Guy Kay - Ysabel

HE WAS WALKING in the night under that nearly full moon. They’d dropped him at the bottom of the hill where their road wound through trees to the villa. He’d said he wanted to take a walk, it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. His mother probably wouldn’t have let him, his father was easier that way. He’d reminded them he had the cellphone.

He couldn’t jog, he wasn’t wearing running shoes, which gave him more time to think. He listened for a car behind him. He’d given her the best directions he could. She’d said she’d find it. She might be ahead of him, too: he had no idea where she’d been when she called.

He was still in shock, he decided, whatever that actually meant.

He had believed her, on the phone.

Reckless, maybe, but there was no real way not to believe someone saying she was your aunt, the one you’d never met. And it fit with things he’d known all his life—adult talk overheard before sleep, from another room. It also made sense of that feeling he’d had that the voice—accent and all—wasn’t as unknown as it should have been.

It was close to his mother’s, he’d realized, after hanging up.

Things like that could make you believe someone.

The road went up for a pretty fair distance, actually, when you weren’t running. He finally came to the car barrier again. There was a red Peugeot with a rental licence parked there. No one in it. Ned walked around the barrier, came up to the wooden sign again, under stars this time, and turned left towards the tower.

After a few minutes he saw it, looming darkly at the end of the path. He hadn’t been able to think of any other place. It wasn’t as if he knew his way around here. She’d said she wanted to be where no one could sneak up on them.

No crowds here, that was for sure. He was alone on the path. Or he assumed he was. It occurred to him that it would have been smart to bring a flashlight—and in the same moment he saw a beam of light beside the tower. It flicked on and off, on and off.

His heart was beating fast as he walked towards it. Impulsively, feeling a bit stupid, he tried to reach inside himself, to whatever had let him sense the man in the cloister yesterday and again in the café this afternoon.

He stopped dead in his tracks. He swallowed hard.

The awareness of a presence ahead of him was so strong it was frightening. Once he’d looked for it, there was this glow in his mind where she was: green-gold, like leaves at the beginning of spring.

“That’s me, dear,” he heard her call out. Same voice, same very slight British accent. “Interesting you found me. I think it must be a family thing. I’m going to screen myself now. I don’t want them to know I’m here yet.”

“Why? And who? Whom?”

The man in the café had talked about that screening thing too. Ned started walking, towards the flashlight, and to where he could sense the glow of her. Not a shining so as to illuminate the night, but within him, placing her in the landscape like some kind of sonar. Then, a moment later, the green-gold went out.

“It’s ‘whom,’ I think,” she said. “Your mother was always better at that sort of thing. Hello, Ned Marriner. Nephew. May I please hug you? Is that unfair?”

She’d been sitting on a boulder beside the low barrier ringing the tower. Now she stood up and came towards him, and in the moonlight Ned saw his aunt for the first time in his life.

He wasn’t sure, actually, how he felt about being hugged, but she opened her arms so he did the same, and he felt her draw him to her, and hold on.

He became aware, after a moment, that she was crying. She let him go and stepped back, wiping at her eyes with the back of one hand. She was slim, not too tall, a lot like his mother.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. This is so uncool, I do know that.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, aunts aren’t usually cool.”

He saw her smile. “I thought I’d try to be,” she said.

She looked at him. For some reason Ned found himself standing as straight as he could. Stupid, really.

“You look wonderful,” she said. “I haven’t seen any pictures since your gran died two years ago.”

Ned blinked. “Gran sent you pictures? Of me?”

“Of course she did, silly. She was so proud of you. So am I.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Ned said. “You never even knew me. To be proud or anything.”

She said nothing for a moment, then turned and went back to the boulder and sat on it again. He followed a few steps. He wished there was more light so he could see her better. Her hair was very pale, could be blond but he was guessing grey. She was older than his mom, six or seven years.

She said, “A lot of things in families don’t make sense, dear. A lot of things in life.”

“Right,” Ned said. “I get that. It’s kind of in my face now.”

“I know. That’s why I came. To tell you it’s all right.”

“How do you know?”

Choosing her words, she said, “Yesterday you entered a space I’ve been in for some time. When it happened I became aware of it, of you, from where I was. The family thing, I guess.”

“Where’s that? Where you were?”

She wasn’t hesitating now. “England. In the southwest. A place called Glastonbury.”

“That’s…where you live?”

“With your uncle, yes. That’s where we live.”

“Why? Why did you go away?”

She sighed. “Oh, Ned. That’s such a long answer. Can I just say, for a bit, that I feel easier there than anywhere else? I have…a complicated connection to it? That isn’t a good answer, but the good one would take all night.”

“Fine, but why did you cut yourself off from…from us?”

It had happened years before he was born, before there’d been any “us,” but she’d know what he meant.

She had clasped her hands loosely, was gazing up at him. It was weird, but even in moonlight he could see how much she looked like his mom. That gesture was his mother’s, even, when she was listening, making herself be patient.

“I didn’t, really. Cut myself off. We always kept track of you three through my mother, your gran. I told you, families are tricky. Meghan felt, rightly I suppose, that I’d done something totally unexpected in getting married so quickly to someone she didn’t even know, moving to England right away. She felt I’d abandoned her. She was…very angry. Didn’t want phone calls, or letters, or emails later. Hung up on me, didn’t write back. She was only seventeen when I left, remember?”

“How can I remember?” he said.

He saw her smile. “Now that sounds like Meghan.”

He made a face. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be, but you do know what I mean? Big sister marries a stranger, city hall, no proper ceremony, moves across the ocean, changes all her life plans? Without any warning. And there was…there was more to it.”

“Like?”

She sighed. “That gets us to the all-night part. Let’s say I was involved in something connected to what you felt yesterday. It runs in our family, Ned, on the maternal side, as far back as I’ve been able to trace, disappearing, showing up again. And in me it included some other things that turned out to be really important. And really, really difficult? That changed me. A lot, Ned. Made it impossible to be what I’d been before. Or stay where I’d been.”

It sounded, weirdly, as if she were asking his forgiveness.

He thought about how he’d felt by the mountain earlier today, and in the cloister before. The impossibility of explaining, making sense of it. “I might be able to understand some of that,” he said.

“Thank you, dear.” She looked up at him. “I thought you’d be feeling afraid, and confused, so I came to let you know you aren’t alone. Not the first. In this.”