Read Online Newford Stories by Charles De Lint - Free Book Online Page B

then he
looked at Meran and left the room.
    “We were promised sweets,” Maida said.
    Zia nodded. “The actual promise was that
there’d be mountains of them.”
    “Do you mind if we finish up here first?”
Meran asked.
    “Oh, no,” Maida said. “We love to wait.”
    Zia gave Meran a bright smile.
“Honestly.”
    “Anticipation is so much better than being
attentive.”
    “Though they’re much the same, in some
ways.”
    “Because they both involve waiting, you
see,” Maida explained, her smile as bright as her companion’s.
    Meran stifled a sigh and returned their
smile. She’d forgotten how maddening the crow girls could be.
Normally she enjoyed bantering with their tricksy kind, but at the
moment she was too worried about Jilly to join the fun. And then
there was the stranger whose appearance had started it all. They
hadn’t even begun to deal with him.
    When Cerin returned with the roseharp, he
sat down on a footstool and drew the instrument onto his lap.
    “Play something Jilly,” Maida suggested.
    “Did you say silly?” Zia asked. “Because
that’s not being serious at all, you know, making jokes about very
serious things.”
    “I didn’t say silly.”
    “I think maybe you did.”
    Cerin ignored the pair of them and turned to
his wife. “I might not be able to bring her back,” he said.
“Because of him. Because of the doors he can close.”
    “I know,” Meran said. “You can only
try.”
     
    - 5 -
     
    “I think I know now what the crow girls
meant,” Jilly said.
    The buffalo man raised his eyebrows
questioningly.
    “About this ill will business,” Jilly
explained. “Every ugly thought or bad deed you come into contact
with steals away a piece of your vitality, doesn’t it? It’s like
erosion. The pieces keep falling away until finally you get so worn
away that you slip into a kind of coma.”
    “Something like that.”
    “Has this happened before?”
    He nodded.
    “So what happens next?”
    “I die.”
    Jilly stared at him, not sure she’d heard
him right.
    “You…die.”
    He nodded. “And then I come back and the
cycle begins all over again.”
    Neither of them spoke for a long moment
then. It was quiet in the alley where they sat, but Jilly could
hear the traffic go by down the block where the alley opened on to
the street. There was a repetitive pattern to the sound: bus, bus,
a car horn, a number of vehicles in a group, then the buses
again.
    “I guess what I don’t understand,” Jilly
finally said, “is why all the good things in the world don’t
balance it out—you know, recharge your vitality.”
    “They’re completely overshadowed,” he
said.
    Jilly shook her head. “I don’t believe that.
I know there are awful things in the world, but I also know there’s
more that’s good.”
    “Then why am I so weak right now, in this,
your season of goodwill?”
    “I think it’s because you don’t let the good
in anymore. You don’t trust there to be any good left, so you’ve
put up these protective walls that keep it out.”
    “And the bad? Why does it continue to affect
me?”
    “Because you concentrate on it,” Jilly said.
“And by doing that, you let it get in. It’s like you’re doing the
exact opposite to what you should be doing.”
    “If only it could be so simple.”
    “But it is,” she said. “In the end, it
always comes down to small, simple things because that’s the way
the world really works. We’re the ones who make it so complicated.
I mean, think about it. If everybody really and truly treated each
other the way they’d want to be treated, all the problems of the
world would be solved. Nobody would starve, because nobody’d want
to go hungry themselves. Nobody would steal, or kill, or hurt each
other, because they wouldn’t want that to happen to
themselves.”
    “So what stops them from doing so?” he
asked.
    “Trust. Or rather a lack of it. Too many
people don’t trust the other person to treat them right, so they
just