Taltos (72 page)

“Dear God, he’s sick,” said Mary Jane. And Rowan, snapping to, wrapped her long wet fingers around his neck.

And the tall one said:

“Well, I know this is a dreadful shock for you both, and Mother and Mary Jane have worried for days, but I myself am relieved to see you at last, and force a decision as to whether I can remain beneath this roof, as they say, your child as well as Mona’s child. As you can see here, she has placed the emerald around my neck, but I bow to your decision.”

Rowan was speechless. So was he. It would have been Mona’s voice except it sounded older, and a little less strong, as though chastened already by the world.

He looked up to see her standing there, big spill of vivid red locks, woman’s breasts and long curved legs, and her eyes, her eyes like green fire.

“Father,” she whispered, dropping to her knees. Her long fingers shot out and clasped his face.

He closed his eyes.

“Rowan,” she said. “Love me, please, and then maybe he will.”

Rowan cried, her fingers tightening on his neck. His heart was thudding in his ears, thudding as if it were growing bigger and bigger.

“Morrigan is my name,” she said.

“She’s mine, my child,” Mona said, “and yours, Michael.”

“And I think it’s time that you let me speak,” said Morrigan, “that I take the burden of decision from both of you.”

“Honey, slow down,” he said. He blinked his eyes slowly, trying to clear his vision.

But something had disturbed this long nymph. Something had made her draw back her hands and then sniff at her fingers. Her eyes flashed to Rowan and then to him. She rose, rushing close to Rowan, before Rowan could possibly move away, sniffing at Rowan’s cheeks, and then standing back.

“What is that scent?” she said. “What is it! I know that scent!”

“Listen to me,” Rowan said. “We’ll talk. That’s what you said. Now come.” She moved forward, releasing him to die of a heart attack entirely by himself, and she put her arms around the girl’s waist, the girl staring down at her with comically frightened eyes.

“The scent’s all over you.”

“What do you think it is?” Mona asked. “What could it be?”

“A male,” the girl whispered. “They’ve been with him, these two.”

“No, he’s dead,” said Mona, “you’re picking it up again from the floorboards, from the walls.”

“Oh no,” she whispered. “This is a living male.” Suddenly she grabbed Rowan by the shoulders. Mona and Mary Jane sped to her side, gently tugging her arms away. Michael was on his feet. God, the creature was the same height as he was. Mona’s face, but not Mona, no, not Mona at all.

“The smell is driving me mad,” she whispered. “You keep this secret from me? Why?”

“Give them time to explain,” Mona pleaded. “Morrigan, stop it, listen to me.” And then she had the girl’s hands in hers, holding them tight. And Mary Jane was standing on tiptoe.

“Now just you simmer down, long tall Sally, and let them tell us the scoop.”

“You don’t understand,” Morrigan said, voice suddenly thick and tears gathering in her huge green eyes, as she looked again to Michael, to Rowan. “There’s a male, don’t you see? There’s a male of me! Mother, you can smell the
scent. Mother, tell the truth!” It was a scream. “Mother, please, I can’t stand it!” And her sobs came like something tumbling downstairs, her face clenched in pain, her tall angular body wobbling, and bending gently as she let the other two embrace her and keep her from falling.

“Let us take her now,” said Mary Jane.

“Just don’t do anything, you have to swear,” Mona pleaded.

“And we’ll meet and we’ll talk, and we’ll …”

“Tell me,” the stricken girl whispered. “Tell me,
where is he
?”

Rowan pushed Michael towards the elevator, pulling open the old wooden door. “Get in.”

And the last thing he saw, as he leaned against the back wall of the elevator, was those pretty cotton dresses, as the three of them fled up the stairs together.

He lay on the bed.

“Now, don’t think of it now. Don’t think,” Rowan said.

The wet rag felt exactly like a wet rag. He didn’t like it.

“I’m not going to die,” he said quietly. And what an effort, the words. Was it defeat again, was it a great ghastly defeat, and the scaffolding of the normal world buckling beneath its weight, and the future forecast once more in the colors of death and Lent, or was it something that they could embrace and contain, something that they could somehow accept without the mind shattering?

“What do we do?” she whispered.

“You are asking me this, you? What do we do?” He rolled over on his side. The pain was a little less. He was sweating all over and despised it, the feel of it, the inevitable smell. And where were they, the three beauties? “I don’t know what we do,” he answered.

She sat still on the side of the bed, her shoulders slightly hunched, her hair falling down against her cheek, her eyes gazing off.

“Will
he
know what to do?” Michael asked. Her head turned as if pulled sharply by a string. “
Him?
You can’t tell him. You can’t expect him to learn some hing like that and not … not go as crazy as she’s
gone. Do you want that to happen? Do you want him to come? Nobody and nothing will stand between them.”

“And what happens then?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound strong, firm, when the firmest thing he knew to do was to ask questions.

“What happens! I don’t know. I don’t know any more than you do! Dear God, there are two of them and they are alive and they’re not … they’re not …”

“What?”

“Not some evil that stole its way in, some lying, deceiving thing that nourished alienation, madness. They’re not that.”

“Keep talking,” he said. “Keep saying those things. Not evil.”

“No, not evil, only another form of natural.” She stared off, her voice dropping low, her hand resting warmly on his arm.

If only he wasn’t so tired. And Mona, Mona for how long had she been alone with this creature, this firstborn thing, this long-necked heron of a girl with Mona’s features stamped on her face. And Mary Jane, the two witches together.

And all the time they had been so dedicated to their tasks, to save Yuri, to weed out the traitors, to comfort Ash, the tall being who was no one’s enemy and never had been and never would be.

“What can we do?” she whispered. “What right have we to do anything?”

He turned his head, trying to see her clearly. He sat up, slowly, feeling the bite beneath his ribs, small now, unimportant. He wondered vaguely how long one could hang on with a heart that winced so quickly, so easily. Hell, not easily. It had taken Morrigan, hadn’t it? His daughter, Morrigan. His daughter crying somewhere in the house with her childmother, Mona.

“Rowan,” he said. “Rowan, what if this
is
Lasher’s triumph? What if this was the plan all along?”

“How can we know that?” she whispered. Her fingers had gone to her lips, the sure sign that she was in mental
pain and trying to think her way through it. “I can’t kill again!” she said, so soft it was like a sigh.

“No, no … not that, no, I don’t mean that. I can’t do that! I …”

“I know. You didn’t kill Emaleth. I did.”

“That’s not what we have to think about now. What we have to think about is—do we handle this alone? Do we try? Do we bring together others?”

“As if she were an invading organism,” Rowan murmured, eyes wide, “and the other cells came to surround her, contain her.”

“They can do that without hurting her.” He was so tired, and almost sick. In a minute he was going to throw up. But he couldn’t leave her now, he refused to be ignominiously sick. “Rowan, the family, the family first, all the family.”

“Frightened people. No. Not Pierce and Ryan and Bea and Lauren …”

“Not alone, Rowan. We can’t make the right choices alone, and the girls, the girls are swept off their feet, the girls are walking the dark paths of magic and transformation, she belongs to the girls.”

“I know,” Rowan sighed. “The way that he once belonged to me, the spirit who came to me, full of lies. Oh, I wish in some horrible, cowardly way …”

“What?”

She shook her head.

There was a sound at the door. It popped a few inches, then rode back. Mona stood there, her face faintly streaked from crying too, her eyes full of weariness.

“You won’t hurt her.”

“No,” he said. “When did it happen?”

“Just a few days ago. Listen, you’ve got to come. We’ve got to talk. She can’t run away. She can’t survive out there on her own. She thinks she can, but she can’t. I’m not asking you to tell her if there’s really a male somewhere, just come, accept my child, listen.”

“We will,” said Rowan.

Mona nodded.

“You’re not well, you need to rest,” said Rowan.

“It was the birth, but I’m all right. She needs the milk all the time.”

“Then she won’t run away,” said Rowan.

“Perhaps not,” said Mona. “Do you see, both of you?”

“That you love her? Yes,” said Rowan. “I see.”

Mona slowly nodded her head. “Come down. In an hour. I think by then she’ll be all right. We bought her lots of pretty dresses. She likes those. She insists we dress up too. Maybe I’ll brush her hair back and put a ribbon in it the way I used to do in mine. She’s smart. She’s very smart and she sees …”

“Sees what?”

Mona hesitated. And then her answer came, small and without conviction. “She sees the future.” The door closed.

He realized he was looking at the pale rectangular panes of the window. The light was waning fast, the twilight of spring so quick. The cicadas had begun outside. Did she hear all that? Did it comfort her? Where was she now, this, his daughter?

He groped for the lamp.

“No, don’t,” Rowan said. She was a silhouette now, a line of gleaming light defining her profile. The room closed and then grew vast in the darkness. “I want to think. I want to think out loud in the darkness.”

“Yes, I understand,” he said.

She turned, and very slowly, with highly effective movements, she slipped the pillows behind him so that he could lean back, and hating himself, he let her do it. He rested, he pulled a deep breath of air into his lungs. The window was glazed and white. And when the trees moved, it was like the darkness outside trying to peer in. It was like the trees listening.

Rowan talked:

“I tell myself we all run the risk of horror; any child can be a monster, a bringer of death. What would you do if it were a baby, a tiny pink thing like they ought to be, and a witch came and laid her hands on it and said, ‘It will grow up to wage war, it will grow up to make bombs, it will grow up to sacrifice the lives of thousands, millions.’
Would you choke it? I mean if you really believed? Or would you say ‘No’?”

“I’m thinking,” he said. “I’m thinking of things that make a kind of sense, that she’s newborn, that she must listen, that those who surround her have to be teachers, and as the years pass, as she grows older, then …”

“And what if Ash were to die without ever knowing?” Rowan asked. “Do you remember his words? What was it, Michael? ‘The dance, the circle, and the song …’ Or do you believe the prediction in the cave? If you do believe it, and I don’t know that I do, but if you do, what then? We spend our lives keeping them apart?”

The room was completely dark. Pale white streaks of light fell tentatively across the ceiling. The furnishings, the fireplace, the walls themselves had disappeared. And the trees outside still held their color, their detail, because the streetlights were shining up at them.

The sky was the leftover sky—and the color of rosy flesh, as sometimes happens.

“We’ll go down,” he said. “And then we’ll listen. And then perhaps, perhaps, we’ll call the entire family! Tell them all to come, come as they did when you were lying in this bed, when we thought you were going to die—all of them. We need them. Lauren and Paige and Ryan, yes, Ryan, and Pierce and Ancient Evelyn.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “Know what will happen? They will look at her, in her undeniable innocence and youth, and then they’ll look to us, wondering, ‘Is it true, is it so?’ and begging for us to choose some path.”

He slid gently off the bed, fearing nausea, making his way through the dark easily from bedpost to bedpost and then into the narrow white marble bathroom. A memory came back—the first time they had come into this part of the house, he and the Rowan he meant to marry. And there had been small bits of a broken statue lying here, on the white tiles that now appeared in the soft, colorless drench of the light. The Virgin’s veiled head, snapped unevenly at the neck; one small plaster hand. What had it been, an omen?

Dear God, if Ash found her, and she found him! Dear God, but that is their decision, is it not?

“It’s out of our hands,” Rowan whispered from the dark.

He leaned over the basin, turned on the tap, washed his face with the cold water. For a while it ran almost warm through the pipes, and then it came from the deep earth and it was really cold. At last he dried off, patting his skin with a little mercy for once, and then he laid aside the towel. He slipped out of his jacket, stiff crumpled shirt with the stench of sweat all over it now. He wiped himself dry, and took the recommended spray can from the shelf to kill his scent. He wondered if Ash could have done that, killed the scent cold so that they wouldn’t have picked it up from farewell kisses he’d given them both.

And in ancient times, could the human female pick up the scent of the human male coming through the forest? Why have we lost that gift? Because the scent is no longer the predictor of danger. The scent is no longer a reliable indicator of any threat. For Aaron, the hired killer and the stranger were one and the same. What had scent to do with two tons of metal crushing Aaron against the wall?

He pulled on a fresh shirt, and a light sweatshirt over that. Cover it all up.

“Shall we go down now?” He snapped off the light, and searched the darkness. He thought he saw the outline of her bowed head. He thought he saw a glimmer of the deep burgundy of her coat, and then he did see the white blaze of her blouse as she turned, so Southern the way she was dressed, so finished.