A Knight of the Word Read online

  Besides, there were more pressing problems just now. There was school; she had to earn grades high enough to allow her to continue to train and to compete. There was Pick, who was persistent and unending in his demand that she give more of her time and effort to helping him with the park—which seemed silly until she listened to his reasoning.

  And, right at the moment, there was the matter of the house.

  She dressed slowly, thinking of the house, which was the reason she was home this weekend when her time would have been better spent at school, studying. With her grandfather’s death, the house and all of its possessions had passed to her. She had spent the summer going through it, room by room, closet by closet, cataloguing, boxing, packing, and sorting what would stay and go. It was her home, but she was barely there enough to look after it properly and, Pick’s entreaties notwithstanding, she had no real expectation of coming back after graduation to live. The Realtors, sensing this, had already begun to descend. The house and lot were in a prime location. She could get a good price if she was to sell. The money could be put to good use helping defray her training and competition expenses. The real estate market was strong just now, a seller’s market. Wasn’t this the right time to act?

  She had received several offers over the summer, and this past week Allen Kruppert had called from ERA Realty to tender one so ridiculously high that she had agreed to consider it. She had come after classes on Friday, skipping track-and-field practice, so that she could meet with Allen on Saturday morning and look over the papers. Allen was a rotund, jovial young man, whom she had met on several occasions at church picnics, and he impressed her because he never tried to pressure her into anything where the house was concerned but seemed content just to present his offers and step back. The house was not listed, but if she was to make the decision to sell, she knew, she would almost certainly list it with him. The papers he had provided on this latest offer sat on the kitchen table where she had left them last night. The prospective buyer had already signed. The financing was in place. All that was needed was her signature and the deal was done.

  She put the papers aside and sat down to eat a bowl of cereal with her orange juice and coffee, her curly hair still damp against her face as golden light spread through the curtained windows and the sun rose over the trees.

  If she signed, her financial concerns for the immediate future would be over.

  Pick, of course, would have a heart attack. Which was not a good thing if you were already a hundred and fifty years old.

  She was just finishing the cereal when she heard a knock at the back door. She frowned; it was only eight o’clock in the morning, not the time people usually came calling. Besides, no one ever used the back door, except …

  She walked from the kitchen down the hall to the porch. A shadowy figure stood leaning into the screen, trying to peer inside. Couldn’t be, could it? But, as she stepped down to unlatch the screen door, she could already see it was.

  “Hey, Nest,” Robert Heppler said.

  He stood with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans and one tennis shoe bumping nervously against the worn threshold. “You going to invite me in or what?” He gave her one of his patented cocky grins and tossed back the shoulder-length blond hair from his angular face.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “You mean like, ‘here at eight o’clock in the morning,’ or like, ‘here in Hopewell as opposed to Palo Alto’? You’re wondering if I was tossed out of school, right?”

  “Were you?”

  “Naw. Stanford needs me to keep its grade point average high enough to attract similarly brilliant students. I was just in the neighborhood and decided to stop by, share a few laughs, maybe see if you’re in the market for a boyfriend.” He was talking fast and loose to keep up his confidence. He glanced past her toward the kitchen. “Do I smell coffee? You’re alone, aren’t you? I mean, I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

  “Jeez, Robert, you are such a load.” She sighed and stepped back. “Come on in.”

  She beckoned him to follow and led him down the hall. The screen door banged shut behind them and she winced, remembering how Gran had hated it when she did that.

  “So what are you really doing here?” she pressed him, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the kitchen table as she reached for the coffeepot and a cup. The coffee steamed in the morning air as she poured it.

  He shrugged, giving her a furtive look. “I saw your car, knew you were home, thought I should say hello. I know it’s early, but I was afraid I might miss you.”

  She handed him the coffee and motioned for him to sit down, but he remained standing. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you,” she said pointedly.

  “You know me, I don’t like to rush things.” He looked away quickly, unable to meet her steady gaze. He sipped gingerly from his cup, then made a face. “What is this stuff?”

  Nest lost her patience. “Look, did you come here to insult me, or do you need something, or are you just lonely again?”

  He gave her his hurt puppy look. “None of the above.” He glanced down at the real estate papers, which were sitting on the counter next to him, then looked up at her again. “I just wanted to see you. I didn’t see you all summer, what with you off running over hill and dale and cinder track.”

  “Robert, don’t start …”

  “Okay, I know, I know. But it’s true. I haven’t seen you since your grandfather’s funeral.”

  “And whose fault is that, do you think?”

  He pushed his glasses further up on his nose and screwed up his mouth. “Okay, all right. It’s my fault. I haven’t seen you because I knew how badly I messed up.”

  “You were a jerk, Robert.”

  He flinched as if struck. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “You didn’t?” A slow flush worked its way up her neck and into her cheeks. “My grandfather’s funeral service was barely finished and there you were, making a serious effort to grope me. I don’t know what that was all about, but I didn’t appreciate it one bit.”

  He shook his head rapidly. “I wasn’t trying to grope you exactly.”

  “Yes, you were. Exactly. You might have done yourself some good, you know, if you’d stuck around to apologize afterward instead of running off.”

  His laugh was forced. “I was running for my life. You just about took my head off.”

  She stared at him, waiting. She knew how he felt about her, how he had always felt about her. She knew this was difficult for him and she wasn’t making it any easier. But his misguided attempt at an intimate relationship was strictly one-sided and she had to put a stop to it now or whatever was left of their friendship would go right out the window.

  He took a deep breath. “I made a big mistake, and I’m sorry. I guess I just thought you needed … that you wanted someone to … Well, I just wasn’t thinking, that’s all.” He pushed back his long hair nervously. “I’m not so good at stuff like that, and you, well, you know how I feel …” He stopped and looked down at his feet. “It was stupid. I’m really sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything, letting him dangle in the wind a little longer, letting him wonder. He looked up at her after a minute, meeting her gaze squarely for the first time. “I don’t know what else to say, Nest. I’m sorry. Are we still friends?”

  Even though he had grown taller and gotten broader through the shoulders, she still saw him as being fourteen. There was a little-boy look and sound to him that she thought he might never entirely escape.

  “Are we?” he pressed.

  She gave him a considering look. “Yes, Robert, we are. We always will be, I hope. But we’re just friends, okay? Don’t try to make it into anything else. If you do, you’re just going to make me mad all over again.”

  He looked doubtful, but nodded anyway. “Okay.” He glanced down again at the real estate papers. “Are you going to sell the house?”

  “Robert
!”

  “Well, that’s what it looks like.”

  “I don’t care what it looks like, it’s none of your business!” Irritated at herself for being so abrupt, she added, “Look, I haven’t decided anything yet.”

  He put his coffee cup in the exact center of the papers, making a ring. “I don’t think you should sell.”

  She snatched the cup away. “Robert …”

  “Well, I don’t. I think you should let some time pass before you do anything.” He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Wait, let me finish. My dad says you should never make any big changes right after someone you love dies. You should wait at least a year. You should give yourself time to grieve, to let everything settle so you know what you really want. I don’t think he’s right about much, but I think he might be right about this.”

  She pictured Robert’s father in her mind, a spectacled, gentle man who was employed as a chemical engineer but spent all his free time engaged in gardening and lawn care. Robert used to call him Mr. Green Jeans and swore that his father would have been happier if his son had been born a plant.

  “Robert,” she said gently, “that’s very good advice.”

  He stared at her in surprise.

  “I mean it. I’ll give it some thought.”

  She put the coffee cups aside. Robert was annoying, but she liked him anyway. He was funny and smart and fearless. Maybe more to the point, she could depend on him. He had stood up for her five years earlier when her father had come back into her life. If not for Robert, her grandfather would never have found her trussed up in the caves below the Sinnissippi Park cliffs. It was Robert who had come after her on the night she had confronted her father, when it seemed she was all alone. She had knocked the pins out from under him for his trouble, leaving him senseless on the ground while she went on alone. But he had cared enough to follow.

  She felt a momentary pang at the memory. Robert was the only real friend she had left from those days.

  “I have to go back to school tonight,” she said. “How long do you have?”

  He shrugged. “Day after tomorrow.”

  “You came all the way home from California for the weekend?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Well …”

  “To visit your parents?”

  “Nest …”

  “You can’t say it, can you?”

  He shook his head and blushed. “No.”

  She nodded. “Just so you don’t think I can’t see through you like glass. You just watch yourself, buster.”

  He looked down at his feet, embarrassed. She liked him like this—sweet and vulnerable. “You want to walk over to Gran and Grandpa’s graves with me, put some flowers in their urns?”

  He brightened at once. “Sure.”

  She was already heading for the hall closet. “Let me get my coat, Mr. Smooth.”

  “Jeez,” he said.

  Chapter 2

  They went out the porch door, down the steps, across the yard, and through the hedgerow that marked the back end of the Freemark property, then struck out into Sinnissippi Park. Nest carried a large bundle of flowers she had purchased the night before and left sitting overnight in a bucket of water on the porch. It was not yet nine, and the air was still cool and the grass slick with damp in the pale morning light. The park stretched away before them, broad expanses of lush, new-mown grass fading into distant, shadowy woods and ragged curtains of mist that rose off the Rock River. The bare earth of the base paths, pitcher’s mounds, and batting boxes of the ball diamonds cornering the central open space were dark and hard with moisture and the night’s chill. The big shade trees had shed most of their leaves, the fall colors carpeting the areas beneath them in a patchwork mix of red, gold, orange, and brown. Park toys dotted the landscape like weird sculpture, and the wooden trestle and chute for the toboggan slide glimmered with a thin coating of frost. The crossbar at the entrance was lowered, the fall hours in effect so that there was no vehicle access to the park until after ten. In the distance, a solitary walker was towed in the wake of a hard-charging Irish setter that bounded through the haze of soft light and mist in a brilliant flash of rust.

  The cemetery lay at the west end of the park on the other side of a chain-link fence. Having grown up in the park, they had been climbing that fence since they were kids—Robert and Cass Minter and Brianna Brown and Jared Scott and herself. Best friends for years, they had shared adventures and discoveries and hopes and dreams. Everything but the truth about who Nest was.

  Robert shoved his bare hands in his pockets and exhaled a plume of white moisture. “We should have driven,” he declared.

  He was striding out ahead of her, taking the lead in typical Robert fashion, not in the least intimidated by the fact that she was taller and stronger and far more familiar with where she was going than he was.

  She smiled in spite of herself. Robert would lead even if he were blindfolded.

  She remembered telling him her deepest secret once, long ago, on the day after she had eluded him on her way to the deadly confrontation with her father. She had done something to him, he insisted, and he wanted to know what it was. That was the price he was demanding for his help in getting into the hospital to see Jared. She told him the truth, that she had used magic. She told him in a way that was meant to leave him in doubt. He could not quite believe her, but not quite ignore her, either. He had never been able to resolve his confusion, and that was a part of what attracted him to her, she supposed.

  But there were distances between them that Robert could not even begin to understand. Between her and everyone she knew, now that Gran was gone, because Nest was the only one who could do magic, the only one who would ever be able to do magic, the only one who would probably ever even know that magic was out there. She was the one who had been born to it, a legacy passed down through generations of the Freemark women, but through her demon father, as well. Magic that could come to her in the blink of an eye, could come unbidden at times. Magic that lived within her heart and mind, a part of her life that she must forever keep secret, because the danger that came from others knowing far outweighed the burden of clandestine management. Magic to heal and magic to destroy. She was still struggling to understand it. She could still feel it developing within her.

  She looked off into the shadows of the woods that flanked the cliffs and cemetery ahead, where the night still lingered in dark patches and the feeders lurked. She did not see them, but she could sense that they were there. As she had always been able to when others could not. Unseen and unknown, the feeders existed on the fringes of human consciousness. Sylvans like Pick helped to keep them in check by working to maintain a balance in the magic that was invested in and determinative of the behavior of all living things. But humans were prone to adversely affect that balance, tilting it mostly without even knowing, changing it with their behavior and their feelings, altering it in the careless, unseeing way that mudslides altered landscapes.

  This was the other world, the one to which Nest alone had access. Since she was very small, she had worked to understand it, to help Pick maintain it, and to find a way to reconcile it with the world that everyone else inhabited and believed fully defined. There, in no-man’s-land between the known and the secret, she was an anomaly, never entirely like her friends, never just another child.

  “You’ve lived in your grandparents’ house all your life,” Robert said suddenly, eyes determinedly fixed in a forward direction. They were crossing the entrance road and moving into the scattering of shade trees and spruce that bordered the picnic grounds leading to the chain-link fence and the cemetery. “That house is your home, Nest. If you sell it, you won’t have a home anymore.”

  She scuffed at the damp grass with her tennis shoes. “I know that, Robert.”

  “Do you need the money?”

  “I could use it. Training and competition is expensive. The school doesn’t pay for everything.”

  “Why don’t you take out a mortgag
e, then? Why sell, if you don’t have to?”

  She couldn’t explain it to him, not if she tried all day. It had to do with being who she was, and that wasn’t something Robert could know about without having lived her life. She didn’t even want to talk about it with him because it was personal and private.

  “Maybe I want a new home,” she said enigmatically, giving sudden, unexpected voice to the feelings that churned inside her. It was hard to keep from crying as she thought back upon their genesis.

  Her friends were gone, all but Robert. She could still see their faces, but she saw them not as they were at the end, but as they were when they were still fourteen and it seemed as if nothing in their lives would ever change. She saw them as they were during that last summer they were all together, on that last weekend before everything changed—when they were close and tight and believed they could stand up to anything.

  Brianna Brown and Jared Scott moved away within a year of that summer. Brianna wrote Nest at first, but the time between letters steadily lengthened, and finally the letters ceased altogether. Nest heard later that Brianna was married and had a child.

  She never heard from Jared at all.

  Cass Minter remained her oldest and closest friend all through high school. Different from each other in so many ways, they continued to find common ground in a lifetime of shared experiences and mutual trust. Cass planned to go to the University of Illinois and study genetics, but two weeks before graduation, she died in her sleep. The doctor said it was an aneurysm. No one had suspected it was there.

  Jared, Brianna, and Cass—all gone. Of her old friends, that left only Robert, and by the end of her freshman year at Northwestern, Nest could already feel herself beginning to drift. Her parents were gone. Her grandparents were gone. Her friends were gone. Even the cats, Mr. Scratch and Miss Minx, were gone, the former dead of old age two years earlier, the latter moved to a neighbor’s home with her grandfather’s passing. Her future, she thought, lay somewhere else. Her life was going in a different direction, and she could feel Hopewell receding steadily into her past.