Prodigal 3: Pieces from the void
<- 2: House of Feathered Serpents 4: What Happened to the Potatoes ->
Leah’s parents were… honestly not what I had expected. I had met her mother before, but it hadn’t exactly been a social visit - actually, I had been sort of preoccupied with the burning school bus behind us, the fact that my best friend was not who she said she was, and that I was talking to the most infamous magician in the world, the necromanceress Sabarin Trelon. I spent more of the time trying not to say anything stupid and trying not to keel over from sheer fright after the amount of times the world I knew had done a cartwheel in the past few hours, which were enough to earn it a decent place on the school gymnastics team.
So, while I’d seen, I had been a little too freaked out to observe, and I doubt I had made a very good first impression. I’d been about ready to collapse in a dusty little pile by the side of the road, and I had no doubt that Leah’s mother had known it when she had shown up just oozing magic on a level that even other mages didn’t even want to think about in order to call her middle daughter to order.
But now, when she stood up from one of the couches to greet me - oddly enough, it was bright cherry red and such a ‘modern’ design that it had probably been out of fashion for several decades, while the other couch actually looked like it had dropped out of a Victorian novel - she could almost be mistaken for a normal person, the kind of mother who joined the PTA and baked cookies. She had a broad streak of grey shooting from one temple back into her ponytail, but other than that, she didn’t look much older than her daughters, and she was very close to the same height as Leah, perhaps a hair shorter.
Except for the eyes. They were grey and they didn’t quite belong in a human face, simply because they knew too much. They should, after watching the dead all of those years. Even her smile knew too much, and I very nearly hesitated when she smiled at me, welcomingly (I hoped) and held out her hand.
“Hello, Ellie,” she said. “I hope that this is a better circumstance for you than the last time we met?”
“Yeah, I haven’t nearly died yet today,” I said, blurting it out stupidly before I could stop myself. I could just feel Leah giving me a look. The look that thought I was insane. At that precise moment, I couldn’t agree more with that look. I wanted to sink into the floor.
But her mother laughed. “Good. Let’s keep it that way. In theory, the island is perfectly harmless, though you wouldn’t know it to look at my daughters.”
The way she said it, as if the joke were so old that no one bothered to laugh at it except with their eyes, made me relax a little. I could practically hear Leah, and most likely Rhian, rolling their eyes behind me.
Leah’s father came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder, and even on what I thought were stone floors his feet were quiet. He was very different from Leah and her mother, but at the same time very much the same, with dark hair - his much shorter than theirs, obviously, but still a little longer than would have been normal where I’d grown up - and skin a quite a few shades darker than my own, from which I was guessing Leah had inherited her permanent golden-brown suntan. But more than anything else, he had Leah’s eyes, dark deep blue, always very slightly crinkled in a smile. And he had a lot of laugh lines around them, even though his hair was still more pepper than salt. Also, he was extremely tall, at least from where I was standing, six three at the least, which would make him, if not a whole foot taller than me, then extremely close. Leah’s mother came up to his earlobe.
He also could have passed for normal, but I had to look up to see his face and that brought in a glimpse of the world outside of the focus of my glasses, which told me definitely that he was not someone to mess with.
Most people, without my glasses, look like pretty blurry versions of themselves - that’s the work of my astigmatism. Everybody is like a bad impressionist watercolor that someone stuck in their jeans pocket and ran through the washer. There are some definite exceptions to the rule, however, and one of them is Leah, who is a cobalt-blue blob of something that suspiciously resembles fire. I can’t look at it very long, because she’s too bright, but there is definitely more to it than that.
Leah’s father, without my glasses, is something shining, dark, and warlike, something from another time, some sort of dark metal - bronze, maybe? - polished into a dark glow. The deep crimson light that was Leah’s mother reflected nicely off of him, but his relative lack of brightness didn’t fool me. There was definitely substance to whatever he was without my glasses, but I couldn’t look for long, because both Leah and her mother were like looking at the sun, and my astigmatism made it hard to focus completely anyway. The extra stuff I saw without my glasses was, unfortunately, as blurry as the rest of the world.
“It’s good to have you here,” Leah’s dad said, and his voice was a lot like the him I had seen around my glasses - calm, controlled, and full of confidence.
“It’s good to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Veldon,” I said to both of Leah’s parents.
Leah’s mom and dad shared an amused look. “Call us Sabarin and Landen,” said Leah’s mom, “No need to be formal when you’re… when you’ll be staying quite a while.”
That was definitely not what she’d started out to say, but I didn’t say anything about it. I was equal parts too intimidated, too interested in everything that was going on, and too polite to ask for clarification. It was an unsettling mixture.
“I suppose the girls haven’t been able to give you the tour yet. Judging from the lack of explosions, that is,” Leah’s father said, and he sent a long look at Leah and Tess in particular, while Rhian chuckled unashamedly. I was wondering why these explosions were such a running joke in this house… to be fair, Leah had blown something up, once or twice, in my presence, which could be unnerving, but the fact that these explosions were being treated in such an offhand manner should have told me that I was in for an interesting week.
I would have expected the jokes about explosions to be leveled at her, not her sister. Unless it was the metaphorical explosion that I’d seen the two of them start earlier. That had to be it.
Funny how I wasn’t sure what was metaphorical anymore in this house…
There were few more words before we set off on a tour of the house, Leah’s mother leading, as she was able to talk quite easily over her shoulder as she walked, much like Leah herself, who was at my elbow the whole time, occasionally exchanging muttered words with one or the other of her sisters. I mostly ignored them, concentrating on the sheer overwhelmingness of the whole situation. First, there was the size of the house, and the casual references dropped by members of Leah’s family to their having ‘built such and such’ presumably by magic, or ‘used to be a…’ in which case I never had any idea of what they were talking about. Unknown worlds stretched tantalizingly before me, as they had that first time when Leah had told me the truth, beckoning me with all their gleaming possibilities.
We made it to the second floor before I knew it, passing through a multitude of odd rooms that passed by my eyes like so many hallucinations. Mostly, the rooms seemed to be used for storage, as there were all sorts of odds and ends thrown together in no particular order. And how many bedrooms could there have been in this house anyway? Surely not any more than four, yet there was so much space…
“Sabarin and Leah can show you how we extract all of these items from the void,” Leah’s dad said, and I did a double take, because up until now his wife had been doing all of the talking, with him only inserting a comment now and again. His daughters were being far more vocal behind us: Leah had apparently said something that Tess disliked, and which Rhian was attempting to placate her about and scold Leah for at the same time.
“… and how did you fit it in with your enormous ego?” Tess asked sarcastically, and I winced for my friend. Their parents exchanged a look over my head and somehow, the argument petered out. Of course, I had no illusions that it wasn’t continuing in a volley of glares behind me, but as far as the family was concerned, I didn’t know what I couldn’t see. Personally, I thought that though Tess was acting in a way that indicated she might somewhat deserve it, Leah was provoking her intentionally.
“The void?” I asked, partly to cover up the awkward silence behind me, and partly because I was curious, though I was in so far over my head in the conversation that a few polite nods and murmurings were barely sufficient to keep me treading water.
“I believe I’ll leave that explanation up to Sabarin,” Leah’s father said with a smile, and the look that his wife flashed him was unexpectedly juvenile. As was the elbow she planted casually, but with very little real force, into his ribs as she turned back around to talk to me where we had paused under a very interesting sculpture which appeared to be a tree made of iron complete with leaves and fruit.
“The short explanation is that there are all sorts of bits of stuff still in the void from when we adjusted the balance of the three worlds,” she said, “some parts retain their identity better than others, and so it’s relatively easy to pull them out intact, though nearly impossible to know what you’re getting, and others have completely dissociated and are only useful in patching other things up -”
“Or making explosions,” Leah cut in, getting a capitalized Look from her mother and from Rhian as she leveled the accusation at Tess with much less humor than she had previously.
“It’s a little like fishing,” Leah’s father explained, seeing my confusion. “You have no idea if you’ll catch anything or what you’ll bring up when you reel it in.”
The one and only time I’d ever been fishing, I’d caught a discarded shoe and a deflated basketball, so I knew exactly what he was talking about. The mental image of Leah fishing around for couches, sculptures and other miscellanea in a swirling vortex brought a grin to my face.
“Not another fishing metaphor, dad!” Rhian objected, and I turned around in time to catch the face that she made. “Try a modern metaphor on for size!”
“I cannot help it if the ancient philosophers discovered everything there was to know about human nature and everyone else has been simply repeating and translating it, Rhiannah,” her father replied with a twinkle in his eye, as all three of the sisters added their own interjections in what was obviously a well-worn family tradition.
“Don’t mind them,” Leah’s mother told me with a straight face, though her lips were twitching, “Come and see the rest of the house, and if we have to leave them to it, then they can just stay here.”
Needless to say, after the initial round of objections faded, everyone followed us. Or rather, they did until we rounded a corner and came into the hall that held all of the bedrooms.
“My room’s not clean!” Rhian exclaimed, darting past me towards her door in what appeared to be a desperate run to stuff everything under the bed.
“Neither is Leah’s,” Tess interjected sharply. “Not for years.”
“You burnt a circle in the ceiling of yours,” Leah shot back, “so you’re hardly one to talk.”
“I should have used your room as a laboratory, but I couldn’t be bothered to move all of your junk,” Tess replied.
“Girls. Our guest will think that the only thing you two ever do is fight…” Leah’s mother had dropped her lighter tones of before, and though her voice was not particularly sharp or angry, it did a good job of calling her daughters to heel.
“Though it’s true,” Rhian said, popping her head back out of the door. “My room’s presentable, if you really must see it,” she announced cheerfully on seeing four pointed stares and one puzzled glance leveled at her head. “It might be best to start with the one that passes for normal around here, anyway,” she said, and grinned infectiously. Despite the fact that she had been glaring at Tess seconds ago, Leah actually snickered.
Clearly Rhian was the peacekeeper in the family.
A look into her room made me grin irrepressibly.
“I had a thing for dolphins and the sea as a kid,” she explained, upon seeing my face as I took in the state of the walls, “but unfortunately no one in the family is even a passable artist.”
The fact that her sea-green walls still bore fish made out of bright, crayon-colored handprints with lopsided eyes and smiles painted on them, and a very wobbly outline of a dolphin, attested to that fact. The fact that her room had to have been decorated in this way at least eight or ten years ago and that she hadn’t painted over it was proof that the sentimental streak I’d observed in Leah ran in the family. A whole wall full of pictures that I was itching to have a closer look at seemed to do nothing but confirm it.
“It’s very nice,” I said, as sincerely as I could, and Rhian snorted a laugh.
“Do you have twice as many manners to make up for the fact that Leah has none, or did you just come that way?” she asked in what was clearly meant to be a joking manner. “Thank you, though. We worked pretty hard on this one afternoon.”
“I distinctly remember Tess not wanting to dip her hand in the paint,” Leah added with an evil grin. Tess’ nostrils flared and she glared at Leah, who continued on inexorably, “so we had to help her out with that - by coating her in the stuff. That’s the only reason it took so long.”
“And then you would not believe how much of a fuss all three of them made when we found them, covered in paint,” Leah’s dad interjected with a grin.
There was a general groan of ‘Daaaaad!’ which made me smile a little more.
Next up was Tess’ room. I knew better by now than to make any predictions about what it would look like, but Tess had definitely not cleaned it up, as it looked like she was attempting to hook up several motherboards to… a bunch of other computer parts. Nearly every surface in the room was covered in diagrams, or chalked circles with lots of scribbling in them, and that was underneath an inch-deep layer of papers and books. I looked up pretty much immediately in order to find the burn mark, but either Leah had been exaggerating, which had been known to happen occasionally, or it had been painted over.
“Don’t touch anything,” Tess said quickly when I entered, “There are several experiments here that must not be disturbed.”
“Tess, you know that none of us would ever intentionally harm your experiments,” Rhian told her, though Tess gave no indication that she believed her sister’s words. “Besides, it’s not like anyone can even walk in here without risking injury to their feet.”
She was right - if you didn’t break an ankle falling over a book or a pile of what were presumably electronic and mechanical parts, you might get a tack or a chip of circuitry embedded in your foot.
“Even more of a fire hazard than I remember it,” Leah commented, and Tess shot her a dirty look. Their parents seemed determined to ignore their low-level bickering for the time being, probably in an effort to preserve their sanity.
It seemed like a fairly good idea.
Tess chased us out of her room quite quickly, and I then finally got a look at Leah’s room, which was actually… surprisingly normal. For the nearly two years that I had known her, I had thought that I had a good handle on what she was like. She was confident, uninhibited, intelligent - though at times distressingly lazy, at least as far as schoolwork went, since she quite enjoyed exercise and being outdoors - generous and outgoing, and she loved being the center of attention.
It occurred to me that I should have a good look at her room and see what it told me about Leah - at least, how Leah had been before I’d known her - but I looked at it and saw the room of a young teenager.
Certainly, there were plenty of details different. Her ceiling and pastel blue walls were plastered not with cut-outs from magazines and posters, but with maps and diagrams, photos and sketches, ones that looked like they’d been torn from the pages of yellowed journals. Some of the diagrams were undoubtedly drawn painstakingly by Leah - I could see her sharp, angular handwriting, but held out no hope of being able to read it - but she couldn’t have made the sketches herself. Aside from Rhian’s comment about none of the family having any artistic talent - which couldn’t be entirely true, given that I’d seen Leah craft an illusion before - there was the fact that half of them appeared to be drawings of what appeared to be a pyramid in the rainforest somewhere, and statues of feathered snakes.
I stopped wondering about the origin of the sketches tacked to the walls when I saw her window.
She had a turret in one corner of her room, lined with windows and scarcely large enough to stand in, and I went directly to it and gazed straight down at the crashing waves thirty feet below, that threw a vicious lace of foam up against the slate-grey rocks. I could see a couple of tenacious orange shells sticking up from the water in places. The constant sigh of the waves and the long wet rattle as they dragged pebbles backwards into the depth could be heard from all the way up here.
“Wow,” I said. I was seriously beginning to overuse that word today, but there wasn’t much else to be said, especially since I was in a more or less constant state of amazement. I’d always wanted to live by the water, but out of all the various places I had lived during my childhood, the closest I’d ever been to this much water was six blocks from a public swimming pool.
“Told you that you’d like it,” Leah told me, smugly, though she hadn’t prepared me for anything about this day except in the most imprecise of terms.
“Yes,” I said, turning to her with a smile that felt like it was stretching my whole face, though I didn’t really mind the feeling, “Just - everything.”
Leah grinned at me with incalculable smugness, leaning against the foot of her bed with her arms crossed. The rest of her family was standing just inside the door, making no secret of the fact that they were watching my reaction, and Leah’s reaction to my reaction. Rhian seemed to be struggling to control laughter, and Tess was watching openly, though she instantly looked elsewhere, at one of the pictures on the wall, when she saw that I was looking at her. Leah’s parents exchanged a glance.
“It’s a good thing we put your room on this end of the house, then,” Leah’s mother said to me.
It took me a long moment to process that statement, and then my mouth dropped open in complete shock.
Before I could blather something in my awe, Leah interjected. “Only the two of you would use me having Ellie over to stay for a while as an excuse to construct a whole new room. Aren’t you overdoing it a bit?”
“Your sisters helped,” her mother replied impishly, and Leah rolled her eyes.
“Just come and see it,” Rhian said, and I followed her out the door, down the hall, and through the door immediately after Leah’s.
Not only did my mouth drop, but I nearly choked on the sight before me. I had expected, when they had said that they had a room ready for me, that they had cleaned up a guest bedroom.
I hadn’t expected this.
After my parents had been divorced, I’d never lived for more than one year in any single place, unless you counted the summers and holidays spent at my grandmother’s house, where I stayed in a little white-walled room with a sloped ceiling and my mother’s old teddy bear sitting on top of the dresser. More than anywhere else, even the pink and yellow room in the house that my father had kept until I was seventeen years old, the clean, spare room under the eaves, smelling like the rosemary and lavender that Gran always used, was home. At least, it once had been.
It wasn’t even the fact that the blue and white quilt - a different pattern than the one that Gran had once stitched, but so similar that I had to check to be sure, though it wasn’t really the same at all - folded up at the foot of the bed was the first thing that I saw. Or that someone, Rhian perhaps, had seen fit to line the top of the pinewood dresser with a selection of seashells. It really looked nothing like the old room under the eaves of Gran’s house. For one thing, the walls were grey stone, leading up to a high ceiling that I doubted I could touch if I stood on the desk chair, and this room was probably about twice as big.
It was the fact that everywhere I looked, I could see that they had left things for me. Someone had put a vase full of tiny white flowers on the desk, right next to a mug full of pencils and pens. There were a couple of books stacked up on the night table, as well as several empty bookshelves along one wall. Not completely empty - there was a jar of small stones, probably collected from the beach, on one, more shells on another - but the few books scattered across them were nowhere close to filling them.
Slowly, I walked into the room, and when I saw that someone had put out a blank notebook, not one of the fancy ones that I always felt bad about writing in, but just a plain spiral notebook, off to one side of the desk, I felt my eyes start to tear up, so I turned quickly towards the window, where my mouth dropped open once again. I walked across the room to the window seat - my window seat? I had no idea why no one else had claimed this room - which let me lean against the panes and stare outwards into the distance. My window was out over the water like Leah’s, but where beneath Leah’s you could see the rocks and the cliffs across the small inlet, mine looked straight out on the water that stretched onwards towards the end of the world.
Everything that I had seen today was beautiful beyond anything I had ever seen before. I gazed out at the odd, truncated horizon at the misty edge of the water, too close but somehow grounding in its vertigo. The brightness of the odd, mist-filtered light cast so few shadows in this bright new world. Or maybe my eyes were just misting up.
It had been three and a half years since I had felt like this. This feeling of knowing this place in my bones, which I had thought had been buried beneath an oak tree and a simple granite tombstone, the twin, though ten years newer, of the one to its right. Drowned in a hundred different colors of paint, as if the color of the year could warm the empty lands of my heart, and by years and years of home being nothing more than a word pressed like a flower between the pages.
How strange that I would have to leave my whole world behind in order to come home.