Guy Kay - Ysabel

She stopped. It seemed she was crying again. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I swore I wouldn’t cry. Your uncle said I didn’t have a hope. I actually bet him.”

“You lose, I guess. Where is he? My uncle.”

She wiped at her eyes with a Kleenex. “I don’t know if I should tell you,” she said.

Ned shook his head. “Too many secrets. Gets screwy.”

She stared up at him. “You’re probably right. Between us, Ned?”

He nodded.

“Dave is north of Darfur.”

It took him a moment. “The Sudan? But that’s…my mom is…”

“Your mother’s there, yes. Your uncle’s watching over her.”

His mouth had dropped open, comically, like in a cartoon. “Does she…does my mom know that?”

His aunt laughed aloud. A burst of amusement that made her seem much younger. “Does Meghan know? Are you crazy? Ned, she’d…she’d spit, she’d be so angry!”

He honestly couldn’t imagine his mother spitting. Maybe as a ten-year-old…but he couldn’t picture her as ten, either. Or seventeen, feeling abandoned by her sister.

He said, really carefully, “Let me get this. My uncle is there secretly? To keep an eye on my mom?”

Aunt Kim nodded. “I told you, we’ve been keeping track of all of you. But she’s the one I worry about.”

“Why her?”

She was silent.

“Too many secrets,” he repeated.

“This is your mother, dear. It isn’t fair, this conversation we’re having.”

“So it isn’t fair. Tell me. Why?”

Gravely, his aunt said, “Because I think Meghan does some of what she does—the war zones, choosing the worst places—as a response to what I told her I’d done, just before I went away. I made a mistake, telling her.”

Ned said nothing. He couldn’t begin to think of what to say. He felt shaky.

She saw that, went on talking, quietly. “She’d thought…I would be an ambitious doctor, try to do good in a big way. I’d talked like that to her when she was young. Big sister, kid sister, sharing my future. Then I…had that experience, and everything changed. I went off to some village in England to spend my life doing country medicine. Childbirth and checkups. Runny noses, flu shots. Everything scaled way down. After the one very big thing she never understood, or accepted.”

“That’s…what you do?”

She smiled. “Runny noses? Yes, it is. I also have a garden,” she added.

Ned rubbed at the back of his head. “And you think…?”

“I think Meghan’s been showing me, and herself, what she believes I should have been like. What I rejected. Along with rejecting her. And she’s proving she can do it better.”

Ned was silent. After pushing to hear this, he wasn’t sure he’d been right, if this was something he really wanted to know.

“Ned, listen. People do wonderful things for complicated reasons. It happens all the time. Your mother is a hero where she goes. People are in awe of her. Maybe you don’t know that—she probably doesn’t tell. But your uncle knows, he’s been there, he’s seen it.”

“He’s done this before?”

“Only when we knew she was going somewhere very bad.” She hesitated. “Three times, before this one.”

“How? How did you know where she was going?”

He thought he saw her make a wry face in the darkness. “Dave’s talented at quite a few things. Computers are one of them. He could explain it better than I can.”

Ned thought, then he stared. “Jesus! My uncle hacked Doctors Without Borders? Their server?”

Aunt Kim sighed. “I’ve never liked that word. Hacked is so illegal-sounding.”

“Well, it is illegal!”

“I suppose,” she said, sounding cross. “I’ve told him I don’t approve. He says he needs to know what she’s doing with enough time to get there himself.”

Ned shook his head stubbornly. “Great. So he just drops his own life and goes there too. And…and what was Uncle Dave going to do if Mom was attacked or kidnapped by insurgents? In Iraq or Rwanda, or wherever? The crazy places.”

The anger he lived with, the fear, dull as an ache, hard as a callus in the heart.

His aunt said, quietly, “Don’t ask that until you’ve met him. Ned, you won’t ever know anyone more capable of dealing with such places. Believe me.”

He looked at her. “And he does this because…?”

“He does it for me. Because I feel responsible.”

There was something different in her voice now. Ned looked down at her, where she was sitting on the rock, hands still clasped.

“Wow,” he said finally, shaking his head again. “That is controlling. I thought my mom was bad. Is it another family thing? Last I checked she was forty-something years old. And you still feel responsible for her?”

Her laughter again, rueful this time. “If I plead guilty to being a worrier, will you let me off with a reprimand? And please—Ned, you mustn’t tell her!”

“She’ll spit?”

“She’ll want to murder me with a machete.”

“My mother? Are you—?”

“Shh! Hold on!”

Her tone had changed completely; there was a command in it, startlingly. Ned froze, listening. Then he, too, heard a sound.

“Shit,” whispered his aunt. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You swore,” Ned pointed out, a reflex; it was what he did when his mother’s language slipped.

“Hell, yes!” said his aunt, which wasn’t his mother’s reply. “We may be in trouble. Damn! My mistake, a bad one. But why would they attack us? What have you been doing here, Ned?”

“Why would who attack us?”

“Wolves.”

“What? No way. Wolves are mostly vegetarian. I learned that in school last year.”

“Then tell these to go find the salad bar,” said Aunt Kim, grimly.

Ned heard a crackle of twigs and leaves from the woods north of them, near the place where the path sloped down towards the city.

“Do you have anything? A pocket knife?” Aunt Kim asked.

He shook his head. The question chilled him.

“Find a stick then, fast, and get back towards the tower.” She flicked on her flashlight and played the beam on the ground between them and the trees.

Ned caught a glimpse of eyes shining.

He was very afraid then, unreal as it all seemed. As Kim ran her beam across the ground nearer to them Ned saw a broken branch and darted forward to claim it.

As he did, he heard his aunt, her voice hard, icy, speaking words in a language he didn’t know, followed by silence from the darkness.

“What?” he mumbled, hurrying back beside her, breathing hard.

“What did you just…?”

“I asked why they’ve come to trouble the living.”

“The living? You mean humans, right? Us?”

“I mean what I said. These are spirits, Ned, taking an animal shape. They have come early, they aren’t as strong as they will be in two nights.”

Two nights.

Right, Ned thought. He knew that part. Beltaine. Hinge of the year, when souls were abroad.

Or so his gran had told him, along with other tales of the old ways. His gran had been named Deirdre and had grown up in Wales, half Welsh, half Irish. The woman beside him now was her older daughter. Things he needed to deal with were coming really fast and he didn’t know what any of it meant.

There was a green-gold presence inside him again, though, when he looked. That was Kim. She wasn’t screening herself any more.

“Were you speaking Welsh?”

“Gaelic. Closer to what they’d have spoken back when. I hope.”

“You speak Gaelic?” A dumb question.

“Took me long enough to learn. My accent’s terrible, but they’ll understand me if I’m right.”

Back when. When was that? he wanted to ask. Sometimes when you had this many questions, Ned thought, you didn’t have a clue where to start.