Page 20 of Mistaken

The robes he wore hid a great deal of his body language, but Sarah still got the impression that Abdul stiffened. “It suits me well enough,” he replied.

Clearly, she’d misstepped, but any attempt to backtrack would sound even worse, so she decided to let it go. “But that’s why you got rid of so many outbuildings, isn’t it? So the view would be nicer?”

“I did not need them,” he said, his tone almost dismissive. “And yes, I think this place is more pleasing now that there aren’t so many structures to clutter it up.”

She had to admit he was right. Her memories from her trip here so many years ago were a little hazy, but she still could recall more buildings than she’d expected when she visited with her father, thinking that the ranch should have been all open fields, maybe with horses and cattle grazing on the dry grass.

“It was a lot different when I was here,” she commented, and Abdul’s head tilted, as though he was surprised.

“You have been here before?”

“Once, when I was eleven,” Sarah replied. “My father and I spent some time exploring northern New Mexico, and we stayed a night in Abiquiu and came to visit Ghost Ranch the next day. We went horseback riding,” she added, realizing she hadn’t seen a single horse since she’d come here.

Well, maybe that wasn’t so strange. She knew that the djinn had made their own odd provisions for all the pets and domesticated animals left behind after the Dying, had used their powers to ensure those animals would have ample food and shelter. Any horses that had been kept at the ranch would now be long gone.

“I hope the changes I have made weren’t too shocking,” he said, and now she grinned.

“‘Shocking’ probably isn’t the right word. It’s just…different.”

Another tilt of his head. “Perhaps you would like to see the pond?”

Was that his attempt to change the subject? She couldn’t tell for certain, and decided it probably didn’t matter so much. After all, she was the one who’d brought up going to look at the pond he’d created, so it would seem odd if she wasn’t eager to see it now.

“Sure.”

He lifted a hand, as if beckoning her to follow him, and she trailed along in his wake as they left the brick-paved courtyard and made their way over to the pond. The going wasn’t as rough as she’d feared it might be, since there was a smooth path covered in pea gravel that led the way, and soft grass grew around the perimeter of the small body of water that definitely hadn’t been there when Sarah visited this place almost two decades earlier.

Not that anyone would have been able to tell that the pond hadn’t been a fixture of Ghost Ranch for decades, with the tall cottonwoods clustered around its border and the graceful weeping willows whose lacy branches trailed along its surface. At the far side of the pond, a family of ducks was just launching themselves for a morning swim, with the parents leading five fuzzy little brown ducklings into the calm, deep green water.

“It’s amazing,” Sarah said, then glanced up at Abdul. As before, he’d stopped a few feet away from her, as though he wanted to make sure he didn’t intrude on her personal space.

Very polite for someone who seemed bent on keeping her prisoner for an unspecified amount of time.

“How do you do it?” she went on, and the hood dipped slightly, as though he was puzzled by her question.

“Do what?”

“All this,” she said, extending a hand to indicate the pond and the graceful trees that surrounded it, their leaves shimmering in the morning breeze. “I mean, it looks like it’s been here for decades or even more. I know that djinn can summon all sorts of stuff, but to make the landscape seem as if it’s been this way forever?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer. When he spoke, though, his voice sounded almost amused.

“As you said, we djinn can call many things into existence. It is not all that different to make a pond appear or to summon a set of trees of a particular height or age. I wished for the landscape to feel established, and not like something carelessly brought into being on a whim.”

Sarah supposed she could see that. At the same time, she couldn’t help thinking he must have something of an artist’s eye, even though she’d heard that djinn in general weren’t all that creative, and were instead consumers of human-created art rather than making anything of their own.

But still, even though she somehow doubted Abdul would pick up a paintbrush and start creating his own renderings of the beauty that surrounded him, she couldn’t help thinking that he’d made his own form of art, starting with the new fields of wildflowers and carefully arranged rock formations she’d noted down by the visitors center, and ending with this pond and the trees that grew around it, as thoughtful and lovely as a Japanese garden.

“It’s very beautiful,” she said, an echo of her words just a few minutes earlier. Somehow, the moment felt almost too solemn, and she found herself smiling as she added, “And it definitely looks as though the ducks like it.”

Had he smiled as well under his hood? Sarah couldn’t detect even the slightest flash of teeth in there, so it was impossible to say.

“Yes,” Abdul replied. His tone sounded friendly enough, but there was also something almost guarded about it, as if he thought they’d begun to develop some kind of rapport and now needed to draw back so she wouldn’t get the wrong impression. “And I hope it will attract other forms of wildlife as the word gets out, so to speak. For now, though, I will leave you here to enjoy this place. You may come back inside when you are ready.”

She blinked at him. “You’re just going to…let me stay out here on my own?”

“I am,” he said, apparently unperturbed. “I can sense your presence, and I will know if you try to wander away from this spot to anywhere other than the house. Besides,” he went on, his voice turning dry, “I doubt you will get very far in that footwear.”

Since she’d thought pretty much the same thing only a little while earlier, she didn’t bother to protest. “No, I wouldn’t,” she said cheerfully. “But thank you for letting me stay out here for a while.”

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