by Leah Bobet
“Is it too late?” Mackenzie asked, and I couldn’t tell if she was hoping or fearing it was true. The boats bobbed on the shore like lanterns, drifting in on a false midsummer tide.
“No,” I said in a small voice, and then summoned up something louder, something I could believe. “No. It is not too late for us.”
“Let’s go, then,” Ada said mildly, and the Thaos leaped out of their wooden boat.
The Chandlers rushed in, took sturdy ropes from Windstown hands, and passed around thick leather gloves. “Don’t touch its skin,” Rami Chandler repeated. “Don’t breathe its scent. If you’re hurt, fall back.” He paused before Councilor Haddad, looked him full in the face, and shook his head. “Dad. Don’t touch its skin.”
“Rami,” Councilor Haddad said thinly, and turned away.
The ropes drew taut, ten bodies to each line. I drew in a breath.
“Heave!” Thao Hang shouted, and every grown man and woman in Windstown and the Chandler village pulled Beast Island ashore.
Birds scattered from their dead nests, and the ropes creaked, strained, pulled the skinned hulk of Beast Island through the currents. It caught in the shallows and dragged, its long paws bent and breaking against the disturbed rocks, and the hefting crew scattered to the back to push, their hands encased in the Chandlers’ thick leather gloves. The Pricketts flung blankets, tablecloths, curtains over the beast’s wet-furred, stinking haunch and pushed through that smoking shield. I ran to the back and threw in among them, put my shoulder to the blankets on the wet corpse. Smelled their wool begin to burn.
The Twisted Things scattered across the beach, burning and agitated, ducking in and out of the violet light of the open portal. A lizard flicked up its red ears at us and hissed. Councilor Kim faltered. “What is that?”
Tyler pulled his shearing knife and brandished it low. “Keep pushing!” he called. “We’ll clear a path!”
I shifted my weight against Beast Island’s hind leg. “But there are so many of them—”
He smiled at me, his sweet, whimsical smile. “This is what I trained for. Keep pushing, Hal. Don’t stop.”
He limped toward the snarls of Twisted Things, and he moved like a killer.
Tyler’s heavy knife connected with a spinner bird and ripped. Bones cracked and feathers flew as it let out an outraged squawk. Nat howled a war cry on his heels and dashed in, her pitchfork high, swinging and swiping anything that moved out of our path. Johan Prickett gave me a frantic glance, and then he was off behind her, silent, eyes narrowed, as focused as a fox.
I traded a frightened glance with Heron. “Keep pushing,” he said. Don’t you give up. I nodded fractionally, and he strode, head high, into the carnage with his twisted knife in hand.
I wasn’t a fighter. I wasn’t a hero, clearing the path ahead of us with blood and fire as the sun rose high. But I knew how to push, and I pushed, shoulder to shoulder, the endless weight before us. It moved an inch; two inches. We pushed: Mackenzie, with Darnell and Janelle and Mrs. Pitts. “Heave!” Hang called again, and we groaned and shoved, and the body skittered another two inches up the scree. One moment at a time, we pushed Beast Island across the beach I’d played on since I was a child. The fumes rose from the blankets, from the body, and I choked. It would never be done. We would never make it.
Tyler slashed fruitlessly at a hissing lizard-fox, and Nat shook her pitchfork at something that looked mostly like wax melting. “Left!” Tyler called out, and Ada Chandler grabbed the lead line. “A little more! Okay, good!”
I leaned in, breath to breath, and pushed with everything I had. The body inched forward, one step, two steps, three.
The tips of those shattered horns vanished into the shimmering forest, then its head, its torso, its rotted tail.
A drop of rain, soft and sweet with fullest summer, trickled down its length and splashed to the ground. And then the purple light, the light of unfurled leaves, flickered and went out.
Silence pooled over the beach. Not the silence of the quiet place, the place I’d walked through to find our Thom: the silence of a constellation, stars in concert, hand in hand.
“Feel for drafts!” Ada called, and the Chandlers surged forward, plugging the chinks and crannies around it with the bodies of dead spinner birds. The tiny licks of heat faltered one by one. The acid summer of that other world, fading away.
We felt the wind go, together. We tilted our heads up into the sky and watched the bright morning sun reemerge from the smoke that had stained our sky.
A birdcall broke the silence, clear and sharp, and we shook ourselves, together, like we’d spent years underwater. Mackenzie grinned, and then Janelle Prickett, and then the sound of a whole town breathing filled the morning until it burst.
Someone was hugging me. Jerome Chandler, or Thao Cua, or any one of my neighbors who were heaving with tears, with sweat, with shouting as the portal burned itself out. Mrs. Pitts let out a whoop, and then the Sanchez girls picked it up, and we stood there cheering, screaming, dancing in the dead sand under the sunrise sky.
Because we’d done it. We’d all done it.
We’d saved Windstown, and the lakelands, and Roadstead Farm.
Tyler wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed me, full and long, in view of the whole of Windstown society. And there it was, that steal of breath, that flutter Janelle Prickett had described so gleefully. I pulled back and looked full into his face, grinning, crying.
“We did it,” I whispered.
“Told you so,” he answered.
And then he looked up, and I felt a hesitant tap on my shoulder. “Ah,” Nat said behind me, quiet, insistent. “Hal. Ty.”
I turned and heard it, felt it: dozens of marching feet, shaking the ground beneath us. I’d almost forgot. The army was coming. The army was here.
The party quieted to hiccups and whispers. “Weapons at the ready, please,” Jerome said, and I stared at him.
“You can’t be serious.”
Darnell Prickett took out his truncheon. Mackenzie Green pulled her filleting knife.
The first of the soldiers of the army that had saved the world came, two-step, down our orchard path.
The Great Southern Army was a wall of sound. They carried horns and drums and standards, wore their polished buttons like regimental badges. The dawn flickered into cacophony as they gained the beach and spread, semicircle, around the tail of Beast Island and the desolated shore.
I realized I still didn’t know how big a regiment was. They just kept coming: rows of thin soldiers, endless as barley, marching forever through the sand. How many people died at John’s Creek? I thought as they stood at attention. How many, if there are so very many left?
We watched them come, all of us damp and stinking and small: the ham-handed people of a river town who had just happened to thwart the second coming of a god.
A slight woman came to the fore: brown-skinned, crisp-collared, lines spidering her face. “Who’s in charge here, then?” she said in a deceptively mild voice.
“That’s General de Guzman,” someone breathed, and it set off a new chorus of murmurs. I blinked. General de Guzman was a woman, small, sharp-eyed, and wrinkled—and she was old. Older than my papa had lived to, older than my Opa or Oma. She appraised all of us like a general-store keeper: hard-faced with hard living, weights and measures in her eyes.
Alonso Pitts stepped forward. “I’m the mayor,” he said, and snuck a look at me. He swallowed. “But it’s her farm.”
I sucked in a deep, sweet breath of smoky air. There’d be hundreds of witnesses to tell Marthe about this. But it was nothing to being here. It was nothing to hearing it said.
“It’s my farm,” I repeated, and put some steel in my spine.
She looked me over, and looked at the tail of Beast Island, slumped in a forever sleep where my dock and rowboat used to be. “Explain this,” she said. Not unkindly, but not kind.
I cleared my throat, and that’s when I felt it.
A full regiment of soldiers leaning in from behind their marching order, memorizing every detail of my tattered coat, my bleeding hands. Firelight glinted in their eyes, and something else. Hunger.
Hope.
I am not a hero, I thought suddenly, piercingly.
Heron looked at the army. And then he looked at me.
“No,” I whispered.
But he knew I didn’t mean it.
He swallowed hard and straightened his back. Devoted. Uncompromising. Brave.
“Lay down your armaments,” he said, his voice reeded with fear, but then louder, stronger. “It’s over. At ease. Put them down.”
The general squinted at him from before that wall of men. “Who says?”
Heron squared his shoulders. Lifted his chin. He was thin to the ribs, but his jaw was squared, his eyes tired; his face soot-smudged—but looking at our braver, brighter tomorrows.
“John Balsam,” he said, and the night went wild.
thirty
THE DAMAGE, IN THE END, WAS BREATHTAKING.
The orchard trees would have to be replanted, the far barley field swept of ash and fertilized anew. The riverbank was a melted ruin: hard stone, run together until it sat slick in the winter light. The brush was dying in the back field, around the guts of what was once a hawthorn tree. And the smokehouse—
There was no smokehouse anymore.
In the far field was a tangled ruin of old brick, its roof fallen in, its beams scorched black. It lay like the eldest of the old-city ruins, jumbled in its own old furniture and a dead pile of long deer horns—and, tangled with it, the crushed body of Asphodel Jones. I swallowed hard at the ruin the falling walls had made of his skull. He would never face his justice. He would never be tried.
I stacked the horns into a pile and set them, like a cairn, atop his body to keep the scavengers away. They cast weird, slanted shadows across the fields as the sun crested over the horizon.
The boats had departed through the morning, one by one, fluttering across the river to emptied Windstown. The soldiers were gone, likewise, from what they were already calling the Battle of Windstown-on-the-River. They’d taken Heron with them: John Balsam, God-slayer. Hero of two desperate wars.
They left me with the orchard, and the ruined fences, and my barley field. I walked the land—my land, my one and only home—and claimed it, step by step. “Home,” I whispered to the fences, the shattered trees. Safe, now. Free.
I counted up the damage, alone and lonely.
It was Tyler who brought Marthe and Thom back down the highway, on the creaking cart weighed down with everything we could lift and still loved. He coaxed the tired ponies up our drive midafternoon, soot and fatigue smudged under his eyes.
“Oh,” Marthe said as her eyes roamed the casualties. Thom ran his bandaged fingers through her hair. It was desolation.
“I’m taking the boards off the windows,” I said. “The chickens made it. So did the goats, and the barn cats.”
Marthe looked at the hammer in my belt, the dirt on my hands, and stepped down from the cart. She reached into Hazel’s swaddle and handed me back my darkwood box. The contents hadn’t been disturbed: every little relic was tucked safely in place. The paper with Papa’s signature fit crisp as a glove.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, and wrapped my weary arms around her.
She held me for a long, long time.
It took less than an hour to unpack. Marthe was upstairs, nursing Hazel in the dim room that was once our papa’s. She’d had James move Mama’s old rocking chair over: plumped up with a parlor cushion, it looked like a nursery sprouting cautiously in the weeds.
I lingered in the doorway. I didn’t feel right, yet, just walking through the privacies of husband and child that had sprung up to surround her, to pull us even farther apart.
I waited ’til she saw me to speak. “How’s Miss Hazel?”
“Terrible,” Marthe said, and brushed the child’s thin curls. “She’s always fussing. She never sleeps. If I knew I was going to be someone’s Milk Lady for the next year, I’d have sent her right back in.”
There was no edge to it. Marthe was tired; I could see the fatigue hanging on her like bracken vines. But she cradled Hazel close, feather-gentle, in her arms.
“Marthe—” I started, and shuffled my feet in place.
“You didn’t tell me,” she said softly, “who Heron was.”
My skin froze. Thom had told her. Of course Thom had told her. They were married, they loved each other, and they never, ever lied.
“Marthe, I—”
She shook her head. “Don’t even tell me that you didn’t know.” She looked up from where the baby nursed, busily, in the shadows. “I’ve known you since the day you were born. You knew.”
I swallowed and nodded mutely. I could hair-split, argue, pick at her, but we both knew the truth.
Her eyes stayed steady on me, filled with a dizzying amount of pain. “Why, Hal?” she asked simply.
I swallowed, and sank down in my socks. All I could see was James Blakely’s wild face in the fields on the night before everything broke, asking me why I couldn’t trust my family enough to let them in.
“I couldn’t,” I started, and it broke down right past my lips. How could I encompass years of that slow slide into fear, guilt, grief? I couldn’t. “I am terrible at secrets,” I said. “I am terrible at lies. I hate everything about this stupid year.” I trailed off. “You don’t understand—”
“God, Hallie,” Marthe snapped. “I don’t know what you want anymore—”
With a wail, the baby arched in her arms. Marthe stopped abruptly and cradled her, and then set Hazel deliberately down in the cradle and buttoned her dress back up to the neck.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said again, but lower. “You used to be so brave, so loving, no matter what happened. And now you’ve grown into this . . . stranger, and I can’t do anything right.”
“You used to be proud of me,” I said, low and small.
Marthe’s chin whipped upward. Her eyes blazed hot, hard, furious. She reached out for my face, and I pulled away; she reached out again and caught it between her two hands. “Listen to me,” she said, looking me full in the eyes. “I am so proud of you. I have always been proud of you, and I will never stop. Do you hear me?”
For a moment, I was nothing but a body, stiff with shock. A body in a strange, new world, where I could succeed.
“But you’re not,” I whispered. “All I do for you is do things wrong. All we do is fight. And I’ve worked so hard to live up to you, to make you proud, but I’m so tired, Marthe. I’m not good enough, and the fields almost went to seed and the beer’s late, and four of the chickens died right in the coop, and I couldn’t do anything right. I just wanted you to love me again. I just wanted you to never, ever make me leave—”
Somehow I was crying. There were hot tears streaming, blinding, down my cheeks, and salt in the corners of my heaving mouth. Marthe sat with my shaking face in her hands, open-mouthed. “Oh, God, Hallie,” she said softly, but it was entirely different now. “Hallie, baby, you’re only sixteen.”
I looked up, betrayed, but her smile was gentle.
“There’s over fifty acres here. You’re sixteen years old. No one on earth could ever keep that much farm with two pairs of hands. I never expected you to—God. I never stopped loving you. I’ll always love you. You’re the only family I have.”
“But you have Thom, you have Hazel now—”
My sister scowled. “Hallie,” she said, “do you remember the night Papa broke the casserole?”
I flinched. I did. I did.
I’d been just eight, and my big sister eighteen, and we were newly alone with Papa’s rules, Papa’s rages, all the ways those rules changed day by day and the rages flew high when you inevitably broke them. Marthe’d done something so trivial—left her winter coat across the old chair, or forgot to scrub a dish—and Papa’s temper exploded, again.
He’d picked up Mama’s old casserole dish and flung it, sailing past us, against the wall.
I’d looked up at my big sister and her stern, furious face. And saw it, for just a moment, afraid.
“You took your hands off your little ears,” she said softly. “You stood right between us and dared him, eye to eye, to lay a hand on you instead.” There was a glint in her eye. Fear, years old, for her safety and mine.
Remembered fear, and real pride.
I saw it before me, sudden as a shudder: He’d stared down at me, my big, raging papa with his heavy meat hands and his heavy red face, and something shrank inside him. Something faded. And he’d turned around and stomped his slow way to bed.
I’d looked at Marthe. And she’d looked at me. And then I threw the most furious tantrum of my life before or after.
That someone had dared to make my sister afraid.
“There’s no one else in the world who remembers that,” she said, and dropped her hands, finally, to the old wood of Mama’s rocking chair. They were thin hands, I noticed, for maybe the first time. Thin hands, work-scarred. Strong. “Everyone else in the world, I have to explain that to. What it means to us. What we are. But you and me, we just know it. We know it without words.
“And I know you understand what that means to me,” she said awkwardly. “Because you ran. You went into that portal and found Thom, as fast as you could, even though it cost something. You didn’t wait. You’re still not someone who thinks they’ll never get to stop walking.”
And I finally got it, the thing she’d been trying to tell me all along. The difference between Heron or our uncle Matthias—walking away from disaster after mishap, slow enough to save their strength for the endless road—and what we were.
People who had to turn around and fight. People who tried, because we had something to lose. A home.
I choked down another, richer sob. She was telling me, I realized. She’d been telling me for months: Marthe and I were each other’s home. And so was Roadstead Farm, malting and eggs every morning and the cozy routine of chores going on into forever.
