Echo Mountain

by Lauren Wolk

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  My mother wanted me to wait until morning to go see if Cate was all right.

  “But that’s her doll,” I said at the cabin door, Esther and my mother on either side of me. “Captan wouldn’t have left her alone at night, and he wouldn’t have taken her doll unless something was wrong.”

  “What’s an old hag doing with a doll?” Esther said. “I’ll bet it’s a poppet. For making spells. Or cursing someone.”

  I thought about the blessing Larkin had taught me. The one Cate said to him whenever he left her. Saol fada agus breac-shláinte chugat.

  “Shame on you,” I said.

  But Esther didn’t look ashamed. “And why would her dog come to you? You’ve only known her for a little while. Why wouldn’t he have gone to Larkin?”

  I didn’t know the answer to that, but I pictured him there, too. Trying to help her but needing help himself.

  I said as much.

  “Then I’ll go with you,” my mother said, though she sounded a little uncertain.

  “You will?” I turned to stare at her.

  She looked like the same mother I’d had that morning, but something was different, and I thought back to what she’d said about emptiness.

  Maybe she saw—in the shape of a dog with a doll in his mouth—a chance to do something about that.

  “I will,” she said. “If it’s more trouble than the two of them can handle, they’ll need both of us. Esther, you’ll take care of Samuel and your father while we’re gone.” She glanced down at her dress. “But let me do something about this first.”

  I didn’t know what she intended, but then she came back wearing a pair of my father’s trousers, cinched with his belt at the waist and rolled into cuffs at the ankle.

  “You’ll have to clean off those poultices in a while,” she told Esther, who looked like a child for the first time in years.

  “I’ll help you, Esther,” Samuel said. “I’m good with poultices.”

  His face reminded me of when he had helped Mr. Peterson with the thorn in Scotch’s hoof.

  But Esther just looked hard at me and then my mother and back again before turning away toward my father’s room.

  “Now what did I do?” I said softly.

  “Nothing,” my mother replied. “I think she’s upset with me this time.”

  “For going to Miss Cate’s with me?”

  She sighed. “For both those things.”

  I had said only one thing, though I now saw it was two.

  I pulled on my boots while my mother fetched hers. We buttoned up our jackets, mine still damp but warm from hanging by the stove.

  “Should we take something along?” my mother said.

  “Me,” Samuel said. “I want to go, too.”

  “No, Esther needs you to stay here,” my mother said. “To help with your father.”

  “We should take some jerky,” I replied. “And a lantern.” We would need light on the trail, and quick fire when we got there.

  “And bread.” She put the food in a sack while I fetched a lantern and lit it at the stove.

  I felt in my pockets for my knife. My flint.

  “You should wear a cap,” I told her. “So the branches on the path don’t get caught in your hair.”

  She stared at me. “Is that why you cut yours off?”

  I nodded. “The trees kept trying to comb it.”

  My mother reached out to touch my hair for a moment. Then she put on a cap and gathered her things.

  Captan was still waiting, but as soon as we joined him he dropped the doll at my feet and then loped off across the yard toward the path up.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t quite dusk yet, though the woods were full of shadows and I was glad to have my mother close beside me, better than a knife in my hand.

  But before we had gone very far, I heard Esther calling, “Wait, Mother! Wait!”

  We stopped. Captan stopped.

  Up the path Esther ran, panting.

  “Let me,” she said. “Mother, if something happens and you’re not back soon . . . I don’t know . . . I won’t know what to do with Daddy and Samuel. Let me go instead.”

  She looked very young standing there.

  “But we’re already on our way,” my mother said, and I heard, in her voice, something just as young. A thread pulling her back toward a time when she was a girl on an adventure. The same thread pulling her forward. “And we’ll be back before you know it.”

  But Esther was pulling on a similar thread, and she was much closer to the spool than my mother was, the thread less likely to break. “Please,” she said. “I’ll help Ellie. I promise I will. And I’ll look after her.”

  As if I needed her to look after me. The idea was just plain silly. And it made me mad. But I stood still and waited for the two of them to sort themselves out. Captan did likewise, though his whole body yearned to be gone, uphill, to home.

  My mother looked past Esther, toward the cabin. “You left Samuel alone.”

  “I did,” Esther said, nodding. “I told him you’d be down soon.”

  Which seemed to decide things.

  My mother sighed. Pulled the cap from her head and handed it to Esther. Handed her the bag with the bread and jerky.

  She gave me a long look. “Take care of your sister,” she said.

  And I loved her more than ever.

  I had wanted her with me. To meet Cate. To look into those blue eyes and realize everything I’d realized, and maybe more.

  But I wanted Esther to know just as much.

  As it turned out, I had plenty more to learn, too.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The climb was easy for me, but Esther had a hard time with the pace, the rocky path, the darkness as it deepened, and the way the branches batted at her face as she struggled up the deer trail.

  To her credit, she didn’t say a word.

  Not even when she fell. Once. Twice.

  “You can go back if you want.” I waited as she struggled to her feet, clapping the dirt off her hands.

  “Just go on.” She was a little short of breath. Her hair had come loose and hung from her cap in soft, fair loops.

  I stepped to one side so she could go first. “Give me that sack,” I said, handing her the lantern. “And go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you. When we get to the steep part, don’t let go of one tree until you’ve got a grip on another.”

  “How, when I have to hold the lantern, too?”

  Which made me impatient, that she would ask me such a thing when the only answer was to manage it, difficult or not. But I said, “I’ll help you.” And when it came to that, I did.

  When we arrived at the cabin, Cate wasn’t there.

  “Where is she, boy?” I asked Captan when I opened the door and found her bed empty. But he stayed out in the yard and didn’t answer.

  Esther crept in behind me, swatting at a fly come to taste her lips. “What an awful place,” she whispered, and I saw it fresh through her eyes.

  The narrow bed, one hard chair, a table, the shelves with jars full of oddments and potions and worms. The nubs of spent candles squatting like toadstools all over the place.

  But then I swung the lantern so she could see the fistful of snowdrops in a mug next to her bed, which meant Larkin. The tiny fawn and the mouse and the squirrel. And those tools, which were in their own way beautiful. But it was only when I held the lantern high to cast light on the shelves full of books, the hanging garden, that I saw her face change.

  “Oh,” she said.

  I laid the little doll on the bed.

  There was a stain on the blanket.

  “I wonder if her wound opened up.” I bent to sniff the blanket for pus or honey, pulled back at the idea of what that would loo
k like to Esther, then leaned closer, inhaling the scent of Cate’s wound.

  It was chilly in the cabin, and a wind had kicked up to push the cabin door wide and follow us inside.

  “Maybe she fell,” I said.

  I ducked past Esther and into the yard, pausing at the sight of Cate’s clean wash hung to dry, waving and dancing at the edge of the yard.

  Larkin. He had done her wash and left water for her bath.

  And I wondered if she had decided not to wait for my help.

  “This way,” I said, following Captan around the side of the cabin toward the shed behind it.

  * * *

  —

  We found her lying outside the shed, wrapped in a blanket that was red where it covered her leg.

  I rushed to gather her up. “Help me!” I yelled when Esther stood back watching.

  So Esther did help me, though with such a look of distaste that I wanted to slap her.

  Cate was heavy despite how thin she was, but we managed to carry her back into the cabin while Captan danced along beside us, whining darkly.

  She moaned a little as we laid her on the bed and covered her up. “There’s firewood in the yard, Esther. Go get some.”

  Which she did while I ripped pages from the big book on the desk and shredded them on the hearth. I hoped they taught nothing more important than the benefits of fresh air and clean water, which I already knew.

  When Esther came back, I twisted a whole page into a wick and lit it in the lantern, laying it gently on the hearth.

  “Careful,” I said, as she reached out with a handful of twigs. “You’ll smother it. Just one at a time to start. Like this.” I laid a single twig across the bricks I’d pushed into place on either side of the flame. “It’s not like the oven at home.” Which could handle a heavy hand.

  In this way, I taught my sister how to build a fire on a cold hearth.

  Before long, we had a good blaze going, and I opened the cabin door just a crack so the smoke would rise straight up into the wide mouth of the chimney.

  Then I fetched a clean nightdress from the wash line and took it inside to warm by the fire.

  While Esther stood and watched, I went to Cate and pulled the blankets away from her leg.

  The wound gaped like a terrible red mouth, but it wasn’t bleeding much anymore.

  “The bath must have melted the honey, opened the cut. Maybe she fell. Maybe she fainted. We’ll know when she tells us,” I said. “But I don’t know why she let it get wet in the first place.”

  Captan stood beside the bed and laid his head next to Cate’s.

  “Why did you open the door if you’re trying to warm her up?” Esther said.

  “To increase the draw, for the fire,” I replied. “The draft. The flow of air.”

  “I don’t know what that means.” She sounded cranky and subdued at the same time.

  “When the fire eats the air inside, the smoke comes back down the chimney instead of going up it.” My father had taught me that. I wondered why he hadn’t taught Esther, but I knew that it was easier to teach a thing to someone who wants to know it.

  “I thought you said she was getting better.”

  “She was. But she’s stubborn. And she’s used to doing for herself. And she didn’t wait for me to help with her bath.”

  I pulled the blanket back over her leg. Then I fetched the deerskin coat from the trunk and laid that over her, too. It was so heavy that I knew it would keep her heat in where it belonged and make her feel safe, besides.

  “Heat up some jerky. In that skillet, there. On the wall,” I told Esther. “Just lay it across the bricks.”

  She did what I said without question, tending the fire and the jerky both. The smell of the venison softening made Captan go toward her and sit nearby.

  “What an ugly dog,” Esther said.

  “Oh, hush,” I said. “You’re a beauty, Captan. A beauty.”

  At which Cate stirred.

  She peered at me in confusion.

  “Captan came down to fetch me,” I told her. “He had your doll in his mouth.”

  She looked at me, blinking, slow to wake.

  I said, “I don’t know why he came for me instead of Larkin.”

  She closed her eyes again. “Larkin’s mother isn’t so fond of Captan.”

  I pushed Cate’s hair away from her face. “How could she not be fond of a dog like that?”

  “He was my son’s dog.” She closed her eyes again. “First mine, as a puppy, but he took to my son like a bird to the sky. So . . .”

  “Shouldn’t that make her love Captan even more?”

  Cate didn’t reply.

  After a while, she opened her eyes again and said, “You must be a very strong girl, to carry me back in here.”

  “Oh,” I said, realizing suddenly that Esther was still standing quietly by the fire where Cate couldn’t see her. “My sister came up with me.”

  “And we should be getting back now,” Esther said. “Mother will be worried.”

  Cate craned her neck around. “A sister?”

  Esther came forward a bit, though she still kept her distance.

  Cate stared at her. “You can come closer, child. I won’t bite.”

  After a long moment, Esther came to stand next to me by the bed, though she looked like she wanted to be somewhere else altogether.

  “Ellie, fetch the lantern,” Cate said, frowning. Which I did, hoisting it so the light fell on Esther’s face.

  “Oh my,” Cate said, her eyes growing wide. She reached for my sister’s hand, though Esther clearly did not want to give it. “You look nearly the same,” she said. “Older, but the same.”

  And I smiled at what was coming.

  Then she looked harder at me. At my face. My hair.

  “You, though, have changed quite a lot. You’re thinner than you were. Taller. And your hair used to be so long.” She reached up with her other hand, and I bent lower so she could touch the soft shortness of it. “I used to call you Rapunzel.”

  And I felt, in that touch, the big, jolly nurse we’d once known. The one who had called me Rapunzel and tended to Esther’s earaches.

  Cate was not big. Nor was she jolly. But as I looked into her blue eyes, I knew both what she was and what she had once been, which were really the same thing, though they weren’t.

  Here, beside me, was another soul both split in two and doubled.

  She looked at Esther again. “Do you not know me?”

  Esther shook her head. But then she bent closer. And her own eyes grew big. “Nobody called Ellie Rapunzel except Mrs. Cleary,” she said slowly.

  And it wasn’t the lantern that lit my sister’s eyes as she sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “But Mrs. Cleary was a big woman. She was a big, round woman with rosy cheeks and hair in a braid down her back and blue eyes”—she leaned closer—“like yours, but . . . you can’t be her. You can’t be.”

  And then Esther was crying, wrapped in the arms of a woman who had wanted nothing at all but to make Esther well when she was sick. To make her stop hurting so much.

  I felt like a bystander, which made me sad. But I felt joyful, too.

  The Esther I’d once known was right there, close enough to touch. And so was the hag who had once been Mrs. Cleary. And still was.

  Chapter Fifty

  After that it was different.

  My sister wanted to stay, to look after Cate while I went home again.

  It was clear that Esther didn’t want to go back out into the dark. But it was also clear that she wanted to be with Mrs. Cleary.

  “All right,” I said. “You stay. I’ll go back.” Though I felt sad, even a little annoyed, to be leaving Cate in Esther’s hands . . . and to see that they were content to stay there together without me. First Larkin, whic
h I had found easy to understand, and now Esther, which I found . . . unfair.

  But I had been the one to wish for Esther to wake up a little. To open her eyes. So I could not very well blame her for doing just that.

  “Mother will be in a state, wondering what’s become of us,” I said, as matter of fact as I could be. “So I’ll go home now and then to Larkin in the morning, and we’ll fetch you some more honey in case that leg festers again.”

  Cate nodded. “I could use some more.” She pushed the deer hide away. Saw that the blanket was bloody where it covered her wound.

  “Where are the bandages we wrapped it in before?” I said.

  “I washed them in the bath. I had them with me. But I remember feeling dizzy on my way back here.” She frowned. “Nothing after that.”

  “I’m surprised you let your leg get wet,” I said, and I could hear the disapproval in my voice.

  She sighed. “I didn’t mean to. I was clumsy. And all for something that might have waited till you got back.” She gave me a rueful smile. “I’m used to doing things for myself.”

  “The bandages are somewhere on the ground near where we found her,” I told Esther. “Go find them. And if they’re dirty, wash them out again.”

  She stayed right where she was for a long moment of no and then went out into the night.

  When she returned, I pointed at the fire and watched as she draped the wet bandages over the back of Cate’s one hard chair and dragged it close to the flames.

  Cate looked from me to Esther and back again.

  “What’s wrong between you two?” she said. “You used to be like peas in a pod.”

  I thought about everything I might say, then chose the simplest. “We’re different.”

  Cate scoffed at that. “So are ink and paper, but they get along very well indeed.”

  “She’s mad at me,” I said.

  “Not mad,” Esther said.

  “She thinks I’m the reason our daddy got hurt.”

  Cate scoffed again. “You’re a girl. You’re not a tree.”

  “She was in the way,” Esther said.