Eight sprinted forward, and Barrie struggled even harder to slow her footsteps. Behind her, Pru and Seven and the others were frozen in place—Obadiah keeping his word and holding them back. Their faces were anguished, and Barrie felt guilty at their helplessness.
The stone pulled her onto the dock, where waves of the receding tide splashed over both sides, as if the river was flowing both toward the ocean and backward simultaneously, like the water sloshing in a tub. The Away swayed wildly at her moorings, her mast creaking and the hull slapping against the pilings.
Fighting to give Eight time, Barrie sat down and dug her heels into the boards of the dock, trying to slow the pull. But she was growing weaker, the stone taking her strength, the way Obadiah had drained her energy. The painful vibration along her body was nothing like the exhilarating feeling of tapping into the spirit path or even holding the Watson stone. The pull dragged her forward an inch at a time, the fabric of her shorts catching on the edges of the boards.
Then suddenly the pressure eased. The air still whipped, the stone still pulled, but Barrie felt an opposing force behind her, holding her back. She labored to turn her head, and found Obadiah close behind her. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll hold you until the boy has the boat ready.” His words came to her clipped and tight, bitten off by concentration.
“Let the stone go, Barrie.” Seven’s voice was a roar above the wind.
“Barrie, please let go!” The naked fear on Pru’s face broke Barrie’s heart.
Seven wore impotent rage like a second skin. Kate, too, looked furious, and Barrie imagined how she must feel. She tried not to think that every inch closer that the stone came to Watson’s Landing was one bit closer to having the magic there and at Beaufort Hall stripped away.
She wanted to reassure Kate and Pru, reassure them all, that it was going to be okay, but she couldn’t be certain that it would. She knew only that the yunwi and the Fire Carrier had been waiting all this time for the energy to come back and for someone to join the stones back together, and she couldn’t let them down.
Instead of giving Pru or Kate promises she couldn’t keep, she turned to Berg and Obadiah. “Do either of you know what’s happening?”
“Something like a wormhole, maybe,” Berg yelled. “If there’s a universe layered above us, think of it as if someone is pushing the eraser end of a pencil through the top sheet of paper toward the sheet below it. Eventually, the top sheet rips apart and things can move through.”
Barrie’s body felt like it was tearing open, aching from the vibrations that rattled her teeth, and the pressure had grown worse since Obadiah had stopped her from moving forward. “Let me go,” she shouted back to Obadiah. “The stone is getting hotter the longer I sit here. I’m not going to be able to hold on to it if you don’t let go.”
Eight had reached the Away and was hurrying to untie the ropes. Obadiah released Barrie, and she shot forward, dragged by the stone as she struggled to her feet. Her legs moved faster than she wanted them to, and her eyes struggled to focus through air that had grown strangely thick.
Heat scorched her hand and up her arm, and her skin felt like it was being flayed from her in strips. She hurtled toward the churning river, and beneath her the dock creaked and shook, and the Away knocked back and forth. Across the water and behind the Fire Carrier, a branch split off a tree and shot skyward, before plummeting suddenly as the wind that had carried it had simply stilled. Then the wind gusted again, more fiercely than ever. An entire cypress tree uprooted, burst up through the air, and eventually splashed back into the water, too.
The ulunsuti gave another lurch. Barrie stumbled the last feet to the boat. Eight caught her and lowered her down inside the hull.
“You sure you want to do this?” he asked, searching her face.
“Just tell me quickly how it works before you get out. How do I steer and stop?”
He used his foot to shove off. “You don’t,” he shouted, running toward the motor. “I’m going with you.”
“Both of you get out of there,” Seven shouted behind them. “It’s not safe out on the water.”
Barrie barely had time to register the words before someone launched off the dock and landed in the boat behind her. She turned, expecting Seven, but it was Obadiah. The boat lurched again, and her legs gave out as Eight revved the motor and the boat tore away from the dock, rocking fiercely in the waves and spray.
Obadiah crouched on the bottom of the Away a moment, his shiny suit beading with water. Then he pitched himself up onto the seat beside her. “Give me the stone, petite, before you hurt yourself.”
“You’re the one who can’t touch it, remember?” Barrie spoke through gritted teeth.
“I’m the only logical one to hold it. I still have energy spooled up from yesterday, and there’s no shortage of it swirling all around us. I was being selfish and cautious before. Anyway, you were right. The curse is gone, and this is what Ayita would have wanted.”
Barrie hesitated, part of her even now still afraid to trust her instinct. Maybe this, though, was what her gift had been leading her toward all along.
Obadiah’s hand shook, and his face twisted in pain as he took the stone. Moving quickly, he went to the bow of the Away and lay down so that no part of the boat was between the two halves of the ulunsuti. The water immediately beneath the boat went calm.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Barrie crawled to the front of the boat, ignoring Eight’s shouts to stop, and sat as close to Obadiah as she dared. He lay flat on top of the hatch, the stone stretched above the water in his right hand, while his left hand clutched the railing. His lips were moving, but the wind ripped away the words.
Behind the Fire Carrier, several more trees tore out of the marshy soil at the edge of the woods, leaving the cypress where Barrie had put the other half of the ulunsuti stone in direct line of sight. A limb broke off that tree as she watched, but the Fire Carrier stood anchored in the marsh grass as if his magic or the pluff mud were keeping him glued into the ground. The tree limb swirled up into the air, turning end over end, and then it dropped back into the river as the air suddenly went still again. The waves died, and the Santisto returned to its normal lazy perambulation toward the ocean, except for a deep dip in the water off to Obadiah’s right, where it appeared as if a heavy bowl had become solid and was pressing the water down.
Between one bounce of the boat and the next, the transient shimmer of air had snapped into place, and both water and air flowed around a clear sphere that had formed between the two halves of the ulunsuti stone. Within the orb, a place was visible, distorted by the curvature, a world with a double crescent moon and a night sky lit with stars so bright that they winked and flickered like gems above a dark surface, and farther away, the vague glow of distant lights.
“Do you see that?” Eight’s voice was hushed but audible in the sudden quiet. With his attention focused on the bubble, the boat veered downriver. The image inside the bubble changed, zooming in closer to the dark surface as if it were flying toward them, until Eight caught his navigational lapse and turned the steering wheel back toward the dock. The image grew smaller again.
Barrie jumped up and ran toward Eight, gesturing toward the woods. “Never mind the dock. Go toward the woods as if you’re going to land where the trees flew away.”
He didn’t ask for an explanation, simply turned the boat in the direction she was pointing and throttled back the engine so that the approach was slow and gentle. Obadiah sat up, moving into a cross-legged position on top of the hatch, with the crystal held up, cut surface out.
The sphere above the water grew smaller as they approached, and the image inside changed as if they were in an airplane and were looking through a porthole that bent and distorted the ground beyond the window. And it was ground. Grass and trees, a meadow of some kind, with the lights and stars gradually shifting out of sight and the foreground shifting closer until it seemed as if someone could step th
rough it from one place to another.
“Don’t you dare,” Eight said, and Barrie stopped, becoming aware for the first time that she had drifted to the side of the boat with her hand stretched out, drawn to the sphere in a way that was probably dangerous.
Obadiah face was gray, and his hand shook with strain, as if the pull between the stones had intensified. Then Barrie felt the energy shift and settle in place, though the wild wind and turbulence didn’t seem to diminish. She felt the change more in the connectedness she had with the world around her, the sense of energy flowing to her and through her that she had first felt while sitting with her eyes closed on Miranda’s back. On the shore, the yunwi were running toward the Fire Carrier, or toward the sphere, Barrie couldn’t tell which. It was too far out in the water for them to reach it, but their excitement was obvious. They, too, felt the sense of rightness.
“I thought we were supposed to bring the two halves of the stone together,” she said, “but we aren’t. This is far enough,” she said with certainty. “Can you move in toward shore without changing the distance between the two pieces of the stone?”
“That’s a good idea,” Obadiah said. “I suspect we don’t want to change the size of that thing by much, or whatever is supposed to happen isn’t going to work.”
“You really think it’s a portal of some kind, or a wormhole?” Eight asked.
“Other world, another world, underworld. Doesn’t much matter what you call it. It’s clearly a gateway to someplace else,” Obadiah said.
Eight had throttled back the engine even more, inching toward shore with barely enough power to cut across the flow of the current. Barrie shouted directions, left or right, trying to keep the ground within the sphere as level as possible with the ground on the shore at Watson’s Landing. Eight cut the motor entirely and steered through the marsh grass until he ran aground in the mud, but the sphere was still too far out in the water.
“I’ll take it from here.” Obadiah jumped off the boat into the water and waded toward shore, the silk of his dark shirt and pants gleaming like a raven’s feathers, but his movement was slow and labored in the water and heavy mud.
Eight dropped the anchor and jumped over the side of the Away to help Barrie out. She pushed toward the shore in Obadiah’s wake, careful not to touch the sphere, although she could feel it humming, vibrating through her the way the Scalping Tree had pulled her under. The Beaufort stone was still drawing her toward the Watson half.
There were more yunwi now. Their shapes were clearer than she had ever seen them, their eyes no longer filled with fire but dark, kind, and slightly wary instead, in a way that reminded Barrie of the way that Miranda had looked at her the first time they had seen each other, as if the mare had hoped Barrie could be trusted but wasn’t entirely certain.
Tears had begun to slip down Barrie’s face, and she wasn’t sure who she was crying for, the yunwi, or herself, or Watson’s Landing, or the Fire Carrier, or maybe for the world because she had a sense that it would be a poorer place when the yunwi left it. And they were leaving, because the two crescent moons didn’t belong on Pilot Mountain, or Blood Mountain, or anywhere else in Barrie’s own universe. Nor did she think the yunwi were coming back. The stories never spoke of the fey coming back once they retreated to their worlds in the hollow hills or their islands in the mist, and it seemed to her that was the biggest tragedy, to know that if she could only have learned to listen to them and understand them, maybe they wouldn’t have had to leave at all.
Maybe that was the real tragedy of humanity. Understanding, actual communication, happened only when both participants were at the right resonance, and that was rare. People who shouted that they knew the answers incited resentment, and people who spoke too quietly never convinced anyone to listen. Those who were selfless were dismissed as fools, while those who served themselves and knew how to put on a crocodile’s smile were the ones who too often spoke with certainty and united their followers through anger. But the good, the deep truth and quiet beauty of the world, that was offered in a whisper.
His back to her, Obadiah had stopped knee-deep in the water. Beyond this, the mud at the bank had bowed around the sphere so that the ground within it was almost at a perfect level with the ground outside. The Fire Carrier had moved back into the trees and was coming around the other side to stand with the yunwi, watching Barrie as she splashed past Obadiah.
The yunwi reached for her, their high-cheeked, narrow faces and wide, deep-set eyes finally clear. Barrie tried to memorize them, take memory snapshots until she’d be able to sketch them, but they pushed toward her, milling the way they usually did. She searched for the ones she thought she knew, the ones who always came with her, but she couldn’t recognize them, and somehow that was one of the worst things of all.
They pressed close, and she wanted to hold them, but she couldn’t. Not if they needed to go. They drew back again, and the Fire Carrier came forward. Barrie tried to think what to say to someone who had stood sentinel for more than four hundred years without complaining, without giving up, even after death. Someone who had watched the Watsons forget their promise, and had had the patience to hope that someday someone would remember.
There were no words, so she said the only thing she could: “Thank you.”
The Fire Carrier nodded, and he and one of the yunwi stepped up to the sphere and dissolved into a shimmer of mist until they stood in the darkness on the other side, whole again and bathed in the glow of the double moons. One by one, the yunwi moved through, until only two were left. When they stood in front of her, Barrie knew.
“Thank you,” she repeated, wishing that two words could stand in place of a thousand.
“Thank you,” they said. Their voices were still soundless, coming from somewhere far away.
One took Barrie’s hand and held it, while the other cupped her palm. A searing sensation, just past the edge of pain, bored into Barrie’s skin and burrowed deeper, racing along the nerve endings up her arm and spreading, radiating, sinking into her blood until it felt like her veins ran with fire.
Flames flickered an inch above her skin, a small bloom of fire three inches in diameter that hovered without visible support. One of the yunwi pressed Barrie’s fingers closed around it, and the fire went out, but they watched her expectantly, waiting for her to—what? Find it again?
Barrie smiled as she had the thought. Because finding it was as simple as thinking and connecting to the energy that flowed through her to the world beyond. She reached inside herself, and the flame sprang forth. She watched it burn, and when she looked up, the yunwi had slipped into the mist inside the sphere. They appeared a moment later on the other side.
There was no long good-bye. No good-bye at all. The bubble shuddered and the image corkscrewed, twisting in on itself and then fracturing with an accompanying burst of wind and spray of water.
A splash behind Barrie made her turn in time to see Obadiah collapse. His face caved in, and for an instant he was an old man falling into the shallow river. He sank beneath the waves, and a raven emerged, water spraying from its feathers in a burst of silver droplets that rained back onto the surface. The bird flew to the Away, circled once around the mast, and then winged up the Santisto toward the bridge, following the dark river away from the Atlantic. A single black feather floated away, and then the water went glass-still.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
It was a long service, but they had decided to do just one memorial for everyone. There were the boxed urns with Mark’s ashes and the newly cremated bones of Luke and Twila, and in honor of Obadiah, Barrie had placed the raven’s feather she had found in the water inside a wooden box. She had hunted through the woods behind the stables and found an eagle feather, too, which she had included in another box for the Fire Carrier. And last, she and Pru had talked long into the night about what to do for Lula. In the end, as much as Barrie was reluctant to part with any kind of history, Lula’s letters had felt so personal and the gri
ef in them had felt so stark that it seemed wrong to leave them for future generations who couldn’t possibly understand because they hadn’t known Lula Watson.
Barrie and Pru had taken turns rereading each letter aloud to each other and burning them afterward in a bowl to catch the ashes. That final reading had been more about forgiveness and regret, and Barrie felt lighter as each page flared and vanished into smoke. Then she and Pru had gathered the ashes and placed those in a memorial box as well. The boxes were made of a wood called purpleheart, which had struck Barrie as appropriate when she’d ordered them online. Each person they were burying, literally or figuratively, had been in some way a wounded soul.
Pastor Nelson’s sermon was about hope and forgiveness, but also about going home. Barrie had taken apart some old necklaces of Lula’s and Mark’s, and Pru had scavenged the crystal prisms from an old chandelier. Eight contributed a box of shells and pale blue sea glass he’d been collecting from the beach, and then the three of them had strung everything together to make wind chimes that hung in the branches of the oak tree that formed the ruined chapel’s living roof. The chimes whispered in the wind while the pastor spoke, and on the walls of the chapel, the yunwi’s roses still tangled with moonflower vines, and it was all perfect, except that it was still good-bye.
Along the wall outside the chapel where the graves had been dug, the mourners stood together while Mary sang “Amazing Grace.” Then they each poured a handful of soil onto the boxes laid out in their individual deep, small graves.
Barrie went first, her heart as fragile as tissue paper and ready to tear apart. Pru squeezed her hand before taking her own turn, and Seven was next, then Eight, Kate, Daphne, Berg, Cassie, Sydney, Marie Colesworth, and her mother, Jolene Landry. Mrs. Price had come with Lily Beth; and Lula’s best friend, Julia Lyons, was there, as well as Alyssa Evans from the barn, Cassie’s friend Gilly, Darrel from the hardware store, and Joe Goldstein from the local paper. Ms. Conley had come from Seven’s office, and a host of others that Barrie had seen or met at Colesworth Place or various spots in town. Even Andrew Bey had taken a break and left the police and the archaeology students to man the mess at the excavation site on their own while he came over. At some point soon, there would be a funeral for Charlotte Colesworth, too. But that was for the future and in a different chapel.
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