Wildalone (42 page)

No wonder Rhys had fallen for me so inexplicably and so quickly. Elza and I looked alike. He could have her on every full moon (obviously). But there were new moons, and half-moons, and an entire spectrum of thinner moons dangling their crescents in between. He must have been lonely through all those. Until, finally, her striking double had emerged—right in front of him, in the morning fog. Why would he pass that up?

A boon or a bane.

Silen was looking at me intently. “Our doubts are our strongest enemy, Theia. Whereas, in your heart, you know the truth.”

“You mean the malleable truth?”

For once, he had nothing to say. I asked him to tell me the rest, whatever he meant by “helping her go through with it.”

“After the accident we had very little time. Only minutes, before the moon would strike the dial.”

“Strike what?”

“The moondial. Calling it ‘sundial' puts humans at ease, but there is no distinction. Noon becomes midnight, that's all.” He took the double flute out of his pocket and placed it on his open hand: one tube lying flat, the other pointing up at a sharp angle. “The moonbeams hit the blade, to cast its shadow. Without this”—his fingers glided along the upper tube—“there would be no moondial, only a garden decoration. The particular one we used that night could have passed for a water fountain, just outside these walls.”

I had come across water fountains. There were several around campus and even one at Pebbles, in the garden outside that enormous library. From afar, these things always looked forsaken; I had never seen water coming out of them. But apparently they could quickly become something else: clocks tempting the moon.

“Everything must be done on a full moon, only then is the dial precise. Afterward, the moon's imperfect orbit throws it off by four dozen minutes every night, and the shadow can never align.”

“Align with what?”

“With midnight. When the blade receives the full moon exactly at twelve, its shadow is hissed to life. Ignited like a wick by the god himself.”

“Dionysus?”

“The very one. Whenever a life has been offered to him, a serpent is dispatched to take it.”

“So then . . . this is how my sister died?”

“Died?” A smile curved his lips with its vague sadness. “Death now merely shrivels at her feet. But it certainly became her part of the barter, if that is what you mean.”

He stepped over to a niche in the wall opposite the fireplace. A graduate student had once referred to it as an “oriel.”

“You are familiar with the legend of the Holy Grail, I am sure. Some believe it to be the chalice from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and which collected his blood after he was removed from the cross. Others see it as a mystical cauldron. In one Welsh legend, King Arthur ventured into the Celtic underworld to steal the cauldron that would restore life to his dead warriors. These lancets”—he pointed at the three stained-glass windows that formed the oriel's semicircle—“tell the story of the knights who went in search of the Grail. One of the more controversial scenes is that of Sir Percival's sister, and how she sacrificed her life to heal a deadly ill woman. It involved a blood-drawing ritual. Hence the name of the glass panel:
Castle of the Strange Custom
.”

I looked at the windows. No color yet, just a grid of glass pieces extinguished until dawn. But somewhere up there, hidden among the others, was a scene whose relevance to my sister's death I was already beginning to guess.

“Imagine how much blood must be taken from one human being to replenish the diseased blood of another! A virgin's blood was believed to be more pure and a dishful of it sufficed, but even that could cause anemia and death. Any smaller dosage—say, a chalice—meant that something else had to be mixed in. Something even more potent than blood: snake venom.”

“But doesn't venom kill?”

“Not when used properly. You know what the Romans used to say?” He waited, as if it was only natural that I would be hanging out with ancient Romans at school. “
There is no death in the cup.
They administered venom as a medicine, knowing that it could heal if swallowed just as it could kill if received in a wound.”

“And my sister received it in a wound?”

“Both, actually. First the serpent delivered death into her veins, then the drink made her immortal. This idea—that one can drink the elixir of life and gain immortality—is as old as humankind. If you look far back in time, the ‘grail' would be just a simple skull in which blood and venom were fused to form a substance of unsurpassed medicinal power. In Greece, we use a mixing dish called a
krater
. But even a simple clay chalice will do.” He raised his hand and I saw in it a small cup filled with water. “Man can give it names, paint mystery around it, drown it in the perplexity of myth. But in the end the grail is merely a cup. Its only power comes from what we pour inside it.”

“I see just water inside this one.”

“Water is where you start; it is the source of all life. Then you procure the additives.”

I watched him ascend the few stairs to what would have been an altar if Procter Hall served as a church. A massive table stretched under the stained-glass window: the High Table from which Dean West used to say Latin grace and preside over his gown-clad scholarly empire. Now Silen ran his hand along the surface . . . and a figure began to appear, that of a man! Then another—a woman's. The bodies were laid out as if for a wake, covered by a white veil, the two heads almost touching in the middle.

“I thought only the lynx could bring secrets back to life?”

“Secrets—yes. But this is my own past, and I can reveal it to you whenever I want.”

He reached under the veil. Lifted the woman's hand. Held the cup under it until the faint splash of a drop against liquid rippled through the hall. I imagined the tiny incision, barely visible on her pale skin. What
Giles had noticed in that casket hadn't been a thorncut at all, but a snakebite, still bleeding.

“You probably expected to see me holding vials—white and red, the venom and the blood. But with a snakebite, the two are already mixed. And if the fang belongs to Dionysus himself, a single drop is enough to turn a chalice into the miraculous fountain of youth.”

He lifted the cup in my direction and I stepped back, terrified that he expected me to drink from it.

“Don't worry, this is not a drink for the living. A sip into one's dead lips, on the other hand, and by the time the next moon rises, life will return to them. This time for good.”

“Then how come my sister ended up in a funeral home?”

“It was the only way.”

“Why, if there was never going to be a funeral?”

“Because the news of a missing student would have been a disaster for everyone involved. Investigations, media, bounties . . . the search would have been endless. A missing
dead
student, on the other hand, is news that gets forgotten overnight. It offers no prospect of a chase, no possibility of a happy ending. An article hits the front page, then the front page hits the wastebasket, and that is the end of it.”

Maybe it was the end for everybody else. But there were two people, in a place I called home, who had never stopped waiting for answers. And who would continue to wait all their lives.

“Did Rhys end up in a funeral home too?”

“No. There was no visible change in him, so he continued with school. The only ones who found out were his brother and that butler—the brother, of course, only years later.”

“How come Elza changed and he didn't?”

“Because he had no pact with anyone. When I pressed the cup to his dead lips, he received immortality—and everything that comes with it—but no strings attached, as you humans like to say. He became indebted to
her
, of course, and always will be. But not to Dionysus. Which makes the daemon a beautiful creature, virtually indistinguishable from any mortal man.”

“And my sister?”

“Your sister challenged the god to the most formidable of bargains: forcing death to step away from prey already taken. Very few have dared to risk the consequences of that bargain. So she had a . . . reversal, of sorts. A metamorphosis. That night, she went as far from being a human as possible while still resembling one on the outside. It is a place from which she can never return.”

Yet she had seemed so human, under that pine tree . . . “Were you the one who stole her body from the coffin?”

“Immortality is the deepest solitude one can imagine. I didn't want her first moments of it to be in a funeral home, all by herself.”

“What about Rhys?”

“She was with him when he woke up.”

The very thought agitated me—of how Rhys had opened his eyes and seen her; how she had smiled at him, knowing that this time he belonged to her for good. “That's exactly what Elza wanted, right?”

“Well, it was certainly more effective than any ring she could put on his finger. But what she really wanted was to be the girl on whose hand
he
would want to put a ring one day.”

“She will be that girl, sooner or later.”

The satyr paused, selecting his words. “I believe he has already found that girl. And it isn't the one he sees on the full moon.”

“Maybe not yet. But everyone else is in his life only briefly, including me.”

“Brevity has nothing to do with it. As you know, love is stubborn. It doesn't end when absence begins.”

There was a barely detectable sorrow in his voice, and I wondered how different his heart could be, after all, from those of us humans.

“Now, enough musings for one night. The last shuttle to Forbes will be here shortly.” He raised his hand and Procter Hall went back to normal: the two bodies disappeared; the chandeliers froze back to their electric glow. “I can arrange for a much faster transport, but you have probably overdosed on phenomena today.”

I smiled, realizing how right he was. “The shuttle will do just fine.”

He opened a hidden door next to the oriel and it led us right outside.

“Silen, I would like to see where my sister died.” His raised eyebrows corrected me again. “I mean, where she stopped being human. You mentioned it was close by?”

“Quite in the vicinity.” He pointed at the adjacent building and I recognized Wyman House, the dean's residence where I had once trespassed by accident. “Trust me, this is a place like any other.”

“It isn't. Not to me.”

I followed him around the back and through a tunnel of leaves whose dome rustled in the dark, high above our heads. It ended in a garden. Just as he had said: a place like any other. Gravel alleys. Geometric flower beds. Evenly shaped bushes. In the middle, isolated from everything else, a stone water fountain dreamed of summoning back to its throat the voice that had long ago abandoned it.

I noticed no spout, just a bare octagonal surface. “Was this always meant as a dial?”

He nodded and positioned his flute on top, then let go of it. The tubes stayed in place (one lying flat, the other pointing up at the night sky) as if held there by a spell. And the clock emerged. A thin shadow, cast at a harmless angle—about five hours off, a week after the last full moon.

“Your sister was . . . she was remarkably . . .”

By now I had heard it so many times. “Brave?”

“That too.” The huge eyes flickered feverishly in the moonlight, each a dial of its own. “But, above all, she was incurably determined.”

He must have assumed I would be just like her. Yet I was neither brave nor determined. Even standing in that garden, where a snake had once hissed to life and sunk its fangs into my sister, filled me with such dread that the venom might as well have spread into my own bloodstream.

“I know Elza was brave, but how did she get caught up in this? All this darkness of rituals and sacrifices . . . it had already found her, hadn't it, long before she met Rhys?”

“Darkness doesn't find us on its own, Theia. It is vain. It wants to be invited.”

When we returned to Cleveland Tower, the parking lot was empty. The last shuttle to Forbes had probably left.

“Don't worry, we didn't miss it.”

I wondered how much more of my mind he had guessed. Or read straight into. Or simply always known. It made being in his presence unsettling and at the same time effortless: for once, there was no point in filtering one's thoughts.

“What am I supposed to do now, Silen? I can't share Rhys with her. No way.”

“To share the one you love—the ultimate challenge to a human heart. But what if the girl you are sharing with is your own sister?”

“If anything, this only makes it harder. Elza is so much like me, but . . . better.”

“Better according to whom? Don't forget that Rhys has chosen
you
. Everything else is an illusion. Ethereal, like your dandelion whose airy head can so easily be scattered down to nothing.”

It was nothing to him. But he wasn't the one who had to live with the thought of Elza. Dread her. Envy her. See her face in every mirror.

“Do you love him?” Anxiety looked grotesque on that face, the last face where I would have expected to find it. “Because if you can break his heart to spare your own a complication, then you don't love him. And you probably never will.”

I wanted to tell him that this time mind reading had failed him, but the shuttle's approaching roar distracted me for a second. When I turned back around, there was only darkness. Stretching far in all directions, giggling soundlessly at the girl who had just brought one more nightmare into it.

THE WISEST OF THE SATYRS
knew everything. To him, past and future were simply halves of an endless, uneventful, solitary present. But about one thing he was wrong: I would have never hurt Rhys to spare my own heart.