Farrell never knew why he brought the lute with him; he was not even aware of it until the three of them were creeping up the stairs. Except for the door, nothing was obviously missing or damaged, but every room seemed shrunken, smelling palely of damp dust, as a house smells that has stood closed for years. Farrell heard no sounds beyond the scrape of their shoes and the soft thump of the lute on his shoulder, and even those were strangely smothered, as if there were no air to bear them up. Everything is in that room with her, everything—not just her son and his witch, but all the light and soul and energy there ever was in this house. We can’t really see the rest of it, because it doesn’t quite exist without her attention. And all her attention is far away now, in a little low-rent place that I probably can’t find again. East of the sun, west of the moon, with an unlisted phone number.
He had counted on Briseis leading them to Sia, as she had done before, but the dog was as gone as the front door. So, for that matter, was the linen closet, leaving no least suggestion that it had ever been there. This time it was Farrell’s turn to rage helplessly; but Ben said, “There are so many ways,” and took them downstairs again, around the back of the house, in through one of the uncountable windows, and up an evasive stair which dissolved into a dim flurry of passages fading off in every direction. Farrell and Julie filed after him along corridors they could not see, around certain doubtful corners that had to be caught up with before they could be turned, and through high, transparent outlines, the color of abandoned spiderwebs, cold to make the blood ache. I know what these are—the ghosts of rooms she forgot about, just let go when she didn’t need to imagine them anymore. Within those almost-walls, his sense of balance abandoned him utterly, leaving him nauseous and heartsick, holding onto Julie. How terrible to be forgotten by the god that made you, even if you’re just a room. How could you love something that can do that anytime?
In the end, he sometimes thought, they never did find that last room at the top of the house. It found them. The open doorway seemed to come roaring up to them, visibly slowing down and stopping where they stood. No country hotel parlor waited beyond, but fat, lumbering vines, crowding the frame, beckoning and warning with the same green greed. They had to put their heads down and plow blindly onward, tearing the vines aside and trampling flowers like unpleasant human faces underfoot, until they broke out into a clearing that had nothing in it but sandy earth and stones and Aiffe dancing. Farrell never found another word for what she was doing, but he always knew there was one.
Her movements were nothing like the way she had danced with him or like any galliard or almaine he had ever seen her perform at the League’s affairs. On that ground, she was all swirling, filigreed insult; here, dancing alone, she was almost two-dimensional, rigid and thin as a razor blade. Back and forth she went, keeping to a small space, always traveling in a straight line, each razor-quick turn and glide at right angles to the one before, her body gradually writing a precise shape into the air, as if on a darkly gleaming floor inlaid with fiery stars and pentagrams. If she sensed her watchers’ presence—and Farrell thought she did—she paid no heed at all, but only danced.
No one, including Aiffe, saw Sia appear. Suddenly there was never a moment when she had not been there, trudging forever across the clearing toward the girl who was calling her out of hiding. She was wearing the disquietingly fluid garment that Farrell remembered, but it murmured over a body that he did not know, one grown impossibly stooped and withered since just that morning. Her shoulders all but hid her emaciated chest. Under the gown, her belly and thighs seemed to have run like candle wax into pitiful drizzles of skin. The gray eyes had gone suet-colored in her shrunken face, and when she mumbled to herself as she slumped along, Farrell saw that her teeth were rotting like cheese. Turning, he saw the silent tears sliding down Julie’s face and realized that he was crying, too.
Aiffe’s dance never faltered, nor did she speak a word to the wretched old woman standing before her. It was Nicholas Bonner’s angelic laughter that caressed her as he strolled out of the wet, jungly air. Where are we now, really? In what ghost-garden of her dreams? “Has it all caught up with you at once, great mother? What, all that majesty tumbled downstairs, all that thunder and lightning shriveled to a sneeze? Did such serene wisdom ever foresee that it must come to this?” He stood beside Aiffe, hands on hips—a child in tights with a Halloween face and a voice that was casting off its assumed humanity, like a tiger bursting from cover. Even his language was melting into a barely comprehensible croon of tiger joy. “How beautiful, how beautiful you are now, what a wonder to see you so. My treasure, my heart, my prize, my mother, how beautiful you are.” He reached out a hand to tilt Sia’s ruined face toward him; but at the last moment, he drew it back.
Aiffe had begun to move slowly around Sia, not in circles, but in hexagons, octagons, dodecahedrons, weaving straightline patterns that glazed the air, dimming Sia to Farrell’s sight. Nicholas Bonner sang, “But now you must go where I will never go again, to lie down howling in that place you made, that place where you have sent me time and time, and you must wait for someone to call you back to light and warmth and pity, and no one ever will, not you, never. And this is nothing but the least bare justice of the gods, and you know that better than anyone except your son.” The old woman shuffled from foot to foot, never looking at him.
“Oh, mother, goodbye,” Nicholas Bonner said. Aiffe danced through one last binding figure and raised her arms in a way that Farrell had never imagined. At his side, Ben sprang up and charged, screaming. A vine caught him at the shins, dropping him flat on his face. Nicholas Bonner turned toward the commotion, his laughter soaring as Aiffe’s arms came down.
But from the far side of the clearing, in two gigantic bounds and a desperate, yelping leap, Briseis came skidding through the air like a tailless kite in a downdraft. All four legs extended, she crashed full tilt into Nicholas Bonner, who went down harder than Ben and lay where he fell. The stone under his head had not been there a second before. Briseis, half-stunned herself, wandered groggily away into the overgrowth, limping and farting. Aiffe hesitated only an instant in completing her banishing gesture, but Farrell missed it because he was hiding his face against Julie’s wet cheek. He kept it there until Sia’s own laughter began.
He would have known that sound anywhere, in whatever throat. Young and rough, and as much of the earth as Nicholas Bonner’s laugh was of that part of the universe where the stars end, it shook the green vines like a wild wind and set birds fluttering and calling where there had been no hint of any other life in the clearing. Sia said, “The justice of the gods. As old as he is, and he still believes that.” Farrell thought he heard Briseis whine, but it was Aiffe.
When he opened his eyes and turned, he saw that she and Sia were standing so close together that they almost touched, and that the air around them was clear again. Aiffe was plainly trying to back away, and just as obviously could not, for the old woman was chuckling gently, “No, no, child, it was your magic that bound me to you. A very pretty spell, beautiful even, but you let yourself be distracted. Magic is easily offended.” As Farrell, Julie, and a bloody-nosed Ben stared, her body began to grow round and solid once more, her eyes to focus, her skin to restore itself. She explained placidly to Aiffe, “You see, you would never have let me so near to you if I looked even a little bit threatening. And I am only really good at very close range these days. I think I must need contact lenses.”
Farrell realized that she was dancing too, that all her apparently aimless shuffling was taking her in a little sly circle with Aiffe at the center. Aiffe, shaking off her moment of shocked paralysis, glanced once at Nicholas Bonner, who stirred slightly. She said two words in a sweet, curious tongue, made one ugly gesture with three fingers twisted together, and stepped easily away from Sia, pointing derisively at her. “Pathetic,” she said. “You think you’re such hot shit, but you’re just so pathetic. I don’t need anybody to help me with you.”
For a few moments they circled each other, Aiffe moving in swift, taunting dashes, almost skipping, while Sia swept around her with liquid economy, appearing to partner rather than challenge her. Aiffe kept up a constant picket-fence rattle of mockery, saying, “Old, old, old. You aren’t immortal, you’re just real, real old, there’s a difference.” Sia laughed and nodded appreciatively and said nothing.
Julie whispered, “But she’s just standing still. She hasn’t been moving at all.” Farrell blinked, craned his neck absurdly and understood, as suddenly as Aiffe, that nothing of Sia was dancing except her eyes and one foot. The eyes were leading Aiffe, keeping her in motion, forcing her to match her steps to steps that were never really taken. How does she do that? What the hell are we seeing? Aiffe was shaking her head weakly, knowing what was happening to her and trying to break free of it. Sia began to sing.
There were no words to the song, and her lips did not open; yet Farrell found himself humming it with her, although he had never heard it before. It was not like the song she had sung to Ben, but it filled him with the same childhood longings, wordless themselves. Sia’s sandaled right foot was swinging idly back and forth, the posture and her big single braid making her look like a bored schoolgirl. Aiffe stood still. Her head bobbed slightly in rhythm with the foot’s pendulous motion, as did the heads of Julie, Ben, and Farrell, equally hypnotized. The bare, pebbly spot where the sandal brushed the ground was peeling back, was dissolving into mud, into smoky mud, and then into the white-gold madness of lava, as wrong as the idea of looking down at one’s own flayed ribs or bubbling lung. Sia went on singing quietly. The raw, roiling wound under her pawing foot grew wider, spreading between Aiffe and her with increasing speed. Farrell could smell it now, like impossibly overheated brakes.
Slow, sleepwalking, teeth bared to the gums, Aiffe raised one hand as high as she could, until it began to spill over with blue light. She gave a rasping, plaintive cry, which was the last thing Farrell heard clearly for some moments. The blue light leaped from her hand and exploded, turning everything in the world to the color of lava. Farrell’s vision returned before his hearing, showing him Ben and Julie sprawled on the ground. Aiffe herself was down on one knee, rubbing her eyes.
Sia was standing by her, offering her own hand, saying—once the words swam together in Farrell’s head—“Now, that is a long-distance weapon, the oldest of them all. Did my son teach you to use a thunderbolt close to? You should not take him quite so seriously, my dear—there are some holes in his understanding.” She turned away, thoughtfully studying the place where the ground had healed completely, the few tufts of grass not even singed. “But you do well, truly. You should never be ashamed.”
She kept on turning where she stood, dancing for herself, reaching up to loosen her hair, as she had done when she tried to help Micah Willows. The coarse, grizzled hair fell down differently this time—endlessly lengthening, enveloping her body in a sparkling haze, within which she turned and turned, spinning a chrysalis of light. The thick body seemed to be elongating with her hair, hips lilting languidly, stumpy legs visibly growing slender and graceful.
Aiffe danced zigzags, arrows, patterns like a shattered mirror. Her straight lines probed for a way into Sia’s glowing spiral, now beginning to move off slowly toward a rise of ground just beyond the clearing. The sandy earth buckled and flowed under them; trees toppled soundlessly; and the rise became a little hill, with one of the fallen trees replaced carefully on the crest. Wonder why she changed it from rosewood to a willow. Maybe that’s her idea of repotting.
“Mean old, ugly old bitch,” Aiffe said, and hurled what Farrell thought was another thunderbolt after Sia. But this handful of brightness boiled over in midair, condensed and coalesced and was a striped snake the size of a pool cue, its skull bursting almost out of its skin with eagerness to strike. It vanished into Sia’s hair and was never seen again.
Sia glided on, still spinning her changes, while Aiffe danced around and ahead of her to lean impudently against the willow tree, arms folded. “Just to save you some time, I am really fantastic with trees. I’m just trying to be fair.” Sia passed by her, slipping straight into the willow like sunlight. Aiffe made a silly grab for her and drew back, crying out softly in pain, as the rough bark began to shine and tremble. Even from that distance, Farrell could watch Sia’s presence moving in the willow, could mark her progress from root to crown, along every waking bough to the tip of each long, trailing leaf, as the tree drank her up greedily. Damn thing even looks like her now. It is her.
Aiffe said loudly, “I warned you,” but Farrell noticed that she stole another quick look back at Nicholas Bonner, who was trying to sit up. “Merry Christmas to me,” she said and abruptly reached inside the velvet gown to put her hand momentarily between her legs. She spoke several words, inaudible to Farrell, then pushed back the gown’s sleeves, rubbed her hands together, placed one carefully on either side of the willow tree, and tore it apart. It groaned and squealed and shredded in her grip, flailing its branches uselessly. Aiffe cracked it like a marrowbone, gutted it with her long, skinny fingers, going through it like a bear through a garbage can.
Farrell held onto Ben and said, “Wait. We aren’t even here. Wait, Ben.”
Within minutes—are there there minutes anymore?—the hillside looked more like a beach at low tide, strewn with a raging scatter of branches, bark stripped away in damp, splintery sheets, and shapeless chunks of wood, none bigger than fireplace logs. Aiffe’s spell-given strength had clearly consumed itself. She leaned on the ripped stump of the willow, her splitting velvet gown heavy with sweat, her breath making the same sounds as the murdered tree. When Sia flowered, chuckling, out of a hamburger-sized chip of bark behind her, Aiffe did not turn.
“Child, enough, let it alone.” Sia’s voice was infuriatingly kind and amused, even to Farrell’s hearing. “We have no quarrel, you and I—how can we? You are a witch, a magical technician, and very good you are, too. But what I am has no more to do with magic than eating ice cream or striking a match. What I am does not die, cannot hate or ever be trusted, and cannot be concerned with your skills. My quarrel is with my son, who uses you as a stick to beat me with. When you break, he will throw you away. Let it alone and I will be your friend, as much as an immortal can be anyone’s friend. Let me alone.”
Aiffe had wheeled on Sia before her own breathing was quite under control, so her words burst from her in a wetmouthed splutter of furious contempt. “Immortal? You still think you’re immortal? You fat bitch, you fat old walrus, you’re dead now, I’m standing here watching you rot.” She was slobbering uncontrollably, spitting in Sia’s face. “You want to know who’s immortal? I walked into your house and I found your secret place and I walked right in there, and nobody ever did that to you before, put that up your snotty, fat ass. Oh, you’re gone, you are gone, I’m not going to let you stay anywhere. Nick told me, he showed me how I could take your immortality anytime I got ready. I may be a mere fucking technician, but I’m ready, and you are just gone.”
Sia never flinched from the blasphemous shower; rather, she put her head back and spun on her toes, like a child playing under an open fire hydrant. Aiffe’s saliva became a rainbow mist of jasmine-scented water arching between Sia and herself, even after she covered her mouth with both hands. The mist thickened, hiding Sia completely, caressing and blurring the ruins of the willow tree. Flapping her arms as if she were shooing birds, Aiffe ran straight into it. Her efforts dispersed the haze quickly enough, but Sia and the willow were both indeed gone. Aiffe screamed so loudly that the entire hillside caved in.
Farrell found himself lurching forward, at once leaning on Julie and holding Ben back. The imaginary place where they were went mad around them; the sky was gibbering colors, howling the spectrum; the landscape pulsed from jungle to desert to cow pasture with every shudder of color. There is still the room where we made love, this is where her eyes live. Where the littered hill had been, a deep grotto began to take shape, a pool as bright as a cheap toy winking at its heart. Without hesitation, Aiffe scrambled to the edge, threw off her velvet gown, and leaped in. She swam with an otter’s theatrical suppleness, constantly doubling on herself to dive again and again, hunting Sia in every least concealing shadow.
Absurd old songs and proverbs straggled through Farrell’s head as he watched her. He chanted, “Oh, what a time I had with Aiffe the mermaid, down at the bottom of the sea,” and announced earnestly to Ben, “What that is, that’s Neptune’s park, ribbed and paled in with rocks unscalable and roaring waters.” Ben looked at him with Egil Eyvindsson’s face.
Ben whispered, “Oh, God, she never could resist going back to stone.”
For all the racket of their fall, the stone fragments had not raised even a handful of foam or caused the tiniest eddy. Now, however, as Aiffe splashed and sported in overwhelming triumph, a deep, slow swirl began to move in the pool, far below her joyously kicking feet, turning the water deep green, then red, then orange, spreading steadily, picking up speed until the entire grotto hummed and sang and thrilled to a yawning note that the three watching could only feel in their teeth and bones. Aiffe understood too late; she clung to a rock and screamed unbearably for control, but the waterspout swept her aside as it surged to full height, spinning so fast now that the immense wind of it tore white holes in the mad sky and hurled Aiffe completely out of the pool. At the top of the spout Sia danced on one foot, whirling against the cyclone’s rotation, her arms bent sharply across her breasts and face. Farrell knew that she was singing again, though he could not hear her.
Naked, dripping, half-stunned, Aiffe was already up on her hands and knees, doggedly crawling in a circle, counterclockwise, muttering like a bag lady and scratching blurry marks wherever she found a patch of soft earth. She did not turn when the high, leathery fins and great rough backs began to break the pool’s surface. Nor did she move even when the rippling necks with scales as big as bricks lifted jaws that turned themselves almost inside-out trying to snatch Sia down. Only when the waterspout caught fire, blazing up with the breathy hiss of newspaper did she stand and look, gradually raising both fists to hail the impossible castle of flame that hid Sia from her once more.
Her cry was wearily implacable. “On your way, old bitch! I told you I’d never let you rest anywhere! On your way, just keep moving!”
At the sound of her voice, the waterspout billowed out into something momentarily like a human shape traced in fireworks—all sparkling hips and Catherine-wheel belly—before toppling silently in on itself and vanishing, taking the fire with it. Only the wind remained, and it was a different wind altogether, alluringly mischievous as Sia’s eyes, playful as Briseis with her trusted beach towel. Like Briseis, in fact, this wind had a toy of its own, one last living ember, no bigger than a penny at that height, but caressed and cozened by the breeze into a tiny nova, soaring over the shattered grotto. Tossed up, carelessly dropped, captured again, it grew brighter and brighter, the brilliance of its little life almost as painful to look at as Aiffe’s cries of rage had been to hear.
Far below, Aiffe stood very quietly now, watching the dancing spark for a long time before she began to dance again, very slowly, her movements strangely clumsy, slurred with menace. She kept turning her head far back over her right shoulder as she danced, snapping her jaws.
Farrell had in his life seen more shape-changing than most people. Each time he handled the experience less well; it always left him feeling as wrenched and disoriented as if he were the one who had passed through the sweet, nauseating shudder in the molecules, to stumble into moonlight on four feet. He looked away, as always, when it happened with Aiffe, but not quickly enough. Her shoulders hunched and bulked, neck and legs shortening so quickly that she seemed to fall to her knees. The metamorphosis of her head was frightening enough—the bones visibly hollowing and streamlining, but the face itself plunging forward, not into a raptor’s hooked beak, but becoming a kind of feathered muzzle, drooling through gray lips. The arms were the worst. They jolted up and out in electrical spasms, achieving magical angles, and Farrell heard them grinding in their sockets as they yanked Aiffe off the ground, even before rust-and-lichen-colored feathers had fully formed. Her feet had turned to huge, yellow-gray talons, arthritically gnarled by their own massiveness. Even the scales on them looked like miniature claws.
Farrell heard Ben laugh and almost failed to recognize the sound. The Aiffe-bird gained altitude like a helicopter, but the very power of its approach blew its bright prey constantly out of reach as it tried to close in. No swallow could have veered and cornered more neatly in pursuit of a gnat, but the ember drifted on, fanned to near-white heat now by furious wingbeats just behind it. The great claws clutched futilely; the slobbering mouth snapped and snapped; and on the ground, Ben whispered, almost pityingly, “Fool.”
At the same instant, Julie gripped Farrell’s wrist and said, “Look down.”
Farrell realized that, while they had all been gaping after the Aiffe-bird, the grotto and its surroundings had become a northern European forest, anciently dark with huge oaks, elms, ash trees, and maples, stretching almost as far as Farrell could see, to a snowy void that he looked at once, and then never again. There is no horizon. There is only where she lets go.
A little way from where he stood with Ben and Julie, an archer in red crouched under an elm tree, setting an arrow to his bowstring. When he rose, Farrell saw that his face was all of the same white nothingness, except for two pulsing amber absences that were his eyes. The Aiffe-bird tried to dodge the arrow, but it danced after her, tracking her frantic doublings and stooping wherever she fled, until there was nothing for her but to change shape in midair. The arrow flashed between her human neck and shoulder as she fell.
Julie made a little splintering sound in her throat; Ben shouted “Sia!” as if it were no name, but a blessing to armies; and Farrell, being who he was, heard himself deliriously singing snatches of a very old ballad about a king who learned to fly:
Aiffe tumbled, sprawling and flailing for a moment, before she righted herself and spoke sharply to the earth below her. The tearing branches leaned aside to let her light nakedness hurtle past, and the ground bulged and rippled up in whipped-cream solicitude, to gather her tenderly into a forgiving green lap, the breath not even jarred out of her. The ember followed her down, fluttering in a rather bored way, and vanished like a snowflake before ever reaching the ground.
Aiffe was on her feet instantly, with the spring of a boxer determined to show that it was a slip and not a knockdown. But the gesture clearly ate up the last of that wild energy that had, in one afternoon, created illusory beings and real storms, hurled thunderbolts, torn rocks and trees to pieces, and broken into a goddess’ sky, where Aiffe had flown as high as any hawk. Now she trudged through stillborn spells on stumbling feet, reduced to picking up handfuls of dirt and hurling them into the air, kicking stones and sand away on all sides. Behind her, Sia materialized slowly—lazily—out of the little showers of earth, the way she arrived out of blood and black stone long ago. She was dancing as she took shape, but it was a different dance this time, and she was different.
“No more,” she said inside Farrell, and with those words the great forest fled, and they were back in the vaguely pleasant little room that Farrell remembered, with the windows full of nothing but Avicenna twilight and an old man and woman laughing on a street corner. Sia was sitting calmly in her elusive chair facing Aiffe, who stared back at her from the middle of the room, dazedly plucking at the velvet gown which had been restored to her. Farrell, Ben, and Julie clung together by the dusty bookcases, while, in the furthest corner, Briseis kept tremulous watch over Nicholas Bonner. He was standing utterly still, arms at his sides, looking only at Sia. A terrible pity swept through Farrell then, and for once he could not turn his eyes away. What could he be but what he is, nothing but skin and spirit stretched unbearably over a black hole? What could he be but what she made when she was young?
“No more,” Sia said again. Even sitting, she was still dancing, moving only her feet in languid patterns like an alchemist’s equations, as Aiffe moved more and more slowly. Sia’s hands opened to show that she was holding some of the sandy earth Aiffe had thrown aside—powdery bluewhite crystals in her right hand, red-gold in the other. She raised her hands and began to let the crystals drift to the ground. Aiffe screamed, the sound made horrifying by the immobility of her face. Julie started toward her, but Ben barred the way.
Sia smiled. Abruptly she tossed the golden crystals straight up, catching them in her left hand while the bluewhite stones were settling gently into her right. She seemed to be playing casually with the crystals, not juggling them, but allowing them to leap randomly from her hands like dolphins or flames, as they chose. Each time this happened, Aiffe half swayed, half lurched a few steps toward her, and then froze again as if the two were playing some sidewalk game together. Sia was singing once more, and this time Farrell understood every one of the dreadfully gentle words.
With every repetition, the crystals whirled upward, melting together for an emerald instant, just at the height of Aiffe’s eyes, then cascading back into order as unlikely as waterspouts catching fire, not one pebble dropped or in the wrong hand. They were spinning steadily faster, and Farrell took a long time to isolate the further moment when they vanished altogether, returning almost too quickly for their total absence to register. Even when he made himself realize that the crystals were dancing through Aiffe’s head on their way from one hand to the other, even then he would never have believed what he saw, except for the expression in her eyes, which were all she could move now. Sia sang:
The crystals flared brighter after each tiny, impossible disappearance, and each time Aiffe had dwindled that much more, as if the shining flecks were draining all her substance, emptying her of light and color and will. She was making a sound, nevertheless, a wordless, insect whine that could only have been produced by an adolescent faced with an unimpressed universe. The crystals had begun to form pictures as they flashed back and forth: flickering but distinct visions of horses and beaches, armored men clashing by torchlight—no, those are headlights, they’re fighting under a damn freeway—boxes of breakfast cereal, boxes splitting at the corners with mysterious hand-labeled jars and packets; buses and television commercials; and a loose-leaf school notebook, filled with magical symbols and diagrams drawn in multicolored felt-tip ink. The patterns looked exactly like Aiffe’s dances.
It’s all her life, it’s Rosanna Berry’s life burning out there, moment by moment. It’s burning, it’s all burning. He understood as well as he was ever to understand anything again that every image the crystals shaped was entirely real, ripped whole out of Aiffe’s mind—that’s Nicholas Bonner, I guess that’s her mother, that looks like a kid’s drawing of trees and maybe a dog—and that the pictures’ glow was literally the light of actual moments being forever consumed. The way they used to disembowel somebody and throw his guts in the fire right in front of him. To burn a life all up like that. A scene of naked people coupling and tripling in a field under a horned moon hissed and vanished, to be replaced by Garth de Montfaucon reading aloud from a Dr. Seuss book. Aiffe kept up that whine that made Farrell want to shake her. He said loudly, “Don’t. Don’t, Sia, don’t.”
He never knew whether he had truly broken Sia’s concentration, bent so absolutely on Aiffe that, in a way, nothing but Aiffe seemed real, nor did he ever allow himself the illusion of having affected Aiffe’s fate one way or the other. But the wheeling crystals did falter for a moment, Sia did turn slightly toward him, and in that moment Nicholas Bonner made the only move left to him. Knocking Briseis aside, he sprang forward in a bound that covered half the room—the laughing golden frog squatting in the redwood grove that first night—shrieking, “Now, sweet witch, now, save me as I save you, now, now!” and batting madly at the tiny lights swarming around Aiffe’s head. Several of the wild blows struck Aiffe herself as she staggered sideways, but it was Sia who cried out.
The crystals blazed up so brightly that even Sia took a step backward. Farrell kept his eyes as wide open as he could, although he saw the world in aching, molten shadows for days afterward. The colors ran and flooded together in a motley bubble shimmering around Nicholas Bonner. Farrell could not hear his scream, but he felt it, like a saw going through the bone. Nicholas Bonner pounded his fists against turquoise, cold, smoky crimson, and great blowing drifts of amber, but he might have been another silent image, burning to ashes with the rest of Aiffe’s memory. The bubble tightened around him, and he fell, started to get up, then abruptly tumbled over, curling into a fetal position, knees drawn hard to his chest, head tucked between folded hands, lightning-colored eyes wide as a dead man’s. The slack lips were saying a single word, mother, over and over.
Sia dawned out of her chair. There was no movement involved, nothing to do with breath and muscle and leverage, only that slow, immense arising in freedom from everything mortal. Farrell tried to look straight at her, to see her truly, but a monster would have been more comprehensible, a black stone more human. What went to answer her son’s despair was a shape that Farrell’s senses could not contain and a light that his spirit simply could not bear. This is why you’re not ever supposed to see the gods naked. So he looked at Julie and Ben instead, and Julie looked back at him, but Ben was far away, moving toward the light.
It took Sia forever to reach the crystal bubble, but forever was no time at all. However long her journey really lasted, she was there while Farrell’s ill-used and completely mutinous eyes were still reporting to him that she was crossing the room, was stretching out her arms, and was beginning to say a word that he knew must be Nicholas Bonner’s real name. The bubble waited for her, matching her light with its own; but behind the slippery flames, it had already grown thick-walled and opaque, almost hiding Nicholas Bonner. Sia took hold of it.
Rather, she took hold in it, for her hands passed straight through the crystal fires and disappeared within the bubble—how far is she, how far has she gone in there, which is she, which is she? For an instant, Sia and the bubble were one—a single blinding silence like a star, endlessly devouring itself. Ben was as close to it as his body would let him go, shouting in a language that Farrell had never heard. Farrell had a moment’s glimpse of Aiffe with her head thrown back and her skinny arms waving randomly. He was never quite certain whether she had been merely fighting for balance, trying to knit one last reflexive spell together while Sia was unmindful of her, or something somewhere between the two. Julie pinioned her and held her firmly, taking no chances.
Then Sia was there again in the form they knew, her hands empty, her mouth opening to utter a howl of hopeless pain that would surely rattle the real stars in their courses and shake gods down out of the heavens like scurrying cockroaches. But the cry never came, and Farrell could not breathe for the dreadful wrongness of that denial. The bubble disappeared. Unlike every other picture that the crystals had made, this one was not followed by any other bright vision. It was just gone, and a very old woman was sinking almost weightlessly to a floor no more solid than herself, and the windows were now saying that it was earlier than it had been, not yet dusk at all.
Ben picked Sia up and carried her back to her chair, which altered its shape to keep her from falling again. He was still speaking to her in the strange language that sounded like a storm trying hard to be gentle. Sia’s eyes were closed, but her chuckle was as tenderly malicious as always. She said, “For what it is worth, my dearest Ben, my best Ben, you are the only human who ever learned even that much of my talk. Speak it to yourself sometimes, just to remember me.” Ben put her fingers to his mouth and whispered against them.
Farrell asked, “What happened to Nicholas Bonner? After what he tried to do, after everything, you were fighting that bubble, those crystals for him.”
Still with her eyes closed, she said, “The crystals of time. I did a foolish thing. I meant to punish that girl in the way that we punish, that we have to punish such pride. I meant to strip her of every memory except that she had offended the gods and must do penance forever.” When she looked at Farrell, he saw the huge stone woman with the dog’s head once again, and she smiled, nodding slightly. “But time is not mine to control,” she said, “only to tease a little. Time is everyone’s enemy, especially of the gods. My son got in time’s way, that is all, like any child running into the street after a ball. No more to it than that, really.”
“But you went after him,” Farrell persisted. “You tried to bring him back, you got in the way too.”
Sia rested her head on Ben’s hand, letting her eyes sag shut again. “And got run over for my vanity,” she answered in a voice too weary even for impatience. “There was never any hope, not from the moment he touched those crystals. But he is my son, mine to deal with, mine to banish, and what is between us is between us alone. So I did what I could do, but he will never come back anymore. Time has hold of him at last.”
The windows of the room were going out as Farrell watched them, and the familiar white nothingness was stirring beyond. Sia said, “You must go now, all of you, quickly. I will hold the way clear for you as long as I can.”
Ben said, “Sia, I am not going.” She answered him in the other language, and he turned away and stood staring at the fading walls.
Sia turned her head to find Julie in the dimness. She said, “You are very brave and merciful. Kannon will always come to you in your need.” Aiffe stood quietly in Julie’s grasp, her eyes terribly tranquil, frowning as if at a pointless question. Only her mouth shivered just a bit—a fishing line taken and run out by something far too massive and wild for its strength.
Julie said, “I don’t want her. I don’t want the gods ever to help me. I hate the gods.”
Sia nodded seriously, even approvingly. “Of course, that is only sensible. We are a terrible lot, we have no fairness, no honor, no sense of proportion. How could you not hate us?” Julie looked away in her turn, and Sia grinned then, momentarily youthful with mockery. “But we do have charm, and most of us are very good social dancers.” Julie did not answer her.
“And sometimes we grant wishes that people never know they have made,” the old woman went on. She took a ring from her finger and held it out to Farrell. It was gold, the color of new bread, fashioned in the shape of a thick, soft, drowsily coiled serpent with a suggestion of a woman’s breasts. The one visible eye was long and empty, a slash of a darkness that Farrell had seen before. Sia said, “It is not magic, it has absolutely no useful powers. It will do nothing at all for you but remind you of me.”
“Thank you,” Farrell said. He put the golden snake carefully on his left forefinger, where it fitted perfectly. Sia spoke to Ben a second time in her own tongue, but he kept his back turned to her. She beckoned to Aiffe, who stumbled when Julie let her go, but then came forward obediently. Sia took the empty, fearless face between her hands.
“Well,” she said, “Let’s see. You have conspired against me with my son, you have tried twice to destroy me, and the second time you had visions of stealing my immortality, which is probably the worst kind of blasphemy, when I think about it. In addition to that, you have used your beautiful little gift for nothing but stupid nastiness. You have caused one man’s death, another’s madness and possession, and you have done worse damage that you do not even know about to people you dragged back and forth across time for the sake of your pride, your play, your revenge. And I am expected to pardon you for no reason but to show off to a friend whose idea of interceding is to tell me that she hates the gods.” She began to laugh again, quietly and truly helpless with mortal amusement. “What have I come to, indeed, for my last act in this world?”
Briseis trembled against Farrell’s leg. When he turned, he saw that the corner where she had been cowering no longer existed. The door was still visible, but white dissolution prowled on the other side. Sia’s voice seemed to be coming more and more from the same void. “This house is falling, and you have no business here. I cannot protect you—if you die before you get out, you really die. Go, go on, this minute.”
Julie started to speak, but Sia would not let her. “The girl stays with me, I will do what I can do. What are you waiting for, good-bye kisses? I am done with hellos and good-byes, done with this place, done with you. Get out of my house now!”
Each of them looked back once. Julie said later that she heard Sia say Ben’s name, but by the time Farrell stood in the doorway he could barely discern Aiffe in that room where even the darkness was going out. He did see the two steel engravings blink off together and thought absurdly, oh, that’s a pity, she likes those. Then he was staggering after Ben and Julie down a corridor that was disappearing faster than they could run, knowing with the most casual, distant kind of certainty that they would never find their way in time.
Briseis took the lead, or they never would have found it. They followed her waving gray tail, calling aloud to keep in contact; and though the dog fled before them with unlikely surefootedness, she was constantly forced to double back and double again, as a silent wind of forgetting tore away floors and stairways beneath their feet. Once Julie caught Farrell as he strode off into nothing at all, and once he had to carry Ben in a steep place for a while.
The serpent ring glimmered on his finger with what must have been its own light, but it was not the least help when he pointed it at the oblivion swirling on every side and whimpered, “Avaunt, get thee gone, let us be.” Oh, Sia, remember us another moment, keep us in yourself yet a little. At the last, they were each running alone, no longer calling, gone from each other as completely as if they had truly vanished. Would we know? How would we know?
They never did agree on the exact point where they crossed from Sia’s true house into the one they knew. By the time they were even aware of having burst up like divers through hallway, kitchen, and living room, they were out on the sidewalk, gasping and crying and falling down in the wet grass. They huddled together for a long while, the three of them, tending to one another under the casually curious eyes of neighbors come out to enjoy the soft twilight after Aiffe’s squall. It was Julie who stood up first to face the odd old house with the roof almost like a widow’s walk and the front door missing.
Farrell had known perfectly well that it was not the visible house falling around them, and he knew also that it was silly to expect brick to boil and wood and shingle to convulse with mourning for a struggle and a passing that had taken place so far from them. Even so, he realized that he was vainly, ridiculously angry with the house, in a way that he had never been angry with Aiffe or Nicholas Bonner. “What day is it?” he asked vaguely, and did not hear if anyone answered, but went on staring at the house, waiting stubbornly to see it slump just a little, settling into the shaded ordinariness that it would wear from now on, now that a goddess no longer lived there.