The wet rag felt exactly like a wet rag. He didn’t like it.
“I’m not going to die,” he said quietly. And what an effort, the words. Was it defeat again, was it a great ghastly defeat, and the scaffolding of the normal world buckling beneath its weight, and the future forecast once more in the colors of death and Lent, or was it something that they could embrace and contain, something that they could somehow accept without the mind shattering?
“What do we do?” she whispered.
“You are asking me this, you? What do we do?” He rolled over on his side. The pain was a little less. He was sweating all over and despised it, the feel of it, the inevitable smell. And where were they, the three beauties? “I don’t know what we do,” he answered.
She sat still on the side of the bed, her shoulders slightly hunched, her hair falling down against her cheek, her eyes gazing off.
“Will he know what to do?” Michael asked. Her head turned as if pulled sharply by a string. “Him? You can’t tell him. You can’t expect him to learn some hing like that and not … not go as crazy as she’s gone. Do you want that to happen? Do you want him to come? Nobody and nothing will stand between them.”
“And what happens then?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound strong, firm, when the firmest thing he knew to do was to ask questions.
“What happens! I don’t know. I don’t know any more than you do! Dear God, there are two of them and they are alive and they’re not … they’re not …”
“What?”
“Not some evil that stole its way in, some lying, deceiving thing that nourished alienation, madness. They’re not that.”
“Keep talking,” he said. “Keep saying those things. Not evil.”
“No, not evil, only another form of natural.” She stared off, her voice dropping low, her hand resting warmly on his arm.
If only he wasn’t so tired. And Mona, Mona for how long had she been alone with this creature, this firstborn thing, this long-necked heron of a girl with Mona’s features stamped on her face. And Mary Jane, the two witches together.
And all the time they had been so dedicated to their tasks, to save Yuri, to weed out the traitors, to comfort Ash, the tall being who was no one’s enemy and never had been and never would be.
“What can we do?” she whispered. “What right have we to do anything?”
He turned his head, trying to see her clearly. He sat up, slowly, feeling the bite beneath his ribs, small now, unimportant. He wondered vaguely how long one could hang on with a heart that winced so quickly, so easily. Hell, not easily. It had taken Morrigan, hadn’t it? His daughter, Morrigan. His daughter crying somewhere in the house with her childmother, Mona.
“Rowan,” he said. “Rowan, what if this is Lasher’s triumph? What if this was the plan all along?”
“How can we know that?” she whispered. Her fingers had gone to her lips, the sure sign that she was in mental pain and trying to think her way through it. “I can’t kill again!” she said, so soft it was like a sigh.
“No, no … not that, no, I don’t mean that. I can’t do that! I …”
“I know. You didn’t kill Emaleth. I did.”
“That’s not what we have to think about now. What we have to think about is-do we handle this alone? Do we try? Do we bring together others?”
“As if she were an invading organism,” Rowan murmured, eyes wide, “and the other cells came to surround her, contain her.”
“They can do that without hurting her.” He was so tired, and almost sick. In a minute he was going to throw up. But he couldn’t leave her now, he refused to be ignominiously sick. “Rowan, the family, the family first, all the family.”
“Frightened people. No. Not Pierce and Ryan and Bea and Lauren …”
“Not alone, Rowan. We can’t make the right choices alone, and the girls, the girls are swept off their feet, the girls are walking the dark paths of magic and transformation, she belongs to the girls.”
“I know,” Rowan sighed. “The way that he once belonged to me, the spirit who came to me, full of lies. Oh, I wish in some horrible, cowardly way …”
“What?”
She shook her head.
There was a sound at the door. It popped a few inches, then rode back. Mona stood there, her face faintly streaked from crying too, her eyes full of weariness.
“You won’t hurt her.”
“No,” he said. “When did it happen?”
“Just a few days ago. Listen, you’ve got to come. We’ve got to talk. She can’t run away. She can’t survive out there on her own. She thinks she can, but she can’t. I’m not asking you to tell her if there’s really a male somewhere, just come, accept my child, listen.”
“We will,” said Rowan.
Mona nodded.
“You’re not well, you need to rest,” said Rowan.
“It was the birth, but I’m all right. She needs the milk all the time.”
“Then she won’t run away,” said Rowan.
“Perhaps not,” said Mona. “Do you see, both of you?”
“That you love her? Yes,” said Rowan. “I see.”
Mona slowly nodded her head. “Come down. In an hour. I think by then she’ll be all right. We bought her lots of pretty dresses. She likes those. She insists we dress up too. Maybe I’ll brush her hair back and put a ribbon in it the way I used to do in mine. She’s smart. She’s very smart and she sees …”
“Sees what?”
Mona hesitated. And then her answer came, small and without conviction. “She sees the future.” The door closed.
He realized he was looking at the pale rectangular panes of the window. The light was waning fast, the twilight of spring so quick. The cicadas had begun outside. Did she hear all that? Did it comfort her? Where was she now, this, his daughter?
He groped for the lamp.
“No, don’t,” Rowan said. She was a silhouette now, a line of gleaming light defining her profile. The room closed and then grew vast in the darkness. “I want to think. I want to think out loud in the darkness.”
“Yes, I understand,” he said.
She turned, and very slowly, with highly effective movements, she slipped the pillows behind him so that he could lean back, and hating himself, he let her do it. He rested, he pulled a deep breath of air into his lungs. The window was glazed and white. And when the trees moved, it was like the darkness outside trying to peer in. It was like the trees listening.
Rowan talked:
“I tell myself we all run the risk of horror; any child can be a monster, a bringer of death. What would you do if it were a baby, a tiny pink thing like they ought to be, and a witch came and laid her hands on it and said, ‘It will grow up to wage war, it will grow up to make bombs, it will grow up to sacrifice the lives of thousands, millions.’ Would you choke it? I mean if you really believed? Or would you say ‘No’?”
“I’m thinking,” he said. “I’m thinking of things that make a kind of sense, that she’s newborn, that she must listen, that those who surround her have to be teachers, and as the years pass, as she grows older, then …”
“And what if Ash were to die without ever knowing?” Rowan asked. “Do you remember his words? What was it, Michael? ‘The dance, the circle, and the song …’ Or do you believe the prediction in the cave? If you do believe it, and I don’t know that I do, but if you do, what then? We spend our lives keeping them apart?”
The room was completely dark. Pale white streaks of light fell tentatively across the ceiling. The furnishings, the fireplace, the walls themselves had disappeared. And the trees outside still held their color, their detail, because the streetlights were shining up at them.
The sky was the leftover sky-and the color of rosy flesh, as sometimes happens.