by Nicola Shill
Yes – love.
She was unprepared to leave, as if she had become deeply engrossed in a story, emotionally attached to the characters, only to discover the last half of the book missing. But the choice was not hers to make. It was now a familiar feeling that she wished she’d been able to say goodbye – at the very least to Gita, Oonnora, Tani, Ith and Iznaya. She wished she’d been able to stay long enough to be reassured of Gita’s recovery and to tell her how very sorry she was.
— CHAPTER 49 —
Heart’s Desire
Zabeth was standing on the ground at the foot of her tree waiting for them when they arrived.
The bat appeared to be aiming to land in Zabeth’s tree, but Lorcan once again caught Cassandra around the waist and ejected them both before it did. As they floated to the ground, Cassandra looked up and understood the reason: the bat had indeed landed in the branches of the tree above but was now swinging upside down. It would have been a frightening dismount indeed from that position, facing directly towards the ground.
The sky was starting to lighten. Zabeth immediately waved Lorcan away and invited Cassandra to walk with her. Lorcan scowled and stepped back to sit on a rock, watching broodily as they disappeared into the bush. Cassandra was shocked by the lack of reverence he showed Zabeth, although he still acceded automatically to her wishes.
The moment they were out of sight, Zabeth began. ‘When we spoke last time, we talked about loyalty.’
Surely Zabeth wasn’t going to accuse Cassandra of being disloyal because she made the mistake of falling asleep? Irresponsible, maybe. Stupid even. Perhaps, she winced, even negligent. But there was no disloyalty in it. She loved Gita. She would protect her with her life. In fact, she’d tried to, albeit a little late. But her own certainty of her guilt prevented her from trying to justify her way out of it, and she remained silent.
Zabeth was already waving her hand as though she’d sensed Cassandra’s inner turmoil. ‘I’m not accusing you of disloyalty, Cassandra. Quite the reverse. I now find myself regretting the bargain I made with you.’ She took a deep breath and sighed. ‘But I won’t break my promise. I’ll return you to the human world.’
Cassandra’s mind swirled in a maelstrom of confusion. Zabeth could not possibly be saying that Cassandra could go home. Where was the catch?
Zabeth noticed her bewilderment and explained, ‘You have proven your loyalty by risking your life to save one of our children. For that we owe you our gratitude. There is no greater sacrifice than the one you were prepared to make. I have to concede that your actions prove you are unlikely to betray us, knowing the harm it would bring. Therefore, I have no choice but to free you.’
A war of emotions started up inside Cassandra. She had spent the entire journey up here cataloguing everything she would dearly miss, feeling the torture of bonds being ripped apart, wishing for another chance or at least a little more time. But this was her heart’s desire. This was the supreme goal that she had learnt to suppress, had buried deep inside herself because the knowledge that it was unattainable was too painful to bear.
Zabeth interrupted her thoughts. ‘You do still want to go home, don’t you?’
Cassandra found herself answering automatically, dreamlike. She looked up to see that they had walked in a circle and were now again in front of Zabeth’s tree. Lorcan was still sitting on the rock with his arms crossed, staring at her.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Lorcan let out a deep breath and dropped his hands between his knees. His shoulders slumped and his head hung forward.
Zabeth nodded sadly. ‘It’s best if we get straight on with it. We’ll miss you, Cassandra.’ She stepped forward and gave Cassandra a quick hug, which, despite its efficiency, was surprisingly maternal. Then her voice became businesslike. ‘You’ll feel a whirlwind and maybe nausea momentarily, but it will pass quickly. When the wind dies down, walk up the hill that way,’ she pointed. ‘Keep walking uphill. Don’t try to find your way down to your home or you will almost certainly become lost. You can make contact with other humans at the summit.’
Burning tears had begun to roll down Cassandra’s cheeks. She turned pleading eyes to Lorcan, not even knowing what she was pleading for. Lorcan stood up and stepped forward. In his eyes Cassandra saw her own pain reflected, but she also saw understanding.
Zabeth moved a little way away to give them a private moment. Lorcan picked up Cassandra’s hand. He turned it over so that it was cradled palm up in his own much larger hand. He bent over and slowly kissed the centre of her palm. Then he closed his fingers over it, pushing her fingers closed, too. ‘Hold on to that,’ he said, and stepped back.
Cassandra closed her eyes against the tears stinging them. The wind spun around her, catching her shawl and whipping it off her shoulders. She felt an overwhelming urge to change her mind and beg to stay.
The wind went on and on. Cassandra opened her eyes and could see that nothing was happening. Lorcan and Zabeth stood in front of her, still the same size. The wind stopped and Lorcan looked at Zabeth with raised eyebrows.
‘Cassandra,’ Zabeth said. ‘You’re going to have to help me. You have to want it. Can you do that?’
Cassandra wasn’t sure she could. She nodded uncertainly.
‘We might need Cal,’ Zabeth muttered. She glanced back at her tree and a moment later Cal emerged from the door at the bottom and walked over to stand with Zabeth and Lorcan. Cassandra felt as though she was standing in front of a firing squad.
‘Okay. Happy thoughts, Cassandra,’ said Zabeth.
Lorcan nodded his head and grimaced at her. Cassandra guessed it was supposed to be an encouraging smile.
Happy thoughts. Happy thoughts. She closed her eyes again and pictured her father, Emma and Lira, all waiting for her at home. The wind whipped around her with the intensity of a tornado, continuing on until she wondered how much longer she could manage to hold her feet on the ground. Her clothes flapped and she worried that they might fly right off. She felt the food in her stomach rising up, making a bid for freedom.
When the storm finally abated, she knew before she opened her eyes that it had done its job.
She looked around at the bush, so small and somehow less wonderful. Lorcan, Zabeth and Cal had disappeared. She knew they were still close by and she wanted to say some last heartfelt parting comment to them, but when Zabeth had mentioned momentary nausea, she was clearly talking about normal people with normal stomachs. Cassandra urgently needed to move away and vomit. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a small, glistening tangle of spider’s web on the ground. It was her shawl, still fae size. She swept it up and crushed it in her palm as she ran into the bush.
Both hands were now curled tightly into fists, holding valuable remnants of a period of her life that she knew would forever be a painfully precious and excruciatingly secret memory.
— CHAPTER 50 —
Turmoil
The next two weeks were a buzz of turmoil for Cassandra.
First came the euphoria of being reunited with Dad, Grandma, Emma and her school friends. But after the tearful reunions, there were hours of questions and investigations by the police. Cassandra had initially been unprepared for them and, at a loss to explain where she’d been for over four months, had feebly claimed total and complete ignorance. Whether people believed her or not was largely irrelevant. If she stuck to ‘I don’t remember,’ eventually any further attempts at interrogation died of boredom. It worked remarkably well, so she continued with it. It worked with her school friends and teachers too, not to mention news reporters and other interested parties, though it did require her to endure psychiatric evaluation and medical examinations.
The dirty, blood-stained top she’d been wearing was taken away for forensic testing. Cassandra knew that the blood had come from Gita. What would they think when they realised she was covered in blood that was not her own? She wondered if it would test differently from human blood. There were certainly many more quest
ions coming. She would simply have to maintain her amnesia defence. Of course, there were the obvious innuendoes about her having gone secretly into drug or alcohol rehabilitation or dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Keeping up her claim of ignorance was difficult at these times because it gave her no course to defend herself. There was even a rumour circulating that her birth mother was, in fact, not dead and had abducted her.
Thankfully, as with all news, she eventually became old news, and people moved on to other dramas and scandals. While she was relieved to be out of the spotlight, she was also fighting a building urge to talk to someone about what she’d been through. She hated lying to Emma and her grandmother in particular. The urge to let it all out was nearly overwhelming. Not that anyone would believe her anyway.
At school, it was impossible to conceal the fact that she had been irrevocably changed by her experiences. It was painful to now be viewing humanity from the fae perspective. Her friends’ obsession with material possessions stunned her as though she were seeing it for the first time. She saw examples everywhere of the wasteful, bottomless pit of materialism: the race to own the latest gadgets and technology, the never-ending need to overhaul the wardrobe to include the latest fashions and brands.
‘Can’t you see how you’re being manipulated?’ she asked a group of friends as they sat in the library during a lesson when their usual teacher was away. Everyone had opted to read magazines instead of doing the work their teacher had left for them, but magazines had lost their appeal for Cassandra now. She saw them as vehicles for consumerism, encouraging over-consumption. She sat with her book open in her lap and watched the fill-in teacher leaning with studied nonchalance against the loans desk, trying to ask the librarian out. He didn’t appear to be having much luck.
No one responded to Cassandra’s question, though she knew they had heard. She was smart enough to know that she should leave it there, if for no other reason than self-preservation, but she felt frustrated and angry at the refusal of her friends to understand the enormity and urgency of the world’s social and environmental problems, and she simply couldn’t remain politely silent; she needed to save them.
‘Manufacturers play on your uncertain self-esteem to make you consume more. You sacrifice the resources of the planet that sustains your lives in a futile quest for happiness and self-importance.’
Unfortunately, there was a limit to how much time Cassandra’s friends wanted to spend believing that they were all doomed and feeling guilty about it, and they soon realised that you didn’t have to spend much time with Cassandra to blow that limit. It wasn’t long before Cassandra found out exactly how lonely school could be. She had never been part of the ‘in’ crowd, but she’d also never experienced the self-conscious desolation of being completely and visibly alone at school. More and more often in the school yard, people she thought were her friends would disappear before she could catch up to them. Entire groups began to disperse between the buildings as she approached. She began to spend her lunchtimes in the library, reading books about the damage humans were inflicting on the world.
Her troubles followed her home. Cassandra would read friend’s innocuous Facebook comments and her mind would translate them into sinister evidence of negligent attitudes. Before she had even thought about the consequences of setting down such a permanent and public account of her first flush of outrage, her fingers were tapping out pithily superior comments. To think that she’d been worried about the fae lynching her for her human attitudes. They had never come up with anything as nasty as the Facebook roastings she was now experiencing.
Sylvia, of course, remained frigidly disapproving. Cassandra heard her shouting at Dad at regular intervals: nuggets of wisdom, such as, ‘Are you really that stupid? It was a stunt!’ or, ‘She did it deliberately to dilute our happiness!’ or many creative variations on, ‘She’s nothing but a selfish teenager.’
She wasted no time informing Cassandra that they were expecting a baby in spring and took every opportunity to poke her with remarks about how she’d been planning to convert Cassandra’s vacated bedroom into the nursery. She grumbled about not knowing which windows to measure up for new curtains and noted how much quieter Cassandra’s room was. Cassandra didn’t know what Sylvia was bitching about: they both knew who would win out, even if Cassandra was, for the moment, residing back in her own bedroom.
Dad was a puzzle of his own. He was in raptures to have her back home, safe and sound, but there was something Cassandra couldn’t quite put her finger on. For someone who had been so overprotective that he’d barely let her out of his sight, he seemed now to be too comfortable accepting that she had no memory of what had become of her and not insistent enough about uncovering the truth. In fact, he was downright defensive of her right to privacy. Her grandmother had noticed it, too. Cassandra had heard them arguing about it. While Cassandra was grateful for Grandma’s concern, she was glad that Dad was resistant to further investigation, whatever his motives.
But Cassandra and Dad were constantly fighting since her arrival home, much to Sylvia’s gratification. Cassandra hated the way she couldn’t stop attacking him, particularly since he was the last person who deserved it. She now realised that many of what she’d formerly considered to be annoying, stingy idiosyncrasies were actually honourable attempts to be environmentally and socially responsible. Sylvia, of course, still did think they were annoying, penny-pinching idiosyncrasies. Cassandra felt guilty for having ridiculed his efforts in the past and for not supporting him when Sylvia had first set to work eroding them, but now she’d moved from attacking him because he was too conscientious, to attacking him for not going far enough. The poor man couldn’t win. Nevertheless, Cassandra couldn’t help herself: he was her father and she was desperate to save his soul.
More and more, Cassandra was becoming distracted looking for fae wherever she went. She stopped herself from actually going searching for them, and she avoided the boatshed, but at night she would sit outside and peer into the darkness, trying, in vain, to catch the telltale glow.
— CHAPTER 51 —
Birthday
A little over a month after arriving home, Cassandra celebrated her seventeenth birthday.
‘Celebrated’ was perhaps too cheerful a word. She spent the day worrying about Gita, remembering that this day was also Gita’s forty-seventh birthday.
That night, she had a quiet dinner with Dad, Sylvia, Emma and Grandma. After double helpings of Grandma’s famous chocolate birthday cake, Grandma slid a small, aged jewellers box across the table to Cassandra. Cassandra opened it to find Grandma’s engagement ring nestled into the velvet interior. She glanced at Grandma’s left hand and noticed that she now wore only her wedding band.
Grandma leaned across and laid a papery hand over Cassandra’s. ‘I want you to have it.’ She patted Cassandra’s hand and sat back. ‘I had planned to wait until your twenty-first birthday, but recent events have reminded me that no future is ever guaranteed, and I won’t waste this second chance we’ve all been given.’
Cassandra lifted the ring out of its box and held it up to the light. A gold band supported a decorative silver dome with emeralds and diamonds embedded in a circle around a larger central diamond. Cassandra was choked with emotion to be receiving such a significant gift.
Sylvia had no such problem. ‘I hardly think that’s an appropriate present for a seventeen year old.’
As Grandma muttered, ‘Shut up, Sylvia,’ Cassandra found her tongue. ‘What’s wrong, Sylvia? Are you annoyed to realise it won’t ever pass on to you?’
‘It won’t pass on to anyone in this family ever again, will it Cassandra? You’re so irresponsible it’ll be lost before your next birthday, let alone your twenty-first.’
Cassandra ignored her and turned to Grandma. ‘Thank you, Grandma. I promise I’ll treasure it and keep it safe.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ Sylvia snarled.
Cassandra had organised to have her school f
riends over for her birthday party the following Saturday night.
‘Do you think we should have brought the kitchen chairs out, too?’ Emma asked. She’d moved the eight chairs from the outdoor setting to surround a small wrought-iron fireplace that Dad had bought especially for the occasion. Cassandra had wanted a bonfire, but Dad wouldn’t allow it (‘I’m not spending the night putting burning teenagers out,’) so this was the compromise. Emma had already lit the fire and had placed four bowls of marshmallows and long skewers at convenient locations around it. She was sitting down now, toasting two marshmallows on one skewer.
Cassandra had almost finished loading the outdoor table with food and drink. She stood, holding a plate of Grandma’s mini quiches and assessed Emma’s work. The fire lacked the spectacle and magnificence of the revelry fire, but it would have to do. ‘I think that’s enough to start with. Not everyone’s going to want to sit around the fire, and if they do, we can bring more out then.’ She put the last plate down and went to sit with Emma. Emma offered her a perfectly roasted marshmallow. ‘You’d better eat. People will be arriving soon and you might not get another chance for a while.’
Two hours later, Emma and Cassandra had finished all four bowls of marshmallows on their own. They weren’t even bothering to toast them anymore. The fire had died down and the chill of the late autumn night was settling into their bones, but neither one of them felt inclined to add more fuel. Dad was cowardly hiding somewhere in the house.
‘We might as well pack up,’ Cassandra said, ‘No one’s coming.’
They left the fire to die out and moved the food inside.
‘Most of this won’t keep,’ said Emma.
Cassandra looked at the plates and bowls of food that covered the kitchen bench and sighed. ‘So much waste. Do you know that the amount of earth’s resources we consume is forty times that of a person living in the third world? We …’
Emma stamped her foot. ‘Stop.’
Cassandra was shocked into silence. She turned to see Emma, hands on hips, glaring at her.
‘I’m sorry, but just … just stop it, Cassandra. I’m tired. I’m sorry your party didn’t work out. You must be feeling dreadful, but I’m feeling wrung out, too, and I just can’t take another one of your self-righteous lectures at the moment.’ She looked around as though searching for party guests and then gestured to the food. ‘Apparently, I’m not the only one. You assume that everyone else is either ignorant or uncaring just because they’re not rabbiting on like you.’