The Dream Weavers by Barbara Erskine (books you have to read txt) 📕

way. She said it would take three and a half hours at this time of day, and I bet she doesn’t stop unless it’s to top up with coffee every half hour. She’s coming to collect you and bring you back, and to be honest, Sis, you’d better come otherwise it will be awful for Dad and probably Bea too. She seems to have it in her head that Bea is some kind of Satanic abuser.’

Emma handed the phone to her father. ‘You’d better speak to him.’ Tears were pouring down her cheeks again.

Bea reached over to put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘It’ll be OK,’ she whispered.

Emma shook her head. ‘It won’t.’

They watched as Simon stood up and put the phone to his ear. As he listened to his son’s impassioned plea, he walked through the sitting room to stand outside on the terrace, looking across the valley.

When the call ended, he sat down on the wall without a word, deep in thought.

‘Can I come and stay with you?’ Emma whispered to Bea.

‘No, sweetheart, I don’t think so. Not at this point.’ Even without Simon’s confirmation of the way it had gone, Bea had gathered the gist of the conversation. ‘We have to agree to whatever your mum and dad decide is best for now. Until your exams are over. It may be we can arrange something for the summer holidays.’ They had followed Simon outside.

‘I hate my mother!’ Emma’s anguished cry pierced her father’s introspection. He looked up. ‘She means well, Em. She’s worried about your future. It’s very hard for her to understand what has been going on. To be honest, it’s hard for everyone to understand.’ He glanced at Bea.

Bea exhaled sharply. ‘Even me. We can put all this on hold, Emma. It’s up to you. You can stop all this happening, now, and you would find that much easier to do if you went back to London, I promise you.’

‘But I can’t leave him. I have to explain. I have to make him understand.’

‘Him?’ Simon’s fists were clenched on his knees, his knuckles white. ‘Who is this him?’

‘Elisedd, of course.’

‘And you expect your mother to understand that? That you are besotted with a twelve-hundred-year-old man!’

Emma smiled. ‘Don’t be silly, Dad.’

Simon looked at Bea in despair. ‘You have to talk some sense into her.’

‘No! She doesn’t,’ Emma retorted. ‘Don’t you understand, Dad, this is real. I’m not making it up! I’m talking about a real person.’

‘And you have to respect that person’s wishes,’ Bea put in sternly. ‘And he does not want to see you, Emma. Not at the moment, perhaps never. And you are bound by your honour as a healer and a traveller between the worlds to respect that.’

Emma looked at her, stunned. ‘A healer? Me?’

‘Yes, a healer. You may not choose to use your gifts of healing, but that’s what this is all about. You are not toying with the affections of some boy from school, you are dealing with very real adult pain and anguish, pain so dreadful it has lasted many lifetimes, and you have to respect that. If you can’t do that, you and I are finished. I can’t teach you any more.’

There was a long silence. Emma walked away from them and stood staring out across the valley as her father had done earlier. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last.

It was grudging but Bea thought it was sincere. ‘So am I. We will get there, Emma. But not now, OK?’ She hated herself for speaking so sharply but it seemed to be the only way to get through to her.

Emma nodded. She couldn’t trust herself to speak.

39

They used to come to this forest sometimes when she was a child, Bea and her mother and her father. It had been a wild, special place, full of magic; a place where she could imagine fairies and elves and all kinds of woodland sprites and trees that whispered and talked high above her head as she hid amongst the bushes playing hide and seek with her father, while her mother found a clearing where she could spread out the rug and unpack the picnic basket.

Bea pulled into the car park and peered through the windscreen. There were a few other cars there, but not many, and the woodland tracks leading off into the distance were empty of people. She opened the door and stepped out. Only a few minutes’ walk along the track and she was out of sight of the cars and alone in a forest that had been there since the days of Offa, probably centuries before him. This would have been the kind of place Nesta was born and brought up, the place she would have learned her magic. She stopped and looked round. A narrow path led off to her right, winding off amongst the bushes. A huge branch had fallen from one of the oak trees in the winter gales and lay across the clearing in front of her. She paused and then quietly she sat down on it and waited. The birds came first, a nuthatch peering at her with beady eyes from the trunk of an ash tree, a thrush calling from the top of a tree, and then a robin, head to one side, hopping closer, wondering if she had brought crumbs. Nesta was standing by the trunk of the oak, half in shadow as she waited, swathed in a shawl the colour of lichen.

‘I need to talk to you,’ Bea said quietly. ‘I knew you would be here.’

Nesta moved towards her and sat down on the branch beside her. Her weight did not register as she moved closer, the unfurling leaves motionless in the still air. Close to she had an uncomfortably powerful energy field, cool and green and nebulous.

‘You never told me. In your wanderings, did you ever find Elisedd?’

Nesta smiled. ‘Eadburh was not the only one to dream. In his heart, at night when he