“I want to thank you for that.”
Ficer accepted this with a slow nod. “I wasn’t sure at first, but I think now it was the right thing to do. Jolly’s a good boy… and if the silver has given him back, it’s for a reason.”
“‘Mostly the silver seems to act without purpose,’” I recited, “‘but sometimes it is otherwise.’”
Ficer laughed. “And where did you here that?”
“From Emil.”
“The old man of the Pinnacles? That one is worth listening to.”
I didn’t disagree. “So what is Jolly’s purpose?”
Ficer’s eyes challenged me from their deep setting among sun-wrinkled skin. “Maybe that’s for Jolly to discover?”
I nodded, for it was true that each of us must find our own way. “I would still like to take him home.”
“And maybe you will. But come. He’s waiting, and he’ll be worried if we’re gone too long.”
Chapter 24
When we returned, Jolly was huddled in a corner, with Moki in his lap. That sight affected me strangely, for it seemed as if I looked back in time at myself, alone in the corner of my room, holding on to a scream of despair until the silver was fully gone.
I moved my sleeping bag next to his and sat down. He watched me with wary eyes as if I were the silver itself. I leaned against the wall, looking out across the room so that he did not have to feel my gaze. I was not, after all, the Jubilee he remembered. I said, “I’m sorry for this strangeness between us. You were my older brother. That’s how I remember you. My best friend. Now seven years have passed—”
“It has not been that long.”
“It has, for me. Seven years.” I tried to smile. “Ficer says I look on you as if you were a ghost. You must forgive me, Jolly, if it seems that way, but the dead do not come back to life every day, looking as bright as when they left. I think it will take some time to get my mind around it… though it doesn’t mean I love you less.”
He nodded, but his grip on Moki tightened. “Do you remember that night I called the silver?”
I could feel his dark eyes on me, and there was defiance in his voice, but I was not going to argue with him. I knew what he had done. Maybe, I knew how he had done it. “I remember it all.”
He leaned back against the wall, his right hand obsessively stroking Moki’s neck. “You are a ghost too, Jubilee. The silver was there in our room. I knew it must have taken you too. How could you have escaped? I thought you were dead. That we both were, and I had killed you.”
I turned to him in surprise. “No. The silver never touched me.”
Ficer appeared in the doorway then, startling Jolly so that he shrank against the wall. “Getting jumpy again?” Ficer asked as he lay down on his sleeping bag.
Jolly smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.” Then he glanced at me. “Did you see what happened that night?”
“Yes.”
His next words were haunted with memory. “There is silver in all of us. Mama told me when a player dies, silver will leave the body, like a last breath. I was that wisp-of-silver. I felt like a ghost, floating, not solid at all though I was still me. Like being in a dream, when you can’t touch anything, but I could see. I could see everywhere… that’s how it seemed. Windows opened everywhere I looked. It was the world—at least I guessed it was. None of it looked like any part of the world I had seen before. But at least it was somewhere, and I was nowhere. I tried to get through the windows, but they kept slipping away. I didn’t know how to move. I thought I would never escape.”
Whether that time in the silver encompassed hours or days or the slow turn of seasons, Jolly couldn’t say, but it was long. I think it was a different kind of time than passes in the world. Perhaps it was a kind of infancy, for like an infant that grows in strength and learns to walk, Jolly’s helplessness gradually yielded to a new mobility. He struggled always to move toward one of these vistas that he called a “window” and finally he reached one.
“It was like being pushed into a painting of a landscape, only to find the land in the painting was the real world, while…” He waved his hand vaguely. “Wherever I had been… that was a dream. Though it had felt real enough when I was there.”
“Where did you find yourself?” I asked when he’d been silent for most of a minute.
“Nowhere.” He shook his head. “There was no one there. Nothing. It was an empty land”—he glanced at Ficer, stretched out on his bedroll—“a lot like this place, but by the ocean.”
He had been terribly frightened and utterly alone. Wandering that strange coast he grew hungry and horribly thirsty under a pitiless sun. He hid behind rocks and watched as wild animals came up out of the water, great fat seals and giant sea stars with shining tentacles. A bull hippo chased him, giving up only when he scrambled up a cliff face where it could not follow.
“I stayed there three days. It rained twice and I had some water, but the sea snails I could pry from the rocks were salty and they made me sick. I thought I was going to die. It made me so angry. I didn’t want to die. But I was sick. I could hardly stand up. When the silver came, the third night I was there, I tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. No more cliffs to climb. So the silver caught me, and it was just like the first time. The world slipped away and I could see it only through windows. I was a ghost again, looking through windows, with a different view everywhere I turned… but I never saw home.”
Moki stirred, so Jolly set him on his feet. The hound stretched and yawned and wagged his tail, and we both watched, as if it was a fascinating thing to see. Then Jolly spoke again. “I thought everyone had lied to me.” His fist clenched against his knee. “I was so angry. Furious at Mom, Dad, because they’d lied to me about the silver—”
“They didn’t lie—”
“I know that! I know it now. But then, I thought it was the same for everyone, that the silver only took you away, it didn’t kill you.”
“But it’s not like that… is it?” I longed for him to tell me that everything I knew was wrong, that players could return from the silver, but Jolly was wiser than that.
He shook his head. “Other players can’t survive the silver. It’s only me and… and…”
“Kaphiri?” I asked softly.
Jolly looked suddenly fearful. “You know him?”
“I’ve met him.” I tried to keep my voice calm. “He’s hunting you. And now… I think he’s hunting me too.”
Jolly nodded, and turned away again. I was afraid he’d stop speaking, so I pressed him with a question. “Jolly? How did he find you?”
“He didn’t. I found him.”
He described how he’d struggled once more to escape the silver by reaching toward the vistas he could see, the “windows” as he called them. It was hard for him to move willfully. It was so much easier to drift, and yet, as he strove for direction, he learned, and motion became easier. This time he chose carefully, before slipping through a window into the world.
“It was a better place,” Jolly said. “A lot like Kavasphir, though there were animals there I never saw before, so I think it was really far away. But there was a stream with fish in it, and wild berries, and I set a trap and after a couple of days I caught a piglet.” He shrugged. “It’s better to hunt with a rifle.”