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

jump forward and backward along the stream. She learned about what the Guild did and what the Ofan hoped to achieve. She had been told about Mr. Mibbs and Jem Jemison, and Nick had talked about how he must learn to jump and go after his comrade-in-arms. Bertrand had said that was ridiculous, and Nick had said it wasn’t up for discussion.

For a long time they had talked about her childhood, and the four of them had pieced together how Grandfather must have kept her talent from her. She had told them about what she could do without ever having jumped. They had been very excited. She was more special than they’d even guessed. Apparently they thought it was impossible to turn time itself backward or forward, and yet she had done both, untrained and without having first jumped.

They made her describe it several times. How at the dinner table she had reversed time and Eamon had melted back to his seat. How at Grandfather’s deathbed he had sped time up . . . no, she had sped time up, and the dust had blown in the light, and Grandfather’s death had come just in time to save him from Eamon’s taunts. She offered to show the Ofan then and there, but when she started to push time back her head began to hurt. So instead they had talked about the plan, about how to make it seem as if she were nobody at all, certainly not the Talisman and not even an Ofan. Just an ordinary young woman—a “Natural.” Bertrand had looked at her with that green, commanding gaze and said that she must prepare herself to learn a great deal, and quickly. They would use the next few days, as they rode across country to Blackdown, to develop a plan and teach her what she needed to know.

Finally Bertrand said he thought they should stop talking about serious things—they should be celebrating. He believed he might have a bottle of wine in his saddlebags. There was cheering, and then there was drinking, the bottle passed from hand to hand. Nick and Leo relived some adventures they’d had when they were in school together in South America, including a triumph at something called an “eighties talent show.” Apparently their victory had involved singing a song entitled “Islands in the Stream.” Julia insisted on hearing the song, and it didn’t take much encouragement to get Nick and Leo on their feet. She expected it to be bawdy, but it turned out to be very pretty, with clever harmonies. Julia liked the pace and rhythm, but Bertrand almost drowned out the singers with his groans and laughter. Perhaps it was the way they performed it; for some reason each man held a fist up in front of his mouth, and leaned into it, staring into the other’s eyes as he warbled. When they were done they demanded a song of her, and before she knew it Julia found herself deep into an off-key rendition of “Gude Wallace.” At first her audience listened politely enough, but really, Julia could not carry a tune, and before long Nick and Leo had their hands over their ears. After three verses Bertrand took pity and joined her. His voice was as rich and as strong as chestnut honey, and with someone to follow she was able to do better. When the last notes had faded, Julia replaced herself in the circle of Nick’s arms, and they all sat again around the fire, staring into its glowing heart and thinking their own thoughts.

“Does Mr. Mibbs want to take me back across the Pale?” Julia sent her question out into the crackling silence. She felt a wave of some complicated emotion travel around the pool of light. Fear, sadness, hope, and anger.

“We don’t know,” Leo said, after a moment.

“You really don’t know, or is that your way of saying ‘don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow’?”

“‘Don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow,’” Bertrand murmured. “Ignatz said that almost every day.”

“Yes, every day,” Julia agreed, and heard the bitterness in her voice.

“You have every right to hate him for what he hid from you,” Bertrand said. “It enrages me, too. But still, he was a great man. He saved my life and taught me how to live it once he’d saved it.”

“Tell me about him.” Julia leaned in. “About Ignatz, not Ignatius.”

Bertrand leaned in, too, so that Julia felt it was just the two of them, their faces red in the light of the dying fire. “You have a great deal of Ignatz in you, Julia Percy, for all that you are not related to him by blood. He gave you many gifts.”

“I have his temper,” Julia said.

Bertrand smiled. “That is a gift and a curse.”

“I know.”

Bertrand poked the fire. “Ignatius Percy was the second son of the Earl of Darchester. He jumped when he was nineteen years old, in the aftermath of the Massacre of Devil’s Hole. Something to do with Seneca warriors behind him and Niagara Falls in front of him. Very dramatic.”

Leo snorted. “It wasn’t a massacre,” he said. “It was a battle. And the battleground is at least three miles from the falls.”

Bertrand inclined his head in Leo’s direction. “Battle,” he said, then turned back to Julia with a smile. “Whatever the truth of his story, Ignatius jumped, and he found himself in the state of New York of the 1930s. The Guild never detected him. Soon enough he connected with the Ofan and learned how to return to his era. His elder brother died and he became the earl. He lived his life half in his own natural time and half in late-twentieth-century Brazil, working with the Ofan host there. But he traveled all up and down the river. I first met him in England in the late 1530s, when he was around twenty-eight years old. I later got to know him better in Brazil, when he was in his forties. For me, it had been only a difference of