Guy Kay - Ysabel

“Which part of the past?”

She smiled faintly. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Right now, from what you’ve said? I’d guess a lot of it, dear.”

He drank his juice. “We’re not going to get her back, are we?”

His aunt raised her eyebrows. “Oh, my! And which part of what family did that come from? Not ours, that’s for sure. Is your father like this?”

Ned shook his head.

“Then stop it right now. We haven’t even begun looking. You go get some rest. This is three in the morning talking in you. And remember, we have six good people here, and two more coming.”

Ned looked at her. “Well, yeah, but if my mom kills you we’re down to seven.”

His aunt sniffed. “I can handle my baby sister.”

He had to smile at that. “You think so?”

She made that wry face. “Maybe not. We’ll see. But really, go back to bed. We’re starting early.”

They’d made their plans. Both cars, two groups. Aunt Kim, with Kate in her best geek mode, had chosen the destinations. It had seemed hopeless, even ridiculous when they’d discussed it. It seemed more so now, in this dead-quiet of night.

He said, “There’s something I didn’t tell you, from before.”

She sat still, waiting.

“When the druid slammed Greg I thought he’d killed him. I got…I lost it, I guess. I’m really not sure how, but, like, I slashed sideways with my hand, from at least four, five metres away, and I…I cut Cadell’s horns off. Halfway up. Like, with a light-sabre, you know?”

She said nothing, absorbing this. Her expression was strange, though. She reached out, almost absently, and finished his orange juice.

“You aimed for the horns? Not him?”

He thought about it. “I guess. I don’t think I actually aimed at all. I had no idea I could even…” He stopped. It was pretty hard to talk about.

“Oh, child,” Aunt Kim said.

“What do I do about it?”

She squeezed his hand on the tabletop. “Nothing, Ned. It may never happen again. It was Beltaine. You’d seen the boar, a druid, the fires. You were pretty far along that road. And you have our family’s link to all of this. Maybe more than any of us. But you probably aren’t going to be able to control it, and maybe that’s just as well.”

“So I just forget what happened?”

She smiled again, sadly. “You’ll never forget it, Ned. But there’s a good chance it’ll never come back. Keep it, a reminder that the world has more to it than most people ever know.”

“My dad said something like that.”

“I like your father,” she said. “I hope he likes me.”

“You need my mom to like you a lot more.”

“Meghan? She loves me. Like a sister.”

Ned actually laughed.

“Go to bed,” his aunt said.

He did, and to his surprise, he slept.

Up in the wind at Entremont, middle of the night, he is remembering other times, watching the torches burn down. He is thinking about the forest, the first time he came here.

He’d been afraid of dying that day, so many lives ago, walking through black woods, following the guides, no idea where they were taking him, if he’d ever get back to the shore and sea, and light.

Even half lost in reverie, he is aware when the other man returns to the plateau, in his owl shape.

It isn’t as if Cadell is making a secret of anything.

Phelan is looking away south, doesn’t bother turning to see the other man change back. He keeps to himself at the end of the ridge overlooking the lights of Aix below. The sea is beyond, across the coastal range, unseen. He feels it always, a tide within, and the moon is full.

He is undisturbed by the other man’s disregard of the rules she has given them. It isn’t as if such behaviour is unexpected.

She is not going to make her choice because one of them has sought some advantage. They have fought each other or waged wars here for millennia. She is as likely to see Cadell’s flying as evidence of a greater desire for her. Or not.

It is never wise, he has learned, to believe you know what Ysabel will think, or do. And this newly devised challenge is unsettling.

Cadell will be feeling the same way, he knows. (They know each other very well by now.) The Celt might even—the thought comes—have returned here because he’s actually afraid she might let a transgression have consequence. She is capricious, almost above all else, unpredictable even after more than twenty-five hundred years. And she has altered their duel this time into something new.

Sometimes when he thinks the number, the length of time, twenty-five hundred, it can still catch him in the heart. The weight of it, impossibility. The long hammer of fate.

They never change, the two of them. She always does, in small, telling ways. She must be rediscovered, as a consequence, each and every time. Endlessly different, endlessly loved. It has to do with how she returns—through the summoning of someone else. The claiming of another soul.

His back to the other man and the spirits, looking out from the edge of the plateau, he is entirely unafraid. Cadell will not attack him here. That far he would never go.

He expects the Beltaine dead to be gone—as commanded—before sunrise, though the druid might not be. Brys is a wild card of sorts in this, always has been, but there is nothing to be done about that, really.

What he cannot alter he will ignore, for the next three days.

What he needs to do is find her. First.

He needs to concentrate on possibilities and there are too many. He reminds himself that she wants to be found. Tries to grasp what that means, in terms of where she might be.

It is possible that she’ll move around, not stay in a single chosen place. They have done this return so many times, the three of them. She will know how to change garments, hide her hair, find money if she needs it. She cannot fly, but there are trains, taxis. This world will not frighten her any more than it has unsettled either of the men, returning to changes. There are always changes.

She is not limited, except by the range, the ambit of their history here, and that is wide, east and west and north, and to the margin of the sea.

In the moonlight, the land below, unfurling south, is bright enough for shadows. He holds the sound of her voice inside him and gazes out towards the changed, invisible coastline, remembering.

He was so afraid, that first time here.

Arriving with three ships to establish a trading post on a shoreline known to be inhabited, and dangerous. You made your fortune in proportion to the danger. That was the way of it. If the goods on offer were difficult to obtain back home, the rewards were that much greater.

He was young, already known as a mariner. Unmarried as yet, willing to take risks, shape the rising trajectory of a life. Not an especially genial man, by reputation, but no obvious enemies, either. A habit of command. They had made him leader of the expedition.

They put ashore, he remembers, on the coast a little west of here. The shoreline has silted up, is greatly changed in two millennia: logging for timber, wood burned for fires, irrigation systems, flood barriers. The sea is farther away now than it was.

He remembers seeing the trees from the boat, the forest coming right down to where they made harbour. A windbreak cove, small, stony beach. Looking from the ship at those oak woods, wondering what lay beyond. Death or fortune…or nothing of significance.

After all, it didn’t have to be one or the other.

The Celts came to them two days later. Appearing silently out of the woods as they were putting up their first temporary structures.

Fear returning, the sheer size of them. They had always been bigger people. And the wildness: half naked, the heavy gold they wore, the long hair, bright leggings, weapons carried.