The River of No Return

and history. Then you can join the Ofan. For God’s sake, you could leave today, spend six years getting an education, and come back here tomorrow, grown up and with some real scholarship to back up your brilliance. You would be of much more use to us!”
    The girl’s face fell. “I’m not going to do that, Alva, and you know why! My mother—”
    Miss Blomgren held up a hand, and Peter closed her mouth. “I don’t want to go there, Peter. Not again. And what about the Talisman? You got me to listen to this diatribe by saying that your little wooden stick there had something to do with the Talisman.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Well, what about it?”
    “You mean I didn’t say?” Peter laughed. “Oh, my God. That’s the whole point. It’s the tally stick. Tally, talisman—it’s the same word, at root!”
    “That’s it. That’s your revelation. Tally sounds like talisman .”
    “Yes.”
    Miss Blomgren exploded. “That’s all? Do you understand that the Pale is going to destroy us? Do you understand that if the Talisman exists, it might be the only thing that can stop it, or even help us discover what it is? Your semantics, your three months making friends with teenagers from ye olde days? How the hell is that supposed to help us in the future?”
    Peter went very still in the face of Miss Blomgren’s anger. Then, when it was over, she took a deep breath and her voice took on an adult gravity. “Please think about it, Alva. A talisman is just like a tally stick, or a symbolon. Except that it isn’t about a debt of money or goods. A talisman is a symbol of the relationship between humans and the supernatural. The relationship of interdependence, of mutual debt, between human beings and the unknown. Gods, or ancestors, or even the future. So, like, yin-yang is that kind of talisman. Or like when a fairy gives you a magical jewel in exchange for your baby.”
    Miss Blomgren shook her head slowly. “Do not go all fairies and warlocks on me, Peter. I can’t take it.”
    “No.” The girl put up a hand. “Stop treating me like a child and listen. A tally is a calculation of human debt. A talisman is one half of a magical deal between humans and otherness. The talisman that we see and can hold might be a word or a symbol or a stone or something. The other half is usually your soul or your firstborn child or something really horrifying like that.”
    Julia swallowed; her throat was so dry it was painful. A talisman. A magical character. A mark, a stamp, a representation. A symbol. But . . . she was just a young woman from Devon. She wasn’t one half of a deal with the devil.
    For her part, Miss Blomgren shook her head. “I need to wake these two girls up and get on with my day, Peter. We’re done here.”
    Peter grabbed Miss Blomgren’s hand as she moved away. “When we’re looking for the Talisman, we’re looking for half of something. At least get that through your head. Something that’s been torn or broken. Some sort of relic of a really intense debt that was never paid, and so now the Pale is coming to kill us all. Who knows what the hell this Talisman is—but I bet you when we find it, it has a jagged edge.”
    * * *
    Julia would have reversed time as she had when Eamon tried to kill her and started it again a few seconds before Peter had appeared in the room. But for some reason Miss Blomgren and Peter didn’t think to do that. They got back into the positions they had been in when Miss Blomgren first froze time, and then Miss Blomgren started it up again. Julia did her best to come to life as if in mid-gesture, but she felt very awkward. Luckily she had been feeling very awkward before, when all she knew about Miss Blomgren was that she was Nick’s lover. Now she knew much, much more, and was even less confident about what steps she should take. Meanwhile, Miss Blomgren explained to Julia and Bella that “Petra” was a servant who had thought it would be a good joke to dress up and surprise her mistress; she had snuck in the door. Hadn’t the girls heard her enter? No? Well, Petra was a tricky one.
    Peter, much less gracefully, played the part of the contrite subordinate and left as quickly as she had arrived, but using her feet and the door this time.
    When Peter was gone, Miss Blomgren didn’t mention tea and lemon cake again, nor did she try to hide that she was suddenly in a bad mood. “Time for you to go,” she said, and made short work of bustling Julia and Bella out of her