The man talks as we walk through the winding streets of the East Side. The early winter twilight is falling, darkness stealing its way up the hill and through the alleyways, filling in the gaps of the trees' empty branches. I sense the bright glow of the stars over my head, but I don't look up. I am focused on going to my mothers.
"I did the best I could," the man says.
I had not been cold, basking in the warmth of the stars overhead and the world clicking into sense and my mothers coming closer to me, but everything retracts somewhat, retreats at his words, and the cold of the air around me seeps through. "What do you mean?"
"It was too late by the time I got here. Your mother sent the word too late. Stubborn and in denial—you who read the prophecies, you are the best at denial. But I suppose maybe you have to be, or the weight of the possibilities—of the futures that could be—would keep you from ever locating the here and now."
Objectively, I feel like nothing he is saying should make sense. And it doesn't really. And yet like everything else since I wandered through my devastated house, it makes the most perfect kind of sense.
"By the time I got to them, the Seelies had done… Well, you'll see."
I don't like the cryptic foreboding of this.
"Who are the Seelies?" Trow asks. "Are they a gang?"
The man spares him a brief look. "Where did you get the hanger-on?"
I bristle on Trow's behalf. "This is Trow."
"You shouldn't tell me his name, my dear. It is both the most important thing about him and the least important, since I don't care. We have this well in hand, Trow. You can go now."
Trow flinches at the dismissal and says, "I'm not leaving her with you. I have no idea who you are. Neither does she. I have no idea what is going on. Neither does she. I think we should call the police."
"What would the police do with an Otherworld uprising? They lack jurisdiction."
"You're not making sense," Trow says between gritted teeth.
"Trow, it's all right," I tell him, taking his hand to try to comfort him.
"No, it's not. Who are you?" Trow demands of the man.
The man pauses, drawing himself up to his full height and looking at Trow down his nose, even though, at his full height, Trow probably has at least an inch on him. "Roger Williams," he answers.
"Oh, come on," says Trow.
The man shrugs and resumes walking.
Trow uses his hand in mine to pull me in the opposite direction. "Come on," he says. "We're going."
"No, we're not. I have to find my mothers—"
"Roger Williams, Merrow? The man who founded Rhode Island? And died in the seventeenth century? That's who's taking you to your mothers?"
"It's not exactly an unusual name," I manage.
But then the man says over his shoulder, not pausing in his strides, "But he's right. I did found this place."
Trow looks positively thunderous at that. "See?" he says.
"Wait." I let go of Trow's hand and run to catch up with the man. I hear Trow swear under his breath and catch up to me. "You can't be that Roger Williams."
"Why not? Did you know him?"
"No. I can't know him. That's the thing. He died centuries ago."
"That is a rude thing to say to me," replies the man haughtily, as if he really is offended, "seeing as how I am standing right here."
"You're dead," Trow says flatly.
"What makes you think I'm dead?" asks the man mildly.
"The fact that you lived four hundred years ago," answers Trow.
"If I died, where's my body?"
"What?"
"Where's my body? Really, you'll do anything to excuse the evidence of your own eyes. You think everyone has to die, so you think I must have died, even though no one has ever located my body. I founded this ridiculous place, created it out of nothing but some apple trees from Avalon, and you think that no one would have bothered to keep track of my final resting place?"
"They must know," Trow says vaguely, but I am thinking how I have never heard of where Roger Williams is buried.
"There was an old wives' tale that I was buried in a certain corner of a certain plot of land here in Providence. They dug 'me' up, and do you know what they found?" He glances over at us.
Trow and I both shake our heads.
"The root of an apple tree. And then they said that was me."
"They said what?" I say.
"They said the apple tree ate my body."
"Do apple trees eat bodies?" I ask.
"You are finally asking the right question. But I expect nothing less. It's the talent of those who read prophecies, to ask the right questions."
"So you're Roger Williams and you never died," says Trow sarcastically. "Why didn't you die?"
"Because I'm a good wizard, and a good wizard should be clever enough to avoid that nonsense. Here we are." He has come to a stop in front of an old Colonial house, like any number of other old Colonial houses on the East Side.
I look at it. "This is where my mothers are?"
"Yes. It was the closest house of power I could think of to bring them. Poe used to live here, you know. He wove the power of his words into the walls. Unfortunately, they're not exactly soothing words, but that's how Poe was. Couldn't get him to stop being melodramatic and fatalistic for two minutes put together."
"Poe?" echoes Trow.
"Edgar Allan Poe," Roger Williams clarifies impatiently. "What do they teach you in school these days?"
"They teach us science, as in living organisms die."
Roger Williams gives him a scathing look. "You think science isn't magic?" he says.
Which, honestly, makes the most sense of anything I've thought of yet.
Roger Williams turns to me, looking almost gentle. He has kind brown eyes. It's nice when the founder of your state turns out to be a nice guy. "What has your mother told you about home?"
This gives me pause. "Home?"
"The Otherworld."
"The other world," I echo. "Home." Aside from a few mentions here and there, she hasn't really told me much about it, but that doesn't matter, because it's always felt like home to me, this mysterious other world she used to talk about, and now here is confirmation that it is.
From a man who should have died four hundred years ago, but really, complaining about that would be a little bit like killing the messenger.
Kind of.
"And has she told you about the Seelies?" Roger Williams continues.
"The who?"
"Oh dear." He looks concerned now. He glances toward the house and back to me. "This is… Perhaps I should…"
"Where are they?" I demand. "Are they in there? I want to see them."
"Merrow, you have to know that—"
I ignore him. Now that I am so close to my mothers, I need to see them, make sure they're all right.
I march right up to the door and into the house.
My mothers are anything but all right. Mother is lying on the couch in the living room, as still as death. And Mom is sitting on the floor beside the couch, curled into a tiny ball, wailing.