by Sarah Chorn
The healer poked around his side. “We need to get this out of you, but you’ll be fine. Just need to stitch you up.” He was all business, and that suited Arlen fine. He wasn’t in the mood to talk. “Please take your shirt off.”
“My shirt?” Arlen asked, cold filling him up. Now he was aware of nothing but this moment and that one request. He did not want to not take his shirt off in front of this man. He didn’t have it in him to power through that particular conversation or endure the looks that would inevitably result from that simple act.
“It’s in your side, son. To get it out and stitch you closed, I need a clear view of the wound.”
“It’s already torn,” Arlen said. “Can’t I just lift it?”
“I—"
At that moment, a woman appeared, pale as newly fallen snow, and obviously ill. Her steps were halting and she was leaning heavily both on a cane and the wall. “You shouldn’t be down here, Ianthe,” the healer said.
“I can’t stay in that room any longer, Edward,” the woman replied, collapsing into a chair. “Cassandra will be down in a moment to help me outside. I should like to sit in the sun.”
Edward grunted and turned back to Arlen. “I really need your shirt off.”
“No,” Arlen said. “I’ll lift it, and you can treat the area, but my shirt stays on. And no shine. Mundane methods only.”
“Let it be, Edward,” the woman said, a small smile curling her lips. Her gaze was fixed on him, gleaming with some emotion Arlen couldn’t begin to guess at. He lifted his shirt, holding the hem of it just below his chest, carefully keeping that area obscured. He sat still, grimacing, biting back his pain, while the healer set to work.
It was little more than a large splinter, really, and it took some time to sew him back up. “You’ll be sore for a while. Let me get you some ointment to keep away infection. It’s in the other room.” Edward left, and then it was just him and the woman.
“What’s your name?” The woman asked, voice gentle, words slow.
“Arlen,” he answered. His hand moved to the chain around his neck. He fingered his mother’s locket. “Arlen Hobson.”
“Arlen Hobson,” she said, drawing out the syllables as though savoring every one of them. “You look familiar, Arlen Hobson. My name is Ianthe. You’re staying in town?”
Just then, the door burst open and Sterling filled the space. “Arlen! You are here! One of my men thought they saw you, thought you were brought here. I’ve got people combing the entire territory for you! Where have you been? Are you okay?” Sterling’s relief was obvious. He looked over Arlen as though cataloging his injuries. He pulled his shirt down quickly. Sterling’s gaze fixed itself on his side. “You injured?”
“It’s nothing major, just had a bit of a cut that needed stitching.” Arlen stood and straightened his clothes. His bloodstained, torn shirt stuck to his skin, and his pants weren’t in much better condition. “Where’s Elroy?” Business. He needed to focus on business. He could handle business.
“Overseeing an operation out west.” Sterling waved a hand in the air as though it was nothing. As though it didn’t matter, this little thing with all those guns and all that screaming. “Come with me. I’ve got rooms at the saloon. You look like you could use a good meal, and we have a lot to talk about.”
Edward breezed in. “Rub this ointment on the wound three times a day. Keep it clean. Try not to bend, twist, or lift much until it’s healed. If you have any problems, come back here and I’ll see to you.”
Then, Sterling had his arm wrapped around Arlen’s shoulders and was leading him outside and across the street, to a saloon.
The saloon, which doubled as a hotel, was dark and nearly empty, seeing as how it was midday. A few men sat slumped over the bar, one was drooling, eyes unfocused, likely shine-drunk. A few whores were relaxing against the far wall, speaking in low tones, occasionally laughing. Arlen gave himself time to adjust to the darkness, and then followed Sterling to a far table. His stitches pulled with each step. He wanted to lay down. He wanted to know what happened to Christopher. Instead, he donned his mask, the face of Arlen Esco, unconcerned and businesslike. Then, he pulled out a seat and sat down with a groan. “There are rooms here for the company. Your trunk has come through, so you’ve got clothes now, too.”
He liked the leathers he was wearing, but he had to admit it would feel good to be in his own clothes again. It would feel even better to lay on a bed and sleep for a year. He was exhausted. No, beyond exhausted. So physically and emotionally drained he could barely focus.
“You were taken from the train by the outlaw,” Sterling said as soon as they were both comfortable. Ah yes, this conversation. “What happened?” Sterling was staring at him, staring through him. Sitting straight in his chair, hands folded on the table before him. Arlen was sure if he lied, Sterling would know it.
“I was taken from the train by the outlaw,” Arlen confirmed. “There isn’t much to say aside from that.” Why hadn’t he thought of a story to tell, some way to fill in the gaps? Something to say that would keep someone like Sterling from poking around and finding things he wasn’t ready to show?
“Why did they drop Elroy off here, but take you?”
“Do we really need to do this now?” Arlen asked. He ran a hand through his hair. Winced, at how it pulled at his wound. “I am tired, Sterling. Can this wait?”
They stared at each other, a silent battle being waged on the scarred, pitted tabletop that sat between them. “People were worried,” Sterling finally said. “Worried enough to go out looking for you. Worried enough to think you might be dead. I thought they’d be bringing a body back to Grove, but instead, you come walking into town like nothing is wrong, and you expect me to let it go?”
“Yes,” Arlen snapped. He slammed a fist on the table. His voice had steel to it. He’d never spoken to Sterling like this before, and the man’s wide eyes and open mouth showed how shocked he was. Yes, he wanted to say. I have a spine now. “I expect you to leave it for now. I am tired, and I am injured, and hungry. My story can wait until after I have rested.” After he’d thought of something to say.
Tension pulled up a chair at the table and got comfortable. “Fine,” Sterling said.
“Tell me about what Elroy is doing,” Arlen said. Elroy, out west, where his family was. West, where all those guns were tearing people apart. West, where he’d last seen Christopher Hobson.
“…found an illegal shine well,” Sterling was saying as he settled into the chair across from Arlen, warming to the topic. “Sent Elroy out to deal with it. Should be an easy job. In and out.”
“What if it’s not?” Arlen asked, forcing himself to focus on the situation at hand. His voice was a block of ice, frigid and sharp, hacked out from the coldest part of his soul.
“It’ll be fine. We sent the best men we have in the territory out there. Our guess is they’ve been running the stuff for years. If there’s a shootout or some such, I don’t see there being much of a problem. Even if they are armed, we’ve got more power than any frontier family has.” Sterling paused. “We’ll keep the guilty party in jail here until the train comes and we can send them off to Freetown for trial. Our informant says they’ve had the well out there for years. Never turned it in. That’s a hangable offense. It’ll be over soon, and it’s better this way. Sometimes the people out here need an example.”
An example.
That’s what he called it?
Not death. Not murder.
An example.
And that was it. Arlen stood up, put his fingers on the table and glared at Sterling. “My name,” he said, “Is Arlen Hobson.”
“What—"
“Arlen. Fucking. Hobson. And I know what is happening on that homestead.” He made to leave. He had no idea where he was going; he just needed to be out of that place, away from under the cloying gaze of Sterling, and the stench of his justifications.
“Matthew Esco is coming, Arlen. He’s on his way. Shoul
d be here any day now.”
That got him to stop, got his shoulders to stiffen.
“He’ll want to see you.”
Yes, he supposed he would, and wouldn’t that be an interesting conversation?
I can feel my end coming.
The world is darker. The shine isn’t helping me anymore. My body is shutting down, and nothing can keep me from feeling that. I am drifting away, like sand from an hourglass. My life is leaking from between my ribs, one grain at a time.
Cassandra is in the room, and suddenly I am overwhelmed with wanting. I want, more than anything, to see her smile one last time. A cough rips through me. Blood fills my mouth. I am trying to hide how this latest fit is tearing me apart. I cover my mouth, try to hold back the worst of it.
Why do we hide our pain?
I am exhausted in every sense of the word.
“Cassandra,” It hurts to speak. “I am drifting. I want to say…” I cannot say more. I do not have the strength.
“Ianthe,” Cassandra says. She is crying again. I feel as though she is always weeping these days. I do not want to sleep knowing her tears are staining her cheeks.
“I want to say…”
Goodbye. I want to say goodbye while I feel like I am sober enough to know what I am saying. But I can’t. The consumption has even stolen this from me.
Silence stretches between us, taking up all the space in the room. Sucking up all the air. We meet each other’s eyes, and we both know. This may be the only ending we get. I do not know if I will wake again.
I do not know when her name turned into a prayer. It must have happened when I wasn’t looking. Three syllables strung like pearls on the thread of my breath: Cass-an-dra. I whisper it into the night until it shines brighter even than the stars.
She rhymes with everything. I hear her in my heartbeat and see her in the sunset. She is the shipwreck floating in the still waters of my heart’s harbor.
There is a half-empty ache in my soul. I am leaving and taking part of her with me. At this moment, I hear all the things language has no room for.
This is the tragedy of living with a beating heart.
This is goodbye.
Her touch is light; her hand is warm. Her thumb strokes my cheek. I close my eyes.
I want her to live so much more than I care if I die. I want her to spend her years lighting the world on fire.
What a glorious thing it would be.
Cassandra, dressed in flames.
The six months since my father’s injury and the incident in the shine fields were horrible. Da healed slowly, and left but a month after he’d arrived, afraid that if he stayed much longer, he would be caught, which would put us all in danger. He was not healed enough, and as far as I knew, he could be either alive or dead. He’d stopped coming to the messenger stone, stopped leaving me trinkets, though each month I went out to him, and left him my own treasures. Each month they disappeared, but he never left me anything.
This, mixed with Imogen keeping Ianthe and myself separated thrust me into a very dark place, full of nothing but loneliness and depression. I had never felt so isolated, or so cut off. The world lost its luster. The two people I loved most might as well have been an ocean away from me, and it pained me greatly to not know how either of them were doing.
One night, when the snow was thick and the moon was just another chunk of ice in the frozen sky, Ianthe stopped breathing. Somehow, Imogen got her lungs to work again.
I cannot imagine how terrible that must have been, sitting beside her daughter’s bed, counting the seconds between breaths. She was alone with the dark and the stars, holding on to hope for one more day with Ianthe.
I wish I had been there with Ianthe, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in months, since Imogen kicked me out. It wasn’t until hours into the next day that Imogen sent the healer, Edward, to our house to tell us that Ianthe was being moved to the small sanatorium in Grove. Her needs were beyond what Imogen could handle.
The sanatorium was a quaint place and I was sure Ianthe would find solace there. Located across the street from the saloon, it was a two-story house, painted white. There were rooms upstairs, each with its own balcony. Outside, on the walkway, sat some rocking chairs. Next door was an apothecary, where I assume Edward got most of his medications and potions for healing the injured.
Edward was a willowy man with stooped shoulders and orange skin. His hands shook as he told us what had happened and that Ianthe’s consumption was too far gone. It was best for her to live in town, where she could get her fill of the crude shine she needed, and be close to a healer if she stopped breathing again.
She was not getting better. No one said that, but that fact hung in the air. Ianthe would never come home again. It was there in the healer’s sad gaze, in the defeated slouch of his shoulders. “Ianthe is refusing to go unless Cassandra is with her,” Edward said, fixing his orange stare on me. “She needs to do this, Cass. Can you go to her? Can you ease this transition?”
He didn’t need to ask. There was nowhere I’d rather be.
“Go,” Annie said. She had seen me wallowing over the past months, worrying over Ianthe, lost in my loneliness. I do not think I realized how much she meant to me until she was no longer there, beside me. I would creep through the meadows each day, begging for a peek of her through the window, or in the cart as Imogen went into town. “If she’s ill, you need to go to her.”
“Let’s go,” I said, the words hitting the frigid air. It required no thought on my part. Ianthe needed me, and I would go, the rest of the world be damned. It was that simple.
I grabbed my shawl and affixed a bonnet and ran out the door, dragging the healer along behind me.
I burst into her house and tore up the stairs. Imogen was sitting beside Ianthe’s bed, hands twisted together in her lap, knuckles white with strain. She looked like she’d lost a great amount of weight. Her skin hung on her bones. Her hair had lost its luster and her eyes were hollow. She was a ghost haunting the present.
Our eyes met, and Imogen stood with a sigh, leaving me alone with her daughter, but not before she rested her hand on my shoulder. I heard her in the hallway, speaking to Edward before she shut the door.
“Ianthe,” I whispered, making my way to her side. I clasped her hand in my own. There was a slight flush to her cheeks that would have been charming at any other time. Her hair was stringy and dry, and her lips were cracked. Her sunken eyes seemed to have a hard time focusing, fixing on me before sliding away, only to do it all over again a moment later. I wove our fingers together and pressed my lips against her fingertips, once for each finger. Then I pressed her hand against my cheek bathed her with my tears
My life changed in a breath. In a blink. In the beat of my heart.
She met my gaze, and I drowned in the ocean of her eyes. I gave myself over to her. Surrender. It was not gentle or soft. It was hard, cutting, and all at once. She was the sun, burning and greedy, and I was the moon begging for her to shine some of her sacred light on me.
The world seemed to shift and shudder. My heart throbbed her name.
I wanted.
I wanted her to touch me. Burn me. Break me. Mend me. Hold me.
I wanted to fill my lungs with the air she breathed.
I wanted to smooth away the boundaries between our heartbeats.
I wanted… so much.
These are the things they don’t tell you: Love is not soft. Love is the loneliest place in the world. For her, I became an island adrift in a foreign sea. I emptied myself just so I could fit more of her inside of me. Love was the fire, and I walked into it over and over again knowing it would burn me.
She was the sweet music of my destruction. The lullaby of my end.
Odd, how I never learned to thank the ground until I knew what it was to fall.
“Cass,” she said. Even that seemed too hard for her. The word cracked on her lips and then lay between us like an injured thing. Her breath was harsh, fast
and sawing. Her pulse beat like a hummingbird’s wing in the thin column of her neck.
She was dying. Dying right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do to save her. I could just sit beside her and watch as she wasted away, fighting for each second, each minute and I vowed to fill them with nothing but happiness, nothing but laughter and love. Her twilight years had come far too quickly, but I vowed to fill them with beauty.
There is a certain brutality in helplessness, and I have never felt it more than I did at that moment. There was nothing I could do for her. Nothing that could turn the tide of her terrible illness. I would have done anything to ease her pain. I would have taken her illness from her in a moment.
But there was nothing I could do, and so I sat beside her and held her hand while the unique torture of watching someone I love die twisted me in knots.
More than that, all I could think of was, maybe there was someone on the other side of the Boundary who could help her. Maybe someone in that wide, incredible world we couldn’t reach, could cure Ianthe, or at least give her more time.
What I would not give for more time.
I could go. I could run past the Boundary and come back with someone to help us. But then how would I get them in?
It wouldn’t be hard. The Boundary wasn’t that far off. It would be nothing but a short journey for me, and then I could come back in just as easily, perhaps with lifesaving medication. It would be worth the risk.
The more I thought about it, the more I was determined to do it. I would settle Ianthe in the sanatorium and then—
The plan was forming in my mind, but Ianthe knew me too well. Her hand squeezed mine. She licked her lips. “Don’t do it, Cassandra. Just… stay with. me.”
“Of course,” I whispered against her knuckles. “I would do anything for you.”
For her, anything. Even if it meant giving up on this one fragile hope. Even if it meant watching her die.
“Sometimes Fate only gives a person a certain number of days.” She paused, seemed to gather her strength before licking her lips and continuing. “I am dying, Cassandra. I may have days, or years, but I am dying. I should like to spend the last of my time with you beside me.”