The Firebird's Vengeance (33 page)

In front of the apothecary window, Grace stopped in her tracks. She stared at the bottles of medicines and notions in the glittering in the window.

“It’s not the right time,” she said in Isavaltan. “These should have all been put away.”

“Now, Grace.” Frank stepped up quickly to take her elbow, as he obviously had many times before. “We talked about this. This way, girl.”

“But these should all have been put away,” Grace said, on the verge of tears. “That night is over with. It didn’t happen. It didn’t have to happen.”

“Nice and easy now.” Frank pushed open the narrow door that led to an equally narrow set of stairs to Grace’s apartment over the apothecary. Grace let herself be led docilely, until they entered the flat. The sight of her own rooms seemed to shake off her melancholy. Without even a glance at Frank, she busied herself with lighting the lamps and poking up the fire in the stove. The windows, Bridget noted, were tightly shuttered. No light would show through to the street.

While Frank watched Grace, ready to intercede in case she was careless with the fire, Sakra looked about him with interest. He took in the lamps with their fringed shades, the wood-framed photographs covering the flocked wallpaper, the shelves crammed with china knickknacks, the hard, slick horsehair furniture and the worn rug. Bridget felt the sudden urge to assure him that she had kept a very different sort of house. She herself saw the dust, the pictures hanging askew, the shawl dropped carelessly by the beaded curtain that led to Aunt Grace’s bedroom. The black stocking draped over the back of the sofa. She smelled the faint odor of refuse left indoors too long.

“Has she been … able …”

Frank seemed to know what she was driving at. “Her rent’s paid to the end of the month.”
By you, I’m sure
, thought Bridget as she watched his jaw grind back and forth. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do. The harbor’s all clear now, and I’ve got a living to earn.”

Which would keep him out on the lake two or three days at a time, depending on where he was running out to.

At last Grace seemed satisfied with the level of light in the room. Indeed, Bridget thought it was overly bright. On one previous visit here, Aunt Grace kept the parlor dim so as not to “interfere with the vibrations.” The faded, ill-cared-for furnishings looked even more battered in full light. Grace turned to the row of pegs by the door and began unwrapping her shawls, hanging the worn lace up fussily. “Thank you, Frank. You can go now.”

“All right, Grace, if you say so.” Frank glanced sideways at Bridget, a look that clearly said,
I will be back to talk to you
.

Bridget nodded, trying to convey,
we will take care of her
, in return. She hoped she was not telling a silent lie. “Thank you.”

“Yep.” Frank nodded, gave Sakra another disapproving glower, and left them there, although Bridget suspected he had second thoughts about doing so. Bridget found she didn’t blame him in the least.

As the door shut, Grace gripped a coat peg as if that were all that was keeping her from falling over. Now Bridget saw the shadows under her eyes, deep black smudges that could only have come from whole nights without sleep. In the next heartbeat, Grace had pulled herself upright, and assumed the haughty stance that reminded Bridget of someone, but for the life of her she could not tell who.

But Sakra, it seemed, could. “Grand Majesty,” he whispered.

His words staggered Bridget.
“Medeoan?”

Grace turned to them, looking down her bulbous nose, and Bridget saw it. In the bright light, without the tricks of shadow and moonlight, she saw the faint reflection of the dowager empress laid over her aunt’s pale, tired visage. But in the space of a breath, that reflection was gone, and Grace was simply Grace again.

“Medeoan is here,” she whispered, as if afraid someone else might hear. The sound of that name coming from her aunt’s mouth spun Bridget’s world around yet again.

“Of your courtesy, mistress,” said Sakra. “Will you tell us how this came to be, since the one who wore that name is dead.”

“I know.” Grace crossed the room to the wing-backed chair and dropped into it. It seemed to be a reflexive motion. “Her ghost was trapped at the lighthouse.”

Bridget’s knees gave way and she sat down abruptly on the horsehair settee. It was obviously no good to protest that Aunt Grace did not, could not possibly know anything of this, but that was what she very much wanted to do.

“She died at the lighthouse,” said Sakra gravely. “It would be so.”

“But surely as empress, she was bound to Isavalta,” said Bridget. “She should be able to cross back.” It was wrong to be speaking of such things here, in these shabby, showy, decidedly unmagical surroundings.

“Perhaps not, she held the reign falsely for many years.”

“Hold your tongue, Southerner,” snapped Aunt Grace and Bridget saw Medeoan looking out from her pale eyes. “It was not you I sent for.”

Sakra fell silent at once, and Grace pressed her hand against her forehead. “She’s here. She won’t be quiet. I shouldn’t have listened. I should have …” She squeezed her eyes closed. “It’s too late now. Far too late.”

Slowly, Bridget reached out and took her aunt’s hand from her brow and held on to it. It felt strange. She had never made such an intimate gesture to Grace before, and had never foreseen a day when she would want to, but she was the only one who could offer the comfort the older woman so obviously needed now.

“Aunt Grace.” Bridget spoke her name firmly, hoping to ground her in the here and now. “Tell me what happened.”

Bridget listened in dazed silence as Grace related her story, from hearing the voice during one of her fake seances, to convincing Frank to take her to the lighthouse, to Medeoan talking her into … what?

“I thought I was only bringing her back with me.” Grace tightened her grip on Bridget’s hand. “Freeing her from the lighthouse. But she has not left me. She comes into my dreams when I am asleep. She comes in the day when I try to see my clients. She’s living her life over, in my mind. She wants you, but she couldn’t reach you, so she drives me to distraction, and plays out all her regrets over, and over, when she’s not asking for you.”

“But …” Bridget swallowed. This was no good. She could not go through this entire interview stammering like a schoolgirl. Aunt Grace was no fraud. She could do as she said, had done as she said. Accept that. Move on. “What is it she says she wants?”

“A chance to redeem herself apparently.” Grace pulled her hand out of Bridget’s and laid it in her lap, gazing down at her fingernails. “She says her land, this Isavalta of yours, is in grave danger and she wants to help. And I don’t care about any of this,” she added dully. “Just tell me you’ll do what she wants and take her away.”

Bridget opened her mouth and shut it again. Take away the ghost of Medeoan, the sad, insane, grasping dowager empress who had caused Bridget to travel to Isavalta in the first place? The idea that the woman was here, now, listening in the back of her aunt’s mind left her chilled.

“It is a complex matter, mistress,” said Sakra. “In life, the Dowager Empress Medeoan was dangerous and vindictive. It may be she is still so in the Land of Death and Spirit.”

Grace closed her eyes. “I don’t care what you
do
with her, just get her away from me.”

“You may be sure we will not leave you in distress.” Sakra glanced at Bridget as he spoke.

“No. No, of course not,” Bridget said hastily. Her grievances against Aunt Grace were old and long-standing, but not enough to leave her haunted by Medeoan.

Or could it be a ruse? Could she and Medeoan’s ghost be working together? Why? What would the dowager’s shade have to offer her? Bridget bit her lip. After all this time, it was so hard to trust Aunt Grace.

Almost as if Bridget had spoken aloud, Grace lifted her head. Her eyes were full of Medeoan, and Medeoan’s anger.

“Do you think I would believe you care?” spat Aunt Grace, and the ghost within her. “You did not come back because you care about me! You did not come back because you knew your work was unfinished and you knew the fate I had been condemned to! Oh, no, you came back for your child! Would you see your child? Would you? Then you shall!”

Grace blundered to her feet, her shoulders hunched, her head thrust forward like a crow in the cold. She blundered forward blindly, tripping over rugs, barking her shins against a chair.

“Aunt Grace!” Bridget leapt after her, a split second before Sakra. Grace tore the fringed shawl off the the blue glass sphere she used as a “gazing crystal,” and slapped both hands hard against it. Bridget closed her hand around Grace’s wrist, and …

And she saw.

She saw herself, as a young woman, hardly more than a girl. Despite the darkness surrounding this young self, she instantly recognized her old room in the keeper’s quarters of the Sand Island lighthouse. Young Bridget lay awake, looking hungrily toward the window, watching the moon rise over the lake. Bridget knew which night this was. She could feel the anticipation of her younger self.

The young Bridget judged the time was right. She rose, tall and slender in her substantial white nightgown, and pulled on her shoes. She paused a moment to check her face in her mother’s silver hand mirror, to pinch a blush into her cheeks and make sure her braided hair hung dramatically over her right shoulder. She took up a long shawl against the cold rather than her normal oilskin coat, but did not bother with candle or lamp. Carefully, she tiptoed down the spiral, wrought-iron staircase, pausing fearfully at an imagined stirring, and crossing her fingers that the weather would remain fair, and that the light had enough oil to get through for at least the next hour.

Outside, thick clouds scudded across the dark sky, lending the half moon a Halloween look. Bridget needed no more light than that to hurry down the stairs that led to the boathouse and the jetty, and the hollow underneath the cliff that could not be seen from the lighthouse.

No, no, stop. Don’t
, thought Bridget, but whether it was to her younger self, or the vision that unfolded she didn’t know.

He came forward, but did not quite leave the shadows. Young Bridget saw the sweep of black hair, the shape of the strong face and body, and knew him to be Asa, the fisherman who had courted and won her to this meeting. Older Bridget looked close and saw and felt a stab at her heart like a knife.

Beneath the facade of Asa waited Valin Kalami. The sorcerer who had brought her to Isavalta with flattering lies, the man who would have murdered her to suit his own ends, he was the one who embraced her younger self. It was his mouth she kissed with heedless passion as he pressed hard against her, already lowering her to the ground.

Why? Why!

But she knew the answer. For the power. She was powerful, she knew that, and Sakra and Mistress Urshila had tried so many times to tell her that raw power was a lure to a sorcerous soul.

Anna, her innocent Anna, was Valin Kalami’s child. A sob broke from Bridget’s throat and she tried to tear herself free.

“No!” commanded Aunt Grace in a deep voice, quite unlike her own. “See the man. You cannot refuse now to see.”

Aunt Grace’s hand clamped around Bridget’s like an iron band and Bridget knew that even if she closed her body’s eyes, her mind’s eyes would still see what played out before her.

Night again. A different night, because now the moon was no more than a thumbnail sliver in the clear sky. Again the keeper’s quarters, but this time the front room, Kalami, not bothering to disguise himself as Asa this time, slipped through the front door. He carried something wrapped in a blanket under his arm. He concealed himself in the thickest shadows to wait but he did not have to wait long. Footsteps rang on the iron stairs, two people going up to the light, then silence.

Kalami smiled in the darkness. With infinite care, he opened the whitewashed fire door that separated the quarters from the tower stairs. Cautiously he stole upward, one soft step at a time.

This would be the dangerous part. There was no place to hide on those stairs. But no other door opened, and no footsteps descended. Kalami reached the second stairs and stole through the door. He crept to Bridget’s room, to the cradle, and the sleeping child that lay there.

Bridget felt a tear trickle down her cheek, but she could not move. She could not do anything but watch.

Kalami laid his burden on the bed and unwrapped it. At first, all Bridget saw was a bundle of twigs and dried flowers. Then she saw Anna, lying unnaturally still on the bed. Slowly, patiently, Kalami lifted the true child and cradled her in the crook of his arm. He dropped the counterfeit in her place, so it fell, arms and legs akimbo, eyes staring dull and dead at the ceiling.

Death would be better than watching any more.

Kalami wrapped sleeping Anna up tenderly in the blanket and hurried down the stairs.

It wasn’t until he was out of the house that the baby woke and began to cry, and by then, Bridget knew, her younger self would hear nothing, because by then she had found the counterfeit, and her own cries drowned out all other sound in her ears.

And the vision faded, and once again Bridget faced the distorted reflection of Aunt Grace’s parlor in the side of her blue glass ball. Her cheeks were soaked with tears and her ears rang. She jerked her hands free of Grace’s grip and pressed her palms against her eyes, shuddering.

Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God
.

She heard Sakra murmur something, and a chair scraped and cloth rustled. Then, Sakra’s familiar touch rested on her shoulder, but Bridget swatted it away, retreating to the windows before she was aware she had moved.

She felt filthy. She felt robbed. There had been only a few moments of that night she could think of without guilt or regret, and they were now gone. Kalami. Not Asa, with his laughing eyes and teasing ways who seduced a lonesome young woman, but Kalami who had lied to her and attempted to own her. He was the one who had given and then taken her daughter.

If he ever came within her reach again, she’d strangle him with her bare hands. If he was dead in the Shifting Lands, she’d hunt his ghost down and tear it to shreds.