The Silent Strength of Stones (14 page)

“Okay,” said Evan.

I blinked and looked at him, because his voice sounded the same but different. And instead of a wolf, there was a tan, muscular, naked man sitting there, his face angular and strangely young, as if he had never tried out any expressions, his eyes lemon colored around their dark irises, his hair like heavy white-gold thread falling about his shoulders, his tan body furred faintly all over with silver. He had dark eyebrows that peaked at their outer edges. He didn’t look quite human.

“Yikes!”

He grinned and cocked his head. I closed my eyes because I could tell he had been the wolf, and it was too weird to think I had scratched behind his ears not a half hour earlier.

“Wake up, Nick,” he said.

I opened my eyes reluctantly and looked at him.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go swimming.”

“Evan?” I said.

He rose and reached down, grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. It required about the same effort as a shrug, apparently. His hand felt rough and hard against mine. He was half a foot taller than I was. “Come on,” he said again, and brushed a broad, long-fingered hand over my head, dislodging bits of dead leaves. “What’s the matter?”

“My brain has trouble with this.”

He hooked his elbow around my neck, stared into my eyes, and said, “No, you’re fine. I change from one thing to another, and you can relate to everything I change into and feel comfortable with it. It’s an expanded relationship. You can handle this, even though it’s new to you. You have a good brain, Nick, and a good heart.” He let go of me and mussed my hair. I felt caramel and vanilla and smooth melted chocolate changes flowing through me, warm and sweet and comforting. I blinked.

“Hey, you need a swimsuit,” I said. I assumed he wanted to go over to Lacey’s and take a look at Megan in her new bathing suit; and though there were beaches on the lake where you could skinny-dip, the pool was a suit-oriented place.

He glanced down at himself and frowned. “Yeah,” he said. “Where am I going to get one?”

“We have them at the store,” I said, and shivered. There was some reason why I wanted to avoid the store this afternoon. I looked at Evan again. There was a white scar on his shoulder—a bite mark—and the scratches of other scars like random graffiti on his arms, legs, and torso. For a second I thought,
I
don’t know this guy!
Then I thought,
Sure I do, he’s my best friend, there’s nothing weird about this.
Then I thought,
You say bleed
... “Evan?”

“Yes?”

I gripped my head. “You did something to my brain.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know if I ... I don’t know if ...”

“Do you want me to undo it?”

“I don’t know.” I felt like I knew him, and it didn’t bother me that he was some lion-maned naked guy in the woods; but at the same time I could remember how I would have felt yesterday running into someone who looked like him—I would have thought,
This guy is nuts
and run the other direction. Mix in the fact that I knew a wolf and that the wolf and this guy were one person—I could spend days being confused about it. I wasn’t sure I wanted that confusion back. I just didn’t want to lose who I was because Evan said so, any more than I wanted his aunt Elissa to be able to make me go blind in a couple of seconds.

Maybe what I wanted didn’t count. There were lots of times when it didn’t.

“Look,” he said. He squinted and glanced toward the sky for a minute, then looked back at me. “It wasn’t like I changed your mind around. What I did was speed up something you would have done naturally. Like the healing.”

When he put it like that, it didn’t bother me anymore. “Okay,” I said. Eyes closed, I pressed my hands over my face for a moment, waiting for my mind to settle. I took a breath, let it out.

He nudged my shoulder. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said again, looking at him. He grinned, and I smiled back, feeling that I knew him and that was all that mattered. Knowing even as I thought it that it wasn’t really true. Oh well. “Suit,” I said. “I don’t want to go in the store right now.” I usually didn’t want to go back to the store once I had a legitimate reason to be away from it, but there was something, some extra reason today—I frowned.

“’S okay. I’ll ward myself and do it. What about you—you want to swim?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I had swum in Lacey’s pool last summer once or twice, when Jeremy had invited me, but usually I made do with the lake. The pool didn’t embrace me the way the lake did.

“I’ll get us both suits. Size?”

“Medium.”

“Want to wait here or come with me?”

“I’ll wait,” I said.

He slipped off through the trees, not toward the path, with only a little rustle of underbrush. I sat and thought about sanctioning shoplifting. If I saved the tags, I could pay for the swimsuits later. My regular one was getting old, anyway; the pockets had holes in them and the lining was torn.

I had to wonder if this warding stuff would actually work. What if Mariah looked up to see Evan, naked, in the store? How would she react? I was wondering more about Mariah than I had before, since we had actually talked. I wasn’t sure anymore that I could guess what she would do.

I wondered if Willow ever used the pool. Maybe she would be out communing with the wood spirits. I would like to watch her do that if I could be sure she didn’t know I was there. Maybe even if she knew. What a weird idea, I couldn’t remember the last time I had watched somebody do something secret when they knew I was watching. I wondered what Willow would look like in a bathing suit, even though I had already seen her without one.

I lay on the ferns and thought about Willow for a while. Presently I noticed there was something bumpy and warm near my leg. I sat up and patted the ground, groped through the dried ferns until I closed my hand around a water-smoothed rock about the size of an egg. It was warm, as if it had baked in the sun for a while. I opened my hand and looked at it. River gray, nothing to set it apart from a million other rocks. I touched its surface to my cheek, then my forehead, and felt calmer, almost sleepy. I slipped the rock into my pocket and curled up.

“Wake up. Maybe that energizing command this morning was a bad idea,” Evan said.

He was squatting beside me, two pairs of navy trunks dangling from his hand. I smiled up at him and stretched. From the direction and length of the shadows and sun speckles I knew some time had passed. I felt totally relaxed. I rolled and stood up.

He rose and stared at me, his brows lowered. “You smell strange,” he said.

“Mm?” I lifted an arm and sniffed my armpit. The earlier dash through the woods hadn’t defeated my deodorant, as far as I could tell.

“There’s a—never mind. Here.” He handed me one swimsuit and stepped into the other one. I changed, slipping the new rock into the suit’s pocket. It made a lump. This wouldn’t work. I would have to put it back in my pants pocket, and for some reason that bothered me. Evan put his hand near it, his brow furrowing. “What is this?”

I shrugged. “It’s a rock.”

“No,” he said in a distracted voice.

“It’s a rock.”

“It’s
skilliau
.”

I slipped the rock out of my pocket and held it out to him. “This is what you’re looking for? Why?”

He held out a hand to the rock, pulled it back. “No,” he whispered, “we must approach with the proper respect.”

I cupped my hands around the rock, wondering if I had done something wrong by just picking it up. It still felt calm and warm. “What the heck is this skilly-whatever, anyway?”

Evan looked away from me for a moment, frowned, and then turned back. “
Skilliau
is the soul of a thing, the spirit of a thing, the energy of a thing; or it is something like that that was put there by a Power or a Presence or by the life of the thing; it is what you can wake up in something, and then it can work with you. Sometimes it wants you to work with it. It is a ... a potential that waits to be addressed. It can do many different things.
Skilliau
can enrich soil and waken seeds and sweeten ovens. Some can bring you luck; some will take a personal interest in your life and help you through troubles. Some keep your cattle healthy or make fruit and vegetables grow bigger. Some aid in powerworkings. That one might be a relaxation aid or something else. Here at the lake there are different kinds. We found this place by consulting a
krifter
in Southclan, and we are here to find some
skilliau
and request that they come home with us to enrich our household and aid us in our efforts to make things happen. Or to enrich Aunt and Uncle’s household, at any rate. Mostly they want
skilliau
that will help with crops and animals. Not a project
I’m
particularly interested in.

“It’s here for us. We just have to find it and wake it and instruct it or request things from it. But ...” He stared at the rock in my hands, then looked up at my face, his eyes the color of melted butter. “If we do it wrong ...”

I touched the rock to my cheek. It felt drowsy as a kitten’s purr and as warm. I couldn’t see how there could be anything wrong with that.

“Where did you find it?” he asked.

I knelt and patted the fern-covered ground. “Here.”

“I didn’t sense it when we arrived or when I left. You woke it, Nick.”

I shrugged. I went to the root mass of the fallen tree and scooped out dirt in a crevice between three small roots until I had enough space to plant the stone, then edged it into its new hiding place. I stroked it and said “Thanks.” My fingers tingled. I made a mark in my memory, thinking that if my mind was troubled I could come here and the stone would calm it, maybe. I backed away and studied the roots; you couldn’t see a stone was lodged among them—their shadows kept it safe. I looked at Evan.

He blinked at me, glanced toward the rock. “Nick?”

“Yes?”

“How did you wake it? It isn’t angry. You must have done it right.”

“I didn’t do anything, Evan. Honest. It was warm and I picked it up.”

“Give me your hand.”

My hand was but even before he reached for it. He frowned, gripped it with one hand, and gestured above it with the other. The little ring of blue flame I’d seen the night before when Willow had done the same thing showed up again above my hand, not so striking in daylight, but there. He leaned over and licked it, then shook his head. “
Eauch
,” he said, more a breath than a word. “Don’t know quite what you are, but you’re something, all right, something air.” The circle of light faded.

“Willow did that to me last night. How do you make it happen?”

He cocked his head. “It’s a dialogue, or kind of a greeting. A way of talking without words.”

“What’s yours look like?”

His brows rose. He released my hand and gestured above his own, drawing up a yellow spiral—not a cone like Willow’s, but a curling staircase of glowing strands.

“Pretty,” I said.

He smiled and flicked the lights away. Then he nudged my shoulder with his. “Come on.” He glanced toward the hidden stone, then gave me an open-mouthed grin that reminded me of his wolf grin, “I’m so glad I fetched you. I mean, you smelled interesting right from the start, but I don’t know if I would have found out how interesting any other way.” He roughed my hair, then gripped the back of my neck and headed toward the path, pulling me with him, his hand warm and hard.

“You don’t have to lead me. I’ll come quietly,” I said.

“Huh?” He blinked at me, stared at his own hand, then let go. “I’m sorry. I forget I’m not a wolf anymore. Lead the way.”

We detoured through the woods when we reached the stretch of path near Lacey number five, and came at the pool from the direction of the driveway.

“Nick?” Adam Lacey said, venturing out of his office.

“Megan invited us to the pool,” I said.

“Megan? Which one’s she?”

“Cute little brunette. Friend of Kristen’s. Couple inches shorter than me with brown curls. Cabin nine, I think. She came by the store earlier to buy a swimsuit and asked me and Evan to join her at the pool.”

“I’m not doubting your word,” he said, lying.

“This is Evan,” I said. “Evan, Adam Lacey, your host.”

“What?” said Adam.

“Evan’s staying with the people in number five....” I glanced toward number five and saw Willow strolling up the road toward us, wearing a green dress that barely came down to her thighs. Her legs looked incredibly long and tan and muscular, even though she wasn’t that tall. She smiled at me, then spotted Evan, and her stroll turned into a run.

“Evan?” she said, breathless.

He grinned at her.

“Evan? Nick? Evan?”

“This is my sister,” Evan said to Adam.

Adam rolled his eyes. “Wait just a second,” he said, “and I’ll get you some towels.”

“What happened?” Willow asked after Adam had disappeared into the office.

“I met this girl,” said Evan.

“I wonder if she’ll recognize you,” I said. “Should you use a different name?”

“No,” said Evan. “She kissed me on the nose,” he told Willow, and grinned with his mouth open.

“Are you crazy?” Willow said.

“You know she’ll believe it or she won’t. It won’t matter,” Evan said.

Adam reemerged from the office and handed us three white fluffy towels.

“Thanks,” I said, surprised. He’d never given me a towel before, no matter who invited me.

His gaze slid to Willow and Evan and away again. “Welcome,” he said gruffly. He disappeared officeward again.

“What have you been doing to that man?” Evan asked Willow, his voice light and amused.

“Nothing, really. I don’t know why he’s spooked. I think it might have something to do with Aunt Elissa.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

“Why?” Willow asked.

“She scares me plenty.”

“I told you not to worry about her,” Evan said.

“Not in those words,” I said. If he had told me not to worry, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to worry. And even though he had told me he would protect me from Aunt Elissa, I still wasn’t sure.