Guy Kay - Ysabel

“I don’t know what we do,” he said to Kate. “But I have to tell my dad.”

She nodded. “I figured. I’ll come with you. If you want? I mean, he may…he should believe it more, with two of us, right?”

Ned had had the same thought.

“You sure? It’s okay? I’d appreciate…”

She shook her head. “Nothing’s okay at all, but I’m not walking out on you. Two’s easier for this.”

It was. But that made him think of something.

“Three’s better,” he said, and took out his phone.

He turned it on, tabbed to the memory screen, scrolled, and had the cell dial automatically.

One ring only. “Ned? What’s happened?”

She’d know there was something. He wouldn’t have called, otherwise.

He cleared his throat. “Something bad,” he said. It was tricky, controlling his voice. “I need…You think you can come up to the villa? I have no idea what to do.”

Aunt Kim had the most reassuring voice. “Of course I can. Are you there now?”

“In Aix. Walking home. With Kate, the girl I met.”

“Walking from where?”

“Entremont.”

There was a silence. “Oh, Ned,” she said. “All right, I’m west of the city, but not far, it won’t take me long.”

“Thanks. Really.”

“Get yourselves home. It’s the last house on that road? Where I dropped you?”

“Uh-huh. Villa Sans Souci. Melanie put…there are these Canadian flags. On the little signs.”

“On my way.”

He hung up. Kate was staring at him, waiting.

“That was my aunt,” he said.

She blinked. “Because?”

He said, awkwardly, “She’s…been here, done this kind of thing.”

Kate’s expression changed. “You’re kidding me. And you knew that? Like, in the cathedral?”

He shook his head. “Met her for the first time in my life two nights ago. We saw…we ran into the big guy. Cadell? The one who killed the bull.”

Kate bit her lip. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“I know. Complicated family story. Didn’t want to start it on the side of a highway. And you were…in a pretty funny mood, you know.”

She flushed. “That wasn’t me,” she said.

“I know.”

“I mean, it was me, but I’d never do…”

“I know.”

She smiled a little, first time since they’d come back down. “For a guy, you think you know a lot.”

Ned tried to smile back and couldn’t quite achieve it. “I don’t know,” he said.

She nodded slowly. “Okay. But, this is good, isn’t it, about your aunt? I mean, she’ll know what to do, right?”

“For sure,” he said.

Maybe, was what he thought.

He wasn’t at all certain there was anything they could do. He wondered about Melanie’s family. He knew nothing about them. Imagined a conversation.

Hi there. Called to tell you your daughter’s disappeared. She turned into some woman from more than two thousand years ago. Red hair. She’s taller.

He took a deep breath. They started walking again, curving around to the left, beside the stop and start of the ring-road traffic, as if swimming upstream through time.

TIME COLLIDED HARD with the present when they reached the slope leading to the villa. Ned found his footsteps slowing between the trees, and not from fatigue. It was reluctance, resistance, a childlike wish that this state of in-between—when something had happened but it hadn’t yet been told and made real, with consequences—might go on forever.

He told himself the feeling was irresponsible, even cowardly. That they couldn’t start doing something about Melanie until he’d spoken about it. But he also knew how impossibly hard it was going to be to tell this story.

Kate was silent again, but beside him. He looked into the overgrown meadow on their right, when they reached it. Nothing there but butterflies and bees, birdsong. Wild grass, clover, a few poppies, some bright yellow flowers on the bushes at the edge of the woods.

At the villa gates he hesitated again, his fingers hovering over the code box that opened them.

Kate said, “We could wait here. For your aunt?”

He had been hoping, to be honest, that Aunt Kim might have been at the bottom of the road waiting to drive them up. He could have handed this off to her. Been there, done that? You tell them.

He looked at Kate, who had volunteered to help him, though she’d never even met Melanie, or his father or the others. She’d known Ned for only four days, and she was here.

He punched the code, the gates swung open. He punched it a second time, to lock them that way, and they walked through. Time moved again.

His father was on the terrace, at the little table, a tall drink in front of him. Steve was in the pool, doing his laps in the cold water. Ned couldn’t see Greg. The gates clanged, as they always did when they opened. His father turned in his chair at the sound and waved.

“Yo!” Steve called, not pausing in his laps.

“You walked?” Ned’s father called. “Better phone Melanie and tell her. She went down to get you!”

“Where was Greg?” Ned asked, walking across the grass. Kate trailed behind him.

“Fell asleep when we got back from the abbey. They were planning something dire for him when you called. I think you saved him. Why’d you phone if you were going to walk? And who’s your friend?” He smiled at Kate.

Ned had a sudden, sharp awareness that this was the last moment of peace his father was going to know here. It was a hard thought: the terrible innocence of people before hearing news that could shatter their lives. The doorbell, a policeman on the porch at night in rain, news of a car accident…

He wasn’t sure what had made him think of that.

He said, “This is Kate Wenger. Kate, my father, Edward Marriner.”

“Hi, Kate,” his father said. “Ned’s told us about you. You sell essays for walk-around money?” He grinned.

“Hello, sir. No, not usually.”

“Ned, have Vera set another plate. Kate can join us for dinner.”

“I will,” Ned said. He took a breath. “But I need to tell you something first. Something’s happened.”

It was awful, but he was actually afraid he was going to cry again.

His father’s expression changed, but not in a bad way. He looked at Ned, then Kate. “Sit down, both of you. Tell me.”

They sat. Ned took a couple of steadying breaths. Steve was still swimming. It had to be freezing in the pool. A black-and-white bird lifted suddenly from the grass and swooped across to the trees by the lavender bushes.

“It’s about Melanie,” Ned said.

“Oh, God,” his father said. “The van? Ned…?”

“Not the van! I would have phoned.” He saw Kate biting her lip again.

“What happened, then? Where is she? Ned, tell me.”

“She’s gone, Dad.”

“Melanie? She wouldn’t leave us in a hundred years.”

Maybe in two thousand, Ned thought.

“Is she joking again?” his father added. “Are you? Jesus, Ned, I’m too old for—”

“It isn’t a joke, sir,” said Kate. “Something bad happened and…it is really, really hard to explain.”

She sounded earnest and intense, not even close to a practical-joke kind of person. Ned’s father looked at her, and then back to his son.

“You’re scaring me.”

“I’m scared too,” Ned said, “and I don’t know where to start.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

Ned took another breath, like the one before you went off the high board at a pool. An idea came to him, and he followed it before he had time to change his mind.

“Dad…do you know what story Aunt Kim would have told Mom, before she went away? Did Mom ever tell you?”

He had never seen anyone, let alone his father, look so astonished.