Tapping the Dream Tree (11 page)

So all he said was, “Um-hmm,” then added, “Odd winter we've been having, isn't it? So close to Christmas and still no snow. I wonder whose fault
that
is.”

Lucius sighed. “You can be insufferable.”

This time Cerin didn't hide his smile. “As Jilly would say, it's just this gift I have.”

“But I appreciate your confidence.”

“Apology accepted,” Cerin told him, unable to resist.

“You wouldn't have any crow blood in you, would you?”

“Nary a drop.”

Lucius harrumphed and muttered, “I'd still like to see the results of a DNA test.”

“What was that?”

“I said, I wonder where they keep their nest.”

Stanton Street was lined with oaks, not so old as those that grew around the Kelledy house, but they were stately monarchs nonetheless. Having reached the Rookery where Lucius lived, the two men paused to look up where the bare branches of the trees laid their pattern against the sky above. Twilight had given way to night and they could see stars peeking down from among the boughs. Stars, but no black-haired, giggling crow girls. Lucius called, his voice ringing up into the trees like a raven's cry.

Kaark. Kaark. Tok.

There was no reply.

“They weren't so happy with this foundling of theirs,” Lucius said, turning to his companion. “At first I thought it was because their healing didn't take, but when I carried him to your house, I began to understand their uneasiness.”

He called again, but there was still no response.

“What do you find so troubling about him?” Cerin asked.

Though he had an idea. There were people and places that were like doors to other realms, to the spiritworld and to worlds deeper and older than that. In their presence, you could feel the world shift uneasily underfoot, the ties binding you to it loosening their grip— an unsettling sensation for anyone, but more so for those who could normally control where they walked.

The still, pale man with his white braids had been like that.

Lucius said as much, then added, “The trouble with such doors isn't so much what they open into, as what they can close you from.”

Cerin nodded. To be denied access to the spiritworld would be like losing a sense. One's hearing, one's taste.

“So you don't think they'll come,” he said.

Lucius shrugged. “They can be willful … not so responsible as some.”

“Let me try.”

“Never let it be said I turned down someone's help.”

Cerin smiled. He closed his eyes and reached back to his home, back to a room on the second floor. A harp stood there with a rose carved into the wood where curving neck met forepillar. His fingers twitched at his sides and the sound of that roseharp was suddenly in the air all around them, a calling-on song that rose up as though from the ground and spun itself out against the branches above, then higher still, as though reaching for the stars.

“A good trick,” Lucius said. “Cousin Brandon does much the same with his instrument, though in his case, he's the only one to hear its tones.”

“Perhaps you're not listening hard enough,” Cerin said.

“Perhaps.”

He might have said more, but there came a rustling in the boughs above them and what appeared to be two small girls were suddenly there, hanging upside down from the lowest branch by their hooked knees, laughter crinkling in the corners of their eyes while they tried to look solemn.

“Oh, that was veryvery mean,” Maida said.

Zia gave an upside down nod. “Calling us with magic music.”

“We'd give you a good bang on the ear.”

“Reallyreally we would.”

“Except the music's so pretty.”

“Ever so truly pretty.”

“And magic, of course.”

Cerin let the harping fall silent.

“We need you to tell us more about the man you found,” he said.

The crow girls exchanged glances.

“Surely such wise and clever people as you don't need help from us,” Maida said.

“That would be all too very silly,” Zia agreed.

“And yet we do,” Cerin told them. “Will you help us?”

There was another exchange of glances between the pair, then they dropped lightly to the ground.

“Are there sweets in your house?” Zia asked.

“Mountains of them.”

“Oh, good,” Maida said. She gave Lucius a sad look. “Old Raven never has any sweets for us.”

Zia nodded. “It's veryvery sad. What kind do you have?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Well, come on,” Maida said, taking Cerin's hand. “We'd better hurry up and find out.”

Zia nodded, looking a little anxious. “Before someone else eats them all.”

In this mood, Cerin didn't know that they'd get anything useful out of the pair, but at least they'd agreed to come. He'd let Meran sort out how to handle them once he got them home.

Zia took his other hand and with the pair of them tugging on his hands, they started back up Stanton Street. Lucius taking the rear, a smile on his face as the crow girls chattered away to Cerin about exactly what their favorite sweets were.

Jilly was no stranger to the impossible, so she wasn't as surprised as some might have been to find herself transported from the Kelledys' living room, full of friendly shadows and known corners, to an alleyway that could have been anywhere. Still, she wasn't entirely immune to the surprise of it all and couldn't ignore the vague, unsettled feeling that was tiptoeing up and down the length of her spine.

Because that was the thing about the impossible, wasn't it? When you did experience it, well, first of all, hello, it proved to be all too possible, and secondly, it made you rethink all sorts of things that you'd blindly agreed to up to this point. Things like the world being round—was gravity really so clever that it kept people on the upside down part of the world from falling off into the sky? That Elvis was dead—if he was, then why did
so
many people still see him? That UFOs were actually weather balloons or swamp gas— never mind the improbability of so many balloons going AWOL, how did a swamp get indigestion in the first place?

So being somewhere she shouldn't be didn't render Jilly helpless, stunned, or much more than curiously surprised. By looking up at the skyline, she placed herself in an alleyway behind the Williamson Street Mall, right where the crow girls had found—

Her gaze dropped to the mound of litter beside the closest Dumpster, and there he was, Meran's comatose patient, except here, in this wherever she was, he was sitting on top of the garbage, knees drawn up to his chin, and regarding her with a gloomy gaze. She focused on the startling green of his eyes. Odd, she thought. Weren't albinos supposed to have red, or at least pink eyes?

She waited a moment to give him the opportunity to speak first. When he didn't, she cleared her throat.

“Hello,” she said. “Did you bring me here?”

He frowned at the question. “I don't know you … do I?”

“Well, we haven't been formally introduced or anything, and while you weren't exactly the life of the party when I first met you, right now we're sharing the same space somewhere else as well as here, which is sort of like us knowing each other, or at least me knowing you.”

He gave her a confused look,

“Oh, that's right. You wouldn't remember, being unconscious and all. I'm not sure of all the details myself, but you're supposed to have been, and I quote, ‘laid low by ill will,' and when I went to brush some hair out of your eyes, I found myself here. With you again, except you're awake this time. How were you laid low by this ill will? I'm assuming someone hit you, which would be ill-willish enough so far as I can see, but somehow I think it's more than that.”

She paused and gave him a rueful smile. “I guess I'm not doing a very good job with this explanation, am I?”

“How can you be so cheerful?” he asked her.

Jilly drew a battered wooden fruit crate over to where he was sitting and sat down herself.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The world is a terrible place,” he said. “Every day, every moment, its tragedies deepen, the mean-spiritedness of its inhabitants quickens and escalates until one can't imagine a kindness existing anywhere for more than an instant before being suffocated.”

“Well, it's not perfect,” Jilly agreed. “But that doesn't mean we have to—”

“I can see that you've been hurt and disappointed by it—cruelly so, when you were much younger. Yet here you sit before me, relatively trusting, certainly cheerful, optimism bubbling in you like a fountain. How can this be?”

Jilly was about to make some lighthearted response, speaking without thinking as she did too often, but then part of what he'd said really registered.

“How would you know what my life was like when I was a kid?”

He shrugged. “Our histories are written on our skin—how can you be surprised that I wouldn't know?”

“It's not something I've ever heard of before.”

“Perhaps you have to know how to look for the stories.”

Well, that made a certain kind of sense, Jilly thought. There were so many hidden things in the world that only came into focus when you learned how to pay attention to them, so why not stories on people's skin?

“So,” she said. “I guess nobody could lie to you, could they?”

“Why do you think the world depresses me the way it does?”

“Except it's not all bad. You can't tell me that the only stories people have are bad ones.”

“They certainly outweigh the good.”

“Maybe
you're
not looking in the right place.”

“I understand thinking the best of people,” he said. “Looking for the good in them, rather than the wrongs they've done. But ignoring the wrongs is almost like condoning them, don't you think?”

“I don't ignore them,” Jilly told him. “But I don't dwell on them either.”

“Even when you've been hurt as much as you have?”

“Maybe especially because of that,” she said. “What I try to do is make people feel better. It's hard to be mean, when you're smiling, or when a laugh's building up inside you.”

“That's a child's view of the world.”

Jilly shook her head. “A child lives in the now, and they're usually pretty self-absorbed. Which is what can make them unaware of other people's feelings at times.”

“I meant simplistic.”

Jilly wouldn't accept that either. “I'm aware of what's wrong. I just try to balance it with something good. I know I can't solve every problem in the world, but if I try to help the ones I come upon as I come upon them, I think it makes a difference. And you know, most people aren't really bad. They're just kind of thoughtless at times.”

“How can you believe that? Listen to them and then tell me again how they're really kind at heart.”

Jilly's head suddenly filled with conversation.

…
why I have to buy anything for that old bag, anyway
…

…
hello, cant we leave the kids at home for one afternoon
…
the miserable, squalling monsters
…

…
hear that damn song one more time, I'll kill
…

No, they were thoughts, she realized, stolen from the shoppers in the mall that lay on the other side of the alley's wall. It was impossible to tell their age or gender, except by inference.

…
damn bells
…
oh, it's the Sally Ann, doing their annual beg-a-thon
…
hey, nice rack on her
…
wonder why a looker like her's collecting money for losers
…

…
doesn't get me what I want this year, I'll show him what being miserable is all about
…

Jilly blinked when the voices were suddenly gone again.

“Now do you see?” her companion said.

“Those thoughts are taken out of context with the rest of their lives,” Jilly told him. “Just because someone has an ugly thought, it doesn't make them a bad person.”

“Oh no?”

“And being kind oneself does make a difference.”

“Against the great swell of indifferent unkindnesses that threaten to wash us completely away with the force of a tsunami?”

“Is this what they meant with the ill will that laid you low?”

“What who meant?”

“The crow girls. They're the ones who found you and brought you to the Kelledys' house because they couldn't heal you themselves.”

A small smile touched his features. “I remember some crow girls I saw once. Their good humor could make yours seem like grumbling, but they carried the capacity for large angers as well.”

“Was that when you were a buffalo?”

“What do you know about buffalo?”

“You're supposed to have buffalo blood,” Jilly explained.

He gave her a slow nod.

“Those-who-came,” he said. “They slaughtered the buffalo. Then, when the People danced and called the buffalo spirit back, they slaughtered the People as well. That's the history I read on the skin of the world—not only here, but everywhere. Blood and pain and hunger and hatred. It's an old story that has no end. How can a smile, a laugh, a good deed, stand up against the weight of such a history?”

“I… I guess it can't,” Jilly said. “But you still have to try.”

“Why?”

“Because that's all you can do. If you don't try to stand up against the darkness, it swallows you up.”

“And if in the end, there is only darkness? If the world is meant to end in darkness?”

Jilly shook her head. She refused to believe it.

“How can you deny it?” he asked.

“It's just… if there's only supposed to be darkness, then why were we given light?”