The Golden Thread (11 page)

“Let's get out of here,” I said.

The picture was of a leaf-taker, and seeing it there, I understood where Bosanka was spending her spare time—in the most familiar territory she could find, our “parkland.”

Which I knew from personal experience to be a center of power in its own right. If she hooked up her native magic with that, we were all going to be in absolutely unimaginable trouble.

Assuming she hadn't done it already.

 

9
Now Here's My Plan

 

 

G
RAN HAD BEEN MOVED
to a private room. I had a few nightmare moments when I thought I wouldn't be able to find her. But I did, of course. I told her everything, even though nothing seemed to get through.

“Bosanka's a witch, Gran,” I whispered, “and there's a whole lot of people at risk here. One of them's already under a bad spell. We can't handle this alone. You have to help me. Please wake up and tell me what's going on, tell me what to do!”

For a minute there, looking at my magic Gran laid out like a little withered-up mummy, I could have killed myself for having used my silver wish to protect my mom. What I
should
have done, of course, was to wish my Gran well again!

But could you make a silver wish for something like that? What if Gran was here for a reason I didn't know? It must mean something that she was out of reach right now, of all times. In all my visists to her at the hospital, it had never occurred to me to think about this situation from her point of view.

Suppose she wasn't dying at all? Suppose she just had to have some rest time, uninterrupted by anything or anybody, so afterward she could live for a long time to come? Or suppose Sorcery Hall had called on her suddenly and she had left her body here while her powerful spirit went off to do something that nobody else could do?

Well, then why didn't she warn me? Why hadn't she seen Bosanka coming and tipped me off, or left me with some kind of advice or special spell to deal with the girl-witch from her horrible planet of hunters?

Or maybe Gran had simply made a mistake. Nobody's foolproof. The machines at the head of Gran's bed made sucking, sighing noises something like the noises I was making, crying, while my mind went on churning.

If Gran did wake up, she'd probably say I was right to make a wish to safeguard my mom, who couldn't, or wouldn't, protect herself in any magical way. And Gran could protect
her
self, I had to believe, even she seemed to be almost completely gone.

Which left me to protect
my
self, while I did my best to deal with some alien witch from Hell. I could manage that, couldn't I, as long as I didn't have to worry about Mom and Gran at the same time? I had the family talent, and I'd already used it, however clumsily, a lot more than I'd ever wanted to, and successfully.

What I
didn't
have was access to Gran's wisdom, but I still knew a thing or two—more than anybody else in the Comet Committee did.

In fact, they didn't know a thing.

It hit me like a breaker, big and cold: no matter how much talent each of those kids might have—Lennie, Tamsin (yuk), dippy Mimi (really, could
she
have any magic?), Peter, Joel, and let's not forget the mystery girl I didn't know—no matter how much, it was pretty clear that none of them had as much experience as I had.

Compared to them,
I
had wisdom, the way Gran had wisdom compared to me.

I kissed Gran on the forehead—her skin was very dry and cool—and went home.

That same Wednesday evening we met at Lennie's: Mimi, Tamsin, me, and Lennie, of course. His parents were at the theater, and his youngest sister was sleeping over at her friend's house.

I got there late, right from the hospital. Everybody gave me funny looks when I came in except Lennie. He was wiping down his favorite shoes, a pair of old, scuffed work boots, with an oily rag.

“What?” I said to the group at large. “What are you all staring at?”

Tamsin said, “Lennie says you're a witch.”

“Lennie!” I yelled.

He said, “People have to know, Val. Us in the committee, I mean.”

“Who decided that?” I shot back. “It's my secret, remember? My
family
secret. You had no right—”

He stopped working on the shoes. “You don't go into a tough game with your team all shaky and wondering what they've got that's strong enough to stop the other guys.”

The whales and giant groupers and things stared from the posters on the walls of Lennie's bedroom. He was taking Mrs. Moorehouse's elective “Spaceship Earth,” an ecology course. He was deeply into marine life-systems, which was not so strange for a kid who had once loved to play at being Captain Nemo in his submarine headquarters, twenty thousand leagues under the sea, with me playing everybody else in the story.

That had been a long time ago. We weren't playing now.

“Okay, okay, I guess I was going to have to say something about it anyway,” I grumbled. “But it's not like waving some stupid magic wand, you know? I'm just improvising, here.”

Mimi said, “Well,
somebody
has to. I mean, what are we going to
do
?”

Tamsin snorted and looked down her nose at me. “Well, I, for one, don't believe any of it. Why should your family have magic? You don't look so special to me.”

I don't need this, I thought, I could just walk out of here. But I
did
need this. Or anyway, I needed the members of the Comet Committee. Maybe I was special, but Bosanka wanted them all.

I said, “I don't know how come, Tamsin. All I can tell you is that Gran's from Scotland, where some people are ‘fey.' You know, with psychic talents and stuff.”

“That's Ireland,” Tamsin said.

Lennie said patiently, “They're all Celts, Tam.”

Mimi said, “What do your parents think about this?”

“My dad went to live in Alaska years ago,” I said. “I don't think he knows anything about it. My mom knows. She hates the whole idea.”

“I bet,” Tamsin said shrewdly. “She'd deny it if we asked her, wouldn't she? She'd tell us you're just very imaginative.”

“Probably,” I said. “So don't bother asking her. Ask me. What would convince you, Tamsin?”

“How about a demonstration?”

Mimi yelled out, “NO! That's what Peter said, and Bosanka turned him into a
deer
.”

Tamsin said, “Oh, for crying out loud!”

“Tammy, listen,” Lennie insisted. “I was there, I saw what happened to Peter. I guess I should have let him gore me so I'd have evidence to show you.”

“But he didn't,” Tamsin said, flopping down in the old red sling-chair by Lennie's window. “So there's no evidence, is there?”

I said, “There's what happened.”

“What you say happened,” Tamsin sneered.

“What all three of us say happened.”

She shrugged. She was wearing a big old shirt of Lennie's over a leotard, and purple leg-warmers—very picturesque. Dressed to impress, not to
be
impressed.

Lennie turned to me. “I think you'd better tell the whole story, Val, your way. About your family, too.”

So I sat down on his bed and told about Paavo and the kraken and Joel and Dr. Brightner and Ushah the witch—and now, Bosanka.

Mimi wailed, “This is crazy! I'm going to tell my mother!”

“How would that help?” Lennie objected. “She could get hurt, Mimi.”

“Well, we could, too,” she whined. “What about us?”

“Look,” I said, “if you tell your parents they'll just freak. As far as we know, there are no grown-ups around with a better handle on this situation than we have ourselves. At least I've had some, uh, experience with this kind of stuff.”

“ ‘Experience,' ” Tamsin jeered. “I bet this whole mess is all on account of you.”

I snapped, “Who first suggested ‘making a star' on the roof on New Year's?”

“Hey, come on,” Lennie said wearily. “Passing the blame around won't get us anywhere. We've only got till Saturday to figure out what to do.”

Tamsin tossed her long black hair. “
You've
got,” she said. “I never said I was getting mixed up with some loony tune from outer space.”

“You have to help!” Mimi cried. “Otherwise she'll turn us all into animals!”

Lennie said, “Tammy, you're in. Bosanka said so.”

“ ‘Bosanka said so,' ” she mimicked. “What do I care? I think she's mad: You're all mad.”

Something in her tone reminded me of Joel, of all people. Then it dawned on me: the problem was not that Tamsin didn't believe—she was the one with the guru, right? The problem was that she was jealous. She'd come up with the Comet Committee, but I was the one who turned out to have been mixed up with wizards and monsters and magic all along.

“Tamsin, listen,” I said. “The whole point of Bosanka insisting on help from the whole Comet Committee is that she thinks
all
of us have magic talent. You heard her, Lennie?—Mimi? She said that separately we're not much, but together we have the power she needs.”

Mimi looked teary-eyed. “I don't want any ‘power'! Where does it come from?” She turned pale. “Next time I go to Mass, will my foot sizzle off when I step over the threshold of the church?”

“Of course not!” I groaned.

Lennie got up and grabbed Mimi's shoulders and shook her gently.

“Come on, calm down,” he said. “It's nothing like that.” He touched the chain around her neck. “You're wearing a cross, right? It hasn't burned you or anything, has it?”

Lennie had spent some time in a Catholic school, so he knew what to say. Mimi pulled away from him, but she seemed to have calmed down. Tamsin caught my eye and looked away again, but for one instant we were both on the same wavelength: thank good for Lennie!

“So where
does
it come from?” Mimi asked nervously. She perched on a tall stool next to Lennie's work table, clutching her little silver cross with both hands. “Your power, Val? Where do you get it?”

“I don't know,” I said. The family talent had come to my attention through my Gran and Paavo Latvela, two people I loved. It just would never occur to me that good people's magic could have anything but a good source. “All I can tell you is, I've never seen my family talent used to hurt anybody, except Dr. Brightner and his awful wife—and even then, my Gran tried first to get Ushah to come over to our side.”

Tamsin inquired coldly, “Tell me something, who decides which people get to use this ‘power' and which ones don't?”

“Maybe you have to earn it.” Mimi ventured. “Say, like if your great-great-grandfather saved the king's life so all his descendants get to be dukes? It's sort of a reward for brave deeds and things.” She smiled timidly.

“Or it could be something like electricity,” Lennie said. “If you happen to be born with the right plug designed into your genes, you can learn to tap into this current that's out there.”

I said firmly, “I don't know and right now I can't find out, but from what I've seen, if you're a decent person you use your talent for decent things. If you're a creep you do creepy things with it.”

“Like Bosanka,” Mimi said, with a visible shudder. “She's horrible. Even if we can do what she wants, how do we know she'll bring Peter back?”

She was talking to me. I was the expert. Help.

“She has to,” I improvised. “She needs us to be the Comet Committee again, and we need Peter in the group. He was here that night. He'll have to be with us on Saturday, if she wants the whole committee's help.”

Mimi said, “But I don't want to help her! She's a wicked, awful witch!”

“Wait. Think about it a second,” Lennie said in that calm, considering way of his that made people stop talking and listen to him. “She's alone in a place that's strange to her. She hates it, and she's really scared. Who wouldn't be?”

“Scared?” Tamsin snorted. “That girl doesn't know the meaning of ‘scared'!”

“And, being the kind of person she is,” Lennie went on patiently, “being scared makes her angry, which feels a lot better. She's mad at everything that's gone wrong and put her in this situation, and everybody who doesn't understand and just seems to be getting in her way, and most of all at herself, for being scared.

“So she thrashes around looking for a way out of her problems. To everybody else, it just looks like she's making trouble for no reason. But she has reasons, only in a strange place, and using a strange language, she can't get that across to people. And that makes her more angry. And more scared.”

He looked around at us. “And it keeps on going around like that, getting worse.”

Mimi had stopped gibbering and began nibbling at her thumbnail, frowning. At least she gave the impression of somebody thinking instead of just freaking out.

But now Tamsin was on a tear. She flipped her heavy black hair like an angry horse throwing its mane.

“Listen, who is this person, anyway? She says she comes from another planet, and she's royalty at home. Really? I mean, what is she? Witchella of Woo-Woo, or what? How do we know that anything this oddball from nowhere says is true?”

Lennie carefully set his scuffed boots, now with a gleaming shine, on the floor by his bed. “Tam,” he said, “I heard what she said. It sounded right from the gut to me. Maybe you don't remember being a foreigner in a totally new place, but I do.”

Tamsin opened her mouth and then shut it and turned to look out the window.

I thought of the first time I'd seen Lennie, with his funny haircut, stumbling through accented English, which he only spoke at all if he absolutely could not avoid talking. He'd been a big kid even then, so he hadn't seemed scared; but of course he must have been.