by Leah Bobet
Shut up, I told myself. Stop working up bribes to make people not turn you away.
I took a deep breath, walked up the steps, and opened the door.
Marthe slumped against the claw-footed tub, wrapped in towels and blankets, hair lank with sweat. The water in the tub was red with blood; the room smelled meaty, thick. She looked up, and something moved against her chest.
Damp and tiny, wholly alive, my niece squalled in her arms.
“Hallie, close the door,” Eglantine said from the basin—but she was smiling now, exhausted and smiling. “I’d like to keep the heat in.”
I closed the door behind me and stared at the baby—her sparse black curls slicked to her delicate head, her compact hands, her red-brown skin hot with the strain of being born. “She doesn’t look like him,” Marthe said, faintly stunned. “Except the hair—”
Eglantine wiped her hands. “She’ll get darker. All my cousins did.” She paused. “And look at those eyes.”
I swallowed. They were the Clarlund eyes I remembered: soft-lidded and warm, taking in the world with a kind bemusement. “Hi, sweet girl,” I whispered, and Eglantine cast me a smile.
The child stirred against Marthe’s sweaty chest, groping for something she didn’t even understand. Eglantine shifted Marthe’s towels carefully.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
Marthe looked down at the naked brown bundle, mouthing at air. “Hazel. Thom had a great-aunt called Hazel Mae.”
“Here,” Eglantine said, and arranged that tiny mouth carefully at my sister’s breast. “Hand behind the head—like that. All the way in.”
I watched them rearrange the small body against Marthe’s chest; listened to the little coughs and cries. On the fourth try Hazel took the latch and nursed in great, desperate gulps: her first taste, her first swallow; for all she knew, it might never happen again. I watched it, absolutely ensorcelled by her tiny muscles, her breaths.
Marthe pressed the child to her shoulder after an endless minute. “I’m already exhausted,” she said with a terrible laugh.
“Shh,” Eglantine said quietly, firmly, and stroked Marthe’s hair. “You’re doing fine, querida. You’re going to do just fine.”
Marthe stared at the wriggling child: a battleground of love and pain and fear.
“Hallie,” Eglantine said, “do you want to hold your niece so Marthe can wash and dress?”
Marthe lifted her head and regarded me, standing useless by the washroom door. “Is that okay?” I said tentatively.
Marthe blinked at me, overwhelmed, her arms still locked around that tiny girl. “Be careful,” she said, and it held all the urgency in the world. Never raise my voice to her; bring her hot cocoa in the wintertime, when the farm was choked with snow; dry her tears, and never cause them; make her smile. Always be there.
Be careful.
“I promise,” I said, and tentatively plucked the drowsing Hazel from her arms.
She was light, so light and delicate. A shiver ran through my arms and pooled in my spine: little live thing. So new and fragile, so amazingly, delicately made. I sat down carefully on the washroom floor. I could not drop this little girl. I could not let her fall.
Hazel fussed against my chest, her mouth shaping wordless things, and I slipped my finger into her fragile brown hand. She gripped shockingly hard. Her flecks of fingers were almost hot. “Hazel,” I said, trying it out. “Hi, there.”
Eglantine Blakely’s round, worrying face broke into a smile again. “Wrap her in the blanket there, Hallie. Marthe, let’s clean you up.”
We stepped out the washroom door together, an anti-funeral parade: three women and a small package of minuscule, grasping child. The door to Marthe and Thom’s room was shut. I opened it, and at Thom’s bedside, James Blakely raised his eyebrows.
“Thom,” I said hesitantly. “It’s a girl.”
Thom’s eyes opened, and he struggled upward—winced at James Blakely’s “No, wait—”
“When?” Thom asked.
“Just now,” Marthe said behind me, and eased through the door. “Her name’s Hazel.”
“Oh,” Thom breathed as Marthe held up little Hazel, bundled in a blanket. She was warm and dry now, half asleep from the hard chore of being born. An unfathomable look passed between them.
“Look what we made,” Marthe said softly, and laid Thom’s daughter on his chest.
Thom’s arms came up, terrified of her small, soft movements and squinched eyes. Hazel wriggled and then settled into his warmth, and his mouth opened in a surprised O. He reached out a tentative finger, and she grasped it, all instinct, and held on for dear life.
“Hi,” he whispered, stunned, and Hazel stirred at the feel of his breath. “Hi, little girl,” he rasped. “I’m your daddy.”
Marthe slumped down on the bedside, and Thom wrapped an arm around her waist. “Babe, you look so tired.”
Marthe laughed, a thundercrack. “You try pushing a kid out.”
It utterly undid him. “I wanted to be here when she was born.”
“You are,” Marthe said.
“But—”
“Thomas,” she said, sharp, and then her voice faltered. “You came home to me.” Marthe’s face, so strong, so angry because it’d kept her strong so long, crumpled into a child’s wail.
That shaking, ashy hand reached up. Felt for the tangle of her unbound hair, and pulled it to his chest.
She sagged around her emptied belly, fell into his arms. He knotted them around her, around their small, new daughter, and sobbed.
I backed away from the door, James Blakely following right behind me, away from my sister and the man she loved, their family, their privacies. Downstairs, into the fields, where I couldn’t hear them cry.
Heron was perched on the red brocade stool when I opened the smokehouse door again, watching Asphodel Jones like a snake, or a wildfire. I set down the provisions—water, canned carrots, a heel of bread—still dreaming. My arms smelled of newborn child. I could still feel her phantom weight tying me down—pleasantly, forever—to this tenuous soil.
“What took you?” Jones said dryly.
I looked down at him, bemused. “I’m an aunt,” I said, and walked out.
twenty-four
“BUT HOW?” HERON ASKED, AND ASPHODEL JONES SIGHED.
“I told you,” he said, and cleared his throat. “We got stuck.”
Afternoon stained the smoky sky. The fields were quiet. Nobody had slept: Jerome Chandler had sighted army scouts a day’s march away from the high towers of their proprietary ruins. The regiment could not—would not—be far behind.
In the smokehouse, I stifled exhausted impatience. “Tell us step by step,” I said, and let my foot brush the empty soup pot, “exactly how you got stuck on the other side at John’s Creek.”
“Jones, you made a deal,” Heron said from the corner.
Asphodel Jones smiled grimly. “I’m keeping it. Calm down.”
“There’s no time—” Heron started, and I shot him a look.
“Tell.”
Jones shifted on his blanket. “We were dead,” he said simply. “The other disciples never thought you would march into the wastes. The best outcome was that eventually you’d get tired of dying, and leave us alone. Let us be with Him, in peace, to commune with that quiet green heart. It wasn’t practical, of course. You never would have.”
Heron’s gray eyes were darkening, his pupils wide with pain and rage. I reached back, held up a hand.
“But in you all came, and that barricade—it wasn’t going to hold anyone back. And that’s when you showed up.” Jones’s face, worn and drooping, painfully normal, broke into steely resignation. “You cut it open: the God’s heart. It was the thing everyone was sworn to die to protect, our glimpse of all that rain, that other world, and of course, the first thing you did was sneak in and rip it to shreds.”
“You were killing us,” Heron said, almost too soft to hear.
Jones’s eye
s went distant; I could guess precisely how many miles away. “I’d made my peace with dying, you know. I knew those months in the wasteland wouldn’t last. Things don’t: not gods, not people. The world’s a wrecking ball, young lady. Don’t let anyone lie to you about that.”
“Things last,” I said, tremulous. “Some things don’t break.”
Jones shook his head sadly and cleared his throat. “You remind me of my little girl, you know. But she’s younger: thirteen, the most beautiful thing in the world.” He smiled, faint enough that I risked missing it when I blinked. “When she was ten, she didn’t like how the birds died if they stayed too long in winter, so she went around everywhere with seed in her pockets, feeding the robins and finches through the cold. She was so insistent that the cold shouldn’t get to win.”
My throat went dry. “What happened to the birds?”
He shrugged. “They died. I told her they would; built her a hutch for them anyway. She checked on them morning and night, but they died. I don’t know how the robins are keeping now.” Jones looked away for the first time. Through the gap in his barricades I glimpsed him for a moment: a pained smile, banked with regret. “I haven’t been home since last winter. She’s likely a woman already.”
You gave up, I thought brutally, with a surge of rage. He’d packed a bag and walked away, and all the regret in the world wasn’t going to change that.
“John’s Creek,” I said again. Insistent. Sharp.
He blinked, and took me in again slowly. “John’s Creek. I was going to die. But something went wrong. Or went right, because I woke up inside my God’s heart. I didn’t realize it wasn’t the afterlife until I came upon a few stray soldiers, scratching their fingers bloody on a wall of matted leaves. It went up seventy feet into the sky. They didn’t know what they were looking at,” he said, quieter, “but I did. I knew the body of our God. The wind was out of Him, but I recognized our offerings to Him in the debris.”
“What happened to them?” I asked, and he shrugged.
“Died, mostly,” he said: brutal and short. “They bickered and killed each other. Or killed themselves. Or drank the wrong water and screamed themselves bloody. I don’t know. I had a job to do. I didn’t stay.”
“What job?” I asked reluctantly.
Heron shifted on the brocade stool and sighed. “Killing me.”
I stared at him. “You’re terribly calm about it,” Jones said, offhand.
“You’re on the floor unarmed, and there’s a regiment coming,” Heron countered. “I can’t get too worried.”
Jones grinned. “There’s the man who walked right into a storm to kill a God.”
Heron flinched. “That’s not me,” he said, and put a hand to his twisted knife. “Don’t get it wrong: I make cheese. I don’t swagger—”
He was cut short by Asphodel Jones’s laugh, wheezing and rich, altogether sincere. “A cheesemaker, hmm?” he said, and, infinitesimally, shook his head. “Don’t tell them that,” Jones said, almost paternally. “It won’t fit the brand-new tales of old.”
“Oh, I know,” Heron said softly. “I know it won’t.”
“The hole at John’s Creek,” I said impatiently. The line of sun was moving, already, across the smokehouse porch.
Jones delivered a sideways shrug. “It was blocked. The body of the God bricked it up. For all I know, it’s still there, closing, but nothing can get through.”
“Closing?” I pounced.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “They close,” he said patiently, and I bit back on a swear word. He’d known, all along, that this was what we were after. He’d been holding it back to torment us—no. The eagerness with which he’d made our deal, the way he kept watching, eyes flicked, for our reactions—that wasn’t about torment. He didn’t have that vicious edge.
Asphodel Jones was lonely. And the longer someone would sit with him and be forced to listen, the longer he could keep from being alone again.
“They heal,” he said reluctantly. “We worked for months to open the hole at John’s Creek wide enough to let the God all the way into this world. And your brother and I worked day and night to widen that pinprick on the shore. We’ve been scratching it open with our fingers, in shifts, for three whole weeks. It would have closed itself in a few days if we’d let it be.”
I stood up. “It’ll close itself. You swear?” My knees were shaking with sheer hope. The hole would close itself if we could block it up before the lakelands, infested now, burned to ash.
“Oh, it will. But before the army arrives?” Jones said pragmatically, and I swallowed a sudden rage.
“I have chores,” I said to Heron, and stomped out onto the steps.
Tyler was leaning against the wall by the smokehouse door, a long rake in his hand. “How long were you listening?” I asked, and he just shrugged. His face looked absolutely ancient, and his mouth was clamped shut. Heron stepped out the door behind me, shoulders bent, and saw those eyes. And stopped.
“Private Blakely,” he said.
“Heron,” Ty replied. “Who are you?”
I saw it in his eyes: the lie. I’m nobody. Heron stepped down into the snow and closed the door behind him. “John Balsam,” he said simply, and bowed his head. “Hired on as a farmhand to have a warm roof for the winter.”
“But John Balsam’s a hero,” Tyler blurted.
Heron flinched.
It didn’t stop Tyler. “John Balsam was strong, bright, courageous. He ran up to the whirlwind when everyone else ran away, and he leaped—” Tyler reached out one hand, grasping. “He leaped. He tried.”
“I’m sorry,” Heron said wearily, and slumped against the doorjamb. “I’m sorry. I’m just . . . not.”
Tyler’s face crumbled like a child’s, and I swallowed. “Ty—”
“Let me by,” he said hurriedly. “Just—leave me alone.” He propped himself up on his rake and shoved past us down the path, into the farmyard, toward the house.
Heron’s face sagged into his cupped hands. “I’ve disappointed him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.
“No,” Heron answered. “We all disappoint eventually.” He stumped slowly back up the smokehouse stairs. “I have to change his bandages. I don’t want to. I want to leave them. I want to watch him suffer and die.”
His gray eyes flickered, not rage, but resignation: the deep pit I felt inside when I admitted to Nat the wrong I’d done.
“That’s why I have to change them,” he finished. “Apparently there are lines I draw too.”
“That’s not wrong—” I stumbled. As if I knew what was right and what was wrong.
“I should have never left home,” he said again, and shook his head. And went back inside, back to Asphodel Jones.
Thom was napping fitfully when I brought lunch up. Tyler trailed me, desolate still, his arms piled with clean linens. James set down his carding in the bedside chair. “Can I leave you with the kids for a bit, Thom? I need to see what Cal and Eglantine are doing about the sheep.”
Thom waved a bandaged hand wearily, and James stood. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said to me and Tyler, and left us together for the first time since we’d left the God’s violet world.
I set down Thom’s soup with a curious trepidation. There was so much we had to say: a whole summer lost between us that we could never get back. Why didn’t you come home in time? bubbled up, desperate, and I quashed it. He was here now. And we had more important things to ask.
“Thom,” I said, and handed him the soup spoon, “why did you bring that man here?”
Thom’s lips parted—and stopped. “What are you doing with him?”
“Keeping him in the smokehouse,” I said. “Learning everything he knows about the other world so we can block that hole on the river before the whole lakelands goes down. And we need everything you know too: about the war, about the God. Everything.”
Thom chuckled bitterly. “I only learned one thing on that walk north: it wa
sn’t even a god.”
“What?” Tyler burst out.
Thom smiled, and it wasn’t the smile I remembered from summer afternoons when I was twelve or thirteen. It was a vicious Cheshire grin, flecked with pain. “That’s the terrible irony of the thing. There are thousands of Wicked Gods in the plains there: hundreds and thousands of those things in the grass, whirling like calving tornadoes. They decorate themselves with leaves and flower petals so they’re not just pockets of wind.
“It was never a god,” he pronounced softly. “It was a wild horse, or a bull cow: some brainless thing that fell through that hole when Jones and his acolytes opened it, got stuck halfway through, and screamed itself raw in the dark.”
Tyler’s hand clenched around his shirt cuff, around that shining button he’d earned at John’s Creek. “But it destroyed John’s Creek,” he said, barely audible. “Burned it to desert in mere months.”
My eyes widened. “It wasn’t the wrath of a god,” I realized. “Ada told us; we just didn’t get it then. The god was just so big, and when our air touches them—”
“—they burn,” Tyler finished, horrified. “It’s a Twisted Thing. It was nothing but a trapped animal all along.”
“That’s all I know,” Thom said simply, and stared down into the bowl of cloudy broth. “All I knew for certain about that world was what Jones saw fit to share with me, and he stopped talking once he realized he’d been the prophet of a false idol.”
I swallowed. Here it was, the question, the real one. “Why did you bring him onto our farm?”
Thom bowed his head. “It was a coincidence. We were both going north, so we held conversation on the road sometimes. When we chanced upon each other, we shared a camp. Who he was stopped mattering after a certain point.”
“It matters, Thom: he turned against the whole world,” Tyler breathed.
“It’s not that simple,” Thom said, and for the first time, he met our eyes. His usually warm brown eyes were burning. “We were two farming men. We were trapped, and dying. We were kind to each other. There is no such thing as an enemy the day you find yourself dying alone.”