“It doesn’t matter,” Giles sighed. He stared at the woodstove and absently pulled the dishcloth through his fingers. “Those two from last night—they think they’re going to summon help from Cassandra. But they’ll never get there.”
From the sink wafted a cloud of steam and the scent of scorched spices. He grimaced, then went on. “Trevor’s calling ahead now to warn them—those two will be cut off before they reach the mountains. I wish I knew nothing about it.”
This was the first time I had any real notion of how the rebels based in Cassandra were organized, or indeed that they were organized at all. “Was—was there any other news?” I asked tentatively.
Giles shrugged, pushed the loose hair back from his face, and shook his head. He was pale and drawn with exhaustion; he must have been up all night, talking with the soldiers or else seeing to some secret business of his own. “Some. There have been more insurrections in the HORUS colonies. And elsewhere—rioting on hydrofarms in the Archipelago, an attack on the provisional government in Vancouver.”
“It’s true, then,” breathed Miss Scarlet. Her black eyes widened as she turned to Fossa. “The Alliance really is taking control.”
“Alliance?” Jane repeated suspiciously, and glanced at me. “What Alliance?”
I looked at the game monitor in my lap. “It’s nothing,” I said.
Jane frowned and turned to Giles. “Is this some kind of joke?” she demanded. “Or are you planning to turn us over to the next band of soldiers who shows up?”
Giles flushed angrily, but before he could reply, Trevor appeared in the doorway, his face smudged with soot. “We need more wood,” he announced, wiping his forehead and leaving a black streak. “Giles and Jane, would you mind helping me?”
Giles nodded and walked. Trevor followed, and finally Jane left slowly, looking back at Miss Scarlet and me with eyes full of hurt and anger. When she was gone, I stood and began clearing plates from the table, and pumped water into the skillet still hissing in the sink.
“Not yet,” I heard Fossa say softly behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw him staring out the window, to where Jane and Trevor picked their away along a path in the snow to the woodpile. Beside him Miss Scarlet shifted on her stool, her eyes still wide and gleaming with a bright, nearly fanatical intensity. “Not till spring,” Fossa rumbled. His long tongue flicked at the spaces between his long yellow teeth. “But soon, soon: our time will come.”
I said nothing. After a few minutes I joined the others outside.
So the winter passed. Mornings when I watched Jane breasting through drifts to the barn gave way to days in March when the inn seemed to float in a still gray lake, so deep was the snowmelt around us. And then slowly the earth surrendered to spring. There were crocuses and aconite in the last snowy patches behind the house, where the sun fell late in the day. Trevor disappeared into the basement for hours, finally surfacing with sacks that he hauled into the barn. Harvesting his macabre fruits. I wondered who would get them.
In the first weeks of April more Ascendant janissaries visited. When they left, the sacks went with them, carried to the tiny electrical jitney by the creaking server, Mazda, and heaped into its storage compartment until it was full. Trevor watched the vehicle jounce over the rutted road, swerving to avoid gullies left by frost heaves. He took off his enhancer and smiled, his optics sending fiery blue darts above his head. I stood at my vantage place on the landing and kneaded the suede panels of my beaded skirt. I recalled his pride in telling me of the mutations he had caused, the hallucinogenic mushrooms that caused death and madness, the truffles that induced fits of despair. Late that night I crept down to the kitchen for some chamomile tea to help me sleep, and found him crouched in front of the shortwave, whispering into its mouthpiece. Whom did he speak to—rebels in the City, in Cassandra or someplace so far away I had never heard of it, someplace in the stars? He was playing a dangerous game. Like Giles, I wished I knew nothing about it.
Giles himself had more mundane harvests. He took Jane into the woods and returned with canvas sacks full of fiddleheads. We ate them cooked with mutton fat and morels; they tasted like the earth itself, mouthfuls of it, raw and rich and green. From the marshes that lay behind Trevor’s fields came the shrill touts of peepers and the tree toads: a sound that always made my neck prickle, seeming to hold in it somewhere a promise that I knew could not be kept. And finally, on a day when there was no longer any breath of chill in the air, the wild apple trees in the meadows began to bloom.
“Well! The winter’s back is broken at last.”
Trevor stood in front of an open window downstairs, looking deeply satisfied. I’d gone with him from room to room, yanking open casements and removing glass storm windows to let the warm air come streaming in. Flurries of white and pink petals blew from the meadows and drifted across the polished wood floors. I found a ladybug in my bedroom and breathed on it until its wings opened and it flew off into the bright blue sky.
“You seem happier than you were a few months ago.”
I shrugged at Trevor’s remark, cupped my hand over my nose. Where the ladybug had rested, a very faint odor remained, an acrid smell that reminded me of Trevor’s basement. “Not really.”
Though in truth the spring had brought a sort of remission to my sorrow. I had never been with Justice in the spring, so the season became a template upon which I could place nothing but raw grief. No image of his laughing face, no touch of his hand upon my shaven skull; nothing but the grief itself. And with nothing to feed it, even grief dies eventually; and so the warmer days and clouds of apple blossom found me dreaming, as often as not, of nothing at all.
“You can’t grieve forever,” Trevor said softly. He picked up a glass transformer from a shelf, tossed it from hand to hand until he dropped it and it shattered on the floor. “Oh, dear.”
He gazed down as though surprised to see the blue-green shards there, then glanced at me. His voice was kind as he said, “Well, things happen in the spring, Wendy. Maybe something will happen to you.”
Something did. It was a shining morning a month later, in the first fat weeks of summer. We had been at Seven Chimneys for half a year. An unspoken truce had fallen between all of us; a truce easy to keep, since we had gotten into the habit of going our separate ways. Jane had left early that morning to check on the lambs in the fields. Miss Scarlet lay on the living-room couch with Fossa, listening to a historical novel about Yll Peng-Si, the tyrant of the Mongolian Nuclear Republic. I sat in the kitchen with Trevor and Giles, drinking tea and fiddling with a packet of cigarettes. Behind me, on the shelf it shared with tins of dried herbs and dusty brown bottles filled with tinctures of valerian and skullcap, the shortwave hummed soothingly. When I asked him where the transmissions were coming from, Giles only smiled.
“ ‘Far away pul-lay-sez,’ ” he sang in his reedy tenor—a bit of doggerel from that damn opera again. “ ‘Stars you only see in duh-ree-ums…’ ”
Trevor smiled indulgently and I grinned as Giles bowed with a flourish. The radio began playing something else, a choral piece by Menton Barstein that Miss Scarlet had always been fond of. I glanced into the living room to see if she was listening, but her head was beside Fossa’s as they stared into the talking book. I sighed and slid a cigarette from the pack.
“This here,” I said, pressing the ball of my thumb beneath the image of the pyramid and looking up at Trevor. “This thing—it reminds me of something I saw at HEL once….”
Without warning the song coming from the radio cut off. The shortwave crackled and fizzed; then there was an ominous, hollow silence. With a frown Trevor stood and went over to it, bending until his ear was close to the little round box. He twisted a knob with infinite care, so slowly it scarcely seemed to move, until the static resolved into a long, breathless hissing. I could make out no words, nothing but that foreboding sibilance. In his chair Giles sat up very straight and stared at his partner, his face pale. Suddenly a string of words rang out. To me it sounded as thin and breathless and meaningless as that other sound, but Trevor listened tight-lipped. After a minute he looked up sharply.