Erik looked far worse than when she'd seen him last. Thinner. Vaguer. But he'd lost none of his self-control, didn't turn a hair when raven allowed him to see a flicker of her real eyes in the face of another of his guards. He continued to ignore her until they were alone, when the other guard left to go and get a coffee. Raven knelt by the plate glass, and as he met her gaze, she let the disguise fall away, let him really see her. He blinked, startled. But before he could say anything, she held up a hand to forestall him.
"You were right, Erik. You were right about everything."
He heard her out in silence, as she relayed in a low, leaden voice as quickly as possible everything that had happened since she had seen him last. Karol. Trask. Azazel. When she was done, she looked at him and muttered "You can say you told me so. Go on."
Erik shook his head, passed a hand over his face.
"Be honest Raven – is there anything I could say to you that would make you feel any worse? Or come to that, any better?"
She shook her head slowly. In spite of himself, he didn't like what he could see in her expression – the annihilation of hope. It's what she needed, what a true soldier needed, to be able to fight for a future they had no expectation of seeing. But it isn't what Charles would have wanted; not for Raven.
"Where is the child now?" he asked. She shook her head.
"I can't say. Not even to you. But he's safe, at least for a little while. I have to go back to him soon."
Erik nodded approvingly; she was learning true caution – too late for Azazel, but maybe in time to save herself and the boy.
"What will you do now?"
She shook her head.
"I don't know. But I know we can't go on like this. I can't go on like this. Not with Karol." She leaned closer, and he saw her dull eyes blaze with sudden fire.
"I'm going to find Trask. I'm going to kill him. I have to. And I can't do what I have to do with a child." She sighed, rested her chin on her knees.
"I said you were right, Erik. You told me Azazel and I couldn't be soldiers and parents too. I always did have to learn everything the hard way. But now I know what I have to do, who I have to be, and Karol won't be safe with me. He'd be better off… somewhere else. With someone else."
Charles, Erik thought. She's going to take the boy to Charles. It was the obvious choice. But why had Raven come to him first? Did she want his blessing or something?
Raven seemed to follow his train of thought. Her mouth twisted down.
"Not Charles. I can't do that any more, Erik. He still thinks these people can be our allies. He doesn't understand what they are, what they do. And he wouldn't understand what I have to do. He'd try to stop me. He could stop me if he wanted to. I can't let that happen."
She looked down at him questioningly.
"And that's why I'm here. I need your help, Erik. Before, when I told you I was pregnant, you were talking about giving Karol up. You must have had some idea back then where you were thinking of. Who?"
Erik hesitated. In spite of the air of business-like purpose Raven was seeking to bring to this discussion, he sensed the shell for what it was – infinitely fragile, covering a welter of pain and loss and fury and fear. Azazel's death had torn a hole of guilt in her, which she was desperate to fill with vengeance. What he told her next could allow her to go down the path she'd chosen; but would it be a path she'd look back down in years to come and blame him for the choice she had made, the sacrifice? Would Charles?
"Come on, Erik. We don't have much time. I need this. We need this."
Erik shut his eyes. So be it.
"I know a woman. She can hide the child for you. She'd do it for me. I knew her – before. In the camp."
Raven started.
"I didn't know you had any friends in the camp."
Erik shook his head.
"Margali wasn't a friend, not really. She was… we were allies. Of sorts. We were both… different. Mutants. You might say that Shaw brought us together."
Raven frowned.
"But Charles… he said that you thought you were the only one like you."
Erik shook his head.
"I thought I was the only one like me left. I thought Margali had died in the camps, like everybody else. She thought I was too. It was only when I left the mansion, started trying to recruit to the Brotherhood that she resurfaced, made contact. It was before you came to us."
Raven instinctively frowned, and he tone was dismissive, scornful.
"But she wouldn't join the fight? What makes you think that Karol would be safe with her?"
Erik gave a short laugh.
"No, she wouldn't join the fight, not Margali. But it's not what you think, not cowardice. Or some delusional belief that we can one day live in peace. Margali is as far from an idealist as it's possibly to get. The Nazis will do that to a person. But her people are in many ways a lot like mine, Raven; fatalistic, pragmatic. And whereas my people live in the past, hers care only about today.
"She didn't believe me when I say a reckoning is coming between our kind and humans. She said that men had been declaring the end of the world since long before her grandfather was born, and yet the caravan keeps rolling on. She thought I was forcing a battle that need not be, that we could not win, and she didn't want any part of it. "There are still so many places to hide in plain sight," she said. "And when they come for me and my family, we won't be there any more.""
Erik sighed.
"It's different for her, I suppose. Before the Nazis, my family was respectable, middle class, safe. Oh there was always a pogrom in some far off place, always the jokes and the assumptions by gentiles, but for the most part, we felt just the same as anybody else in Dusseldorf. What happened to us was a shock. But the gypsies? Every hand's been turned against them in every country since the dawn of time. What we call the Shoah, they call the porajmos – 'the devouring'. But while the Jews are still reeling from it decades later, the gypsies simply hand it down to their children as an object lesson and carry on. Survival isn't just a skill for them, it's a way of life. You can trust Margali to protect your boy."
Raven nodded slowly.
"OK then. Fine. So how do I find her? And more importantly, how do I convince her to help me when I do? From what you say, she doesn't sound like the kind of woman who'll take anything I say on trust."
Erik nodded.
"You're not wrong there. But Margali has a soft spot for mutant children. If you can get her to listen to you, I'm sure she'll agree to take him. She's part of a travelling circus, Der Münchner Circus – find the circus and you'll find her. Getting close to her will be the hard part – she has a gift for concealment and misdirection, as you will see. But you're resourceful, Raven. You'll find a way. When you do, tell her I sent you. And tell her… 23917. Say it back to me."
Raven frowned.
"23917?"
Erik nodded.
"She'll know what it means. She'll trust you then. And I truly believe she'll help you. Although don't expect tea and sympathy. She really isn't that kind of woman."
Raven walked briskly through Union Station in the skin of a briefcase-carrying businessman with halitosis and a pot belly, someone no-one would want to engage in idle conversation. She rode the escalator into the bowels of the station, and taking out her key, unlocked the storage locker at the end of a shadowy row.
Karol was lying bound and gagged on the floor of the suitcase-sized locker, and his eyes lit up with relief when he saw her. As quickly and gently as she could, she untied him, untied the rag covering his mouth. He looked at her almost accusingly.
"Don't like this game, mam'chka!" But he huddled against her anyway, obediently wrapping all four limbs around her middle as she manifested long, drooping coat sleeves to cover him up and the unkempt, malodorous disguise of a city tramp.
"I know. I'm sorry. I promise, we won't ever play that game again."
She could hear the strange new timbre in her voice when she spoke to him, an almost decorous reserve that had never been there before she had made the bleak decision to give him up. It was as if she was trying to subconsciously prepare him for the separation that was to come, to start distancing herself now to ease the pain then. But Karol was not co-operating, and the more she tried to resist her instinctive need to respond to his need, the more clingy and demanding he became. She couldn't imagine, even now, how she would ever leave him behind. How he would ever forgive her.
Better if he just forgets, she thought, as she stumbled muttering through the crowds toward the rented motel room downtown. Better if he never remembers me, or Azazel, or that he could have saved his father but didn't.
She shook herself at that, hating to hear that thought still bobbing to the surface of her mind like a corpse that wouldn't sink. It wasn't his fault, she reminded herself bitterly. It was yours. But if Karol had only teleported before they left the compound… If Azazel had only known they were safe… If only. That was the thought she kept circling back to, that was why when she tried to hold and comfort her child when he woke up damp and screaming from nightmares of men with guns hurting his mother, when he trailed her like a shadow everywhere she went seeking some illusory security, she found her love ringing hollow.
She knew how unfair it was to blame him for failing to get them out of a situation that was entirely her own doing. And the fact she couldn't help doing so only made her hate herself more, until her love was so twisted up with guilt and blame and hate she couldn't unpick it any more.
Better this way, she thought, already planning their journey back to Germany. Better for both of us.
Karol loved the circus. It was all Raven could do to keep him still and silent on her lap, peering at the action through a gap in the buttons of her voluminous overcoat. He gasped with delight at the trapeze artists particularly, but he also bounced excitedly at the antics of the trained horses, squealed with glee over the elephants, and almost burst out of her coat laughing at the clowns. The only part he didn't like was the lion-taming, when he flinched away from the roars and the cracking of the whip, burying his face in Raven's breast. She sighed, wondering not for the first time why a child of hers and Azazel's seemed to be so soft, so sensitive to fear and hurt. He needs to be stronger than this, she fretted, if he's going to survive.
After the show, Raven slipped Karol up onto her back and skulked her way back stage. She'd seen Margali Szardos – or 'Mistress Margali of the Winding Path', as she called herself – plying fortunes out on the concourse, but the crowd around her had been too large to speak to her without attracting notice. Now she found a tent/flap hanging open, spilling a diamond of yellow light onto the churned-up grass behind the circus front. She steeled herself, shimmered into the skin she had chosen for this confrontation, and stepped into the tent.
Margali was on her feet before Raven was even fully in the tent, something concealed in her raised right hand. But her arm dropped as Raven stepped into the light.
"Erik?" the woman demanded, in a voice deep and husky, rich with the accents of Provencale. "Is that really you after all these years?"
"No," said Raven in Erik's voice. "I'm not him. But he sent me. He told me you wouldn't trust me, so I thought this might help to get the conversation started." And with that, she shimmered into her own skin.
To give the gypsy credit, she barely flinched. Her eyes narrowed.
"You thought the best way to gain my trust would be to deceive me from they outset? Well that's… novel. And that's more than can be said for your little parlour tricks, cherie. Who's the baby?" Karol shrank back behind Raven's shoulder under her scrutiny. Raven shrugged him off into her arms.
"This is Karol. He's what I've come about."
Margali eyed her without favour.
"And why should I help you? You say Erik sent you; but I'll need more than a stolen face to convince me, chavi. How do I know you can be trusted?"
Raven was ready for this.
"Erik said you'd say that. He told me to tell you – 23917. I don't know what it means, but he said you would."
After a long moment, Margali relaxed. She waved a long, brown hand at a footstool.
"Sit. I'll get someone to bring milk for the tikno."
She leaned out of the tent flap and shouted some instructions into the dark outside in the peremptory tone of one used to being obeyed. Then she swept back into the tent, wrapping her long red shawl about herself.
Raven now took the time to really look at her; she was a darkly handsome woman of middle years, with coal black yes and long, wild black hair beginning to silver here and there. She looked every inch the exotic gypsy of folklore, with her bright shawl, silk head scarf and huge hoop earrings; but something about her poise made the vivid garments look like a costume, ironically assumed for tourists too eager to be deceived. And now when she drew out a long, black, evil-smelling pipe and began to puff away on it, Raven smiled behind her hand, knowing a prop when she saw one. Hiding in plain sight, indeed. She got the feeling there was a lot more to Margali Szardos than her all too perfect presentation revealed.
She told her story to Margali as briefly as she could, leaving out as much as possible about her life before the Brotherhood and how she came to know Erik. Margali didn't need to know about Charles, about the X Men. She felt somehow defensive about her pampered background in front of this woman who, from suffering and degradation Raven could only imagine, had hauled herself up against the odds to run her own little world. Margali didn't press or ask questions, just sat listening intently, in a thick cloud of pipe smoke that reminded Raven sharply of Azazel.
"So," the gypsy said when she had finished, and Karol lay asleep on Raven's lap, exhausted from his exciting day and bored by the adults' conversation. "You bring the child to me. You are wanting to run away and join the circus? Well this is all well and good. We can always use more talent here, and we're all one big family – mutant, human, gypsy, gadjo, no-one asks, no-one tells."
Raven shook her head.
"Not me. Just him."
Margali's thick black brows arched in surprise.
"Really? You are sure about this?"
Raven looked down at Karol, curled up like a cat in her lap, breathing softly in his sleep. He looked so tiny, so fragile, and for a moment time blurred for her, and she was once again in that blood-soaked hotel room, holding the warm, wet, screaming evidence that changed forever, that she was now a mother. She reached out a tentative hand to stroke his back – then watched the hand close into a fist, twitch, and withdraw.
"Yes. I'm sure. I can't keep him safe. Not with what I have to do."
Margali gave her a penetrating look.
"'Have to' are big words, cherie. You have to eat, and breathe, and sleep. Everything else is a choice you are making. Is revenging the past so important to you that you'll feed your future to it? The future you bled for in childbed?"
Raven jerked up her chin. She needed this woman's help, but she was damned if she'd be interrogated for the privilege.
"That's for me to decide. What I'm asking you is to make it so that I don't have to feed his future to it as well. Will you help me or not?"
Margali looked at her for a long moment, and Raven had the uncomfortable feeling she was peering into her soul. Raven flinched as she reached out, laid a hand gently over Karol's sleeping head. Raven thought for a moment she saw a sparkle of light between the two; then the gypsy woman nodded, stepped away.
"I will help him. He has a good soul. I will take him in. But understand me; this is not a crèche, where you leave him when you please and find him waiting if and when you should return. If I take this boy, I take him as my own, tu comprends? And if he were my son, and he were in such danger, I'd take him and hide him where nobody would find him. Not even you. He will have a new name; he will have no home. There is no changing your mind; no going back."
Raven looked down again at her sleeping son – forced herself to look at him, really look at him. To remember every minute of his life, which until now she had been there for. And then with infinite care, she lifted him, put him down on a Moroccan rug on the floor of the tent. He didn't stir. She took a step back, and then another.
"I want you to take him."
There was that voice again, that multi-tonal voice that spoke her true heart. Margali looked at her sharply, then nodded, spat on her palm and held out her hand. After a moment's hesitation, Raven reached out and shook the woman's hand. It felt like hot leather, and her grip was firm.
"Khushti. It is done then."
Raven felt a tug deep in her belly, a ghost of the moment when Karol disappeared from inside her during labour, an emptiness that nothing else could fill. But she didn't falter. Margali withdrew her hand, gathered the sleeping Karol up in her arms and put him on the campbed at the back of the tent.
"Go now then, girl. Go seek your vengeance. Leave the boy with me."
Raven started.
"But I have to say goodbye."
Margali scoffed.
"You have to. He does not. This is not just your story you're writing any more. The more he suffers now, the more chance he will remember. Better he forgets he ever knew his parents, that he ever had any life but this. I told you - if I take him, I take him as my own. And I say he doesn't need that wound to carry."
Her eyes were like granite, implacable. Raven felt the part of herself that was still Raven shrivel a little smaller under that scornful scrutiny. She turned to leave - but turned back at the last moment.
"Margali? What is 23917?"
The gypsy woman gave a short laugh, then pulled up the long, loose sleeve of her gown. Raven winced at the twisted scar tissue that covered her forearm from wrist to elbow.
"That was 23917. That was the number they gave me when they took me. When I took myself back, I let it go." She slipped her sleeve back down her arm, sighed.
"Erik always did have trouble letting go of the past. You too, I think, cherie." Eyes softening at last, Margali raised her hand over Raven in a complicated gesture.
"Good fortune to you on your path, my dear. I think you will be needing it."