She hadn’t seen him since. Neither had Pick. That was almost a year and a half ago.
“Where do you think he’s gone.”” she asked quietly.
Pick, riding her shoulder in silence, shrugged. “Can’t say.”
“He was disappearing though, there at the end, wasn’t he?”
“It looked that way, sure enough.”
“So maybe he was all used up.”
“Maybe.”
“Except you told me magic never gets used up. You told me it works like energy; it becomes transformed. So if Wraith was transformed, what was he transformed into?”
“Criminy, Nest!”
“Have you noticed anything different about the park?”
The sylvan tugged at his beard, “No, nothing.”
“So where did he go then?”
Pick wheeled on her. “You know what? It you spent a little more time helping me out around here, maybe you could answer the question far yourself instead of pestering me! Now turn down here and head for the riverbank and stop asking me stuff!”
She did as he asked, still pondering the mystery of Wraith, thinking that maybe because she was grown up and Wraith had served his purpose, he had reverted to whatever form he had occupied before he was created to be her protector. Yes, maybe that was it.
But her doubts lingered.
She reached the riverbank and stopped. The bayou spread out before her, a body of water dammed up behind the levy on which the railroad tracks had been built to carry the freight trains west out of Chicago. Reeds and cattails grew in thick clumps along the edges of the water, and shallow inlets that eroded the riverbank were filmed with stagnation and debris. There was little movement in the water, the swift current of the Rock River absent here.
She looked down at Pick. “Now what?”
He gestured to her right without speaking.
She turned and found herself staring right at the tatterdemalion. She had seen only a handful in her life, and then just for a few seconds each time, but she knew this one for what it was right away. It stood less than a dozen yards away, slight and ephemeral in the pale autumn light. Diaphanous clothing and silky hair trailed from its body and limbs in wispy strands, as if on the verge of being carried off by the wind. The tatterdemalion’s features were childlike and haunted. This one was a girl. Her eyes were depthless in dark-ringed sockets and her rosebud mouth pinched against her sunken face. Her skin was the color and texture of parchment. She might have been a runaway who had not eaten in days and was still terrified of what she had left behind. She had that look. But tatterdemalions were nothing of the sort. They weren’t really children at all, let alone runaways. They weren’t even human.
“Are you Nest Freemark?” this one asked in her soft, lilting childlike voice.
“I am,” Nest answered, risking a quick glance down at Pick. The sylvan was mired in the deepest frown she had ever seen on him and was hunched forward on her shoulder in a combative stance. She had a sudden, inescapable premonition he was trying to protect her.
“My name is Ariel,” said the tatterdemalion. “I have a message for you from the Lady.”
Nest’s throat went dry. She knew who the Lady was. The Lady was the Voice of the Word.
“I have been sent to tell you of John Ross,” Ariel said.
Of course. John Ross. She had thought of him earlier that morning for the first rime in weeks. She pictured him anew, enigmatic and resourceful, a mix of light and dark, gone from Hopewell five years earlier in the wake of her father’s destruction, gone out of her life. Maybe she had inadvertently wished him back into it. Maybe that was why the mention of him seemed somehow inevitable.
“John Ross,” she repeated, as if the words would make of his memory something more substantial.
Ariel stood motionless in a mix of shadow and sunlight, as if pinned like a butterfly to a board. When she spoke, her voice was reed-thin and faintly musical, filled with the sound of the wind rising off trees heavy with new leaves.