The Thread That Binds the Bones (22 page)

She seemed surprised, but after a moment, she nodded. Tom looked at Trixie. She gave him a small smile, a very tired one; he took Maggie’s hand and they went out the back door, with Trixie following. “What would you like most?” he asked them.

“A nap,” said Trixie.

“Inside the house or out?”

“A bed would be nice,” she said.

Tom glanced at the house, wondering about the rooms upstairs. “Oh, they can’t object to that!” he said. “Can you stand a short flight?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

He licked his upper lip, concentrating, trying to remember how Peregrine had flown, and Agatha. It was like surfing on waves that rose from the earth—lifters, Peregrine called them, without being able to see them—but it also involved nets. He put his arms around Trixie, which startled her, stepped on a rising wave, and lifted them both up until they hovered outside a second-story window, looking into a room they hadn’t seen before. “Probably Jaimie’s,” Tom said, staring at a neatly made white bed.

“Heaven,” said Trixie.

The window was open. Tom helped her in through it, then stood, nonplussed, on air, wondering how one got down off a nonexistent wave that seemed intent on traveling outward. At his thought, the wave lowered itself like an obedient elephant and set him on the ground near Maggie.

“So you can fly,” she said.

“I’m not really sure about it. Peregrine could teach me. Is that what you want?”

“Not yet. Let’s get away from here.”

Chapter 16

Maggie strode off, choosing one of the narrow trails that led deeper in among the trees, and Tom followed. The morning sun had chased the frost out of all the exposed places, but under the trees the white lace still lingered on the carpet of dead leaves. The air in the shadows was chilly, tainted with the breath of winter.

After a few minutes’ walk they came to a place where half-bare trees cast what shadows they could over a wide spot in the creek. Maple leaves flared yellow and red; some lay on the water, swaying gently in a loose tapestry against the rocks at the pond’s lower end. Maggie shivered. She had come out without her jacket. Tom noticed how little he felt the cold. He wondered if that was something Michael had built into his clothes with the stain resistance, or whether this was another case of heat being a friend.

Maggie sat on a damp licheny fallen log, one touched by sun. Tom sat next to her. “Liked—hosting Ianthe,” she said. “She untangled all those webs on Miss Annis and the baby, she cut just the right cords—with light beams that came out of my fingers! She made heat come out of my hands and it didn’t burn me. She just wanted that kettle to get warm and it did. Wish she was inside me all the time.”

“I think that’s dangerous, though. Laura said she could burn out your insides.”

She peeked sideways at him through brown hair. “Don’t care. I’d like to die from that. Wouldn’t mind at all. Especially if I could go home, and then if Dad laid a hand on me—heat! If Carroll came for me, and I could do what he could ... don’t know what I’d do, but ...” She frowned and tucked her hair behind her ear, staring at the ground. “Ask Pa Peregrine if he can call Ianthe back. Bet
she
could make me fly.”

Tom heaved a deep sigh.—Peregrine?

—Yes, honored? He sounded sleepy.

—Maggie wants to host Ianthe as I host you. Is that dangerous?

—? Oh! Peregrine woke with a rush.—Yes, Tommy. For one thing, Ianthe, unlike me, has no wish for half-life. For another, Maggie has no
sitva
in her bones. If she hosted Ianthe for a prolonged period of time, her body would destroy itself. I refuse to wish that on one I ... consider my daughter.

“He says it would kill you,” said Tom to Maggie, “and he won’t do that. He loves you.”

“Oh ... how ...” She looked at him and a tear spilled down her cheek. “How could anyone—”

He gathered her into his lap and held her. At first she was all knees and elbows; her face was hot and wet, and she snarled as he hugged her. Then she relaxed.

Tom let Peregrine share the embrace. Peregrine felt awkward at first, but he reached up and stroked Maggie’s hair. She stiffened at his touch, then gradually relaxed. For a long time all they heard was their own breathing—Maggie’s interrupted by occasional sniffles.

“Pa Perry?” she whispered.

“Yes, daughter,” said Peregrine.

“Can you teach me to fly?”

He closed his eyes, trying to figure out a way a
tanganar
could fly. He thought through Family history, recalling all sorts of games played with
tanganar
,
willing and unwilling, cruel and kind. Never had anyone enabled a
tanganar
to fly. “I can think of no way, child. Ask Tom. His mind is less cluttered with notions of impossibility. I am starting to fear that if I train him too well, he will lose some of his abilities.”

“But I don’t really know how to fly,” Tom said, startling himself. Both voices were his, though Peregrine spoke in a lower range.

“However you imagine it will probably work,” said Peregrine. “You have immense power reserves, and unknown connections and structures in your house of self. You need only choose a shape for the power’s expression and perhaps it will cut itself to your last.”

Maggie stirred. Tom opened his eyes and looked at her. “It just seems weird, you telling yourself things,” she said. “You don’t know what’s in your own head, do you?”

“Not until I talk to myself.”

She pushed her way free of his embrace. “Tell me about flying,” she said, standing on a carpet of fallen leaves.

“These waves pulse up out of the earth. You step on one and it lifts you up. After that, though, you have to cast nets or hooks to pull you where you want to go. I guess you could fly as fast as you wanted if you could think that fast. Faster than flying: it would be easier for me just to pull us back to Trixie’s house through the sideways place right now than to fly us across the river again.”

“But you’d miss the view, and the freedom. Want to be up there where nobody could touch me and just look down on it all.”

He stood up and took her hand. “Okay,” he said. He frowned, and blinked into Othersight. Then he touched her forehead. “Look, now. Do you see waves? There’s a gray one, like a whale, coming up out of the earth. Then another one inside, lavender, rising up like a bubble, spreading, growing; and others, can you see? Up into the air, then they swoop away ...” Waves rose, faint but unceasing.

She squinted past his hand, her eyes moving back and forth. He glanced from the shimmery waves to her.

“I can’t—I don’t see them,” she said. She pushed his hand away from her forehead. “I can’t see them! You’re making all this up, aren’t you?”

“Here’s one right under us.” He let it lift him as it grew and domed. It carried him up until he was level with the upper canopy of the trees. “Wait,” he whispered to the wave, and it tensed beneath him and stopped expanding. He could feel its longing to spend itself across the sky, but it waited. “You see it, then you imagine it lifts you. There’s one under you right now.”

She jumped. She clenched her hands into fists and grabbed a breath. “Lift me, lift me,” she chanted, but her feet stayed flat on the earth.

“Down,” Tom muttered to the wave he stood on, and it lowered him. “Thanks,” he said, and the wave spilled up through him and thinned to nothing in the open air.

Maggie glared at him. “Can’t you just cast a spell and make me fly?”

Perplexed, Tom mulled it over. Could there be some way of throwing a net over her that would respond to her wishes? Carroll hadn’t needed instructions on how to fly when he had been turned into a crow. On the other hand, it wasn’t the first time he had been a bird, from what he had said to Maggie. “If I turned you into a bird—” Tom said to Maggie.

Her eyes looked into distance. She frowned after a moment, then said, “Want to fly like Peter Pan. We flew, Jaimie flew. People can fly, I know they can.”

Maybe it had to do with vision. He could manipulate a sky skin once he saw it. He had been able to dissolve Carroll’s net over him once he saw it. Though other people at the Hollow operated without Othersight, he knew Othersight gave him an edge. Maybe he could give Maggie Othersight. “I don’t know if this will work, but I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Want to try something?”

“Yeah! Ready for a change.”

He stood a moment, ordering his thoughts, then cast a tiny net toward the spot between her eyebrows, and requested that the net grant her the same extra sense he had, the ability to shape what she saw, and to shut off her second sight when she wanted.

“Ouch!” she said. She scratched at her forehead and ground her teeth. “Ouch! It’s like a toothache.”

“Try to relax.” He caught her hands.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch!” Her fingers tensed, clenched, released. He could feel the muscles in her hands pulling tight and tense. Her breathing speeded and jerked.

Tom realized his net was trying to close around something that wasn’t there—was scrabbling in her brain in search of a missing organ. “Stop!” he said to it, and it slackened and dissolved. “Maggie? Are you okay?”

She breathed like a panting animal, fast and shallow. He let go of her hands, and she put them to her forehead, pressing as if trying to push something through her skin and skull.

Alarmed, Tom opened Othersight and looked at Maggie. Her green and lavender aura had a dark, bruised spot where her fingers pressed her forehead.—Peregrine! What have I done?

—Care, said a woeful Peregrine.—With great care, you can mend it.

Tom knelt in front of Maggie, gripped her shoulders. He tensed, then sent out the smallest tendrils he could imagine, stroking her damaged aura, coaxing it into re-weaving itself. His awareness focused down on the project completely, watching as each microfilament healed and wove itself in among the others, with him offering raw materials somehow to replace those that were damaged; the threads he presented were silver, but they stained lavender or green as soon as Maggie’s aura accepted them.

He had just gotten to the point where the bruise was gone, overlaid with Maggie’s colors—but how fragile the whole looked, now that he had seen its building, how thin the individual threads, how delicate the fabric—when something touched his shoulder, startling him out of trance. “What! No! Not now!” he cried, muscles that had been locked loosening, spilling him out of his crouch.

“Tom!”

The air was chilling sweat on his face; his body inside the impermeable clothes was awash, and he could smell his own odor, strong as it was after a whole day’s hard labor under a summer sun. His hands hurt, still locked into the curved grip he had had on Maggie’s shoulders. His arms and legs shook with fatigue, and sweat dripped from his eyebrows into his eyes. With great effort he worked himself awake, to realize that the sun had moved and Laura was standing over him. Maggie stood earth still, unblinking.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Laura asked. “Maggie! Are you all right?” She snapped her fingers in front of Maggie’s face three times.

Maggie woke. “Oh, God,” she said. She rubbed her forehead with the first two fingers of her left hand. “What happened?”

Tom put his hands on the ground, forcing the fingers to open, and sat up. “I tried to cast the spell you wanted, but it worked wrong. Can you think straight, Maggie?” His voice was hoarse.

“Got a terrible headache,” she said.

“But your mind, it’s all there, isn’t it?”

“Huh?” She stopped rubbing her forehead and stared at him, then closed her eyes a moment. “Think so,” she said.

“Bless the Powers and Presences,” he said, and heard Peregrine speaking in his voice.

She began rubbing her shoulders. “Ow.” She opened her jacket and peered under her overall straps and T-shirt. “How’d that happen?”

“What is it?” Laura asked.

Maggie peeked at her other shoulder, then wrapped her jacket tight around her. “Bruises,” she said, her face going blank.

Tom looked at his hands. “I did it. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”

“What happened?” Laura asked as Maggie iced over.

“She wanted to fly. I thought if she could see what I see, she could—but she doesn’t have the right equipment. Oh, Maggie, I hurt you in your head.”

“I remember,” she said in a small voice.

“Peregrine helped me fix it, but I guess I squeezed your shoulders.” His fingers were still stiff and aching. “Oh, Lord. Hate me if you have to. I’m just so glad we could undo the harm.”

Laura went to Maggie. “May I touch you?” she said.

“Why?” Maggie asked.

“I don’t have many of the Bolte gifts, but I have a small healing spark.”

Maggie shrugged. Laura placed her long-fingered hands on Maggie’s shoulders and began to sing. The sounds spoke of warmth and comfort without using any words Tom knew. He hugged himself, trying to let the sound soothe away his misery, knowing he had hurt Maggie when she trusted him most: he had used both magic and physical strength on her, neither in ways she needed. The more he thought about it, the less he liked himself. Why hadn’t he stopped to consider? How could he take such a chance with powers he’d only known for two days? How could he practice on a child when he’d never even experimented on other things? Just because everything else had come easy didn’t mean ...

—Stop wallowing, said Peregrine, in a stern but kind mental voice,—and think about our daughter.

He opened his eyes, realizing that he was sitting there hugging himself, knees drawn up, in the posture closest to invisible, the one he had used in tense situations when he was a child. Laura sang. Tom blinked, saw a strong golden force cloaking her hands, flowing into Maggie’s shoulders. Laura stroked Maggie’s head, her hands spreading light wherever they touched. Maggie frowned. Her eyes were bright. She swallowed.

—You can creep up to her and beg forgiveness, but who will that serve, you or her?

He expelled breath, let his arms down. “I don’t know what I’m doing yet,” he said to Maggie.

“I know.” Maggie worked her shoulders, turned her head. Laura lifted her hands. “Much, much better. Thank you, Miss Laura,” said Maggie.