Black House

Once upon a time

in the Territories . . .

ONCE UPON A TIME (as all the best old stories used to begin when we all lived in the forest and nobody lived anywhere else), a scarred Captain of the Outer Guards named Farren led a frightened little boy named Jack Sawyer through the Queen’s Pavilion. That small boy did not see the Queen’s court, however; no, he was taken through a maze of corridors behind the scenes, secret and seldom-visited places where spiders spun in the high corners and the warm drafts were heavy with the smells of cooking from the kitchen.

Finally, Farren placed his hands in the boy’s armpits and lifted him up. There’s a panel in front of you now, he whispered—do you remember? I think you were there. I think we both were, although we were younger then, weren’t we? Slide it to the left.

Jack did as he was bidden, and found himself peeking into the Queen’s chamber; the room in which almost everyone expected her to die . . . just as Jack expected his mother to die in her room at the Alhambra Inn and Gardens in New Hampshire. It was a bright, airy room filled with bustling nurses who had assumed a busy and purposeful manner because they had no real idea of how to help their patient. The boy looked through the peephole into this room, at a woman he at first thought was his own mother somehow magically transported to this place, and we looked with him, none of us guessing that years later, grown to a man, Jack Sawyer would be lying in the same bed where he first saw his mother’s Twinner.

Parkus, who has brought him from French Landing to the Inner Baronies, now stands at the panel through which Jack, hoisted by Captain Farren, once looked. Beside him is Sophie of Canna, now known in the Territories as both the Young Queen and Sophie the Good. There are no nurses in the sleeping chamber today; Jack lies silent beneath a slowly turning fan. Where he is not wrapped in bandages, his skin is pale. His closed eyelids are hazed with a delicate purple bruise-blush. The rise and fall of the fine linen sheet drawn up to his chin can hardly be seen . . . but it’s there. He breathes.

For now, at least, he lives.

Speaking quietly, Sophie says, “If he’d never touched the Talisman—”

“If he’d never touched the Talisman, actually held it in his arms, he would have been dead there on that platform before I could even get close to him,” Parkus says. “But of course, if not for the Talisman, he never would have been there in the first place.”

“What chance has he?” She looks at him. Somewhere, in another world, Judy Marshall has already begun to subside back into her ordinary suburban life. There will be no such life for her Twinner, however—hard times have come again in this part of the universe—and her eyes gleam with an imperious, regal light. “Tell me the truth, sir; I would not have a lie.”

“Nor would I give you one, my lady,” he tells her. “I believe that, thanks to the residual protection of the Talisman, he will recover. You’ll be sitting next to him one morning or evening and his eyes will open. Not today, and probably not this week, but soon.”

“And as for returning to his world? The world of his friends?”

Parkus has brought her to this place because the spirit of the boy Jack was still lingers, ghostly and child-sweet. He was here before the road of trials opened ahead of him, and in some ways hardened him. He was here with his innocence still intact. What has surprised him about Jack as a grown man—and touched him in a way Parkus never expected to be touched again—is how much of that innocence still remained in the man the boy has become.

That too is the Talisman’s doing, of course.

“Parkus? Your mind wanders.”

“Not far, my lady; not far. You ask if he may return to his world after being mortally wounded three, perhaps even four times—after being heart-pierced, in fact. I brought him here because all the magic that has touched and changed his life is stronger here; for good or ill, the Territories have been Jack Sawyer’s wellspring since he was a child. And it worked. He lives. But he will wake different. He’ll be like . . .”

Parkus pauses, thinking hard. Sophie waits quietly beside him. Distantly, from the kitchen, comes the bellow of a cook lacing into one of the ’prentices.

“There are animals that live in the sea, breathing with gills,” Parkus says at last. “And over time’s long course, some of them develop lungs. Such creatures can live both under the water and on the land. Yes?”

“So I was taught as a girl,” Sophie agrees patiently.

“But some of these latter creatures lose their gills and can live only on the land. Jack Sawyer is that sort of creature now, I think. You or I could dive into the water and swim beneath the surface for a little while, and he may be able to go back and visit his own world for short periods . . . in time, of course. But if either you or I were to try living beneath the water—”

“We’d drown.”

“Indeed we would. And if Jack were to try living in his own world again, returning to his little house in Norway Valley, for instance, his wounds would return in a space of days or weeks. Perhaps in different forms—his death certificate might specify heart failure, for instance—but it would be Wanda Kinderling’s bullet that killed him, all the same. Wanda Kinderling’s heart shot.” Parkus bares his teeth. “Hateful woman! I believe the abbalah was aware of her no more than I was, but look at the damage she’s caused!”

Sophie ignores this. She is looking at the silent, sleeping man in the other room.

“Condemned to live in such a pleasant land as this . . .” She turns to him. “It is a pleasant land, isn’t it, sirrah? Still a pleasant land, in spite of all?”

Parkus smiles and bows. Around his neck, a shark’s tooth swings at the end of a fine gold necklace. “Indeed it is.”

She nods briskly. “So living here might not be so terrible.”

He says nothing. After a moment or two, her assumed briskness departs, and her shoulders sag.

“I’d hate it,” she says in a small voice. “To be barred from my own world except for occasional brief visits . . . paroles . . . to have to leave at the first cough or twinge in my chest . . . I’d hate it.”

Parkus shrugs. “He’ll have to accept what is. Like it or not, his gills are gone. He’s a creature of the Territories now. And God the Carpenter knows there’s work for him over here. The business of the Tower is moving toward its climax. I believe Jack Sawyer may have a part to play in that, although I can’t say for sure. In any case, when he heals, he won’t want for work. He’s a coppiceman, and there’s always work for such.”

She looks through the slit in the wall, her lovely face troubled.

“You must help him, dear,” Parkus says.

“I love him,” she says, speaking very low.

“And he loves you. But what’s coming will be difficult.”

“Why must that be, Parkus? Why must life always demand so much and give so little?”

He draws her into his arms and she goes willingly, her face pressed against his chest.

In the dark behind the chamber in which Jack Sawyer sleeps, Parkus answers her question with a single word:

Ka.