Heartland

EPILOGUE

The Chorus flew into the studio like an owl, darted around my head, and then left again, returning to their watch post on the roof of the barn. Visitors. A single car, coming slowly down the old road from the highway. Seeing the landscape around the farm through their psychic radar, I watched the sedan approach. Two souls: one in front, one in back; I recognized them both, though they had been changed by the coming of the spring.

I wandered over to the sink by the window to wash my brush, and looked out at the yard. The flowers were blooming in the old field; it was starting to look like I remembered it. Though there were no geese and no little girl to chase them.

The car rolled up to the main house, and Marielle got out of the back. Antoine stayed in the car. Driver's seat. The significance of their positions in the vehicle was not lost on me.

I had finished drying my hands by the time Marielle walked across the yard to the barn. It hadn't housed horses since she had gone off to school, and Philippe had turned it into a makeshift studio, complete with a small furnace for glass in one corner.

Someday I might try my hand at glass, to see how much of Cristobel I still had. Though judging by the way I was making a mess out of the watercolors, I was going to be a dismal glass blower. Probably just as well; the artist's life was a little too sedentary for me anyway.

When I had first arrived at the old farmhouse, I had spent a few days cleaning out the main house, getting it ready for habitation again. Philippe hadn't been here for a few years, and the whole place, while still sealed from the elements and curious locals with too much wine in their bloodstreams, had become filled with dead air and ghosts. It had needed a good cleansing.

I had then turned my attention to the barn and had discovered the canvases and the glass-blowing tools. A memory of Cristobel's initiation had given me an idea, and after a few days of poking through books in the extensive library, I had formulated a spell.

I hadn't taken the oath, in the end, and the Land had been generous enough to let me go with the healing magick of the Grail still upon me. My right hand was still gone, and the gauntlet was still attached to my wrist. I could have had Nuriye undo her magick and remove it, but I had wanted to get out of Paris. I had wanted to put all of my past behind me.

Besides, the daughters were undoubtedly busy. Vivienne had managed to breach the wards enough to allow access to the roof of Tour Montparnasse, but it was going to take a little longer, I suspected, to free them entirely from that building. They didn't need me underfoot.

The spell I had in mind required a lot of heat, and the glass-blowing furnace turned out to be perfectly suitable for my needs. After two nights of incantations and preparations, I had gone into Carcassone and stocked up on raw meat and fish. I was going to need a lot of protein afterward.

The glass-blowing furnace had come back to life with some reluctance, as if it was unwilling to serve a new master, but I stroked it in the right way and it slowly became a white-hot core. The Chorus had shielded my eyes and my flesh, and a heavy apron-inscribed with a number of seals and sigils-protected me from the brunt of the heat as the forge melted the gauntlet down. I shaped a new hand from the magick fire and bound it to the liquid smoke of Cristobel's rosary beads. I stole marrow and bone from my feet and made new fingers, I sloughed flesh off my thighs and ass to make new skin, and I kept John ab Indagine's chiromantic drawing as the foundation of my new palm.

The lifeline went all the way around the base of my palm, twice around my wrist, and ran up my forearm and bicep to my armpit. A tiny tattoo of black beads.

Afterward, for almost a week, all I had done was eat and sleep while the Chorus helped my body grow back the raw materials I had taken to make the hand. It was still a bit stiff, and the flesh was new and pink. There were no scars on the knuckles. I had wiped away my past.

Marielle knocked once before she entered the studio. She was wearing a green cashmere sweater and a pair of old jeans that were supple in their familiarity and comfort. She had dyed the color out of her hair; it was solid black again, as it had been when she was younger. Her father's signet ring glittered on her left thumb. It was clearly a man's ring, but she wore it well. It drew your attention, but not because it was an incongruity, but because it was an anchor. It grounded her, announcing how she was the rock upon which all the world turned.

"Salve, mi soror," I said, tipping my head forward a touch. My sister.

"Salve, mi frater," she replied. The slight of my honorific wasn't lost on her and her reply came somewhat awkwardly.

"I wondered when you might come," I said.

"We all needed some time to heal," she replied, wandering into the studio. She saw the canvas on the easel, and I wondered what she saw. I wanted to ask her; part of me still thrilled at the idea of hearing her interpretation, of being drawn in by her vision.

"It's going to take longer than a few weeks," I said, pushing that desire away.

Marielle nodded. "It's a new world, Michael. The old ways have been abandoned, but not forgotten. We needed a clean break, no matter how painful. We are not snakes; we don't slough off our old shells every year. It takes a little longer."

She caught a hint of the objection rising in my chest. "Regardless of how quickly our flesh regenerates. Broken hearts and spirits take a little longer." She shrugged. "But, children are resilient and eager to learn. They do heal, and they do learn to forgive."

"Is that what you're telling them? That they'll forgive you eventually?"

"Me?" Her eyebrows went up. "Why would they need to forgive me?"

"Did he ask you to kill him, or did you decide to do it on your own?"

Something that might have been a sneer started to move across her lips, but she hid it quickly, burying it beneath a sad smile. "A year ago, my father told me the Land had nearly rejected him at his last Renewal. He didn't think he would be strong enough to renew his oath this spring, and so he was forced to decide who would take the Crown after him, and how they would take it."

"Did he ask you to kill him?" I repeated.

"No child should ever have to bear the blood of their parents on their hands," was her response.

"That's not the way he remembers how the ritual goes."

"But he is gone, and there is no one to confirm what he thought, and so my way will be the way it is."

"Convenient."

"It is a better pattern, Michael, for all the threads. You See that."

I did. I had had some time to think about it since I had left her and Antoine in the church with the Grail. I had had time to figure out who was really playing whom. Whose vision was really the deepest.

Marielle came closer, studying my face. "In the end, my hands are clean," she said, "and that is the way my reign shall be. That is the way they will know that I will always be smarter than them, that I will always See further and deeper than any of them. They may not like that a woman leads them, but they will not be able to dismiss the fact that I earned the right to do so. And from this point, we will work toward a future where they will understand. Where they will Know, and in Knowing, they will be strong."

"Why?" I asked. "Why the object lesson?"

She took up my new hand and raised it to her lips. They were warm and her kiss invigorated my new flesh. I wanted to pull away, but I was rooted to the spot, caught in the magnetic whirlpool of force she carried within her. That she had always carried in her. The Chorus flickered into the room, falling back into my skull, and the skin of my new hand began to tingle. The teeth marks on her right ring finger whitened, old memories coming to the surface. The opals in the signet ring on her left thumb glowed like the moon.

She looked at her hands, holding mine. "You and Antoine broke my heart a long time ago," she said, "and I made the mistake of going to my father and telling him of the pain. Do you know what he told me?"

I remembered the last conversation between Philippe and myself, burned into my brain from two perspectives. Most die in darkness and in pain. "I can imagine," I said.

"He told me I had made that choice. I was responsible for what happened between the two of you, and I needed to own that responsibility." She shook her head. "I knew he was manipulating me, that he was twisting my thread. He wanted me to be confused and angry. As if I could plant that guilt and water it with my tears. As if I could make it grow with all that misplaced frustration and hurt. He wanted me to hate both of you, because he knew-when it came time-that I would have to play you two against each other again."

She looked at my eyes, and I knew she saw the memory of my own Qliphotic blackness there. "It is an easy choice, isn't it?" she whispered. "When you are bound in darkness. When you are frightened and willing to do anything to make the emptiness go away."

"It is," I said.

She leaned forward, hesitating for a moment, and when I didn't pull away, she brushed her lips against mine. All the air in my lungs vanished, drawn down into the whirlpool of her psychic beauty. "The sun has come back," she whispered, her lips still close to mine. Her face, so close to mine. "The world turned, and dawn brought light to our darkness. We can choose new paths now, can't we? We can put the past behind us and try again. Isn't that the opportunity given to us by the Land? We are the kings and queens of the world, Michael. We can choose any path we want. To walk into the light, or to stay in the dark." Her lips touched me again, flooding me with warmth. "Which path will you take?"

I pulled my hand out of hers and crushed her to me, kissing her fiercely. At some point, she broke away with a tiny noise, but it was a brief moment-an inhalation more than a reaction-and she then grabbed me again. I had already told her my choice, and I wasn't going to change my mind. No matter the allure of her words, or the touch of her flesh. No matter the path she offered.

Our lips parted eventually, but we remained close. Touching at chest, hip, and thigh. Hands lightly tracing each other. I wiped the moisture from her cheeks with my right hand and she tried to kiss my fingers once more. On her finger, the white ring of teeth marks. She would carry them forever, just as I carried Reija's hair about my throat.

We all carry our scars. Some of them are more welcome than others. Some of them don't remind us of pain, but of the things we once loved.

I thought of Lafoutain and Vivienne. We can't control how other people love us, can we? Eventually we recognize that they do.

In his own way, Philippe had loved his daughter too. As best he could.

"Your father left me a memory of this place," I said. "You. When you were about eight. Chasing geese out in the field."

She nodded. "They came back every spring. As soon as the frost broke, I would leave my window cracked at night. So that when they came back, I would hear them. They always came at first light, chased by the dawn. I knew it was spring when I heard their voices again."

"Really? Your father was a very visual man. Most of his memories are like silent films. Little loops of imagery." The memory played again in my head. Little Marielle, laughing, chasing white shapes in the field of yellow flowers. This time there was sound, and I probably imagined it.

But maybe not.

"Thank you for telling me," I said.

Reluctantly, she let go and took a step back. A shy smile tugged at her lips. "I'm glad you know."

"Goodbye, Marielle."

"Goodbye, Michael."

After she left the studio, I didn't go to the window and watch her drive away with her Shepherd. What was done was done, and what was gone was gone.

Even though the equinox had passed, the sky was still empty of stars at night and the wind off the river was cold. When it got dark, I made a fire in the main house and read from a copy of Eschenbach's Parzival until I couldn't stay awake any longer.

The sun would wake me in the morning. The main sitting room looked toward the hills in the east. The dawn light would creep across the valley, stir up fog on the river, and steal through the large picture windows. It would wake me, and I would rise, free to make any choice I wanted.

Free to chose any path.

We all pass through Yesod.

I thought I might stay a few more days, though, in case the geese came back. Just to see them with my own eyes.