“May we speak in private?” I asked.
He looked around at the crowd. “We hide in plain sight,” he said. “We attract more attention if we huddle in a corner. Here nobody pays attention, we are ignored.”
He had the air of a man unused to changing his mind, and for a moment I felt stymied.
“Nem, Papa,” said lovely young Erszebet, and gave me a shy smile. “én teázni vele. Azt szeretné gyakorolni az angol tudásom.” To me: “We have tea, yes?”
With a sweetness and grace of movement, the pure fluidity of youth, she held her hand out to me with a smile, and smiled even more happily when I took it.
“Add nekem néhány shillinget,” she said over her shoulder to the man, whose solemnity melted. “én is fizetek vissza, amikor hazaérünk.” He drew a coin from the wallet in his vest pocket, she accepted the money with a grateful smile and began to pull me through the crowd, down the stairs, to the West Refreshment Court (flanked by those exotic public lavatories). She selected a tea-cart surrounded by little tables and chairs full of flagging matrons.
When we were close to the tea-cart, she gave me a conspiratorial grin, her eyes twinkling as I had never known Erszebet’s eyes to twinkle. “I speak very good English,” she whispered in my ear. “But I do not want him to know that.”
“Thank God,” I said impulsively. “Erszebet, I am glad to hear it, because truly I must speak to you alone.”
“Very well, let us speak over cakes and tea,” she said, and, smiling, she held up the coin with a flourish.
When we had settled at a small table with our refreshments, she said, eyes still sparkling, “So you have been Sent from the future. That has never happened to me before and I am very happy to meet you. Please tell me about the future. Father would say it is wrong to ask that, but I am so curious. I hope it is better than the present. The present is very difficult for us, for so many reasons. Please tell me magic is repaired soon. Surely it must be, or you could not have been Sent.”
I had never heard Erszebet speak so exuberantly, without an absence of rampaging insults, in all the time I’d known her. I hated that I had to be the one to give her the news.
“I am here to warn you that things will get much worse before they improve,” I said, “and they can only improve at all if you will agree to the request I am about to make.” I hesitated for a moment. Surely Erszebet knew many witches. Should I ask her to tell all of them to preserve themselves? Would that not give us more witches to collect in the twenty-first century?
And yet that would create such a muddle, and I had no Chronotron or even quipu to ask for clarity. I decided to stay within the bounds of what I knew we needed to accomplish. “And you must keep this request a secret. It is only for you.”
“I love secrets,” she said, grinning again. Grinning, she looked like a teenager. “I’m very good at keeping secrets.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, and said confidingly, delighted with herself, “I have a secret lover my parents do not know about. Not even Mother suspects, and she’s a very able witch!”
“I promise not to tell her you have a lover,” I said, forcing myself to grin right back at her. “If you do not tell her this. But, Erszebet, this is something you cannot even tell your lover.”
“That is easy, we do not actually talk very much,” she said slyly, with the tiniest blush of a recent ex-virgin. She giggled. Erszebet Karpathy giggled. It took so much willpower to keep my face smiling, to not close my eyes and shudder a bit at what I was about to ask of her.
“Erszebet, magic is about to end completely. Totally.” She blinked, and suddenly was serious and attentive, vaguely more similar to the Erszebet I knew. “It will stay extinguished for many, many years, and then we will bring it back—you and I, and some other people.” She blinked again, doe-eyed and speechless. “But, Erszebet, this is the most important part: it does not come back for such a long time that you would have died of old age first. So I have come here to tell you to cast a spell upon yourself that will prolong your life as long as possible. To slow your aging enough that you can live for two hundred years.”
She looked almost in a state of shock. “Who are you?” she asked. “Who are you that would ask me to do this?”
“My name is Melisande Stokes, and I am your friend,” I said. “I wish I did not have to ask this of you, but you, and only you, will be able to save magic someday—as long as you cast that spell upon yourself.”
She gave me a distressed look—not the haughty irritation of my Erszebet, but a childlike confusion. “Why me?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I had never stopped to think about this, since my experience of our relationship was that she had reached out to me. “Perhaps it is because fate has placed me here at this moment in time, when magic is about to end. It is perhaps that random. I don’t honestly know. What I do know is that it is your destiny to fix it. Extend your life, and Send me back to my own time, and we will meet there eventually and work together.”
Her dark green eyes darted from side to side as she considered this. “If this news is true, then I would prefer,” she said, “that I extend both our lives and you go through this journey with me. Then when the time comes, we will meet your colleagues and work together.”
I believe my heart actually stopped for a beat. “That’s not possible,” I said, thinking fast. “I already exist in that time period, I will be an old woman and a young one simultaneously on the same Strand. Surely that will cause diakrónikus nyírás.”
She thought this over, her mouth setting into a harder line now, a foreshadowing of the Erszebet to come. “This is a terrible thing you are asking me,” she said. “A very, very difficult thing.”
“I realize that, Erszebet,” I said. “But so important. And you choose to do it. And it is the right thing. You are there with me, in the future, and—” I hesitated. It would be a lie to tell her that she was glad of making that choice. She had only ever expressed regret and bitterness. But I had to convince her to do it. “In the future you know that it’s the right thing to have done.”
She stared at me levelly a moment. “Am I happy?” she asked. “Am I joyful? My lover tells me I am joyful. It is my favorite thing to be these days.” I stared at her like a deer in headlights startled fawn, and she knew the answer before I could prevaricate. “I see,” she said. “Not happy. Not joyful.”
“But . . . satisfied that you have done the right thing,” I insisted. “This makes you the most significant witch in the history of the world.”
“And if I say no?”