“Well, you always did underestimate me, admit it.” His speech had lost every trace of another time or place; only the hungry humor remained, so cold that it glowed and danced like little deep-sea fish.
Ben was blinking and coughing now, trying to sit up, as Sia answered, “No, never you. Human stupidity, human longing, human madness, I have underestimated those forever.” The last word was a flinty whisper, all but inaudible.
Aiffe said, “He’s just here because of me. I brought him here, he’s staying at my house.” Pettishly playful, she tugged lightly at Nicholas Bonner’s arm with both hands.
Farrell said loudly, “I’ll get Ben on upstairs.”
Sia never turned. Nicholas Bonner and she stood together in a shifting circle of light, and Farrell knew, as he knew nothing else in that moment, that past the circle’s edge nothing existed—not himself, not whining Aiffe, not even a hurt, half-conscious Ben, muttering her name over and over like a penance. If he stops doing that, what happens? Don’t stop, don’t let her forget about us.
The boy’s golden head lifted, and the transparent, insatiable, monstrously despairing eyes of Nicholas Bonner came to bear on Sia across the bright circle. “I always return where you are,” he said. “Every time. Have you ever noticed that?” She did not answer, and Nicholas Bonner smiled. “And each time you’re that much weaker, that much more imaginary. I could walk into your house now, if I wanted to.”
Astonishingly Sia laughed then, no shotgun snort, but a rich, singing chuckle of seductive contempt. “You? Idiot wizards, drunken priests, any tinker woman with a grudge can banish you from this world; any spiteful child can call you back again. The yo-yo of the universe!” Farrell, struggling to keep Ben on his feet, almost dropped him at that comment. Sia said, “In my house, you? To walk through my shadow would destroy you.” She added something in the wind-language, and Farrell wondered if she were calling Nicholas Bonner by his real name.
Aiffe, who had been gaping in growing resentment from one to the other of them, suddenly pushed past Nicholas Bonner into the light. Or at least she tried to; it seemed to Farrell that the circle’s edge withdrew from her, slipping just far enough out of her reach to make her lurch clumsily after it, like that circus clown who used to keep trying to sweep up the spotlight. Even standing directly between Sia and Nicholas Bonner, thin face reddening, shoulders twisted, she was somehow further outside their concern than before, not merely nonexistent but impossible. She said to Sia, “Wait a damn minute, okay? Now. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
She blocked Farrell’s view of Nicholas Bonner, but he felt the hot smile spreading on his skin. The boy said straight through her, gently, humbly, “Well, then you’ll have to come out to me. Come out of your house and talk to me, old love.”
For a moment Farrell thought that she would actually do it. The thick figure tautened, the grizzled hair flared in its silver ring like a cobra’s hood, and Farrell found that he was sagging marrowless against Ben as the fire in the living room coughed and went out and an inhalation all around him set every door in the house slamming. Very far away, Sia lifted a bunny-slippered foot from the threshold and Aiffe shuddered to her knees; but Nicholas Bonner stood still, the slight body thrumming only a little, like a knife struck into a tabletop. When Sia put her foot down again, not a fraction further into the night than before, Nicholas Bonner winked at her, and the wink made a clicking, toothy sound, although Farrell knew that it couldn’t. Too empty even to fall, he heard Ben whispering, “Sia. Sia. Sia. Sia. Sia.”
Almost as softly, Nicholas Bonner said, “But you can’t, can you? My poor friend, you’re trapped in there. All your beautiful names, all those journeys, those glorious dwellings, all your empire, and just see what it’s come to.” And he clucked his tongue in perfect parody of sorrowful human relish. “Here you are, ruling over your last two lovers and a dog in a house like a stork’s nest, and your power stops at your front door.” He stretched his arms wide, wriggling his fingers elaborately, making Willie Nelson grin sequins. He said, “But I wonder if I do.”
Ben said clearly, “Prester John, she knows,” pointed more or less at Aiffe, and fell down with the effort. Aiffe moved to Nicholas Bonner’s side, visibly trembling and so pale that her eyes had gone entirely green, the bright, shallow applegreen of a hurricane sky. Nicholas Bonner put his arm around her without looking at her. He took a slow step toward Sia and then another, bringing the girl with him.
The old woman in the doorway said, “If you come any closer, I will not exile you again. Instead, I will change you.”
Nicholas Bonner stopped where he was. His laughter broke over her, smoky-cold as the fumes of dry ice. “What I am doesn’t change. Who should know that better than you?” He cocked his head, brazenly quizzical, but there was something surprisingly like wariness in the melting voice, something that remembered pain. “You saw to it yourself. I cannot be changed.”
“Not for the better,” she said. “That was always beyond me, from the first. But I can make you worse than you are.” She did not raise her own voice, but the hair stirred along Farrell’s forearms. Sia said, “Try, then.”
The boy did not move. “Try it, try it, put ‘em up,” he mimicked her. “Old love, even at your best, even when you were really somebody, the most you could ever do to me was to push me off the sidewalk for a little while. What do you think you matter now, when you don’t dare stick a toe out of your burrow? A traffic light has more power over me than you do, in this world.”
“Yes?” The single flat syllable cracked and sparked with derision like static electricity. “Well, you might be right. I am certainly less than I was, no hiding that. But if you stick a toe into my house, I will think about you in a certain way, and you will never be able to wear beauty again, whatever form you may take. And who would pay the least heed to you then, or believe that you have any power at all, in this world?”
For a moment Nicholas Bonner’s face became as pitilessly lonely as his eyes. He gripped Aiffe’s shoulders until she yelped and swung her in front of him, saying in a light, careful voice, “Do it the way I showed you. Do it now.”
Aiffe wriggled under his arm, refusing to look straight at Sia. “Nick, let’s go, I need some more practice, okay?” Her acne patches were boiling up like stigmata.
“Focus,” the boy said. “You can do it, it’s just focusing. Just like in the park, exactly the same, now.” He turned her body between his hands with a raging precision, aiming her. She neither resisted nor cooperated, but kept whimpering, “Nick, I want to go, let’s go home.” Nicholas Bonner took hold of her limp arm, holding it out, making her point at Sia.
Farrell gave up trying to lift Ben and began hauling him away from the door. He heard Sia’s voice, full of a terrifying pity, “Child, no,” and the boy saying, “Now,” as the air suddenly smelled violently of lightning and the vast inhalation happened a second time. Farrell scrambled toward the stairs, feeling the old house lunging and aching in the ground, while the walls curtsied slowly to each other and the chess table, the chairs, and the fire tongs hurtled into his legs. He held fast to Ben, pulling against a power like the disemboweling undertow of a sinking ship. The floor seemed to be slanting steeply under him, and he knew that he heard the girl cry out in bitter shock and pain, a chattering moan that laid Farrell’s spine bare. But it was Nicholas Bonner’s voice, not hers; and with that, chaos came to an end almost as confounding as itself. In the tumbled, freezing house, the only sound was Sia’s rasping sigh. Ben had finally stopped saying her name.