Ghostlight (27 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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“Oh, don't bother,” Truth said. “I'll come back for it.” She piled her bags on the settle bench to the right of the door. She only intended to be gone a few minutes, and after all, who was going to steal her things here?
She walked around the side of the house, through the portico where coaches once had drawn up to take on and discharge passengers in inclement weather. By rights there should be a carriage house somewhere in sight, but all
Truth saw was the back terrace, the garden, and the boxwood maze off to the left. Maybe the carriage house had burned down.
“Light?” Truth called softly. She'd passed the house and drawn even with the entrance to the maze but she still didn't see Light anywhere. Hadn't Julian said that Light went wandering in the woods sometimes? If she'd gone there now, Truth could hunt until Blackburn's New Aeon showed up and probably still not find her.
Truth peered into the maze, wondering if Light were anywhere to be found down its white-pebbled pathways. The key to this maze was easy; like many of them, you simply alternated left and right turns in order to come to the center, and used the same method to leave.
Truth took a step down the path, and stopped when she heard voices. A moment later Light and Michael came into view. He had an arm around her shoulders, and Light was laughing up at him, her silver hair spread over his arm and lifting on the breeze like scrolls of cloud. Michael tapped her on the end of her nose with a finger, smiling, and she shoved playfully at his chest. Then they saw Truth.
Light flinched, like a child with a guilty secret. Michael watched Truth to see what she would do, but duplicity was not in his nature. He did not try to hide what Truth had just seen, or make her think that she had not seen it.
“Hi,” Truth said, in what she hoped were neutrally friendly tones. “I was just looking for Light, and Gareth said she was up this way. I wanted to make sure you were all right after last night,” she said, addressing this last directly to Light.
“Oh.” Light looked uncertain. “I'm all right,” she said hopefully, and it came to Truth that Light probably had no memory of the events of the previous night, only memories of all the other times that people had badgered her for information that she didn't have, about events she couldn't remember.
“Well, that's all right then,” Truth said, smiling encouragingly. She wondered if Julian had told Light who Light's father was, and, if he had, if Light had made enough of a connection to realize that she and Truth were sisters. “I just wanted to see you again. That's all.”
“You don't want to talk about Thorne?” Light said doubtfully.
Out of the corner of her eye Truth caught sight of Michael's faint warning frown.
“I don't want to talk about anything you don't want to talk about,” Truth said honestly. “What would you like to talk about?” She spoke slowly and plainly, as if to a backward child, though there was nothing about Light that suggested impairment, only a
difference
so profound that the vocabulary to describe it simply did not exist.
Light giggled and hung her head, peeping slyly up at Truth through her lashes. “You know a secret,” she said.
It took Truth a moment to realize that the pronoun she'd heard was not the expected one. “
I
know a secret?” she said.
Light nodded, still smiling. Truth looked at Michael, hoping for guidance.
“Do you think Truth wants it to be a secret, or will she tell it to us?” Michael said.
In answer, Light slipped out from under his arm and stepped toward Truth, holding out her hand. Truth reached out in return, and Light's fingers closed around her, in a surprisingly strong and assured grip.
“She's … worried,” Light said, as if she were reading sentences in an unfamiliar language. “About me knowing? No, about what others will do when they know. But she still thinks it will be better if everyone does. Truth doesn't like secrets,” Light announced, staring into Truth's eyes with a silver-eyed gaze.
Truth refused to be spooked by this demonstration,
which might be anything from genuine telepathy to guesses so accurate they might simply seem supernatural.
“Light's my sister,” Truth said to Michael, glancing up at him. Light's fingers tightened around hers. It had been the right thing to say, then.
Perhaps it was the proximity of the strongly psychic Light, but when their gazes met suddenly Truth imagined she could hear Michael's unspoken thoughts:
If you will not leave for yourself, won't you leave for her? Take her far away, keep her
safe
?
Truth shook her head reluctantly.
And what would you do with my sister, if you had the right?
she thought back.
“I've been talking with Light about her gifts,” Michael said aloud, as if her were answering her unspoken question.
“Michael says I shouldn't see things,” Light said, but not as if this disturbed her.
“Michael says,” corrected Michael, coming closer to the two women, “that all the human senses are a gift from God, and Man's gift
to
God is his discipline of those same senses.”
“Meaning that Light shouldn't use her powers?” Truth interjected sharply.
“Meaning that we are sent to live in this world, and while we are here, our task is to fit ourselves for those things we will be called upon to do in this world, not to try and live in another. Light has great abilities, but it may be that her task in this world is to set them aside.”
“Of all the—” Truth began, but Light's pressure on her hand stopped her. To be normal—was that so bad, when being different had brought Light such pain?
“You would not say that your sister should speak to every person she meets, much less invite them into her home. How much less ought she to do that when the visitor is unseen, and she has no one's judgment or help to rely upon but her own?”
“So you just want her to …” Truth couldn't think of a tactful description for what she thought Michael wanted.
“To accept the protection of One who will bar the door of her soul to any malignant forces,” Michael said firmly. “To deny what she is when that is the handiwork of God would be impertinent, to say the least, but to deny her protection in her vulnerability would be folly.” Michael smiled gently, to take the sting of fanaticism out of his words.
“I see
your
soul,” Light said softly to Michael. She was about to say more, but Michael gently laid a finger on her lips.
“You must hush, or your sister will say I am a bad influence on you, a religious fanatic who believes that everyone must seek the Divine as he does.”
“And are you?” Truth said boldly, carrying the war to the enemy.
“There are many ways to approach the Divine,” Michael told her. “But only one of them, so I believe, is safe, and that safety was purchased at a cost of pain, sorrow, and tears that is being paid to this very day. But I perceive that I am annoying you, Truth, and you already think me quite tiresome. Shall I leave you with Light?”
“Oh—no,” Truth said, thinking both of her purchases waiting for her on the front steps and how happy Light seemed with Michael—at least when Julian was not around to disapprove. “I have some things to do—I really did only want to see if Light was okay.”
“Yes,” Michael said.
For now
, his eyes told Truth.
But what of the future?
 
When she got back to the front steps, her bags were gone. It did not occur to Truth that they had been stolen; she was baffled more than worried, until she remembered Gareth's offer to take them inside.
Must have done it anyway
, she thought to herself. Gareth tried too hard to please, trying to buy himself a
place in the Circle as if they would not grant it to him by right. Certainly checking her room would be the first thing to do.
When she stepped into the foyer, the faint salt-sea-sugar-pine scent of incense thrust her suddenly back to her first night at Shadow's Gate. She shook it off. Smell was the most primal of the five senses, the one most likely to trigger illogical associative memories. It meant nothing—other than, possibly, that the door of the Drum Room/Temple was open. She tried to remember if she'd smelled incense the one time she'd been in there and couldn't. She went on up the stairs, to find that the Temple's door was not the only door that was open.
The door to her room stood open, and Truth could hear rustling sounds within. Was Gareth unpacking her things as well? That was going a little too far.
Truth hurried through the doorway and stopped dead.
Fiona Cabot was in Truth's room, wearing one of her usual exiguous outfits—a bodysuit in burgundy crushed velvet with a translucent chiffon skirt—though why someone who desired respect so desperately should dress as if she shopped out of the
Frederick's of Hollywood
catalog was a riddle that Truth had not yet solved.
Tissue from the shopping bags was strewn all around the room, and the bags themselves had been thoroughly ransacked. As Truth watched, Fiona tried on the velvet vest—
Truth's
velvet vest—and turned toward the mirror on the dresser, admiring her reflection. As she turned back she saw Truth.
“Oh, there you are. I saw that blond idiot bring this stuff up here, so I decided to see if there was anything here I liked.”
Her face was serene and untroubled. Truth had a moment to wonder why Fiona had been hanging around her room before being consumed with an anger so great it was literally paralyzing. “Get out of here,” Truth said. “And take that off while you're at it—it isn't yours.”
“Make me.” Fiona's smile was an ugly thing. “It's like your dear old dad said—I've got the right to do whatever I want and you've got the right to cry about it. You're not going to yell to Julian because that'd make you look like a wimp and maybe he wouldn't let you hang around here any more, so I guess you're just going to put up with me.”
Fiona stripped off the vest and threw it into a corner, then turned back to the shopping bags, humming under her breath.
“You … bitch,” Truth said.
The hot anger was gone, replaced by a cold contempt and the wonder suitable to the discovery of a new species. She'd seen them in books and on television, but she'd never expected to meet with one in real life; a bitch; a woman who put as much thought and effort into making other people unhappy as most people did into making themselves happy.
Fiona turned back to her, smiling sweetly, and responded with a word so foul it actually made Truth's ears ring with shock to hear it. She picked up Truth's nail scissors from the dresser top, then reached into one of the bags at her feet and pulled out a fistful of marbled green silk—Truth's dress.
Truth took a step into the room, wondering if she could grab the scissors out of her hand before Fiona carried out her obvious intentions.
“I wouldn't,” Julian observed mildly. Each woman froze, as if the remark had been addressed to her alone. “Fiona, my angel, have you been being naughty?” Julian said.
“Truth was showing me the new dress she'd gotten in town,” Fiona lied silkily, “and I was going to trim a loose thread. Only I don't see it now.”
She dropped the dress and scissors to the floor together and kicked them to one side, smiling at Julian
with the perfect confidence of the woman who knows she will be believed not because she is truthful, but because she is beautiful.
“Fiona, darling.” Julian's voice was warm and sympathetic, and Fiona flowered beneath it like a rose in the sun. Truth wondered that she couldn't hear the fury underneath; it spilled off him like smoke from a cake of dry ice, arctic and burning.
“If you ever bother Miss Jourdemayne again—in
any
way—I'm going to have Hereward drive you to the nearest bus station and you'd better pray you have enough money in your pocket for a ticket to somewhere because I guarantee the gravy train will have been derailed. I don't need attitude cases here at Shadow's Gate—which means I don't need you. I hope I'm being very clear?” he asked graciously.
Whatever Fiona had been expecting, it was not this dispassionately savage shaming. As Truth watched, the girl went so pale that her sluttish makeup seemed to lie on the surface of her skin, chalky and inert. Her eyes seemed to grow larger, brilliant through the lens of welling tears.
“Fiona?” Julian said, in that same mild voice.
Fiona gulped, her lips stretching in a sickly rictus of appeasement. She shook her head, unable to speak, the velvet costume suddenly lurid against the ashen pallor of her skin. Julian took a step to the side, and Fiona took the escape offered, running from the room.
Julian looked at Truth.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “Are your things all right? I suppose it's no secret to you that magick—like parapsychology—attracts some inherently unstable personalities.” He smiled ruefully.

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