A.K.A. Goddess (7 page)

Choice. That’s the real power.

A knock sounded at the connecting door to Rhys’s room.

“Magdalene?” Rhys called softly, trying not to wake me if I were still asleep. We’d left the door cracked between us, in case there was further trouble. Only as I glanced up and saw him framed in the doorway did it occur to me that I was wearing nothing but what I’d slept in.

Yesterday’s T-shirt and panties.

“I could go get breakfast while you—” he offered, then stopped, most of him hesitating between the rooms and all of him staring at me with those blue, blue eyes.

I was suddenly, stupidly glad Aunt Bridge had insisted on us traveling together.

For a long moment I just stared back. I had no desire to cover myself—why should I? A T-shirt is hardly a Merry Widow, after all. High-cut blue panties do not a G-string make.

Rhys turned away first. “Why don’t I just do that?”

“A croissant would be great,” I said. “With fruit. And herbal tea, if they have it. I’ll shower while you’re out.”

“I’ll have it in here.” He pushed the door back to a crack.

I considered saying, “Be careful.” Or even protesting that he shouldn’t go anywhere without me. But it seemed overly paranoid, even after last night, and no small bit egotistical.

Instead I called, “Thanks.”

A shower. That was the ticket. Shower good.

Afterward I toweled my hair semidry and combed it, and changed into clean panties and my one clean replacement shirt, a mauve camisole. I gave my face the barest hint of blush and eyeliner, not being a big makeup person, and put on yesterday’s cargo pants and boots.

It’s the price you pay for traveling with just a backpack.

I went to the connecting door and knocked. “Are you—”

Before I could finish, the door swung farther open and I saw that not only was Rhys back from the café, but he was kneeling by the bed, apparently…praying. In soft Latin.

I reminded myself of what he’d said—that he was after the goddess grails only to find the Holy Grail. That put us on distinct points of the religious spectrum, whether we were both ecumenical in our beliefs or not. But…

It felt weird, noticing how well the man wore a pair of jeans while he was reciting the Ave Maria with practiced ease.

I was raised Catholic, Catholic-ish anyway. I know the Ave Maria when I hear it.

It felt weird, noticing how long his dark lashes looked against his pale cheeks as he prayed. It felt wrong.

Not just invasion-of-privacy wrong. Deeper than that.

I started to back out. But with a murmured “Amen,” he smiled toward me, almost in relief, crossed himself and stood. “The food’s on the table. Let’s come up with a plan of action.”

“A plan for finding the Melusine Chalice?” I asked, sitting at the little table by the window. Below us we could see part of the Futuroscope park—a strange contrast to how far into the past we meant to go. “Or for avoiding gun-toting bad guys?”

He lifted croissants out of a paper sack and handed me one. “It’s difficult to avoid people you cannot name.”

I took the roll but hesitated—and it takes pretty heavy thoughts to keep me from a freshly baked Poitevan croissant.

“Do you have a different theory?” guessed Rhys.

“Not a theory so much as a concern.”

He waited, handing me a paper cup of tea with a floral essence.

I said, “I’m worried that we’ve gotten involved with some kind of secret society.”

Rhys sat in the other chair, eyes widening. “If we were going after the Holy Grail, I’d think you were on to something. Ceremonial orders like the Illuminati or the Priory of Scion.”

I took an innocent bite of my croissant and chewed. It was still warm from the oven. Mmm! And he’d brought fruit, too—strawberries, oranges and grapes.

“You can’t mean it,” Rhy challenged, with a laugh. “An ancient order? For one thing, we aren’t after the Grail. We’re after a holy relic, perhaps even a cup, but not the Grail.”

“You are,” I reminded him.

“Not exactly,” he protested. “I hope to find a connection, studying with your aunt. But as low as the chances of finding the Melusine Chalice are, the likelihood that it may lead us to the true Grail…”

I wished he’d stop making it sound like all the goddess cups were secondary. Even if he believed it, it seemed rude.

“Well,” he continued, “those chances are hardly high enough to merit high-speed auto races and gunfire.”

“Unless they know something we don’t.”

“Do they think the real Grail is in Poitou?”

“Could we just call it the Sangreal?” I asked. Sangreal is a classic term for the Holy Grail. To some it comes from the term sang graal—blood grail or blood cup. To a few it has an even more complex meaning about mythical royal blood-lines…but that really didn’t apply here.

It’s still about blood. Always about blood.

“The goddess chalices may not be of your particular faith,” I said, with what I felt was admirable reason, “but let’s assume that if they exist, they’re also real. And holy.”

“This is fair enough,” he said. “But do you mean to imply that these…people…think the Sangreal is in Poitou?”

“No.” I hated to tear down his hopes, but like he’d said, what were the chances? There was plenty of Sangreal research out there far more exhaustive than the research Aunt Bridge and I had been compiling on Melusine. “I don’t think the men who chased us last night, and who hurt Aunt Bridge, and who stole our notes…I don’t think they’re after the Sangreal at all. I think they want to suppress the goddess grails.”

“Why is that?” His gaze was unsettling. “Are they magic?”

My inner academic resisted that explanation, even as my Grail Keeper side hoped it was true. “Even if the cups have no supernatural powers, their existence could rewrite early history, reveal a more powerful feminine past. That’s important.”

“Again I say, high-speed auto chases and gunfire?”

He had a point. “Okay, so I don’t know their motivation. All I’m saying is, there are enough of them to worry me. Unless they’re racking up unbelievable frequent-flyer miles, the men who broke into Aunt Bridge’s office aren’t the same ones who broke into mine. They’re educated enough to know about our research. And they managed to break into the museum in New Delhi—the National Museum of India—to destroy the Kali Cup.”

“You’re talking a widespread network of very powerful people,” said Rhys. “Willing to go to great lengths to stop us.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And on our side we’ve got…”

“You, me and a nursery rhyme that’s been in my family for generations.”

Rhys stared at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Uffach cols.”

Lex Stuart and I become friends just in time for me to watch him die. Even his willpower can’t hide it. His eyelids swell. His coordination fails him. He throws up in class.

Then he vanishes altogether.

I send get-well cards and hear nothing. The normalcy of volleyball and final exams surges back as if he’d never been there. Then, over summer break, his mother calls me.

She talks about BMTs and isolation periods and platelet production resuming—I’m thirteen now, but all I really grasp is how relieved she sounds. Then she asks me to visit him.

She’ll send a car. That’s my first clue that I’m about to enter a whole different world. Fairyland.

The Stuarts live outside of town, with tended woods and high-gated drives. Their lawn looks like a golf course. Their house looks like a palace. Lex’s mom looks like a movie star.

Only once she leads me to Lex’s room and I see him, do I truly believe that he’s alive.

He stands to say hello, despite his mother’s protests.

Once she leaves to “arrange a snack,” I fold my arms and say, “Way to keep in touch.”

“I’ve been preoccupied,” he says seriously. Not busy. Preoccupied. “Thank you for the cards.”

He looks weak, but good. He’s gone from wraithlike to skinny, from ashen to merely pale. His hair is growing in, a darker brown but still with ginger overtones.

“Are you back?” I ask.

He says, “I think so.”

So I take over the sofa beside his chair, so that he’ll sit, and demand that he tell me what it was like.

Even with his matter-of-fact presentation, without the uglier details, it sounds awful. His cousin was a match for a bone marrow transplant, which is why he got such serious chemotherapy. His mother cried. Some days he wanted to die.

“But now…” He searches for the right words.

“Now you don’t?” I prompt him.

He nods, with a ghost of a smile. But it’s a friendly ghost. My smile is more free; I feel that comfortable with him. I have the oddest sensation that our spirits are also conversing, and better, if only we could listen in.

The maid arrives with a huge platter full of crackers and cheese and fruits—and candy bars with the wrapper ends cut neatly off. Almost everything tastes as wonderful as it looks.

Lex tells me he’ll be coming back to class in the fall, at least until Christmas, maybe the full year. Recovery seems to be a slower process than I had imagined.

“There will be a dance, when school starts,” he says, still matter-of-fact…except for a certain intensity in his hazel gaze, a catch in his breath. Except for whatever our spirits are saying behind our backs. “I would very much like it if you would attend with me. If you don’t mind not dancing a lot.”

I’ve never been asked out before. “But that’s not for another month.”

“I wanted to beat anybody else asking,” he says.

I’m in braces, and I’m by no means slim. I’m not ugly; even I know that. But…he thinks there could be competition for me?

Lex Stuart, I decide, is wonderful.

“It will be years before we know how I’ll turn out,” he says, as if warning me. “Even if the cancer doesn’t reoccur, I could end up not growing or getting cataracts or getting really fat. Or…other stuff.”

If I think about it too hard, the warning won’t make sense. I deliberately don’t think about it, and it feels exactly right.

“I would love to go with you.” It is an understatement.

When I get home, I can’t stop talking about Lex and the Stuart mansion and the food and the fresh flowers.

“It’s like fairyland there!” I tell my parents.

They exchange worried glances.

Mom says, “Just remember your fairy tales, Maggi. Fairyland always has a catch.”

I was expecting Lex to call—heck, I’d half expected it the day before. This was probably his version of giving me space.

I just hadn’t planned to be marinating in the destruction that powerful men so often wreak when he did.

After we checked out of the Holiday Inn, I rented a little silver Renault Clio. The train didn’t stop at the small town of Lusignan, where Rhys and I were now walking. What had once been a center of power was now a rural town. And the glorious castle—one of many—which the fairy Melusine had supposedly built for her bridegroom in one night…

Long gone. Nothing left but a sunny, public walking path where once the castle had stood, and trees, and an uninterrupted view down to the River Vonne. The castle had been razed for harboring Huguenots, adding to my frustration about finding anything. Whatever the goddess worshippers might have hidden at Château Lusignan was history, thanks to devastation and religious intolerance. Thanks to dark power.

My phone trilled out “Ride of the Valkyries” at the exact wrong time. When I glanced at the caller ID and saw it was Lex, I rolled the call over to voice mail.

Trust me, Lex. You do not want to talk to me right now.

Rhys glanced at me and my phone, then said, “Any goddess cult that worshipped Melusine would have gone under ground by the thirteenth century—fourteenth, at the latest. Would they not?”

I fingered a little purple flower beside the path. “Mmm-hmm.”

“And Lusignan was torn down, stone by stone, in 1574?”

Over religion. “A tower was torn down later.”

“So what did you expect to find?” asked Rhys.

“Not the chalice,” I admitted, though it would feel right to uncover it here at Melusine Central. “Just…a clue. Something. We have to start somewhere, don’t we?”

He looked around us and murmured, “Three fair figures…”

That was the first line of the nursery rhyme that my family has passed down for generations, seeming nonsense with a hidden meaning—like “Ring around the Rosie” being about the bubonic plague, or “Mary Quite Contrary” being the Queen of Scots. Nursery rhymes rarely attracted the attention of people in power, so they made a great treasure map.

Ours started, “Three fair figures, side by side…” As a child, I’d pictured people; kids are that literal. As a scholar, I knew the “figures” could be anything, standing stones or towers or trees or buildings.

Nothing stood in threes at Lusignan. Not that we could see.

My phone rang again. Lex. This time I just turned it off. My inner good-girl protested that it could be important, it could be an emergency, how could I be so selfish….

AKA the Eve Syndrome, holding ourselves responsible for everything. Ten years ago, before I had a cell phone, I couldn’t have stressed about it. I chose not to this time, either.

Instead, I raised my face to the blue sky, breathing in the fresh air. “This isn’t where we need to be looking.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” Rhys spread his arms to indicate the commons around us. “So where do we go next?”

“To the women,” I decided, looking down the hill toward the two-lane road—and a Romanesque church that had survived the castle’s destruction. “And since I’m not ready to go door-to-door asking questions, I suggest we try St. Hilaire down there.”

Why did I sense that Rhys didn’t like my suggestion? He didn’t frown. He just said, after a moment, “Do you want to borrow my handkerchief?”

For my head. This was Europe.

“Thanks,” I said, accepting the neatly folded cloth.

“I’ll get the car and meet you outside.”

Once upon a time, the women of Lusignan would have gathered around the town well to wash clothes or collect water, and to bond. Wells are famous for their goddess connections.

If you’ve ever tossed a penny into a fountain and made a wish, some part of your soul must have understood their magic.