The River of No Return

were arranged around the fire in a circle, and Nick was sleeping at Julia’s feet. Sometime in the night she had felt Nick’s hand creep under her blankets and find her bare foot. He’d slept holding it. He held it now. It was as if she were a kite, and he was holding the string, so that she wouldn’t fly up and up until she disappeared.
    She looked at her hands, and at the copper ring she now wore on the little finger of her left hand. Her mother’s ring . . . but not the mother she had thought she had. A mother and no known father, and a new grandfather . . . a terrifying Russian grandfather whom she hated. A grandfather who wanted to kill her. She twisted the ring around so that the eye in the circle could be seen. Another ancestor she had never imagined, a long-ago grandfather, had made this ring, across the seas, before Europeans had even known that the world was round or that half the world still lay over the western horizon.
    Half the world.
    Julia closed her eyes. That long-ago grandfather had been P’urhé . . . she couldn’t even recall the name of the country in which he had lived. But it meant that Julia wasn’t legitimate, or the descendant of earls. Indeed, she didn’t even belong in the nineteenth century. Her mother had been a woman whom Bertrand had described as possessed of a flaming courage and an astonishing intelligence: the very woman she had seen in the strange painting that Eamon had shown her, the woman he had called a mulatto. It meant that Julia had been born in the future, born in a terrible future, and that her mother had probably died to save her from it. Her mother had put her in the hands of a beloved and brilliant teacher, Ignatz Vogelstein, né the Earl of Darchester . . . Grandfather. Julia clenched her fists against that word, Grandfather . How much had Ignatz Vogelstein known? How much had he hidden from her?
    The four of them had stayed up talking, putting more logs on the fire. Julia had spent those hours propped between Nick’s legs, his arms around her, her head leaning back against his chest. The things she learned had been terrible, but they had also relieved her. It had been wonderful, simply to ask questions and to have them answered.
    She had learned about the Guild and the River of Time. That it was possible to jump forward and backward along the stream. She learned about what the Guild did and what the Ofan hoped to achieve. She had been told about Mr. Mibbs and Jem Jemison, and Nick had talked about how he must learn to jump and go after his comrade-in-arms. Bertrand had said that was ridiculous, and Nick had said it wasn’t up for discussion.
    For a long time they had talked about her childhood, and the four of them had pieced together how Grandfather must have kept her talent from her. She had told them about what she could do without ever having jumped. They had been very excited. She was more special than they’d even guessed. Apparently they thought it was impossible to turn time itself backward or forward, and yet she had done both, untrained and without having first jumped.
    They made her describe it several times. How at the dinner table she had reversed time and Eamon had melted back to his seat. How at Grandfather’s deathbed he had sped time up . . . no, she had sped time up, and the dust had blown in the light, and Grandfather’s death had come just in time to save him from Eamon’s taunts. She offered to show the Ofan then and there, but when she started to push time back her head began to hurt. So instead they had talked about the plan, about how to make it seem as if she were nobody at all, certainly not the Talisman and not even an Ofan. Just an ordinary young woman—a “Natural.” Bertrand had looked at her with that green, commanding gaze and said that she must prepare herself to learn a great deal, and quickly. They would use the next few days, as they rode across country to Blackdown, to develop a plan and teach her what she needed to know.
    Finally Bertrand said he thought they should stop talking about serious things—they should be celebrating. He believed he might have a bottle of wine in his saddlebags. There was cheering, and then there was drinking, the bottle passed from hand to hand. Nick and Leo relived some adventures they’d had when they were in school together in South America, including a triumph at something called an “eighties talent show.” Apparently their victory had involved singing a song