And then after about ten minutes they stepped suddenly out from the jungly growth into a sloping stretch of open ground, still indistinct but beginning to take form in the dawn. As soon as they were free of the trees, Jonas dropped to the ground, his bearlike shape fitting as easily into a lotus position as if he were sitting onto a chair. Ana sat down a distance from him and pulled her knees to her chest. Wrapping the borrowed coat around her, she tried to ignore her wet, bruised feet.
There was a faint breeze here, and from somewhere the crisp music of water trickling down stone. The sun was coming quickly now, and details became visible—trees, a small building on the other side of the clearing, a stream winding down the hillside in a delicate curve to the gleam of a pond below. With more light came the colors, the rich green turf and the yellow of a few late daffodils growing up through it; the pale blossoms, white or pale yellow, of a scattering of shrubs Ana could not identify; the creamy white marble of the little building, its four narrow pillars reminding her of the main house's entrance foyer and giving it the air of a shrine; the deep, vivid, and unexpected blue of the roof tiles.
And birds, even before full dawn. Distant and tentative at first, then becoming near as others showed themselves and joined in. A far-off rooster contributed its crow, and Ana nearly smiled at the sound.
The chorus grew around them, until all the world rejoiced at the coming of day and the grove rang with life.
Ana felt well and truly out of her depth here. A Marc Bennett she could get around, a Steven Change she could manipulate, but what could she possibly do with a force of nature like the Bear? She hadn't the faintest idea what they were doing out there, what it was that he expected her to see, how she should react to him. She did know that the method she had used to impress herself on Steven—Ana the enigmatic Seeker who knew more than she realized—would be utterly useless here. Jonas had already, with a few tense sentences, out-enigmaed the sphinx, and she had no chance to match that. It would just puzzle him.
"Sex is a curious thing, is it not?" Jonas mused, startling her.
After a minute, when no explanation followed, Ana asked a bit uncertainly, "I'm sorry?"
He waved a big hand at the grotto. "Male birds sing to attract females and to proclaim their territory. In primates, the male pounds his chest and the female aligns herself with the most promising male. A woman's great fear of violation is not only the personal threat, but the fear of the species that her choice might be taken from her. Just as a man's great fear, castration, is not only the loss of his own strength, but having his presence in the gene pool taken from him."
Despite her nervousness, it was very, very tempting to respond to this with a complete non sequitur of her own regarding the Dalai Lama's teeth or the migration of the monarch butterfly, but she resisted.
"I don't understand," she said apologetically.
"You were afraid of me. Now you're not."
This was patently not true, but Ana responded carefully, "It was dark and you were a stranger. Now it's not, and you're not."
"And you have stopped to listen to the morning," he said with no recognition of the validity of her statement.
"It was very quiet earlier."
"It still is quiet back there in the deep woods."
"Really? Why?"
"This estate was built in the 1830s," he said. "The family was wiped out in the First World War and the flu epidemic that followed. The gardens deteriorated, the rides grew over, the outbuildings fell into disrepair and then into ruin.
"Change came here twelve years ago. This grotto we're sitting in was one of our first attempts at Transformation. It was so overgrown as to be impenetrable, a solid thicket of laurel and other shrubs grown to vast proportions. Not even bramble could grow. And like the area we were in earlier, there was no life. No birds, no animals, just the insects and funguses of decay.
"Our first action was destruction," he said with no small degree of relish. "Chain saws, bulldozers, and poison for the stumps—when we finished, there was devastation: a few top-heavy trees, a pile of stones where the summerhouse is, and bare, gouged earth. It resembled a First World War battleground, and had about as much life in it.
"And now birds and squirrels live here, the pond that was little more than a mud hole supports half a dozen kinds of fish, the soil that was sour and hard now smells sweet and gives life to a myriad of growing things."
The bearded man, seen clearly now, had a faraway, almost dreamy look on his face. His head was tipped back so that the thick black hair tumbled back on his shoulders; the untrimmed beard covered his face nearly to his cheekbones. Daylight confirmed nighttime's impression, that this was indeed a bear of a man. He was, oddly enough, the sort of man Ana normally found physically attractive, as big and furry as Aaron had been, or Antony Makepeace, or most of the men who ended up in her bed (other than Glen, but then, Glen was another thing altogether).
This bear, however, was no comforting presence, and Ana had no desire whatsoever to sink her fingers into his hair. She felt a fascination, certainly, but it was like the compulsion of reversed magnets, repellent face-to-face but with a strong tug from the back. This bear was more grizzly than teddy, appealing from a safe distance but murderous when crossed. Ana had a strong urge to sit, quiet and small in her corner, although at the moment he seemed almost unaware of her presence.
"The land and its Transformation is a paradigm for our real work here. From destruction comes forth life. From the ashes of fire beauty is born. Personally, I wanted to set the glade to the torch, to purify it down to the ground and the stones and see what came of it, but my friends and the county council disapproved of the idea. It would have been interesting, however. There are many seeds that come to life only after the touch of fire."
The deep, detached voice sent a cold thread down Ana's spine; she hugged the borrowed coat more tightly around her and closed her eyes.
She was abruptly aware of how terribly afraid she was, although she could not have said precisely why. Fear, like pain, was an old and familiar companion. She had long ago learned to distance herself, to use the very intensity of the sensation to create a wall between it and her. Pain or fear alike could rage through her body, but her essential self was left quiet in one small corner, aware but not overtaken.
This was different. The normal barriers refused to stay up, the spark of her being was flaring and fluttering madly in the gusts of emotion—the affection she felt for Dulcie and Jason crossed with the battering of memory and the assault of Change—and she could not find the point of balance that kept the fear-ridden Anne Waverly away from the calm essence at the center and allowed Ana Wakefield to get on with her work. There were too many pulls, too many anxieties and memories, and Anne would not go away. The situation was massively dangerous, to herself and to those around her. Ana had to be allowed to slide free; her intuitive and unthinking response to people and events was the key element that made her work for Glen possible. Why was that proving so difficult this time?
She opened her eyes. The morning was still sweet, and Jonas Fairweather was still looking at the side of her face. She turned to him and gave him a smile that felt like a rictus.
"Jonas," she said,"tell me about alchemical transformation."
Chapter Twenty-eight
From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)
"Alchemical transformation," Jonas said thoughtfully, sounding for all the world as if this were a new idea to him. "Ah yes, Steven seemed to think you had hidden talents in the field. Actually, my friend Steven knows I've been having some problems with my Work, and thought you might help. God knows he's tried everything else."