Persuasion Page 5

  Probably because, even though Eight knew about the headaches that came on every time Barrie left Watson’s Landing, he had never mentioned that his father had them.

  “Eight doesn’t know about your migraines, does he?” she asked. “Or about the binding?” Her voice wobbled, and she stopped and took a breath before she continued. “He didn’t understand why I was getting headaches any more than I did when I first got here. Which means you’ve never told him—”

  “Is that so wrong?” Seven turned and frowned down at the fine, white shell dust that coated the toes of his burgundy wing tips. “Try to understand. All I want is for him to have a semblance of a normal life. None of the heirs ever have real choices—our lives are mapped out for us by decisions that were made three hundred years ago. I’ve resented that since I first found out that was what was waiting for me. I wanted Eight to have at least the illusion of having chosen. I swore I would find a way to make it different for him.”

  “That’s still you choosing for him. He doesn’t want to be a lawyer. Don’t you know him at all?” Remembering the bleak expression on Eight’s face when he had told her about his dyslexia, she wished for the first time in her life that Mark had taught her something more useful than how to pick out a great pair of shoes. A solid right hook, for instance, would have been great for waking Seven up.

  She fought to keep her voice steady. “Eight’s learning disability makes him self-conscious. Instead of telling him you’re proud of him for who he is, though, and saying you’ll support him no matter what he wants, you’ve tried to force him into a mold he was never going to fit. He thinks that means you’re disappointed in him for not being more like you.”

  That was a worse betrayal than anything Lula had ever done. Lula might not even have known about the binding. Since Emmett had wanted the gift buried and forgotten, Barrie had to assume he had never explained it to Lula any more than he had to Pru. But also, Lula had been Lula. She’d never made any pretense of being up for a mother-of-the-year award.

  “You have to tell Eight. Warn him.” Pushing away from the tree, she walked to where Seven stood. “You should have warned me when I first came.”

  “Pru wasn’t sure you even had the gift, and she didn’t want us saying anything in case you didn’t. At least until you’d settled in.” Seven placed both hands on Barrie’s shoulders. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to tell you until I knew you better. But I do know Eight. His happiness obviously means a lot to you. Think about it. Wouldn’t you keep a secret to keep him happy?”

  Barrie shook her head. “Not this secret. It isn’t mine to keep. Or yours. And he’s going to do what he wants about going out to California, regardless of what I tell him.”

  “Is he?” Seven’s face was pinched with regret. Barrie tried to picture what she would have done in his shoes, but she couldn’t say. Seven’s good intentions didn’t change the fact that hiding something this important from Eight was wrong. All that did was set him up for an even bigger trauma later.

  Seven glanced toward the corner of the house to see if Eight and Pru were returning yet, but they weren’t. Digging into his pockets, he jiggled his keys or loose change—something that sounded like raw nerves jangling.

  “I love Eight,” he said simply. “Thanks to the Beaufort gift, that fact alone makes it painful for me to refuse him anything. On the other hand, I’m also his father, which means I have responsibilities beyond what the gift urges me to do. Eight thinks he knows what the compulsion to give people what they want feels like. He has no idea how much worse that will become, and I won’t tell him and spoil his happiness. But that’s why you have to let him go. You have to want him not to stay, and you can’t tell him about the binding.”

  “How do I make myself want something that I don’t really want? I can’t,” Barrie said.

  “You will if you care about him at all.” Seven’s eyes softened into sympathy, but he averted his face almost immediately as if he realized how much she didn’t want his pity. Of course he realized. He knew.

  “With all that’s happened since you arrived,” Seven continued, “I’ve finally come to see that, to Eight, baseball is much more than a sport. It’s who he is. Don’t you see? These things that we Beauforts and Watsons refer to as ‘gifts’ are as much curses as anything the Colesworths have to bear. The ‘gifts’ keep us bound here so tight, we don’t even bother dreaming. You’ve already given up on wanting to go to art school. But you at least had the chance to consider what you wanted. Beaufort heirs have always stayed here and practiced law, so that was what I was going to do. I never even let myself think about other options when I was growing up. Dreams shape the kind of human beings we become. Not having a dream gave me a smaller future and made me a smaller person. It would be selfish for me not to want more than that for my son.”

  Until that moment, Seven had always been a little larger than life to Barrie. He’d always seemed so self-possessed and intimidating that she’d never imagined that he could look so . . . undone.

  “Eight will still have to abandon whatever life he has built for himself once I’m gone,” Seven said, “but at least he will come back to Beaufort Hall knowing that he has done his best to live the kind of life he wanted. That’s why you have to let him go.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” Barrie asked in a strangled voice.

  “By realizing there’s no scenario in which you two can have a future together. You are bound to Watson’s Landing, and Eight will be bound to Beaufort Hall. The distance across the river might not seem very far, but it would always be there between you. One or the other of you would always be in pain. That would only get worse. The bindings will force you back to your responsibilities, and people in both families have gone crazy from the pain of that. They’ve committed suicide to escape it. If you let Eight give up his scholarship when you have no hope of a future together, he’ll have given up his dreams for nothing.”

  He finished speaking, and Barrie heard the staccato rush of her own heartbeat in her ears. An hour ago, she wouldn’t have let herself think about marrying Eight. The idea that she couldn’t, though, made her realize how much heartache she was in for.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  While she was alone upstairs, the quiet of the house wrapped around Barrie like a comfortable shirt. Comfortable, not comforting. She had too much pent-up frustration to let herself be consoled.

  Emerging from the shower in a billow of steam, she felt weighed down by gifts and obligations, by fear and loss and fury. She needed to try to speak with the Fire Carrier again. What Seven had told her made it even more important than before that she find a way to understand what was expected of her and what the binding meant.

  Wrapped in a towel, she stopped at the balcony door on her way to get her clothes. It was almost midnight, but several of the boats were still there, bobbing in the moonlight that reflected across the water. The scene was too similar to her memory: a boat and the Fire Carrier approaching, flames shooting across the water, the boat exploding, the smell of fuel burning, Wyatt and Ernesto screaming.

  Logically, Barrie knew there had been other boats before and the Fire Carrier hadn’t done anything to them. Logically, she knew he had saved her. But logic didn’t trump the memories.

  She’d had days to come to terms with how she’d seen him that night, not as the shadowed spirit of an ancient Cherokee witch but as something more. As someone real. And all along, he’d had something he wanted to tell her that he didn’t know how to communicate.

  Since that night, she’d been thinking about trying to speak to him again, but thanks to the boats and Eight, who was asleep in the room beside hers, the Fire Carrier would have to wait. After dressing hurriedly, she slipped outside to the balcony. Treading lightly to avoid the creak and groan of weathered wood, she crossed to the railing.

  The darkness whispered with night birds calling and insects droning, and the air settled around her, heavy with the sweetness of honeysuckle and magnolia and dam
p, cloying heat. All these things had been here when she’d first arrived at Watson’s Landing. Since the night the spirit in the fountain had bound her, though, sight and smell and hearing, all her senses, were more intense, as if her skin had melted away and left her raw and beating in time with the landscape.

  She didn’t need the chime of the grandfather clock downstairs to warn her.

  Orange tongues of flame appeared in the woods, the flickering glow marking the Fire Carrier’s progress to the river. He emerged in the marsh with the sphere of fire in his outstretched hands. Bending low, he unraveled it a thread at a time until the entire surface of the water had ignited and the blaze ran upriver the length of the island, and down to the creek on the far side of the Watson woods.

  Barrie held her breath, waiting for the boat to catch, to explode and send up a spray of smoke, fumes, and sharp fiberglass shards. She let the memories hit her, and they came in waves and waves.

  Nothing exploded. The boats on the river never moved, and whoever was in them showed no sign of being aware that anything magical was happening around them.

  The Fire Carrier turned to face Barrie. He gave her a silent nod, and she raised her hand and waved.

  “What does he look like?” Speaking behind Barrie, Eight made her jump.

  He stood in the doorway, shirtless with his golden skin shining with moon and flame. His hair fell across his forehead, making Barrie want to reach over and brush it away. Brush away all her doubts and the things she wished she didn’t know.

  She concentrated very hard on not wanting to talk about any of that.

  “He’s our age,” she said. “Your age, maybe. Wearing a red-and-black mask of war paint and a dark feathered cape. Not what I’d expect a witch to look like.”

  “Then maybe he’s a warrior. Or a war priest, or one in training.” Eight’s lips kicked into a lopsided smile. “Yes, I’ve been trying to read up. The Internet’s a wonderful thing.”

  “What does your dad say about him?”

  “Nothing much except that he’s yours. You’re supposed to protect the island and keep it safe, which is why you see him, and we’re supposed to know what people want so that we can guess their intentions and keep our side of the bargain.”

  “What kind of bargain?”

  Eight gave a tight and impatient shrug. “Dad claims that’s all he knows.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  Eight turned to look at her more fully. “What do you mean?”

  Barrie took a moment to choose her words, because family relationships were like rubber bands, liable to snap back against anyone who tried to stretch them. And despite the questionable choices he had made, Seven was still Eight’s father.

  “The gift has never been interrupted in your family,” she said. “So why wouldn’t all the knowledge and the reasons—the whole instruction manual for the bargains the Fire Carrier made—have been passed down to Seven? Since Pru doesn’t know anything, your father is our best chance for finding out the truth.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve tried to get him to tell me? He doesn’t want me to know.”

  “You’re not a kid. Maybe it’s time you stopped asking, and demanded that he give you answers.”

  Eight had gone still again, that uncanny stillness he wore like a mantle. The silence filled with the too-loud sounds of frogs and insects and the drum of Barrie’s heart. She waited for him to speak, to yell at her, to tell her to mind her own business.

  Instead, he said, “What is it that you are trying so hard to hide? I can’t get a read at all—except that there’s something you don’t want to tell me.”

  He crossed the balcony and leaned down beside her. With his forearms braced on the railing and his shoulder brushing hers, they were millimeters and miles apart. When she looked up, his eyes shone green and deep.

  Barrie couldn’t tell him. She had already said too much. On the other hand, the fact that he couldn’t read her gave her a little hope. Evidently, she couldn’t lie to him about what she wanted, but she could mask her wants, or at least layer them with other things she wanted.

  She turned back toward the river.

  “There are these things called boundaries,” she said. “From now on, if I don’t want to tell you something, maybe you could try respecting that. You clearly accept it with your dad. And maybe I don’t even know what I want. People frequently don’t.”

  “I can’t help knowing, any more than you can help feeling something lost. What you want is just there, like seeing colors when some people are color-blind.”

  “You told me once that you don’t like your dad’s sense of ethics. That he manipulates people—”

  “I’m not manipulating you—”

  “That’s not what I’m trying to say.” Barrie picked at a shard of cracking paint on the balcony railing and watched the boats drifting on the water. “You told me once that you didn’t want to live the way your father does, using the gift to bend the rules and maneuver people into doing what you want. I know he doesn’t do anything illegal. But what if he did something bad in another way, something you didn’t like, except he did it for good reason?” She made herself watch his reaction. “Could you forgive him?”

  “What’s this really about?” Tugging the chain of her necklace, he pulled the three Tiffany keys from beneath the baby-doll tee Barrie had thrown on with her sleep shorts. He used the chain to draw her closer. Then he slid his arms around her waist. “What did my father say to you while you walked out to the gate together?”

  “What if it was me who’d done something you didn’t like?” she said a little desperately. “Would you forgive me?”

  “Are we still being hypothetical?” Eight tipped her chin toward him and pushed her hair behind her ear, smiling to soften the words. “I suspect I could forgive you almost anything, but you were right earlier about being honest with each other. I should have told you about what was going on here when I found out. That wasn’t fair. I’ll try to be more open with you, and I hope that whatever you’ve got going on in your head—whatever happened between you and my dad—you’ll trust me enough to tell me.”

  Down on the river, the Fire Carrier had recalled the flames from the surface of the water, reeling them in and spooling them back into a fiery ball. He didn’t glance up toward the balcony again. Barrie held her breath, and felt like her lungs were burning, too. As the Fire Carrier turned to go back into the Watson woods, she used the excuse to get away from Eight. Moving to the end of the balcony, she watched while the wavering orange glow of spirit fire lit the trunks of cypress and oaks that soared toward the star-pricked sky.

  Eight came up beside her and pulled her down to sit against his lap. With his chin resting on her hair, he waited quietly while she watched the light moving deeper into the woods. Long after it had vanished and the boats on the river were all that remained to disturb them, she still didn’t want to move, or speak, or do anything to break the beauty of sitting there with Eight. Their breath came in sync, and even their hearts beat together, as if Eight could sense how hers sped up whenever they touched like this.

  She knew if she brought up Seven again, it would ruin things. Maybe it was wrong not to tell Eight, but maybe she had already said enough to make Eight go back to get answers from his father. It couldn’t hurt to wait another day and see whether that worked before she told him about the binding.

  Eventually, they both returned to their rooms.

  In the small hours of the night, Barrie woke to find flashlights moving on the shore near the charred remains of the Colesworth dock. But Cassie’s treasure was the last thing that Barrie wanted to worry about. She rolled over and went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  All the boats were gone the next morning when Barrie and Eight set off to meet Seven for Cassie’s hearing. They climbed into the Away, Eight’s pretty sailboat, with her sleek lines and the name that was a promise of his intent to get out of Watson’s Landing. Eight started the motor for the trip
to Watson’s Point. A short distance below the creek, a bald eagle plummeted from the sky to snare a fish in his talons, then flew off in a rush of wings and bubbling water. Barrie imagined she knew how the fish felt. In addition to the usual migraine, she had the same sense of impending doom at the thought of seeing her cousin.

  “Don’t worry about the hearing,” Eight said after ten minutes of making small talk and getting one-syllable answers. “Dad says the judge will ask us a few questions about how Cassie left us locked inside the tunnel and how we feel about her going to jail versus getting community service. We’ll tell him jail is good, and then we’re done.”

  Barrie would have preferred not to be going at all. Pru had remained at Watson’s Landing to have the motion detectors installed, and Barrie would much rather have stayed to help.

  After tearing off the faded orange life vest, she stowed it into the storage compartment beneath the seat. Eight bumped the Away gently against the floating walkway in the marina. He jumped out to tie off the line, and the boat rocked wildly. Barrie grasped the mast, but her fear of the water wasn’t as overwhelming anymore. The small flash ebbed as quickly as it had come, and her brief gasp was drowned in the cry of a pair of gulls squabbling over a french fry a few feet away.

  “I’m sorry.” Eight caught her hand and helped her out. His arm slipped around her waist, circling her in warmth that felt good in spite of the scalding temperature of the mid-June morning. They passed a pair of old men with faded eyes and faded T-shirts stretched tightly over rounded bellies. Each man stood with one foot braced on the gangplank of a rust-dribbled cabin cruiser that stank of fish.

  “Morning, Eight. Barrie.” One smiled while the other nodded.

  “Morning,” Eight said, which Barrie echoed, even though she’d never seen the men before. Their curiosity followed her as she passed, but it seemed no more avid or hostile than it had felt when she’d first arrived in town. Barrie really missed the cloaking fog and anonymity of San Francisco.