Guy Kay - Ysabel

“I got it,” he said to his uncle in the dark room. “Cadell’s out there, not too far, and I think he’s calling.”

“Why?”

“How would I know?”

That was unfair, even if he hated these questions…And then, in fact, he realized that he did know, because he remembered something.

“I bet he’s hurt. Kate and I saw him trying to fly when he left.”

His uncle stood up, a large figure in the darkness. “Ned, he couldn’t have. He’d had a knife in his shoulder muscle.”

“Go tell him that.”

There was a silence. His uncle sighed. “All right,” said Dave Martyniuk. “Let’s do that. You able to find him?”

“Don’t know, but if he’s actually calling me, I have a guess. Why do…why do we want to go out there?” He was scared, he’d admit it if asked.

His uncle was dressing. “Because we’re adrift here, no good ideas.”

“He is too. That’s why they came to us.”

Martyniuk shrugged. “Sometimes the blind do lead the blind.”

“Yeah,” said Ned. “Straight over cliffs.” But he started pulling on his jeans and a shirt. “We should bring Aunt Kim. If I’m right, he’ll need a doctor again.”

“Kim, and your mother,” his uncle said.

“Mom?”

His eyes had adjusted enough that he could see his uncle nod.

“She still feels outside all this. Afraid of it. The story of your family. The reason we never met before today. You have to draw her in, Ned. Has to be you.” He hesitated. “You might not have thought about this yet, but what’s happened to you here isn’t going to go away after we leave.”

Ned hadn’t thought about that.

They went quietly down the hall and Dave knocked softly on the master bedroom door.

His mother was a light sleeper. “What is it?” they heard.

“We need you, Meghan. I’m sorry. Can you come downstairs?”

They went down without waiting. Same knock at the bedroom below.

A few moments later there were six of them in the kitchen, with the stove light turned on, for muted light. Ned had had a quick, subversive thought that Kate would come out all T-shirt and legs again, but she’d pulled on jeans and his McGill sweatshirt.

Uncle Dave briefed the others.

“We can all get in the van,” Ned’s father said. “I’ll drive.”

Dave Martyniuk shook his head. “Too many of us, and no reason. I’ll take Ned and the doctors. Edward, there’s really nothing you can do up there, and certainly not Kate.”

“I did have four years of karate?” Kate said optimistically. “Till I was twelve.”

Ned smiled, so did the others.

Edward Marriner looked as if he was about to protest. Aunt Kim forestalled it. “Actually,” she said, “Dave can drive us, but he stays by the car. Ned will take us up.”

“That makes no sense,” her husband said quickly. “Kim—”

His wife held up an index finger. “One, you can’t even walk properly, cher. I’ll wrap your knee again later. That was a bad landing.” She lifted another finger. “Two, even with that, you could very easily start or be provoked into a fight. I saw the way you two were circling each other.”

“I was not circling!” her husband exclaimed. “I, um, have a bad knee!”

His wife didn’t laugh. “Dave, listen. If he flew it was to be defiant, show that Phelan couldn’t stop him, and our orders not to didn’t matter. But the wound did stop him.”

“Of course it did,” Meghan said.

“I know. But Y chromosome, remember. Male idiocy. And so he may be up there spoiling for a fight because he’s had to ask for help.”

“Perfect logic,” Dave said. “So you leave me behind and he picks on Ned?”

“He won’t,” Ned said.

Again that new response after he spoke, the unexpected deference.

“I’ll get my bag,” his mother said briskly. “Ned, take a jacket, it’ll be cold out there.”

The kitchen emptied of adults. Kate lingered a moment. “Want the sweatshirt back?”

He managed a crooked smile. “What’s under it?”

“Me, I guess. But a T-shirt, too.”

“Drat. Only reason I woke everyone was to see if you’d flash your legs again.”

“I figured.” She cleared her throat. “I’d feel stupid saying, ‘Be careful,’ you know.”

“Go ahead, I won’t tell anyone.”

“You scared?”

“Yeah.”

She looked at him. “Be careful.”

He nodded.

UNCLE DAVE PARKED THE CAR where Kim pointed, by the barrier that separated the road from the jogging path. He turned off the engine and they all got out.

“Keep your cellphones on,” he said. “I’m right here.”

“Ready to limp to the rescue?” his wife said.

“Kim, don’t be funny.”

She smiled at him, the moonlight caught it. Ned saw his mother watching as Aunt Kim gave her husband a hug and lifted her face for a kiss. “Sorry, love,” she said. “But I’m right about this and you know I am.”

Dave still looked like he wanted to argue.

Ned walked around the barrier with his mother and aunt, following the beam of his flashlight down the path. It was farther than he remembered. The moon was ahead of them as they went. Clouds moved quickly, obscuring and exposing it, and stars. None of them spoke. This would be, he realized, the first time the two sisters had been together since his mother was a teenager.

In a way, it made him wish he weren’t here. Then he realized something: he didn’t have to be. There was nothing important he brought to this, once he’d woken up knowing that Cadell was calling. Aunt Kim could sense the man as easily as he could.

He was here as a buffer, he decided. To let them be together. Or maybe to hold a flashlight.

He kicked a pebble on the path, heard it skitter away. His aunt, on his right side, said quietly, “Not usually a good idea to talk about kids when they’re there, but I haven’t had a chance to tell you I really like my nephew.”

His mother, on Ned’s other side, made no reply. Ned kicked another stone. It was quiet up here, and cold. He kept expecting to see the tower ahead, round and roofless.

Meghan said, “None of your own. Was that a choice?”

Something difficult seemed to have entered the night.

“Not directly,” his aunt said finally. “Result of a different kind of choice, back when. I would have liked children. So would Dave. Teach them basketball, whatever.”

She was talking in a clipped way. Not her usual tone, Ned thought. As if she was controlling her voice.

The silence that followed made him nervous. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, post-up moves and all that, I guess.”

“That’s it,” Aunt Kim said. Her voice was almost inaudible.

“Adoption was a no?” his mother asked.

Another dozen steps. Ned played the beam ahead of them. He really did wish he were somewhere else now.

His aunt sighed. “Oh, Meg. This was all so long ago. It would have felt like dodging something, sneaking around it.”

“What? You thought you deserved to be childless?” His mother’s voice was sharp.

“I deserved something for a decision I made. This was it.”

“And you know that, Kim? You know that’s why you couldn’t?”

“Oh, sweetie. Meg. Yes, I know it.”

His mother swore in the darkness. She didn’t apologize, either. Ned kept his mouth shut.

He heard a snorting, scuffling sound to the right. Shone the beam quickly that way, but there was scrub and brush off the path, and he saw nothing.

He looked ahead again, and there was the tower at the end of the path, with the moon behind it and empty space beyond, where the land fell away.

His mother stopped, staring at that roofless ruin, the ghostly solitude of it. He and Aunt Kim had been here before; she hadn’t.