“Fine. Decide for yourselves who stays and who goes free to see Sir
Leith. But if I glimpse the faintest falseness in your eyes, in your face,
hear it in your words when you speak to him, the brother you left behind will
share stale bread and moldy cheese rinds with the rats.”
Val gazed at her, his eyes narrowed and so intent on her that Pierce wondered
uneasily what, by word or action, he might trigger in her. He only asked, with
unexpected gentleness, “What is it? If you want our help, tell us what you
need.”
Her face crumpled suddenly; she dabbed at the corner of one eye with her
forefinger. “I need him to understand how deeply I am in love with him. That
he holds my heart in his. I need to move him as he moves me. Can you help me
with that? He finds it so difficult to be grateful despite all I’ve done for
him. Can you persuade him? I want to rule his heart, to make it tack and turn
toward me, always toward me, until all the world understands the poetry that
he feels for me. I want him to forget the queen. I want to be known, from this
time on, as his legendary love. Can you help me?” She flicked a finger at her
other eye, then gave them both a dark, tearless stare. “If you can’t, then
stay out of my way. Now. Choose. Which of you remains here, which of you sees
your father. Be ready to tell me when I return.”
Val said quickly, after she vanished, “I am older than you, far more
experienced with fighting whatever she might conjure up, and I’ve been with
him my entire life. Please. Let me go.”
“I can lie better than you,” Pierce said.
“How do you know?”
Pierce gazed at him helplessly. “Because there’s so much I don’t know about
either of you. I could invent all kinds of things and believe them at the same
time. And I’ve been around a sorceress all my life. Look at your face. Have
you ever told a single lie?”
“Of course I have.”
“That must be the first. You can’t even lie convincingly about lying. Your
eyes don’t know how.”
Val said nothing, just looked at him with such burning, pleading urgency that
Pierce yielded and stayed behind to await the cheese rinds and the rats that,
he expected, would be inevitable.
It did not take Val long to get into trouble. After some roaming and futile
banging at walls, during which time stood around and watched, judging from the
lack of even a hairbreadth of movement from light or shadow, Pierce found a
plate on a cracked and blistered wooden chest. As promised, it held some furry
cheese whittled to the rind, and a couple of rock-hard heels of bread. He
looked at it glumly, wondering how his father and brother were faring. Also as
promised, a rat popped up from behind the chest, eyed Pierce warily.
“Help yourself,” Pierce told it, and turned away to find another wall,
another weapon.
He dumped the dead plant out of a cast-iron pot, and was trying to put a dent
in a windowless wall inset with an incongruous window seat, when the rat
leaped up onto the seat and stood staring at him.
“Sorry,” Pierce sighed. “You’ll have to wait for the next meal after
whatever that one was.” He whacked at the wall with force, determined to
fight his way back into the world by whatever worked. The rat did not move.
Pierce glanced at it again. Something in its dark, fixed gaze, its complete
lack of instinct or common rat sense, made Pierce’s skin prickle.
He lowered the pot, whispered, “Mom?”
The wall around the window seat blew into fragments. The rat, squealing,
leaped one way, Pierce another. When the shards of lath and plaster finished
falling, and the dust settled, he felt light and heard the distant roar of the
sea.
A series of muffled explosions thundered methodically around him, followed by
some furious shouting just before the floor collapsed under his feet. He
thudded down an inch or two, and walls around him collapsed, dissolved, like
the long spiral of chambers within a shell fraying apart, opening up to reveal
its outer structure. He stood in the lovely mansion he had seen from the road,
with its airy rooms overlooking the highway and the sea, its windows stained
the mist and pearl of what he finally realized was dawn.
Across the road, down a long, empty beach, a crow chased a seagull. Their
cries were audible even above the waves. Pierce, watching the crow gain air
and peck at the gull’s feathers, shivered suddenly, amazed at the power that
his mother possessed to have torn apart the sorceress’s spell like a squall
hitting a haystack. He watched for a time, wondering if she would turn and fly
back to him. Both birds vanished behind a jut of headland. He waited, as the
sun revealed its waking eye between two layers of cloud, then closed it again
and carried on unseen. Pierce opened a sliding deck door, stepped outside,
taking deep breaths of the briny, chilly air. He heard voices, and went to
look over the side of the deck.
Val and Leith stood below. Val was pulling on his jacket and sliding weapons
into its hidden pockets. Leith, holding Pierce’s clothes and boots and the
kitchen knife, was scanning the lower windows and shouting his name.