“I see,” Kami said softly. She kept walking beside him, but a little farther apart. The cold air surrounded her on all sides.

PART V

WANDERING BECOMES TOO LONELY

Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’s living.

—George Eliot

Chapter Nineteen

Favor Fire

Ash had been staring at his phone, trying to work up his nerve, for the last twenty minutes.

He was standing in the portrait gallery of Aurimere early on Friday morning, and he felt like all of his ancestors were judging him. Charles Lynburn, 1788, looked coldly out of his gilt frame as if to say that he would have been quicker about making this call than Ash, and when he was alive phones hadn’t even been invented yet.

Ash gazed at the floor instead of at the Lynburns all around him and hit the call button. After a few rings, he heard Jared’s voice in his ear. “Who is this and what do you want?”

“Is that how you answer the phone to every number you don’t recognize?” Ash demanded.

“Ash,” Jared said. “Shame. I was hoping it would be a telemarketer. How did you get this number?”

“Kami gave it to me.”

Ash heard the indrawn breath at her name, and wondered if it was a means of getting Jared to do what he wanted or a means of getting him to hang up.

Jared didn’t hang up.

“Mum takes the other sorcerers out training every morning,” Ash said. “I’m not invited.” He waited, until Jared said, “Unless Aunt Lillian’s soldiers are booze hounds to a man and downstairs in the pub, nor am I.”

Ash allowed himself to relax a fraction. He hadn’t really thought his mother would let Jared help her, and banish Ash. Not really.

“And yet we’re the Lynburns,” Ash said. “We’re the strong ones.”

“Oh, you keep telling yourself that.”

All Ash had ever wanted was to be at home and surrounded by his family. Now, under the judgmental gaze of a hundred Lynburns, with a sneering Lynburn voice in his ear, he started thinking about the merits of running away and changing his name. “Ash Smith” had a certain ring to it.

“We’re going to have to fight,” he said. “So do you want to practice fighting together? Like we sparred together at Rusty’s place, but with magic.”

He thought but did not say that he had been taught things Jared hadn’t, let the offer of assistance remain implicit, and hoped there was no way Jared could guess at his ulterior motive.

“Do I get to punch you in the face this time?” Jared inquired, and before Ash could reply he said, “I’ll meet you at the bridge over the Sorrier River,” and hung up.

* * *

Ash had only been at the bridge over the Sorrier River at night before. Then the trees had been simply shadows over the thin silver line of the river, wet rocks turned into mirrors by the moonlight. Now the trees formed an arch of brown that looked carved, a curve over the straight line of the bridge. Lingering gold leaves were trembling, fragile, in the air, and clinging to the branches as if they feared the fall to the river.

The river was full, colored gray and brown by the rocks and the riverbed, splashing and churning as it ran its course. Jared was leaning against the side of the bridge, arms propped along the railing, watching the water. He did not look up until Ash was standing awkwardly beside him, and had been doing so for some time. When he did, the look was brief and cold.

“All right, then,” said Jared. “Let’s see what you can do.”

“Um,” said Ash.

Jared looked down at the river and smirked. “Little bit of performance anxiety? Can you not do it when someone’s watching you?”

“Magic is not a joke!”

“Put up or shut up,” Jared said. “I don’t have all day.”

Ash put his hands in his pockets and stared down at the river. He concentrated on the light in the water, glints where the scarce sunlight touched the currents, and wove them together in his mind.

“When you want to do something magical,” he told Jared, not looking at him, “you have to choose a particular piece of nature as your source for the moment: you have to make something a single focus.”

Ash took one hand out of his pocket and reached out, palm up, asking the river, and the thread of light on the water that he had made came flying out onto the bridge. It hit his palm with an icy-cool shock and hung taut over the side of the bridge, a transparent glittering rope.

“So then you lasso your enemies?” Jared asked. “You’re like Wonder Woman.” He slanted an amused gray glance over as Ash made a faint exasperated sound at the back of his throat. “What?” Jared asked innocently. “I am just trying to understand the practical application of this magic.”

The rope disappeared in Ash’s hand, leaving nothing but sparkling drops in his palm and against the planks of the bridge. Ash felt his temper evaporate with it.

“Let me give you another demonstration,” he said, and magically shoved Jared with all his might.

Jared was quite obviously not expecting anything of the kind, and he fell spectacularly, with a yell and a grab at the bridge that missed by a fraction of an inch, and a splash like a white fountain. Ash stepped away from the side of the bridge to avoid getting wet. When he stepped back he saw Jared already struggling to his feet in the surging currents. His hair and shirt were dripping wet, and the river was almost to his waist: he was clearly having trouble standing upright.

The river went pure pale gray and entirely, perfectly flat, like the surface of a pebble worn by years of rushing water. When Jared looked up, Ash saw that his eyes were like pieces of the river, cold and opaque.

He felt the bridge rattle, and looked on either side to see the wooden rails of the bridge peeling gently away, small fissures in the wood becoming cracks that chased each other. The whole thing was going to give way, Ash thought, and braced himself for the icy shock of the water.

It never came. He blinked open eyes that he had not realized were shut and gave Jared a puzzled look.

“There are non-sorcerous people who might want to use the bridge,” Jared said. “I’m all for mindless vandalism, but it seems like a jerk move.”

Jared grabbed at the log supports of the bridge rail and hauled himself up onto the bridge. Ash was not sure if he could have done that, and was reminded again of the fact that Jared was obviously a lot stronger than he was, used to taking care of himself.

It did cross Ash’s mind that he really might be about to get punched in the face, but Jared didn’t punch him. He stood on the bridge, looking as determinedly immune to cold when soaking wet as he had looked earlier, on a winter morning with no jacket, and said, “What’s next?”

“You set those scarecrows on fire,” Ash reminded him. “Can you set a tree branch on fire? Living branches should be more of a challenge.”

Jared looked at a tree branch hanging over the bridge in a slender silver line above the gray water. It burst into flame.

“Okay,” said Ash as the fire swallowed the branch at a roar and the crackling, burning piece of wood fell into the water below. Jared walked off the bridge into the woods, flames trailing him like a pet comet. Ash raised his voice. “But can you do it without—and this is really important—starting a forest fire?”

Jared did not answer. Envisioning what his mother would say if he was the accidental catalyst of Jared’s burning the town to the ground, Ash dashed after him, scuffing up dirt and pine needles under his feet as he ran. Luckily, it was quite easy to follow the burning tracks Jared left behind him, pine needles glowing like lit cigarettes and then going out.

He caught up to Jared, seeing his turned back and branches turned into torches, red tongues of fire licking at the pale morning sky.

It wasn’t out of control. Not yet.

“Stop!” Ash shouted. He ran at Jared, seizing him by the shoulders and whirling him around to yell in his face. “I said one branch. One! How much fire do you think you can manage before it gets out of hand? You have to stop now.”

Jared’s face was sheened with sweat, and it was gathering at his temples, where his hair was still damp from the river. The fire stuttered and coughed, sounding like his stupid motorcycle, and then all the branches went out.

“This is a lot more effort than it was before,” he said, and his voice sounded harsh, as if he’d inhaled some of the smoke curling through the woods.

He didn’t know it, but he had just given Ash the perfect cue.

“Of course,” Ash said. “You were able to wake the woods when you had a source. You didn’t need to focus on any one thing: she was the one thing, and the power flowed through her to the rest of the world.”

Jared sat down abruptly on the forest floor, leaning against a tree with his head tipped back and one leg drawn up. He looked exhausted and sick.

“There’s no need to remind me.”

“I’m sorry,” Ash lied, making his voice sound humble the way he did when one of his parents was angry with him. He ducked his head and added, “I can describe it, but I can’t imagine it. What was it like, having a source?”

“Ask a fish to describe water,” Jared said, with a sharp gesture at his own wet clothes. “It’s how I lived all my life, until now. If you want to understand, I can describe what living differently, living your life, seems like to me.”

“All right,” Ash said uneasily, not sure how that would help him but not wanting to turn the offer down.

Jared gave him a bleak look. He said, his voice measured and deliberate, “It seems like hell.”

Ash made no sound. The smoke from the burned wood drifted up through the bare tree branches, forming strange silvery patterns on the wind, moving gently from side to side, almost uncertainly, as if it was lost.

“Every dark moment you ever had in your life,” Jared said. “Every time you were a kid hiding under the covers convinced that nobody in the world existed, that it was just you and the nightmares. Every time you felt alone in a crowd, alone by yourself, forever and essentially alone, and don’t pretend there weren’t moments like that. Every time you felt worthless, every time you thought there was no purpose to existing, no center to the world and no peace to be found. I never had a single moment like that, I was never lonely a day of my life, until now. Now I feel like the world is hell, and hell is a place where the souls of the damned can still see heaven. Because that’s the worst thing of all. And yet I can’t look away.”

Ash nodded as if what Jared had just said made any sort of sense, and looked somewhat desperately around. There was no help forthcoming from the trees or the drifting smoke.

“But you don’t end up—you know, mated for life or anything,” he said. He felt like it was important to check.

Jared looked up at him. Ash discovered there was nothing that felt so epically unjust as Jared, of all people, looking at him as if he was crazy.

“What?”

“Well, I couldn’t help but notice you making out with Holly at the bar.”

Ash winced at the memory. His dad had said to go make friends with Kami Glass, and he’d done as he was told because he always did what he was told, and Kami was goofy and fun and pretty, and she was always trying to be and do good, and he had started to feel sick about what he was doing. He’d assumed she would never forgive him, and had been amazed when she had.

Except that had been a misunderstanding.

It had hurt, but then there had been Holly, gorgeous and friendly and soothing to his hurt ego. Thinking of how desperate he must seem, turning to any girl who gave him attention, made Ash cringe.