Cold Fire - Page 44/210

“I thought walking the dreams of dragons meant sleeping, and waking up to sketch my dreams. I was thinking of it in a…metaphorical way, not an actual one. I don’t like it here. And I was never bleeding, so how can I have crossed?”

“Let’s get off this island. Then we can talk.”

We splashed across the muddy flats and climbed up a sleepy bank carpeted with a bank of intensely gold flowers like chiming bells. No, the flowers were actually chiming as the wind’s caress made them bob and tinkle.

“Those flowers are making noise,” Bee said in a small voice.

She struggled up to a patch of ordinary grass and sank down. I sat beside her. It was a beautiful day. The landscape with its splendid trees and golden bank of flowers looked perfect enough to be painted. A searingly blue butterfly fluttered past. My whole body felt as heavy as a sack of sand. I could not have moved if the great general Hanniba’al and a thundering herd of elephants had borne down on us at that moment, although even had they done, I fully expected some horror would materialize out of the soil to flay them to ribbons, crack their bones to pieces, and suck out their marrow.

“Blessed Tanit,” I said in a voice that did not sound like my own, “the spirit world was nothing like this the first time I walked here.” I thought of the wolves who had pursued me and the coach as I fled Four Moons House. “Well, I guess it was. We should have listened to Rory. This is not a safe place. Merciful Ba’al. Now he’ll wait at the Buffalo and Lion wondering what became of us! Do you know what he told me after you went off with the headmaster? He said that the headmaster is a serpent. A dragon. That illusion we saw looked exactly the way I imagine a dragon would look. But the headmaster is a man.”

“Cat,” whispered Bee.

“Did you hear the headmaster say those two strange things right before the militia arrived? He said, ‘That explains her.’ He meant me, like he was watching me all those years in the mirrors trying to figure out what I was. Then he said by all means to take you with me, but that was after I said I was going to the labyrinth. If he knew the labyrinth would lead me to the well, and the well was a crossing into the spirit world, that would mean he wanted you to cross into the spirit world. That he knew you could cross. But your blood didn’t open the Fiddler’s Stone, so how could—”

“Cat.” Bee’s fingers clamped so hard on mine they cut off my words. Her voice was a murmur. “Don’t move except to turn your head to your right.”

A thousand pins would not have made the skin along my neck and back prickle more violently. I slowly turned my head.

A woman sat cross-legged on the bank under the canopy of a massive yew tree whose wide crown and split trunk I had, strangely, not noticed until just now. She simply sat, saying nothing, looking over the river, her hands folded peacefully in her lap. She had the look of the locals who lived in the countryside northeast of Adurnam: tightly curled black hair with a reddish cast, dark brown skin, and brown eyes, features that spoke of Celtic forebears as well as West African ones. It was her ordinariness that made me uneasy. She was dressed in the commonplace, practical summer clothing of the villages: a skirt sewn from bright cloth printed with red and orange paisleys on a butter-yellow fabric and bulky from petticoats beneath, and a high-necked blouse with a kerchief tucked around the collar. The apron she wore over all looked recently laundered, not a stain or a crease. She held a strip of fabric of the same pattern as the skirt. Folding it, she deftly bound it over her hair to create three decorative peaks in the fabric.

Perhaps I sucked in air too hard.

She turned. Her eyes widened with the same surprise I had felt a moment before.

Hers was a face that arrested the gaze. It had a familiar look to it, especially about the eyes, which were deeply lashed and finely formed. I trusted that face at once, although I knew I ought to trust nothing here.

“Greetings and peace to you, Aunt,” I said, for there is never any harm in being polite. “Is all well with you?”

Bee’s hand tightened on mine.

The woman spoke in a voice I had heard before. “No trouble, through my power as a woman. And you, bride of my grandson? I did not expect to find you so quickly.”

Bee tugged on my hand. “Run.”

“Do I know you?” I asked, for I was dumbfounded, although not struck dumb.

“Before this, one time I and you have met. I am Vai’s grandmother.”

I don’t know how many times I blinked, or how wide my mouth gaped. Bee’s tugging on my arm grew quite insistent, until I realized she intended to rip off my arm if I did not do something.