The River of No Return (46 page)

“But why didn’t you tell me?”

“You weren’t ready.”

It was Nick’s turn to say nothing. Leo was right. He hadn’t been ready. In fact, he’d been perfect material for the Guild. Rich all his life. Too accustomed to security and too easily distracted by the material pleasures of life. The comfort of jeans. An old house in the Vermont woods. If he hadn’t been called by the Guild to play a minor role in their drama, he would have remained happily drowned, full fathom five, in the twenty-first century.

Meg and Leo had been right to abandon him.

“Sorry,” Leo said. Nick could tell he was. Sorry that Nick hadn’t been ready, that he and Meg had no option but to leave him behind. Sorry, in other words, but not regretful.

“So did you go to Brazil?” Nick kept his voice light. “Alice and Arkady said you must have, when I asked why they’d killed you. That’s what I thought. That they had killed you. And yes. Before you say anything, I went ahead and took their money anyway.”

Leo stopped walking, and Nick stopped, too. The birds and insects were loud all around them, and the sky seemed to be lighter than a minute ago, and darker at the same time. “We went to Brazil,” Leo said. “We found the Ofan in Cachoeira, but they were in disarray. Eréndira Altukhov had disappeared in the effort to cross the Pale, and Ignatz Vogelstein had gone off somewhere—to raise Eréndira’s daughter, I just learned from Alva.”

“Yes.” Nick nodded toward the barn. “Julia.”

“The Talisman.” Leo sounded doubtful.

“You don’t believe Julia is the Talisman?”

“I don’t know,” Leo said, slowly. “Alva told us all about Peter’s theories, and about the P’urhépecha ring. Peter is a brilliant kid, and I’d never discount anything she had to say. And Alva’s insights are always really interesting. So I’m not saying Julia isn’t important. I just don’t know what it means to say that she is the Talisman.”

“Me either,” Nick said. “But I’m only the brawn. You’re the brains.”

Leo smiled. “I’ve got brawn too,
kemosabe
. So if you’re applying for the role of sidekick, I don’t need one.”

“I wasn’t,” Nick said. “But you can let me know if the position opens up.”

They set out walking again. “I’ve been studying the talent for ten years now,” Leo said, turning the topic. “Looking into the group control of time. The gift changes, you see. It gets weirder, and more powerful, if we work in groups of three or five or more—instead of individually. I don’t think one person, one special magical savior, is going to save us from the Pale. It’s going to take collective effort.”

“I’ve been wondering—maybe the Pale is a good thing,” Nick said. “A kind of cleansing. Washing over time and space. A new beginning. Ahn says no, but . . .”

“Like the Ghost Dance? Everything will be good again? Jesus coming as a cloud to cleanse the land?” Leo frowned. “You know the funny thing about the end of the world, my old friend? We always talk about it as if it hasn’t happened already. Because of course the world has ended many times. And when it ends for some people, other people report it in the papers or on TV as a new beginning.” He kicked along for a moment. Then he stopped walking and turned, tapping Nick on the chest with a finger. “But maybe not for you, Nick. You know. ‘Though worlds may change and go awry, while there is still one voice to cry, there’ll always be an England!’”

“That’s not fair,” Nick said.

“You’re right,” Leo murmured. “It’s not.”

They stood for a moment, their arms full of dry wood, looking up at the glorious twilight sky.

“I’m sorry,” Nick said, after a brief pause.

Leo said nothing for a moment, then gestured upward with his chin. “There’s your Mars and your Venus.”

Nick looked up above the apex of the barn at the bright planet and the brooding one. “I’m going to have to go after him,” he said, and whether he was making his promise to Jemison to Leo or to the emerging stars, he didn’t know.

J
ulia is not an experiment. She is a human being.”

Had Nick said her name? Julia blinked her eyes open. It was dark, and there were flames crackling somewhere to her left. She was still on the pile of hay . . . still in the barn. Someone had lit a fire, right in the middle of the floor. There must be a hole in the roof for the smoke, Julia thought dreamily. There was a breeze, but she was perfectly snug. Her head still felt heavy, and it ached, but much less than before.

Nick and his friends were sitting around the fire, talking. Julia could see Nick’s face clearly. He had shaved and looked like himself again, though his hair was rumpled and his shirt was open at the throat. His handsome friend was next to him, and the third man had his back to her, silhouetted in front of the flames. It looked cozy, and Julia thought about getting up and joining them. But when she lifted her head it throbbed. She laid it down again gingerly.

“Of course she’s not an experiment.” The Frenchman’s face was strangely aloof and devoid of expression. But he spoke with frustration, as if he had explained this already. “At least, we don’t think she should be treated as an experiment. We think she should be educated, just as we think you and everyone else should be educated.”

“I’ve heard nothing else for weeks except about how I
should
be educated,” Nick said. “But when am I actually going to start learning?”

“Alva is your tutor, Nick. You were supposed to learn from her.” The man named Bertrand turned his gaze on Nick.

“Is that what you meant when you told me to take her as a mistress? You meant I should ask her to be my tutor? Excuse me for misunderstanding. In my world there’s a difference between whores and schoolteachers.”

Julia opened her eyes wide in the darkness. Nick was very angry. He had been told to take Miss Blomgren as his mistress? By this cold, beautiful Frenchman? It made no sense.

“The sex was just a front, Davenant, to fool Arkady and the rest of them. You could sleep with Alva or not, depending on how the two of you felt about each other. Don’t you understand that we were orchestrating a double bluff back in Fleet Street? You were to seem to be spying for the Guild, when in fact you were to visit Alva for instruction in time play.” Impatience flickered across his face and was repressed. “But your pride, Nick, is not my concern. I am interested in a far more important problem. That problem is named Julia Percy, and she lies over there, mercifully alive. If you are desperate to begin your education, just think what it must be like for Julia. You
know
you want to learn more. But she doesn’t even know that her so-called grandfather was duping her all those years. Ever since she was tiny he was watching her, trying to figure out how she did what she did—a mere child, and so gifted. But as for inducting her into the mysteries of her incredible talent—well.” The Frenchman stared into the fire. “He kept her entirely ignorant, inert, like a stone. I will always respect Ignatius Percy. He was a great Ofan, a great teacher. But still. It is unforgivable.”

Julia listened, her heart pounding. Her so-called grandfather? Had duped her? He knew all along that she had the talent, knew that she could manipulate time? But she couldn’t play with time until after he’d died. She had never done it herself until that time she stopped Eamon from cutting her throat. It had always been Grandfather. It had
always
been him. And anyway, what was so special about her talent? Everyone in this barn seemed to be members of this group called the Ofan. They seemed to have the talent, too. What was so different about her?

In the firelight Nick’s face looked careworn. “If I’d known all of this about Julia, I would have told her,” he said. “The moment I first saw her again, I would have told her. I’d have given her every scrap of information at my disposal, though believe me, there weren’t many scraps.” He looked at his friends. “I understand that you are all concerned for Julia, too. You are concerned because you think she is the Talisman. But I know her. What I feel for Julia is . . .” He stopped, and stared at his hands.

The others sat still, waiting for him to continue, but he didn’t.

In the silence, Julia felt something heavy lift from her. Something she hadn’t even realized she was carrying until it was gone. It wasn’t because of Nick. It was because they all
knew,
all three of them. They knew she was the Talisman, they knew she was in danger, they were her friends. She could stop pretending.

The man who had been quiet until now spoke. His accent was staccato and yet melodious. “With the right training she should be able to hide that talent with skill rather than ignorance. So we’re going to tell her the truth about herself, and the extent of the danger from both the Guild and Mr. Mibbs. We’re going to learn about her talents from her own mouth. Then we’re going to teach her to act as if it isn’t true. In a way, we are going to continue Ignatz’s policy of total camouflage. But with one essential difference. Julia will know she’s hiding something. She will know what she’s hiding, and why, and she will know how to hide it.”

“Alva said something like that, as I was leaving London last night,” Nick said. “Something about finding a way for her to pretend.”

“Yes, it was Alva’s idea.”

But Julia wasn’t listening anymore. She watched the smoke rise from the fire and let her gaze travel all the way up to the darkness behind the firelit rafters. She was among friends. The secrecy was at an end. But Grandfather . . . she closed her eyes and confronted the darkness inside. There was no more hiding from the truth. Grandfather
had
kept her from knowing about herself. He had lied to her. For her entire life. She had been able to manipulate time all along. Since she was a child. She knew the men sitting around the fire were right; she could feel it in her fingertips, all up her spine, even at the roots of her hair. The knowledge was there, so quick and ready and bright that it must have been with her all along. She was like these men, but she was more powerful, more gifted somehow. She was the Talisman not because she made Grandfather stronger, but because she was so strong herself. And Grandfather had walled her up.

She had
frozen time before he died. She had. She knew it now, and it was as if she had always known it, but the knowledge had stayed just beyond her reach, like a dream only just forgotten. It was when she was in a temper or seized by fear. When her emotions got the best of her. She had been the one to freeze Eamon and his team of horses all those years ago when she was four. She had frozen him again, those times they dressed him up and made fun of him. She remembered now, the way he had teased her into a rage, and her sights would narrow on him. Her blood would sing in her ears, and he had seemed to fix in her gaze. He had been locked in a moment of time. But Grandfather had always been there, ready to pretend that it was he who had frozen Eamon, just for fun.

And then . . . in those last moments of his life. Grandfather had sped time up so that he could die before Eamon arrived. But he hadn’t actually been the one to do it. He was too weak. He was dying. He had incited her
to do it. She remembered how he had focused her attention on the dust, how she had felt his power as the dust flew. Except that it hadn’t been his power she had felt. It had been her own. Her power, speeding his death. Hot tears welled up behind her eyelids and oozed out over her cheeks. His very last act had been to use her and then hide the truth from her. He tricked her into killing him. Or used her to kill himself. What was the difference? There was none.

Grandfather. Julia felt herself tumbling down, down, into a deep well of cold rage, a well encrusted with an icy rime of grief.

It was unforgivable, like Bertrand said.

Yet as the tears tracked down her cheeks, their salt, their warmth, restored her to what was real. The flesh and its failures, love and its limits. The ancient barn surrounded her, the huge, rough stones catching the flickering firelight. Julia breathed in the scent of smoke, hay, and chickens, the scent of now. Beneath the present moment she could sense the deep movements of time, the seasons that had been laid away in this barn, year after year. The harvests stretching back and back . . . She sighed, and floated back up to the present. She was in an ancient barn, with Ofan men. In those last moments Grandfather had given her the clues she needed. He had told her to pretend. And he had told her that she would be Ofan after all.

Maybe he had given her just enough knowledge to protect her, and ultimately to save herself. Maybe trust and clues were more powerful than instructions. He hadn’t told her who she was, he hadn’t provided for her. It was a betrayal. And it was a gift. He hadn’t
told
her who she was; he hadn’t dictated the terms and limits of her life. He’d left her to do that for herself.

Julia opened her eyes. Her head felt clearer. The pain was gone.

“You’re the Alderman, in this era, anyway,” Nick was saying. “Why can’t you just call off the dogs? Tell Arkady and the rest of them to leave Julia alone?”

“I could do that, and I will,” Bertrand said, “but Julia has to agree, at least in the beginning, to pretend to be nobody. We must train her to be able to withstand the tests. Arkady is on the scent, and Mr. Mibbs could return at any moment, having discovered that Jemison is nothing but a very courageous Natural. For all our sakes Julia must learn to pretend.”

“Poor Julia,” Nick said. “To be finally told the truth and then immediately told to hide it.”

Silence fell around the fire. A log settled, and sparks flew. Outside, an owl called.

Julia spoke. “I am awake,” she said.

* * *

And awake she stayed, all night, long after the others had fallen asleep. As the dawn broke, revealing that the roof of the great barn not only had a hole but was half missing, the massive rafters holding up nothing but the pinkening sky, she lay curled in blankets on a bed of straw. The four travelers were arranged around the fire in a circle, and Nick was sleeping at Julia’s feet. Sometime in the night she had felt Nick’s hand creep under her blankets and find her bare foot. He’d slept holding it. He held it now. It was as if she were a kite, and he was holding the string, so that she wouldn’t fly up and up until she disappeared.

She looked at her hands, and at the copper ring she now wore on the little finger of her left hand. Her mother’s ring . . . but not the mother she had thought she had. A mother and no known father, and a new grandfather . . . a terrifying Russian grandfather whom she hated. A grandfather who wanted to kill her. She twisted the ring around so that the eye in the circle could be seen. Another ancestor she had never imagined, a long-ago grandfather, had made this ring, across the seas, before Europeans had even known that the world was round or that half the world still lay over the western horizon.

Half the world.

Julia closed her eyes. That long-ago grandfather had been P’urhé . . . she couldn’t even recall the name of the country in which he had lived. But it meant that Julia wasn’t legitimate, or the descendant of earls. Indeed, she didn’t even belong in the nineteenth century. Her mother had been a woman whom Bertrand had described as possessed of a flaming courage and an astonishing intelligence: the very woman she had seen in the strange painting that Eamon had shown her, the woman he had called a mulatto. It meant that Julia had been born in the future, born in a terrible future, and that her mother had probably died to save her from it. Her mother had put her in the hands of a beloved and brilliant teacher, Ignatz Vogelstein, né the Earl of Darchester . . . Grandfather. Julia clenched her fists against that word,
Grandfather
. How much had Ignatz Vogelstein known? How much had he hidden from her?

The four of them had stayed up talking, putting more logs on the fire. Julia had spent those hours propped between Nick’s legs, his arms around her, her head leaning back against his chest. The things she learned had been terrible, but they had also relieved her. It had been wonderful, simply to ask questions and to have them answered.

She had learned about the Guild and the River of Time. That it was possible to jump forward and backward along the stream. She learned about what the Guild did and what the Ofan hoped to achieve. She had been told about Mr. Mibbs and Jem Jemison, and Nick had talked about how he must learn to jump and go after his comrade-in-arms. Bertrand had said that was ridiculous, and Nick had said it wasn’t up for discussion.

For a long time they had talked about her childhood, and the four of them had pieced together how Grandfather must have kept her talent from her. She had told them about what she could do without ever having jumped. They had been very excited. She was more special than they’d even guessed. Apparently they thought it was impossible to turn time itself backward or forward, and yet she had done both, untrained and without having first jumped.

They made her describe it several times. How at the dinner table she had reversed time and Eamon had melted back to his seat. How at Grandfather’s deathbed he had sped time up . . . no,
she
had sped time up, and the dust had blown in the light, and Grandfather’s death had come just in time to save him from Eamon’s taunts. She offered to show the Ofan then and there, but when she started to push time back her head began to hurt. So instead they had talked about the plan, about how to make it seem as if she were nobody at all, certainly not the Talisman and not even an Ofan. Just an ordinary young woman—a “Natural.” Bertrand had looked at her with that green, commanding gaze and said that she must prepare herself to learn a great deal, and quickly. They would use the next few days, as they rode across country to Blackdown, to develop a plan and teach her what she needed to know.

Finally Bertrand said he thought they should stop talking about serious things—they should be celebrating. He believed he might have a bottle of wine in his saddlebags. There was cheering, and then there was drinking, the bottle passed from hand to hand. Nick and Leo relived some adventures they’d had when they were in school together in South America, including a triumph at something called an “eighties talent show.” Apparently their victory had involved singing a song entitled “Islands in the Stream.” Julia insisted on hearing the song, and it didn’t take much encouragement to get Nick and Leo on their feet. She expected it to be bawdy, but it turned out to be very pretty, with clever harmonies. Julia liked the pace and rhythm, but Bertrand almost drowned out the singers with his groans and laughter. Perhaps it was the way they performed it; for some reason each man held a fist up in front of his mouth, and leaned into it, staring into the other’s eyes as he warbled. When they were done they demanded a song of her, and before she knew it Julia found herself deep into an off-key rendition of “Gude Wallace.” At first her audience listened politely enough, but really, Julia could not carry a tune, and before long Nick and Leo had their hands over their ears. After three verses Bertrand took pity and joined her. His voice was as rich and as strong as chestnut honey, and with someone to follow she was able to do better. When the last notes had faded, Julia replaced herself in the circle of Nick’s arms, and they all sat again around the fire, staring into its glowing heart and thinking their own thoughts.