“I’m surprised they let you go.”
“Who?”
“Your secret guards.”
Oh, yes. My secret guards …
The memory arrived so quickly that it felt fabricated. “I snuck out through the attic,” he said. “After dark.”
“Clever boy.” Her smile flexed around the words. “What can I get you?”
“Something to drink,” he said. “That’s quite a climb.” He sat down at her kitchen table even though he didn’t feel tired. The small heavy trestle that supported him was gray and gashed from tools.
“Five thousand feet, give or take,” she said as she opened the icebox. She pulled out a jar of dark cloudy liquid and poured him half a glass. “Loring tea,” she explained, then filled it with ice, sugar and heavy cream exactly as he liked.
She set it in front of him. He said thank you. She smiled and turned to wipe off the countertop.
He lifted the drink and noticed a shape in the middle of her table. A red dark shadow more than a book. He felt as if he should have been surprised. “My uncle’s book.”
“If you say so.” She sat down across from him.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It hasn’t been his in a long time.”
“You’re right,” he said.
He downed the whole glass of tea. He was incredibly thirsty. Sun from the windows hit pans and kettles hanging overhead, reflecting burning copper pools into the kitchen’s depths. Sena leveled her eyes at him. “I need to tell you something. But we can’t let him hear. You have to keep it secret. No matter what happens. You can’t repeat what I’m going to say.”
Caliph’s attention riveted to her eyes. “What?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What?” It was like an echo.
There was a timing problem. When had this happened? But he felt reflexively warm inside. He choked slightly. Then smiled. The smile spread. He saw it mirrored on her face, a slow but definite upwelling of happiness that pushed both corners of her lips up. And the issues of when and how … where this had happened … all faded into dull unimportant doubts. He was overjoyed. This meant they were together. For real. They had a future.
Caliph had wanted this for so long.
Maybe it was foolish to interpret this as some kind of cement that would hold them together, keep her from disappearing, but he did. Somehow this made everything official.
He leapt from his seat and moved around the table to sit beside her. The fashionably cut cashmere obscured her waist. He began to suspect what it was hiding. But no. He put his hand under the delicate wool, against the smooth warmth of her belly. There was no sign. He looked at her face, confused, but her smile didn’t waver.
“It’s too early,” she whispered. “I’ve been holding her for you. It’s a girl.”
“Holding her?” He felt like they were talking in a church.
“We can do that.” Her voice was barely audible even in the small area of the kitchen. “Hjolk-trull can do that.”
Caliph grappled with the possibilities of what she was saying. How could it be? Her organs became cryptic and mysterious. He had no idea if this was really possible. He remembered her eyes ghosted with clurichaun fire, full of playfulness. Had it happened then? He was still disoriented with respect to time.
She was touching his neck. “What should we name her?”
Caliph’s mind was empty of girl names. He tried to think. What would she want him to choose? Maybe he should suggest naming it after her. No. He had a better idea. “We could name her after your mother.”
Sena’s mouth plucked with delight. “My mother?”
“Why not?” said Caliph. “She had a beautiful name.”
“Aislinn,” Sena whispered in his ear.
“Aislinn.”
There was a knock at the door. Caliph scowled and got up to answer it.
“Caliph—”
But he had already opened it. And there it stood, black and stooped, already reaching into the house. Something in a robe almost. Caliph smelled that familiar old-man smell. It trickled into everything, insinuating itself through the cottage like dust or smoke.
Its hand reached out and rested on the top of his skull.
The past intruded on the present. It sickened him, swirling like a bowl of his own vomit, stinking in front of his face. He tried to shut the door but it was too late. Nathaniel had already come inside.
Caliph turned to look at Sena. She had apologetic eyes. Why? This was his fault. He had opened the door.
He felt the cottage change back into his bedroom. He felt the math of his uncle’s house again, the air of that place—twenty years ago—it had bent his bones. It had modified his skull, crushed his eyes into hard skeptical wedges. And it was doing it again. He was squeezed down, out of adulthood, back into his six-year-old frame. He was back in the house on Isca Hill.
Vaguely, Caliph felt himself lying on his back; he could almost hear Dr. Baufent trying to rouse him. But that place was far away. His teeth were pestles, grinding on the fabric of the dream. They could not cut through. He could not wake up. He could not remember what Sena had done, for which he was supposed to be angry and repulsed.
Sena’s cottage disappeared. She was calling to him but her words were quickly fading away. Replacing them was his uncle’s voice. It demanded that he show himself.
“Stay with me,” said Sena.
Caliph sat up. He was covered with ashes from lying in the fireplace. This was where he had played hide-and-seek with his imaginary friends. Uncle had raged at him for tracking ashes across the carpets. He knew he was supposed to come out when his uncle called, but he stayed where he was.
The fireplace was galaxy-black. Caliph got to his feet, standing among the deep pornographic carvings that his uncle had commissioned from Niloran stonecutters. His blood bubbled, his face felt like it had been coated in hot honey. Inside him, there was thunder. He was angry at his uncle. It felt like his skeleton might shake apart.
“Caliph!” his uncle called.
But Caliph stayed hidden, ashamed that he wasn’t brave enough to come out. He had never been brave. When he played at dolls with the girls down the lane, the boys from the nearest farmhouse had called him names. They pushed him so hard into the road that he wound up with gravel in his hands. After the boys left, the girls kissed his scratches and gave him phantom tea and medicine, but eventually they forgot him, called away by parents that didn’t like them playing with the boy from Isca Hill. Caliph was ostracized because of his uncle.
“Caliph!” Nathaniel’s voice had reached fury.
He felt Sena’s hand tug gently on his fingers. Somehow she was in the fireplace with him. Small, just like him. “I’m not one of those girls,” she said. “I’m not going to leave you.”
Caliph pushed her up against the carvings, smelling sweet mint. She laughed and held his wrists. “Shh—he’ll find us.”
Caliph looked out into his bedroom. His uncle was standing right there in front of the hearth, eyes like spider bellies, staring right through him.
It was impossible that Nathaniel couldn’t see them. But this was a dream.
“If you say so,” she whispered.
“What did you give me to drink?”
Sena put his hands on the bones of her pelvis, the muscles of her lower back. She looked at him seriously.
“Shuwt tincture,” she said. “So that you can follow me.”
He wanted to follow her. He wanted to protect her … and the baby … from his uncle, from everything wrong with the world.
He looked over his shoulder. The old man’s eyes were still on him. He decided he had to come out.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“Yes I do.”
“You can’t tell him what I told you.”