Legacy (37 page)

That was a mistake. As I was taking the two steps back to my original position behind the oars, another swell lifted the boat, tipping it dangerously at the height of the wave. Windmilling my arms to keep my balance, I couldn’t hold on to my wand. It flew out of my hand, tumbling just out of reach toward the sea.

“No!” I shrieked, lurching to grab it as it fell. All I managed to do as the wand vanished under the white-capped waves was to lose my balance. I reeled around for a moment as seawater sloshed over me, until my toe caught under a loose rope and I fell backward, screaming, my head smacking into the wooden stern with a crack.

It was the last thing I heard before I passed out.

Lady of Mercy
Save us from our madness
Let us see the truth
Of our sublime divinity

The voice was faint at first, singing through the thick silence of unconsciousness.
Where . . . how . . . what . . . was I . . . am I . . .?

Questions I could not answer.

It took a long time for me to be able to open my eyes, as if there were silver weights on my eyelids. I awoke to a calm silver sea, blinding in its beauty. On it drifted my boat, or what had once been my boat, transformed now into a sleek silver fish complete with scales and a face on its bow like the serene
visages on Chinese junks, meant to appease the water gods.

And I was not alone, although I wasn’t startled by her presence when I saw her: a beautiful young woman with skin the color of teak and long ropy hair tied at the top of her head so that it hung down her back like a corsair’s.

“Ola’ea,” I said.

“Shh.” She smiled at me through dark elongated eyes. “You must not be so loud here. Too much talk will deafen you to what you need to hear. Learn to be silent,” she said. “It will give you courage and power.”

“Okay.” I spoke as quietly as I could. “Ola’ea?”

“Yes?”

“I’m not dead, am I?”

“No, little one. You are resting.”

“Good.” I shook myself, trying to get rid of the leaden grogginess that weighed on me so heavily. “I need to reach Peter and Eric. I have to help them.”

“The Darkness is stronger than you. Stronger than almost everything.”

“I know.”

“So you cannot fight it and win.”

“I can try,” I said. I shifted in my seat. “Will you help me get to the island?”

“Henry Shaw’s island?”

“Yes. Where he died.”

“He did not die there.”

I blinked. “I thought he set himself on fire after being infected by the Darkness.”

“That was what he planned. But it was not a good plan. Death is never the answer. There was another way.”

“I knew it!”

“Quiet. You know nothing.”

“Sorry.”

“Still, you have not lost faith. That is why I am here. Your name is Serenity?”

“Katy.”

“Oh? Ashamed, or unsure?”

“Huh?”

“Are you ashamed of who you are, or do you still not know your true name?”

“My name is Katy,” I said truculently.

“Katy,” she repeated. “A safe, harmless, powerless name. Who wouldn’t love someone named
Katy
?”

“Ola’ea—”

“Shh.”

“It’s important.”

“That doesn’t mean it has to be loud.”

“What’s the other way to defeat the Darkness? The way you taught Henry Shaw?”

“I did not teach him anything. By the time I arrived on the island, Henry was already near death.”

“From burning?”

“From fear, I think. His heart had stopped. I brought him back to the Meadow.”

“And he walked into the fire there?”

“Not him. His wife, Zenobia, took his place.”

“
What
?” I was outraged. “She would do that for that . . . that creep?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps she knew that it was the Darkness perpetrating such evil, and not her husband.”

“But still. She didn’t have to
die
for him.”

“It was not her dying that saved Henry,” she said. “It was her
willingness
to die. A different thing entirely.”

I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but it didn’t seem to be worth pursuing. “Wait a second,” I said. “If Henry Shaw didn’t die on the island—if there was actually a ritual in the Meadow to get rid of the Darkness in him, and his wife Zenobia took his place in that ritual . . .”

“Yes?”

“Why isn’t there any record of that in the
Great Book of Secrets
?” I asked.

“Isn’t there?”

“No. There’s just the song about the sacred fire. Which is why they think burning people is a good idea.”

“Shocking. That isn’t even the song.”

“It isn’t?”

“It’s the
spell
. It must be spoken while the ‘Song of Unmaking’ is sung. Was that not clear?”

I sighed. “Not really.”

She shook her head. “I suppose I forgot to write that part down, then.”

“Forgot? You just
forgot
to write down something so important?”

“I was rather busy at the time.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said disgustedly.

“Transporting an entire village to another plane of existence is not an easy task, whatever you may think in your sixteen-year-old wisdom.”

“All right, all right.”

“Not to mention holding off the cowen lynch mobs.”

“Fine,” I said levelly. “I understand. You had your hands full.”

There was a long silence. “I suppose I should have written it down,” Ola’ea said finally.

“That’s okay.”

“I think perhaps that was a mistake.”

“Hey, I know all about that,” I said. “Sometimes I think making mistakes is my calling in life.”

She laughed. “You are kind,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“But loud.”

Deflated. “I guess.”

“If I could give you any gift, it would be the ability to listen.”

I swallowed. “I can listen,” I said quietly.

“Good. Practice. You will not be sorry.”

“Okay,” I said. I lay back in the boat. The sun felt warm on my eyelids. “So did things turn out okay for old Henry?”

“Oh, yes.”

“But his wife burned in the fire.”

“The sacred fire, yes.”

I sat up. “I’m sorry, but that’s just not cool. Mrs. Shaw didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Neither of them did anything wrong.”

“But . . . the Darkness . . .”

“There is always the Darkness. The magic lies in being able to walk through the Darkness without being changed by it.”

“Without . . . How is that possible?”

“By knowing who you are,” Ola’ea said.

“Did Henry Shaw know who he was?”

“He knew he was not the Darkness.”

I lay back again. “I’m tired,” I said.

“I will sing to you.” Ola’ea guided the boat toward a glowing shore.

Lady of Mercy
Save us from . . .

“. . . our madness,” I finished lazily. “The burning
is
the madness, isn’t it?”

“Bad mojo.”

“Is that a real word?”

“Not in my language.”

“And the song?”

“A translation.”

“It sounds familiar, though.”

She smiled. “Ah, you have listened. Do you see how valuable silence can be?”

Lady of Mercy

“Is that Olokun? The Lady of Mercy?”

“Olokun, Kwan Yin, Mary, Cybele, Nokomis, Isis, Astarte, Athena, Inanna, Freya, Lakshmi, Amaterasu. She is the Goddess, the Earth, the source of life. The name we use for her does not matter, if we know her true name. What is that name, Serenity?”

“Love,” I said.

“Very good. How do you feel?”

“I’m . . . let me see. I’m cold, I think.”

“Good. That means you are still alive. Tell me, why would you wish to be alive?”

“Because someone I love needs me,” I said.

Ola’ea sighed. “Then you have reached your destination.”

“The island? I’m there?”

“Remember the song.”

I sang.

Lady of Mercy
Save us from our madness

Oh, so cold.

Let us see the truth

Violent sensations: Horrible pain in my head. Thunder crashing. Rain hitting me like needles. Lightning turning the insides of my eyelids red.

Of our sublime divinity

And cold water, bucketsful.

I opened my eyes, screamed. The rowboat was half submerged, my body almost entirely underwater. When I scrambled to sit up, my foot broke through the rotten floorboards.

“Ola’ea!” I cried as more water gushed in. Memories, or fragments of memories, whizzed through my head. A silver boat, a black woman with hair like a corsair’s . . .

A swell picked up the sinking boat and shot it forward
with me inside, still holding on to its sides. I forgot everything about my dream, if that was what it was. All I could think was that I was riding into doom.

Lady of Mercy
Lady of Mercy
Lady of Mercy

With a crash like the crack of a whip the boat collided with a boulder and broke apart, spilling me out along with the ropes and bilge water onto the rocky shallows.

For a while I just lay there, coughing, tasting the sand in my mouth. Lightning forked overhead, illuminating a strange horseshoe-shaped configuration in the distance.

Whitfield Bay.

I’d made it to the island.

Wincing, I got to my feet. Every part of me hurt. One knee and all my knuckles were scraped, and there was a lump the size of a lemon on the back of my head, but I wasn’t bleeding badly, and I didn’t think any bones were broken. My bare legs under my shorts were covered with goose bumps. I rubbed them to get the blood flowing into them again as I tried to figure out which direction I should take.

There was another flash of lightning, this time fainter and farther away. The storm was finally subsiding. I walked over to the remains of the rowboat. It was in pieces, splintered against an outcropping of big rocks. There was no water around it now, no shoreline for ten feet.

The tide was going out.

I listened. There were no cars on the island, no radios, TVs, computers, no artificial noise at all. The rain was milder now; I could even hear insects in the brush.

And then, with the intensity of a hundred bolts of lightning, a ball of red and yellow flames streaked across the sky and exploded into the trees on the interior of the island. The fourth harbinger, fire.

“Peter,” I whispered, already running.

The Darkness had come home.

The cabin was already burning when I reached it. Even in the dark I could see that part of the roof had collapsed and most of the windows had blown out.

It was an odd sort of structure. When Peter had mentioned the family “cabin,” I figured that the Shaws’ idea of a cabin would be a lot different from mine. But this really was little more than a shack, and very, very old, too, judging from the thick, uneven stone walls and squat doorways.

I’d approached the building from the back, and walked around it carefully, feeling my way through the weeds that surrounded the house while trying to avoid the roof slates and broken glass that were still exploding all around me.

“Peter?” I called tentatively. I was sure he was here. I could feel his presence.

And I could feel something else, too.

“Eric?” I asked tentatively.

He was sitting in the crook between two big tree branches,
his useless legs dangling like those of a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Kaaay?” he croaked, lifting his arms.

I ran up to him. “Honey, it’s going to be all—”

He kicked me in the face. “Surprise!” He burst out laughing. “That was a pretty good imitation of the cretin, don’t you think?
Kaaay
?”

I rubbed my cheekbone where his sneaker had connected. It was in almost the same place I’d fallen in the Meadow. I’d have a black eye by tomorrow, for sure. On the bright side, though, it hadn’t been a very hard kick. Fortunately, as malevolent and powerful as the Darkness inside him was, it was still restricted by the frailty of Eric’s body. The blow hadn’t really hurt me. The only real pain was in losing Eric to the monster who had taken over his body and then wanted to destroy it.

“Oh, dear, I’m afraid I haven’t been a very gracious host. Let me kiss it and make it better.” He showed me his teeth, clacking them in a chomping motion.

“Where’s Peter?” I demanded. Eric’s gaze slid toward the burning building. As I rushed toward it, Peter emerged from the kitchen entrance, coughing and sweaty. His bare chest was smeared with soot. “Katy,” he said. His eyes looked infinitely sad. “Why did you come here?”

“Because I knew this was where you’d be,” I said.

He didn’t answer, just turned with his hands on his hips to stare at the blaze.

“Maybe I can help you put out the fire,” I suggested.

He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “I think it’s a lost cause. There were some extinguishers in the house, but they weren’t much use. I’ve just been clearing some of the brush away.”

“Can I help you with that?”

He shook his head. “There isn’t anything more I can do without some kind of tools.” He shrugged. “Maybe the rain will put it out.”

The fire was already dampening. It looked like smoke was going to be a bigger problem than fire spreading to the greenery. The wild storm had subsided to a steady, cold rain. Peter didn’t seem to notice it. Pushing his hair away from his face, he sat down cross-legged on the open ground. “I’d hoped that Eric and I could stay here,” he said to no one in particular. He picked up a small stone and tossed it at the fire.

“That was your plan?” I asked.

He grinned. “Yeah. Pretty sketchy, I know.”

I swallowed to keep from crying. “Okay,” I said, trying not to let my voice reflect the frustration I felt. “We’ll go back in the morning. There’s got to be some magic—”

“No,” he said. His voice was level and weary. “I’m done with magic.” He smiled shyly. “I was never very good at it, anyway.”

“But Eric . . .”

“Eric’s gone,” he said, his voice heavy with resignation.

“Excuse me,” the boy in the tree declared loudly, waving his hand. “Sitting right here within earshot, in case you didn’t notice.”