A Knight of the Word

CHAPTER 2

They went out the porch door, down the steps, across the yard, and through the hedgerow that marked the back end of the Freemark property, then struck out into Sinissippi Park. Nest carried a large bundle of flowers she had purchased the night before and left sitting overnight in a bucket of water on the porch. It was not yet nine, and the air was still cool and the grass slick with damp in the pale morning light. The park stretched away before them, broad expanses of lush, new–mown grass fading into distant, shadowy woods and ragged curtains of mist that rose off the Rock River. The bare earth of the base paths, pitcher's mounds, and batting boxes of the ball diamonds cornering the central open space were dark and hard with moisture and the night's chill. The big shade trees had shed most of their leaves, the fall colours carpeting the areas beneath them in a patchwork mix of red, gold, orange, and brown. Park toys dotted the landscape like weird sculpture, and the wooden trestle and chute for the toboggan slide glimmered with a thin coating of frost. The crossbar at the entrance was lowered, the fall hours in effect so that there was no vehicle access to the park until after ten. In the distance, a solitary walker was towed in the wake of a hard–charging Irish setter that bounded through the haze of soft light and mist in a brilliant flash of rust.

The cemetery lay at the west end of the park on the other side of a chain–link fence. Having grown up in the park, they had been climbing that fence since they were kids-Robert and Cass Minter and Brianna Brown and Jared Scott and herself. Best friends for years, they had shared adventures and discoveries and hopes and dreams. Everything but the truth about who Nest was.

Robert shoved his bare hands in his pockets and exhaled a plume of white moisture. 'We should have driven,' he declared.

He was striding out ahead of her, taking the lead in typical Robert fashion, not in the least intimidated by the fact that she was taller and stronger and far more familiar with where she was going than he was.

She smiled in spite of herself. Robert would lead even if he were blindfolded.

She remembered telling him her deepest secret once, long ago, on the day after she had eluded him on her way to the deadly confrontation with her father. She had done something to him, he insisted, and he wanted to know what it was. That was the price he was demanding for his help in getting into the hospital to see Jared. She told him the truth, that she had used magic. She told him in a way that was meant to leave him in doubt. He could not quite believe her, but not quite ignore her, either. He had never been able to resolve his confusion, and that was a part of what attracted him to her, she supposed.

But there were distances between them that Robert could not even begin to understand. Between her and everyone she knew, now that Gran was gone, because Nest was the only one who could do magic, the only one who would ever be able to do magic, the only one who would probably ever even know that magic was out there. She was the one who had been born to it, a legacy passed down through generations of the Freemark women, but through her demon father, as well. Magic that could come to her in the blink of an eye, could come unbidden at tithes. Magic that lived within her heart and mind, a part of her life that she must forever keep secret, because the danger that came from others knowing far outweighed the burden of clandestine management. Magic to heal and magic to destroy. She was still struggling to understand it. She could still feel it developing within her.

She looked off into the shadows of the woods that flanked the cliffs and cemetery ahead, where the night still lingered in dark patches and the feeders lurked. She did not see them, but she could sense that they were there. As she had always been able to when others could not. Unseen and unknown, the feeders existed on the fringes of human consciousness. Sylvans like Pick helped to keep them in check by working to maintain a balance in the magic that was invested in and determinative of the behaviour of all living things. But humans were prone to adversely affect that balance, tilting it mostly without even knowing, changing it with their behaviour and their feelings, altering it in the careless, unseeing way that mudslides altered landscapes.

This was the other world, the one to which Nest alone had access. Since she was very small, she had worked to understand it, to help Pick maintain it, and to find a way to reconcile it with the world that everyone else inhabited and believed fully defined. There, in no–man's-land between the known and the secret, she was an anomaly, never entirely like her friends, never just another child.

`You've lived in your grandparents' house all your life,' Robert said suddenly, eyes determinedly fixed in a forward direction. They were crossing the entrance road and moving into the scattering of shade trees and spruce that bordered the picnic grounds leading to the chain–link fence and the cemetery. `That house is your home, Nest. If you sell it, you won't have a home anymore.

She scuffed at the damp grass with her tennis shoes. `I know that, Robert:

`Do you need the money?'

`I could use it. Training and competition is expensive. The school doesn't pay for everything:

`Why don't you take out a mortgage, then? Why sell, if you don't have to?'

She couldn't explain it to him, not if she tried all day. It had to do with being who she was, and that wasn't something Robert could know about without having lived her life. She didn't even want to talk about it with him because it was personal and private.

`Maybe I want a new home; she said enigmatically, giving sudden, unexpected voice to the feelings that churned inside her. It was hard to keep from crying as she thought back upon their genesis.

Her friends were gone, all but Robert. She could still see their faces, but she saw them not as they were at the end, but as they were when they were still fourteen and it seemed as if nothing in their lives would ever change. She saw them as they were during that last summer they were all together, on that last weekend before everything changed–when they were close and tight and believed they could stand up to anything.

Brianna Brown and Jared Scott moved away within a year of that summer. Brianna wrote Nest at first, but the time between letters steadily lengthened, and finally the letters ceased altogether. Nest heard later that Brianna was married and had a child.

She never heard from Jared at all.

Cass Minter remained her oldest and closest friend all through high school. Different from each other in so many ways, they continued to find common ground in a lifetime of shared experiences and mutual trust. Cars planned to go to the University of Illinois and study genetics, but two weeks before graduation, she died in her sleep. The doctor said it was an aneurysm. No one had suspected it was there.

Jared, Brianna, and Cass–all gone. Of her old friends, that left only Robert, and by the end of her freshman year at North–western, Nest could already feel herself beginning to drift. Her parents were gone. Her grandparents were gone. Her friends were gone. Even the cats, Mr. Scratch and Miss Minx, were gone, the former dead of old age two years earlier, the latter moved to a neighbour's home with her grandfather's passing. Her future, she thought, lay somewhere else. Her life was going in a different direction, and she could feel Hopewell receding steadily into her past.

They reached the chain–link fence and, without pausing to debate the matter, scrambled over. Holding the flowers for Nest while she completed the climb, Robert gave them a cursory sniff before handing them back. Side by side, the two made their way down the paved road that wound through the rows of tombstones and markers, feeling the October sun grow warmer against their skin as it lifted into a clear autumn sky. Summer might be behind them and winter closing fast, but there was nothing wrong with this day.

She felt her thoughts drift like clouds, returning to the past. She had acquired new friends in high school but they lacked the history she shared with the old, and she couldn't seem to get past that.

Of course, the Petersons still lived next door and Mildred Walker still lived down the street. Reverend Emery still conducted services at the First Congregational Church, and a few of her grandfather's old cronies still gathered for coffee at Josie's each morning to share gossip and memories. Once in a while, she even saw Josie, but she could sense the other's discomfort, and understanding its source, kept her distance. In any event, these were people of a different generation, and their real friendships had been with her grandparents rather than with her.

There was always Pick, though. And, until a year or so ago, there had been Wraith …

Robert left the roadway to cut through the rows of markers, bearing directly for the gravesites of her grandparents. Isn't it odd, she thought, trailing distractedly in his wake, that Hopewell should feel so alien to her? Small towns were supposed to be stable and unchanging. It was part of their charm, one of their virtues, that while larger communities would almost certainly undergo some form of upheaval, they would remain the same. But Hopewell didn't feel like that to her. It felt altered in ways that transcended expectation, ways that did not involve population growth or economic peaks. Those were substantially the same as they had been five years earlier. It was something else, an intangible that she believed might have influenced only her.

Perhaps it was her, she pondered. Perhaps it was she who had changed and not the town at all.

They walked up to her grandparents' graves and stopped below the markers, looking down at the mounds that fronted them. Gran's was thick and smooth with autumn grass; the grass on Old Bob's was still sparse and the earth less settled. Identical tombstones marked their resting places. Nest read her grandmother's. EVELYN OPAL FREEMARK. BELOVED WIFE OF ROBERT. SLEEP WITH ANGELS. WAKE WITH GOD. Old Bob had chosen the wording for Gran's marker, and Nest had simply copied it for his.

Her mother's gravestone stood just to the left. CAITLIN ANNE FREEMARK. BELOVED DAUGHTER & MOTHER.

A fourth plot, just a grassy space now, was reserved for her.

She studied it thoughtfully for a moment, then set about dividing up the flowers she had brought, arranging them carefully in each of the three metal vases that stood on tripods before the headstones. Robert watched her as she worked, saying nothing.

`Bring some water,' she said, pointing toward the spigot and watering can that sat in a small concrete well several dozen yards off.

Robert did, then poured water into each vase, being careful not to disturb Nest's arrangements.

Together, they stood looking down at the plots, the sun streaming through the branches of the old shade trees that surrounded them in curtains of dappled brightness.

`I remember all the times your grandmother baked us cookies; Robert said after a minute. 'She would sit us down at the picnic table out back and bring us a plate heaped with them and glasses of cold milk. She was always saying a child couldn't grow up right without cookies and milk. I could never get that across to my mother. She thought you couldn't grow up right without vegetables'

Nest grinned. 'Gran was big on vegetables, too. You just weren't there for that particular lecture:

`Every Christmas we had that cookie bake in your kitchen. Balls of dough and cookie sheets and cutters and frosting and little bottles of sprinkles and whatnot everywhere. We trashed her kitchen, and she never blinked an eye'

`I remember making cookies for bake sales.' Nest shook her head. `For the church, for mission aid or something. It seemed for a while that I was doing it every other weekend. Gran never objected once, even after she stopped going to church altogether:

Robert nodded. `Your grandmother never needed to go to church. I think God probably told her she didn't have to go, that he would come to see her instead'

Nest looked at him. `That's a very nice thing to say, Robert'

He pursed his lips and shrugged. `Yeah, well, I'm just trying to get back into your good graces. Anyway, I liked your grandmother. I always thought, when things got a little rough at home, that if they got real bad I could move in with you if I really wanted to. Sure, you and your grandfather might object, but your grandmother would have me in an instant. That's what I thought'

Nest nodded. `She probably would have, too.

Robert folded his arms across his chest. `You can't sell your house, Nest. You know why? Because your grandmother's still there'

Nest was silent for a moment. `I don't think so:

`Yes, she is. She's in every room and closet, in every corner, and under every carpet, down in the basement and up in the attic. That's where she is, Nest. Where else would she be?'

Nest didn't answer.

`Up in Heaven playing a harp? I wouldn't think so. Too boring. Not floating around on a cloud either. Not your grandmother. She's in that house, and I don't think you should move out on her.'

Nest wondered what Robert would say if he knew the truth of things. She wondered what he would say if he knew that Gran's transgressions years earlier had doomed her family in ways that would horrify him, that Gran had roamed the park at night like a wild thing, that she had run with the feeders and cast her magic in dangerous ways, that her encounter with a demon had brought about both her own death and the death of Nest's mother. Would he think that she, belonged in an afterlife of peace and light or that perhaps she should be consigned to a place where penance might be better served?

She regretted the thought immediately, a rumination both uncharitable and harsh, but she found she could not dispel it entirely.

Still, was Robert's truth any less valid in determining the worth of Gran's life than her own?

Robert cleared his throat to regain her attention. She looked at him. 'I'll think about it; she said.

`Good. 'Cause there are a lot of memories in that house, Nest'

Yes, there are: she thought, looking off into the sun–streaked trees to where the river was a blue glint through the dark limbs. But not all the memories were ones she wanted to keep, and perhaps memories alone were not enough in any case. There was a lack of substance in memories and a danger in embracing them. You did not want to he tied too closely to something you could never recapture.

`I wouldn't sell if it was me, you know,' Robert persisted. `I wouldn't sell unless I didn't have a choice'

He was pushing his luck, irritating her with his insistence on making the derision far her, on assuming she couldn't think it through as carefully as he could and needed his advice. It was typical Robert.

She gave him a look and dared him to speak. To his credit, he. didn't. `Let's go' she said.

They walked bade through the cemetery in silence, climbed the fence a second time, and crossed the park. The crossbar was raised now, and a few cars had driven in. One or two families were playing on the swing sets, and a picnic was being spread in a sunny spot across from the Sinnissippi burial mounds. Nest thought suddenly of Two Bears, of O'olish Amaneh, the last of the Sinnissippi. She hadn't thought of him in a long time. She hadn't seen him in five years. Now and then she wondered what had become of him. As she wondered what had become of John Ross, the Knight of the Word,

The memories flooded through her.

At the hedgerow bordering her yard, she leaned over impulsively and gave Robert a kiss on the cheek. `Thanks for coming by. It was sweet of you'

Robert looked flustered. He was being dismissed, and he wasn't ready for that. `Uh, are you, do you have any plans for the rest of the day? Or anything?'

`Or anything?' she repeated.

`Well, lunch, maybe. You know what I mean:

She knew exactly. She knew better than he did. Robert would never change. The best thing she could do for them both was not to encourage him.

`I'll call you if I get some time later, okay?'

It had to be okay, of course, so Robert shrugged and nodded. `If it doesn't work out, I'll see you at Thanksgiving. Or Christmas'

She nodded. `I'll drop you a note at school. Study hard, Robert. I need to know you're out there setting an example for the rest of us'

He grinned, regaining a bit of his lost composure. `It's a heck of a burden, but I try: He began to move away into the park. `See you, Nest: He tossed back his long blond hair and gave her a jaunty wave.

She watched him walk down the service road that ran behind her backyard, then cut across the park toward his home, which lay beyond the woods at the east end. He grew smaller and less distinct as he went, receding slowly into the distance. It was like watching her past fade before her eyes. Even when she saw him again, it would not be the same. She knew it instinctively. They would be different people leading different lives, and there would be no going back to the lives they had lived as children.

Her throat tightened, and she took a deep breath. Oh, Robert!

She waited a moment longer, letting the memories flood through her one final time, then turned away.