Lucius shook his head. “The crow girls found him lying by a dumpster behind the Williamson Street Mall. They tried to heal him, but all they could manage was to keep him from slipping further away. Maida said he was laid low by ill will.”
Jilly’s ears perked up at the mention of the crow girls. They were the real reason for her current interest in all things corvid—a pair of punky, black-haired young women who seemed to have the ability to change your entire perception of the world simply by stepping into the periphery of your life. Ever since she’d first seen them in a café, she kept spotting them in the most unlikely places, hearing the most wonderful stories about them. Whenever she saw a crow now, she’d peer closely at it, wondering if this was one of the pair in avian form.
“That makes it more complicated,” Meran said.
Sitting back on her heels, she glanced at Lucius. He gave her an apologetic look.
“I know he has buffalo blood,” he told her.
“Yes, I see that.”
“What did Maida mean by ill will?” Cerin asked. “He doesn’t appear to have any obvious physical injuries.”
Lucius shrugged. “You know how they can be. The more they tried to explain it to me, the less I understood.”
Jilly had her own questions as she listened to them talk, such as why hadn’t someone immediately called for an ambulance, or why had this Lucius brought the injured man here, rather than to a hospital? But there was a swaying, eddying sensation in the air, a feeling that the world had turned a step from the one everyone knew and they now had half a foot in some other, perhaps more perilous, realm. She decided to be prudent for a change and listen until she understood better what was going on.
She wasn’t the only one puzzled, it seemed.
“We need to know more,” Meran said.
Lucius nodded. “I’ll see if I can find them.”
“I’ll come with you,” Cerin said.
Lucius hesitated for a long moment, then gave another nod and the two men left the house. Jilly half expected them to fly away, but when she looked out the window she saw them walking under the oaks toward the street like an ordinary, if rather mismatched, pair, Lucius so broad and large that the tall harper at his side appeared slender to the point of skinniness. The crows remained in the trees this time, studying the progress of the two men until they were lost from sight.
“I have some things to fetch,” Meran said. “Remedies to try. Will you watch over our patient until I get back?”
Jilly glanced at the professor.
“Um, sure,” she said.
And then the two of them were alone with the mysteriously stricken man. Laid low by ill will. What did that mean?
Jilly pulled a footstool over to the sofa where Meran had been kneeling and sat down. Looking at the man, she found herself wishing for pencil and sketchbook again. He was so handsome, like a figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Except for the braids and raggedy clothes, of course. Then she felt guilty for where her thoughts had taken her. Here was the poor man, half dead on the sofa, and all she could think about was drawing him.
“He doesn’t look very happy, does he?” she said.
“Not very.”
“Where do you know Lucius from?”
The professor took off his wire-rimmed glasses and gave them a polish they didn’t need before replacing them.
“I can’t remember where or when I first met him,” he said. “But it was a long time ago—before the war, certainly. Not long after that he became somewhat of a recluse. At first I’d go visit him at his house—he lives just down the street from here—but then it came to the point where he grew so withdrawn that one might as well have been visiting a sideboard or a chair. Finally I stopped going ’round.”
“What happened to him, do you think?”
The professor shrugged. “Hard to tell with someone like him.”
“You’re being deliberately mysterious, aren’t you?”
“Not at all. There just isn’t much to say. I know he’s related to the crow girls. Their grandfather, or an uncle or something. I never did quite find out which.”
“So that’s why all the crows are out there.”
“I doubt it,” the professor said. “He’s corbae, all right, but raven, not crow.”
Jilly felt a thrill of excitement. A raven uncle, crow girls, the man on the sofa with his buffalo blood. She was in the middle of some magical story for once, rather than on the edges of it looking in, and her proximity made everything feel bright and clear and very much in focus. Then she felt guilty again because it had taken someone getting hurt to draw her into this story. Considering the unfortunate circumstances, it didn’t seem right to be so excited by it.
She turned back to look at the pale man lying there so still.
“I wonder if he can turn into a buffalo,” she said.
“I believe it’s more of a metaphorical designation,” the professor told her, “rather than an actual shape-shifting option.”
Jilly shook her head. She could remember the night in Old Market when she’d first seen the crow girls slip from crow to girl and back again. It wasn’t exactly something you forgot, though oddly enough, the memory did have a tendency to try to slip away from her. To make sure it didn’t, she’d fixed the moment in pigment and hung the finished painting on the wall of her studio as a reminder.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think it’s a piece of real magic.”
She leaned closer to the man and reached forward to push aside a few long white hairs that had come to lie across his lashes. When she touched him, that swaying, eddying sensation returned, stronger than ever. She had long enough to say, “Oh, my,” then the world slipped away and she was somewhere else entirely.
- 2 -
“I have resumed my responsibilities,” Lucius said as the two men walked to his house a few blocks farther down Stanton Street.
Cerin gave him a sidelong glance. “Guilt’s a terrible thing, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
The harper shrugged. “It makes you question people’s motives, even when they’re as straightforward as my wanting to help you find a pair of somewhat wayward and certainly mischievous relatives.”
“They can be a handful,” Lucius said. “It’s possible we’ll find them more quickly with your help.”
Cerin hid a smile. He knew that was about as much of an apology as he’d be getting, but he didn’t mind. He hadn’t really wanted one. He’d only wanted Lucius to understand that no one was holding him to blame for withdrawing from the world the way he had—at least no one in the Kelledy household was. Responsibility was a sharp-edged sword that sometimes cut too deep, even for an old spirit such as Lucius Portsmouth.
So all he said was, “Um-hmm,” then added, “Odd winter we’ve been having, isn’t it? So close to Christmas and still no snow. I wonder whose fault that is.”
Lucius sighed. “You can be insufferable.”
This time Cerin didn’t hide his smile. “As Jilly would say, it’s just this gift I have.”
“But I appreciate your confidence.”
“Apology accepted,” Cerin told him, unable to resist.
“You wouldn’t have any crow blood in you, would you?”
“Nary a drop.”
Lucius harrumphed and muttered, “I’d still like to see the results of a DNA test.”
“What was that?”
“I said, I wonder where they keep their nest.”
Stanton Street was lined with oaks, not so old as those that grew around the Kelledy house, but they were stately monarchs nonetheless. Having reached the Rookery where Lucius lived, the two men paused to look up where the bare branches of the trees laid their pattern against the sky above. Twilight had given way to night and they could see stars peeking down from amongst the boughs. Stars, but no black-haired, giggling crow girls. Lucius called, his voice ringing up into the trees like a raven’s cry.
Kaark. Kaark. Tok.
> There was no reply.
“They weren’t so happy with this foundling of theirs,” Lucius said, turning to his companion. “At first I thought it was because their healing didn’t take, but when I carried him to your house, I began to understand their uneasiness.”
He called again, but there was still no response.
“What do you find so troubling about him?” Cerin asked.
Though he had an idea. There were people and places that were like doors to other realms, to the spiritworld and to worlds deeper and older than that. In their presence, you could feel the world shift uneasily underfoot, the ties binding you to it loosening their grip—an unsettling sensation for anyone, but more so for those who could normally control where they walked.
The still, pale man with his white braids had been like that.
Lucius said as much, then added, “The trouble with such doors isn’t so much what they open into, as what they can close you from.”
Cerin nodded. To be denied access to the spiritworld would be like losing a sense. One’s hearing, one’s taste.
“So you don’t think they’ll come,” he said.
Lucius shrugged. “They can be willful…not so responsible as some.”
“Let me try.”
“Never let it be said I turned down someone’s help.”
Cerin smiled. He closed his eyes and reached back to his home, back to a room on the second floor. A harp stood there with a rose carved into the wood where curving neck met forepillar. His fingers twitched at his sides and the sound of that roseharp was suddenly in the air all around them, a calling-on song that rose up as though from the ground and spun itself out against the branches above, then higher still, as though reaching for the stars.
“A good trick,” Lucius said. “Cousin Brandon does much the same with his instrument, though in his case, he’s the only one to hear its tones.”
“Perhaps you’re not listening hard enough,” Cerin said.
“Perhaps.”
He might have said more, but there came a rustling in the boughs above them and what appeared to be two small girls were suddenly there, hanging upside down from the lowest branch by their hooked knees, laughter crinkling in the corners of their eyes while they tried to look solemn.
“Oh, that was veryvery mean,” Maida said.
Zia gave an upside down nod. “Calling us with magic music.”
“We’d give you a good bang on the ear.”
“Reallyreally we would.”
“Except the music’s so pretty.”
“Ever so truly pretty.”
“And magic, of course.”
Cerin let the harping fall silent.
“We need you to tell us more about the man you found,” he said.
The crow girls exchanged glances.
“Surely such wise and clever people as you don’t need help from us,” Maida said.
“That would be all too very silly,” Zia agreed.
“And yet we do,” Cerin told them. “Will you help us?”
There was another exchange of glances between the pair, then they dropped lightly to the ground.
“Are there sweets in your house?” Zia asked.
“Mountains of them.”
“Oh, good,” Maida said. She gave Lucius a sad look. “Old Raven never has any sweets for us.”
Zia nodded. “It’s veryvery sad. What kind do you have?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, come on,” Maida said, taking Cerin’s hand. “We’d better hurry up and find out.”
Zia nodded, looking a little anxious. “Before someone else eats them all.”
In this mood, Cerin didn’t know that they’d get anything useful out of the pair, but at least they’d agreed to come. He’d let Meran sort out how to handle them once he got them home.
Zia took his other hand and with the pair of them tugging on his hands, they started back up Stanton Street. Lucius took the rear, a smile on his face as the crow girls chattered away to Cerin about exactly what their favourite sweets were.
- 3 -
Jilly was no stranger to the impossible, so she wasn’t as surprised as some might have been to find herself transported from the Kelledys' living room, full of friendly shadows and known corners, to an alleyway that could have been anywhere. Still, she wasn’t entirely immune to the surprise of it all and couldn’t ignore the vague, unsettled feeling that was tiptoeing up and down the length of her spine.
Because that was the thing about the impossible, wasn’t it? When you did experience it, well, first of all, hello, it proved to be all too possible, and secondly, it made you rethink all sorts of things that you’d blindly agreed to up to this point. Things like the world being round—was gravity really so clever that it kept people on the upside down part of the world from falling off into the sky? That Elvis was dead—if he was, then why did so many people still see him? That UFOs were actually weather balloons or swamp gas—never mind the improbability of so many balloons going AWOL, how did a swamp get indigestion in the first place?
So being somewhere she shouldn’t be didn’t render Jilly helpless, stunned, or much more than curiously surprised. By looking up at the skyline, she placed herself in an alleyway behind the Williamson Street Mall, right where the crow girls had found—
Her gaze dropped to the mound of litter beside the closest dumpster, and there he was, Meran’s comatose patient, except here, in this wherever she was, he was sitting on top of the garbage, knees drawn up to his chin, and regarding her with a gloomy gaze. She focused on the startling green of his eyes. Odd, she thought. Weren’t albinos supposed to have red, or at least pink, eyes?
She waited a moment to give him the opportunity to speak first. When he didn’t, she cleared her throat.
“Hello,” she said. “Did you bring me here?”
He frowned at the question. “I don’t know you, do I?”
“Well, we haven’t been formally introduced or anything, and while you weren’t exactly the life of the party when I first met you, right now we’re sharing the same space somewhere else, as well as here, which is sort of like us knowing each other, or at least me knowing you.”
He gave her a confused look.
“Oh, that’s right. You wouldn’t remember, being unconscious and all. I’m not sure of all the details myself, but you’re supposed to have been, and I quote, ‘laid low by ill will,’ and when I went to brush some hair out of your eyes, I found myself here, with you again, except you’re awake this time. How were you laid low by this ill will? I’m assuming someone hit you, which would be ill will-ish enough so far as I can see, but somehow I think it’s more than that.”
She paused and gave him a rueful smile. “I guess I’m not doing a very good job with this explanation, am I?”
“How can you be so cheerful?” he asked her.
Jilly pulled a battered wooden fruit crate over to where he was sitting and sat down herself.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“The world is a terrible place,” he said. “Every day, every moment, its tragedies deepen, the mean-spiritedness of its inhabitants quickens and escalates until one can’t imagine a kindness existing anywhere for more than an instant before being suffocated.”
“Well, it’s not perfect,” Jilly agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we have to—”
“I can see that you’ve been hurt and disappointed by it—cruelly so, when you were much younger. Yet here you sit before me, relatively trusting, certainly cheerful, optimism bubbling in you like a fountain. How can this be?”
Jilly was about to make some lighthearted response, speaking without thinking as she did too often, but then part of what he’d said really registered.
“How would you know what my life was like when I was a kid?”
He shrugged. “Our histories are written on our skin—how can you be surprised that I wouldn’t know?”
“It’s not something I’ve ever heard of before.”
“Perhaps you have to know how to look for the stories.”
Well, that made a certain kind of sense, Jilly thought. There were so many hidden things in the world that only came into focus when you learned how to pay attention to them, so why not stories on people’s skin?
“So,” she said. “I guess nobody could lie to you, could they?”
“Why do you think the world depresses me the way it does?”
“Except it’s not all bad. You can’t tell me that the only stories people have are bad ones.”
“They certainly outweigh the good.”
“Maybe you’re not looking in the right place.”
“I understand thinking the best of people,” he said. “Looking for the good in them, rather than the wrongs they’ve done. But ignoring the wrongs is almost like condoning them, don’t you think?”
“I don’t ignore them,” Jilly told him. “But I don’t dwell on them either.”
“Even when you’ve been hurt as much as you have?”
“Maybe especially because of that,” she said. “What I try to do is make people feel better. It’s hard to be mean when you’re smiling, or when a laugh’s building up inside of you.”
“That’s a child’s view of the world.”
Jilly shook her head. “A child lives in the now, and they’re usually pretty self-absorbed. Which is what can make them unaware of other people’s feelings at times.”
“I meant simplistic.”
Jilly wouldn’t accept that, either. “I’m aware of what’s wrong. I just try to balance it with something good. I know I can’t solve every problem in the world, but if I try to help the ones I come upon as I go along, I think it makes a difference. And you know, most people aren’t really bad. They’re just kind of thoughtless at times.”
“How can you believe that? Listen to them and then tell me again how they’re really kind at heart.”
Jilly’s head suddenly filled with conversation.
…why do I have to buy anything for that old bag, anyway…
…hello, can’t we leave the kids at home for one afternoon…the miserable, squalling monsters…