The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

“Something both the Ofan and the Guild are seeking. We hope it has the power to change the future.”

Jemison frowned and turned the ring over in his hand, then gave it back to Alva. “Are you saying it is magical?” Jemison cast a doubting glance at Nick. “This little thing?”

Alva folded her fingers over the ring. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have never believed in magic; to my mind the things we do with time aren’t supernatural. They don’t rely on incantations or spells or potions; we simply have a talent. But . . .” She looked up at Jemison. “Ignatz Vogelstein, our great teacher and visionary, sent me a letter, Mr. Jemison, with a hint enclosed about the Talisman. The hint was the symbol that is worked into this little ring.” Alva looked from Jemison to Nick, her eyes alight. “Tell me now, Nick. How is Julia connected to Ignatz Vogelstein?”

“She is his granddaughter.”

Alva stared at him. “Oh,” she whispered. “Of course! Why didn’t I realize it when I saw her yesterday? Her eyes reminded me of his; I even told her so. And yet I didn’t put two and two together. Even though she was there with your sister . . . he never let me meet the child, you know—”

Jemison interrupted. “So either the ring is the Talisman, or her grandfather gave her the ring as a sign for her to show others that she can be trusted. She holds the secret.”

Nick shook his head. Something was tickling his memory. “I don’t think she does know,” he said. “I don’t think she has any idea that this ring is important at all. There was something she said . . .” He gestured toward Jemison. “May I have that hussif?”

Jemison handed the pouch over and Nick held it in his hand, remembering Julia talking to him about it. She’d said she didn’t keep sewing notions in it, but rather some keepsakes. . . . He opened it again and found a fossil trilobite. “This is a memento of her grandfather,” he said. “And that . . .” He pointed to the ring in Alva’s hand. “She thinks that is a trinket, the only memento she has of her mother, who died when she was three months old. She called it a ‘fairing.’”

Alva reached for the trilobite and held it in her palm beside the ring. “Ignatz,” she whispered. She sighed. “When I saw Julia’s gestures, and when I saw those dark eyes . . . Ignatz used his hands in just that way when he talked, and he had dark eyes, too. Like good, strong Assam tea. A redder brown than Julia’s. I almost wept right there in my kitchen, surrounded by half-pickled beets. . . .”

“Alva.” Nick touched her shoulder. “Julia is lost. We need to stay focused.”

But Alva held the ring up and contemplated it with that same misty expression. “It is beautiful, isn’t it,” she mused. “Crafted before the fall of Mesoamerica by a P’urhépecha metallurgist—did you know that their work was even finer than the Mexicas’? It is priceless.”

Nick pushed his fingers into his hair and sighed. “I beg of you, Alva—”

“No—follow me, Nick. Something doesn’t make sense here. The ring is a treasure in two ways. The Spanish melted down every piece of metal they could lay their hands on, so almost no pre-Conquest jewelry remains, and yet here is this ring. Second, this ring was Eréndira’s inheritance from her mother, but Arkady doesn’t have it—Julia does. And Julia thinks it is a trinket of no value except a sentimental connection to her own dead mother. Why?”

“It must have been Ignatz’s way of making the ring significant to her,” Nick said. “He passed the ring off as her dead mother’s so that she would carry it around with her all the time. But why would he make her the keeper of the Talisman, and yet not tell her what it was? We’re back where we started.”

Alva shook her head. “No, we’re not back where we started. It’s clear! The ring itself isn’t the Talisman, it marks the Talisman. It is a sign.” She turned those eyes, glowing like a bluebell wood at dusk, on Jemison and then on Nick. “Ignatz told Julia the ring was her mother’s so that she would always have it near her, but he didn’t want Julia to protect the ring. He wanted the ring to reveal the truth about Julia. Julia Percy is the Talisman.”

“That’s mad,” Nick whispered.

“Why else would she carry that ring of Eréndira’s close to her all the time and yet not know what it is?”

“From what I’m beginning to understand about your boyfriend,” Nick said, “he kept Julia in the dark about everything. His lies don’t prove anything about either the ring or Julia. They only prove that he was a pig-headed old man—”

But Alva wasn’t listening. She was staring at the ring, and she looked as if she might faint.

“What? What is it?”

“Oh, dear God,” Alva said, and raised her still, shocked face to Nick’s.

“Tell me!”

“It was not Ignatz Vogelstein’s eyes I recognized in Julia’s,” Alva said, her voice a trembling thread. “I was led astray by the brown color of them and the familiarity of her gestures. The ring did belong to her mother, Nick. Julia is not Ignatz’s granddaughter. She is Arkady’s.”

* * *

The marquess rose up like a wall of fire at Alva’s words, enraged by the suggestion that the woman he intended to marry was not legitimate, was not English. But Nick met that rage with his own, and he simply reached inside and pinched the marquess out like a puny candle flame.

He knew in his bones that it was true. Julia was Eréndira’s daughter.

It made Julia’s isolation, her danger, and his own fear for her more tangible. She was alone, and she had no idea who she was. The man she had loved as a grandfather had tried to protect her by wrapping her up in a tissue of lies, and her blood grandfather, Arkady, was hell-bent on . . . Nick swallowed. He was hell-bent on harming her,