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.
But nothing did happen. Sia made no sorcerous gestures, voiced no incantations, called down no lightning, but stood still in one place with her dog’s paws propped on her shoulders and a black man threshing on her hearth, each howl arching his back more dreadfully. The starlight in the room began to ebb, and what returned was not good darkness but hot, bustling shadows that chittered like hamsters. A mask over the fireplace was rattling its bronze jaws.
“Ah, well, there, you see?” Sia pushed Briseis down and turned to face Farrell and Julie. “For every action, an equal and opposite reaction—this is true for gods and demons as well as rocket ships. If you bend the universe the wrong way, even for the smallest instant—which is what you would call a miracle—and you lose your hold, the universe snaps back at you, you get something you did not ask for. I was punished so once before.” Her voice remained as placidly amused as ever.
Farrell could not remember how to speak. Micah Willows’ cries were clawing the inside of his head bloody, and Sia was dwindling as he stared, not merely to her usual size and self, but seeming to lessen in texture as well, so that he thought he could see the black flames and the yammering bronze mask through her body. She hushed the whimpering Briseis with a touch and knelt by Micah Willows once more, murmuring words that were neither English nor the old Arabic. He grew frighteningly still, his breath scrambling and slipping in his chest. Sia whispered to him, “Forgive me.”
“McManus,” Farrell said. A shadow the size of a pig slid between his legs, then circled back, nuzzling him. He said, “McManus, when he came to the house with a gun. I remember what you did. I saw you.”
Sia’s surprised laughter sounded like Micah Willows’ breathing. “That was no miracle, that was only fear. It is the easiest thing in the world to make human beings afraid—none of us could ever resist it. They do all the work for you, and then they call you a god. But no one can make the universe afraid.” A second mask, her favorite, from New Guinea, began to clatter its tusks and sharks’ teeth together; she waved it silent, and it spat at her contemptuously.
“Forgive me,” she said to Farrell and Julie. “I should never have let you in, never have pretended that I could do anything for your friend. That was vanity, not pity, and I am very sorry for it. Go now. I think you still can.”
The pig-shadow had been joined by others, larger, with too many legs. They pressed close around Farrell, pushing against him like Briseis, thick as blankets, smelling like dog food. Far away, on the other side of the shadows, he could hear Julie saying, “Joe, help me get Micah on his feet. We are getting out of here.”