Shadows

CHAPTER 14

I WOKE UP SURPRISINGLY WARM AND COMFORTABLE and . . . peaceful. I thought I could smell coffee. And I had the oddest sensation that Mom was nearby. I had a vague recollection that something really dreadful had been happening, but I shied away from remembering and concentrated on feeling—safe? What was that about? Why did I want to think about being safe? But I shied away from whatever it was again.

That was coffee I was smelling. I didn’t mean to speak out loud—and spoil everything—but the feeling that Mom was standing by my bed holding a mug of coffee was so strong: “Mom?” Except this wasn’t my bed I was lying on.

Something, or rather someone, stirred. And I snapped back into reality. The reality of lying on cold hard bumpy ground with a pillow made of corners. The reality of being curled up against someone’s chest. Um. Someone’s naked chest. Takahiro was human again. Oh . . .

I raised my head cautiously. Takahiro’s eyes were blinking open. He saw me and smiled. There was something like a blanket draped over us but I was still, um, rather intensely aware of the full length of Takahiro’s body pressed against mine, although I was still in all my (filthy) clothes from the day before. I had one hand curled up under my chin and the other over Taks’ shoulder. I went to touch his chest and . . . oh. I didn’t mean to move away from him, and I didn’t move very far, but far enough to see what my hand was touching: he had the most awful scar: three ugly, grotesque starbursts of raggedly healed flesh: one just above his left nipple, one just below his sternum, and one over his right ribs. “Oh, Taks . . .”

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I have a problem, next time the doc tells me to take my shirt off to listen to my chest.”

I stroked the starburst over his heart and realized I’d started to cry. “Oh, hey,” he said, “don’t cry. I’m fine—genki desu.” He started to struggle up to one elbow, and winced. “Well, almost fine. It still kind of hurts, but only a little. Really. And Mongo is the best. If he hadn’t got me out of the way of that second . . . Hey. Maggie. Please don’t cry.”

I gulped and nodded and gulped again and got the hiccups. How dreeping romantic is that. He patted me on the back and said, “We’re alive, we’re fine, we’re free, and you’re a hero.”

“You’re a hero,” I said, still staring at his chest.

“Ja, okay, we’re both heroes,” said Takahiro. “And Mongo. Live heroes. Those are the best kind.”

There was the crunch of approaching feet. I looked up. Even having (mostly) remembered where we were and (some of) what was happening and that (presumably) we weren’t safe yet and there were (probably) some very-pissed-off cobey units chasing us, I was still expecting it to be Mom. It wasn’t. It was Val. But he was carrying two big plastic cups of steaming coffee.

He sat down beside us, and as we both sat up I realized it wasn’t a real blanket over us, it was one of those crinkly plastic emergency blankets over two sweatshirts and a jacket. Both of us were moving cautiously for our different reasons, but my algebra book had been good for the crick in my neck, or maybe that was having Taks back. I almost started to cry again as I said to Val, “Look—”

Val was already looking. “Hurt?”

Takahiro gave a half nod. “A little.”

“Even for a werewolf that is a great deal of damage. You are very brave. And very foolish.”

Takahiro raised one shoulder in a careful shrug. “There wasn’t like a lot of time to think. And Mongo helped. It got us out of there. All of us.”

“It did indeed,” said Val. “I thank you. All of us thank you.”

“So desu,” said Takahiro. “S’okay. You’d’ve done the same.” And he grinned.

Val laughed. “I would perhaps like to think so.”

I drank half a pint of coffee in one gulp. I could feel my brain trying to plug itself back into its sockets. I was probably imagining the short-circuit noises and the burning smell. “Val, Mom’s not here, is she? I know. It’s crazy. I just keep feeling as if she’s right behind me or something.”

Val nodded, and this dopey smile spread over his face. They’ve been married two months, I told myself, trying not to think about my boyfriend’s naked body one sweatshirt and a plastic blanket away from me. Taks shifted a little so he could sit up better. He picked up his coffee with one hand, and his free hand settled itself to hang over my shoulder. “She and her sisters have given us their protection,” said Val.

“Protection?” I said, looking around. We were in a kind of glade with the sun striking through the leaves. There wasn’t anything to see but trees, but I was pretty sure I could hear traffic noises not too far away. I had no idea what was out this way, beyond Goat Creek and the barrens. There were roads out here? With cars and stuff on them? It was like coming to the end of the world and discovering a shopping mall.

“Sindurak,” said Val. “A—something like what the gruuaa—and the dogs—do, only more complete. Less flexible, less adaptable, but if we stay here, where they have cast it, we are effectively invisible. They are coming for us.”

“Coming for us?”

Val nodded, and his smile got sharper, and he suddenly looked like someone I wouldn’t want mad at me. “There has been, in the last eighteen hours, the most unholy row in this end of Newworld, and your three aunts, who seem to be curiously placed to cause maximum official havoc, have been doing so.”

“Blanchefleur?” I said. “Blanchefleur too?”

“Yes,” said Val. “All four sisters. While your aunts make generals weep and cause nervous breakdowns in senior civil servants, your mother is chiefly responsible for our protection—that is why you feel her presence so strongly.”

Takahiro’s stomach gave a growl like a whole pack of wolves, and Val said, “The rest of the story can wait. It will take Elaine a little while to arrive and meanwhile Casimir has brought us all breakfast.

“Takahiro, you will find most of your clothes—the ones, I gather, you managed to get out of before you ’changed—”

“I’m learning,” said Taks. “I did get out of most of them first. But I was in kind of a hurry.”

“Yes, I ascertained that,” said Val. He stood up. Not like an old guy who had just spent a really uncomfortable night on the ground. Some day—soon—I was going to ask him about all the weird stuff his old life had taught him. “You did extremely well,” said Val. “Most of your clothes are intact, and there beside you. Maggie, if you will come with me, and leave him to his ablutions.” But instead of standing there glaring at me till I shrugged off my naked boyfriend and meekly got up and followed him, my not-so-wicked stepfather, two months married, turned his back and strolled slowly away, and Taks and I threw ourselves at each other and kissed as if our entire lives had been leading to this moment. Maybe they had. It was the most gorgeous thing that had ever, ever, ever happened to me and it was—terrifying. It was probably just as well that Val—still not turning around—paused and called, as if idly, “Maggie.”

I kissed Takahiro’s mouth one last time—I kissed the starburst over his nipple one last time—and tore myself away. When I caught up with Val he was smiling.

“Bacon,” I said disbelievingly. “I smell bacon.”

Val and I had come through a little grove and there was an insanely tidy campfire with a very bent grate that looked like it had once been a shelf in a refrigerator propped up over it, and half a dozen bacon rashers, and four slices of bread-becoming-toast lying on it. There was also what looked like a bucket with a plank across it sitting cozily at, or in, the edge of the fire, but that smelled like a coffeepot. Casimir was carefully and neatly turning the bacon over with another stick with a sharpened end. He was being watched by six dogs and one cat, but Arnie, eating an apple, was watching them and—possibly excepting Majid—I’d bet on Arnie. There was even a (large, mostly empty) bag of dog food being held closed by a small pile of firewood.

Casimir looked up and smiled his smile, and I immediately remembered that I was unbelievably filthy and tear-stained and disgusting, and I didn’t want to think about what my hair looked like—and at the same time, with my mouth full of Takahiro and my body still burning with the touch of his hands, I wasn’t too bothered. I smiled back.

Jill held out a paper plate and Casimir slid the toast and bacon onto it. There was also butter, jam, and a plastic knife. “Oh my,” I said between mouthfuls. “Sugoi. Oh wow.” Casimir had already loaded up his grate again. Takahiro would take a lot of feeding. Mongo changed sides and lay down at my feet, giving me the full force of the big-puppy eyes. Not a hope, friend, I thought at him.

Jill settled down next to me and said, “Daijobu ka? You okay?”

I thought about Taks’ mouth on mine and a kind of explosive thrill went through me. I could feel my (uncombed) hair standing on end and the lightning zapping out of my eyes. It made my hand shake, and I nearly hit myself in the face with my slice of (heavily buttered and jammed) toast. Not quite. I bit it off and chewed. “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much.”

Jill was smiling at me. I looked at Casimir and back at her and her smile got ever so slightly wider. “He’s a lot better-looking than Eddie,” I said very quietly. “He is, isn’t he?” said Jill, just as quietly.

“So,” I said in a normal voice. “What happened to you?”

They’d left me alone by the barrier as I’d asked them to but, Jill said, they hadn’t gone two steps when Takahiro started stripping out of his clothes. “I didn’t have a clue,” Jill said, “but Caz figured it out instantly and was like whipping his socks off and I’m all whoa, I’m fine for skinny-dipping but where’s the lake, but then Taks started growing fur and I finally got it.” She paused and an expression I couldn’t read crossed her face. “It’s, um, pretty weird, watching,” she said. “Caz said he’d never actually seen anyone change before, but it didn’t seem to faze him any. I was pretty fazed.”

I nodded. I didn’t know but I could maybe guess. I hadn’t seen much when Taks’d changed back to human out in Val’s shed, but it had been disturbing. Whatever had happened last night after Taks-as-wolf caught up with us finally . . . I guess I slept right through.

But as Taks finished the change into wolf the dogs freaked and that’s when Jill lost her grip on Mongo’s collar—but she saw the two of them stampeding back toward where they’d left me. “It had gone all foggy where you were,” she said. “And not a good fog. Like what the armydar might look like if you could see it. I . . . hoped for the best. Since there wasn’t anything else I could do. The gruuaa network had other plans for me, you know?

“Caz really calmly, like he does this all the time for his werewolf friends, folded up Taks’ clothing and put it in his knapsack—even his shoes, which are gigantic. When they’re on Taks’ feet you don’t realize they’re the size of backhoe buckets. Then Caz said that magic always takes longer than you think it’s taking and we probably had some time. Did you see him poking around in the trunk of the Mammoth? Arnie is obsessive about some weird stuff—although I guess I’ll never think about weird in the same way again—so all our vehicles have rope, matches, a first-aid kit, water purification tablets, a little hatchet, and an emergency blanket as well as a flashlight and extra fuel cells in the well with the spare tire. Caz had already put the rest of this in his knapsack and I’d been standing there thinking either this boy is totally anal or I’m a dead battery. I guess we know which it is.

“So after Taks and Mongo went back to join you—we hoped—the rest of us kept on toward what you’d thought was the front of the building. I’d been having this really squashing sense of doom, but it’s been so bad the last few days I’m like, so? Big ugly sense of doom with a side of fries and an extra-large coffee, you know? I was also kind of distracted by Whilp, who was so totally trying to talk to me and I had no idea what she was saying. And then Caz says like idly, When will they get here? and I heard myself answering just as idly, About an hour, and then I stopped and looked at him—What? Sorry, he said, that’s something else my mom taught me, and I know you’re picking them up better than I am. Picking what up, I said. The army, he said. They’re coming, aren’t they?

“And then something like straightened out in my head and I thought, Yeah. They’re coming. A lot of them are coming—I mean, a lot? For just Val and Arnie? Why a lot? What?

“I don’t know, Caz said, but if we’ve got an hour we can prepare a welcome for them. Do you want the hatchet or my penknife? and he pulled this folding knife out of his pocket. I took the hatchet since I’ve split way too much kindling in my life—”

In spite of the circumstances I grinned. Arnie, Jill’s mom and her four brothers all loved camping. Jill did not love camping. Occasionally she got to stay home with me.

“—and we started dropping brush across the track, and Caz untwisted the rope to make more rope and started weaving it through the brush—and muttering while he did it. I didn’t ask him what he was muttering, but it wasn’t English, and his mom taught him kind of a lot, didn’t she? Sometimes it seemed to me that the rope kind of wriggled for a while after he let go of it.

“The gruuaa network you sent with us—they were all over what we were doing. It’s a good thing Caz was so calm and focused because I kept kind of losing it—I’d start worrying about what was going on with you guys and I’d jerk myself back to what I was doing, preferably before there was any serious blood loss, and I’d discover that the jiggly woven thing that Caz and the gruuaa were making had gone way more complicated since the last time I looked. Then pieces of Caz started disappearing as the gruuaa moved around. It made me really dizzy, and Caz took the hatchet away and gave me some of his untwisted rope strands instead, and that worked because the gruuaa showed me where to wind them through.

“That’s—that’s when Whilp finally figured out how to tell me about hooking—pinning—I don’t know what to call it—some of the gruuaa around us and the dogs. I’d let the dogs off lead when we were dragging the brush around—I didn’t like the idea of them being helpless if something went wrong, you know? And Whilp needed me to help, uh . . . it wasn’t just guarding, it was invisibling, like what was happening to Caz. Like Taks in the school yard yesterday, only more so.”

“Wow,” I said admiringly. “I don’t know about invisibling.”

“But stuff did happen faster than we were ready for . . .” Jill’s eyes got huge and we stared at each other, and I knew we were both remembering wolf-Takahiro with the blood streaming down his chest.

Takahiro appeared through the trees and for a moment the world stopped as I looked at him. He didn’t look like a boy who thought he was too tall any more. He looked like a hero. A live hero. The best kind. He looked back at me and smiled. That hot distracting thrill ran through me again.

Casimir was turning more bacon. “This is not ready yet, and I gave the last to Maggie. There are apples, and potatoes in the ashes, which might be done by now.”

“You are a miracle, son,” said Arnie, eating another apple.

“I serve the mgdaga,” said Casimir calmly.

Ugh. “Where did all the food come from?” I said through another mouthful, and before anyone said anything about what Casimir had just said. Takahiro was rolling out black wrinkly-skinned potatoes with what I guessed was Casimir’s jackknife and his fingers. “Ow,” he said, and sucked his fingers. Werewolves when human still burn their fingers. He finished rolling them onto another paper plate, picked up a couple of apples too, and settled down beside me to eat.

“Caz,” said Jill smugly. “He’s the only one of us who saw any of this coming—”

“I saw none of it,” said Casimir, glancing up from his fire and looking for the first time not merely drop-dead gorgeous but also young, young like Jill and Taks and I were young, and vulnerable, and not knowing a lot—but then knowing a lot hadn’t done Val and Arnie much good. I suddenly wondered what it had really cost Mom to let us all go last night—and had to stop myself from looking over my shoulder again, to check she wasn’t standing right there watching us. She felt so close I almost reached up to stroke the air, having got kind of accustomed to stroking invisible companions recently.

I hadn’t noticed when Hix reclaimed my neck as her personal space, but I could feel her there now, and there were trailing gruuaa ends more or less visible over both my shoulders and Taks’, and a faint sweet smell in spite of the bacon. I noticed a shadow curled up on Jill’s knee. She had a hand near that knee and was wiggling a couple of fingers in a petting sort of way. I grinned again. Whilp.

“But you saw that something was,” said Jill. “The rest of us were all, oh, it’s a cobey, it’s several cobeys, who cares about deep lines, that’s what the army is for—and you got all your money out of the bank and bought a first-aid kit and two emergency blankets and some chocolate and peanuts and a water bottle with a safe-water thingy and matches and kindling starter.

“So we all had blankets last night, you know?” she said to me, and the Casimir smile came and went on her face, and I was counting: the blanket from the car, that’s one, and I was guessing Arnie and Val would have shared one, which left one for Casimir and Jill. “And this morning he was up before any of the rest of us and got the fire started, and then left it with Val while he went foraging.”

“That was only sensible,” said Casimir. “No one is searching for me.”

“And by the time he got back—the second time, with the dog food—your mom had done her security-lockdown trick and . . . here we are.”

I lied. When I thought none of the others was looking I gave Mongo half my last slice of bacon. Taks got through his first plateful in approximately one gulp, and his second almost that fast . . . his third . . . I began to lose count. “Maybe you should finish off the dog food,” I said.

“Ha ha ha,” he said.

Jill said, “She’ll be here soon.”

I think we all heard a car turning out of the general traffic noise and coming toward us, and then stopping. Nobody else moved as Val got up and went toward the sound of the hand brake going on. I had a chance to think, What in all the worlds is she driving? as I tucked my hand through Takahiro’s arm—he was eating another apple with his other hand—and then there was a bang like a storm-drain cover being dropped, which was maybe the driver’s door closing.

They came back pretty quickly, and Mom could have been a little flushed from the general circumstances, although they had their arms around each other’s waists. I got up and ran to her, and I would have managed not to cry—I think—except that she started crying, and then I had to cry too to keep her company.

She was driving the biggest double pickup van thing you have ever seen in your life: the kind of truck that really wanted to be a stretch limo except it’s on these like bulldozer wheels, and it had two seats like an ordinary four-door car and then an ordinary pickup cap over about two-thirds of the gigantic rear, like trying to put double-bed sheets on a king-sized bed. We were all going ooh and aah in a stunned kind of way—a lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours but the Super-Plus Mammothmobile was still startling—and Mom said, “It belongs to one of Gwenda’s clients, of course. We didn’t know how many of you there were but I remembered what you looked like leaving last night” —and her voice got all wobbly and she gave a gigantic sniff before she went on—“and Gwenda got on the phone to some construction boss whose daughter she’d defended, and this, this thing,” she said, gesturing at it, “was delivered to our door about an hour later. It’s like driving a house but we’d asked for large.

“Arnie,” she said, “I’ve talked to Danielle”—Jill’s mom—“and she’s going to meet us at Haven. And the same construction boss sent his daughter and another driver down to Goat Creek to pick up the car Jill was driving last night. The army seemed to think it belonged to an escaped detainee and had impounded it, but the daughter convinced them that it was one of her dad’s fleet of vehicles and is bringing it back. She said to tell you it wasn’t a big deal, that the division at Goat Creek is still pretty confused.”

“There are so many of us,” said Arnie.

Casimir laughed.

There were quite a few of us to fit in even Mom’s Super-Mammoth . . . especially when it turned out, to Val’s horror, to include an ugly, raggedy sheep, which had somehow climbed through that hole in the Goat Creek fence and Mom’s safety net. Mom, who was maybe feeling a little light-headed, laughed and laughed. “I am sorry,” said Val about three dozen times. “I used a spell I only imperfectly remembered—”

“—and that worked,” Jill said, “under pretty ghastly circumstances. Shut up, Val—I mean, sorry, Mr. Crudon, but shut up. We’re all here, we’re all alive, we’re all great.”

So because Mom said and Val very reluctantly agreed that if the spell was that strong it might injure the sheep to break it by leaving it behind, Arnie and Casimir blocked off a little of Super-Mammoth’s gigantic rear so if any of the other animals noticed that one of their number was prey we’d have enough warning to stop and sort things out. The sheep, I guess demented with love, didn’t object to this at all. Casimir somehow found time to pull up some grass for it, and it lay down and munched its grass and then chewed its cud like hanging out with dogs (and a small swirly-striped tiger, who, to my enormous amazement and relief, jumped into the Super-Mammoth with the rest of the livestock) was something it always did. Maybe it thought other sheep were boring and that it had finally found its spiritual home.

We were on the road for hours—hours and hours—but I was still so tired I slept through most of it, tangled up with Takahiro (and quite a few gruuaa and my algebra book), while Jill and Caz curled up from the other end of the luxuriously long back seat of Super-Mammoth, and the three grown-ups sat in front. Since we left the window to the rear open, there were critter heads sticking through and looking for opportunities most of the time, but there wasn’t really space even for Majid at his most spaghetti-like between Casimir’s back and Taks’ long legs. So I’m not sure how I got squashed in with Mongo too, but I did. It’s very hard to do submission well when you’ve wedged yourself in like a doorstop under a door, but when I opened my eyes long enough to discover Mongo jammed up under my chin and against my chest, he tried. I couldn’t laugh either, my ribs didn’t have room, but Hix patted my face as if she got the joke.

But Taks and I were mostly out, like hibernating bears, and the critters must have behaved themselves because no one woke me up to be Critter Master. We stopped at a highway service area at least twice. I remember Mom trying to get me to eat something. But all I wanted was sleep—and to know that Takahiro was still there. I could hardly bear to be away from him long enough to go to the ladies’ to have a pee. Sure, I was a seventeen-year-old girl in love, but last night had been a little too epic.

It was dark again by the time we got to Haven. I recognized the smell of the pine trees in my sleep and for a moment I was four years old again and coming here for the first time, and frightened, and wishing I was at home in my own bed . . . the fear was too familiar, and for a moment, as I struggled back toward wakefulness, I remembered Dad intensely—remembered him more clearly than I had in years, his face, his laugh, his hazel eyes (that Mom said were my hazel eyes), his favorite tie, or the one he claimed was his favorite, because I’d given it to him, which had (surprise) dogs and cats all over it. He had been wearing it the night he died.

I was still tired, tired almost to death, and too much had happened in the last twenty-four hours, the last forty-eight hours. I was someone else than I had been two days ago—before the cobey in the park, before I tried to cradle a timber wolf in my lap, before my algebra book started following me around, before I knew what the sound of bullets fired at you sound like—before I’d kissed Takahiro. Before Mom took her magic back so she could protect us. Before . . .

For a moment I couldn’t bear it—couldn’t bear any of it. Couldn’t bear that Dad had died, couldn’t bear that he wasn’t seeing Ran and me grow up, couldn’t bear that he never met Takahiro—or Mongo . . .

But there was so much, recently, that was unbearable. Like that the world was nothing like I’d thought it was. That I wasn’t what I thought I was. And that what I was might matter in this suddenly strange world.

For a moment it hurt. It hurt a lot, like it had right after Dad had died, when the world that Mom and Ran and I lived in shattered into millions of sharp little pieces, and we were walking around on the slivers, so every step cut into us, and all we saw around us was empty and broken. When we found out that people die when they shouldn’t. That stuff happens, and sometimes it happens to you.

That the world was nothing like I’d thought it was.

It hurt like bullets ripping into my chest, or like being head-onned by some bugsucking assface at eighty miles an hour. For a moment it hurt so much I thought it would kill me. But—maybe because of the last two days, maybe because I was tired almost to death—I couldn’t refuse to let it in either, like I’d been refusing for almost eight years.

At first I held on, held on hard, like the hurt and the grief and the fear were a piece of paper I was trying to fold, like I had to fold them up to make the cobey that was trying to eat me go away. But I couldn’t fold them up, any more than I could fold gruuaa. I realized, hanging in my half-sleep and half-despair, that Hix was patting my face and humming again, and her sweet smell was stronger, like she was blowing it over me, like your mom tucks an extra blanket around you if it turns chilly. Mongo shifted fractionally (fractionally was all that was possible) and I had a familiar cold wet nose buried in the too-small gap between my neck and the curve of my collarbone. Taks, still asleep, let his arm slip down a little farther when Mongo moved, and tucked his hand between my belt and the waistband of my jeans, like making sure I couldn’t escape without his noticing.

Now. This was what now was.

Mongo was snoring.

Slowly, painfully, I let go. It was like prying my own fingers off the edge of the cliff. And that hurt too—particularly the falling part, and not being sure what was at the bottom.

But I did know. Now was what was at the bottom. I was already there. With Mom and Ran and Mongo. And Jill and Takahiro. And cobeys, and the fact that the world(s) were so much different than I thought.

There are so many of us.

Arnie. And Casimir.

Hix. All the gruuaa.

And Val.

I woke up taking the deepest breath I’d maybe taken in eight years (in spite of Mongo). The car had stopped, and the front doors were opening. Jill murmured something, and then her door opened. I felt around for a door latch and just about managed not to fall out when I found it and our door opened too. Even Mongo looked a little stiff as he poured himself out onto the ground. I reached down for my algebra book: it was nearly full up with pages again. I patted it, but I patted it clumsily, and managed to get my hand caught between the top cover and the first page . . . and had the really odd feeling that it briefly held my hand, like some dogs will do, gently, with their mouths, as a way of saying hi. I stuffed it under my arm and slid out of the car. Takahiro followed me, yawning and stumbling like any sleepy boy, not like a hero or a werewolf. He put an arm around me and I leaned against him. The algebra book, of course, was in the way.

I finished waking up faster than I might’ve when my brother hit me like one of his own racing cars. Ran and I hadn’t hugged each other in years—he wouldn’t even let Mom hug him—but we hugged each other now till I think we left bruises, and then he let me go and stood there a moment like he wasn’t sure what to do next. Eventually he said, “Hey, there’s coffee and food indoors. Hey,” he added to Taks, seemingly no more than mildly surprised at Taks’ arm having replaced itself around me. And then left at a trot like he was leaving the scene of a crime.

The front door of Haven was open, just like it had been when I was four, and Mom had had to hold me up because I was too sleepy and too frightened to stand on my own. I thought I remembered that the light had spilled down the steps to the driveway like a golden river that long-ago night too, but this time it looked warm and welcoming, and I was standing on my own feet and (more or less) awake. I slid my hand under Taks’ arm—he’d grabbed my algebra book with his other hand when Ran had thudded into me. Gwenda was coming down the steps at a very undignified speed, and hugged me almost as hard as Ran had. “My amazing niece,” she said. “I knew your mom was wrong about you.” There were two more figures on the steps up to the house. One of them was Rhonwyn. I was guessing the other was Blanchefleur: I was going to meet her at last.

Gwenda went on holding my hand for a moment when she let go of me, and there was a little buzzy sensation against my palm, like when Mom had kissed me before she let us go after Val. Like the human version of Hix tickling my neck. I was still thinking about this when Gwenda moved away from Taks and me to address all of us, like we were a jury she wanted to sway in an unpopular direction. “We are so glad you are here. We have an enormous amount to talk about—and then to do. Our world is changing—has already changed—whether any of us likes it or not—whether those who decide Newworld policy like it or not, whether General Kleinzweig likes it or not. For now you are safe here. For now. And we will make it safe for you in this new future that has begun.” She held out her hands in a gesture that might have been threatening or it might have peacemaking or it might have been both, and I saw Gwenda, the courtroom crocodile, shine through my aunt in a way that was both scary and comforting.

“But we also need your help. We need your help urgently!” She laughed a little, and it was a real laugh, but it was also determined and impatient.

Rhonwyn and Blanchefleur, if it was Blanchefleur, had come down the steps as Gwenda was talking and Rhonwyn came up beside Gwenda and put an arm around her shoulders, but less like a hug and more like grabbing your over-enthusiastic dog before he scares off your visitors. “Gwen,” she said. “Let them come in and sit down. They’ve had a long day.”

I realized Jill was standing beside me, and Casimir looking uncertain on her other side. I took her hand with my free hand. She smiled at me and then reached out and grabbed Casimir’s hand and drew him to stand next to her. He glanced across the other three of us and smiled—shyly, his dimple barely showing. “Welcome to Newworld,” I said, mostly to him, but really to the four of us. The grown-ups would have their ideas, but we’d have ours too. “Welcome to the new Newworld. It’s going to be . . .” and I paused. None of the words I could think of really fitted, and “insane” would probably be bad for morale. Mongo was sitting on my feet, Hix was humming in my ear, and I could see gruuaa wrapped around both Taks and Jill and—there was one or three scampering up the golden river toward Haven’s open door. If my knowledge of ordinary critter body language was anything to go by, they were happy and excited. I looked up, and found Blanchefleur looking at me. She had to be Blanchefleur, she looked so much like the other three sisters. She smiled. I smiled back.

I looked around for Mom—and Val. They were standing with their arms around each other (of course). I smiled at them too. Mom’s smile was one of the things I loved best in the whole world. My eyes moved to Val. There was, I thought, some irony in his smile—but maybe I couldn’t see him clearly where they were standing at the edge of the light. Not seeing clearly was a good thing with that shirt. Although jail, escape over the barrens, and a night sleeping on the ground had subdued it somewhat. I’m your apprentice now, you know, I thought at him. In the new Newworld.

“Interesting,” said Takahiro. “It’s going to be interesting.”