Guy Kay - Ysabel

“But of course you do,” said another voice, from behind Ned and below.

They all wheeled. But even as he did, Ned saw Ysabel’s face, and he realized she was unsurprised.

They watched as Phelan pulled himself up from the slanting plateau below the opening to the south.

He stood, unhurried, brushing dust from his knees and the torn jacket, using his right hand only. Then he, in turn, looked at the woman.

“A wound?” said Ysabel.

“Inconsequential.” Ned saw the bald head, the scar, the grey, cool eyes and then—with surprise—a smile.

“You heard that?” She was smiling, too.

“It is my proof of being present, love. I need to have heard that or you might not believe me.”

“You would lie to me?”

He shook his head. “Never in any life. But you have disbelieved before.”

“With cause?”

Phelan looked at her. Then shook his head again. “With a right to do so, but not with cause.”

The brief smile had gone. There was hunger in his face, and longing, so fierce they were a kind of light.

“You were below,” said Cadell flatly.

“A harder climb, yes, but I was south and had to come that way.”

“It doesn’t matter. You were not here.”

Phelan shrugged. “No? Tell me, what did she ask the boy, about his bracelet?”

Ned felt the weight of three gazes upon him. He wanted to be invisible, absent, gone.

Then he heard her laughter. “I see. You will say that you did hear, and so came to me first?”

Phelan was looking at the other man, his eyes cold as wilderness, waiting. The light in his face was gone. There was no reply from the Celt. Phelan said, precisely, “She asked him if his mother gave the bracelet to him. Shall I tell now his reply that you also did not hear?”

Wolf on a mountain peak.

Cadell’s blue gaze, returning, was as hard, though, unyielding. It never had yielded, Ned knew.

“It makes no matter how and where you climbed or what you heard below. You were not here to find her first.”

A silence in that high place. It felt like the last silence of the world, Ned Marriner thought.

Ysabel ended it. Ended more than stillness.

“He was not. It is true,” she murmured. “But neither were you, my golden one. Alas, that I am unloved, but neither were you.”

And as she stopped, as that voice fell away, the three of them turned to Ned again.

It might have been the hardest thing he’d yet done, to stand straight, not draw back. Face them, breathing hard, but controlling it. He looked from one man to the other, and ended with Ysabel. The long travel of her gaze, how far it seemed to go, to reach him.

“He is not part of this,” Cadell said.

“Untrue,” she said, still softly. “Did he not lead you here? Will you say he did not? That you found me yourself?”

“The boar guided him,” Phelan said. “The druid’s.”

No fire or ice now. A sudden, intense gravity that was, in its own way, more frightening. As if the stakes, with what she’d said, had become too high for fury or flame.

“It isn’t the druid’s boar,” said Cadell. “Brys served it, not the other way around.”

“I didn’t know that,” Phelan said. “I thought—”

“I know what you thought. The beast is older than any of us.”

Phelan’s thin smile. “Even us?”

Cadell nodded. The light from the south caught his golden hair.

The woman remained silent, letting them speak across her, to each other.

“And so it was the boar…caused this?”

Cadell shook his head. “It made this possible, at best. The boy could have died at Entremont, in Alyscamps, by the round tower. I could have killed him in Glanum where I killed you, once.” His turn to smile, lips closed. “You could have killed him many times. Is it not so?”

Phelan nodded. “I suppose. I saw no reason to have him die. I helped them get away, when the needfires were lit.”

“Perhaps a mistake.” The deep voice.

The other man shrugged. “I have made others.” He looked at Ysabel, and then at Ned again, his brow furrowed now.

Cadell said, “We could have been here ahead of him. I saw him fall, twice. The boar made this harder for him, showing us where he was going.”

“And your meaning is?”

Cadell’s teeth flashed this time. “My thinking is too hard for you? Really? You said the boar caused this. It isn’t so.”

And still the woman did not speak.

She stood as if barely attending to them, withdrawing even as she remained. Ned thought of the sculpture again, sunlit in the sheltered cloister. It was cold here now, so far above the world.

Phelan said, “There is another way to see it, if you are right—the animal bringing us both.”

“Yes. I also have that thought.”

“I killed you once here, did I not? With some others.”

“You know you did. They were lost in the chasm.”

“Not you.”

“They were lost,” Cadell repeated quietly.

Phelan’s wintry smile. “You cling to that, among so many deaths.”

“It is more than dying, there.”

“Not for you, with me alive to hold you to returning. You would have known it even as you went down.”

“They didn’t. They were lost there.”

“Yes. Not you.”

“So I owe you my life?” The bite of irony.

They actually smiled at each other in that moment. Ned would remember that.

“As you said,” Phelan murmured. “We could have arrived ahead of him.”

“As I said.”

They both looked at Ned again.

He said, in a small voice, “I’m sorry, I think.”

Cadell laughed aloud.

“No, you aren’t,” said Phelan. “You’ve been refusing to leave this from the outset.”

A small, maybe a last, flare within. “You don’t know me well enough to say what I feel,” Ned said.

A moment, and then Phelan—stranger, Greek, Roman—nodded. “You are right. Forgive me. It is entirely possible to need or want something, and be sorry it is so.” He hesitated again. “It appears I did more than I intended when I brought you into this. I could not say, even now, what made me do it. What I saw.”

“No? I can,” said Ysabel, breaking her stillness, returning to them. Then she added, with sudden passion, “Look at him!”

The two men did so, again. Ned closed his eyes this time, his mind racing, lost. He opened them. And saw, in both men at the same moment, a dawning as of light—and then a setting of the sun.

Neither spoke for a long time.

Cadell made one quick, outward gesture with his good hand that Ned didn’t understand. Then he pushed fingers through his long hair. He drew a deep breath. Lifted the hand, and let it fall again. He turned to Phelan.

“You truly didn’t know,” he said to the other man, “when you drew him in?”

Phelan hadn’t moved. Or taken his gaze from Ned. He still didn’t. “I knew something. I said that. Not this. How would I know this?”

Know what? Ned wanted to scream. He was afraid to speak.

Cadell, quietly, said, “We might have realized, when we saw the mother and her sister.”

Phelan nodded. “I suppose.” He was white-faced, Ned saw. Shaken to the core, trying to deal with it.

Cadell pushed a hand through his hair again. He turned to Ysabel. She was standing very straight now, extremely still, gathered to herself: a beauty near to stone, it might seem, but not truly so.

The big man looked at Ned for a moment, and then back to her. He said, wonderingly, the deep voice soft, “The mother has your hair, even, near enough.”

At which point, finally, very late, overwhelmed as if to a cliff’s edge of stupefaction, feeling that waves were crashing there against his mind, Ned Marriner understood.