The River of No Return

entitled “Islands in the Stream.” Julia insisted on hearing the song, and it didn’t take much encouragement to get Nick and Leo on their feet. She expected it to be bawdy, but it turned out to be very pretty, with clever harmonies. Julia liked the pace and rhythm, but Bertrand almost drowned out the singers with his groans and laughter. Perhaps it was the way they performed it; for some reason each man held a fist up in front of his mouth, and leaned into it, staring into the other’s eyes as he warbled. When they were done they demanded a song of her, and before she knew it Julia found herself deep into an off-key rendition of “Gude Wallace.” At first her audience listened politely enough, but really, Julia could not carry a tune, and before long Nick and Leo had their hands over their ears. After three verses Bertrand took pity and joined her. His voice was as rich and as strong as chestnut honey, and with someone to follow she was able to do better. When the last notes had faded, Julia replaced herself in the circle of Nick’s arms, and they all sat again around the fire, staring into its glowing heart and thinking their own thoughts.
    “Does Mr. Mibbs want to take me back across the Pale?” Julia sent her question out into the crackling silence. She felt a wave of some complicated emotion travel around the pool of light. Fear, sadness, hope, and anger.
    “We don’t know,” Leo said, after a moment.
    “You really don’t know, or is that your way of saying ‘don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow’?”
    “‘Don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow,’” Bertrand murmured. “Ignatz said that almost every day.”
    “Yes, every day,” Julia agreed, and heard the bitterness in her voice.
    “You have every right to hate him for what he hid from you,” Bertrand said. “It enrages me, too. But still, he was a great man. He saved my life and taught me how to live it once he’d saved it.”
    “Tell me about him.” Julia leaned in. “About Ignatz, not Ignatius.”
    Bertrand leaned in, too, so that Julia felt it was just the two of them, their faces red in the light of the dying fire. “You have a great deal of Ignatz in you, Julia Percy, for all that you are not related to him by blood. He gave you many gifts.”
    “I have his temper,” Julia said.
    Bertrand smiled. “That is a gift and a curse.”
    “I know.”
    Bertrand poked the fire. “Ignatius Percy was the second son of the Earl of Darchester. He jumped when he was nineteen years old, in the aftermath of the Massacre of Devil’s Hole. Something to do with Seneca warriors behind him and Niagara Falls in front of him. Very dramatic.”
    Leo snorted. “It wasn’t a massacre,” he said. “It was a battle. And the battleground is at least three miles from the falls.”
    Bertrand inclined his head in Leo’s direction. “Battle,” he said, then turned back to Julia with a smile. “Whatever the truth of his story, Ignatius jumped, and he found himself in the state of New York of the 1930s. The Guild never detected him. Soon enough he connected with the Ofan and learned how to return to his era. His elder brother died and he became the earl. He lived his life half in his own natural time and half in late-twentieth-century Brazil, working with the Ofan host there. But he traveled all up and down the river. I first met him in England in the late 1530s, when he was around twenty-eight years old. I later got to know him better in Brazil, when he was in his forties. For me, it had been only a difference of two years.”
    “Is that when you’re from? The sixteenth century?” Leo sounded eager for the answer, but Bertrand merely glanced across at him before returning his focus to Julia.
    “As I was saying, I spent time with him in Brazil in the twenty-first century. But the twenty-first century is a bad time for Ofan activity. The Guild is very strong in the computer era, and it is difficult to hide. And once Eréndira—your mother—disappeared over the Pale, Ignatz fell apart. He was a passionate man. Swayed by his desires, his loves, his griefs. He lost control.”
    “I cherished that in him!” Julia felt the fire hot on her face and realized she was leaning ever closer to Bertrand. “Do not say that his passion was a weakness.”
    “I do not say it.” The Frenchman’s green gaze cooled her, and she leaned back. “It takes all kinds, Julia. All kinds. Do you think that because I am one kind of man, I judge other kinds?”
    “I