Lily leaned back in the passenger seat and reflected on how seldom she got to drive. She could drive perfectly well, and had a license and all, but, at home, others in her large family were always using the cars, and at school she was not one of those with their own car who were thus always being asked for rides. Well, neither did she really want to do a lot of driving, so it didn’t matter.
The driver of this car, Joanna Conningsby, did not own it. It belonged to her family. But Joanna looked very pleased and proprietary as she drove, and no wonder. She, like Lily, was a student at the Barfield Academy for Sundered Young Ladies, and this was the first time she had been deemed mature enough to be given the use of a car to go off on vacation by herself.
Well, not “by herself” strictly, but in suitable company. Lily was flattered that Joanna’s family considered her “suitable,” and it was even more flattering that Joanna had specifically asked for Lily’s company. She and her parents both looked for Lily’s help, or at least advice, “if anything Sundered came up.”
Lily had spent her entire life Sundered—her family had been Sundered for generations—so she regarded the request with amusement and even a little pity rather than with any alarm. But the Conningsby family had become Sundered only three years ago and so were no longer protected by the Sundering, the twist of luck that hides magic and the supernatural from the general population. This had left them with a certain level of anxiety and confusion in the background of their lives, so they reached out for guidance.
Quite reasonably. It was well-known by the experienced Sundered that newcomers fared better—survived better—the faster they became educated about the Sundered world. Though no one knew for sure, it was often speculated that the Sundering was there to protect the “monde-minor” from the “monde-major,” the ordinary unSundered world from the Sundered one.
“Your aunt and uncle seem very nice,” Joanna observed.
“Thanks. I think so, too.”
“And the young guy was Alec?”
“Alex. Yes.”
“He looked a bit familiar.”
“You may have seen him around. He goes to Barfield Boys.” This was the Barfield Academy for Sundered Young Gentlemen, just across the road.
“And he’s your cousin, not your brother, right?”
“That’s right. Don’t worry about keeping track. It’s a big family, and no one expects non-relatives to keep it all straight.”
“Well, I know Iris a bit.” This was Lily’s sister, a year ahead of them.
Lily nodded. “I have her and four brothers: Charles, Walter, Bernard, and Oliver. The boys are all older and out of school. Oliver’s married.”
“And Charles is … the one … in your cavalry?”
“Right.” Back at school, while swapping biographical facts, Lily had shown Joanna pictures of her family, on her phone. Joanna’s immediate reaction to Charles (for which Lily had been waiting) was “Is all of that Charles?” It was.
“So … he got me thinking,” Joanna now said. “If centaurs are real, what isn’t real?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, is Narnia real, for instance?”
“No. Lewis may have been Sundered—he knew a lot about Logres, apparently, and he knew Tolkien, who was definitely Sundered—but he made Narnia up, as far as anyone knows. People do make things up, after all.”
“How about Oz?”
“No. There are places like Oz, but not as … cute.”
Lily considered Joanna’s situation. One grew up Sundered or not and learned some things were real and others were not, and that the dividing line was sometimes blurry and disputed. But if you went from unSundered to Sundered, suddenly a great many more things turned out to be real, and you might wonder if there was anything left in the unreal category. At least, that dividing line now moved far, far away, to an unknown location.
“Most fiction is just fiction,” she said at last. “And the stuff that isn’t still isn’t a perfect match. I– I don’t have a clear rule to apply. I’ll help as I can, of course. What does Emily think is real?” Emily was Joanna’s cousin, a good friend but unSundered. They were to meet her at a beach-side inn at Burnstow.
Joanna considered. “Well, no one in the family believed in magic or anything supernatural. That’ll still hold for Emily, but she likes quirky history.”
“Like Atlantis? Doggerland used to be off the coast here.”
“More like rumors of pirate treasure. She loves to go poking about with her metal detector.”
“Ah. Is that why our vacation is on the shore?”
“Yes. She came up with the idea and did all the organizing, making reservations and things. I hope you don’t mind?”
Lily smiled. “Not at all. Pottering around on the beach or lying in the sun while Emily plies her detector sounds very relaxing.”
– — –
The seaside inn at Burnstow had started as a summer house for a Victorian magnate. Liking privacy, he had built it some distance from any commercially useful shoreland. A century and a half later, and given modern plumbing, electricity, wifi, etc., it made a very pleasant inn of the kind called a “retreat,” and indeed sometimes hosted religious retreats.
Emily was the only person in sight when they arrived, waiting for them on a porch that wrapped three-quarters of the way around the house. She was rocking in a rocking-chair, with her eyes closed, and looked well into vacationing already. But she opened her eyes, smiled, and waved as they drove up.
She hopped down from the porch to greet them. “They let you have the red car!” she exclaimed to Joanna, hugging her. “And you must be Lily,” she said, offering Lily her hand.
“Yes, I am,” she answered as they shook. “Thank you for including me.” She took stock of Emily. Some grandparent must have had a lot of dominant genes because she and Joanna looked much alike: both were of athletic build, with wavy, sandy brown hair. Joanna put broad blonde streaks in hers, in a manner that didn’t try to look natural, while Emily’s was lightened by the sun.
Lily, in contrast, was taller, more slender (“skinny,” she called herself), pale, and dark-haired.
All wore jeans and T-shirts. Lily’s shirt, like Joanna’s, proclaimed Barfield’s, while Emily’s said Beep If You Dig Detectoring. “Well, the more the merrier,” Emily said, “and Joanna’s mentioned you several times. Says you’ve helped her a lot in getting used to this new school.”
“Barfield’s can be a bit of a shock.”
“Sounds Victorian as hell.”
“Edwardian, actually, and it makes up for it by being eccentric.”
“I guess! Founded by a bunch of anthropologists?”
“Anthroposophists. They’re a denomination you don’t often hear of.”
“I guess! Well, come on in and I’ll show you the rooms.”
Their rooms, airy and bright, were on the second floor, with views of the sea. They had been made by dividing one larger room and had a connecting door.
“I hope you two don’t mind taking the other room,” Emily said. “I’m afraid I’ve rather spread out over both beds, here. But I’ll move stuff if Lily wants her own.”
The room was bare and spare, no longer at all Victorian, but there were two twin beds under white blankets, one on either side. One bed had been made up but the other, which Emily had waved at apologetically, was occupied by a scatter of machine parts, some books, and a collection of intertidal litter.
“Got started early, did you?” Joanna asked, leaning over the bed and examining.
“’Fraid so. I got here yesterday.”
“Don’t move for me,” said Lily. She had glanced through the connecting door and seen the other room was an exact mirror image of this one.
She bent over the collection on the bed beside Joanna: some nails, a few low-denomination coins, and a house key. “Is this a good haul for one day?”
“Part of an afternoon, really. Yeah, not bad.”
“And is this the sleuth himself?” Lily asked, reaching out to touch, but not lift, a meter-long rod with a grip and display at one end and a circular paddle at the other.
“Yes!” Emily’s level of animation ticked up. “It’s a Talos Bloodhound with a 30-centimeter coil. It’s got these filters that let you pick up only the metals you want to hunt, or eliminate things like iron or aluminium, and it came with this huge pack of accessories.”
“However much did it cost?” asked Joanna.
“I don’t know. It was a gift, and I’m honor-bound not to look up the price.”
Lily realized she was peering over a miniature Sundering into an entire world of hobbyists, one of them at her elbow this moment.
“Do you want to give it a run?” Lily asked, because why not ingratiate yourself?
Emily grinned. “Sure!”
Soon, they were on the beach, Emily sweeping away systematically. For a while, she lectured on technique and scavenging rules and other aspects of the hobby, but then she and Joanna fell to catching up on family gossip, rehashing it.
Lily stopped trying to follow the conversation and decided she could do her own form of collecting: seashells. She had done this many times on family sea-side excursions, as a child, and there was no reason not to do it again.
She decided to be selective about it, and so avoid the overflowing sandy plastic bags of her childhood. Where were all those shells now, anyway? Anything with a living animal in it got chucked into the ocean, of course, as they always had. But so did chipped shells or those with a hole drilled by some predator, probably another mollusc.
As she picked up periwinkles and limpets, she thought back on the scavengings of her youth, with siblings and cousins taking part and adding to the overflowing hauls. She looked at Joanna and Emily, and smiled to think of walking the beach with Charles as he now was, his hooves printing the wet sand. A day on the beach with Lily’s brother would Sunder Emily good and proper!
One did not do that. As Joanna and her family could testify, it was a great shock, loaded with confusion and anxiety most of the time. And it could rebound on the party doing the Sundering. The chance that hid magic could be good or bad and could happen to anyone—to the person who might otherwise see the magic or, just as readily, to the one about to reveal it. To try to deliberately Sunder someone was to stand up and ask for a serving of bad luck.
You could get away with it, especially if the number of people involved was small—just Emily, for instance—because the Sundering was not watertight. That was why the world rang with myths and fairy tales. But it was still hazardous. Barfield’s taught classes on the Sundering, and a good thing too, but most of the students learned the basics on their mothers’ knees.
While contemplating these things, Lily had filled her palm with unexamined shells for sorting later. Emily saw her juggling, said, “Oh. Here,” and handed her a plastic bag from the pouch on her belt. Lily thanked her and continued the hunt for the perfect periwinkle.
Emily found a number of bottle caps and pull tabs, and 26p in coins. After the last penny turned up, she joked, “Now we can buy lunch,” and suggested they go do that. Rather than buy the rather pricey food at the inn, they drove into Burnstow and got fish and chips followed by ice cream.
– — –
Burnstow was a working fishing village with no tourist industry, but it was easy to get down to a pleasant enough beach. As they strolled, ice cream cones in hand, Emily gestured down the shore, back toward the inn, barely visible. “See that outcrop, between here and the inn? I’d like to poke around there.”
“Pirates?” Joanna asked.
“No, actually. Not this time. Though around here it’d be vikings, I suppose, not pirates.”
“Vikings were pirates,” Lily observed.
“Okay. But those rocks used to have a building on them. Or so said this book I found. Belonging to the Templars. A per– perception…ary or something.”
“Preceptory?” Lily suggested.
“That was it. Like a monastery?” she asked Lily.
She nodded. “A dorm, basically,” she said, reflecting that it must have been a very small one.
“Why have a seaside dorm?” Joanna asked.
“Well, that’s what the book called it,” Emily said dismissively. “The thing is, are you guys willing to walk over there?”
“Sure,” said Lily.
“It doesn’t look that far,” said Joanna.
A few minutes later, ice cream cones consumed and metal detector retrieved from the car, they set out for the purported preceptory.
“A small, isolated building on the shore,” Lily speculated, “might be a lighthouse.”
“That would be cool,” said Emily. “Did they have lighthouses back then?”
“Back when?” asked Lily. “Well, doesn’t matter. There have been lighthouses forever. Just, for most of that time, they only had a fire on top, nothing higher-tech. But I was just wondering. I don’t know that it is a lighthouse.”
“Are you a history major?” asked Emily.
“They don’t call it a ‘major’ at Barfield’s, but I study it.”
“How do we know it was built by the Knights Templar?” Joanna asked.
“We don’t,” Emily replied. “I don’t know that it was much of a book. But it’s definitely worth poking around.”
The alleged preceptory ruins were on a stubby little tongue of rock half drowned in sand and sea grass, crowned with stones. The stones were a mix of natural and shaped. Emily unslung her Talos Bloodhound, fired it up, and began diligently detectoring.
Lily and Joanna helped by getting the litter out of the way, mostly beer cans, though they found a nice steel cigarette lighter than someone probably regretted losing. It could not have been there long, because it still lit.
Most of the shaped stones formed a bit of floor with a shallow corner of wall, almost invisible under wind-blown sand. Emily devoted a lot of attention to it.
This effort was rewarded. She got a signal, faint but clear. Happily, the girls dug the sand away with their hands. They uncovered a wall stone that had a smaller stone or brick set in the middle of it. “How odd” was the uniform verdict. The Bloodhound soon determined there was something metallic behind the brick. The sand had long ago eroded any mortar around the brick, so it was loose and easily removed.
Everyone stared at the little rectangular hole. “The next step,” Joanna remarked, “is for someone to put their hand in that hole and feel around.”
No one volunteered. Finally, Lily said, “Well, no need to rush in. Let’s use our phones.” All the phones had flashlights, and soon all three beams were shining in the hole.
“There is something in there,” Emily announced.
“And no bugs,” Joanna observed.
Lily was silent. Besides history, she studied magic. She was no mage—did not even know if she could be—but she had learned to sense magic and was beginning to discern its different qualities and aspects. And there might be something enchanted in that hole.
Before Lily could think of a mundane-sounding caution, Emily said, “No bugs. Good enough,” and plunged her hand in. She saw the alarm on Lily’s face, grinned, and said, “No worries. I’ve had my tetanus shots.
“It is metal, though,” she added, taking her hand out with far more care than she had thrust it in.
It did not look metal, being solid green. It looked like a child’s pinwheel, a pencil-long stick with a little fan at one end.
“Oh,” said Joanna, disappointed. “Just modern rubbish. But what was it doing in there?”
“I don’t think it is,” said Emily, turning it about in her hands and peering closely. “It really is metal, for one thing. Brass or bronze, I think. It’s all green from the patina. Verdigris. And it’s sure not mass-produced. Look.” She offered it to the other two.
Lily held still, but Joanna took it and looked it over. “You’re right. Metal.” She twiddled it. “The handle’s square.” She meant in cross-section. “There’s writing on it.” She peered at the vanes of the fan.
There were only three, making the fan look like a trillium flower. There were letters engraved on each, near the center of the fan, and more letters on the handle, likewise close to the center.
“There’s more on the other side,” Joanna noted. “Looks like Latin.” She offered the pinwheel to Lily. “What do you make of it?” She knew Lily knew Latin, or at least more Latin than she did.
Lily took it reluctantly, but she took it. She had been contemplating the magical whiff of the thing as well as she could, but detecting no immediate danger. The vanes bore three letters each, reading FLA, FUR and FLE. The printing on the handle read BIS. Not Latin so far. But, on the other side of the handle, near the middle, was printed QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT.
That certainly was Latin, and clear enough, but Lily did not immediately translate it. She stalled for time, staring at it while giving her attention once more to the feel of the thing’s magic.
For it was definitely enchanted. Not much power, though. Unless it was concealed. No, Lily knew how to detect wards, and there were none here, she was fairly certain. So far, so good, but that really wasn’t very far.
The enchantment felt pretty straightforward, but it was waiting to be triggered, and the trigger part was not so straightforward. That meant, she decided, that it was not some routine enchantment like a preserving spell. (Would a preserving spell have allowed this patina?) A preserving spell was actually not that straightforward, and had no trigger.
So how did you trigger it? Better yet, how did you make sure you didn’t?
“Can you read it?” Joanna prompted.
“‘Who is this that is coming?’”
Joanna’s eyes widened. Emily said, “Weird.” She reached for it and Lily surrendered it gladly, then immediately wondered if she should have. But Emily was the finder.
Emily did her own fiddling with it. “Hey, the letters on the vanes line up with the ‘bis’ on the handle. So you get a changing … monologue or something as it spins. ‘Fla bis. Fur–”
“Don’t!” Lily commanded.
Emily stared at her quizzically. “Am I saying Latin obscenities or something?”
“No.” Actually, it immediately occurred to her, she should have lied and said yes. It would make things simpler and maybe safer. “But, well, there are other ways for words to … go bad.”
“What? You think it’s a magic spell or something?”
“Is that impossible?”
“Oh, but just the idea of magic words is silly! Words are just vibrations in air, after all.”
“The words ‘Ready, aim, fire’ are just vibrations too, but they can have serious results if addressed to the right audience.”
“Who would this audience be?”
“You never know who’s listening.” Lily couldn’t tell Emily the listener might be the whiff of magic she felt around the pinwheel.
Emily stared at Lily, the quizzical look becoming tinged with contempt. “Are you really worried about spells?”
Yes. But she was saved from admitting it by Joanna, who said, “Lily believes in respecting other cultures. Those words– Well, funny little nonsensical words are often for rituals.”
“This is a religious pinwheel?” asked Emily, humorously but now without contempt. She looked at Lily, who shrugged. “Well, I’ll be careful not to say ‘flabis furbis flebis.’” She grinned.
Lily’s face stayed blank. She had too much to react to. There was the little edge to her personality Emily had just shown. There was the happy fact that the spell remained untriggered. And there was the spinning inscription, which she had now just heard.
A breeze came from off the sea. The pinwheel rotated with a tiny squeal. “Hey!” said Emily. “It still works!” Delighted, she held it up and blew into it.
flabis furbis flebis flabis furbis flebis flabis furbis flebis flabis furbis flebis, over and over. Inane. Silly.
And the trigger went off.
Lily thought of Tibetan prayer wheels. She thought how prana and spiritus both had the first meaning ‘breath.’ She also found herself thinking how St. Paul had called Satan the Prince of the Power of the Air, so that, ever since, air had an uneasy reputation in alchemy. But now the enchantment was gone, gone with the trigger. It had been completed, had done whatever its job was.
“This,” Emily exulted, “is the best thing I ever found!” She held it higher to catch the breeze better and spin. “Real archeology! I should look up the rules—maybe it’s supposed to go to a museum—but I’m going to keep it over our vacation, at least, and photograph the hell out of it!” She gave Lily a glance with just a hint of the sardonic in it. “You don’t object?”
“Not at all.” The harm had been done, whatever it was.
Emily carefully tucked the spinner into its own plastic bag, cushioned by more bags, then picked up the detector again. “Can’t expect another find like that,” she remarked, “but, on the other hand, it pays to be thorough, and the likeliest place to find something good actually is near something else good.” She started on a careful going-over.
Joanna and Lily stood back and watched. Joanna asked, sotto voce, “What was all that?”
“The spinner was enchanted until she blew on it. Then the spell fired. Don’t know what it did.”
Joanna swore, but still softly. “And the gibberish? Make anything of it?”
Lily nodded. “It was Latin, too, just hard to recognize because of the way it was chopped up. It meant… ‘you are blowing,’ ‘cunning,’ and ‘you are weeping.’”
Joanna swore again.
“Something wrong?” asked Emily.
“Just… can’t believe the luck,” Joanna answered.
Lily admired her ambiguity.
– — –
Emily’s efforts produced nothing but two more beer cans. “That’s okay,” she said cheerfully. “I declare victory anyway.” And she led the way back up the beach to Burnstow and their parked car.
“Who were the Knights Templar, anyway?” she asked after a few minutes of plying her detector in a casual, almost playful way. She directed the question to Lily, whom she had clearly pegged as an historian.
Lily obliged: “They were a military order, the biggest one. They took vows like monks and had a big organization all over Europe. They started out supplying fighters for the Crusades, but later they got into banking. The pope and the king of France squashed them in the 1300s.”
“Why?”
“The king owed them a lot of money, and the pope was nervous about how big and powerful they were getting. Victims of their own success, you could say.”
“And how do pinwheels come into it?”
“I never heard that they did. Didn’t you say you weren’t too confident in this book of yours?”
“That’s right. It’s– Oo, another penny. This thing’d pay for itself if it weren’t a gift. The book’s called Criminal Coasts, and it’s kinda click-bait, if a book can be click-bait. Like those shoddy newspapers they sell at grocery checkouts.”
“Tabloids?”
“Yeah, them. Sensationalist. But it was a fun read. Plenty of pirates, and I guess Joanna’s told you I love pirate yarns. Funny stories about smugglers, too. The Templar stuff was in a chapter on espionage.”
“I don’t see medieval spies with pinwheels,” Joanna observed. Emily laughed. “Or crusader-banker monks.”
They got back to the car. Emily proposed a scenic route back to the inn, which got them lost for about an hour. Lily spent the hour trying to detect if they were cursed or pixie-led as the result of the pinwheel spell, while not looking worried. She did not succeed in either effort. “Relax!” Emily told her. “If we head east, we’ll hit the coast, find out where we are, and take the coast road back to the inn. Or we can wait until we get some coverage back and ask the GPS.”
Minutes later, they found the coast. The phone coverage came back at the same time and led them uneventfully back to the inn. There, they decided to indulge in a seafood dinner, ignoring the inn’s prices.
While waiting for their food, they took pictures of the pinwheel lying on a clean white napkin, next to a small tape measure for scale, supplied by Emily, who routinely took it when out detectoring. “I’m going to load these up to some websites tonight,” she declared. “Look! If you shine the phone’s light at a sharp angle, the inscriptions come out better.”
After dinner, Lily and Joanna got another look into the world of detectorists through Emily’s laptop, as she uploaded the images of the pinwheel, then made proud announcements on websites. Since it was not coinage or precious metal, there seemed a decent chance she might be able to keep it lawfully, but determining this was boring, so they switched to watching funny videos.
They had had a rich meal after a day of walking in the sun and wind. Emily yawned. Half an hour later, Joanna yawned. Lily was too keyed up to yawn, but even she felt sleep lowering a curtain between her and her misgivings.
And so to bed.
– — –
But, once alone with Joanna, Lily propped herself up on her pillows and began her own net researches.
“What are you looking for?” asked Joanna, keeping her voice down.
“I’m looking up the Latin bits.”
“I tried that on the car ride,” Joanna said. “Nothing. Just translations matching yours.”
“I’m checking some sites that aren’t on the search engines. Not the usual ones. There are also some other search engines you should know about.”
But the Sundered web had nothing to add either, which Lily decided to take as slightly reassuring. And she was sleepy. Lights out.
So, of course, she was immediately prey to uneasy thoughts. Should she call her baron? Or even the Magery?
And tell them what? Hello, I'm a student at Barfield's, and I get pretty good marks in magic analysis, and I think an unSundered friend of mine just set off an old spell. No, I don't know what it did. No, there's no magic left now. No, no one else saw anything, just me.
The response would be somewhere between a politely condescending dismissal and an abrupt click.
Which meant that, really, she should just go to sleep. She tried. After nearly an hour trying to hypnotize herself into believing there was nothing wrong, she achieved a drowse.
She woke at once when the yelling started. The first thought that came to her was, “Ah, there it is.”
She nearly collided with Joanna at the connecting door, then let her go through first. After all, Emily was Joanna’s relative, not hers. But this thought came with a twinge of guilt: she felt a rising reluctance to encounter whatever was making Emily yell.
But there was nothing to encounter, only Joanna gently shaking Emily by the shoulder. “Em! Em! Wake up! It’s just dreams. Wake up.”
For a few more seconds, Emily tossed and yelled, then uttered a few ugly, shapeless sounds that were trying to be words of protest. Then she woke with a gasp.
“Em, it’s okay,” Joanna said firmly. “You’re okay.”
Lily turned on the light. There was the other bed, with its collection of finds. In the middle was the pinwheel. She stared hard at it, closed her eyes, took a breath, and did the mental exercises she’d been taught for magic detection. Nothing there. Anything, anywhere in the room? She didn’t feel satisfied telling herself yes or telling herself no. Blast.
She turned to Emily and Joanna. “Thanks. Thanks,” said Emily. “Wow, that was nasty. Haven’t had anything like that in years.”
Lily sat down next to her on the bed. “When one of us had a nightmare, my Aunt Lu used to say, ‘Talk about it if you think that’ll make it seem less scary, or we’ll talk about something else if you just want to forget it.’ Which would you rather?”
Emily stared at Lily in a mixture of confusion and surprise. “Um. Uh.”
“I have an app on my phone for playing a trivia game,” Lily offered, “if you’d like to do that while you calm down.”
“Nnnno, I think I’d like to tell you. That might make it seem … trivial. Silly. Less.”
“Fire away,” said Joanna, sitting down next to Lily.
Emily took a couple of deep breaths, then, in what looked to Lily like a delaying tactic, remarked, “Your Aunt Lu sounds like a wise old bird.”
Lily nodded. “She was. Let’s say ‘is.’ She put in a lot of time as a professional child-wrangler—nanny, governess, private tutor—and when she retired, just kept on with us. We were awfully lucky to have her.” Then she looked expectantly at Emily.
“Well. I– I was out walking on the beach. Now. That is, it was night, like now. And there was a wind blowing off the ocean, into my face. And I looked out and saw a little white speck on the horizon. And I knew it was a sail, that a ship was coming in. And I stood and studied it a while, and I remember thinking that I shouldn’t be able to see it in the dark, that it must be glowing. And for a while, it was just interesting, but then I realized the wind was blowing it straight at me. And I thought that there was no place to dock, to moor, but then I remembered about Viking longships just coming straight up on the shore, and the men jumping off and attacking, charging up through the surf.
“And then there was surf, and the wind was much higher. And I felt sure the ship was attacking. And I turned to run and tell somebody, but I slipped on the shingle and slid into the water. And then I was drowning, and an undertow was sucking me away from the land. And that was bad, but what was worse was that I knew the undertow would take me out to the ship. The attacking ship. And they would… I dunno. Make sure I drowned. Get me. And I was trying to get my head above water, and yell for help, and thrash my way out of the water, all at once. And then I woke up.
“That… that sounds pretty lame, I know.”
“Perfect,” Lily pronounced. “That’s how it’s supposed to work—telling it to defuse it.”
“Um. Could we play that trivia game for a while anyway?”
“Certainly.”
Within an hour, the trivia game became boring, Emily yawned a few times, and everyone went back to bed. But they left the connecting door open. Lily drew Emily’s curtains; the room had a nice seaside view, but now was not the time to enjoy it.
“Well, that was right on the nose,” Joanna remarked as she and Lily resumed their beds. “Are we done now?”
“Wish I knew,” Lily sighed as she turned out the light.
– — –
They waited until half an hour before the inn stopped serving breakfast before they woke Emily. She apologized for getting them up; she apologized for keeping them up; she apologized for making breakfast late. After the third apology, Joanna said, “Em, it’s all right! It’s no more your fault than the weather. It happens—we cope. The actual weather’s still great. Let’s rev up the Bloodhound and hit the beach!”
So they did, starting at the inn, then heading left along the sand toward Burnstow. But it was soon obvious to all of them, though none commented on it, that Joanna was leading Emily. She walked ahead, pointing out allegedly likely places to scan, asking after progress, making cheerful remarks about the nice day and how the tide was so much lower now, and wasn’t that convenient.
Emily, on the other hand, was mostly silent. She waved the detector about in a way that looked haphazard, especially if you had seen her technique yesterday. Her footsteps dragged. After a bit, she offered the detector to either of the other two. Joanna took it reluctantly, put up with a few minutes of bad-tempered instruction and correction from Emily, and wound up leading a silent procession along the beach.
Lily watched. She watched the path ahead, for when the ruins would come in view. She watched the sea for anything among the fishing boats and sports craft that would answer to Emily’s luminous nightmare sail. She watched Emily stumble along, blank-faced and weary.
Besides watching, she continually quizzed her surroundings mentally for any sign of magic, working or waiting or residual, but found nothing.
She felt badly about doing nothing to relieve the silence, but could think of nothing to say.
Eventually, Emily stopped trudging and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to go any further. I’m done in. What sleep I got last night did me no good at all.”
“Very understandable,” Lily murmured.
“Sure, Em,” said Joanna. “We’ll go back and flake out on the porch.”
Emily shook her head. “No. Thanks, but– I’m so tired, I just want to lay down right here!”
Lily and Joanna exchanged looks of alarm, which Emily missed, since she was staring blankly at the sand. “You can’t lay down here!” Joanna exclaimed, waving her arms to indicate the empty beach. “You’ll get sunburned and chilled at the same time.”
“Sun screen,” Emily muttered.
“Oh, yes!” Joanna replied sarcastically. “I love spraying myself all over with something oily and then lying down in the sand. Don’t you?”
“I’m just so tired!” Emily pleaded. Tears sounded not far away.
“There’s that,” Lily said, pointing down the shoreline. A few hundred yards ahead was an old wooden pier, the outermost of Burnstow—the town was just visible in the distance. Apparently, there had once been a fisherman’s house out here. The house had vanished, but the pier remained, running from some grassy dunes, on posts across sand and shingle, then a few yards over the sea. “We could get under there to be out of the sun, and the dunes might give us a bit of a wind-break.”
“All right,” said Joanna. Emily said nothing, but followed in a silent plod.
Eventually, they were under the pier. The sand was chilly and lumpy, but Emily stretched herself out on it and went to sleep immediately. Joanna and Lily sat down on either side of her.
After a few minutes, Joanna asked, “It’s all gone?”
“As far as I can tell. Shot its bolt yesterday, when she blew on the pinwheel. Not a whiff since. I’ve been looking.”
“Last night was quite the whiff,” Joanna contradicted.
“That– I have a hard time believing there was no connection, but there was no m– Nothing was running at the time.” Lily did not want to use words like “magic” or “spells” any more than Joanna did, in case Emily was not as unconscious as she looked. Lily sighed discontentedly. “Sundered gamblers with the right skills have been known to play for the energy of a night’s sleep. Maybe the pinwheel was for making extractions like that.”
“Nasty little gizmo,” Joanna grumbled. Lily nodded. Her own sleep had been far from perfect. She lay back on the sand, her arms folded behind her head to keep the sand out of her hair, sighed, and closed her eyes.
Joanna leaned back on her elbows and asked, “How long should we stay? Till lunch?”
“Okay,” Lily answered. She wondered if they should then head back to the inn or go on to Burnstow. That would mean passing the ruin. Then she stopped thinking for a while.
– — –
Lily woke with a shriek as the rotting timbers of the pier collapsed on her under the rush of freezing water. But–
Now she was awake. What was real? What was not? The cold water was real, at least in part. Here it came again, a sheet of water sliding up the shore, soaking her sandals, the back of her shorts, the back of her T-shirt, the back of her head. The collapse of the pier was a dream, though. It stood above her just as before.
She scrambled to her feet, driving herself awake as fast as possible. It was surprisingly unpleasant. She became aware of Joanna’s voice, cursing steadily. And there was Joanna, having just finished hauling Emily to her feet, staring out to sea, glaring and cursing.
Lily followed her gaze. There were a couple of fishing boats, off to the left, toward Burnstow. Joanna was not glaring at them. There, on the horizon, was a tiny triangle, bright white, like a little flame. As Lily watched, it vanished. Had it sunk? Or just sailed over the horizon? That fast?
Here came another sheet of water, more leisurely, making a half-hearted swipe at their feet. Joanna made sure Emily would stay standing on her own, then bent down and retrieved the detector. It had gotten wet. She pushed a couple of buttons experimentally, gave a satisfied grunt, then shouldered it. She hooked her arm through Emily’s and led her out from under the pier, back toward the inn.
Emily was awake and even a bit adrenalized. “I suppose,” she said, “the locals would laugh at the silly tourists who didn’t take the tide into account.”
“They’d have no reason to,” Joanna growled. “Yes, the tide’s coming in, but not that far. Look!” She pointed along the writhing waterline. “It hasn’t come up nearly that far except just for us!”
“Must be something odd about the sea bed there,” said Emily, sounding almost normal.
“Or something,” Joanna muttered. She locked eyes with Lily briefly. “C’mon. Back to the inn. Change clothes. Loll on the porch. Wrapped in those big, thick, white towels they have.”
“Lunch,” proposed Emily.
“Oh, yes! Lunch!” Joanna agreed, still growling, as if lunch would feature fillet of enemy, when she could figure out who that was.
In fact, lunch featured toasted sandwiches and hot tea and coffee. Internally warmed, and with Emily apparently back to normal vigor, they did not loll on the porch, but took off in Joanna’s red car to cruise about inland.
Late afternoon found them in a suitably picturesque village, in a used book store. Emily went to search for books on pirates and treasure, leaving Joanna and Lily in an alcove full of children’s books. Joanna spotted a copy of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. With compressed lips, she hooked it off the shelf and opened it to the illustration of the three children falling through the picture into the ocean before the ship.
“Are we getting the reverse of this?” she asked, showing the picture to Lily. “A ship coming out of the Dreaming at us?”
“Did you see–?”
“I didn’t go to sleep at all. I just watched. I saw that sail show up, and a minute later, we got our own bespoke high tide. Sent by what? Is it coming out of the Dreaming? What’s on it? At first, I thought it was just nightmares plaguing Emily, though that’s bad enough. But… but ‘Who is this that is coming?’”
“I don’t know! I don’t understand at all. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t find any magic going on. Not any longer.”
“Well, leave that part out for now. After all, it’s more important to know who or what is after Emily.”
“That’s true.”
“So what comes out of the Dreaming?”
Lily sighed. “It’s like the problem we talked about on the trip out here.” She waved at the Narnia book still in Joanna’s hand. “What can be real? There’s just so many possibilities.”
“Well, what are the usual things that could come out of the Dreaming?”
Lily gave a bleak laugh. “Usual? Usually, only what’s gone into it, dreamers.”
“So are we up against someone doing dream magic?”
“No, I’d feel the magic. Anyway, that spinner was waiting around for centuries to send off its– Oh! That’s it! I’m not finding any magic because there isn’t any and doesn’t have to be. The only magic was the sending of a signal. And something heard it, far off in the Dreaming. It’s not here yet, so no magic here. Not necessarily even any magic when it gets here. Just it.”
“Quite bad enough,” Joanna said. “But couldn’t there be a community of, I dunno, dream mages, lasting for centuries, living in the Dreaming, in a position to hear the spinner go off?”
“No, mortals can’t live in the Dreaming. Not physical enough. To visit the Dreaming bodily is possible, but it’s big magic and just temporary.”
“Well, what does live in the Dreaming?”
“Dream-figures, if you want to call them alive. And fays and ghosts.”
“And staying alive doesn’t apply to ghosts,” Joanna reflected. “But the Dreaming isn’t the afterlife. They told me that at school. Basic Sundered geography. Part of that remedial orientation they gave me for being new at all this.”
“That’s right. But ghosts can haunt the Dreaming, just as they sometimes haunt here.”
“So, ghost or fay. Hope it’s a fay.”
Lily shot Joanna a look. “Why?”
“Well, I’m just going by the ones I’ve heard about. You’ve even got a brownie at your house, you said. What’s her name? Stella? I was hoping to see her.”
“Trella. Another time.”
“And there are the ones you told me about at Ufham, your brother’s cavalry base. And there was that hot guest lecturer with the long platinum hair that people said was an elf.”
“He was. But all of those are friends. Trella’s a family retainer. The fays in Ufham Wood have been neighbors and co-workers for generations. The elf was an invited guest. This guy is no friend. Or he has a lot of explaining to do.”
“So you’re hoping for a ghost?”
Lily shrugged, her eyes wide. “The commonest kind of fay is a little thing that can be a short human, or, like, a mouse or a wren. The commonest kind of ghost is a cold, sad patch that won’t go away. But what’s coming isn’t common. The Dagda is a fay, and was reckoned father of the Irish gods. The ghost of Achilles was worshipped as a god. So the spread is really wide.”
“You’re saying it doesn’t matter whether it’s a ghost or a fay, we don’t know what to expect.”
Lily stared blankly through the bookcase before her. “That’s right.”
“Should we– Isn’t there … someone we could call? Someone you could call? Someone in Grand Normandy?”
Lily considered her own frustrated reflections about this. And all she had to add since then was a glimpse of a sail and a couple of malicious waves that might have been natural. But now Joanna was asking; it wasn’t just her private worries. “I’ll try.” She led the way out to the car park, for better privacy, then pulled out her phone, set it on loudspeaker, found the link, and dialed. “Baron Dubosc’s residence,” a female voice answered. “This is the reeve.” “This is Lily Darneley,” she said. “I live in Dimble Abbots. I want to report a … possible … hostile haunting.”
“Yes? Time and place?”
“Last night and again late this morning. At Burnstow.” She went on to name Joanna and Emily, clearly specified Emily’s unSundered status, and described the discovery of the spinner, followed by its discharge and, hours later, Emily’s nightmare, then, today, the sail and the waves.
Aside from occasional utterances of “Yes?” to get Lily to continue, the reeve said nothing. When she was done, the reeve asked, “Did you detect magic in the untimely waves?”
“I, uh, I was too surprised to check.”
“Of course. Well, this bears watching, but we don’t have anything to act on yet. Exorcism of the spinner would be pointless. Exorcism of your friend—Emily Cunningham?”
“Conningsby.”
“Conningsby—might be effective, but really should be done with her knowledge and consent. Otherwise, it most likely will not be effective. And knowledge and consent would very likely Sunder her, a serious step to take.”
“Yes, I understand. So… just wait and watch?”
“I’m afraid so,” the reeve said, a note of human sympathy creeping in for the first time. “We can hope the nightmare is only the result of a heavy dinner after an exciting day.”
“I– Yes.”
“Please feel free to contact us again if there are any developments.”
“Thank you,” said Lily on a fading note. The reeve hung up. Joanna swore.
They re-entered the store and found Emily at the checkout counter. “Look!” She held up a brightly colored cardboard children’s book. “Famous Pirates! I had it as a kid. Unbelievably sanitized!”
– — –
Emily’s fond reminiscences of the pirate book lasted them through dinner, which was eaten in the car, parked by a seafood stand in Burnstow.
Emily read excerpts then showed off the artwork to general amusement. “Everyone looks very clean,” Joanna remarked, looking at the illustrations. “Who are all these women at the dock? Blackbeard’s assorted wives?”
Lily was relieved to chuckle along with the other two, but you could see the ocean from the food stand, and she couldn’t help keeping an eye out. She thought she caught Joanna doing the same.
Then back to the inn. Lily reflected that one walk on the beach (interrupted) and one drive around the country weren’t a very busy day, but it was a vacation, and it was enough that Emily seemed better. Mostly. To the tune of watching funny videos on her laptop all evening. Well, perhaps that was Emily at full recovery; Lily didn’t really know her at all well. Yesterday evening could hardly have been typical.
So maybe she’d be left alone now. Though was there any reason to suppose so?
Evidently Emily did not suppose it. As the video ended and the last cat slid helplessly off a waxed table, she asked, a propos of nothing, “Does melatonin cause nightmares?”
“Yes,” said Joanna. “Or it can. More dreams. Weird ones.”
“What you want,” said Lily, “are allergy pills. Antihistamines. They’ll make you sleep and cut down on dreams. I’ll ask the landlord.” Without waiting for permission, she popped down to the front desk.
There, the landlord sat at his ease, reading a newspaper, staying up until 10:00 to offer tea, coffee, batteries, entry for the locked out, and other little services. These included allergy pills. He cheerfully described how he was a martyr to grass allergy, which was a factor in choosing to run a sea-side inn, and the same was true for many guests, but others wanted them for sleep. Here are two. Any tea? No? Probably smart. Good night.
Lily returned to the room to find Emily standing there, ready, with a glass of water in her hand. “Thanks,” she said, and gulped the pills. Then she picked a small bottle off the bedside table, tossed off its contents, and took another swig of water.
“What–?” Lily began.
“More of the stuff,” Emily explained. “After you left, I remembered I had some in my bag. But just two more pills. Don’t worry, it’s not an overdose or anything; I checked. But I am not having a night like last night if I can at all help it.”
Joanna now entered from the other room, clad in pajamas. She looked at Lily’s expression and asked, “What’s going on?”
“I found two more pills and took them,” Emily explained. “Four, grand total. But it’s okay. I looked it up. Now...” She turned back to the laptop. “While I wait for them to kick in, I’m going to watch this. It’s an old documentary on pirates, a favorite of mine.” Her firmness of delivery deserted her. “I, uh, I hope you don’t mind. I mean, do you want to watch with me?”
Lily realized Emily was asking for company, and no wonder. “That sounds fine. But will a documentary about pirates be soothing?”
“Like I said, it’s an old favorite. No surprises.”
The documentary, to do it justice, was fairly boring in its own right, Lily thought. That it should be an old favorite of Emily’s was a measure of her interest in pirates. The thing was an hour long, but well before it was over, Emily had nodded off, just as planned.
She was still in her street clothes, but lying on her bed, curled up slightly to leave room for the other two at the foot, while they all watched the laptop set up on a chair. Once she was obviously asleep, Joanna uncurled her while Lily ended the video.
She had had time to think. “Emily has the right idea,” she said to Joanna. “Do what you can. She doesn’t know that her dream-proofing will work or even that she needs it for sure, but she’s taking steps. We should too.”
“Fine by me, but what steps?”
“Latin ones.” She picked up Emily’s laptop and began working. In a few minutes, she showed Joanna:
Sciatis nos sub protectione Dominorum Insulae Mediae esse. Abite et nos in pace relinquite.
“Which means?”
“‘Know that we are under the protection of the Lords of the Middle Isle. Depart and leave us in peace.’”
“We are?”
“We are. I am, and I say you are,” Lily said firmly.
“Who are the Lords of the Middle Isle?”
“The fay lords and ladies of Webney, Grand Normandy’s fairy patrons. That’s what I’m going to say if something nasty and fay shows up. And I’ll have the Magery on speed-dial on my phone. Fays aren’t usually big on Latin, but it came to a Latin spell, so it probably knows Latin.” She began muttering to herself, rehearsing the ad hoc exorcism.
“What if it’s a ghost?” asked Joanna.
“Discede et relinque nos in pace, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” Lily replied promptly, then translated, “‘Depart and leave us in peace, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ Would be worth trying on a fay, too.”
“Um, okay, but what if this thing isn’t Catholic?”
Lily shot Joanna a short glare. “So much the worse for it. And it probably isn’t. If it’s tangled up in this malarkey, it’s probably some quirky kind of heretic.” She put the laptop on the bedside table, open to the Latin passages, so she could rehearse them.
After a few mumbled iterations, she said, “The problem is exorcisms are less reliably effective on fays and ghosts than on demons.”
“Why?”
Lily shrugged. “It’s just an observed fact. Some say it’s because demons are clear about how much trouble they’re in, while fays and ghosts are notoriously muddled much of the time. Anyway, we need more besides Latin.” She looked around the room.
“Crosses?” suggested Joanna. “Cold iron?”
Lily nodded and pulled a small silver crucifix out of her collar.
Joanna added brightly, “For cold iron, I think there’s a crowbar in the boot of the car,” then, reconsidering, “which means going out to the car, in the dark. Uh. Why do these things always happen in the dark?”
“They don’t,” Lily answered. “But this one is attached to Emily’s dreams, and she dreams at night, as you do. Or it shows up in broad daylight when she falls asleep on the beach, under an old pier. Remember?”
“Right. Well, maybe we could filch some tableware out of the kitchen. It’s probably steel … and in the middle of the night, in a room full of sharp edges. Damn!”
Lily took a plastic water pitcher from under the bedside table and filled it from the bathroom tap. “Don’t get too hung up on iron,” she advised. “It’s nothing special to ghosts, and only some fays worry about it.”
“Which fays?”
“Superstitious ones who remember when all iron was sacred, back when it was the new hot thing, so to speak, and all blacksmiths were priests of Hephaistos under one name or another.” She plunked the pitcher down next to the laptop and started net-surfing.
“What are you doing?” Joanna asked.
“Looking for the prayer to make water holy.”
“Don’t you have to be a priest to do that?”
“Well, yes, but I think it’s worth a shot. Private blessing might do. Ah, here we go. Exorcizo te, creatura aquae, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis…” She crossed herself and went on.
It turned out that proper holy water required blessed salt as well as the services of a priest, and there was no salt around. So Lily left the water just privately blessed and considered her next move.
Joanna joined her in searching through the room for ad hoc weaponry. Little presented itself. “A comb or a brush to the face is a nasty surprise,” Lily reflected, going through Emily’s toiletries, “but the thing might not even be palpable. And using them means grappling with it, which I hope we don’t have to do.”
“There’s this,” said Joanna, holding up a spray can of sunscreen. “We could spray it in its eyes. They specifically warn against it.” She pointed to the safety warning, directly under the one about flammability.
“Worth keeping in mind,” Lily agreed, “though, really, that crowbar in the car is looking very attractive.”
She picked up her phone and started seeking for one of the Sundered web sites that might prove useful. But she was tired, the tiny print swam in her eyes, so she turned back to Emily’s laptop.
“What are you doing?” asked Joanna.
“I thought I’d better educate myself on ghosts.”
“We’d better.”
“To be sure. Anyway, I’m sure NorWiki has a page on them. Several, I hope.”
They read together. After a while, Joanna said, “I was encouraged when they said ghosts make their bodies out of air, but here—” She pointed. “—it looks like air can be quite enough if they have enough energy behind it. Any way of guessing how much energy this one has?”
Lily shook her head glumly. “Keep reading.”
Soon Joanna’s mood rose again. “Muddling! They’re easy to confuse!”
“Not always,” Lily cautioned, “but it’s an angle we should pursue. Hoo! Sometimes, you can even get them stuck counting grains of rice. If only…”
“Palindromes? They can be distracted by palindromes?”
“Not always,” Lily repeated. “Sometimes.”
“That would be great! Hey, I know a good one: ‘Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog.’” Lily giggled so Joanna added, “‘Sit on a potato pan, Otis.’” Both girls laughed, but then Joanna sobered. “Oh. Would this thing even know modern English?”
“Fear not!” Lily commanded and opened a new window on the computer. After a bit of searching, she produced:
SIGNA TE SIGNA. TEMERE ME TANGIS ET ANGIS.
“Cross yourself, cross yourself. Madly you hit and vex me,’” she translated. “It’s even appropriate,” she remarked grimly. “It’s supposed to be something St. Martin said to the Devil.”
Joanna snorted. “Is it insulting to the Devil to tell him to cross himself?”
“It’s just a palindrome. I don’t think a lot of theology went into it. But one can hope so.”
Joanna turned back to the computer. “Fire. That sounds promising.”
Lily read over her shoulder. “Mm. But it’s like the palindromes: you have to catch them when they’re muddled, or by surprise. If they’re all charged up, they have the focus to hold out.”
“Oo, look at this! Electromagnetic pulse!”
“Must have been interesting, discovering that one,” Lily murmured.
“But I bet we’d catch this ghost by surprise! How much is he likely to know about electromagnetic pulses?”
“There’s that,” Lily agreed. “How would we set off a pulse?”
“And how powerful does it have to be?”
They read further. NorWiki was usefully practical; it assumed that anyone who wanted to know about disrupting ghosts would want particulars. “It looks like our best bet,” Joanna concluded, “would be a microwave oven, jiggered to run with the door held open.”
“There was one in the kitchen,” Lily offered.
“The kitchen again.”
“We could both go.”
“I guess. But Emily–”
Wind blasted through the room, cold and wet and salt, from the window.
Which was shut.
As she and Joanna gaped at the fluttering drapes, Lily glimpsed light, freezing white. She remembered the gleaming tooth of a possible sail she had seen, maybe, on the horizon earlier that day. She only had time for the thought to flicker through her mind before there was a crash and a mast came shattering through the window, trailing ragged phosphorescent sail.
Lily glanced at Emily. She had curled up against the cold, but she was still sleeping through the gale. That seemed unnatural.
When she looked back, something stood in the tangling drapes, a figure wholly wrapped in clinging white cloth. No face or hands showed. It stood as straight and stiff as the mast should have done, folds of cloth—sailcloth?—flapping and dripping around it.
Weapons. Defenses. Where were they? She seized the pitcher of blessed water. Joanna lunged for the computer.
At the next glance, the figure was a fathom closer. She had not seen it walk; it was simply there, like a chesspiece set in a new position. It was headed for Emily. She was now curled into a tight knot but still asleep.
“Emily!” Lily cried. “Wake up! Wake up now!” No response.
She threw the water at the figure. No response there, either, but it did not move, and maybe the water had stopped it.
She spared another glimpse at Emily, then stared. Still she slept, and it was unnatural. Lily was drenched, and she had seen Joanna was in like case, but Emily and her bed were perfectly dry. The sea wind did not stir her hair.
It was a yard closer, again without having stirred. But its way was blocked by Joanna. She held the computer before her, reading, shouting, “Exor!… seezo!… tee…!”
A vein of exasperation ran through Lily’s fear. She should be doing the Latin and Joanna should be attacking with water. Not that either helped.
If not water, fire? She darted to the bed cluttered with Emily’s findings and seized the lighter. It lit, but now what? If she threw it at the figure, it would shut. Did she need to close with the thing? She prayed—not Latin, not English, just naked prayer—and readied herself to do that.
Joanna was still confronting the thing, conveniently in Lily’s way, a cowardly corner of her mind noted. It was suddenly a foot to one side, in another of its leaps-without-motion. Joanna moved to block it. She bumped the bedside table, scattering miscellany. The spray can of sunscreen fell over.
An idea sped through Lily’s mind on wings of adrenalin. She seized the spray can, moved around Joanna, held the can behind the lighter, and sprayed.
Flame hit the white figure. For a moment, it was a pillar of fire.
There ought to have been some explosive noise. Lily could not decide, afterward, if there had been. But now all was still. The figure was gone. There was no wind. No shipwreck thrust through the windows, which were unbroken. Only the drapes stirred a little on their way back to stillness.
The carpet and furniture were dry. So were Lily and Joanna, though their hair was mussed. Emily had uncurled.
Joanna and Lily stared at each other, panting. Then Joanna went to the bed and nudged her cousin. “Em. Wake up, Em.”
“Mmh.”
“C’mon. Just enough to get under the sheets.”
“Go ’way. ’S middle o’ th’ night.”
“Right. So get in the bed.” Eventually, they got her under the bedclothes, Joanna lifting her legs while Lily extracted the sheet and blanket from beneath. Then they shoved aside the coins and bottlecaps on the other bed, sat, and stared at Emily.
After a bit, Lily told Joanna, “You are incredibly brave.”
Joanna only widened her eyes and shrugged. “You don’t think she’s still, uh, enchanted, do you?” she asked.
“No. She’s just got four antihistamines in her. But, yeah, it was keeping her under, I’m pretty sure.”
“Why?”
“I… think it needed her dreams for a connection to the waking– the living– the everyday world. There ought to be an expert in this stuff back at Barfield. I am definitely going to ask around.”
Joanna nodded. They sat silently, listening to quiet, normal sea sounds for some minutes. Finally, Joanna asked, “Did it really happen?”
Lily pondered, then answered, “I once read that you shouldn’t ask if a thing is real. It’s always a real something. Like, is it a real snake or a real hallucination? Either way, it’s a real something. The ghost was real because real fire banished it. It was doing something real but I don’t know what. High-power seeming? Big telepathy-telekinesis combo? A ‘manifestation’? Not that I know what that is. Some kind of flat-out incursion of the dreaming into the waking? More questions for those experts when we track them down.”
“It’d be nice if we had some evidence to show them. Something physical.” Joanna sighed. “Unfortunately…” She waved at the tidy, silent, brightly lit room.
Lily looked around. “There’s the holy water. Or rather, there it isn’t. No water in the pitcher, no big wet spot on the carpet.”
“Where’d it go?”
“No clue.”
“An empty pitcher and a dry rug aren’t much evidence.”
Lily shrugged. “If we can get the right mages interested, there’s people with far better magical analysis skills than mine. And retrocognitives. And like that.”
“Okay. It’s gone for good?”
“So I’ve been told. Fire disrupts the connection to matter. It goes … wherever.”
Another silent minute passed.
“Go to bed?” Joanna suggested.
“No. No. We will sit here, with Emily, with all the lights on. Maybe I’ll fetch a blanket from our room. Maybe we’ll fall asleep sitting here.”
Which was what happened.
– — –
They woke well after the early summer dawn, but Emily was still asleep. They slipped into their own room and finally got to bed, in full daylight, with the connecting door open.
They woke again when Emily came in, two hours later, yawning, pronouncing herself groggy from all the pills and chiding them for letting her go to sleep in her clothes. Joanna happily gave her a rebuttal, detailing just how hard she was to maneuver when asleep and asking just how used she was to having other people change her clothes. Emily replied that wasn’t what she had meant.
While the cousinly bantering went on, Lily smiled to herself and interrogated the surroundings for signs of magic. All was as mundane as one could ask.
At breakfast, as an experiment, Lily asked the landlord if they had had the computer cranked up too loud last night. He answered, “Oh, that’s all right. No one else in the inn just now, and wife and I could barely hear it, over our end. Some disaster movie?”
“Something like that. We won’t do it again.” He smiled and moved on.
“I didn’t think the documentary was that loud,” Emily remarked.
“We watched some stuff after you fell asleep,” Joanna told her. Then, when Emily went for seconds of toast, “Corroboration,” she murmured to Lily.
Lily nodded. “A bit. It did happen. Someone from Magery might even get some testimony out of him, without him realizing it, if we can interest them.”
The Magery was interested. When Emily went for a walk with her detector to clear her head, Lily stayed on the porch with Joanna and called the reeve again. This time, she got patched through quickly to the Magery, and the two of them spent the better part of an hour on speaker phone, detailing their experiences.
That afternoon, the girls returned from an excursion far up the north of the coast to find a couple had checked in. They were lounging on the porch and were quite friendly.
While Emily detailed the features of the Talos Bloodhound to the “husband,” the “wife” showed her Magery badge to Lily and Joanna. “We examined the room while you were out,” she told them. “Only residues left, for magic, though they were clearly for necromancy and dream. But retrocog was very interesting.
“My dear young ladies, you beat back a full-blown incursion attempt. It was trying to overlap the dream world with the waking. That was no ‘weak and idle theme,’ but you made it ‘yield’ like a dream. Congratulations on defending the natural order.” She noted their confusion and said, “Sorry, I was quoting from the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Anyway, again, congratulations.”
They blushed and thanked. But Joanna asked, “How would the Sundering have coped if we hadn’t been here?”
“Well, perhaps it coped by making sure you were here. Though the philosophers tell us it doesn’t do to personify the Sundering or conflate it with Providence. And it might not have coped at all. It’s not foolproof. It might have done nothing, leaving your cousin and the innkeepers Sundered and severely traumatized, or worse. And a particularly nasty undead on the loose. But you did the coping, so there wasn’t.” She smiled brightly.
The Magery couple only stayed one night, to look plausible, then moved on. The girls stayed out the rest of the week, as planned, in great normality.
After parting with Emily and starting the drive home, Joanna asked Lily, “So, she’s not Sundered, is she?”
“I didn’t catch any hints of it from her,” Lily answered. “And I’m pretty sure the mages would have known and said something.”
“Good.” Joanna drove in silence for a minute. Then: “Did you ever clear her cache?”
“What?”
“On her computer. You know how, when you start to enter a web page, it puts up all the things that look like it, that it’s seen before?”
“Oh. Oh!”
“You get rid of those by clearing the cache. There’s always a menu item for it. And we did use her computer for some very odd sites.”
“No! I never once thought about that. So if she enters something starting ‘nor,’ NorWiki could pop up?”
“Yes. Of course, people don’t pay a lot of attention to those lists.”
“Right. And I could call the Magery again, have them sic a gremlin on it or something.”
“Sounds good.”
“It’s probably nothing.”
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