Free The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod Page B

Dust sparkled up from the struck strings.
    ‘I’m really quite glad I came here,’ I said.
    ‘Hmm …’ Annalise was humming, scarcely listening.
    ‘Now I know people like you don’t just go to Northallerton.’ She closed the lid with a bang.
    ‘I think you’d better get back to your mother.’
    I scurried after Annalise down corridors and stairways. Inside Mistress Summerton’s study, tobacco smoke hung in weary drapes around the plants. It seemed as if my mother and Mistress Summerton had long been sitting in silence.
    ‘We really must be going.’ My mother climbed slowly from the chair. I saw from the glistening trails that lay across her face that she’d been crying. ‘You see, there’s the last train ..
    ‘Of course, of course …’ Mistress Summerton stood up also, smiling with a flash of her glasses, and my mother and I were wafted from the room and back into the big main hallway where the engine ice still glimmered and sparkled through doorways with a faint inner light. I looked around for Annalise, but she had already vanished.
    The two figures, my mother stooped, little Mistress Summerton as strange and alive as the house itself, regarded each other across the distance of their vastly different existences. Then, in a gesture that was rare even between people of the same family in those times of physical reserve, Mistress Summerton stepped forward and took my mother in her small brown arms. In a way, I was almost as shocked by this embrace as I was by anything I had seen on this magical Fourshiftday. And it seemed to me that the two figures merged; or rather, that Mistress Summerton encompassed them both, spreading across the hall and growing briefly vast in a beating of wings.
    ‘There …’ Mistress Summerton stepped back and reached to touch my mother’s forehead, muttering something more, wordless words which ran high quick and clear as a guildsman’s spell. Then she turned to me, fixing me with the gaze of her glasses, which filled with swirling light.
    ‘You must take care of your mother,’ she said, although her lips barely moved. I can feel a strength in you, Robert. And hope. Keep that hope, Robert. Keep it for as long as you can … Will you do that for me?
    I nodded.
    Mistress Summerton smiled. Her strange gaze travelled through me.
    ‘Goodbye.’
    I looked back at the house as my mother and I walked down the white driveway. The crystal growth seemed more like the honey-glow of twilight now. And above it all, the stars were forming. One, shimmering low ahead of us in the west, was a deep, dark red.
    My mother grabbed my arm.
    ‘Don’t tell Beth or your father about today,’ she muttered. ‘You know what he’s like …’
    I nodded, thinking of Mistress Summerton’s words.
    ‘And take this basket—I don’t see why I should have to carry it all the way!’
    I carried the empty picnic basket for my mother as we hurried to catch the last train from Tatton Halt.

V
    L IVING THE HARD AND ORDINARY LIFE we lived on Coney Mound, torn as I was between past and future wonders, my mother hardly needed to have asked me not to speak to anyone about our visit to Redhouse. Naturally, I was hungry to keep my own secret portion of this world, particularly if it lay beyond Bracebridge. So I bore my burden—along with the bright images of that day; Annalise, Mistress Summerton—in silence, although, as I wandered the town, my head was filled with questions which had previously never troubled me.
    Down in Bracebridge market square, I found a patch of especially cracked and weathered old stone where the stocks had stood, and where, before that, and in the chaos of the First Age, changelings might once have been burnt before we learned how to tame and capture them. And rummaging through the town public library, sniffling over dank pages, I searched for G for Goldenwhite, U for Unholy, R for Rebellion, and C for changeling. But what was a changeling? All the talk of green vans and Northallerton