dirty glass.
The voices faded in through the static. I recognized one of them, and the walls of the Schola pulled away. I was outside, the trees shimmering—one moment fully-leafed, the next bare grasping branches.
The voices came back as the trees burst into full summer green again, their shadows turning everything around them to liquid even as color flooded my sight. Sound wavered, but then it was like finding the radio station you want, a chance bump in the road moving your finger on the dial just that perfect amount so the song comes in clear and loud.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It will get better.”
“She hates me.” There was a clack of wood hitting wood, and a short sharp sound of frustration. “I want to go home.”
“She can’t do anything to you. Not with me here. First form, Elizabeth.”
A heatless pang went through me.
It was a half-ruined chapel, vines growing up the stone walls. It was vaguely familiar, and I realized why in a dreamy sort of way. I’d been drawing it for weeks now. There was a wide grassy center and a stone altar, and she appeared between the veils of mist. Her achingly beautiful heart-shaped face, a few long ringlets escaping to bob against her cheeks. She wore black capris and a white button-down, her hair parted in the middle and pulled back. The cut of the clothes somehow said “old.” You could just tell she wanted to iron her hair flat and do some macramé.
She held malaika, the slightly curving wooden swords, with sweet natural grace. One of them made a half-circle, so sharp you could hear the air being cut. Perched atop the altar, her Keds shuffling as she stepped back and the swords made a complicated pattern, she was a deadly beautiful bird mantling its wings.
“Straighten your leg,” Christophe said from the shadow under the wall on the right. The sunlight was a physical weight, golden-grainy like old honey. His eyes burned blue, and he watched her critically, his eyebrows pulled together.
Each time I saw him, it was as if I’d forgotten how well his face worked together, every angle and line fitting just so. He was in jeans and a black T-shirt, his hair pure Liverpool mod touched with blond highlights. “Wrist,” he said mildly, and my mother stopped. She half-turned and gave him a Look.
Oh but I recognized that; it was the way she’d look at Dad when he was late for dinner, or when he said something joking about her washing dishes. It was the mock-glare of a pretty woman looking at a man she knows very well. Half-teasing, almost angry, and very aware of him looking at her.
The wingbeats of my pulse paused. The pins and needles stabbing static fuzzed through the scene, but I focused, just like holding the pendulum over Gran’s kitchen table and searching for the little internal tickle that would make it answer questions.
I couldn’t get enough of seeing her again. She was breathing easily, and she pushed away a stray curl with the back of her hand, the malaika held as easily as a butter knife. She was so graceful. I saw, as if I had a pair of binoculars, that her fingernails were bitten down, too.
Just like mine.
She looked so young. In the picture Dad carried in his wallet, the shadows in her eyes were darker, and she seemed older. Right now she looked, well, like a teenager.
Every little girl thinks her mother is the most beautiful woman in the world. But my mother was. She really was.
Her mock-glare turned into a set expression, mouth firm and eyebrows drawn together a little. “I feel like an idiot, stuck up on here. Why can’t we practice inside?”
Christophe’s face was unreadable, but he was tense. The tightness in his shoulders, the way his feet were placed just so, told me all about it. “The sunshine does you good. First form, again. Concentrate, Elizabeth.”
She rolled her eyes and turned away.“Wish you’d just call me Liz.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He sounded just the same—half-mocking, light and sarcastic. But something in his tone made me look at him, and just for an instant his face was naked. The aspect was on him, fangs touching his lip and his hair dark and slicked-down.
Christophe stared at my mother like he wanted to eat her.
But my mother had looked up at the destroyed roof of the chapel. Her tone had turned soft and distant, like she didn’t even remember he was there with her. “I mean it. I want to go home.”
“You are home.” He dismissed it with three words, and why was he looking at her like that? It was almost indecent.
“She hates me.” A quick, sideways grimace. “You don’t get it, Chris.”
He straightened. Stepped to the very edge of the wall’s shadow. Anger crackled around him. But his face didn’t change, and his tone was just the same. “Her hatred means less than nothing.”
“You train me out here so she won’t see it. Because you’re her steady.”
“I’m not her steady. It’s useful for her to think so, though. First form, Elizabeth.”
If he wanted her full attention, he’d gotten it. She actually frowned at him, and I remembered how she used to look when something wasn’t going right. When she smiled, the world lit up, but when she looked serious, almost grim, her beauty was more severe. She shifted her weight uneasily. “How can you be so cold?”
Christophe folded his arms. “First form, Elizabeth.”
“The girl’s crazy about you, youngblood.”
For once, Christophe actually looked puzzled. “Youngblood?”
“God, you’re such a goon. She thinks you’re a fox.” My mother laughed, and the sunlight got brighter. “But you are, right? Reynard.”
A long pause, while he watched her. She swung the malaika, but halfheartedly.
Finally, he stepped back into the shade. “This is serious business. You have a gift for these, and—”
“Forget it.” She dropped both of them with a wooden clatter and hopped down off the square block of stone in one coordinated movement. “Every day it’s the same thing. Why don’t you just go back and play with Anna instead? I’m sick of all these games.”
“It’s not a game. It’s deadly serious, and the sooner you—”
“Bye.” She waved her fingers over her shoulder as she stalked away toward me. My heart swelled to the size of a basketball inside my ribs, and a burst of that static went through the entire scene.
NO! I wanted to yell, but couldn’t make my lips work. The buzzing roared through me. I forced it away. I want to see!
Static flew like snow. It cleared enough for me to see Christophe, his hand around my mother’s wrist as she pulled away from him. She twisted for the thumb to break his grip; he caught her shoulder with his other hand. She tore away again, her hair flying and a pair of dainty fangs visible as her mouth opened, yelling something.
She slapped him. The sound was a rifle crack, buzzing and blurring at the edges. They faced each other, my mother’s chest heaving and her eyes full of tears as if he’d hit her.
Christophe smiled. It was a wide bright sunny grin, as if he’d just been kissed. A handprint showed on his pale cheek, vividly flushed. “Do that again,” he said quietly. “Go ahead, Beth. I’ll let you.”
Her lips moved, but I didn’t hear what she said. Because the static was worse, pouring down like a river of white feathers, and the buzzing had become a roar rattling through me, the pins and needles now knives and swords. The line holding me taut at the scene snapped, and I—
