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“Well, you always did underestimate me, admit it.” His speech had lost every trace of another time or place; only the hungry humor remained, so cold that it glowed and danced like little deep-sea fish.
Ben was blinking and coughing now, trying to sit up, as Sia answered, “No, never you. Human stupidity, human longing, human madness, I have underestimated those forever.” The last word was a flinty whisper, all but inaudible.
Aiffe said, “He’s just here because of me. I brought him here, he’s staying at my house.” Pettishly playful, she tugged lightly at Nicholas Bo
Farrell said loudly, “I’ll get Ben on upstairs.”
Sia never turned. Nicholas Bo
The boy’s golden head lifted, and the transparent, insatiable, monstrously despairing eyes of Nicholas Bo
Astonishingly Sia laughed then, no shotgun snort, but a rich, singing chuckle of seductive contempt. “You? Idiot wizards, drunken priests, any tinker woman with a grudge can banish you from this world; any spiteful child can call you back again. The yo-yo of the universe!” Farrell, struggling to keep Ben on his feet, almost dropped him at that comment. Sia said, “In my house, you? To walk through my shadow would destroy you.” She added something in the wind-language, and Farrell wondered if she were calling Nicholas Bo
Aiffe, who had been gaping in growing resentment from one to the other of them, suddenly pushed past Nicholas Bo
She blocked Farrell’s view of Nicholas Bo
For a moment Farrell thought that she would actually do it. The thick figure tautened, the grizzled hair flared in its silver ring like a cobra’s hood, and Farrell found that he was sagging marrowless against Ben as the fire in the living room coughed and went out and an inhalation all around him set every door in the house slamming. Very far away, Sia lifted a bu
Almost as softly, Nicholas Bo
Ben said clearly, “Prester John, she knows,” pointed more or less at Aiffe, and fell down with the effort. Aiffe moved to Nicholas Bo
The old woman in the doorway said, “If you come any closer, I will not exile you again. Instead, I will change you.”
Nicholas Bo
“Not for the better,” she said. “That was always beyond me, from the first. But I can make you worse than you are.” She did not raise her own voice, but the hair stirred along Farrell’s forearms. Sia said, “Try, then.”
The boy did not move. “Try it, try it, put ‘em up,” he mimicked her. “Old love, even at your best, even when you were really somebody, the most you could ever do to me was to push me off the sidewalk for a little while. What do you think you matter now, when you don’t dare stick a toe out of your burrow? A traffic light has more power over me than you do, in this world.”
“Yes?” The single flat syllable cracked and sparked with derision like static electricity. “Well, you might be right. I am certainly less than I was, no hiding that. But if you stick a toe into my house, I will think about you in a certain way, and you will never be able to wear beauty again, whatever form you may take. And who would pay the least heed to you then, or believe that you have any power at all, in this world?”
For a moment Nicholas Bo
Aiffe wriggled under his arm, refusing to look straight at Sia. “Nick, let’s go, I need some more practice, okay?” Her acne patches were boiling up like stigmata.
“Focus,” the boy said. “You can do it, it’s just focusing. Just like in the park, exactly the same, now.” He turned her body between his hands with a raging precision, aiming her. She neither resisted nor cooperated, but kept whimpering, “Nick, I want to go, let’s go home.” Nicholas Bo
Farrell gave up trying to lift Ben and began hauling him away from the door. He heard Sia’s voice, full of a terrifying pity, “Child, no,” and the boy saying, “Now,” as the air suddenly smelled violently of lightning and the vast inhalation happened a second time. Farrell scrambled toward the stairs, feeling the old house lunging and aching in the ground, while the walls curtsied slowly to each other and the chess table, the chairs, and the fire tongs hurtled into his legs. He held fast to Ben, pulling against a power like the disemboweling undertow of a sinking ship. The floor seemed to be slanting steeply under him, and he knew that he heard the girl cry out in bitter shock and pain, a chattering moan that laid Farrell’s spine bare. But it was Nicholas Bo