Part 4 (1/2)
7.
OSE CAME IN ALONE WITH LAURA'S BAG AND PULLED THE LITTLE DOOR CLOSED BEHIND HER, AS IF SHE DIDN'T want what she had to say to get out into the open air. She at once began to speak, commencing an attack. A few moments later Laura, thinking she would confound her cousin, wet her finger and thumb, and closed them on the wick of the room's single candle.
”Laura!” Rose was enraged. And then she looked down into the light on the table, the world in miniature, perfect but for the distortion at its edges. Laura monitored her cousin's face, waiting for Rose's set, righteous look to soften in amazement.
Rose stared at the streets, beetling traffic, and brushstrokes of flocking pigeons. She continued to look grim, staring through the world as though it were an apparition. She said, ”To think I believed that you were telling me everything. That you'd let me in on what you were planning. But all you told me was what you were feeling. If we are friends, do you imagine that our friends.h.i.+p is just made up of shared feelings?”
”I didn't talk to you about my dreamhunting. I thought it was better not to speak about what you'd missed out on.”
”Do you think that's what I'm talking about? You sparing my feelings by not tantalizing me with dreamhunter stories? Are you listening to me? I'm not even talking about what you chose to do-you may have had very good, considered reasons for bringing that nightmare to the Opera. But, Laura, I can't believe that you didn't tell me about that-that thing!”
Laura thought it was better to pretend she didn't know what Rose was talking about. She knitted her brow. ”Thing?”
”The monster. The statue. The thing that carried you off.”
”That was the nightmare. Part of the horrible dream.”
”I didn't sleep, Laura! You made sure I didn't sleep. You put Wakeful in my musk creams. I was awake, and I know what I saw.”
”Do you? You have to realize, Rose, that my talent has made me different from you,” Laura said. ”I'm not as susceptible to-”
”Lots of people have talent. Lots of people have things that make them different. But, you know, even if we shared every aspect of our lives, the difference between you and me was still going to be huge, not because you're talented but because you believe our differences are more important than what we have in common.”
Laura looked at Rose and wondered whether her cousin was going to cry. Rose was so worked up. She, Laura, had always been the weepy one. Now she felt dry, deadened, and suspended.
”So-I don't want to hear about your G.o.d-given talent. Especially since you are just going to stand there lying to me!”
Laura stood, silent, thinking about the Hame inheritance, ”The Measures,” her servant. She fought her urge to explain and, fighting it, realized that she wasn't finished, that there was more to do. After a while she said, ”When I go to the Place, I feel that I might be able to catch a dream that will make sense of my whole life. Not of other people's lives. Just my own. It isn't that I think I'm different. It's that I have to deal with actually being different-with things that have changed me.”
”Listen to you,” Rose said. ”Even now all you're doing is talking about your b.l.o.o.d.y feelings.”
Laura shook her head. She was too tired to properly understand what Rose was saying to her. She doggedly went back to her explanation. Why wouldn't her cousin just let her get this said?
”Try to imagine it was you. Try to imagine that your ma and da disappeared and all you were left with was a letter saying what you were expected to do. Try to imagine that you did something you knew was impossible-but it felt right. It felt like gravity. Not like a mystery and a terror, but like a secret wrapped around its own solution. Rose, I know I can be impulsive. But I couldn't see to do anything other than what Da told me to. And setting out to do it was like crossing a narrow bridge over a chasm-I couldn't stop, I couldn't look down. And I had to think my gift came to me because someone thought I should have it. That it was G.o.d-given.” Laura was aware that Rose did not believe in G.o.d. All her life Laura had wavered between her cousin's and uncle's atheism, and her father's faith. Now she was firmly in her father's camp. If ”The Measures” had not come from G.o.d, where had they come from?
Rose said, ”You think you've stolen fire from Heaven.”
Laura waited. Then she nodded. She nodded to say she accepted that Rose's view was fair and may well have been right.
Rose just looked at her, bleak. ”Laura, you haven't told me anything. You don't trust me. Clearly you're not the person I thought you were. Or you're not the person you once were.”
Laura said, weakly, ”People change.”
But Rose had raised a hand to stop her speaking. ”The point is-honestly-that I don't know whether I trust you anymore. Or even like you.”
Laura's face clenched, and two cold tears slid down her cheeks. ”I don't believe you, Rose.”
”You'd better believe me.” Her cousin pushed the bag across the table. ”Have a safe journey,” she said, then left the turret room.
8.
HORLEY TIEBOLD FOUND HIS DAUGHTER AT HER SCHOOL. HE MET HER IN THE PRINc.i.p.aL'S OFFICE AND WALKED HER OUT into the quad, where they stood under a peach tree whose buds had just cracked to show tight, spotless tips of pink blossom. Rose stood a little way from him and slipped her hands under the bib of her pleated pinafore to warm them. She wouldn't meet his eyes. ”You're going to ask me where Laura is. You know, if I had a dollar for everyone who's asked me that, I'd be rolling in money.”
”I know where Laura is. I've been to the Temple. Father Roy told me that, at his request, you delivered some of her clothes.”
Rose was looking at him now. It was a careful, self-contained look, and very grown-up. ”For her journey,” she said.
”Yes. They're sending her off somewhere safe. To join her father-who I've seen.”
”Oh,” said Rose. She blinked. She stretched out the toe of one highly polished shoe and pushed it through a puddle to make ripples. ”Laura didn't know about that when I saw her.”
”They plan to tell her when she's well on her way. They're worried about her state of mind, and I think it suits them to keep her subdued.”
”Yes, I can see that.”
”Darling?” Chorley said. He felt as if he had dropped a stone down a well and hadn't heard either a clatter or a splash.
”So Uncle Tziga's alive?” Rose said; then she looked into her father's face, her expression open and wondering. Chorley reached for her and drew her to him. His earlobe brushed across the top of her head, and he realized she'd grown since he'd last held her. She was hugging him now-hard-so that his breathing was a little constricted. ”I've been worried that Ma will be really angry with you,” Rose said. ”And with Laura.”
”I doubt your mother will be angry with me when I tell her I've found Tziga. I'd have come home sooner, except where I was they get five days' worth of newspapers only every five days. When Tziga read about the riot and nightmare, he said, 'It's Laura.' And I shouted at him.”
A sharp gust of wind swept over the roofs around the quad and altered the air pressure in the enclosed s.p.a.ce. The peach tree seemed to throw up its branches in surprise, and drops of water rained down on father and daughter.
Chorley said, ”Tziga has a head injury. He has fits. It doesn't do to upset him.”
Rose drew back and looked into his face. ”How did he hurt his head?”
Chorley looked away. He couldn't meet his daughter's eyes. He tried to control his face and his feelings.
”Da?”
”I don't expect your mother back for several days yet.”
”Da?”
”No,” said Chorley. ”I'll tell you when I understand more.”
”Uncle Tziga is hiding from the Body,” Rose said. ”The Body supplies the Department of Corrections with nightmares.”
Chorley was startled. ”How do you know that?”