“You’re lying.” She whirled on me. “Why would you do this? We are sisters: we share everything.” She brought her face so close that I could see fine wrinkles around her eyes, like hairline cracks in an antique vase. Her hard life was written in those lines, along with an unexpected fragility. I steeled my heart against it.
Her eyes shone, bright and dangerous. “Do you know what else I perceive? You’ve been talking with your uncle.”
“What?” I had not anticipated this. She perceived more than I’d realized she could in so short a time. My heartbeat quickened like a panicked rabbit. “You’re mistaken.”
“Never. No one else leaves such a blackberry residue in the air.” She stuck out her tongue as if she were tasting it. “All I have ever wanted,” she said, her voice strained, “is for you to love me exactly as you love him, and you won’t. Am I not your dearest sister? Am I not more deserving than some wicked, heartless dragon, uncle or not?”
I had lost control of this conversation; the wind blew cold over the garden.
She tasted my fear and smiled ruthlessly. “You’re half dragon. Were you going to tell me that? I had to learn it from your memories as I walked through your larger mind. You have not been honest with me at all, and now you’re hiding something in that cottage. Open the door.”
“No,” I said.
She raised her arms over her head and slowly splayed her fingers. Her hands elongated grotesquely, like spindly tree branches or scalpel-sharp claws. They became forked lightning hurled at the sky, and their terrible touch raked the inside of my skull, scraping and shocking and shattering. I collapsed, screaming, clutching wildly at my head in the real world, and in my mind, and in my mind’s mind, there was an infinite regression to the very center of myself.
Then the pain stopped, and for a high, shining moment, I saw Heaven.
Jannoula bent over my prone form. She held out her hand, now humanly proportioned, and I grasped it gratefully. She pulled me to my feet; I threw my arms around her, weeping.
She was my dearest sister. I loved her more than anything. I was overflowing with love. Words could not. I had never felt.
“There we go,” she said, her voice a melody. She smiled like the fond sun and patted my head like the kiss of springtime. “All I need now,” she said, “is for you to unlock that door.”
How could I not? She was my sister. The key was already in my hand; if I trembled, it was because I could barely contain my joy at being useful.
I had the padlock off in a trice; I held it up to show her. She smiled as the Saints smile on all of us from Heaven, full of goodness and light, overawing me. “Come,” she said, taking my hand. “Let’s see what this silly fuss was all about.”
She opened the door upon darkness. “I don’t see anything,” she said, elegantly confused. “What’s in here?”
“Nothing,” I said, which was all I was sure of anymore.
“It can’t be nothing,” she said. Even her irritation carried a rich resonance, like a deeply peeved viola.
I stopped short at the threshold. I remembered being inside earlier; I’d circled the cottage and said ritual words. My own voice came to me, that very chant, telling myself, Go into the cottage, go out of my mind.
What had that meant? Would I go mad—out of my mind—if I entered?
Jannoula still held my hand. No matter how much I loved her, I dared not enter the cottage. It was probably bad for her to go into that eerie, dense darkness. I said, “Sister, neither of us should go in there. Please.”
“Fie!” she cried, violently yanking my hand. “There’s something that you don’t want me to find, but I am going to find it!”
“Sister, please don’t. I built this place to trick you. I see how wrong that was now. I can build anything, a palace worthy of you, just please don’t—”
She let go of my hand, crossed the threshold, and slammed the door in my face.
My feeling for her went out like a candle in a puff of wind.
I quickly locked the padlock and sank to my knees, shaking uncontrollably. I was myself again—surely nothing could mean more than that—and yet I felt more bereaved than relieved. I had lost my friend forever.
I wept. I had loved her, in fact, before she forced me to.
I had seen sweetness in her, and fragility. It could not all have been a lie. She was in pain every day. What was it doing to her?
My head rang hollow without her presence, an aching emptiness like the void I’d seen at Jannoula’s core—and yet not like. I used to fill this entire space myself. I would relearn the trick of it, or fill it with music. I would find the way.
Exhausted, I slept, waking in time to rush to St. Ida’s Conservatory for my lesson. Orma listened to my breathless explanation: I’d tricked her; she was gone.
He said, “I’m astonished at this mantra you devised. When you were yourself, you knew it as a command for Jannoula: Go into the cottage, go out of my mind. But when she seized control—as you anticipated she might—you took it as a warning against following her into the cottage yourself. And it worked.”
In truth, it had come far too close to failure. I didn’t care to dwell on that. “What will happen to her?” I asked, a weight of guilt still on my heart.
He considered. “I presume she can enter your mind no further than the cottage door. Unless she likes sitting alone in darkness, she’ll lose interest and keep herself to herself.”
Herself seemed a terrible place to be; I still wished I could have saved her from it. This guilt was going to rankle a long time.
I tapped my flute thoughtfully against my chin, grateful to Orma for helping me. I wished I might have embraced him, or told him I really did love him, but that was not his way. Not our way. I contented myself with saying, “If you hadn’t noticed—and cared enough to warn me when you did—I don’t know what would have happened.”
He snorted, pushed up his spectacles, and said, “Give yourself some credit. You heeded my warning; I wasn’t sure you would. Now let’s start with the suite by Tertius.”