth. Then he started walking again. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

“So what will you do if Seven doesn’t change his mind?” Barrie asked Eight quietly.

“I spent the whole morning arguing with him, and there’s nothing I can do except come up with the money myself. I’m supposed to meet with the coach from Charleston this morning to see what they can come up with for me, too, and I’ll
have to take what works out the best. Trust me, I know how lucky I am. Normally, I wouldn’t have a chance of even getting back on the team, much less having them give me any financial help. And I can get a job. If Daphne can do it, I sure as hell have no right to whine.”

They both fell silent, and it wasn’t until they were halfway back across the river that Barrie scraped up the courage to bring the subject up again. “Maybe you should think about going to California, after all. It’s not that I want you to go,” she added hastily. “I know you could get jobs, but with your dyslexia you’re already working harder than most people—”

“You think I want things easy?” Eight cut the motor to glide in beside the Colesworth dock. “Or are you assuming I can’t manage?”

Barrie hid her expression as she stood up to loop the mooring line around the pillar. “I know you can do whatever you set your mind to. All I’m trying to say is that I’m not going anywhere, so maybe it’s not worth killing yourself to be closer to me. Four years is a long time, but it’s not forever.”

Her stomach clenched as she said the words, and even the thought made her feel lost already.

“You should get a chance to be away from this place,” she continued. “I’ve had the chance to see what it’s like in other places. All right, I admit I haven’t experienced much, but it was enough to know that this, right here, is where I
want to be. I think you should have the same opportunity.”

“
You
think? Or my dad thinks?” Eight pulled himself up to the dock and held out his hand to steady her. “Because I thought we agreed last night that you weren’t going to make assumptions or decisions for me anymore.”

He walked up the path toward the top of the rise, his strides long and alive with anger. Not for the first time, Barrie wished a meteorite would fall on Seven’s head.

She owed Eight the truth. Telling him was never going to get easier. She hurried after him, but by the time he had stopped to let her catch up, they had reached the top of the path. And Obadiah was sitting cross-legged off to the side of the excavation area with his eyes locked on hers.

Hands on his knees, he looked perfectly relaxed. Even his suit and navy shirt, apparently the same ones that he had worn the day before, didn’t seem to have a speck of dirt or a wrinkle on them, and the archaeology crew, Andrew and Berg and all the other students, simply flowed around him like water around a boulder in a stream.

“They don’t even know they’re walking around him, do they?” she whispered to Eight. “Wait.
You
can see him, can’t you?”

“Yes, and he’s creepy as hell.” Eight shaded his eyes to look around.

As before, a dozen large black ravens were perched on top
of the broken columns of the ruined mansion with their feathers ruffled and their heads swiveling with interest to follow the movements of the dig crew.

The archaeologists had made good progress. They had cut the grass away from some of the squares around the collapsed tunnel and from most of the area above the hidden room, and dirt had been dug out and hauled away in different sections so that the area now looked like a three-dimensional patchwork quilt. Their movements slow and interspersed with yawns as if they hadn’t slept much, the students were scraping away the soil with trowels and dumping it into buckets. When those were full, they hauled them toward the side of the overseer’s hut, where they ran the dirt through giant sieves to separate out the artifacts. Berg and Cassie, who was still wearing long pants to hide her ankle monitor, were working in adjacent squares above the hidden room.

They were talking, Barrie realized. Or rather, Berg was talking and Cassie seemed to be genuinely listening. Surprisingly, Cassie was also doing as much manual labor as any of the others, despite her lack of experience.

None of the crew looked up as Eight and Barrie crossed the grass. Barrie said, “Hello.” But no one answered.

She stopped in front of Obadiah. “Why don’t they notice us?”

“The same reason they don’t see me,” he said. “People see what they expect, and that’s not a fraction of what their
eyes take in. Most of them are easy to fool, at least while I’m nearby.”

“Is that what we are to you?” Barrie flushed hotly and crossed her arms. “Fools to play with? Entertainment?”

“Don’t put words into my mouth,
petite
. Both you and the boy are surprisingly hard to fool.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” Eight asked, which he did quite frequently, now that Barrie thought about it, as if the world was blurred around him, and he needed his corner of it in clear focus. A realist trapped inside an impressionist painting.

Or maybe what Obadiah was saying was that the world was more cubist than impressionist. That the human mind couldn’t comprehend all the layers of time, space, and motion and place them into a harmonious image, so it shut its mental eyes to everything that didn’t match its preconceived ideas.

Maybe that was what she’d been doing too.

“Are you planning to stand there all day holding that food?” Obadiah rose to his feet in a single sinewy motion and held his hand out to take the cooler. After rummaging through it and the bag Eight had brought, he extracted a sandwich and both the loaves of bread and took them over to one of the slave cabins. The door creaked open, and he crossed the plank flooring of the narrow one-room building. Prying up a loose board beside the brick hearth, he revealed a makeshift cellar filled with clay bowls and various jars. There were stones also,
and piles of cracked, yellow bones and rusted straight pins tied together with what Barrie hoped was string.