by Sarah Chorn
It felt good to tell his truth to another person. Felt good to have that contact, to know that he was being heard, and in some way, understood.
“What are you going to do?” Elroy asked. “They’re going to hang Hobson. There’s no way around that. ”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Arlen admitted. “I don’t think I’ve known anything since I got out here. All I know is that Matthew Esco is coming out here. I need him to tell me why he took me. I need to hear what happened, in his words.” A pause. “What are you going to do, Elroy?”
“Don’t know,” the man admitted. He hadn’t moved yet. “The healer said that shine will always be a problem for me. I’ll be aching for it for the rest of my life. I think I need to get away from… all of this. From all this blood. From the shine.” He drew in a shuddering breath. “I think I’m going to look for Sefate.”
I am traveling through the twilight of the soul, a barren landscape, save for all those glistening stars. I am drifting. Drifting on a sea of broken glass. Sailing through the dark on a ship with no cargo, and no compass.
I can feel Cassandra nearby. I think I will always feel her.
I think of goldfinches, and I envy those small creatures. That is what I long to be. A bit of stolen summer, yellow-breasted and porous-boned, with a song so sweet it makes the world shake off winter. I yearn to be one small, warm-blooded, freely flying piece of the whole.
I will die wishing for one more moment. One more breath. One more beat of my heart. I am resigned to my fate, but I wish death would tarry outside a spell. Instead, the figure is a hulking thing looming over the foot of my bed. I feel its cold breath there, stealing away my life. Sucking it right from me.
“Ianthe,” Cassandra says. I feel her hand cupping mine. Her touch is gentle, and her skin is soft. “Ianthe, my love, I have kept something from you.” She is weeping. Her tears make her words sound watery, each one flowing off the edge of a cliff, falling down, and down, and down, to crash on the bedrock of her sorrow. “It’s about your mother.”
My mother.
I am so far gone, it takes some time for that word to anchor me. Long minutes pass before I can find the strength to open my eyes.
“Tell me,” I whisper.
And I watch, as she falls apart.
“Tell me about my mother.” It wasn’t even a whisper, really. Ianthe had no voice. She was drifting further away from me with each passing day, and no amount of holding on could keep her near.
Whatever strength I’d used to keep myself together was gone. I was fraying. Soon, the wind would carry me away. I was sure of it.
Ianthe tried to sit up, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t focus on me. After a brief struggle, she finally sagged back into her pillows with a defeated sigh and closed her eyes.
Edward said this was normal, that this was the way of things. Her body was shutting down, and she was losing strength. I could see her, minute by minute, becoming weaker. I couldn’t help but wonder what that felt like, feeling all the parts of her just… stop. I hoped it didn’t hurt.
In her haze, she hasn’t noticed that her mother hasn’t visited her.
“I can’t, Ianthe. Please don’t make me tell you what has happened.”
Fate, I was selfish. Selfish to look at her plagued body and want to keep her for but one more day. One more moment. One more breath. I beg her for this, even after I have just decided I cannot keep it from her anymore.
I have never believed myself to be strong. I am not a sturdy oak. I am a willow, easy to bend, eager to snap in any wind. I am soft and full of want.
“Cassandra,” Ianthe said. It took her twice as long as it should to say my name. She stopped in the middle of it to gasp for breath, then focused all her energy on finishing up the word. Like she needed taste the fullness of it in her mouth one last time.
There is a feeling that comes with the end. A sense of cold finality, and I felt it then. The very room itself was filled with knowing. This would be it. One last conversation. One last stolen moment. One final, agonized goodbye. We shouldn’t have spent it talking about this. Not about sorrows and pistols, shine and death. We should have spoken of something else. Anything else. The sunrise. The sunset.
Tomorrow.
I never understood the promise of tomorrow until I moved into the sanatorium with Ianthe. Never understood the succor of knowing that there would be another day, and another one after that. There is a certain hope in the idea of the sunrise.
Hope is such a precious thing. Like a flower in summer, it is fleeting.
“It’s okay,” Ianthe said, her voice hoarse and feeble. As hollow as the rest of her. “It’s okay to cry. There will be better days than this.”
I covered my face with my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt her hand against my back, patting me before it slid back down to rest on the bed. I watched as her eyes slid closed, as though even that much action exhausted her.
She deserved to know. I could not let her leave me with this hanging over us both. “Ianthe, I only did not tell you sooner because I knew it would hurt you to know and I cannot…” my voice trailed off. I turned on the bed so I might see her. Then I steeled my nerves, and I told her. I told her all of it.
Three days ago, this took place. Three small days. Such short leaps through time. Nothing, really. A dream, the flutter of a bird’s wing, a leaf falling from a tree. Those three days in the grand scope of things are nothing, yet they were everything to me. I clasped her cold hands in mine and watched her feebly shake her head from side to side as I divulged the scope of the massacre, the unimaginable, murderous barbarity that took from us everyone we have ever loved.
She was dying, and every word that fell from my lips was twisting the knife. I love her, and I was killing her.
I watched, hopeless, helpless, as tears slid down her cheeks, as her mouth opened and closed; whether to speak or scream, I will never know.
“I am alone,” she said. She was staring past me, at what, I could only guess. Staring, perhaps, at the past. There was a look in her eyes that I’d seen before, only once, but it was burned into me. The night when she arrived at our cabin to tell us Ben had been killed, she had stared just like this. It sent a chill up my spine.
“No,” I told her. “Not alone. I am here, Ianthe. I will always be right here.”
She sighed. I felt her gaze like a caress. “You should not have to watch me die.”
“Where else would I possibly be?” I asked her.
For her, anything.
She wove her fingers through mine. “Cassandra and Ianthe,” she murmured.
It was all she had, and it was enough.
It took such a short amount of time to tell her how they all died. Such full, amazing lives lived so passionately, and all it took was an hour for me to tell her how it all came to a fiery, impossible, unbelievable end. “Edward has taken some men out to the homestead to dig graves,” I told her. “Next to Annie’s baby from all those years ago. In the meadow.”
Ianthe looked to be sleeping. Her chest moving with her shallow breaths. Exhausted. This was too much for her. I made to move, but her grip on my hand tightened.
“Bury me out there,” she said. “In the meadow.” Her eyes opened and fixed on me, clear as I hadn’t seen them in nearly a year.
“I swear it,” I said.
A smile curled her lips. “It eases me, to know who is waiting for me. Who will be waiting for you, when the time comes, may it not be for many, many years.” Her breath rattled in her lungs. Her lips were speckled with blood. “I am tired, Cassandra. Will you sit beside me until I sleep?”
I clung to the music of every word she spoke.
I curled up beside her, expecting every breath to be her last. I hung on each one of her heartbeats.
Finally, after hours of watching her sleep, after the passage of a day, after an eternity of moments stretching into a forever that would never be long enough, Edward appeared in Ianthe’s room. “You need to
clear your head, Cassandra,” he said. He took in Ianthe’s sleeping form, and his eyes filled with sadness. Ianthe had lived longer than anyone expected, and we had all grown close. He was hurting, too. “If aught changes, I’ll send for you.”
He didn’t need to ask where I would be going. We both knew.
It was a day for long goodbyes.
My father’s death was to be a spectacle. They’d built the gallows right in the center of Grove over the past three days. I’d listened to hammers hitting nails, to the workers shouting at each other. Earlier today, someone had hung a noose. It was empty, for now, but doubtless, it would be adorned with my father on the morrow. The train had arrived just this morning and a bunch of important company men had gotten off of it, stinking up Grove with their fine suits and all their money. Blood money.
Fate, everything hurt. My heart. My soul. Even my bones ached. I had aged a lifetime in a few days.
Ianthe. She was my everything. She was the best part of me. How could I possibly live in a world without her in it?
I decided to take the long way to the jail. The walk would give me time to calm down, soak in the sunset, and clear my mind.
I thought about my father.
I only took one trip with my da. Only once, did he take me away from Grove. I was, perhaps twelve when it happened. We were only gone for two or three weeks, not long, but long enough. It felt like a big adventure at the time. He came to the house early one morning, dressed rough, cheeks flushed, eyes sparkling, and said, “Cassandra, get your things. I’m going to take you to the mountains for a spell.”
Annie was worried. She argued with Da for a long time about taking me, and all the dangers she foresaw in the act, but all Chris did was laugh. “She’ll be fine, let me have some time with my daughter,” he said. For my part, I was overjoyed. I cared not a whit where we went, as long as we were together.
He hauled me off to the mountains. I left being civilized behind. I put on buckskins, cut my hair, and set about being a wild woman, trapping and skinning as I had when I was a child. It was just the two of us walking across the spine of the world.
We’d spend our nights side-by-side, a fire painting us with its soft amber light while we listened to the songs of wolves chasing the moon across the sky. I will not recount everything that was said, for some things remain sacred between father and daughter. I will, however, tell you the one thing he taught me that will matter to you.
Bloodshed is always superfluous. It is the deeper damage that is best.
Those weeks with him were the best of my life. Just the two of us getting to know each other after a lifetime apart. It was like coming home again. Like being embraced after years of being without. Annie and Jasper had become family to me, as real and true as any, but they could not take the place of my father.
There was freedom under the stars, standing on the tops of mountain peaks, the vast world arrayed below. A feeling of being above it all. Detached from it. The world was too small a thing to affect us, and so it didn’t.
I left part of myself on that mountain.
I turned a corner, and the door of the jail, closed tight, loomed ahead of me. My heart beat rapidly in my chest. My palms were sweating. I stopped, leaned against a wall to gather myself.
I looked at the heavens. Before, I’d taken so much comfort from all that untamed emptiness. The sky just seemed to go on and on and I saw nothing but freedom in its distant horizons. Now, I suddenly felt small. I was so insignificant, and these events were overwhelming, how could I make sense of them all?
When I was a child, I used to wonder what the stars were. Now, I think I know. The stars are fire. One flame for each of our exquisite agonies. A graveyard of hopes and dreams.
Beautiful agony. Painful joy.
I took in a great breath, and approached the jail, knocking on the door twice.
I had come here every night, asking to visit my father, and every night I had been turned away. The man who answered the door likely knew who was begging entrance before he answered the door. A certain knowing filled his features.
“He’ll see you,” he said, his voice low and rough. “Mind, you only get five minutes. No touching the bars, no touching the prisoner.”
He watched me go inside. I felt him watching me as the dark of the jail swallowed me up.
The jail was dimly lit and smelled like dust and well-used leather. A second company man sat behind a desk, watching me as I made my way to my father’s cell.
I did not know what to say to my da. What could I say? He was behind bars that had been rubbed to a bright sheen with shine oil, likely to make them stronger. One touch from my smallest finger, and whatever strength the shine imbued all that iron would be naught but a memory. I could reach out, and change everything. I could touch the shine lock on the door to his cell, and it would spring open. I could so easily give him freedom, and perhaps that is what hurt the most. I could do so much to help his situation, and yet I could do nothing at all.
Helplessness is its own curse.
There would be no touching him. I would have to say goodbye to my father without feeling his hand in mine, or the brush of his lips on my forehead, or the embrace of his arms.
Da was sitting on the floor, staring at his hands. He did not see me, and so I took in my fill of him. His violet hair was unkempt, his beard trimmed to a scruff along his jaw, and the bruises on his face had turned a lighter green than the vivid purple they had been when I last saw him.
The moment stretched, and I wrapped it in amber, locked it deep inside of me.
I must have made a noise, because he looked up and met my eyes, a small smile curling his lips. “Might I have a moment alone with my daughter?” He asked the company man who still sat at the desk. He grunted and walked out, doubtless to linger against the door and glared at the world with the man who had answered the door. “Come here,” Da said to me.
I came as close to the cell as I would dare and collapsed onto the floor, a bare breath away from those iron bars.
“Why?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what I wanted the answer to. Why did he run into that firefight? Why did he get caught? Why did he come back to Shine Territory all those years ago? Why? Why? Why?
“It doesn’t matter, Cassandra.” He sounded so resigned.
“It does matter!” I shouted. “It matters. You are going to die, and you are my father. What happens to you is everything to me.”
“Everything I have done, Cassandra, everything, has been for those I love. Perhaps I made mistakes along the way, but my intent has been sure.”
“Da,” I whispered, wiping away my tears before they could fall.
“I’m empty, Cass. I died the day your mama died. All that’s left is my body. It was worth it.”
“We can fight this,” I said.
He was already shaking his head.
“Please,” I begged. The word was a boulder swallowed by an ocean of quiet. I listened to the whisper of his breath and the barely audible sigh of resignation that followed. It filled the space between us, pulsing along with the beat of his heart.
I know what surrender feels like. It is soft as sunlight off a bird’s wing in summer and burns surely as fire.
I, too, am fluent in silence.
They say diamonds are formed from pressure, and that is what I felt then. Pressure, low and hot, building inside. My tears were gems, freshly formed in the forge of my soul, and I gave them to him. They were the most honest gift I have ever given.
He was done. He had resigned himself to his fate. There was no talking him out of it. He had spent his life fighting, and now exhaustion had stolen over him. I think, perhaps, they expected this to be a punishment. They did not see his death as his salvation.
“Oh, Cassandra,” he whispered, his hands reaching through the bars of his cell, stopping just short of touching me. He drew in a breath. I watched it shudder through him. “I deserve this. I know that pinches to hear, but I do. Listen to me, and listen to me well. Sal
vation does not look like light.”
It was time for him to rest. A body can only bleed for so long. A wounded soul has an expiration date.
“I want to say some things to you,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”
“I don’t want you to die. Everyone I love is dying.”
“That’s the thing about love,” he said. “It’s present even after the sundering.”
He studied me and then sighed. “You have grown into such a wonderful woman. Your mother would be so proud of you if she was alive to see you. I should have been more of a father to you, Cassandra. I should not have let you go. I have so many regrets. They fill me up until I feel as though they are drowning me. I have missed so much.”
My father had always been such a strong man. It nearly undid me to watch him crumble around the rock of his fault and lay it bare for me to see.
Behind me, I heard the marshal enter the room, sit behind his desk, his wooden chair groaning. My last moments with my father were almost over. It’s almost time!” The marshal shouted.
I heard the him approaching, thick-soled boots on the dusty ground. “Cass, my daughter, one last thing.” He held up a finger and the company man halted. I do not know why he granted us this final moment, but I am glad he did. “When it is over, will you do me a favor?”
“Anything,” I breathed. And I would. I would do absolutely anything for him.
“When I’m dead,” he said, “bury me next to your ma. Will you do that? Find a man named Arlen Esco, and he’ll show you where to go.”
“Arlen Esco,” I whispered, not truly hearing what was being said. I was too busy memorizing every detail of him, down the calluses on his palms. The next time I saw him, I knew this would only be a body. “Find Arlen Esco.”
“Yes, Cassandra, listen to me. Arlen Esco is your brother. He’s a good man. Find him, and he will help you bury me.”
That cut through my clouded thoughts and all my swelling grief. “My brother?” I asked. “What brother?”