The River of No Return

beginning to understand about your boyfriend,” Nick said, “he kept Julia in the dark about everything. His lies don’t prove anything about either the ring or Julia. They only prove that he was a pig-headed old man—”
    But Alva wasn’t listening. She was staring at the ring, and she looked as if she might faint.
    “What? What is it?”
    “Oh, dear God,” Alva said, and raised her still, shocked face to Nick’s.
    “Tell me!”
    “It was not Ignatz Vogelstein’s eyes I recognized in Julia’s,” Alva said, her voice a trembling thread. “I was led astray by the brown color of them and the familiarity of her gestures. The ring did belong to her mother, Nick. Julia is not Ignatz’s granddaughter. She is Arkady’s.”
    * * *
    The marquess rose up like a wall of fire at Alva’s words, enraged by the suggestion that the woman he intended to marry was not legitimate, was not English. But Nick met that rage with his own, and he simply reached inside and pinched the marquess out like a puny candle flame.
    He knew in his bones that it was true. Julia was Eréndira’s daughter.
    It made Julia’s isolation, her danger, and his own fear for her more tangible. She was alone, and she had no idea who she was. The man she had loved as a grandfather had tried to protect her by wrapping her up in a tissue of lies, and her blood grandfather, Arkady, was hell-bent on . . . Nick swallowed. He was hell-bent on harming her, perhaps even killing her.
    “All right then,” Nick said, taking a deep breath. “Julia is Eréndira’s daughter. She is the Talisman. Can that new information shed any light on what might have happened to her?”
    But Alva was frantically trying to make sense of the new revelation. “Eréndira had no children when I knew her,” Alva said. “She was young. She took on lovers like she took on ideas: fully, passionately—and then she moved on. But when she returned to us, dying of wounds I could not see? She had aged in her time across the Pale. She must have had a child and given it to Ignatz. And he must have hidden it. An hour after her death Ignatz disappeared to Devon, only to return to London now and then, and only as the Earl of Darchester. It wasn’t long after he left that we heard he was raising an orphaned granddaughter.”
    “But how does it follow that Julia is a human talisman? What does that even mean?”
    “It means Peter was right.” Alva scowled. “Which she usually is, damn it. She told me that the Talisman would have a jagged edge, that it was broken. That it was one half of a desperate promise with the unknown.”
    “There is nothing broken about Miss Percy,” Jemison said.
    “Her terrible birth—that’s what I’m thinking of,” Alva said. “What if she was born across the Pale? Or born in her mother’s violent transition back? She was torn into this world, don’t you see? Torn from another world. An orphan, a foundling . . . her very brilliance a threat to her life.”
    Jemison shrugged. “Sounds like the human condition.”
    “If you’re right,” Nick said, “Julia was conceived, or carried, or born in a world where time is moving backward. Perhaps she has some hidden knowledge about the Pale, hidden even from herself? Or some power? Something so powerful that Ignatz decided to bury it away and hope it never surfaced?”
    “Yes,” Alva said musingly. “Eréndira brought her back here, back to this forward-moving time—a talismanic connection to that other world, torn from one time and given to another. Eréndira died of the effort it took to return, or of complications from childbirth—and she put little Julia into the arms of her teacher, not her father. Ignatz went to great lengths to hide Julia from Arkady. Which must mean that Eréndira and Ignatz both feared what the Guild would make of Julia.”
    “But the Guild wants to turn the Pale back, too,” Nick said. “For all that you hate them, they are more misguided than evil. And how different was Julia’s life with Ignatz from life in the Guild? The Guild relies on ignorance to keep their power. They lie to us and keep us happy with money. Well, isn’t that what Ignatz did to Julia? Raised her as an earl’s granddaughter and told her nothing at all? He might have been a great Ofan teacher, but he used Guild methods to control her. I think . . .” Nick took the copper ring from Alva’s fingers and turned it so that he could see the motif of the eye in the circle. “I think