The Thread That Binds the Bones (37 page)

—I don’t feel hungry.

—You are too far past hunger to feel it. I cannot remain in you when you are this depleted; you have no protection. Go, fetch food and force yourself to eat it. I will stay beside you.

Maggie sat up. Her clothes were scorched and flaking, some of the material burnt into her skin. It was the death of Pearl’s graduation dress. Moaning, she pried fibers away. Whole patches of her skin burned and throbbed. When she couldn’t stand the task anymore she got up on shaky legs and headed into the bathroom, pulling off everything she could, and went to stand under the shower’s warm rain until she was pretty sure she was wearing her skin and nothing else. Most of her hair was burnt down to bristle. Her head itched and so did the places where her eyebrows used to be, and her skin hurt, even though the rain was gentle. She opened her mouth to the rain and swallowed water, which soothed her throat as it went down.

Laura was waiting when Maggie finally stepped out of the shower. She had brushed the ash off her head; she actually looked good with the equivalent of a crew cut. She held out her hands. “I’ve still got a little healing in me,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t give it to you last night.”

“Had other things on our minds.” Maggie walked to her and closed her eyes, feeling the cool strength coming from Laura’s hands, wanning as it spread through her, taking away the burning. “Thanks,” she said. “Gotta eat. Get strong.”

“Yes,” said Laura. “I’ll be right down. There are clothes in my wardrobe. Help yourself to any of them.” She stepped into the shower.

The kitchen floor had sunk down about two feet, and its surface was pitted, ridged, cratered, and pooled, a picture of what the top of boiling water would look like if you could freeze it. The food preparation area was devastated, wood cupboards singed, metals smoke-darkened, all the hanging herbs crisped to shadows.

Maggie stood on the kitchen threshold, wearing a ceremonial white robe that must have fitted Laura when she was a head shorter, and now fitted Maggie. All Laura’s shoes had been an inch too long for her. She didn’t know if she wanted to chance bare feet on the ruptured floor, even though her feet were tough and calloused. The entry to the pantry looked relatively untouched; maybe there was still food there, but it was across the frozen cauldron of stone.

“
Wish
I could fly,” she muttered. A hand touched her shoulder and she jumped as if shot.

“Sorry,” said Carroll, looking down at her with his head tilted. He had all his hair. “Here.” He held his arms out.

She bit her lip, remembering her first vision of him, just like this, holding out his arms, asking her if he could take her away, a light of appreciation in his green eyes. She had stepped into his arms unspeaking, and he had lifted her up into the air, a flight toward a new life, away from the old one, and for a moment she had believed dreams could come true.

She went to him and he picked her up. They drifted a couple feet above the floor across to the pantry’s entrance. He set her down there and snapped glows and they looked around.

She went to the smoker and opened it, found jerked beef on the top rack, nibbled an edge of a piece and decided it was done. With the first salty vinegar taste, she discovered her hunger and sat down and ate, gnawing meat and swallowing without chewing much.

Carroll poked through containers, lifting lids and sniffing. “Apples,” he said. “Want one?”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

He fished a couple out of a barrel and came to sit down beside her. She handed him some jerky. After they had taken the edge off their hunger, Maggie said, “I’m on a mission from a ghost.”

“What?” he said, and laughed.

“Laugh now,” she said, “before she comes inside me and bosses you around. Ha!”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ll see.” She grinned at him and went to the bread box. She pulled a heel off a loaf and dipped it into the butter crock, smearing it against the butter’s surface, then went to one of the water barrels and scooped up a pitcher full of water. She rejoined Carroll on the floor, broke the bread, and handed him half. “Salt between us,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said.

Boot heels slapped on the floor outside, and then Laura came in. She was dressed in a white blouse, jeans, and cowboy boots. “Where’s the licorice, Maggie, do you know?”

“In a box on the top shelf,” Maggie said, pointing into the upper reaches of the room.

Laura held up her hands and the box came down to her. “Can’t explain it, but I have this craving—”

“My ma used to say the body always knows what it wants when you’re expecting, and that’s when you learn to listen.” Maggie ate about half her bread, sipped water, and felt she had had enough.

Laura lifted the top off the box and grabbed a handful of black licorice twists, then sent the box back. Carroll stared at her with narrowed eyes as she came over and perched on a barrel near them, pulling her legs up and sitting cross-legged.

“Expecting?” he said.

“Has it occurred to you yet that Fayella may have been twisting a lot more than our minds?” Laura asked him before she savagely bit the ends off six licorice twists at once.

“What do you mean?”

“Earth and water, Carroll. Know how many body systems that covers? Powers of generation, and ...” She demolished licorice, then looked up, and sudden tears streaked down her cheeks. “The babies,” she said. “The dead babies. Thank Powers Mom warded us all when we were little.”

She jumped down. “I’m going to check on Tom.”

“I’ll come with you.” Maggie got up, wishing the robe had pockets so she could stash some food. She joined Laura on the threshold of the pantry and stared at the floor again.

Laura stooped. “Climb on my back,” she said.

“You sure? I—”

—Maggie?

—Ianthe! Come on in.

She felt the Presence settling into her. Under the nudge of Ianthe’s explorations, she curled her toes and wiggled her fingers. “Rise,” said Ianthe to Laura, who stood and stared at her with wide eyes.

“Maggie, do you still have your safeguards?” Laura said.

Ianthe gave her back her voice. “Uh-huh,” she said. “She says I’m the only one who can spiritspeak right now, but she says she’ll only stay as long as it’s safe.”

“Maggie?” said Carroll from behind her.

—Say hi, Maggie thought to Ianthe.

Ianthe turned and studied Carroll. “You are an earth power? Have you healing skill? Look to this wounded ground,” she said, pointing to the floor.

“What?”

“Is it not a good servant, who has given years of service to the Family? The time has come to give back.”

He stared at her with narrowed eyes for a long moment, then looked at the floor, frowning.

“That is my message,” she said quietly. “The time has come for healing.”

He sighed and went out to the center of the floor, kneeling in a clear spot and putting his hands against the ground.

After the Great Unbinding had been tamed to nothing the night before, Miranda Locke, eighty-two and still the best healer in the Hollow, had consulted with Michael, who was sign earth and had more energy left than Carroll. Under her direction he had built two incubators in the large cavern, bubbles in the rock that could hold a person each and would remain a constant temperature and tend as best they could to body needs. Weavers brought the softest cloth they had; one of the gardeners supplied cotton for softening the surface. Everybody who could heal had done what they could.

Laura looked into Tom’s bubble, stared for a while at him, naked, pink, hairless, curled half under a sheet, lashless eyes closed, breathing sleep-slow. She reached into the warmth of his safeplace, touched his head. She sensed no response, not physically, and not in the new spectrum of the nonphysical she had been learning to perceive.

—Tom?

In the midst of weaving the night before she had realized that of course she could talk underneath. It was strange, as if she suddenly realized she had had two arms all along, when she’d been using only one.

—Tom? You in there somewhere?

After a long time, the thinnest thread of whisper responded:—Is it morning yet?

A laugh bubbled out of her, shocking her.—No! No, go back to sleep, and get better.

First came the scents, sun-baked rock and clean sheets.

Tom’s stomach hurt; he felt like he had been kicked several times in the gut. He opened his eyes. The world swam in a haze. Everywhere he looked all he saw was a yellow-orange blur, until he glanced toward his hand, a pink blur, and saw he was half enmeshed with something else, a pale lavender blur. He blinked. Nothing got clearer, and Othersight did not kick in. He touched the lavender with hypersensitive fingertips, felt linen, fine rough texture like the lightest lick of a cat’s tongue. Reaching out to the orange, he felt the rough grit of warm rock. He lay and listened to his own breathing; it was the only thing he could hear. It sounded soothing. He fell asleep again.

Somebody smelled like violets. He opened his eyes and looked up at what was probably a face, though it was too blurry for him to be certain. It was a tan-pink blur, with gray above it, and two dark spots where eyes should be. “Aunt Rose?” he asked, and the deep voice of a stranger came out of his mouth.

“Tom? Are you awake?”

“You’re not Aunt Rosemary,” he said. Listening to himself, he realized he was no longer thirteen, and the stranger’s voice in his mouth was his own. “Is this a really weird dream?”

“No. Are you all right?”

“I can’t ... see very clearly. Aunt Agatha?”

“Yes.”

“Wait.” He lay and thought his way down to the tips of his toes, working upward along the arched bones of his feet. For a moment he contemplated his ankles, then moved on to consider the rest of his body piece by piece, rebuilding it in his mind, touching himself to assure himself that he existed. His stomach and his gut were still very tender, the muscles slack. He touched the top of his head and felt stubble, and found more on his chin.

“We did what we could to heal you, but that doesn’t seem to include hair,” said Agatha. “And we can tell eyes to heal, but we can’t tell them what to see.” Then she said, in a gentler voice, “How old are you?”

“Thirtee—thirty.”

“Do you know where you are?”

He glanced up at the orange above him and realized he didn’t have a clue. “Nope.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

He closed his eyes and took inventory. While he was trying to figure it out, though, a young voice answered. “I’m only eight but I can fly already, and I’m going into town! We’re going to steal newspapers from Tycho’s Pharmacy and find out about the war. A German submarine sank the
Lusitania.
Alexander says we have to care about what happens in the world beyond, but I’m not too sure. It doesn’t have anything to do with us, does it?”

Silence answered the voice. After a moment, Agatha said, “Tom?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“What was that?”

“Probably a ghost.” Ghosts sometimes spoke through him, though he usually didn’t admit it to people. He closed his eyes.

“Whose?”

“Fayella’s,” he whispered, then sat up. galvanized. His head brushed the ceiling but didn’t bump it. “Aunt! The Unbinding?”

“Stopped. It’s over. Do you remember?”

He pressed his hands to his chest, where his heart was hammering.

“We owe you a debt we probably can’t repay,” Agatha said. “We’ll give you whatever we can. Is there anything you want right now?”

“Information,” he said. “What happened to her?”

“She’s asleep, and we’re not letting her wake up. We haven’t figured out what to do with her yet. Jess has been ferreting out information for us. Tommy, this thing went a lot deeper than any of us realized.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you ready for an extended discussion? This is the first time I’ve been sure your mind is still in there, though Laura told us two weeks ago you could think.”

“Two weeks ago?” He blinked, frustrated by the blurry vision. “Aunt, where am I?”

“In the Hollow.”

“Not a part I’ve seen before.”

“Michael crafted this for you. It’s a recovery room.”

“Oh.” He leaned back against the wall. It was warm and sandy against his back, and it gave a little. “Nice.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No. Laura. You said Laura. Is she all right? Is Maggie all right? Are Bert and Trixie?”

“The living all survived. Ianthe says we have lost many Presences to the Unbinding.”

“I remember,” he whispered. They had pressed what little self they had into the light, trying to stop its spin, and instead it had splintered and fractured them.

“One Presence I’m worried about.”

“Who?” asked Tom, then wondered what had become of Peregrine.

“Fayella. How can her ghost speak through you when she’s still alive?”

“At the end, her memories got mixed up in mine. I don’t think it’s really a ghost.”

“Oh, good. Wait. Does that mean you might act like her?”

He could hear the fear edging her voice, and it worried him.—Peregrine!

No response.

—Peregrine? Peregrine, please wake up.

“Tom?” said Agatha.

“What? Oh, no, no. Nothing like that. You said before this went a lot deeper than you thought. What did you mean?”

“Jess found some diaries Scylla must have hidden, dating way back to when she and Fayella were girls. Scylla was worried about Fayella. She wrote a lot about her.”

“Fayella was in love with Scylla’s brother Alexander.”

“What? How did you know?”

“More of the memory mix. Go on.”

“Scylla cast klish stones for Fayella and got skulls and snakesheads, sure portent of something gone wrong. But she doesn’t seem to have warned anyone else about it. Scylla said Fayella did abominable things, and that she was trying to contain them, but then, all of a sudden, the diaries stopped talking about Fayella altogether. Jess reminded me of an old discipline, a minor unbinding, one of the tangles, which makes people forget you. We’ve been wondering how much Fayella practiced that one on all of us. Nobody alive in the Hollow remembered the Nightwalker story until Beatrice told it to us, and there’s evidence that Beatrice is tangled about it, too.”