“Find your own answers,” she said harshly. “I’ve been trying since I
came here to forget all this.” Then she halted, midwhirl in her pacing, to
stare at him. “No. Don’t. Don’t leave me, Pierce. There’s nothing you need
in Severluna. Your father does not even know you exist, and even if you find
him or your brother, what can they do for you? You’re not trained to the ways
of the court. I have no family there to take you in. You’ll be alone in a
city full of strangers—what will you do with yourself?”
He gazed at her, wondering that she could show him such things—a father, a
brother, a world not governed by wind and tide and how many crabs came up in
the net, but by wealth, power, knowledge, and the sources of the strange magic
she knew—and expect him not to want what she herself had wanted.
He stirred, beginning to think. “What I do here,” he answered slowly. “I
work for you. I’ll find another restaurant.”
“But how will you find your way? You can barely read a map.”
He shrugged. “People do. Find their ways. Even people as ignorant as I am of
anything beyond Cape Mistbegotten. I’ll put one mile behind me, then another,
until I get where I’m going.”
“And what,” she asked helplessly, “will I do without you? Without the sound
of your voice in this rambling old house? Without the sweet face I’ve known
all of your life? Here everyone knows your name. You have a place here,
everything you need. How will you know even how to look for a bed in
Severluna?”
“Mom.” He leaned forward, caught one of the long, graceful hands working
anxiously around the other. He tugged at her gently until she dropped beside
him again on the couch. “What I don’t know by now, it’s time I learned.
Stop worrying. The road runs both ways. If I get into trouble over my head, I
can find my way back. Anyway. When in my life have you not known where I am?”
She was silent at that; she sat tensely looking into the fire, fingers
kneading the sofa cushions. “Yes,” she said finally. Her grip loosened
slowly; she met his eyes again, her own no longer angry, grieving, but calmer
and beginning to calculate. “Yes. Come and work with me for one more evening.
Please,” she begged, as he stirred in protest. “I’ll be understaffed
without you. And I need you under this roof one last time, while I get used to
the idea that you are leaving me. At Haricot tonight, I can teach you a little
sorcery, some arcane methods that will be useful to know in a strange kitchen.
All right?”
He nodded absently, hearing only every other word of kitchens, sorcery,
cooking, as he conjured up the knights again in memory. They might remember
him, he thought: the young man who had seen the legendary shadows of their
ancestors.
“In the morning, if you still want to leave, we can make proper plans. Yes?”
“Yes,” he said absently, and realized then that he was already gone, on his
way, the roof over his head, his bed, now only his first temporary stop, and
her advice among the possessions he might take or leave behind when he
continued his journey.
2
Merle was chanting again. Carrie heard his voice coming out of the old rowboat
hauled to dry dock under a hemlock. Keys in hand, she paused beside the pickup
door, listening. She couldn’t make out a word of it. The old crow perched on
the wind-bowed crown of the hemlock burst into sudden, raucous song. Carrie
wondered if Merle and bird understood each other. It seemed as likely as
anything else about her impossible father.
She tossed the keys onto the driver’s seat, walked into the long grasses
under the shadow of the forest. She and Merle lived at the southern edge of
Proffit Slough, high and back far enough so that the daily ebb and flow of
tidewater pushing into sweet water didn’t find its way into their house even
in the most violent weather. Several other houses, old, patched, painted long
ago in muted colors, stood peacefully among the silent pines. They were relics
of a past when farmers had drained the land and built the only road that ran
between the fields and up to the highway. Farmers and crops and cows were long
gone; the land had been repossessed by streams and tidal channels, the
labyrinthine sea nursery regulated by tides and seasons and the ancient
rhythms of the moon. Only farmhouses remained, inhabited by the artistic, the
eccentric, the reclusive.
And Merle, who, Carrie’s mother said for years before she left them, was just
plain demented.
The chanting from the boat was getting eerie, high and reedy, like some ritual
litany that should have been accompanied by gourd rattles and drums. Carrie
looked down into the boat. Merle stopped his chanting abruptly and stared at
her with such astonishment and wonder that she felt like something he had been
trying, with no real hope, to summon. Well, here I am, she told him silently.
As suddenly, he recognized her. He smiled. He was lying on his back beneath
the broken seat planks, his head cushioned on a monstrous dandelion blooming
through a hole in the boat bottom.
“Are you drunk?” Carrie asked.
He considered the question. “Not this morning.”
“Do you want some help up?”
“No, thanks. I’m good.”
“Coffee?”
“There’s a thought,” he answered, but showed no other signs of interest.
“Well, what exactly are you doing?”
“Waiting.”
“For what?” she demanded bewilderedly. “A bus?”