Wings of Fire, page 6
And also, after a while of sitting side by side in silence, Jack became aware of one other thing—she was crying, silently, soundlessly, with tears running down her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them up.
“What is it?” he asked abruptly.
“I have lost it,” she said, her voice very low. “My skin is lost to me. I cannot go home again…”
“You had it with you? “
“Yes, of course! I always have my skin with me. It is the way of my kin. Unless we can hide it and know it is safe… but I was coming here, and after that I didn’t know where I would be, and I thought it would be safer with me… and now…”
He drew a deep breath. “Where did you leave it?”
“On the boat, in my bag...” She looked at him, and the look in her face changed from despair to one of stark terror, a memory of Shura and her hunger for life. “I can’t go down there!”
Jack settled back with a degree of smugness, partly born of relief. He had not wanted to find himself responsible in some way for those tears. “You’ll have to find someone who can, then, won’t you?”
He had meant to tease her gently, to bring her out of her despondency, but he relented immediately as he caught sight of her expression. This was obviously too deep for jest. “I will go. I will go! But not tonight. Not now. I’d rather… not go down there now. Shura is still down there.”
“But you will get it?” She suddenly sounded very young, very afraid.
“I will.” He grinned, a lopsided, impish grin that suddenly made him look exactly like the vivid young boy he had once been, a long time ago, before. “For a price.”
Fiana drew herself up stiffly. “What is your price?”
“A story, I think. About Coocollain.”
He could see her surprise, it flickered in her face like a shadow. For a moment he was annoyed—what did she think he was going to demand? The traditional price of the skin was the life of its wearer, spent with its thief, often a long captivity and a cruel one—but it was the humans who did that sort of thing. He was taniwha now. What did she think he would do with a selkie wife?
“I’ll tell your story,” Fiana said, with a sudden smile. Then it fled, and her eyes were wide and dark and vulnerable as she looked up at him. “What would be your price to find Sabrina for me? Now?”
“Find Sabrina? Why? She’s safe on shore somewhere, I promise you that I gave her…”
“It is what I have to do. Go with her.”
His curiosity again got the better of him. “But why?”
She looked away. “It was a promise made.”
He decided to let it go. He could find out later. He wanted to know more about this Fiana. She seemed very young, and she was very far from her ancestors’ realms. Just what was it that bound an Irish selkie to somebody like Sabrina…? Jack was intrigued. “It would be a debt you would owe me.”
She met his gaze appraisingly. To their kind debts and promises were matters of importance, not to be given lightly. But she had little choice. “I will owe you.”
He smiled at her and turned to kill the fire. “Let’s go then.”
It took very little effort to find Sabrina’s trail. He led Fiana further into the forest, keeping parallel with the shore of his lake. It was full night now, the cloudy sky not letting through any moonlight, but he knew this place well and he moved with swift assurance. Fiana stumbled blindly alongside him. She was still drained from her ordeal in the lake, too weak for his liking; she had been too close to Shura’s hunger. He would have preferred for her to rest a while. She moved slower and slower, dragging her feet, until in the end he caught hold of her arm and almost carried her forward, fearing she would fall and hurt herself otherwise.
“Not very far now,” he said to her, trying to cheer her up. “Just across this stream, and then up the hill.”
He should have felt something, he should have known, but he was concentrating on steadying Fiana and searching for Sabrina. Not until the sudden freeze in the air and Fiana’s startled cry alerted him, too late, did he realize he had stumbled into one of Shura’s domains. She had more than one here in the woods she haunted.
He swore softly in his own tongue and pushed Fiana behind him. In front of him, from the little stream he had been about to cross, the pale hungry spirit gathered herself from the evening mists. His eyes narrowed.
“Shura, let us pass!”
Shura hissed at him. “I said I would not stand against you there, water spirit. But this is my place. And here I claim what I want.”
“Have you not had enough?” He could still fight her, but as Jack he was at a disadvantage, and she had feasted on much life only recently. He knew that he was the weaker of the two of them right now. “Just let us pass. We need to live in peace here, you and I.”
“What for?” She pointed a claw at him. “I could claim the lake also, vodyanoi.”
He instinctively crouched down, searching for and finding the balance of the warrior. He had been a warrior, before. He had forgotten nothing. “You challenge me? You dare to challenge the taniwha?”
She bared her teeth, drew herself up above them. “Ah, you are not so strong here, taniwha. This is my place.”
“No!” Fiana reacted in the same instant as Shura launched herself at Jack’s face, claws reaching out for his eyes. Fiana’s gesture, as futile as it was brave, cost Jack a precious instant as he tried to push her out of the pale ghost’s path. It didn’t take much—Fiana lost her balance and fell to her knees beside him as he felt himself wrapped up in Shura’s cold arms, her sharp teeth filling his vision. He jerked his head away but even as he struggled against her, he could feel his legs go numb and weak and he wavered and fell. He could no longer sense his hands.
At the corner of his eyes he thought he could see Fiana tearing at Shura, who struck out at her with a single impatient, withering blow. Fiana fell again, and this time she did not get up. Helpless now, Jack closed his eyes and reached out for the only source of help he could think of.
Sabrina!
*4*
It was almost dark now, and the air was turning cool. Sabrina began to shiver violently as the evening breeze plastered the thin t-shirt she had worn under her sweater against her skin and played across her bare arms, reminding her of the clammy fingers that had tried to drag her into the black lake sinking into shadows behind her.
The bank was steep and seemingly unclimbable from where she had been cast ashore. There was a jetty on the other side of the inlet, with steps and gravel paths and all the trappings of civilisation—only a couple of hundred meters away, but it may as well have been in Brazil. On the other side of it was a flat beach. Either of those would have been easier to handle. She had known the terrain, she had seen photos, she knew where the ferryboat was supposed to have docked—but for some reason she had aimed herself past all that, and into the woods beyond. Perhaps it had been an instinct of self-preservation, seeking places to hide rather than the open beach or the pier head. But now the stratagem had turned on her—it was this steep bank, or nothing. Actually, no, not nothing. A slow dying from cold and fear, alone out here in the wilderness, in a night haunted by a handful of dangerous spirits willing to kill her—or to die for her.
Giving up would have meant wasting Jack’s gift to her, and Fiana’s; and also wasting the lives of all those poor hapless people whose only crime had been being on the same ferry that she had cursed with her presence. She drew a long shuddering breath and pushed clinging wet hair out of her eyes, leaving a wide muddy smear across her cheek. Her lower lip trembled like a child’s and she bit it violently until she could taste blood. But she was not going to sit down and bawl, although that was the only thing she seemed to have any strength or inclination to do.
It was then that she saw it, somewhere above her, in the trees. A light.
Whatever it was, wherever it was, light in this wilderness meant habitation, and warmth. Survival. Sabrina turned her head from the lake that had claimed all those innocent lives, and her thoughts from the creatures which had had a hand in the deed. She is not one of us, Fiana had said, speaking in her defence, pleading for her life. One of them—no, she was not one of them, not the hungry devourer with the pale eyes, or the quiet dark girl who had seemed willing to sacrifice herself that Sabrina might go free, or the man with the lake in his eyes. Recalling Jack, Sabrina instinctively felt for the stone around her neck, the mysterious opal pendant which seemed to have started the whole drama. It was still there, but now it was just a stone, cold with nothing more than a dousing in icy mountain water. No, she was not one of them. She was human, and in desperate need of a helping hand.
The man in the Swanndri. He had been on top of the bank. There had to be a way to get up there. Teeth chattering like castanets, Sabrina plunged into the ferns and the underbrush. Twice she was turned back by impenetrable thickets of rainforest. Long fern fronds, heavy with damp, and twisted vines that curled around the trees and along the ground reached to tangle her ankles, trip her up in the dark—she found herself on her hands and knees time and time again, her fingers digging into the rich muck of mud and fallen leaves. Sharp sticks of possum-gnawed birches poked out from trees invisible in the murk, stabbed her sides, scratched her bare arms.
The third time she set her teeth and scrambled up across an inhospitable prickly mat of vegetation, ploughing through obstacles instead of allowing them to stall her. When she finally broke through, she found herself on a sort of path. Narrow, twisting, often losing itself in the forest as she turned to follow it uphill—but a definite path. Human feet had passed this way.
By the time she finally made the top of the ridge, the night was thick around her. She was staggering with exhaustion and a steady shivering hypothermia that seemed to have chilled the marrow in her bones. She could have been faced with one of Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian dream castles, and she would not have questioned its presence there. What she did find was, on the face of it, almost as useless to her. The light she had seen from the shore, the light she had followed like a guiding star, streamed from an electrical substation, a long, low building huddling under a coil of pylons and wires. Not a friendly house, then. No help.
Sabrina sank to her knees at the edge of the forest and sobbed, her chin sinking to her chest. She was spent, flickering, almost fainting. The feel of hands on her shoulders and a warm, blessedly dry blanket being wrapped around her felt like just another hallucination for a moment, and then she looked up and met such an unexpected pair of eyes that she came back to full consciousness with a snap. The hands that were tending her were real, indeed—and the eyes that went with them had last twinkled at her over a cup of tea in a cottage in Arrowtown.
“What kept you?” asked Uncle Bob conversationally, hoisting her up into his arms like a rag doll and walking towards the building on the hill. The tone was light, but there was a current underneath that Sabrina read as relief, and her instant reaction was rage.
“Put me down!” It was meant as a bellow, but came out as a croak, and drew only a smile.
“All in good time,” he said. “A bit of brandy in the tea, I think. And I have dry clothes in there.”
“What did you... What are you doing here...? How did you get...?”
“Tea,” he said firmly, “first.”
If she had not been feeling so thoroughly chilled and weak and miserable, Sabrina told herself desperately, she would have put up much more of a fight. As it was, it was a struggle not to give in to the cough that stuck in her throat, or to the wretched tears that she was still on the verge of. Whatever he thought he was doing, she was going to take that brandy, and the tea, and the dry clothes. By God, he owed her. He owed her all that, and more—he owed her an explanation, and it had better be a good one.
Her first glimpse of the inside of the putative substation, when Uncle Bob set her gently on her feet just inside the front door, drove everything from her mind with an impulse of pure shock.
“There’s a tracksuit on your bed, it should fit,” Uncle Bob said, as though there was nothing strange at all in the fact that the substation had somehow metamorphosed into an exact replica of his cottage in Arrowtown, complete to the book of poetry by Milton which she had not quite put back properly in her haste when she’d been caught drawing it from his bookshelf.
“But this is impossible,” she said. It came out sounding flat and childish, a denial in the face of palpable truth, however absurd it may seem.
“It is my house,” Uncle Bob said equably. “It goes where I go. Go and change, Sabrina, you’ll catch pneumonia, and that’s the last thing we need right now.”
“The last thing we – ” Sabrina gasped, and then folded over into a paroxysm of coughing that doubled her over and almost made her collapse all over again. When she straightened, eyes streaming, it was to Uncle Bob holding out a glass of amber liquid.
“On second thought,” he said, “brandy first, tea later. Come on, drink it. Take it with you. Go, get out of those wet clothes.”
Sabrina took the glass mechanically and allowed herself to be steered into the bedroom, trailing the blanket he’d wrapped around her.
The pale, mud-streaked face whose shock-wide eyes she met as she looked around the room initially startled her—until she realised that she was looking at herself reflected in a gilt-framed mirror on the far wall, and that she looked like nothing so much as a lunatic escaped from Bedlam. She drained her glass of brandy in two swallows and gasped as the fiery liquid burned its way down her throat. There was another door opening out of the room. It was ajar, and Sabrina crossed over to investigate. It led into a bathroom with a sink tiled in blue and a tiny square shower tucked into an alcove. In the space of time it took to expel her breath in a sigh she dropped the blanket and shrugged out of her soaked clothes, leaving them in a sodden little heap on the floor. The stream of warm water on her face and body brought awareness back to her mind and heart, and she found herself crying in the shower, a continuous exchange of water as her tears were sluiced away by the spray and more sprang to take their place. She cried until she was exhausted, standing with her face turned up to the shower as if the water streaming down her body could cleanse her of the pain and the responsibility for what had happened that day on the lake. When at last she stepped out and reached for the towel hanging on a hook beside the basin, she was scoured of everything except the anger. That was still there, burning steadily; and now, once she had donned the dry and blessedly warm tracksuit and combed out her towel-dried hair away from her face, she felt sufficiently buoyed by the shower and the brandy to go out and face its subject.
She found him pouring the tea in the drawing room, for all the world as if nothing was amiss.
“Honey?” he said, not turning to face her but instantly aware of her presence in the room. “You need it strong and sweet, I think.”
“Who the hell are you?”
There had been a dozen other questions vying for the honour of being first out, but that one suddenly seemed pre-eminent. That was the answer on which any and all other questions hinged.
Uncle Bob straightened.
“You would believe nothing from me tonight,” he said, “not even if I told you that lake is deep and cold and haunted, even though you have already found that out by yourself. But hear it from me, and you will probably deny your own experience of it.”
Sabrina laughed. “And this, I suppose, is a good reason for not telling me anything at all?” Her hand went to her throat, found the stone which still hung there, and then both hands were up on the chain, on the nape of her neck. But the clasp that she’d used to fasten the thing around her neck seemed to have evaporated, and all her fingers found was a length of fine chain. She tugged at it, irritated. “What is this thing that you gave me? And how do I get it off me?”
“Pull that chain hard enough,” said Uncle Bob conversationally, “and it’s your neck that will give way first. I’d leave it. It doesn’t come off, Sabrina, not until it’s over.”
“Until what’s over?” she yelped at him, driven beyond frustration.
“Come and have some tea,” he said. “Please. I do not mean you harm, I swear it.”
“You had no right,” Sabrina whispered, letting her hands drop to her sides, her eyes wide and bright and focused somewhere far beyond Uncle Bob’s homely walls. “You had no right to take me.”
“It was choice that I did not have,” he said gently, wrapping her hands around a saucer and a cup of fragrant tea, “Sit down.”
Sabrina found that it was possible to be no less angry at somebody if one was suddenly sorry for them at the same time. There had been something of an ancient and unhealed grief in Uncle Bob’s voice, and it called to her own new, raw, harsh one, which responded, incredibly, with sympathy. She had just been told that the chain that she wore round her neck was a real one which bound her to Uncle Bob’s purpose until he was ready to let go—and here she was, she was sipping his tea and feeling sorry for him.
She is not one of us.
“Who,” Sabrina said conversationally, “are those creatures who tried to kill me and/or save me out on the lake? And why does this... thing make them want me dead?”
Uncle Bob actually choked on a mouthful of tea, and had to cough himself back to coherence.
“And while you’re thinking about it,” Sabrina said, sitting straight and stiff in her chair, “you can tell me all about that choice you did not have. If I’m to live with the responsibility of knowing that all those poor lost souls on the ferry died because I was on it, I’ll have a reason why.”
“I told you,” said Uncle Bob, “that you’d not believe a word I said to you...”
