The Firebird's Vengeance (48 page)

Bridget shared a glance with Sakra, who gestured with open palms, saying silently they must obey. Bridget agreed.

By the time she returned, she saw Aunt Grace had set Sakra to work cracking eggs into an ancient earthenware bowl she had brought out from somewhere, while Grace added milk from a bottle that must have been delivered on the doorstep.

Bridget had never pictured any such scene taking place in the over-fringed and perfumed parlor, but she realized Aunt Grace had no stove in her living quarters, and she had to do her cooking somewhere.

“While we’re at this, Bridget, you can make use of the time, I’m sure,” Grace said. “The lavatory’s down the hall.” Sakra cracked the last egg into the bowl, and Aunt Grace commenced whisking them with a battered fork. She pushed her hair back from her face, and Bridget saw the thin scab on the wound she had caused.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Grace,” she blurted out. “About, before. I didn’t mean … I lost control. I don’t know what I’m doing very well yet.”

Grace sighed, but did not look up. “I think that’s a hazard of our family. Always rushing into things when we don’t know what we’re really doing.” Our family. Not “my sister,” not “you.” Us.

“Aunt Grace — ” Bridget began again.

“No,” Grace interrupted. “I’m not ready yet.”

So, Bridget held her peace. The lavatory was cramped and none too clean, but it had water that ran clear after a minute of rust-red, and Bridget made a brief wash with the cold water and harsh soap. As Sakra left to do the same, Bridget sat on the sofa and put her hair into some semblance of order with a comb and pins borrowed from Aunt Grace. Other than that, Grace did not pause in her shuttling between the stove and the sideboard that, it turned out, contained her mismatched china and aging silverware.

Bridget let her aunt have her silence and as much space as she could. There was so much to readjust to, she was not sorry for a little time to herself.

Breakfast was the eggs cooked in bacon fat eaten with thick slices of toasted bread spread with new butter and last summer’s blueberry preserves, and a most unladylike brew of coffee so thick and black it satisfied even Sakra’s taste.

When the last crust had been consumed, Aunt Grace pulled her coffee mug toward her and clutched it with both hands. She stared into the depths of her cup, as if she meant to work one of her divinations from what she saw there. Her whole frame slumped forward, seeking to curl in on her heart, to protect herself. Bridget felt Grace’s weariness and worries dragging her down toward the comfortable place in her where nothing had changed, where the old excuses and old refusals were still valid and necessary. Part of her longed to sink back to that place inside herself.

Desiring change, but not to be changed.

When Grace straightened back and shoulders, her carriage became completely that of the woman Bridget had always known, and her heart constricted.

“You’ll be leaving now, I suppose,” Grace said in her familiar, acerbic tone.

“I’ve got to finish this thing,” said Bridget. “I’ve got to find Anna.”

“Of course.” Aunt Grace’s gaze returned to her cup. She was struggling with something inside her, something old and strong, Bridget was sure.

“Did … that man … the one who took your mother away …”

“Avanasy,” whispered Bridget.

“Yes. Did he love her? Did he truly?”

Which was not at all the question Bridget had been expecting. “Yes,” she answered. “Truly, and deeply, beyond the time of his death even.”

“You don’t know this?” Sakra asked Aunt Grace.

Grace sipped her coffee before she answered. “I know Medeoan loved him,” said Grace. “And that he couldn’t return that love, and it broke her heart.” Memory, so old and yet so new, dimmed her eyes. “Part of her understood he loved Ingrid, part of her could never accept it,” she murmured, closing her eyes. “I’m too old for this.”

“Aunt Grace, I think
I’m
too old for this.” Humor and determination reestablished themselves and Bridget found it easier to breathe. “But we haven’t been given the luxury of choice.”

“Nor of time,” said Sakra, lifting his head as if he had just caught an unfamiliar and unpleasant scent.

“What is it?” asked Grace, before Bridget could.

“I don’t know.” Sakra glanced about him, looking for the source of whatever it was he sensed. When he did not find it, he frowned. “Nothing, perhaps, but it is a feeling, an intuition. I do not think we should linger here.” He looked down at Bridget. “Do you think you are strong enough to make the crossing now?”

“If I must be.”

“I think that you must.”

Bridget nodded once, accepting his word. She turned to her aunt. “I’m sorry, Aunt Grace. I’d stay longer if I could.”

Grace wrapped her arms around herself as if warding off the cold. “Yes, I know.”

“All right.” Bridget reached out and touched her hand so Aunt Grace would look at her. “When this is over, I’ll come back. I swear it.”

Grace nodded, but Bridget knew she did not believe. Bridget wanted to speak some words of reassurance, but before she could find any strong enough, Sakra pushed back his chair. Seemingly unable to sit still a moment longer, he got to his feet and began to pace, peering out between the shutter slats, looking for the reason for his sudden restlessness. “No time left,” he murmured. “Why? What’s coming?” He shivered. “And we still must create a spell for our return.”

At that, Aunt Grace drew herself up. “I think I can help.”

Bridget stared. She could not stop herself.

“There were advantages to having Medeoan in my head. She really did live her life over again for me, and I managed to retain a few things. Roll back the carpet so we can get ready. Excuse me.”

Grace vanished behind her curtain. Bridget looked from the curtain to Sakra and back again.

“I don’t know,” he said in answer to her unspoken question. “But we can hope.”

Grace watched them through the space between the curtain and the threshold. As soon as she was gone, they moved close together, heads bowed, talking in confidence. Anger she did not want stirred inside her. She knew now Sakra was from a place called Hastinapura, and that Medeoan’s treacherous husband had been from the same place. As a result she had for years nurtured a hatred of all such people, even though she had married her son to a woman of the same realm, even though she passed on the regret of that blinding hatred with all the other things she had given to Grace.

It was so strange. It was as if she were seeing double. Thinking double. She stood both inside and outside every action. She knelt and pried up one of the floorboards by the bed and pulled her money box out from under it. She unlocked the box with the key she kept in her pocket and dumped the money back into the empty hole. The box was all she needed for now.

Grace’s hands opened her jewelry box and set aside the paste and gilt and plucked out the two necklaces that were genuine silver. The first held a locket that Ingrid had given her when she turned sixteen. She had not looked at it in years, and yet she had never given it away. Not even when the wolf was at the door and she could have pawned it for a meal and a down payment on the back rent. She slipped the locket off the chain and pocketed it.

The other was a slim chain hung with garnets given to her by some admirer professing his love. Had he purchased some of her rapidly diminishing virtue with this gift? She stared at it, and could not remember. All at once, Frank’s face appeared before her mind’s eye. She found herself wishing she could explain things to him, but that wish dissolved in an unexpected eagerness as she planned what was needed, a feeling of finally doing right, of being of good use. She checked the jug on the stand and found it full of water, so there would be no need to go down to the lavatory. She tucked the open money box under her arm, picked up the water jug, and returned to the parlor.

Bridget and Sakra had finished their private conference and begun moving the furniture and rolling up the rugs to expose the scuffed and warped floorboards underneath. Her newly critical eye noted this last with approval. The pattern of the carpet would only confuse the pattern of the spell.

Bridget straightened, dusting off her hands. “Well, Aunt Grace, what next?”

Grace set down the jug on her worktable that had been pushed back against the wall. She handed Bridget the silver chain, and told her, pulling the instructions out of the depths of her new knowledge, not knowing what she was going to say until the words tumbled from her lips. Bridget took it all in, uncertainty bordering on disbelief plain on her face. When Grace finished, Bridget turned to Sakra, her brows arched.

“It could well work,” he said. “With sufficient power behind it.”

“All right, then.” Bridget tucked her skirts up into her waistband and set to work.

Bridget set the open money box in the center of the room, with the key in the lock. She pulled the chimney off one of the lit lamps and trimmed the wick low so it began to smoke and the scent of mineral oil grew sharp. This she set beside the money box. Then she picked up the jug and took a deep breath.

“At the end of the world there burns a lamp. Beneath the light there is a door that is locked with a silver key. Beyond the door there is the river whose name is birth, whose name is death, whose name is life. Beyond the river is Eternal Isavalta.” Bridget dipped her fingers into the jug and sprinkled the water onto the floor, walking in a tight spiral working outward from the box and the lamp. “I, Bridget Loftfield Lederle, daughter of Ingrid, daughter of Bridget, have lit the lantern. I have opened the lock with the key of silver, I have opened the door. I have marked the way with water from the river whose name is birth, whose name is death, whose name is life. I will walk the path that is the riverbed and I will set my feet on the ground that is Eternal Isavalta. This is my word and my word is firm.”

The room grew cold and the air turned prickly, as if a thunderstorm drew close overhead. The hairs on Grace’s arms and the back of her neck rose slowly and her skin shivered with goose pimples. It was getting hard to breathe. The air felt thin.

Bridget began the chant again. She did not look in the least cold. Instead her cheeks were flushed with warmth and her eyes shone brightly. She began the spell again, her voice trembling from effort or from eagerness, it was hard to tell. Grace swayed, pulled by some force she could not name. She wanted to walk, to run, to dance to the rhythm of Bridget’s words and the patter of water drops she scattered from her fingertips. The two sounds, the only sounds, and yet somehow they filled the whole world and wove themselves together becoming one indivisible thing, a single command that reached inside to Grace’s heart and sinews and would not let her be still.

Bridget repeated the chant again, and then again. The spiral grew to encompass Sakra. The words wound round with the sharp-scented smoke and the patter of the water. Grace felt herself growing lightheaded. Her eyesight grew dim, or was it the room itself blurring, softening, melting into Bridget’s words? The photographs on the wall seemed to move, turn, and stare, the images becoming grey ghosts to see her off on this bizarre journey.

The air had grown so cold, Grace was shaking. She could barely breathe. Bridget wound one of the silver chains around Sakra’s wrist. Her face was pale, her gaze distant, her words unceasing, but softening, drifting down into barest whispers.

Bridget’s lips moved, but Grace could no longer hear what she was saying, and she began to walk forward, continuing the spiral she had begun with the water. The world around her was melting like butter, slumping, spreading, running out into endless, undefined whiteness.

Bridget led him into whiteness, her eyes wide open.

Then, they were gone, and Grace was alone in her parlor, with only the rolled-back carpet, disordered furniture, and the washing up for three to show that anything had happened.

She let out a breath that she did not know she had been holding, and inside her something loosened. On impulse she got up and walked over to one of the little mirrors that hung between the photographs to help create dim but eye-catching reflections during seances. She studied her own face, and noted that her eyes were sunken a little deeper than they had been when she had given herself over to Medeoan’s ghost, her hair touched with a little more silver.

“Well,” she said to her reflection. “You’re free. Once again. What are you going to do this time?”

Chapter Nineteen

Anna’s eyes opened, and for the first time, she saw the Land of Death and Spirit.

The Land of Death and Spirit is a land of part truths
, Master Liaozhai had said.
It is not Heaven and it is not Earth, it is only the pathway between. It is a place of memories and remnants and the creatures that are welcome no place else. You cannot see the whole of a thing there, and so must beware of all that you do see
.

Anna had been told often enough that her greatest gift was her ability to see truly. She had never thought what that would mean in a place where everything was partly hidden. Her eyes saw too much all at once, and they saw nothing at all. She saw the world try to show her a deep forest of pine trees with trunks that were wider than she was tall. But at the same time, she saw things that her mind could scarcely understand. She saw fear, she saw love and jealousy, happiness and sorrow, she saw the hundred million memories of the dead swarming like bees. She saw time encasing all like golden ice, not moving at all. She saw a river of voices and worlds cutting its swath through all. She saw its countless winding tributaries weaving through the land like roots beneath soil. She looked up and saw the high blue dome farther away than the sky had ever been and knew it was Heaven.

She saw the ghosts, as thin and fragile as veils of tissue. She saw the spirits flit between them, unnoticed. She saw everything at once, piled on top of one another like sheets of rice paper, for there was no true time or distance to separate one thing from another.

It was too much. Anna clapped her hands over her eyes and moaned.