The Golden Thread (6 page)

What was this, some special eastern European form of anorexia? “Why?”

“For strong will,” she said. “One who rules others must rule first the self.”

Now this was serious stuff. Food is not a trivial matter.

“What kind of ruler, exactly, Bosanka? Do you have a—a title?”

She turned back to the mirror, zipping up the last pair of jeans. It fit. Closely, but it fit. Turning to see herself from all angles, she said, “Oh, many. First Hunter, Keeper of the Wild, Breath of the Horn, others.”

First Hunter? Breath of the Horn? Were there titles like that, even in darkest fairy tale country?

“You don't believe?” she said, spiking me with a chilly look. Royally gracious she certainly was not, but she was under a lot of pressure, right?

“I do, I believe you,” I said quickly.

“You need to believe, Balentena. I am as I say.”

She walked out front and tossed her jeans on the counter. The salesclerk rang up the price. Bosanka dug a crumpled wad of bills out of her skirt pocket. She had more than enough, singles mostly, and she pocketed her change without counting it.

While the sales clerk folded the jeans, I went to the door and looked outside, half expecting to spot a black SUV full of square, scowling gunmen waiting. There was nothing like that, of course, only a couple of ladies in running suits walking a pair of little, wrinkly dogs.

Behind me, Bosanka said sharply, “Look, Balentena. I want you looking.”

So I looked.

The inside of the store went suddenly dim—or was it the inside of my head? The aisle down the center, with its beige carpeting, was now a damp dirt path. The racks of sport clothes were green and rustling undergrowth that led my eye back into dark, damp forest depths.

Close by, something made soft, nervous sounds, a kind of churring that vibrated with an anxious undertone. Where the sales clerk had been stood an animal like a giant kangaroo, round-shouldered and covered with short yellow fur. It was fumbling around with something it held down with its paws under a little fall of water from a rocky outcrop. The air was thick with a wet chill and a smell of soaked earth and vegetation.

“My God,” I said, but not a sound came out of me.

I heard water splashing on stone, and some start-and-stop rustling noises from back among the trees. The tall animal nattered softly to itself as it worked with what it held under the water—a wad of wide, flat leaves. They were purple.

“You see,” Bosanka said.

At the sound of her voice, the kangaroo-clerk jerked its head up and blinked at us, plainly alarmed. Its open mouth showed uneven yellow teeth and a bluish-tinged tongue. The creature dropped the leaves it had been washing and began shifting nervously from one foot to the other, rubbing its paws together in front of its stomach. I could see the gleam of its dark, delicate claws.

“Bosanka, stop it!” I gasped. I caught the doggy smell of the animal and saw the panic in its bright little eyes. It began making fast clicking sounds and wrinkling its lips, showing more teeth.

“Easy, easy now!” I fumbled frantically behind me for the door handle.

There wasn't one. I reached through fog and touched the rough bark of a tree. I felt steepness dropping away around us, as if we stood with this human-sized and agitated creature on a high mountain crag inside a cloud.

“You see,” Bosanka said again. There was a scornful twist to her mouth as she watched me sweat.

“I see, I see,” I jabbered, stepping sideways along where the front wall of the store had been, away from the ex-clerk. “I believe you, honest!”

My foot slipped on wet leaves. I tottered and flailed.

Bosanka grunted irritably and did some quick, intricate moves with both hands, like making a cat's cradle without string. The foggy air thickened into a white blanket which melted away in an instant. There was the store clerk, coughing and snuffling and poking around under the counter. I slumped against the heavy glass door of the shop, breathless with relief.

The clerk bobbed up again with a little wad of tissues clutched in her fist. “Oh, excuse me,” she panted, looking wildly around the inside of the shop. “I don't know what's wrong with me today. Allergies, I think, even if it is still winter. Isn't it?”

“It's the damp,” I agreed hastily, shaking fog droplets off the sleeve of my quilted coat. “It can really get to you.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. She flashed me a grateful, terrified smile. “Now, is there anything else I can do for you ladies?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

I shoved the door open and staggered out into the bright winter afternoon. Behind me I heard the clerk saying, “Don't forget your package, miss.”

Bosanka answered, “I don't forget.
You
forget.”

I headed automatically for the park, my own personal landscape, my home ground. This wasn't just a case of exiled royalty anymore. This was magic, and my heart was pounding.

When Bosanka caught up to me, I exploded. “What did you turn that poor woman into?”

“Was a leaf-taker,” Bosanka said shortly. “You could see for yourself.”

“Are those things dangerous?”

“No danger when the Keeper of the Wild is with you,” she said coolly. But I remembered that she hadn't turned her back on the transformed clerk.

While I had the nerve, I asked her straight out, “Bosanka, why did you do that?”

“So you stop talk about ‘Bosnia,'” Bosanka said irritably. “I am not from there. The school knows only a story, a smoke. You know a little what I am now, and I know you. So comes time to stop playing little schoolgirl and do what I want.”

My heart pumped ice water. “Which is what?”

“Use power to find my people for me,” she said.

If this was reality, it wasn't any reality of
mine
.

I said, “What power? You're the one with the power! Honestly, I don't know what you're talking about. Whatever you think I am, you've got the wrong person, okay? I'm an American teenager, ignorant and klutzy, barely literate and backward in every way, and I'm absolutely not the one you want.”

She said, “You tell me no?”

“Yes. No. I mean, I can't do whatever it is you mean by that, ‘find your people,' ” I gabbled, imagining myself suddenly sprouting a coat of yellow fur and a muzzle and the rest of it, with a corner of foggy forest to go with me, right here on a Manhattan sidewalk.

Family talent or no family talent, I was not the class of wizard that Bosanka was looking for, that was for sure. Next to her, I was no class at all, which I needed very badly to explain to her.

But she had her own ideas about this. “What I need, you can do,” she said positively.

“I'd love to help,” I said, “really. That's why I signed up to host a foreign guest. But what you're talking about—whatever you're talking about, Bosanka—I can tell you right now, it's way out of my league, you know? Beyond me. I'd only mess you up, and you'd end up sorry you ever asked. Look, I failed a French test last week, do you call that power?”

I hadn't actually failed, but it had been close.

“Oh, not you alone,” she said, frowning. “But with your friends, there is enough.”

“Enough what?” I said, glancing around. “What friends?”

“Enough power,” she said. “Among all the ones with you, New Year's.”

With me? New Year's? Taken completely by surprise, I said, “You mean at Lennie's party?”

“Comet Committee,” she said, nodding once. “What else? Bring them tomorrow after class, in the science room.”

She walked away.

If I had any doubts left about the reality of what had happened back in the jeans store, they were put to rest at that moment.

Stuck on one side of the Denim Delight shopping bag she carried was a fat, wet, purple leaf.

 

5
Silver Wishes

 

 

T
HEY WOULDN'T LET ME SEE GRAN.
The nurses said they had her on a different floor for tests, and I would have to come back later. I couldn't even sit with her and talk to myself in hopes that she would open her eyes and answer me. I took a bus home, feeling wrecked, with so much to talk about and nobody to talk about it with.

Now I knew what had crashed into us all the night of the Comet Committee. Our pouncing wildcat from psychic space had been Bosanka Lonatz, and now she was
here
. And she had homed in on me.

Horrible possibilities kept flickering through my mind like trailers for bad movies: what if Gran's “tests” did something to her and she got worse—ultimately worse—and what if once Gran died, the family talent was gone from all of us? What if I was going to be left facing Bosanka with nothing that I knew enough about to use for our defense?

A little more of that kind of thinking, and I would go insane. Gran would be ashamed of me if she could hear my quivering thoughts.

Didn't she and Paavo teach me, didn't they
show
me, that you don't just sit around shaking and moaning. You get up, put one foot in front of the other, and do whatever you can. Even if the chances are good that you can't actually do it at all, or that you can do it, but not walk away alive.

The bus lurched and a large person standing over me lurched, too, and demolished my left foot. So much for walking.

Besides, put one foot in front of the other and do
what
?

For starters, I had to relay Bosanka's demand to the members of the Comet Committee and make them believe it. Not easy, since I wasn't at all sure what she wanted beyond a meeting of the group.

And how in the world was I going to tell them about what had happened in the jeans store? I trudged home from the bus stop, with pauses for the errands on Mom's list, thinking about how Lennie and the others (especially Peter and Tamsin) were going to react to that one.

Should I even talk to them at all?
I
was the witch's grandchild, the one Bosanka had zeroed in on. Obviously it was my family talent that had made the Comet Committee into something more than just a party that night on Lennie's roof.

My family talent had drawn her, like lightning to a steel barn. I shuddered when I remembered that moment of impact, now that I had an idea of what—of
who
the intruder was. Without me, I was sure, none of this would be happening. But how could I convince them of that?

I mean, they might believe strange things about Bosanka. But to reveal that I, Val, had a personal history with magic would really be asking for it. I couldn't help wondering if because of that history I should be handling Bosanka on my own. But how? I didn't have a clue. I desperately needed to talk it out with somebody.

What about Barb? She had specifically asked me to include her in the next magical adventure that came my way. Only this present magic was about Bosanka, and Barb wasn't talking to me because she thought Bosanka was a racist.

To tell the truth, Barb and I had been having some problems anyway. “The Great Witch-Girl,” she called me sometimes. She thought I was arrogant. Well, I didn't need any of that now. I was shaky enough as it was.

I could phone Joel, who at least would know what I was talking about. But he had walked out on the Comet Committee, and we had parted afterward on such a sour note! I had no business missing him, and I was pretty sure he wasn't missing me at all.

Besides, he had troubles of his own—his hands, his whole future in music. It wouldn't be doing him a favor to complicate his life by dragging Bosanka into it.

Mom was home, reading Manley's latest enormous spy thriller and scribbling comments in the margins. She was also crying, on and off. I saw a box of tissues on the table next to the stack of manuscript pages, and a big paper shopping bag on the floor with lots of used tissues in it.

I didn't need to ask what was bothering her, of course. We were both pretty susceptible to tears since Gran's stroke.

She blew her nose hard and made pulling-yourself-together sounds (throat clearings, sniffs, and so on) while I fussed around with the mail on the hall table, giving her time to come out of it.

“Val? Have you been at the hospital?” she said.

I said I had.

“You're a sweet kid, you know that?” she said. “For a ghastly teenager, that is. I'll go over tomorrow, it's my turn.”

We did that, taking turns. It didn't require a lot of scheduling or discussion. When you live alone with your mom, important things can run pretty smoothly if you're both halfway reasonable people, which we were.

This does not mean that we never argued, fought, or generally hated each other. I was sweet-and-sour Val, depending on my moods, which lately even I could see seemed to change from one moment to the next. And Mom had her own attacks of the crazies.

I had done a neat essay about this in creative writing class the term before and had gotten an A on it, so I couldn't really complain. I figured that I was storing up material for best-sellers I would write later on. Mom had said once, “Wait until you're a writer yourself, you can write all about us and embarrass the hell out of your father.” We both had a good time playing around with that idea. But sometimes I wondered nervously what she
really
expected from me and my writing, and did I want to be tied up in that?

We would probably never have to cross that bridge now. Leaf-takers, something told me, do not write books.

Mom said, “Stick a couple of frozen dinners in the oven, will you, Val? All the pots are in the sink, and I've got to finish reading this before I talk to Manley.”

After dinner, I lay on my bed with my earphones on listening to Balinese gamelan music that Lennie had lent me, instead of making my usual evening phone call to Barb. After a while Mom looked in on me and insisted that I get into my bed instead of lying on it. She had a theory that visiting Gran sapped my energy (which it did), and that if I didn't get more rest I would get sick myself.