"My favorite," she said, sounding like she meant it. She took a small bite. Her freckled nose wrinkled. "Hmmmm, really good." She took another bite and looked at him. "So tell me something about yourself."
He thought a moment, staring off into the crowds, then told her about traveling through Great Britain. She listened intently as he recounted his visits to the castles and cathedrals, to the gardens and the moors, to the hamlets and the cities. He liked talking about England, and he took time to give her a clear picture of what it was like there–of the colors and the smells when it rained, which was often; of the countryside with its farms and postage–stamp fields, walled by stone; of the mist and the wildflowers in the spring, when there was color everywhere, diffused and made brilliant in turn by the changes in the light.
She smiled when he was done and said she wanted to go someday. She talked about what it was like to run a coffee shop, her own business, built from scratch. She told him what it was like growing up in Hopewell, sometimes good, sometimes bad. She talked about her family, which was large and mostly elsewhere. She did not ask him what he did for a living or about his family, and he did not volunteer. He told her he had been a graduate student for many years, and perhaps she thought he still was one. She joked with him as if she had known nun all his life, and he liked that. She made him feel comfortable. He thought she was pretty and funny and smart, and he wanted to know her better. He was attracted to her as he had not been attracted to a woman hi a very long time. It was a dangerous way for him to feel.
At one point she said to him, "I suppose you think I'm pretty forward, inviting myself to spend the evening with you."
He shook his head at once. "I don't think that at all."
"Do you think I might be easy?" She paused. "You know."
He stared at her, astonished by the question, unable to reply.
"Good Heavens, you're blushing, John!" She laughed and poked him gently in the ribs. "Relax, I'm teasing. I'm not like that." She grinned. "But I'm curious, and I'm not shy. I don't know you, but I think I'd like to. So I'm taking a chance. I believe in taking chances. I think that if you don't take chances, you miss out."
He thought of his own life, and he nodded slowly. "I guess I agree with that."
The sun had dropped below the horizon, and darkness had fallen over the park. The band had begun playing, easing into a slow, sweet waltz that brought the older couples out onto the dance floor beneath the colored lamps that had been strung about the pavilion. Out hi the grass, small children danced with each other, mimicking the adults, taking large, deliberate steps. John Ross and Josie Jackson watched them in silence, smiling, letting their thoughts drift on the music's soft swell.
After a time, he asked her if she would like to take a walk. They climbed to their feet and strolled off into the darkened trees. Josie took his free arm, and moved close to him, matching his halting pace. They walked from the pavilion toward the toboggan slide, then down through the trees toward the river. The music trailed after them, soft and inviting. The night was brilliant with stars, but thick with summer heat, the air compressed and heavy beneath the pinpricked sky. It was dark and silent within the old hardwoods, and the river was a gleaming, silver–tipped ribbon below them.
They stopped on a rise within a stand of elm to stare down at it, still listening to the strains of the distant music, to the jumbled sounds of conversation and laughter, to the buzz of the locusts far back in the woods. On the river, a scattering of boats bobbed at anchor, and from farther out in the dark, over on the far bank of the Rock River, car lights crawled down private drives like the eyes of nocturnal hunters.
"I like being with you, John," Josie told him quietly. She • squeezed his arm for emphasis.
He closed his eyes against the ache her words generated within him. "I like being with you, too."
There was a long silence, and then she leaned over and kissed him softly on the cheek. When he turned to look at her, she kissed him on the mouth. He put caution aside and kissed her back.
She broke the embrace, and he saw the bright wonder in her eyes. "Maybe, just this once," she whispered, "I'm going to be a little more forward than I thought."
It took a moment for the import of the words to register, and then another for the familiar chill to run through him as the memories began to scream in the silence of his mind.
When he sleeps the night after O'olish Amaneh has given him the black walnut staff with its strange rune markings and terrible secret, he dreams for the first time of the future the Lady had prophesied. It is not a dream of the sort that he has experienced before. The dream is not fragmented and surreal as dreams usually are. It is not composed of people and places from his life, not formed of events turned upside down by the workings of his subconscious. The dream is filled with the sounds, tastes, smells, sights, and feelings of life, and he knows in a strange and frightening way that what he is experiencing is real.
He is not simply dreaming of the future; he is living in it.
He closes his eyes momentarily against the feelings this revelation generates within him. Then he opens them quickly to look about. The world in which he finds himself is nightmarish. It is dark and misted and filled with destruction. He is on a hillside overlooking the remains of a city. The city was once large and heavily populated; now it lies in ruins, empty of life. It does not smolder or steam or glow with fading embers; it has been dead a long time. It sits lifeless and still, its stones and timbers and steel jutting out of the flattened earth like ravaged bones.
After a time, he begins to see the feeders. There are only a few, prowling the ruins, dark shapes barely visible in the gloom, eyes yellow and gleaming. He knows instinctively what they are. They are far away, down within the rubble, and they do not seem aware of him. He feels a twinge in his right hand, and looks down to find that he holds the black staff. Where he grips it, light pulses softly. The light signals the readiness of the staff's magic to respond to his summons. The magic is his to wield in his service to the Word. It is vast and formidable. It enables him to withstand almost anything. It gives him the power to destroy and to defend. It is the Word's magic, drawn from deep within the earth. It whispers to him in seductive tones and makes him promises it cannot always keep. His immediate response is to want to cast the staff away, but something rooted deep within forbids him from doing so.
He feels exposed on the hillside, and starts to move tentatively toward the shelter of some trees. When he does so, he finds that he no longer limps, that his leg is healed. He is not surprised; he knew it would be so.
When he reaches the trees, the Lady is waiting for him. She is a small, faint whiteness within the dark, as ethereal as gossamer. She looks at him, smiles, and then fades. She is not real after all, he realizes; she is not even there. She is a memory. He has been to this place before, in another, earlier time, before the destruction, and coming here again has triggered the memory.
He begins to understand now. He is living in the future, but only in his sleep. It is the cost of the magic he wields, the title he bears, and the responsibility he shoulders. He will live his life henceforth in two worlds–the present when awake, the future when asleep. The images come in a rush, like the waters of a river overflowing its banks in a flood. He is a Knight of the Word, and he must prevent the future in which he stands. But he needs the knowledge the future can give him in order to do so. He must learn from the future of the mistakes and missed opportunities of the past. If he can discover them, perhaps he can correct them. Each time he sleeps, he has another chance to learn. Each time he sleeps, the future whispers secrets of the, past. But the future is never the same because the past advances and alters it. Nor does his sleep lend order, coherence, or chronology to what he witnesses. The future comes to him as it will and reveals itself as it chooses. He cannot control it; he must simply abide it.