Guy Kay - Ysabel

He found himself walking faster, the urgency inside him strong suddenly, anger and fear. He needed to run, burn some of it off.

He heard a sound ahead of him.

Same snuffling, grunting as when they’d come this way. He stopped dead, breathing quietly. His mother and aunt were well behind him now.

He was about to turn on the flashlight when he saw the boar in the moonlight.

It was as he remembered it. Huge, pale-coloured, nearly white, though that was partly the moon. It was alone, standing stock-still in his path—as it had the last time, in the laneway below.

The animal returned his gaze. He knew by now this wasn’t a simple sanglier like those that had rooted up the field beside the villa.

There was an ache in his chest, as if too many things were wanting release. He said, “Cadell’s gone. He went down the other way. So’s Brys. The druid? He’s really gone. I’m sorry. There’s just me.”

He had no idea what he expected. What happened was that, after a moment, the boar turned its back on him.

It turned and faced east as Ned was—as if rejecting him and all he’d said. As if saying just me meant nothing to this creature, or worse than nothing. As if he didn’t mean anything at all, wasn’t worth looking at.

It did look back once, though, then trotted away—surprisingly agile—into the brush beside the path and was swallowed by the night.

“And what the hell did that mean?” Ned Marriner said.

They came up beside him. “What is it?” his mother asked.

“That boar, same as before.”

His aunt looked around. “It’s gone?”

He nodded.

Kimberly sighed. “Let’s go, dear. Don’t make yourself crazy trying to understand all this.”

“Can’t help it,” he said.

But he walked on with them, and at the end of the path they turned right and came to the barrier and went around it. Dave was on the other side, leaning against his car. Kim went forward and put her arms around him, her head against his chest.

They heard her say, “I told him you could have taken him apart.”

Dave Martyniuk chuckled. “You did? Good thing I stayed behind then, isn’t it? You tired of me? Ready for widowhood?”

“He was trivializing you, honey. I didn’t like it.”

Dave kissed the top of her head. “Trivializing? Kim, I’m a middle-aged lawyer who plays Sunday rugby for the district team and can’t move for two days after.”

Ned heard his aunt laugh softly. “Yeah, so?” she said. “What’s your point?”

“That does remind me,” Ned’s mother said brightly. “I really need to review the quality of security being sent out with me. What good’s a gimpy rugby player in Darfur anyhow?”

Dave Martyniuk looked at her, over top of Kim’s head, which was still against his chest. He grinned. “Fair question.”

Meghan shook her head. “No, it isn’t. And you know it.”

“I know it too,” Ned said. “I saw you this afternoon, remember? That was no weekend rugby thing.”

“You haven’t seen our team play,” his uncle said. “Ned, you want your uncle killed soon as you meet him?”

Ned shook his head. “Not in a hurry for that, no.”

Dave said, “The truth? I do know how to fight. I’ve made sure I still do. But this one—both of these—are in their own league, their own world. I talked a good game in the villa because I wanted them taking us seriously, but I’d have died up there if he wanted me dead.”

Silence. They were completely alone at the end of the road, in the middle of a night.

“What’d he wind up doing?” Dave asked.

Meghan said, “Kim cleaned him up again, then Ned told him he’d sensed Ysabel in Arles. He’s going there.”

Dave looked at Ned. “Why did you do that?”

Ned shrugged. “I told Phelan when he said goodbye. Guess I was being fair.”

“Think anyone else will be?”

Ned scuffed at the gravel. “Maybe not.”

Kimberly let go of her husband, stepped back a little. Her hair was very white in the moonlight. “I’ve decided not to like her,” she said.

Uncle Dave pretended to be startled. He looked at Meghan. “What? After all these years!”

Kim punched him in the chest. “Not my sister! I adore my sister.”

“I haven’t deserved that a whole lot,” Ned’s mother murmured.

“Not the point,” Kim said.

“Shouldn’t it be?”

Her sister shook her head. “No. And the one I don’t like is Ysabel.”

Her husband laughed aloud, startling Ned. “Oh, God. Don’t let her know,” he said. “You’ll completely ruin her life this time around if she finds out Kim Ford feels that way.”

His wife hit him again. “Be quiet, you.”

Dave was quiet. It was Ned who said, after a moment, “Don’t hate her. Don’t even dislike her. She’s outside that. Even more than they are.”

The other three looked at him.

“Can’t help it,” his aunt said stubbornly. “The two of them play this game of hide-and-seek and then the loser gets killed for her? I don’t like it, that’s all.”

“You haven’t seen her,” Ned said. “It…makes a difference. It’s what they’re all about. I don’t think she has a lot of choice either.”

“Hold on,” his mother said.

They turned to her. The moonlight was on her face.

“You didn’t say one would be killed, Ned.”

“But I did,” he said. “That’s what she…”

He stopped. His heart was suddenly hammering again.

“You didn’t, dear,” his mother said, very gently. “Neither did Kate. I wrote it down.”

They were staring at her.

Meghan Marriner looked at her son.

“You said sacrificed.”

Sunrise, the first gift in the world. Promise and healing after the hard transit of night. After a darkness beset with beasts—imagined and real—and inner fears, and untamed, violent men. After sightlessness that could lead one astray into ditch or bog or over cliff, or into the clutch and sway of whatever spirits might be abroad, bent on malice.

Morning’s pale light had offered an end to such fears for centuries, millennia, whatever dangers might come with the day. Shutters were banged open, curtains drawn, shop doors and windows were unlocked, city gates unbarred, swung wide, as men and women made their way out into the offered day.

On the other hand (in life there was almost always another hand), daylight meant that intimacy, privacy, escape from the unwanted gaze, silence for meditation, the solace of unseen tears on a pillow—or of secret love on that same pillow before, or after—were so much harder to claim. Rarer coinage, in the clear light.

It is more difficult—much more difficult—to hide and not be found.

BUT SHE WANTS to be found. That lies at the heart of this. She is prepared to become angry that they have taken so long and she remains alone.

Unfair, perhaps, for she’s made this difficult, but they are supposed to love her beyond words, need her more than breath or light, and she has spent a second night outside and solitary, and it has been cold.

She is not unaccustomed to hardship, but neither is she immune to longing. Seeing them both at Entremont when she came through to the summons has kindled need, desire, memory.

She would not let them know this, of course.

Not yet, and only one of them, after. But these sensations are within her now and, lying awake, watching stars traverse the open space to the south, as if across a window, she has been intensely, painfully aware of them, of lives lived and lost.

And of the two of them, somewhere out there, looking for her.

She isn’t certain why she’d said three days. No need to have done so. A small hard kernel of fear: it is possible they might not find her in time. She knows herself very well, knows she will not back away from this. Is aware that having arrived now in this place she has chosen she will not go forth again. Will not make it easier for them, or for herself.