Newford Stories (6 page)

“As if.”

“Before this it was fruit faeries,” the
professor added, leaning forward from the sofa where he was
sitting, his tone confidential.

“Wasn’t.”

The professor tched. “As good as was.”

“Well, we all need a hobby,” Cerin said.

“This is, of course, true,” Jilly allowed,
after first sticking out her tongue at the pair of them. “It’s so
sad that neither of you have one.”

She’d been visiting with Professor Dapple,
involved in a long, meandering conversation concerning Kickaha
Mountain ballads vis-à-vis their relationship to British folktales,
when he suddenly announced that he was due for tea at the Kelledys’
that afternoon and did she care to join them? Was the Pope
Catholic? Did the moon have wings? Well, one out of two wasn’t bad,
and of course she had to come.

The Kelledys’ rambling house on Stanton
Street was a place of endless fascination for her, with its
old-fashioned architecture, all gables and gingerbread, with
climbing vines and curious rooflines. The rooms were full of great
solid pieces of furniture that crouched on Persian carpets and the
hardwood floors like sleeping animals, not to mention any number of
wonderfully bright and mysterious things perched on the shelves and
sideboards, on the windowsills and meeting rails, like so many
half-hidden lizards and birds. And then there were the oak trees
that surrounded the building, a regular forest of them, larger and
taller than anywhere else in the city, each one easily a hundred
years old.

The house was magic in her eyes, as much as
the couple who inhabited it, and she loved any excuse to come by
for a visit. On a very lucky day, Cerin would bring out his harp,
Meran her flute, and they would play a haunting, heart-lifting
music that Jilly never heard except from them.

“I didn’t know fruit had their own faeries,”
Meran said. “The trees, yes, but not the individual fruit
itself.”

“I wonder if there are such things as acorn
faeries,” Cerin said.

“I must ask my father.”

Jilly gave a theatrical sigh. “We’re having
far too long a conversation about fruit and nuts, and whether or
not they have faeries, and not nearly enough about great, huge,
cryptic parliaments of crows.”

“It would be a murder, actually,” the
professor put in.

“Whatever. I think it’s wonderfully
mysterious.”

“At this time of the day,” Meran said,
“they’d be gathering together to return to their roosts.”

Jilly shook her head. “I’m
not so sure. But if that
is
the case, then they’ve decided to roost in your
yard.”

She turned back to look out over the
leaf-covered lawn that lay under the trees, planning some witty
observation that would make them see just how supremely marvelous
it all was, but the words died unborn in her throat as she watched
a large, bald-headed Buddha of a man step onto the Kelledys’ walk.
He was easily the largest human being she’d ever seen—she couldn’t
guess how many hundreds of pounds he must weigh—but oddly enough he
moved with the supple grace of a dancer a fraction his size. His
dark suit was obviously expensive and beautifully tailored, and his
skin was as black as a raven’s wing. As he came up the walk, the
crows became agitated and flew around him, filling the air, their
hoarse cries growing so loud that the noise resounded inside the
house with the windows closed.

But neither the enormous
man, nor the actions of the crows, was what had dried up the words
in Jilly’s throat. It was the limp figure of a slender man that the
dapper Buddha carried in his arms.
In sharp contrast, he was
poorly dressed for the brisk weather, wearing only a raggedy shirt
and jeans so worn they had almost no colour left in them. His face
and arms were pale as alabaster; even his braided hair was
white—yet another striking contrast to the man carrying him. She
experienced something familiar yet strange when she gazed on his
features, like taking out a favourite old sweater she hadn’t worn
in years, and feeling at once quite unacquainted with it and
affectionately comfortable when she put it on.

“That’s no crow,” Cerin said, having stepped
up to the window to stand beside Jilly’s chair.

Meran joined him, then quickly went to the
door to let the new visitor in. The professor rose from the sofa
when she ushered the man and his burden into the room, waving a
hand toward the seat he’d just quit.

“Put him down here,” he said.

The black man nodded his thanks. Stepping
gracefully across the room, he knelt and carefully laid the man out
on the sofa.

“It’s been a long time, Lucius,” the
professor said as the man straightened up. “You look
different.”

“I woke up.”

“Just like that?”

Lucius gave him a slow smile. “No. A
red-haired storyteller gave me a lecture about responsibility, and
I realized she was right. It had been far too long since I’d
assumed any.”

He turned his attention to the Kelledys.

“I need a healing,” he said.

There was something formal in the way he
spoke the words, like a subject might speak to his ruler, though
there was nothing remotely submissive in his manner.

“There are no debts between us,” Cerin
said.

“But now—”

“Nonsense,” Meran told him. “We’ve never
turned away someone in need of help before and we don’t mean to
start now. But you’ll have to tell us how he was injured.”

She knelt down on the floor beside the sofa
as she spoke. Reaching out, she touched her middle finger to the
center of his brow, then lifted her hand and moved it down his
torso, her palm hovering about an inch above him.

“I know little more than you at this point,”
Lucius said.

“Do you at least know who he is?” Cerin
asked.

Lucius shook his head. “The crow girls found
him lying by a dumpster behind the Williamson Street Mall. They
tried to heal him, but all they could manage was to keep him from
slipping further away. Maida said he was laid low by ill will.”

Jilly’s ears perked up at the mention of the
crow girls. They were the real reason for her current interest in
all things corvid—a pair of punky, black-haired young women who
seemed to have the ability to change your entire perception of the
world simply by stepping into the periphery of your life. Ever
since she’d first seen them in a café, she kept spotting them in
the most unlikely places, hearing the most wonderful stories about
them. Whenever she saw a crow now, she’d peer closely at it,
wondering if this was one of the pair in avian form.

“That makes it more complicated,” Meran
said.

Sitting back on her heels, she glanced at
Lucius. He gave her an apologetic look.

“I know he has buffalo blood,” he told
her.

“Yes, I see that.”

“What did Maida mean by ill will?” Cerin
asked. “He doesn’t appear to have any obvious physical
injuries.”

Lucius shrugged. “You know how they can be.
The more they tried to explain it to me, the less I
understood.”

Jilly had her own questions as she listened
to them talk, such as why hadn’t someone immediately called for an
ambulance, or why had this Lucius brought the injured man here,
rather than to a hospital? But there was a swaying, eddying
sensation in the air, a feeling that the world had turned a step
from the one everyone knew and they now had half a foot in some
other, perhaps more perilous, realm. She decided to be prudent for
a change and listen until she understood better what was going
on.

She wasn’t the only one puzzled, it
seemed.

“We need to know more,” Meran said.

Lucius nodded. “I’ll see if I can find
them.”

“I’ll come with you,” Cerin said.

Lucius hesitated for a long moment, then
gave another nod and the two men left the house. Jilly half
expected them to fly away, but when she looked out the window she
saw them walking under the oaks toward the street like an ordinary,
if rather mismatched, pair, Lucius so broad and large that the tall
harper at his side appeared slender to the point of skinniness. The
crows remained in the trees this time, studying the progress of the
two men until they were lost from sight.

“I have some things to fetch,” Meran said.
“Remedies to try. Will you watch over our patient until I get
back?”

Jilly glanced at the professor.

“Um, sure,” she said.

And then the two of them were alone with the
mysteriously stricken man. Laid low by ill will. What did
that
mean?

Jilly pulled a footstool over to the sofa
where Meran had been kneeling and sat down. Looking at the man, she
found herself wishing for pencil and sketchbook again. He was so
handsome, like a figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Except for
the braids and raggedy clothes, of course. Then she felt guilty for
where her thoughts had taken her. Here was the poor man, half dead
on the sofa, and all she could think about was drawing him.

“He doesn’t look very happy, does he?” she
said.

“Not very.”

“Where do you know Lucius from?”

The professor took off his wire-rimmed
glasses and gave them a polish they didn’t need before replacing
them.

“I can’t remember where or when I first met
him,” he said. “But it was a long time ago—before the war,
certainly. Not long after that he became somewhat of a recluse. At
first I’d go visit him at his house—he lives just down the street
from here—but then it came to the point where he grew so withdrawn
that one might as well have been visiting a sideboard or a chair.
Finally I stopped going ’round.”

“What happened to him, do you think?”

The professor shrugged. “Hard to tell with
someone like him.”

“You’re being deliberately mysterious,
aren’t you?”

“Not at all. There just isn’t much to say. I
know he’s related to the crow girls. Their grandfather, or an uncle
or something. I never did quite find out which.”

“So that’s why all the crows are out
there.”

“I doubt it,” the professor said. “He’s
corbae, all right, but raven, not crow.”

Jilly felt a thrill of excitement. A raven
uncle, crow girls, the man on the sofa with his buffalo blood. She
was in the middle of some magical story for once, rather than on
the edges of it looking in, and her proximity made everything feel
bright and clear and very much in focus. Then she felt guilty again
because it had taken someone getting hurt to draw her into this
story. Considering the unfortunate circumstances, it didn’t seem
right to be so excited by it.

She turned back to look at the pale man
lying there so still.

“I wonder if he can turn into a buffalo,”
she said.

“I believe it’s more of a metaphorical
designation,” the professor told her, “rather than an actual
shape-shifting option.”

Jilly shook her head. She could remember the
night in Old Market when she’d first seen the crow girls slip from
crow to girl and back again. It wasn’t exactly something you
forgot, though oddly enough, the memory did have a tendency to try
to slip away from her. To make sure it didn’t, she’d fixed the
moment in pigment and hung the finished painting on the wall of her
studio as a reminder.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think it’s
a piece of real magic.”

She leaned closer to the man and reached
forward to push aside a few long white hairs that had come to lie
across his lashes. When she touched him, that swaying, eddying
sensation returned, stronger than ever. She had long enough to say,
“Oh, my,” then the world slipped away and she was somewhere else
entirely.

- 2 -

“I
have
resumed my responsibilities,”
Lucius said as the two men walked to his house a few blocks farther
down Stanton Street.

Cerin gave him a sidelong glance. “Guilt’s a
terrible thing, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

The harper shrugged. “It makes you question
people’s motives, even when they’re as straightforward as my
wanting to help you find a pair of somewhat wayward and certainly
mischievous relatives.”

“They can be a handful,” Lucius said. “It’s
possible we’ll find them more quickly with your help.”

Cerin hid a smile. He knew that was about as
much of an apology as he’d be getting, but he didn’t mind. He
hadn’t really wanted one. He’d only wanted Lucius to understand
that no one was holding him to blame for withdrawing from the world
the way he had—at least no one in the Kelledy household was.
Responsibility was a sharp-edged sword that sometimes cut too deep,
even for an old spirit such as Lucius Portsmouth.

So all he said was, “Um-hmm,” then added,
“Odd winter we’ve been having, isn’t it? So close to Christmas and
still no snow. I wonder whose fault
that
is.”

Lucius sighed. “You can be
insufferable.”

This time Cerin didn’t hide his smile. “As
Jilly would say, it’s just this gift I have.”

“But I appreciate your confidence.”

“Apology accepted,” Cerin told him, unable
to resist.

“You wouldn’t have any crow blood in you,
would you?”

“Nary a drop.”

Lucius harrumphed and muttered, “I’d still
like to see the results of a DNA test.”

“What was that?”

“I said, I wonder where they keep their
nest.”

Stanton Street was lined with oaks, not so
old as those that grew around the Kelledy house, but they were
stately monarchs nonetheless. Having reached the Rookery where
Lucius lived, the two men paused to look up where the bare branches
of the trees laid their pattern against the sky above. Twilight had
given way to night and they could see stars peeking down from
amongst the boughs. Stars, but no black-haired, giggling crow
girls. Lucius called, his voice ringing up into the trees like a
raven’s cry.