Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) by Freda Warrington Read Free Book Online Page B

their distance. Daniel was different: gentle, nervous and equally inexperienced. They discovered pleasure together, until their bond faded naturally back into friendship again.
    Did he have other girlfriends? Surely no one special; no one she could remember. Since leaving college, Stevie had had occasional brief affairs, all of which she’d ended because she never felt at ease. She’d concluded she must be too unconventional or damaged to connect with “normal” people. Perhaps both she and Danny were simply too weird to sustain a proper relationship.
    Stevie made to get out of bed, but paused, recalling something else. His painting style had changed radically after he’d met her, or so he claimed. “I drew anything and everything,” he’d told her, “but I had no real direction. Once I met you, though … I can’t explain. It’s like you give off an aura and my head’s suddenly full of images that are really important, even though no one understands them, least of all me.”
    Thanks , she thought, since you weren’t painting pretty portraits of me. No, it was grotesque stuff like saints with snake heads, angels with lion paws and beaks—images that made your lecturers shake their heads in despair.
    Some muse I was. No, Dan, you had no business trying to shift the credit for your bizarre visions onto me. Credit or blame, whichever—it wasn’t my doing.
    She decided that when she found him she was going to tell him exactly that.
    “So what’s going on, Danifold?” she murmured. Reluctantly she pushed back the bedcovers and felt the chill of the air. “What’s happened to you?”
    *   *   *
    The watery world of the dream haunted her as she took a barely warm shower and dried off. How frustrating, that she rarely dreamed of anything more pleasant than drowning. “Aquaphobia” was the official term for her fear of water, a doctor had once told her, although his simplistic diagnosis didn’t begin to cover what she felt.
    She chose a calf-length patchwork dress in blue-green shades, adding a thick jade-colored cardigan. Once dressed and sipping a mug of tea, Stevie finally stopped shivering. She smudged kohl on her eyelids and worked at her knotty hair until it was more a flow of russet-amber ripples, and less of a fright wig. Perhaps she should trim it to jaw-length, like Fin’s, if only to save five minutes of pain and swearing in the morning.
    But her hair was part of her, a kind of veil that gave her both identity and camouflage.
    She hung strands of rough-tumbled beads around her neck: orange carnelian and turquoise. The color clash pleased her. She added silver gem-set rings that she’d made herself, and bracelets with dangling charms. Her spectral cat, like a tiny leopard, lay watching her from the bed with its claws digging into the duvet.
    The water dream had been unusually intense. The triptych, the sudden reminders of Daniel and the past, awoke feelings she was always trying to bury.
    By eight-thirty, Stevie was down in the museum shop, counting money into the till, firing up the computer, ensuring all was neat and ready for opening time. She checked the upstairs gallery, where examples of metalcraft stood on display behind glass: jugs, trophies, world globes, even a model battleship hammered from silver and gold. Her favorites were five skeleton clocks, each one unique, with their inner workings of cogs and spindles revealed like elegant kinetic sculptures.
    She unlocked the doors to the factory, poked her head in and said, “Good morning,” to the ghosts. No apparitions were visible, but she greeted them anyway, out of courtesy and a mild dash of superstition.
    Back in the gift shop, she entered the exhibition space, put out fresh piles of leaflets and tacked up a poster advertising a jazz concert. The clockmaker’s bench in one corner was her addition. However, one of the staff, Alec, was a lifelong clock-obsessive and often requisitioned her workspace. To her annoyance, he was