Unmade

Kami did not feel panic at the thought. She felt empty, desolate as the gray sky, quiet past the point of misery. It seemed almost reasonable that hope would die too.

“What would any man want, with the world at his feet, but someone to share it with? I want my wife.”

“No,” snapped Jared, and took a furious step forward. Ash said nothing, but Kami felt the flare of determination behind the walls in her mind. He stepped up too, standing at Jared’s shoulder, having his back.

Rob’s eyes traveled contemptuously past Jared, over his shoulder, and fixed on his wife’s face.

“Lillian,” he said. “Will you come?”

“If I do, you will let every one of them go?” asked Lillian, and stared ferociously at Rob. Kami knew Lillian well enough by now to know that she was deliberately not looking at anyone, unwilling to betray that she had weaknesses.

“Lillian,” said Kami’s dad. “You don’t have to.”

Kami saw the look on Rob’s face when he heard that. She had a single terrible moment when she thought she would have to act, would have to choose whether to save Angela or her father.

“Shut your mouth.” Lillian’s voice was more cutting than Kami had ever heard it, like a whip handled in expert hands. It was either a Lynburn’s scornful outrage or a desperate plea for him to be quiet. “I am so tired of hearing you babble to your betters on subjects you know nothing about.”

Rob’s tensed muscles visibly eased, and a smug smile spread across his face.

Lillian turned her salt-white face to her husband. “I assume I do have to, if I want them to live?”

“I would prefer to think of it as you seeing the cleverest and most reasonable course of action to take. You are my lady. You should be second in this town only to me, and all should bow their insolent heads to you.”

“All should bow their insolent heads to me,” said Lillian. “That’s true.”

Rob wasn’t stupid. He saw what Lillian was implying. But he laughed, gently. It seemed bizarre and grotesque, seeing the two Lynburns bicker over a body. But Kami saw Lillian’s hand clenching into a fist at her side, knuckles whiter than her face. She had to trust that Lillian was playing for all of their lives.

“I always admire your spirit, Lillian,” Rob said. “Even though I find the display of your spirit often so stupid. Are you going to be smarter now?”

“Are you going to let them all go?”

“Go, go,” said Rob, and waved a benevolent hand. “All of you can go about your business now. All of you can rest easy in your beds. Order has been restored to Sorry-in-the-Vale. You may depart, safe in the certainty of a true sorcerer’s peace.”

He waved a hand negligently at Angela, who sagged, gasping, as if she was a fish held on an invisible hook. Jon Glass stepped up to Angela and took her hand, caressed it and would not let it go. He held her back and drew her away, not letting her lunge again or stumble as she went.

Rob did not deign to notice what any of his defeated foes were doing. He held out a hand to Lillian, a gesture less of affection than command.

Lillian reached out and took it.

They walked, the golden pair, the lord and lady followed by their retinue, into Aurimere.

Enough of Rob’s people stayed behind so that Kami knew they had to go, and go quickly. Any one of them could be a victim of Rob’s malice, even if he had already taken his sacrifice.

She could not go, though, not quite yet.

She stepped up to the stone dais. She refused to look at the ruin that was Rusty’s body. She looked only at him.

Kami used the edge of her sleeve to clean the blood from his dear face, until it was untouched, until she could tell herself he looked as if he was only sleeping, as if he might wake soon. She smoothed back his hair with a tender hand, light as though she could wake him, and bent down and kissed his cold brow.

“Sleep well, sweetheart,” she whispered.

She hated to abandon him there on that cold stone, but she did it. She turned and walked the long road down.

All the words that I utter,

And all the words that I write,

Must spread out their wings untiring,

And never rest in their flight. …

—William Butler Yeats

Chapter Nineteen

The Boundless Deep

They went back to the Prescotts’ farmhouse. Kami had thought Angela might not go, but she came back with them, walking silently. It made sense. How could she return to the place where she and Rusty had lived? Angela had never gone away to be alone before, not really. She had always had someone to go home to.

Angela did not speak to any of them, all the long walk home. She did not even let Kami walk near her, outstripping Kami effortlessly when Kami tried. She had let Kami’s dad keep her hand, for a little while, but then tore it from his grasp as if his sympathy burned her.

Once they were at the house, Angela headed for the bedroom farthest away from the others, as far away from everyone as she could get. But she had still chosen to go home with them. Kami hesitated and then followed after her in a rush, shutting the door behind her hastily.

“I understand if you want to be alone,” Kami said quickly. “I just want you to know that you don’t have to be, that you never have to be. I want you to know how much I want to be here for you and oh, God, how sorry I am.”

Angela stood across the room, by the bed. Her eyes were like holes burned in a sheet.

“I’m sure you are sorry,” Angela said slowly. “You should be sorry. Would any of this ever have happened if you hadn’t had the burning urge to know every damn thing that wasn’t your business, if you hadn’t decided that you were on some kind of stupid crusade? Everyone told you to stop, but you wouldn’t listen. You were so sure you knew best.”

“Was I wrong?” Kami whispered.

“I don’t care if you were wrong or right. I don’t care about good and evil. You’re the one who made all this some kind of story, and it never has to be real for you. Your Lynburns will protect you. But they didn’t protect him. You wanted to have your stupid adventure, and you got him killed. All I care about is that my brother is dead and it’s your fault!”

Angela stopped speaking, panting. She looked despairing and exhilarated at once, looked as if she’d needed to punch someone in the face and done this instead.

Kami felt lashed by the words. She opened her mouth to shout that she had suffered too, that her mother was gone, beyond all real chance of recovery. But there was that faint hope, the thread that Kami was clinging to. She didn’t know what would happen, what she would do, if that thread broke and she fell. She didn’t know how Angela felt, and she could not stop fearing that she would.

She didn’t shout. She didn’t want to hurt Angela any more than she was already hurt.

“We could stop, if that’s how you feel about it,” she said in a low voice. “Rob Lynburn can do what he wants. He doesn’t need us anymore. He’s not going after my … he might leave us alone. He doesn’t have any of our tokens. He could rule or destroy the whole town, and we could—let him. We could run away. He might not try to stop us. He might just let us go. We could go far away from here, and never know what happens next to anyone in Sorry-in-the-Vale. We could stop fighting and forget it all.”

She looked up at the end of the speech to see Angela arrested, somehow, caught in a startled moment with her mouth open and her tear-wet eyes wide. She looked at a loss with her anger taken from her, even briefly. She looked young and terrified of feeling anything else.

“You’re lying,” she said in a hard, sullen voice. “You won’t stop. You never do.”

“That’s right. That’s who I am. I won’t stop for anybody … but I will for you,” said Kami. She wasn’t sure if it was right, or okay to say, but nothing was right anymore. She told the truth. “You’re my sister.”

“I’m nobody’s sister anymore!”

Angela screamed the words. It made Kami think of the way the wind had howled, the sound of a world being torn to pieces.

Kami could do nothing but throw clumsy words at all of Angela’s pain, move forward with her hands held out, knowing that words and arms were so little comfort it was almost laughable.

“You don’t have to be my sister, and I know it doesn’t make up for anything, but I’m yours, I’m yours. I love you and I won’t stop loving you even if you hate me, I won’t leave you, I won’t want to, nothing you ever do or say will ever make me turn away from you. And that’s family, it is, it has to be.”

Angela could not back away any further. Kami had always been the one who took the extra steps, acted and dragged Angela in her wake, from the time that they were both twelve, when Angela was the new girl who hated everyone and Kami had refused to be hated and insisted on friendship.

Kami hesitated now. She didn’t know if she would be welcome. If what Angela wanted was for her to be different, to give up, then Kami did not know what a different person would do for Angela. She tried to imagine being a better person, who could be better for her friend.

She was here, and she loved Angela. She did not know how to be any better than that, be the person who loved Angela, as hard as she could.

Kami took a step toward Angela, and then another. Angela sat on the bed, in the corner, with her head bowed. She did not make a move in Kami’s direction or away from her. When Kami took Angela’s hands in hers, they were cold.

Angela’s hands were limp in Kami’s for a moment, and then they clutched far too tight. Her grip was icy and strong, like the grip of a hand in a nightmare, breaking through a grave. Kami tried to chafe some warmth into her fingers, and Angela slipped free and clutched at her sleeves, at her shirt, got a handful of her hair. She grabbed at her like someone drowning, and as she did, she began to sob.

“I’m sorry,” Kami whispered. “I’m sorry, it’s so bad, there’s nothing I can do to make it right. But I love you and I’m here.”

“And we give up if I say?” Angela’s voice was choked with tears, like a river choked with leaves.

“We give up.”

“And if I say we go after them, we kill them all, we wipe them out? If I tell you that we have to make them pay for what they did?”

“Then we will do that together,” Kami said, into Angela’s tumbled hair. “I swear.”

Angela let out a wail, a terrible sound torn out of her throat, one that made Kami’s own throat ache in sympathy. It was true what she had said, there was no action she could take, no way to make this right. The only thing she could do, in all the world, was be there.

Angela’s arms went slowly around her waist, and they sat locked together, until Angela’s wild sobbing was muffled, finally, against Kami’s shoulder.

Angela collapsed with exhaustion at last, after the storm of tears. Kami staggered out of the room feeling as if she had been in a fight, her body aching as though she had been beaten, but not feeling as if she could ever collapse. She hated the thought of even closing her eyes. She had to do something. She found a little room where she thought Hugh Prescott had done his accounts, with a kitchen chair and a workbench that he seemed to have used as a table, with paper and pens on it. Some of the paper had sums scratched on it, some of them crossed out, as if Holly’s dad had not been able to make the numbers work the way he wanted them to.

Kami sat on the kitchen chair: parts of the yellow wood were blistered, and patches of it were worn white. She stared at the blank page in front of her until it seemed like a doorway into oblivion, until her eyes were so strained they burned, and she could not think of a thing to write or anything else she could do. She could not think of anything but Rusty, and how she had not valued him enough.

Rusty. She had known he was sweet, known he was loyal, known he was loving. But he had been so familiar to her, for so many years. She had not thought of her lazy, goofy Rusty, her best friend’s big brother, as a hero.