Wayfarer: A Tale of Beauty and Madness (Tales of Beauty and Madness) (16 page)

I
T WAS PRETTY MUCH HEAVEN.

Each morning began with strengthening sunshine spilling through the glazed windowpanes. There was no tapping of lacquered talons on the door or lunging into terrified wakefulness thinking she would be late for school. The bathroom was small, but she didn’t have to worry about the door creaking open or a false-honey voice bouncing off the tiles right before the madness started.

Instead there was the clink of thick glass milk bottles on the front step—Auntie was old-school, and had morning groceries delivered at dawn. She could probably afford it—she could charm rings around just about any teacher Ellie had ever had. Still, she never left the house, so maybe she was retired? She must have saved and invested a pretty penny to be so reclusive, but it was rude to pry. As early as Ellie tried to get up, she never caught the milkman.

Auntie always made a big breakfast, floating around the kitchen with her thistledown hair braided into a coronet. The scarecrow rustled each time Ellie sat down at the table, but when she glanced at it, it stilled. Maybe it was an experiment, maybe it was just sensitized material reacting to the fact that there were
two
active charmers in Auntie’s house now.

Because the old woman didn’t want her to leave.
Stay, and learn. Auntie offers sanctuary, she does.

After so much bad, Ellie was finally getting a little luck. It was, as far as she was concerned, about damn time. If only she could stay here until she was eighteen . . . but that was Too Far Ahead. Maybe all that planning really didn’t do anything, since every single one she’d had turned into a worthless jumble.

After breakfast, Ellie washed the painted dishes and Auntie dried, moving in companionable silence except for the old woman muttering the name of a charm symbol and Ellie lifting a soapy, drenched hand to sketch it in trembling air.

She hadn’t missed one yet.

Auntie didn’t charm in a workroom. Or rather, the whole house was her workroom, and the garden too. She didn’t seem too concerned about stray Potential breaking things or mutating. “Must flow, yes yes,” she would mutter. “Like water, or oil. See, little dove?”

The empty space still opened inside Ellie’s head whenever she charmed, but it didn’t matter. Auntie taught her how to set her feet in the ground before it flowered, toes sinking in like roots, and it was amazing how such a simple thing made the emptiness friendly instead of scary. There was a fuzzy sense of what was occurring when she did it, a sleepwalker’s sensibility of the earth moving around her.

“Watch the rose, Columba,” Auntie whispered, and Ellie would sink down in front of a single flower, barely breathing as she studied it, until the world became bright frilled petals and a saffron heart, a slim green stem and whirling universes inside the unfolding of a blot of crimson. The old woman’s touch on her shoulder would wake her from a burning reverie, and the roses would explode with vigor, charmlight under the surface of the garden’s blossoming all but blinding her.

The days were long seashore-curves of charming, with plenty of food to fuel the Potential. Round loaves of sweet or rye bread, spiced honey, apples, eggs always spun on the counter before being cracked into a bowl, wild rice, seeds and nuts, cheese tangy-yellow or mellow white. Auntie didn’t eat meat, and Ellie didn’t miss it. For once there was nobody watching every bite as if it cost cash, nobody bringing extra and pretending it wasn’t charity.

Auntie herself only ate bread and honey. There were weirder diets, and Ellie had seen Laurissa on a lot of them. Besides, Auntie was old, let her eat what she wanted.

After lunch there was cleaning the cottage while Auntie bustled through the garden, charming and weeding and snap-pruning. The bees followed the old woman, circling her white head while their hives near the back fence murmured a song Ellie didn’t dare get close enough to decipher. She’d never been stung, and Auntie said the little buzz-cousins wouldn’t, but why take a chance?

Auntie never gave a room the white-glove treatment once Ellie was done with it. She merely glanced about and nodded, mumbling in that odd way, as if singing along to music nobody else could hear. Once in a while she would smile, pleased, and that white V-shaped smile did something funny to Ellie. It made her shoulders clench but her chest loosen, and she found herself standing straighter every time it showed up.

The old woman never yelled or threw things or told Ellie she was worthless. Instead, she was downright
pleased
. Sometimes she even said the magic word, and Ellie’s heart would get two sizes larger and several ounces lighter all at once.

Apprentice
. There wasn’t any paperwork to make it official, but that could come later. For right now, this was enough.

Juno was walking distance away, but why risk the Strep finding her there? Or risk the Sisters insisting she go “home”? Her schoolbag, broken and reknotted strap looped back on itself, hung in the closet. No homework, no Babchat. She rose when she felt like it and went to sleep when she was exhausted and charm-drained. It was a good feeling, to work hard and fall into the soft gray bed. No bruises, no scrapes, no flinching at every shadow or sudden movement. Auntie was halfway to apprenticing her already, and that would be enough to get Ell a license. More importantly, even half-batty as she was, the old lady could
charm
. Apprenticing with her would be
worth
something; Ellie learned more in a week here than she had in a year of Juno’s careful, mind-numbingly safe classes, where you always had to wait for the slowest damn idiot in the room to catch on.

The early evenings were the best, because as Auntie made dinner Ellie practiced charm-symbols, looking through her battered thick paperback copy of Sigmundson’s. The blue-jacketed scarecrow rustled, but she was used to it by now. The entire house was friendly and familiar, no sharp edges or cold stone. No screaming, no slaps, no steady drip of venom.

Sometimes she still heard Laurissa, though.
Worthless, lazy, stupid, slut, bitch, HATE YOU.

Thinking about it made her hands shake a little, but she took a deep breath and the trembling retreated. It was getting easier. “Auntie?”

“Mh. Barley tonight, the soup must be thick.”

Vegetables and barley. Toni would add meat.
Had the cook found another job? There was no way of telling. Had Ellie been the problem all along, and Rita and the Strep now nice and cozy because she was gone? How was Rita dealing with the Strep’s attention all on her? Did she like it?

We all have to swim on our own.
Tentatively, Ellie tried a question. “Have you ever been afraid of Twisting?”

The old woman waved a wooden spoon, absently. “Why does the dove ask, hmm? Does Auntie seem tumbled-about to young eyes?” A flash of white teeth, and a small branch fell from her tangled white head.

“I’ll comb your hair tonight.” Ellie pushed her chair back. “And no, I just wondered. I’ve always been afraid of Twisting.”

“Little Columba will not Twist.” Auntie nodded, sharply. “Comb Auntie’s hair with quick fingers, yes.
Sarbirin
.”

Ellie’s hand leapt up, the tiny stick in her fingers sketching a fluid charm-symbol with eldritch light. Pale in the lowering sunshine through the kitchen window, it still fluoresced just fine, and the smile that filled her cheeks didn’t feel like a mask anymore.

“Tripaltia.”

Another symbol.

“Kepris.”

It was so easy, like breathing. Potential shaped itself, and the symbols hung in the air, two stretching toward each other and the third—
Tripaltia
, repelling most of the Second List and all of the Third through Thirteenth
except
when used in subordinate position—kept them apart, straining, threads of Potential building a structure of reaction and chance around them.

You weren’t supposed to be able to hold them in open air for very long, but it was so
easy
. Or it had become that way, under the old woman’s careful tutelage.

The longer she stayed here, the more she’d learn, and the better equipped she’d be to make some sort of living. Maybe even save enough to go overWaste. She had hazy memories of the train ride, Dad catching up on his law-journal reading as the sealed carriage holding their sleeper compartment hurtled through the night. Ellie dosed with a sedative pill to make travel easier, both of them not speaking around a hurtful absence that was her mother’s shape and size—

She caught herself, swallowing hard, and willed the stinging in her eyes to go down.

Auntie’s wide white smile sharpened. “Good.” She nodded, and turned back to the bubbling pot on the sleek stove.

Ellie brought her hands together, the branch—sensitized now—trapped between them. The three symbols exploded in a cascade of harmless sparks, winking out before they hit the cinnamon floor. The sapphire glinted uneasily, swirling with charmlight, but Auntie didn’t even notice. She just stirred the soup and reached for an earthenware crock by her elbow, cast a handful of pearly barley into the simmering pot. She paused, added another.

Ellie sank back down at her place at the table. She sniffed once, hard, and the tears retreated. The scarecrow rustled again, and a flicker of motion made her head turn instinctively, her pale hair moving in a smooth shining wave, longer now.

How long have I been here?

It was a relief to find out it didn’t matter. If she kept moving steadily, working hard, being useful, Auntie would let her stay. After a while, the aching places inside her wouldn’t matter.

The scarecrow’s faded eyes were blue smears, its mouth a sad downturned line. Why Auntie had the thing stuffed into the chimney corner was beyond Ellie.

On impulse, she leaned over, tucking the scrap of wood under the scarecrow’s faded denim sleeve. The twig was sensitized by the passage of Potential, sure, and a single strand of thistledown hair was wrapped around its smooth bark. The scarecrow was looking a little thin. It could use all the stuffing she could find.

“Bowls!” Auntie crowed, and Ellie leapt to her feet again. Funny, but she didn’t mind serving dinner here. Especially since she seemed to get it right, the way she never had for the Strep.

The scarecrow rustled again, but there was the bread to slice and the bowls to fill, and Auntie’s silver spoon to ladle the hot soup to her watering, waiting mouth while Auntie dipped her own in thick amber honey.

Outside, twilight deepened into night, and once Ellie made up her mind to ignore it, the world beyond the garden’s fence didn’t matter at all.

A
stone spat blue and the thing hissed, its hungry ancient face splitting in a wide V to show white, white teeth. The night around her was not dark but white, each edge laden with hurtful brilliance; creeping darkness threaded through with slim grasping fingers.

At first there was a sting at her breastbone, a pinching. Then a drowsy warmth all through her, a feathered nest, the safety of exhaustion.

The last time she’d felt protected had been with her head resting against his neck.

Avery?
Slurred and heavy, a sleeptalker’s mumble. If this was a dream, it was a funny one. A queer draining sensation spread through her dream-body; a brushing over her dream-skin, as if she was back in Ruby’s car and the minotaur was chasing them. The streets warped like the minotaur’s Twisting, ribbons of diseased Potential rising and twining around its bone-heavy head, and as she looked down her own arms were wavering corkscrews, bones painlessly warping. Her head was heavy, drooping forward as her neck shortened and her shoulders rose, and she tried to wake up but there was no air, she could not breathe, fish-gasping, her jaws working . . .

The thing crept away, and for a long time she didn’t know if she was awake or asleep. Until finally her body became her own again and—

• • •

She jolted upright, clutching the sheet and coverlet to her chest, her entire body throbbing and the sapphire sending out tiny crackling sparks that painted the walls of the gray room, bleaching it to white with sharp-cut shadows. No moonlight braved the windowpanes.

Ellie fought for breath.

The cottage was still and silent, breathing to itself. Blinking turned the room into shutter clicks, an alien chiaroscuro. For a few seconds she couldn’t remember just
where
she was, and the only thing that kept her from screaming was the hazy thought that the Strep might hear.

She’s not here. You’re at Auntie’s.

Her heart quit trying to throw itself out through her ribcage. Sweat dewed her skin, but she was
cold
. Her teeth chattered, and for a second, there was the terrifying vertiginous feeling of being . . . invisible.

No, not invisible. Transparent. A clear pane of charmglass.

Why should that bother me?
Her heart calmed down, and slowly, slowly, she warmed up. Her teeth stopped clicking together, the shudders coming in waves instead of constantly. The waves spread out, their peaks diminishing, and after a little while she could unlock her arms from around her knees and stretch, tentatively.

Her ribs ached. No, not ribs. A knot of pain high on the left side of her chest, and she rubbed gingerly at it. A bruise, maybe? What a weird place to be bruised. There wasn’t anything here that hurt; Auntie never even touched her unless it was a brief brush while passing a plate or a small thing to be charmed.

When she could, she slid her legs out of bed and stood, shakily. Faint cityglow showed through the diamond windowpanes, dappled by leaf and branch shadows—though there wasn’t a tree on this side of the cottage; it had to be a charm—and made blotches on her arms and legs. She tacked unsteadily for the door, opened it, and peered out into the hall.

I don’t feel right.

For a hazy moment she contemplated getting her schoolbag and her uniform—Auntie had produced crisp white button-downs and plaid skirts as well as kneesocks and panties, even a bra or two and several camisoles in Ellie’s size, brushing aside her stammered attempt at gratitude, as usual—and creeping out the front door, through the trellis arch and the frilled roses, and sneaking to a phone box.

Who would she call? Ruby, who would probably just yell at her for disappearing? Cami, who would be so worried, so helpful, so fragile? Neither of them needed Ellie dropping more problems in their lap, especially Laurissa-sized problems.

Avery?
The thought died as soon as it began. Another person who didn’t need problems with the Strep-Monster, and who had probably forgotten all about Ellie and her annoying habit of not meeting him or calling when she said she would.

I’d forget me too
.
It would be a relief.
Her shoulders sagged. Her panties were riding up, and she shut the door, standing and staring at the knob for a moment.

Wait. I locked this. Didn’t I?

Maybe not. She didn’t need to lock things here. Still, forgetting to do that was like forgetting to breathe.

A wave of exhaustion crashed over her, carried her across the floor, and deposited her into the soft gray bed again. She sank down, snuggling under the covers, and the leafshadows on the ceiling were skulls and bony hands until she blinked. Then they were normal, just branches dancing on the wind.

“I don’t ever want to leave.” Her furtive whisper took her by surprise, rippled the air like a pebble thrown into a still pond. “Not even if she throws me out.”
I’m staying. I don’t care what happens.
Ellie lay stiffly for a long while, watching the branches move as the hot tears trickled down her temples, vanishing into her hair.

I won’t ever go back to Laurissa. I’ll walk into the core first.
The scary thing wasn’t thinking that. It was the quiet, sure knowledge that once she started moving that direction, she wouldn’t stop.

If the core didn’t kill her it would Twist her, because of the black scratching thing she had flung at the Strep. A curse, almost as black as Laurissa’s own work on a gaudy, loud-ticking watch. There was the wounded look on Cami’s face, too, and Ruby’s dismissal.
Let her go
.

Well, they had. Now it was her turn to let her fingers unclench a bit, and just let things go too.

When sleep finally came, there were no more dreams.