Five Odd Honors (32 page)

Something white as snow, thick as sap or honey, oozed from the cut.

“. . . our blood—my blood—is white.”

Brenda let impulse carry her past shock. With an almost apologetic glance at Parnell, she gently touched the wound on his thumb. There was no sleight of hand at work here. At even this slight pressure, more of the white oozed forth.

She jerked back her hand, nodded acceptance.

Parnell stuck his thumb in his mouth, a completely natural gesture, one Brenda herself had done dozens of times after nicking herself in the kitchen or on the edge of a sheet of paper.

After a moment, Parnell removed his thumb from his mouth, examined the still oozing wound, and tamped it with a perfectly normal handkerchief he pulled from his pocket.

“One good thing,” he said. “My blood won’t stain this like yours would.”

Brenda was still too stunned to speak.

“You find references to the white blood of the sidhe folk here and there. Most of the time such references are framed in a Christian context—an excuse for the sidhe folk’s professed propensity for stealing human children. The legends say we’re trying to breed red blood into the next generation so we will be considered human enough to be admitted into the Christian heaven.”

“A re you? ”

Parnell laughed. “No. If heaven’s that picky, most of us aren’t interested. We don’t even steal human babies. We’ve rescued a few, but that’s not the same at all. Humans are interesting, yes, but it’s a wholly human idea that you folks are some pinnacle of creation the rest of us are striving to reach.”

Brenda tried hard to find something intelligent to say.

“Is that the only difference between us? Your white blood?”

“Oh, no,” Parnell said. “There are many others. That was just the easiest way to show you that I’m as different as some of the people I’m going to introduce you to. . . .”

Brenda held up her hand. “Wait. Is this—” She ran a hand in the air to indicate the green-eyed, honey blond young man who sat comfortably curled on the grass near her, “how you really look?”

“Right now it is,” Parnell said, “and believe me, it’s hard work maintaining a full shape-change, so I’m not shifting again. What you’re seeing here isn’t a mere glamour. I could be x-rayed and every organ would be in its proper place, every bone perfect.”

“But if you were hit by a car,” Brenda protested, “you’d bleed white goo.”

“Actually,” Parnell said, “even that detail has been attended to. I made a minor adjustment tonight—and don’t be deciding that the whole thing is a trick.”

“Don’t worry,” Brenda said. “I’m not. I never even heard about the white blood thing. You’d have done better to give yourself pointed ears or something if you’d just wanted to fool me.”

“Harder,” he said. “For reasons I’m not going into . . . And less likely, anyhow. Not all of us have pointed ears. We’re not Vulcans or Romulans. Now, are you ready to meet a friend of mine?”

Brenda felt herself biting into her upper lip with her lower teeth and quickly corrected the gesture. She knew it looked really ugly, like she was some sort of ogre with an overshot jaw.

“Uh, sure. Is it Leaf?”

“Oh, no. You’ve met Leaf, sort of, kind of. I’m going to introduce you to someone else.”

“Okay . . .”

Parnell looked directly at the trunk of the oak tree. “Come out, Gall. There’s a lady waiting to meet you.”

Brenda waited, expecting someone to walk around the trunk of the tree. Instead the trunk of the tree itself began to change character. What she’d taken for a lumpy growth—an oak gall, now that she thought about it—began to move.

Clapping her hand across her mouth to stifle a sudden squeak of surprise, Brenda watched as the oak gall grew—or extruded, she really wasn’t sure which—skinny arms and legs. Using these, it pulled itself from the embrace of the tree’s bark and hopped down onto the ground next to Parnell.

What stood there had no real head or body; it was just a small lumpy mass the color and texture of oak bark. The entire thing was about the size of a baseball, but not nearly as neatly spherical. It had a face in the way that you sometimes see faces on tree trunks—a sense of eyes, a nose, and a mouth, unevenly proportioned, but unforgettable once you saw them.

Brenda remembered how in her room at home there had been a stain on the paint on her bedroom wall, hardly more than a heightening of shadows. One night, padding into her partly lit room after a trip to the bathroom, she’d suddenly seen it as a demon face, ferocious and evil. Even in the brighter light of day, Brenda couldn’t remove the impression that a demon was there and watching her. She’d hung a picture over the “face,” but even then she could imagine the evil-seeming, glowering face was still there. Eventually, she’d convinced her mom to let her repaint.

That was how Gall’s face worked. It wasn’t anything like a face in the proper sense, but once Brenda saw it, saw the eyes bright as beetle carapaces staring at her with curiosity equal to her own, she couldn’t ignore that it was really there.

Now that she’d had a moment to adjust, Brenda noticed that Gall wasn’t humanoid. He had three legs, rather like twigs, set in a rough tripod around his base. He had at least four twiglike arms.

“So,” said Gall, addressing Parnell, “is this a maiden or a hero?”

“Are the two mutually exclusive?” Parnell said. “Who this is, as you know perfectly well, is Brenda Morris. Remember, my lumpy friend, you agreed to come here. Don’t pick now to act up.”

Parnell’s tone was friendly but stern. Brenda was reminded of her dad talking to one of the boys when he acted in that jerky way boys can when they’re nervous.

Nervous,
she thought.
Yeah. Well, me, too.

“This,” Parnell said, turning to Brenda, “is Oak Gall—that is, you can call him that until he tells you otherwise. He’s not the only oak gall, but there are times he acts as if he is.”

Brenda held out a hand, doing her best to act normal.

“Hello, Mr. Oak Gall. I’m pleased to meet you.”

Oak Gall walked forward, his gait spiderlike on those three spindly legs, but no less graceful for that. He took her hand—grasping it between two of his own and making a shaking motion. He was stronger than she’d expected.

Why do I expect to know anything? White blood. Walking and talking tree lumps.

Parnell was watching them both carefully, and Brenda realized that this meeting was as much a test for Oak Gall as it was for her.

I wonder why it matters?
she thought. But what she said aloud was, “Anyone else lurking about?”

“Not tonight,” Parnell said. “I thought two of us were enough.”

“And one of you,” Oak Gall said. He’d sat down, sprawling by supporting himself on various arms and legs. The more Brenda looked at him, the more she realized that her mind was what had superimposed the idea of arms and legs on the little rounded figure. Structurally, Oak Gall more resembled a daddy longlegs. If it lived in trees, that made a whole lot more sense than humanity’s awkward bilateral symmetry.

“So there are Chinese spirits,” Brenda said, thinking aloud. “And now I have to accept Irish ones. What else?”

Parnell shrugged. “Just about anything you can imagine.”

“Imagine? Then do we give you your shapes through our imaginings?”

Oak Gall made a rude noise that Brenda decided to interpret as a derisive laugh. Parnell sighed.

“No, not really. Sometimes we take on the shapes you have created for us, because that’s what you expect, but we aren’t creatures of your imaginations.”

“What are you?”

“Living, thinking beings . . . The world is full of us if you would just look. Modern humans don’t want to look, so they miss a lot.”

Brenda flung her arms around her legs and pillowed her chin on her bent knees. After a long moment, while she tried to wrap her brain around all this weirdness, she sighed.

“But what’s real?”

“Real?”

“I mean, we’ve got you Irish creatures. I’ve met dragons and tigers that are just like what Chinese mythology would have led us to believe in. Right? From what Pearl and Des and the others have told us, there are tons of indigenous traditions, each with their own ideas. So what’s real?”

Parnell grinned at her. “I can tell you were raised in a monotheistic, scientifically oriented culture, Brenda. Try this instead. It’s all real.”

“All? But the various traditions contradict each other!” Brenda unfolded herself and started talking faster, waving her hands as if that would get her point across. “I mean, Christians and Jews and like that say you live and die once. Tons of other religions say you get reincarnated. Some cultures say everything has a spirit in it—even rocks and buildings. Others say that only humans have souls. How can they all be right?”

Parnell grasped one of her flailing hands and gave it a soft squeeze. “Relax, Brenda. Try to think about it this way. Opposites, contradictions, what ever you want to call them, are more real than anything else. In a sense, we know what everything is by knowing what it’s not.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What is green? Bluer than yellow, yellower than blue.”

Brenda had flinched when Parnell took her hand, but she didn’t pull away. To be honest, those warm, slightly rough fingers were a distinct comfort. She forced herself to look at Oak Gall. The craggy, knobby, barky face was studying her. She wondered if she was the first human Oak Gall had ever met, if this was as startling for him as for her.

Parnell went on. “You’re like a little bug who lives at the South Pole.”

“Are there bugs at the South Pole?” Brenda said, trying hard to sound more relaxed. “Wouldn’t it be too cold for them?”

“Don’t try to distract me, Brenda.” Parnell squeezed her hand one more time, then let it drop. “You yourself are too distracting by far. Now listen.”

“Sorry. Okay. I’m a bug at the South Pole.”

“You’re
like
a bug at the South Pole. All you’ve ever seen are degrees of cold and ice and snow. Little Bug You judges everything by all this cold. You won’t even believe there could be something as impossible as fire. You’ll believe in greater and lesser degrees of cold as an intellectual exercise, but not in something as hot as fire.”

Brenda straightened slightly, thrust her legs out in front of her. She’d always been like her dad in that she preferred to work through problems. Dithering was not her speed—not for long, at least.

“Okay,” she said. “So now Little Bug Me goes out into the world away from the South Pole. Not only do I learn about fire, but I learn that there are places where snow and ice can’t exist. I see. So this universe or multiverse or what ever that you’re telling me about is like that. Everything, even flat-out contradictions, exists—and you don’t need to go elsewhere to find it. It’s right here, if you know how to look.”

“That’s about it.”

“Parnell, do you really believe all that? That anything is possible if you know how to look?”

“Believe? Sure.” He flashed a grin at her. “Understand? Not really, but I’ll take that view over the one that tries to eliminate the contradictions to the point of not seeing what’s in front of my nose.”

Brenda looked over at Oak Gall. “Like him.”

Oak Gall grinned at her. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did.

“Like you,” said the tree-bark creature.

Despite the accident—as everyone had started calling it, to avoid the uncomfortable word “attack”—Pearl had insisted that Nissa stay in Virginia long enough to get her life in order. However, by the middle of the second week in September Nissa and Lani were back.

Pearl had insisted on driving to the airport to get them; she wasn’t going to let herself be jinxed by one piece of bad timing. The car had been kept inside a garage since the accident, as had the van. When it must be parked and left, some very interesting wards were set. So far, no one had shown interest in either vehicle.

“I heard from Des,” Pearl said when they got into the house and unloaded the luggage. “They’ve crossed the wall of water—on the back of a fish, apparently. They’re working out plans to cross the sea of fire.”

“I don’t envy them,” Nissa said. “I talked to Brenda today. She sounded keyed up, but not cranky. She suggested that Lani and I go ahead and take overher room right away, said that at the rate things are going, she might manage a visit at Christmas, but not before, and maybe not even then.”