Our visit to Margo that evening—for our emergence through Gus’s accursed rabbit hole found us bathed in sunset—was surely not the first, only the first of which I was sensible. My screaming voice softened on the instant, and I was surprised by the vibrancy ringing through every note of birdsong. The scent of fermenting apples clouded the golden air. Damson shadows streaked across the grass, and where Gus stepped the grasshoppers burst in such abundance that they nearly gave the impression of splashing water.
Shadows. What a luxury this juxtaposition of violet and amber was, after the diffuse pallor of Nautilus! How marvelous the scattering of tiny creatures, the small lives tumbling along their secret ways beneath the soil! The suspended life of Nautilus seemed a dull and deathly thing in comparison.
And Gus called this the unworld. Were the people here therefore unpeople, unwomen and unmen? But of course, I realized, that was what Gus thought. Besides himself, only Margo had ever been real to him; I surely hadn’t. When my own independent reality had infringed too much on his awareness he had killed me in retaliation.
For being real, and no mere projection.
Gus promptly quit the orchard and its adjacent gardens in favor of slinking along the edge of the woods. The underbrush snarled at his legs, for the only path ran through the grass outside this dusky verge. He tramped on determinedly, cursing under his breath. Even concealed by the scrim of the trees, he twisted often to look over his shoulder, to peer around the trunks for some fancied mob waiting to drag him to justice.
It was in this craven fashion that we drew in sight of the Farrows’ house, with its white and petty grandeur marked by dark green shutters, its yellow roses, its maple tree flaring crimson above the east wing’s gabled roof. A stooped figure clung to the balustrade in front of the parlor, whose French doors hung ajar. Margo scanned the woods with hawklike expectation, then caught sight of Gus with a visible jolt.
In that small movement I read that her love for Gus was no longer unadulterated. But that was not what startled me.
Gus had murdered me on a fine day in early July, and from all I could see it was now late September or early October. Without giving the matter much thought, I had inferred that three or so months had passed since my death. I had dared to hope that I might glimpse Thomas or Anna, if only at a great distance; that they might sense me and look around, searching for the source of a sweet ache resonant with my name; that my love could somehow translate through the air and brush them with solace.
But with a hundred yards still between us and Margo, I knew at once that not even grief could have aged her so much in such a short time. When I had seen her last she had been an upright, stately woman, old but willowy, her movements swift and definite. Now her posture had a fractured quality, as if the inner force that had sustained her had been flung against a wall. It was clear that time must have allied with heartbreak to bring Margo to this state.
I knew then that I had been dead for years.
I can’t say why it mattered to me so much—whether my body was months or centuries in the earth, my life was gone for good—but the realization stung. Time would have done its work and dried the tears of those who loved me long ago. The sense of my presence would mean, not comfort, but a miserable reminder of old grief, best put aside. Thomas might, perhaps, have married someone else; he might have a babe in arms. While I knew I should wish myself utterly forgotten for their sake, I could not find in myself enough generosity to do so.
I wanted to see longing in their eyes, and feel that I remained linked to anyone other than my killer. The pleasure of returning home twisted and struck me with renewed pain.
Gus broke into a run, racing across the lawn to his aunt, and scrambled over the balustrade. His bag of dirty laundry thudded down. “Margo!” he breathed.
“If all your sorcery can’t get the stink out of your underclothes, then what use is it, I’d like to know?” Margo sniped by way of greeting. Of course she could not hand off his laundry to a washerwoman, or not without provoking questions.
“Magic is as finite as all other sources of power, Margo. One must consider carefully how one expends it, not waste it on domestic minutiae. If you have an army at your call, you do not set the cavalry to embroidering cushions.”
“These greater ends of yours. You haven’t seen fit to inform me of what they are, have you, Angus, my boy?”
“Is this how you welcome me home?” Gus rejoined with fond reproach, and swept his aunt into an embrace. She was smaller than formerly, her wispy head resting on his collarbone, though Gus himself was of only middling height.
It galled me to observe any redeeming qualities in my murderer—I would have preferred to keep my loathing pure—but his tenderness for Margo was undeniable. He enfolded her as if her bony frame were some rare and delicate flower, kissed her brow as softly as petals falling. I saw a tear well in Margo’s glittering gray eye. She pressed close, though only for a moment.
So she still loved him. Against her better judgment, no doubt, for she must know what he had done. The conjunction of my cooling corpse and Gus’s abrupt flight, and on the day after my engagement, was hardly equivocal.
“Come in and eat your supper before you waste to nothing,” Margo said, and pushed him away. “I’ve packed some things for you to take along with you, too, though it’s never enough to put any flesh back on your bones. Your magic is eating you alive.” She turned away, tugging him through the French doors into the parlor—and in contrast with Nautilus, here I flowed through the wall above the door in just the fashion stories had taught me to expect.
Behind her back, Gus was grinning at her solicitude. Nautilus was a city of many pleasures, I supposed, but coddling was not among them.
His meal was set out on a low table before a cold grate—the evening was too warm for a fire—and it was extensive, roast beef and kidneys, potatoes and stewed peaches. Gus sat and attacked the food at once, and Margo stood watching him with an expression I could not decipher. Sunset gold streaked across the room, knelt against the wall, plumped on the cushions.
Gus kept eating, ravenously. I wondered if the meal had been meant for Margo—she could hardly demand an extra supper from the cook before sending her out of the house. It did not seem to occur to Gus that she might have gone without for his sake.
Margo had not once glanced in my direction, I realized, nor given the slightest flinch at my admittedly subdued screaming. Outside of Nautilus, then, I was both invisible and inaudible to all but Gus, just as he had said. Small wonder that visiting the unworld gave him such an appetite. How unconcerned, how happy he looked as he shoved forkfuls of beef into his bulging cheeks!
Margo’s hands behind her back knit busily at the air. Something was troubling her, I thought—something more immediate than the strangling of a girl of nineteen however many years before.
“It isn’t only for my own plans, you know, that I need to conserve my powers. It’s also for your sake that I economize, and in every way I can. It’s a disgrace how my parents have—relegated you, as if you were nothing but a heap of worn-out skin. I mean to get you out of this dull place. To elevate you to your proper condition.”
Margo gave a small start, from which I gathered that the idea was new to her. “Transport me to your fairy-tale city, you mean, Angus? The one so exclusive, as you can’t seem to stop telling me, that only sorcerers are allowed to sniff its rarefied air? Why would it take in an old lady with nothing to recommend her but a talent for bitterness? I might as well attempt to reclaim Fort Sumter.”
I did not catch the reference. Later I would grow used to experiencing history in a pattern of dashes and elisions, skipping from one year to another. The trick, I find, is never to be surprised.
Angus had lifted a forkful of scalloped potatoes halfway to his mouth. But at this he dropped his fork and leapt up to clasp Margo by her shoulders.
The fork did not fall. Instead it maintained a wobbling levitation, though the potatoes escaped and splattered on the carpet. Gus was oblivious.
“You are a queen among rabble,” he informed her somberly, his lichen-green eyes fixed on her face. She kept her own gray gaze stubbornly lowered. “Margo, I beseech you, don’t make the mistake of seeing yourself as these—these squabbling goblins see you! In Nautilus you would envision yourself truly, I’m sure of it. That’s the reason I must bring you there, as soon as I can manage it.”
A queen. Gus had often described me in terms similarly exalted. My realm had proved to be bipartite: a span of air hitched to the shoulders of a murderer and a span of cold clay dancing with grass. I did not suppose that anyone envied me my rule.
Margo tottered, slightly but noticeably. Was she feeling faint?
“I don’t anticipate becoming a witch, Angus, able to turn frogs into castles or whatever else might impress those examiners who approve your city’s new arrivals. Not in the time I have remaining to me.”
The word remaining was etched in acid. I understood at once, but Gus seemed not to notice.
“You need not worry about time! Once I take you to Nautilus, all this nonsense of aging and illness will stop where it is. As long as you never set foot outside the city, you can endure as long as it does.” He laughed, and the notes were jerky with nerves. Margo pulled from his grasp and started at the sight of the hovering fork. Fragments of scarlet sunset winked on its tines.
“Angus. There’s a catch to bringing off your delusions of me as some grand old Morgan le Fay in the making. Remember, won’t you, the citizenship requirements you like to boast about? I don’t meet them.”
“I’m aware that you don’t—though you might develop a slight magical capacity with enough effort. But Nautilus is like anywhere else in that respect. Officials can be careless with the paperwork.”
The minotaur had said that magic was currency in the sorcerers’ city. I understood at once that Gus would have to save up a great deal, however that task might be accomplished, to pay a bribe of this magnitude. So, of course, did Margo. She’d always had a fine ear for matters related to human corruptibility.
“If properly persuaded, you mean. Letting in an old lady with no more magic than a mayfly has in her—that won’t come cheaply.”
“What wouldn’t I pay for your sake? No one else alive is worth a fig to me.” At this Gus noticed the suspended fork with precisely the irritable cry of a miser who finds he’s left the candles burning. The fork dropped with a clatter. “I did not even mean—ugh, and these small expenditures add up so quickly! I must be more careful.”
Margo laughed, quite as horribly as I might have done. “And are you rich, in that unnatural city of yours? What vast wealth do you have to fling in their venal faces? Angus, my dear boy, I know your intentions are loving. But they’re also ridiculous.”
“I am not rich yet.” Gus had started pacing, his supper forgotten. Beyond the balustrade, I watched the last traces of crimson sunset submerging into blue. “But I have both natural aptitude and unparalleled perseverance combining to make me so, and you are not so old that we need be in any rush. Soon enough I’ll be able to offer you the life you always should have had—where wishes are horses indeed, and even sprout wings! You will ride above the glowing towers—”
This speech was also familiar to me. Now that I was expired, it seemed, Gus had cast the feverish visions once reserved for me around Margo’s stooped shoulders instead.
She stood shaking her head with marked impatience while Gus attended only to his own mania. But at last he seemed to truly see the gesture.
His eyes widened, full of liquid light, and his face went gray with understanding. It had taken him long enough.
“I will see nothing, my boy, except the cracks in the ceiling over my bed. Perhaps the shiny pink snout of some hired nurse, snuffling about me. And even that much won’t be mine for long.”
Gus’s hands were clenched. “That can’t be. I won’t allow it.”
“You seem to believe that the sun requires your permission to set, and the corpse solicits your approval before it rots.” Margo had caught hold of the back of that sofa where Gus had been sitting. She looked very pale, a white rag straining to keep hold of human form.
“They do! Or they will, at any rate. Margo, you have no idea of the feats that are in my reach. Once I carry you to Nautilus—it isn’t timeless in the strict sense, but the time we have there is not the kind that slants toward the grave! And if I cannot pay the fees at this very moment, I—My other endeavors can wait until we have you comfortably established, I will sacrifice even my mission for the time being—”
Margo kept her gaze fixed on the sofa’s melon-colored brocade. I could feel how desperately Gus wanted those gray eyes turned toward him, warm and confident and flooded with gratitude. He would say anything, I knew, spout any lie to secure that look, and then attack nature in an attempt to twist his words true.
“Angus. I will soon be dead, my boy, and making myself at home in some suitable perdition—for I don’t suppose there’s ever been enough charity in my heart that the beyond will spare any for me. The world will roll along well enough without me, and you will be obliged to accept that death isn’t yours to command.”
Gus’s lips tightened in a smile at once pained and vicious. “It was once. Why shouldn’t it be so again?”
Margo at last looked at him. “I seem to recall that only worked in one direction.”
“Ah.” He bared his teeth in a strained grin. “That was over three years ago. My abilities have improved since then.”
Margo laughed darkly and spun toward the window; I recognized the yearning in her gaze as it met the sky’s glassy indigo, for her feeling was not so different from my own.
“I’ve always admired your arrogance. It takes a certain spirit to be so blind to reality.”
“Margo.” He approached her again, embraced her again, this time from behind. His lips brushed her white hair. “I will determine what is, and is not, reality. At least where you are concerned. You will live, and live as a queen, in a realm as bright as pearl. I ordain it so. I give you my word.”