by Rita Woods
But he’d been there.
Real.
As real as the roof of her cabin, as this sliver of wood she held in her hand. Somehow, the Edge had lost its shape, collapsed on itself, at least for a moment. A moment long enough for the slave Zeus and that abomination hunting him to enter.
Abigail had been at the smokehouse, her face raised to catch a bit of morning sun, when she’d felt it: a quickening behind her heart, a sense of the world tearing into halves. She was standing in Remembrance, the wood of the smokehouse rough against her back, the smell of hickory smoke thick on the fall air. And then she was standing in an empty field, the wind whispering through the grass, geese flying in formation overhead.
Then … pain.
Her head pounded and there was a ringing, like a hammer against metal. She’d staggered, bile rising in her throat. She knew this feeling, had lived inside it, nearly died from it, wanted to die from it, in those black days and months after Simona and Josiah pulled her from the streets of New Orleans.
But that had been more than a half century before. Before she’d learned what it was. What she was. Now she knew to skate along the fissures rather than fight through them, knew the way of drawing the energy that was in all things—the rocks, the water, a beating heart—into herself and transform it how and when she wanted. And what she created responded to her will and her will only. Until three days ago. When the Edge had fallen of its own accord like a broken window. And now fear ran through her veins, cramping her gut.
“Tout bagay anfóm.” The old priestess ground her teeth. “Everything is fine.” She rolled to her side, moaning as she curled into herself. She was so very tired. The slaver’s pale, pockmarked face flashed against her closed eyes. His smell was still sharp in her nose, his sour sweat mixed with fear. She’d wanted to shred him, wanted to tear him apart. Would have scattered bits of him through all the worlds she could find if Josiah hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t called her back to herself. She knew he hadn’t stopped her because he feared for the slaver’s safety. He’d have gladly destroyed the blanc himself. No, Josiah had stopped her because she’d lost control. She ground her teeth.
“Abigail.”
She started. She’d not heard him come in. But that had been his way from the first. Josiah, lurking in the shadows, but always there. In the beginning, she’d assumed it was Simona who led the way through the darkness. Only many years later did she come to understand the truth of it.
“Abigail.”
She rolled to her back but would not look at him, silently willing him to leave. His stare was a hot coal against her face, and she could hear the unasked questions. He wanted to know about the slaver. He wanted to know how the Edge could have been penetrated. But mostly he wanted to know about the change in her. But there were no answers she was ready to give.
The silence grew between them, a weight pressing her deep into her straw mattress.
“Merde,” she swore. She sat up. Josiah was there in the corner, staring silently at her, as she knew he would be.
“What?” she snapped.
He calmly lit his pipe. “What is it?” he asked, finally. He raised the pipe, the beads of his bracelet clicking in the silence.
She swore again, then struggled to stand. When he reached to help, she swatted his hand away. “Mwen byen. I’m fine!”
Leaning heavily on her walking stick, she limped to the door, knees and back aching. She was so tired.
After days in bed, the air felt sharp against her skin. She smelled snow on the wind. She had a sudden flash of bright blue satin unfurling into the dirt, bridal wreath blooms crowding the empty space in front of her stoop, and she staggered in the threshold, confused. She felt Josiah’s hand press against her back. She grunted a protest but did not push him away.
The sun was still hours from rising, and for that she was grateful. She was too unsettled yet to face her people. She and Josiah drifted through the moonlit settlement like two restless souls, and the thought made her laugh to herself, that they should move along the same plane as the loa, the spirits. They walked in silence past the smoldering Central Fire and the smokehouse, past the path leading up to the smithy, through the cemetery, until they found themselves moving downhill, back toward the clearing.
The clearing.
The most powerful place in Remembrance.
All those years before, she’d walked away from Simona’s shack in the depths of the bayou. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she needed to go. She walked for months, crossing half-frozen streams, sleeping in open fields, until she arrived here, at this clearing, the grass as tall as her shoulders, ribbons of energy crisscrossing in the Ohio air. She’d known immediately that she was home, and she’d known what that home would look like.
“Tell me,” said Josiah.
The aroma of cherry tobacco hovered around them as she stared across the clearing at the tree line, which was just a darker shadow against all the other shadows, remembering those first warm nights in this unfamiliar place.
“Bad times coming, old man,” she said finally, not answering the question she knew he was really asking.
Josiah made a noise that landed somewhere between irritation and amusement. She shot him a look. His still-thick hair, pulled back from his face with a leather tie, had only a few strands of gray, and his coal-black face was as unlined as the first day she’d seen him over sixty years before. In all that time, she’d glimpsed a hint of his true age only once. When he’d come to pull her from the bayou. She shook her head, not wanting to remember that time of despair.
“Bad times,” he echoed. “It always be bad times for black folks.”
“Not funny.”
“No,” he agreed. “But true all the same.”
He pulled on his pipe, and she knew he was still waiting for her to tell him about the slaver. She pressed her lips together and gazed into the darkness.
Josiah sighed. “What your white lady say?”
She sucked her teeth. He was talking about Quaker Mary. Once a month, more if circumstances warranted, Mother Abigail met the white woman on the Outside of the Edge. They met to trade Louisa’s liniments and honey and the flawless horseshoes and whimsical fancies from Thomas’s smithy the blancs seemed unable to get enough of in nearby Ashtabula. The priestess traded for the things that couldn’t be grown or made in Remembrance: salt and sugar, buttons and iron ore. But most importantly, she traded for news of what was happening Outside.
“Quaker,” said Mother Abigail.
Josiah grunted. “Quaker a white lady, ain’t she?”
“Quaker’s different kinda white. Some kinda different god.”
A faint echo sounded in her head, and a face swam up from deep in her memory. Pale blue eyes, a scar puckering the left side of his face. Le juif. The Jew. André Dreyfus, as he’d looked the day he’d stepped from the ship in New Orleans. The day she lost everything she’d had before and started on the road to becoming someone, something else. Her mouth went dry and she swallowed hard. Why was that time haunting her today?
“She Quaker,” she said again.
She had never heard of Quakers before arriving in this valley. A blanc was a blanc. Creatures not to be trusted, creatures who might smile with white teeth, then bite your neck with them. But these quiet, strange-dressing blancs had proven different. Over time, she developed a wary trust of them, a working relationship, especially with the one called Mary, enough so that if a runaway decided to move on from Remembrance, to continue farther north, the priestess entrusted their safe passage to her.
“Last time we meet, she show me a paper. Say it say the blancs allowed to take runaways back to they masters now. Even if they make it this far.”
She felt Josiah tense.
“She say them trackers go where they please. Even into that big town. Ashtabula. Be snatchin’ free mens off the street less they prove they free. She say that paper say it okay to do now.”
Beside her, Josiah had gone rig
id as stone, his pipe clenched in his fist.
“So still harder times comin’ then,” he said. His voice was low and hard. “They not gon’ stop. Ever.”
The old priestess shrugged and gazed at the sky. Daylight was coming.
“But that ain’t the whole of it, though?” he asked.
“I’m gettin’ old, Josiah. Old and…” She hesitated.
She was on the verge of telling him how some days she woke, confused, and reached for Hercule, wondering why there was no sound of workers heading for the coffee fields. How sometimes she saw the spires of St. Louis Church looming from the Ohio mist and smelled the coal-fouled Mississippi River. She was right at the brink of telling him that in the past weeks, the past months, those things seemed more real to her than Remembrance, that the bright rivers of energy that she rode, that she needed to keep them all safe, seemed faded and dull.
They had been together so long. He’d been at her side as she lay naked in Simona’s cabin without food or water for days, fires burning in the corner under the low roof until her sweat turned the ground she lay on to mud. Until the ghosts of her husband, her sons, her sister whirled around her in flashes of oranges and yellow, speaking a language she didn’t understand.
She was right on the edge.
But in the end, she turned to him, the person she’d known longer than anyone else in life, and said, “It will be day soon and the people are scared.”
He watched her, eyes narrowed as she brushed past.
“Come,” she said.
18
Winter
She moved through the settlement, head down, eyes fixed on the ground under her feet. The whispers, the stares washed against her back like a soft wind. It had been three days since Zeus appeared in Remembrance, the slaver right behind. Three days since anyone, aside from Josiah and Louisa, had seen Mother Abigail.
A group of women were working near the root cellar, and as she passed, they fell silent. She hunched her shoulders and walked faster, feeling their eyes burning into the back of her head.
Remembrance was on low simmer, but with each day that passed with no sign of the priestess, it moved closer and closer to boiling over. Rumors crackled through the settlement like lightning, each one more horrifying, more unbelievable than the last. The wells were poisoned, though no one seemed ill. Slavers were sneaking into the settlement in the dead of night and stealing children, though none were missing. Mother Abigail had abandoned them, disappearing into the night, heading across the lake to the north and into Canada.
Near the path that led to her cabin, she passed an elderly man. She met his eye and smiled, but the look he returned was so filled with hostility that she faltered, stumbling on the uneven ground. She glanced around, but there were no friendly faces to be seen. She hurried up the path, not looking up or slowing until she reached her cabin and was safely inside. Closing her eyes, she let out a shaky breath.
That first night she’d climbed the trail toward Mother Abigail’s cabin to find Josiah standing guard in front of the door, a silent black mass, and felt the familiar tingle of revulsion. She’d never liked Mother Abigail’s companion, never understood what he was to her, why he was always just there, hovering at Mother Abigail’s shoulder. Was he a relative? A friend? Lately, Winter’s dislike of the man had begun to morph into something more. Something closer to hate. She hated the odd, opaque eyes that seemed to follow her everywhere. Hated the way he slipped through Remembrance, silent, stealthy, like smoke. And she hated the way that just being near him set her teeth on edge. A current surrounded him that caused her hair to stand on end, repelling her.
He had never said a harsh word to her that she could remember, yet she sensed he detested her in equal measure. That morning, when he smiled at her there at the threshold, the spit soured in her mouth.
“Can I see Mother Abigail?”
“She restin’.”
She waited for him to say more, to tell her to come back later, that Mother Abigail was fine, but he’d said none of those things. He stood, silent, unmoving, that smile fixed on his face. For a moment, she stood her ground. He would not run her off without seeing Mother Abigail. She wasn’t afraid of him.
Except, she was.
Inexplicably and definitively afraid. Without another word, she turned and ran all the way back to her cabin. And now, two more full days and nights had passed with no sign of the priestess.
Pulling her cloak tight, Winter leaned against the door and tugged hard at her hair. The walls seemed to close in around her, pressing the air from the space.
She whirled and flung open the door, startling a boy who was walking by leading a goat on a tether. He blinked, then hurried past. She glared at his retreating back, then charged up the trail toward Mother Abigail’s. At the top of the trail her resolve wavered and she veered off into the brush, heading for the small penned area where the priestess kept her coop.
A flock of chickens rushed forward as she eased into the pen, but immediately lost interest when it became clear that she had nothing to feed them. She slumped, shivering onto a metal pail near the gate.
What would happen if Mother Abigail did disappear? The thought had never occurred to her in any real way. Mother Abigail was like the earth or the sky: ancient and somehow never-ending.
Remembrance existed inside a wrinkle in space created and maintained by Mother Abigail. If the priestess were to leave or, unimaginably, die, would that space simply cease to exist? Would the Edge smooth out like a freshly ironed shirt, exposing them, merging them with the Outside? And what about her? As much as she’d never really felt a part of Remembrance, it was the only place she knew. Outside was a universe that lived only in her imagination, fed by the horrific stories of those who’d escaped and the scars they bore on their minds and their bodies. And yet, in spite of that, there was the tiniest longing, the faintest flicker of curiosity about “out there.” She shot a glance at the back of the cabin on the other side of the pen.
A chicken pecked its way close. Small and gray with streaks of amber, an Easter Egger, it was Mother Abigail’s favorite for the pale blue and green eggs it laid. She stared hard at it. Bands of pale gray lay atop bands of darker gray, strands of golden red running through. She focused on the way the soft feathers curved along the chicken’s round body before splitting like a fan at the tips. She concentrated until she could see the place where the feathers entered the gray pink chicken flesh.
Winter couldn’t do what Mother Abigail could do—pull space apart, fold it up on itself. But she could do this.
She could see the pieces that made up a thing. And if she focused hard enough, then that thing—a table, a tree, this chicken—became just particles spinning in space in the shape of a table, a tree, a chicken. And if she focused really, really hard, she could change the way the particles spun, speeding some up, slowing others down, drawing them to her or pushing them away, as if she were some giant magnet. She couldn’t explain how she did this any more than she could explain why her heart beat, but she could. The way Mother Abigail could bend space or Willie could wiggle his ears.
Sometimes, when the adults were away working, she entertained the smaller children by making miniature tornadoes of dirt. Or she would make the Central Fire leap and dance, pushing it to form shapes in the air: a fish, a flower, sometimes a face. But faces were hard and the effort left her feeling dizzy and hot. Whenever the adults caught her at this, they yanked their children away, giving her the evil eye. They never said anything. Of course not. She was Mother Abigail’s pet, after all.
Winter ground her teeth, an ember of resentment glowing in the pit of her stomach. It was true that when she was little, this thing she could do had sometimes gotten away from her. Water flashed to steam, scalding a boy. A load of horseshoes being readied for Outside slightly melted and ruined. But nothing like that had happened in a very long time. But still, many in Remembrance looked at her as if she were a stray cat that had wandered in to warm itself at their fi
re. It wasn’t fair. She belonged in Remembrance more than any of them.
The only one that truly seemed to enjoy her company was David Henry. He had come to Remembrance three summers before, when she was fifteen. He was old. He didn’t know his exact years, but she guessed him at thirty or so. David Henry didn’t talk much, he just smiled and appeared in the exact place the settlers seemed to need him the most, setting traps and fishing lines, digging out the root cellar, repairing the shelters.
He was also the best tracker in Remembrance. Since the spring thaw, he’d been teaching her. She liked being out in the woods with him, liked listening to the tales he spun about the woodpeckers and the red foxes. He said she was a natural. She didn’t tell him it was because she sometimes could see the trail a deer or a rabbit left behind, little particles drifting in the brush, like sparks. Not always, but sometimes. She thought about going to find him, to see if he was going out today, but the thought of walking back through the settlement again clenched her stomach into a fist.
The Easter Egger pecked closer to her feet, searching the dirt for bugs. She stared at it, the soft gray feathers, the tiny round body. She could see all that made up the little chicken, minute particles spinning round and round each other, the bits that made up the feathers; the eyes, spinning faster than the body. The chicken wasn’t really a solid thing. There were spaces there, like tightly packed, whirling grains of sand. Spinning, spinning. The shape of a chicken. And deeper, beneath the warm flesh, spinning faster still, blood. Moving fast and hot. But even here, there were spaces. The blood not one thing, but a million things. Traveling together. Faster and faster … the shape of blood …
“Winter?”
She cried out as the world jerked, dropped from under her. Spots flashed before her eyes and she fell, vomiting in the cold dirt. She felt hot and sick, confused. It took her a long moment to remember where she was. Taking deep breaths, she felt the cool beneath her hands, smelled vomit, smelled … blood?