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

her gaze. He had been locked in a moment of time. But Grandfather had always been there, ready to pretend that it was he who had frozen Eamon, just for fun.

And then . . . in those last moments of his life. Grandfather had sped time up so that he could die before Eamon arrived. But he hadn’t actually been the one to do it. He was too weak. He was dying. He had incited her to do it. She remembered how he had focused her attention on the dust, how she had felt his power as the dust flew. Except that it hadn’t been his power she had felt. It had been her own. Her power, speeding his death. Hot tears welled up behind her eyelids and oozed out over her cheeks. His very last act had been to use her and then hide the truth from her. He tricked her into killing him. Or used her to kill himself. What was the difference? There was none.

Grandfather. Julia felt herself tumbling down, down, into a deep well of cold rage, a well encrusted with an icy rime of grief.

It was unforgivable, like Bertrand said.

Yet as the tears tracked down her cheeks, their salt, their warmth, restored her to what was real. The flesh and its failures, love and its limits. The ancient barn surrounded her, the huge, rough stones catching the flickering firelight. Julia breathed in the scent of smoke, hay, and chickens, the scent of now. Beneath the present moment she could sense the deep movements of time, the seasons that had been laid away in this barn, year after year. The harvests stretching back and back . . . She sighed, and floated back up to the present. She was in an ancient barn, with Ofan men. In those last moments Grandfather had given her the clues she needed. He had told her to pretend. And he had told her that she would be Ofan after all.

Maybe he had given her just enough knowledge to protect her, and ultimately to save herself. Maybe trust and clues were more powerful than instructions. He hadn’t told her who she was, he hadn’t provided for her. It was a betrayal. And it was a gift. He hadn’t told her who she was; he hadn’t dictated the terms and limits of her life. He’d left her to do that for herself.

Julia opened her eyes. Her head felt clearer. The pain was gone.

“You’re the Alderman, in this era, anyway,” Nick was saying. “Why can’t you just call off the dogs? Tell Arkady and the rest of them to leave Julia alone?”

“I could do that, and I will,” Bertrand said, “but Julia has to agree, at least in the beginning, to pretend to be nobody. We must train her to be able to withstand the tests. Arkady is on the scent, and Mr. Mibbs could return at any moment, having discovered that Jemison is nothing but a very courageous Natural. For all our sakes Julia must learn to pretend.”

“Poor Julia,” Nick said. “To be finally told the truth and then immediately told to hide it.”

Silence fell around the fire. A log settled, and sparks flew. Outside, an owl called.

Julia spoke. “I am awake,” she said.

* * *

And awake she stayed, all night, long after the others had fallen asleep. As the dawn broke, revealing that the roof of the great barn not only had a hole but was half missing, the massive rafters holding up nothing but the pinkening sky, she lay curled in blankets on a bed of straw. The four travelers were arranged around the fire in a circle, and Nick was sleeping at Julia’s feet. Sometime in the night she had felt Nick’s hand creep under her blankets and find her bare foot. He’d slept holding it. He held it now. It was as if she were a kite, and he was holding the string, so that she wouldn’t fly up and up until she disappeared.

She looked at her hands, and at the copper ring she now wore on the little finger of her left hand. Her mother’s ring . . . but not the mother she had thought she had. A mother and no known father, and a new grandfather . . . a terrifying Russian grandfather whom she hated. A grandfather who wanted to kill her. She twisted the ring around so that the eye in the circle could be seen. Another ancestor she had never imagined, a long-ago grandfather, had made this ring, across the seas, before Europeans had even known that the world was round or that half the world still lay over the western horizon.

Half the world.

Julia closed her eyes. That long-ago grandfather had been P’urhé . . . she couldn’t even recall the name of the country in which he had lived. But it meant that Julia wasn’t legitimate, or the descendant of earls. Indeed, she didn’t even belong in the nineteenth century. Her mother had been a woman whom Bertrand had described as possessed of a flaming courage and an astonishing intelligence: the very woman she had seen in the strange painting that Eamon had shown her, the woman he had called a mulatto. It meant that Julia had been born in the future, born in a terrible future, and that her mother had probably died to save her from it. Her mother had put her in the hands of a beloved and brilliant teacher, Ignatz Vogelstein, né the Earl of Darchester . . . Grandfather. Julia clenched her fists against that word, Grandfather. How much had Ignatz Vogelstein known? How much had he hidden from her?

The four of them had stayed up talking, putting more logs on the fire. Julia had spent those hours propped between Nick’s legs, his arms around her, her head leaning back against his chest. The things she learned had been terrible, but they had also relieved her. It had been wonderful, simply to ask questions and to have them answered.

She had learned about the Guild and the River of Time. That it was possible to