Farrell realized that she was dancing too, that all her apparently aimless shuffling was taking her in a little sly circle with Aiffe at the center. Aiffe, shaking off her moment of shocked paralysis, glanced once at Nicholas Bonner, who stirred slightly. She said two words in a sweet, curious tongue, made one ugly gesture with three fingers twisted together, and stepped easily away from Sia, pointing derisively at her. “Pathetic,” she said. “You think you’re such hot shit, but you’re just so pathetic. I don’t need anybody to help me with you.”
For a few moments they circled each other, Aiffe moving in swift, taunting dashes, almost skipping, while Sia swept around her with liquid economy, appearing to partner rather than challenge her. Aiffe kept up a constant picket-fence rattle of mockery, saying, “Old, old, old. You aren’t immortal, you’re just real, real old, there’s a difference.” Sia laughed and nodded appreciatively and said nothing.
Julie whispered, “But she’s just standing still. She hasn’t been moving at all.” Farrell blinked, craned his neck absurdly and understood, as suddenly as Aiffe, that nothing of Sia was dancing except her eyes and one foot. The eyes were leading Aiffe, keeping her in motion, forcing her to match her steps to steps that were never really taken. How does she do that? What the hell are we seeing? Aiffe was shaking her head weakly, knowing what was happening to her and trying to break free of it. Sia began to sing.
There were no words to the song, and her lips did not open; yet Farrell found himself humming it with her, although he had never heard it before. It was not like the song she had sung to Ben, but it filled him with the same childhood longings, wordless themselves. Sia’s sandaled right foot was swinging idly back and forth, the posture and her big single braid making her look like a bored schoolgirl. Aiffe stood still. Her head bobbed slightly in rhythm with the foot’s pendulous motion, as did the heads of Julie, Ben, and Farrell, equally hypnotized. The bare, pebbly spot where the sandal brushed the ground was peeling back, was dissolving into mud, into smoky mud, and then into the white-gold madness of lava, as wrong as the idea of looking down at one’s own flayed ribs or bubbling lung. Sia went on singing quietly. The raw, roiling wound under her pawing foot grew wider, spreading between Aiffe and her with increasing speed. Farrell could smell it now, like impossibly overheated brakes.
Slow, sleepwalking, teeth bared to the gums, Aiffe raised one hand as high as she could, until it began to spill over with blue light. She gave a rasping, plaintive cry, which was the last thing Farrell heard clearly for some moments. The blue light leaped from her hand and exploded, turning everything in the world to the color of lava. Farrell’s vision returned before his hearing, showing him Ben and Julie sprawled on the ground. Aiffe herself was down on one knee, rubbing her eyes.
Sia was standing by her, offering her own hand, saying—once the words swam together in Farrell’s head—“Now, that is a long-distance weapon, the oldest of them all. Did my son teach you to use a thunderbolt close to? You should not take him quite so seriously, my dear—there are some holes in his understanding.” She turned away, thoughtfully studying the place where the ground had healed completely, the few tufts of grass not even singed. “But you do well, truly. You should never be ashamed.”
She kept on turning where she stood, dancing for herself, reaching up to loosen her hair, as she had done when she tried to help Micah Willows. The coarse, grizzled hair fell down differently this time—endlessly lengthening, enveloping her body in a sparkling haze, within which she turned and turned, spinning a chrysalis of light. The thick body seemed to be elongating with her hair, hips lilting languidly, stumpy legs visibly growing slender and graceful.
Aiffe danced zigzags, arrows, patterns like a shattered mirror. Her straight lines probed for a way into Sia’s glowing spiral, now beginning to move off slowly toward a rise of ground just beyond the clearing. The sandy earth buckled and flowed under them; trees toppled soundlessly; and the rise became a little hill, with one of the fallen trees replaced carefully on the crest. Wonder why she changed it from rosewood to a willow. Maybe that’s her idea of repotting.
“Mean old, ugly old bitch,” Aiffe said, and hurled what Farrell thought was another thunderbolt after Sia. But this handful of brightness boiled over in midair, condensed and coalesced and was a striped snake the size of a pool cue, its skull bursting almost out of its skin with eagerness to strike. It vanished into Sia’s hair and was never seen again.
Sia glided on, still spinning her changes, while Aiffe danced around and ahead of her to lean impudently against the willow tree, arms folded. “Just to save you some time, I am really fantastic with trees. I’m just trying to be fair.” Sia passed by her, slipping straight into the willow like sunlight. Aiffe made a silly grab for her and drew back, crying out softly in pain, as the rough bark began to shine and tremble. Even from that distance, Farrell could watch Sia’s presence moving in the willow, could mark her progress from root to crown, along every waking bough to the tip of each long, trailing leaf, as the tree drank her up greedily. Damn thing even looks like her now. It is her.
Aiffe said loudly, “I warned you,” but Farrell noticed that she stole another quick look back at Nicholas Bonner, who was trying to sit up. “Merry Christmas to me,” she said and abruptly reached inside the velvet gown to put her hand momentarily between her legs. She spoke several words, inaudible to Farrell, then pushed back the gown’s sleeves, rubbed her hands together, placed one carefully on either side of the willow tree, and tore it apart. It groaned and squealed and shredded in her grip, flailing its branches uselessly. Aiffe cracked it like a marrowbone, gutted it with her long, skinny fingers, going through it like a bear through a garbage can.
Farrell held onto Ben and said, “Wait. We aren’t even here. Wait, Ben.”
Within minutes—are there there minutes anymore?—the hillside looked more like a beach at low tide, strewn with a raging scatter of branches, bark stripped away in damp, splintery sheets, and shapeless chunks of wood, none bigger than fireplace logs. Aiffe’s spell-given strength had clearly consumed itself. She leaned on the ripped stump of the willow, her splitting velvet gown heavy with sweat, her breath making the same sounds as the murdered tree. When Sia flowered, chuckling, out of a hamburger-sized chip of bark behind her, Aiffe did not turn.
“Child, enough, let it alone.” Sia’s voice was infuriatingly kind and amused, even to Farrell’s hearing. “We have no quarrel, you and I—how can we? You are a witch, a magical technician, and very good you are, too. But what I am has no more to do with magic than eating ice cream or striking a match. What I am does not die, cannot hate or ever be trusted, and cannot be concerned with your skills. My quarrel is with my son, who uses you as a stick to beat me with. When you break, he will throw you away. Let it alone and I will be your friend, as much as an immortal can be anyone’s friend. Let me alone.”
Aiffe had wheeled on Sia before her own breathing was quite under control, so her words burst from her in a wetmouthed splutter of furious contempt. “Immortal? You still think you’re immortal? You fat bitch, you fat old walrus, you’re dead now, I’m standing here watching you rot.” She was slobbering uncontrollably, spitting in Sia’s face. “You want to know who’s immortal? I walked into your house and I found your secret place and I walked right in there, and nobody ever did that to you before, put that up your snotty, fat ass. Oh, you’re gone, you are gone, I’m not going to let you stay anywhere. Nick told me, he showed me how I could take your immortality anytime I got ready. I may be a mere fucking technician, but I’m ready, and you are just gone.”