by Amy Wilson
She has dark hair and dark eyes, and her dress is green, and her song is breaking me apart. I don’t know how to break Io’s spell.
How do I break this thing? I demand.
She looks up. Her eyes widen.
Who are you?
I cannot answer – my heart is stuck in my throat.
WHO ARE YOU?
She looks straight at me, her hands twisted together.
I stare at her, take in every inch of her. That is my mother. Not a warrior queen who stalked by my side into school, not a tragic princess locked away by wicked witches. Not any of the images I’d fed myself over the years. She is a woman. A real blood-and-bone woman, small and full of complicated things. I hold her in my heart, just the way she is. I see the way her hair curls as it escapes its bun, the dry flowers that still nestle there, the chapped skin on her hands, the shine of her shadowed eyes as she looks at me.
‘Come out,’ I shout then, raising my hands, my voice resonating with all the dreams and fantasies that were never really her, as I send it all out. My breath is hot. It curls like steam in the air, and static rolls over the glass. Petals fly inside the globe, bricks crack and the house begins to collapse behind her. I pull harder and the glass warps, shattering and sending a million shards out into the room. I close my eyes against their sting, and when I open them again there she is, standing before me, in a muddle of the things that kept her there all those years. She is static, still caught in my spell, but tears well up in her eyes as she stares at me.
She is crying.
I am angry. I am made of towering rock, glinting and bright, and she is crying.
‘I needed you.’
Clementine? No, but I am dreaming. This cannot be! IO! Break this spell. Let me move!
‘It isn’t Io’s spell,’ I whisper. ‘Io’s spell shut you in the globe. This is mine, and it’s keeping everything still for a moment so I can think!’
Let me go! she bursts. Please, I do not understand – break this spell!
Make everything go again? Wake Io and her cursed butterflies, the candles and the war in my blood? I’m afraid that if I let go, it’s going to be too big, and the whole house will fall apart.
I can’t.
You can.
Her eyes are intent. She smells of the earth and the stars, a deep, metallic scent that washes over me and takes me to a memory of sunshine and a bright, light kitchen, the windows open to the garden, and my ma, singing, happy.
How has she been here all this time, content in her make-believe, while I grew up?
Clementine!
Nobody else ever said it like that; even if they had tried, they never could have made it ring. The spell I cast to trap Io has become a thick knot in my mind and it grows, the longer I hold on to it, until my head is pounding. I reach out and touch the sleeve of her dress, and it’s real. The flowers in her hair begin to bloom.
She is real.
My spell breaks, the knot unwinds with a snap that makes my ears ring and noise ricochets around me: Io’s screech, the thunder of a storm outside and cracks that spread up the walls to the ceiling with a terrible ripping sound. The candles stutter into life once more.
‘Clementine?’ my mother whispers, rushing to me, holding my arms tight, her dark eyes looking deep into mine, flitting to take in every part of me. ‘Is it you?’
I nod.
‘But you are all grown up,’ she says. ‘How can this be? I saw you this morning. I left you with your pa, and you were tiny – a whirl of joy and temper. You are only two . . . you cannot be this! What happened? What did they do?’
The cracks in the ceiling widen as my heart stutters. She doesn’t have the answers, she only has questions, and I don’t know what to do with all the shock and grief spilling out of her.
‘How old are you, Clementine?’
‘Twelve.’
The tears fall. The glass dome shatters, and the moons over our heads are brighter than ever.
‘How did this happen?’ she whispers, looking up, and then back to me. ‘Where are my sisters? What did they do? How can this . . . ? Oh, Clementine, my sweet girl, I have missed so much. Oh Piotr . . .’ She lets go of me, puts her hands to her mouth. ‘Your dear pa. Such a little row . . . have I really left you both for so long! Where is he now?’
‘He’s at home,’ I say. ‘He . . . didn’t know where you went. He gave me your book, and I found the house, and Ganymede was there. She says she put you in here because she thought you weren’t happy . . .’ My own tears start to fall. ‘She didn’t know you had me – you didn’t tell them – so she put you in a globe so you could be with Io and she could comfort you. And then Io hid you here.’
‘It was a day!’ she says. ‘I thought it was just a day. That is Io’s magic; I didn’t feel it! What have they done to us, Clementine? We were happy. We were a family!’ She brushes the tears from her cheeks and takes a breath. ‘We will fix it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We can use magic.’ Her eyes dance with sudden possibility. ‘We can . . . we can make it so that your memories are mine, so that it has been but a day. Your pa, as well. We will all be together, in here. And time will mean nothing.’
‘You can’t turn back time! You can’t make me two again! You can’t take back everything that happened while you were in here – that’s my life! Pa’s life!’
‘You have lived it all without me,’ she whispers after a long silence. ‘So then what do we do?’
‘We go home,’ I say.
‘We go home,’ she repeats. ‘But don’t you hate me, for having left you for so long?’
I can’t answer that, not right now.
She looks at me long and hard, and then nods, a decision made. She takes my hand in hers, kisses me hard on the forehead and then lifts her face to the dome above us.
‘IO!’ she roars.
The windows in the tower break, the glass blows out and the whole house rings like a bell with her fury. She storms out of the tower room, pulling me along behind her, and her footsteps are like thunder as we go.
The house is falling down around us. With every step it shudders, rolling like a ship at sea. The cracks have splintered every wall, and the paintings hang lop-sided, some of them crashing to the floor. My mother’s hand is small but strong, her stride unrelenting as she sweeps through the corridors, her skirts like a forest, the flowers in her hair blooming brighter all the time.
‘IO!’ she shouts again, bursting into the main passageway, pulling us down the stairs. ‘Where are you? Stop hiding from me!’
There’s movement in the hallway below, and Io flashes past us, running for the vast front door, Dylan close behind her. We race down steps that crack beneath our feet as the trees in the forest begin to fall with a groan.
‘What are you doing?’ Io demands as we emerge at the front of the house. Her hair is a haystack, her copper cloak unravelling at the bottom. ‘Callisto! Calm yourself!’
Dylan edges past her and rushes over to me with Helios as I pull myself away from my mother.
‘What did you do?’ he asks. ‘Everything went dark, and then Io was racing for the tower – I tried to stop her, and then she heard your ma shout, and the whole place started to fall down! I’ve never seen Io frightened before!’
‘I just got her out,’ I whisper. ‘That’s all.’
I can’t stop staring at them. They’re like wild animals stalking each other, and the fury in the air between them is so fierce it threatens to turn us all into embers. We draw back as the tower behind us lurches with a great screech, falling through the floors of the house, dust and chips of black stone flying out all around us. The bridge cracks and breaks in two, and the three of us race across the scrubby ground to stand by the black river, watching as the sisters face each other in the rubble, barely flinching in the chaos.
‘Calm myself? Look what you’ve done!’ my mother yells, throwing out a hand in my direction, clouds rumbling overhead, obscuring the three mo
ons the sisters were named for.
Io had everything here, I realize, looking up. Her sisters in the sky with her, and all the paintings of all the worlds they’d made inside the house. She made a world within a world, and she missed nothing.
‘You with your warped magic – look how it has darkened while you’ve locked yourself in here! All of this illusion doesn’t change anything, Io. You have used this place as your own private entertainment, and you trapped me here because you could not bear to let me free, and I have missed everything! I have missed my daughter growing up!’
‘I didn’t know you had a daughter!’ Io flings back at her, golden skirts flying as she’s forced back from the ruin of her house, her sister darting in the other direction in a whirl of green. ‘Had you trusted us, we would have known! We would never have taken you away from your only child. Why didn’t you tell us, Callisto?’
‘I was afraid! I knew Gan would say she had magic and must be controlled, and I couldn’t bear that. I was so tired of you both, all the arguments and the power struggles – and now look what you’ve done! You have taken my heart and I can never get it back, Io . . . There are ten years of her childhood that I will never know! How can I go home after all this time? How can I make it right? I loved them more than the earth and stars, Io – more than anything!’ She stamps her foot and tears at her chest and yells with such force that the ground beneath us shudders. ‘You have ruined me!’
‘I have not!’ Io replies with a catch in her voice. ‘I have not, Callisto. They are still there. They will love you still. How could they not? I am sorry! I am so sorry . . .’
Her voice breaks, and the clouds overhead crash together. Great fat drops of rain begin to fall around us. The river beside us rises in a tide, and the sky darkens ominously.
‘Are you doing that?’ I whisper to Dylan.
‘I don’t know,’ he says.
‘They haven’t even noticed,’ I say as the river breaks its banks and starts to flood over the dry ground.
My mother and Io are still circling each other; they don’t hear us calling. They don’t see the water rising. They can only see each other’s desperation, and I can barely see anything because my eyes won’t stop making tears. She’s here, and she is just what Pa said she was. She’s a force of nature, and I can only stand and watch.
‘We have to go!’ Dylan shouts. ‘The storm is getting worse – it’s not safe!’
‘We can’t just leave them!’ I protest as the two sisters move closer together, their breath misting in the air, sparks still flying even as rain pounds down around us. The river has reached our ankles already and the house is a great mound of rubble.
‘We can,’ he says, grabbing my hand and pulling me to the glass wall that curves from the river to the forest. ‘You’ve done everything you can here. We’ll get back to the house and break the globe, and they’ll come back.’ He doesn’t wait. ‘Let us IN!’ he commands with a voice like flint, and the glass warps, and we are back in the house where all of this started.
It’s ear-stretching quiet after all the chaos: just a narrow corridor, pale sunlight filtering through a narrow window, and the snowglobes on their shelves, all in a silent whirl. Io’s globe stands before us, cracks already fracturing the glass. It seems impossible that Ganymede hasn’t heard the racket, and yet it is all just within one tiny globe.
‘Let’s break it, then,’ I whisper, once we’ve caught our breath.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Do you know how?’
‘Don’t you?’ I ask. ‘You seemed pretty sure when we were in there!’
‘I wanted to get us out,’ he says. ‘And there was no way they were ever going to hear us.’
‘Let’s do it together,’ I say. ‘Our power combined . . . if we just blast it all at them, maybe the glass will shatter.’
We stand back a bit, and Helios retreats, sitting in the corner with a huff. Footsteps start to echo from far away: Ganymede will be here soon.
We need to do it now.
We hold hands, and focus on the globe. My mother and Io rush towards the glass on the other side, realizing we’ve already broken out, and then I hear Dylan’s song for the first time. It’s like the rush and tumble of a stream, like a waterfall, untamed and beautiful. I thread my song with his, gathering all my magic, everything I ever wanted or needed, and the waterfall flashes with gold, flowing from us to the snowglobe.
The glass breaks with a blast of magic that makes my hair stand on end, and the corridor fills with tiny particles of black dust.
And two women stand in the midst of it all, pale with shock, staring at us, both of them drenched and breathless from all their shouting.
‘Clementine!’ my mother gasps. ‘What did you do?’
‘I got you out of there,’ I say. ‘With Dylan’s help . . .’
She stares at us, but there is no more time for talk. The chandeliers flicker, the globes begin to swirl and Ganymede is upon us.
‘What is this?’ she demands, rushing along the corridor and stopping dead when she sees us all here, the candles in the sconces on the walls guttering. Her shock is so great that it’s another wave of destruction, heading in our direction.
‘Control yourself, sister,’ says Io, rising up to her full height, running a shaking hand through her golden hair, butterflies spiralling out. ‘Did you think we would be gone forever?’
Ganymede doesn’t say anything. Her grey eyes are huge, shining like mirrors, looking between us all, lingering on my mother, who stands by my side, ashen-faced, her song a broken chord that flutters without end.
‘I thought I’d lost you all,’ Ganymede whispers. ‘I thought I’d lost you, and it was my fault. I sent you all away.’ Her song is a whispering thread of want and need and desperate, hiding loneliness. ‘I thought I’d be alone forever,’ she says. ‘I was unkind, and it has always been the two of you against me, so you both went, and I was alone here. A hundred, a thousand years of solitude. What happened, Clementine? Is this your doing?’
‘None of it is my doing!’ I say. ‘The three of you did it all!’
‘And you brought them back here, after all this time,’ she says.
‘It was ten years,’ I say. ‘Which is long enough.’
‘It was my fault,’ she says heavily. ‘I put Callisto in there. I thought it would help.’ She turns to my mother. ‘I thought you would know peace there, that it would be easier. I didn’t know you’d had a child. When I knew for sure who Clementine was, I spent days looking for you, but it was too late: Io had hidden you, and I couldn’t find you anywhere.’ Her voice shakes. She is braced for attack, drawn up tight, ready for her sisters to take her down.
But they don’t. They just watch her unravel all by herself, lost and lonely in the house she made a prison.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
They’re such small words, and her voice is so small as she says them. The house does not shake, the walls do not crack, but something shifts anyway, something quiet and warm that flowers into the air and picks up all their broken threads, and makes the air hum with the song of three sisters, joined together after a lifetime.
‘Are you OK?’ whispers Dylan, drawing me aside while they stare at each other, not speaking, not touching.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t know if we can make it right.’
‘She can try,’ he says. ‘You can try. I would, if I had a chance. If my dad could come back . . .’
‘You have memories; you knew he loved you!’ I blurt.
‘He was away half the year, and when he was around he was thinking of the sea. He wasn’t perfect,’ Dylan says. ‘Nobody’s perfect, Clem!’
‘But you would try, if you had him back.’
‘I would,’ he says, holding on tight to Helios. ‘And you will.’
‘Will you, Clementine?’ my mother asks. ‘Can I make it up to you?’ Her eyes fill. ‘Tell me you always knew that I loved you . . . Tell me your pa told you, every day . . . Did he sing my
song for you, even after I was gone?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But I didn’t know it was a spell. I didn’t know about this place, about Ganymede or Io,’ I say, my voice shaking. ‘And I don’t know why you hid me from them like that. Am I really so strange?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘You are a wonder. You are a force of nature, magnified a million times. You are a whole world, all of yourself, far more than I could ever have imagined. I loved you so fiercely that I hardly knew what to do with myself when you slept, and I can say I’m sorry for the rest of my life, but it will never be enough. I don’t know how to make it right.’
‘Are you waiting for me to tell you?’ I ask. ‘Because I don’t know!’
‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘It’s up to me.’ She nods firmly, and her song breaks out around her like a storm as she crosses the distance between us, making herself big around me as she holds me, her heart beating like a drum.
It’s time. The sisters are doing a lot of flapping, and earnest talk, but they haven’t worked out what Dylan and I have in mind. I doubt they’ve even considered it, even after everything that’s happened. We don’t debate it. We don’t give them the chance to argue; it’s just what needs to happen. What always needed to happen, ever since I first walked in here and found Dylan locked in a snowglobe.
Ever since we blew apart Io’s globe, and felt the magic spiral out around us.
We start at the closest globes, joining our songs to break them. As each one smashes, there’s a blast of power that makes the world just a tiny bit brighter, and the material within puffs out: clouds of tiny golden stars, coloured glitter, tiny gleaming blue fish – all bursting out like confetti. The magicians inside turn to us, their faces bright, and then they disappear.
‘Where are they all going?’ Dylan asks, after the third one.
‘Back where they came from,’ I say. ‘That’s what Fabia said. They’d all find their way . . .’
‘Children!’ comes a steely voice. ‘What are you doing?’
‘We’re sending your prisoners home,’ I say.
‘Clementine, you can’t just . . .’ starts my mother.