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SUMMARY: This story follows "Father Bedford 2." It is the other side of that story.

In the dark of her own cellar, The Wizard curls into the thick smelly pillows of her cot and tries to regroup. She is crying. Strange to have tears for him again. She remembers the first time and how hard she cried, clinging to Anna in the chilly hold of a scum ship, years and many more tears from home.

But this is Helena crying. This is her first time to see and feel the horror of it. A shame. Somebody so aged and frail. A shame. Guilt splashes through her, threatening the fine veneer of sanity still wrapped around her.

Sleep, comes Silver's order, but that is the balm for her and she needs to be awake; needs to comfort her new companion. Silver does not understand so much. She does not know how to follow the will of two.

Follow, echoes Silver, but it is a rebuke.

"Apologies," she says through tears into the quiet night. "Forgive?"

Sleep, is the response.

Instead of settling, her mind reels with the chaos of the last few hours. The crackle of power and the stench of demon blood swirl in a hurricane through her head. The best she can do is put them to order – explain them to herself.

It all comes in symbols that bob in her sketchy memory:
A road: a secret road beneath the light. An underground tunnel, Silver translates, abandoned and boarded up.
Shrubs of stone: an orchard of the dead. A graveyard, says Silver.
A house of lonely penitence. She does understand what or where, only how it felt...ascetic? The rectory. Never mind.
A space between walls of death: a room beneath ground with limestone walls, the same dead things that bring power to these wet walls. Hush, Wizard. Merely the cellar of the rectory.
A pain, separate and keening to her own heart: somebody she loves among those she loves ached above her head. He is as confused as you. Silver sighs. Humans.
A key of sound: a chant. A ritual.
Fragile prison! -- She cannot explain. There are no words, only the splintering sharpness of bloodletting violence. No translation comes. Silver does not know this one, either. She knows only the formulas, not the magic they make. For anything deeper, she needs the wizard to be of sound mind. Whatever happened, happened beyond her sensory horizon.
The Rose: the answer. The answer they need. The words are all lost but these. If you would stay with me, wizard, Silver chides softly. If you would stay present enough, I would help you write.

She was there. She was acting. She needed to save him, to save her and to save them. But she was so confused and her ritual felt so dirty in the dust and in the place of the holy men. She had tried to cast the spell; had really tried. But Helena would have none of it; Helena does not know what it meant. That is why she must know tonight. "Silver!"

Silver slides through her like a sigh. She can tell of events, not of meanings. She might comfort an old woman who has been taught to see evil in elder rites. Maybe. No promise, Wizard.

She was in the basement of the rectory. It had to be the rectory. She needed him. But the ritual had failed. The battle within herself between these two old women had thwarted it.