“You saw it happen,” he said.
Julie made a sound like heavy cloth tearing. “It was a tilt for the crown, everybody saw it. Everybody in the League knows what happened.”
“And nobody wants to know. My specialty.” Julie made no response. Farrell said, “By now it never happened at all.”
“Oh, by now he was always crazy. Ask anyone.” The bitterness in her voice dried Farrell’s own throat and nipped at his breath. She said, “He was never crazy, not ever; he’s not crazy now. He took risks, he was—he is—curious about everything, and sometimes he’d dance right on the edge of something really dumb, and I’d get scared and yell at him, and we’d have a huge fight, the kind you and I never have.” Farrell started to interrupt, but changed his mind. Julie was crying now. “But he is not crazy. In this whole town full of crazies, he might be the only one who isn’t.”
When they pulled up in front of the shaggy house on Scotia Street, Micah Willows descended to the curb without assistance, sniffing the midnight air delicately and smiling with a curious drowsy serenity. “Oh, here,” he said softly and moved toward the house, floating over the grass like a giraffe, which is a creature made entirely of shadows. Following with Julie, Farrell thought that the door began to open just before he knocked.
She wore a brown dress, as shapeless as Farrell’s zoo uniform had been, and less becoming: it made her look thicker and shorter-legged than she actually was and slumped her breasts and belly into one bolster-roll of mashed potatoes. But Farrell saw that she stood in the doorway with the still acceptance of her body that he had only known in a few women who had never in all their lives imagined themselves not beautiful, not even for a single bad moment, in pain, despairing. Micah Willows knelt at her feet and spoke to her in medieval Arabic, and she answered him in the same tongue, soothing and reassuring. But there was something astonishingly close to fear in her voice as she asked, “Why have you brought him to me?”
The question was addressed to Farrell, but it was Julie who answered. “You’re supposed to be a healer. He needs to be healed.”
Sia said, “He may be beyond my healing. Many things are.” She stooped over Micah Willows, and something about her creased bent neck stung Farrell’s heart. The twinge lasted until she lifted the black man effortlessly in her arms and carried him through the doorway into her house. Without turning, she said to Farrell, “Joe, call Briseis. You, if you care for him, come inside.” Julie looked at Farrell and followed her, and Farrell went off around the birdhouses to winkle the dog out of her favorite nest behind Ben’s compost pile.
When he returned with a more than usually apprehensive Briseis skulking behind him, Sia and Julie had already settled Micah Willows on a frayed rag rug before the fireplace. Julie moved around the living room as Sia directed her, lighting incense in some burners and not in others. Sia herself squatted beside Micah Willows, touching his face and chest and his sweaty hair, while he held her free left hand, smiling at her with his eyes wide open. She said, “Start the fire, Joe.”
The room felt stuffy and overheated, but Farrell arranged logs, newspaper, and kindling without question, tossing on equally obediently the strange spiky bundles that Sia gave him. Most of them smelled bad when he held them, and worse when he added them to the fire—and at least one wriggled in his hand—but each changed the color of the flames, from yellow to blue, blue to blood-red, red to sunset-green, and from green to various shades of purple and gray and slug-white, such as had no business on any hearth in any home. The last packet, and the word she spoke, made the flames turn black and answer her, and Sia, still crouching, turned heavily to face Farrell and Julie.
“None of this circus will help him,” she said. “None of this has the least bearing on whether or not I can free him and the one trapped within him from each other. All this is witch-rubbish, this is what that foolish little girl would do, but I am no witch and it will not help.” She looked very tired, her cheeks glistening damply and her upper lip showing thin white lines, but she chuckled suddenly—a whispering, fiery sound itself, like hair being brushed. She said, “This is all to comfort me and play for time, because I am afraid. Once I could have healed him by imagining it—indeed, once this thing that has happened to him would never have been allowed, no more than a leaf is allowed to jump back up to its tree. But now I am afraid and I am delaying the moment when I must learn why I should be afraid. So if either of you knows some small spell of your own, we can try that one, too. I need friends, and I have no pride.”
She was looking straight at Julie as she spoke.
Farrell asked, “Where’s Ben? How come you’re still up this late? Did you know we were coming?” Sia ignored him completely.
Julie bridled, surprisingly flustered, fumbling sullenly for words. “If I knew any damn magic that could make him well, he wouldn’t have been like this for five minutes.” She looked away from Sia, rubbing her swollen eyes.
The old woman said impatiently, “Oh, more people than not have some magic, they just forget about it. Children use it all the time—what do you think jump-rope rhymes are, or ball-bouncing games, or cat’s cradles? Where do you think that girl, that Aiffe, draws her power? Because she refuses to forget, that’s all it is.” Abruptly she sighed and slapped her thighs, pushing herself upright. “But this is not a matter for magic anymore. A vain, silly child played a jump-rope trick on your friend, and now nothing but a miracle will help him. And that is exactly the bloody trouble with amateurs.” She beckoned Briseis to her, commanding the reluctant dog step by step until they stood on either side of the silent, smiling Micah Willows. Sia said, “Well, perhaps Briseis can work a miracle. Perhaps we can all work one together. Let’s get on with it.” She began to unbraid her hair.
The task seemed to take forever, as if she were unraveling mountains, towers, not hair; but with each strand freed and brushed out, the living room seemed to grow larger, the walls paling and receding, the ceiling dissolving into starlight. The black flames crouched low, all but extinguished, but Sia loosened and loosened her hair, and the strange starlight filled the room, silvering faces, sparking blue in Briseis’ fur, making everything heartbreakingly bright and nothing truly clear. It clung thickly around Sia, until she glittered like a snow-woman, and it filled Micah Willows’ wide eyes with dawn.
Farrell had been raised in church but without religion, a compromise pleasing enough to everyone involved. He had never missed God or the hope of heaven, but he had dearly wanted confession to rest his mind, Communion to let him touch something beyond Father Krone’s dry, shaky hand, and holy water to taste like starlight. Now, with the room brightening toward some sure wonder, exaltingly unbearable, he managed to think, or say, or neither, oh, how kind, after all, how kind. Then Sia shook her hair free upon her shoulders, and Micah Willows screamed.
Even at the moment, Farrell realized that the cry was one of fear, not pain, and that it came through Micah Willows, but not out of him. For all that, it raked right down all his bones, and he started forward as impulsively as Julie. But they would have had to pass Sia, and they could not do that. She stood between them and Micah Willows with her back to them, an immense, shining silence, distorted with strength, no one they knew, no friend of theirs. Briseis rose up on her hind legs, huge as a tiger, and they embraced over Micah Willows’ body, crowding into each other so that Sia appeared to have Briseis’ pointed, white-laughing head in place of her own. Farrell remembered then the reflection he had seen within the first hour of his first meeting with Sia, and he held Julie tightly and waited for the wonderful thing to happen, as he had always known it must.