The Thread That Binds the Bones (17 page)

“All right,” said Hal.

“Come in. Sit down. Have some tea,” May said.

They walked in and Hal pegged the curtain shut behind them.

“Sit down,” said Hal, gesturing toward the bed. Laura and Tom sat among the cushions, and Hal sat on the couch beside May. Tom watched teacups complete with saucers float to the samovar’s spigot, pause long enough to fill, and come toward him through the air. He caught the first one, and Laura caught the second. The cups were fragile porcelain, pure white; the saucers were about the size of his palm.

“Sugar? Cream? Lemon?” asked May. “You still take cream and sugar, Laura?”

“Yes,” Laura said, and set cup and saucer on her knee so she could catch the tea tray as it flew to her.

“Tom? May I call you Tom?” May asked.

“Sure.”

“You’re taking all this very well, you know. With
tanganar
we either have to enchant them into believing it’s all normal, or let them scream a lot the first few days. Are you from a branch of our family?”

“I don’t think so. I never knew who my father was, though. Which method do you favor, May, screaming or enchanting?”

“I would rather we didn’t fetchcast at all; we didn’t do it when I was young, not the way the younger members are doing it these days. But if they must fetchcast, I prefer the screaming. Much better if people have their own minds. Hal is a good enchanter, though—he can pick just the smallest piece of a mind to change, without disrupting anything else—it’s a lot quieter and less distressing than screaming.”

“I heard Mr. Hal was more of a beguiler than a spoiler,” Tom said. “I heard a lot of things in town people never talked about before. You were right, Laura. The town runs on talk. Mr. Hal, did you really work on cars at Pops’s Garage?”

“Yes. Pops! I’d forgotten that.” Hal looked at his hands, then up at Tom. “There’s thin blood in my line,” he said. “Before my
plakanesh
,
I
wasn’t sure what would become of me. I thought I’d better have a trade in case I didn’t come into power. Pops was terrific. He didn’t think poison of me or edge away. Straightforward.”

“Did you know that Eddie was his adopted son?”

“Eddie?” Hal frowned. “Who’s Eddie?”

“Gwen’s fetch,” said May.

“Oh.” Hal stood up. “Well, she can’t keep him. Pops must be getting old now. We can’t take his son away. Gwen is so—careless.”

“It’s already taken care of, Daddy,” Laura said. She offered the tea tray to Tom, who declined. She set it on the floor.

“Are you sure? Gwen’s tenacious.”

“I’m sure,” said Laura. “Besides, what could you do to her? Dance to her measure, that’s all.”

“I could do something,” Hal said. “I think I could enlist some of the others; I’m not the only one who’s tired of her tactics. You’d help me, wouldn’t you, May?”

“I suppose, if I had to,” she said, smiling at him. “Apparently I don’t. Did you do something about this, Tom?”

“Yes. I took two of them with me when I left.”

“Whose was the other?”

“Carroll’s.”

May stared at him, her face troubled. “No small steps for you, are there?”

“I don’t think your family appreciates small steps.”

“True.” May looked at Laura. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I was so happy for you, Laura. Presences blessing a union for you—I wasn’t sure I would ever see that. I thought you were wise to leave when you did. But now ...”

Laura leaned against Tom and smiled. “Don’t worry, Ma. I’m happy.” Tom put his arm around her shoulders.

“But—still wingless?”

“I’ve always been wingless,” she said. “Ma, are you and Daddy going to spend the rest of your lives here in the Hollow?”

“Is Outside so much better?”

“For me it is.”

“Which reminds me,” said Tom, thinking about the differences between Outside and Inside. “What about that wall test, anyway? What was it supposed to accomplish? Are there more of those?”

“It’s an old test of breeding—” Laura began.

“Wall test?” asked Hal. “What wall test?”

“—Breeding suitability,” Laura said. “It used to be everybody who wanted to get married was tested by earth, air, fire, and water, and if they failed, there was some ritual to render them barren.”

“Nobody’s done the Elements Tests in more than thirty years,” said Hal. “Did someone try to wall test you, Laura?”

“The A-twins,” she said.

“Great-aunt Scylla declared all such testing void in the fifties,” May said. “The blood’s too thin to survive it. Those brats! The only test we still do before weddings is Purification.”

“Did we cheat on the wall test?” asked Tom.

“No, not really,” Laura said. “Two people can act as one. The twins couldn’t have moved rock like that if they were apart from one another. What right did they have to test
me
?
Only might right, which is the way it works around here a lot of the time. Tom, I’m so glad we’re married.”

“Might makes us right?”

Laura sighed. “It may not reflect well on me, but I like feeling right for the first time in my life.”

“Laura, please explain,” said May in a no-nonsense voice. “Alex and Arthur took it upon themselves to test you?”

“In the kitchen wall.”

“And you didn’t call us?”

“I’ve never been good at summoning, any more than I was good at other disciplines. I called Tom.” She looked at her ring. “He came and let me out, and he turned the twins into toads for me.”

After a moment’s silence, Hal said to Tom, “This was why the Presence was laughing last night? You have as much potential as the others in our immediate family?”

—Peregrine?

—One of the reasons, yes.

“Yep,” said Tom.

“So we don’t have to worry about you anymore, Laura,” said May.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well. Welcome to our family, Tom. Thrice welcome.” May nodded to him. “Laura is the best of her generation.”

“I know.”

May smiled. “Of course. Laura, where have you been the past six years? Couldn’t you drop us a note?”

“Make Luke come all the way out here to deliver a letter, knowing the way Sarah’s been watching him since we were in high school? No, thanks. I didn’t think you cared.”

“That’s not fair.”

Laura stared at her mother.

May sat quiet, meeting her daughter’s eyes. At last, May said, “I do care, and so does your father. If you had made an effort to keep in touch, we would have told you what was going on. But you—disappeared. You didn’t send us an address or any way of getting in touch with you. A lot of things have been happening here, Laura.”

“I noticed Annis and Jaimie were missing. Where are they?”

Silence.

“Annis’s fetch got her with child,” said Hal.

“She asked for Purification and a sanctioned marriage, but Christopher refused to even consider it.” May sat a moment staring at the rug nearest the couch, then looked up. “Annis is his favorite daughter. Annis and Jaimie thought Chris was just being ornery, but I think he was dreadfully afraid Annis and the fetch would fail the tests of the Presences and Powers.”

“Who’s the fetch?” Laura asked.

May rubbed her forehead. “It’s a terrible name. Bernie?”

“Barney Vernell,” Hal said.

“A wavering, ghostly little man with glasses.”

“I know Barney,” said Laura. “I remember: he wrote her poems in seventh grade. I thought that was so sad, because they could never—but they have ...”

“I don’t understand the attraction,” May said in a meditative voice. “He has straw hair, pale skin, invisibility—who could notice him? I didn’t, until this thing with Annis.”

“What happened?”

“They ran away—the three of them—and took a lot of the good spirit out of the house.”

“Jaimie went with them?”

May frowned at the rug. “Yes. She claimed she’d rather die single than marry anybody in the Family.”

“Where are they now? Did they have the baby?”

“We don’t know. Agatha had Zenobia and Meredith krift in search of them, but they could find no trace. I don’t think any of us realized how well Jaimie learned the disciplines. She has them shielded completely, or perhaps they’re on another continent.”

“I think they’re near,” said Hal. “I thought I sensed their traces during the ceremony today.”

“When did they leave?”

“Almost three months ago. We could have told you all this if we had known where you were,” May said.

“You could have figured it out if you were really interested.”

“I tried,” said Hal. “You blend right in. You’re invisible in a city—you were in a city, weren’t you?”

“Good guess.” She didn’t sound very friendly. “Michael found me.”

May sighed. “Michael’s more powerful than we are; you must have realized that by now. Do you think we would have let him pester you the way he did while you were growing up if we could have stopped him?”

“Oh,” said Laura, her eyes widening.

“Your mother could probably have passed the breeding tests, but I wouldn’t have,” Hal said. “Scylla dropped them just in time for our wedding. Presences blessed us with five children .... Thank the Powers Michael survived Purification. He has the most promise, but the warping on him—so dangerous, but we couldn’t seem to counter it, I don’t know where he got it. I don’t think we’re responsible, any more than Chris and Hazel are responsible for how Gwen and Sarah are. Your mother and I have talked this over and we don’t know what to think. I’m sorry, Laura.”

“There’s something about this generation,” said May in a troubled voice. “Either the blood is weak or the character’s warped. I thank the Powers that brought you and Tom together, Laura. I confess I have often wished I could turn the twins into toads myself.”

“Tom turned Carroll into a crow this morning,” said Laura.

“What?” said Hal.

“Carroll turned Tom into a jackass first, but he undid that and turned Carroll into a crow.”

“We should have stayed for cake,” said May.

“We wanted to celebrate alone with each other,” Hal said. “Two children successfully linked—a lovely feeling. We left right after the ceremony.”

“What did Carroll think of all this?” May asked.

“I don’t know,” said Tom. “I released him later. He shook hands with me. I’ve been puzzled about that.”

“Acknowledgment of equality,” May said. “How unlike Carroll.”

“Peregrine wasn’t sure if it was a trick or not.”

“Peregrine? The Presence? Is it still around? Normally they only manifest during special rituals, when we summon them,” said May.

“That’s what you think.”

“Oh? You have other information?”

“This place is hip-deep in—in Presences. They just don’t use visible light very much.” Tom glanced around the room, wondering if there were any spirits there. He didn’t see any. Suddenly he remembered being eleven and living with one of his relatives. He saw the phantom of his aunt’s first husband. It came to breakfast and read a phantom newspaper. Her second husband made orange juice, then sat in the same place as the phantom. The first time Tom saw it happen, he waited for some outcry, which never came; after that he accepted it as normal, until the phantom started telling him how it had died. His nightmares after that, his sleepwalking and sleeptalking had frightened his aunt so much she asked that he be moved somewhere else. Counseling had quieted the dreams, buried the memories until now. “Peregrine ...” He held out his hands, palms up, fingers outspread. “Peregrine came inside me. He’s training me.”

Hal and May looked at each other. “Have you heard of something like that?” he asked her.

“In 1792. Rupert Locke,” she said, “honored by the Presence of Lucian Bolte, who died in 1615.” She looked down at her hands, which rested on her thighs, then glanced sideways at Tom. “Rupert set a lot of precedents, overturned traditions, disturbed everybody, and generally did the Family a world of good.”

“Am I being set up as a piece of history? I’m not sure I like that.”

—It won’t happen against your will, Peregrine assured him.

“You probably don’t have to like it,” said May. “It will just happen. But enough of that. I still have no idea what my daughter’s done since she left us, or what your future plans may be. I don’t even know what my new son-in-law does—unless you really drive a taxi, which strikes me as highly improbable.”

“I’m really a janitor,” said Tom. In his late teens, he had been overpowered by a desire to be woodwork, totally anonymous, to disappear, and being a janitor had seemed the perfect way to realize this desire. He had apprenticed himself, learned the trade, and practiced it without looking back for almost twelve years, until he ran away from Portland. “There wasn’t any steady work open for that in Arcadia, so I became a cab driver instead. Laura’s a model.”

“What?” Hal looked surprised.

“I’m going to be modeling maternity clothes soon,” she said.

May opened her mouth, closed it. Slowly her right hand rose, nested in her left. “We didn’t do any of the fertility rituals,” she said.

“Oh, well,” said Laura, her voice rising on the first word, cresting on the second without coming down very far. She shrugged. She smiled.

“You’ll stay here until after the baby’s born, won’t you? So we can krift, gift, seal, welcome it?”

“No way,” said Laura, as Tom said, “Not a chance.”

“Why not?” asked Hal.

Tom looked at Laura, waited for her to speak. “The air here is cold and poisoned,” she said.

“Think what shapechangers could do to an embryo,” said Tom.

“Babies are sacred,” May said, her voice indicating, “This is law.”

“Alex and Arthur locked Laura in a wall. What if they had decided to do the render-you-barren thing? What if it had worked? I don’t trust you people any more than I would a nest of rattlers,” said Tom.

“But—oh. Well, I guess you have reason,” said Hal. He frowned. “The twins wouldn’t have done it if they had known, though.”

“I think we’ll be better off elsewhere. I want to get training, too,” Tom said.

“In what?” asked Laura.

“Career training. I’m not sure what field. I think I should make more money now. Also midwifery, parenting—I’m not sure this is the best place for that. And—I told Maggie she could come with us, Laura, if it was all right with you.”