Blood, Ink & Fire

by Ashley Mansour

  She’s almost right. My watch reads 03:26:09.

  I seem to run the same mantra in my head minute after minute. Please get me there. Please let the antidote work. Please . . .

  The darkness descends as we reach the summit. I spot the broken-down RV in the distance. “There!” I shout, pointing out to Denmark the path toward the place we set up camp just the night before.

  “I see it,” Denmark nods toward the smoke wafting into the night sky.

  The campfire is still burning. That must mean they’re okay. That everything’s okay.

  The truck rolls up the hill to the clearing. Denmark grabs my hand and gives me one stern glance. “You may want to prepare yourself.”

  Prepare myself? Wasn’t that what I had been doing all this time?

  “Your grandfather, he . . .” Her voice is flat and even. “It’s possible we didn’t make it in time.”

  I fling open my door and spot Ledger running toward me, his arms outstretched. For a moment I think it’s relief I’m seeing in him, his arms wide open, as if to wrap me in a warm embrace. Except he can’t do that. It would be the last time if he did.

  So if not relief, then what is it I’m seeing?

  I scan the darkness, searching for his face, and then I realize: he isn’t running to bring me closer. He’s running to stop me.

  “Elle!” He doesn’t need to say another word. I can see it written on his face. I’m too late.

  I shut my eyes so I don’t have to know anymore. My limbs fail. I crumple to the earth. It’s as if I’m being swallowed up, as if I’m drowning inside that endless ocean. I scream and scream until my chest feels too tight to breathe. When the scream is gone, I feel nothing but emptiness.

  “I thought we had more time! I thought we had more time!” I shout it over and over until Ledger kneels by me, then I break down into sobs.

  “No,” he says simply. “We didn’t. I’m so sorry, Elle. I’m so sorry.”

  “I still have to try, Ledger,” I plead. “I still have to try and save him.”

  “You can’t,” Ledger whispers, his eyes reflections of my pain. “Noelle, I promise you, he’s already gone.”

  “Please,” I beg him, though I don’t know what for. “Please, make it stop. I feel like I’m being ripped apart.”

  Ledger tries to place his hands on the fabric of my shirt, to pull me closer. But it’s not enough. I need to be with him. I need to be close. Only I know exactly what will happen if I touch him one more time. The thought of losing him, too, is so unbearable I wrench back from him with terror. “Stay away,” I yell at him. “Not you, too. I can’t—”

  Ledger stays in the dirt by my side, just letting me break right there in front of him. I cry for minutes, but time stretches so that it seems like an eternity.

  “Was he hurting?” I ask him, finally regaining myself. “Was he suffering?”

  “Don’t torture yourself thinking of those things now. What matters is that you’re here, you’re okay. That’s what your grandfather wanted more than anything, Noelle.”

  “But I’m not okay! Ledger, I can’t lose him! I can’t!”

  “I know,” he says.

  I start sobbing. “He can’t be gone. I failed him.”

  “Listen to me,” Ledger says, sternly. “You did not fail. You did exactly as your grandfather wanted. You survived!”

  “I didn’t save him,” I cry.

  “Noelle you have to see that your grandfather didn’t want to be saved. Not to live like this. To make you suffer alongside him. It’s the last thing he ever wanted for you.”

  Ledger pretends to wipe my eyes. “We can’t stay here. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know. I just need to say good-bye.”

  *

  My grandfather’s face is frozen like a statue’s. I pull in my bottom lip to keep from crying any more. The images of my grandfather’s life haunt me as I stare at his unmoving body. I don’t recognize the man I knew. Something’s gone from him, or been taken. Now he’s just a shell beneath blankets.

  “We need to find a place for him,” says Denmark, interrupting my thoughts. She scans my face. “We need to lay him to rest.”

  We take Grandpa to the summit of Mount Memoria, where the slope of the mountain flattens, creating a natural lookout. The sky is alight with color. Several purple insects zip by our heads. Denmark says they’re not insects but night-flying lizards, and they are attracted to the sound of human sadness. I don’t know if I believe her.

  We break the earth with pickaxes and shovels from the back of Denmark’s truck. When we’re finished, the sun is rising over the distant hills. We lower my grandfather’s body into the ground. We replace the soil, first with handfuls and words, and then all at once. Denmark suggests we find stones to mark the grave, and we separate to see what we can find. I wander down into the underbrush and haul back a large, flat stone shaped like a lopsided heart. I carry it back to the grave. I roll it on top of the mound of dirt and let it fall, feeling Denmark’s and Ledger’s eyes on me.

  “Stop it,” I yell at them. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  As we drive back to the camp in silence, I begin to feel like a wheel spinning out of control. There’s only one comfort, one truth I cling to that keeps me from losing my mind. And that is this simple fact: there’s no deal to honor now that my grandfather is gone. Fell took him from me, just like they took everyone I loved. Except Ledger. But even he is going to leave me. Soon, I’ll have nothing left to lose.

  When we get back, we stoke the fire. Denmark makes tea from nettles and wild mint. I’m thankful for the hot liquid, even though it doesn’t fill up the emptiness I feel inside me. I look at her across the fire, at her weatherworn face and tired eyes, remembering that we share the same blood. “Thank you,” I say, breaking the silence, “for finding me, for trying to save us.”

  She holds up her cup. “Hey, it isn’t over yet. Remember that.”

  “It is for me.”

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? My entire family is dead. Fell took everyone I love and left me here. Why don’t they just take me, too, and get it over with?”

  “I would say you just might get your wish,” Denmark says, coolly. “But the real question is not why Fell doesn’t come for you. The real question is, what will you choose when they do?”

  “Choose? As if there is a choice now. What reason do I have to do anything but give in to them? There is nothing left for me to save.”

  Denmark narrows her eyes and stares into her cup. “Do you really believe that?”

  “It’s what I feel,” I say.

  “Look around you. Do you really think Mount Memoria was burned to the ground? That the Risers gave up and let everything they had be destroyed?”

  “But I thought . . .”

  “They fought! And they made sure those volumes got to you and you alone. Through me.”

  “You mean, you saved them from the fire?”

  “When we heard about your coming, we knew Fell would be close behind. Mount Memoria’s Risers fled for their lives, saving the books and their people. And they asked me to find you. Why do you think I had both volumes? It wasn’t magic. It was the Risers’ last wish before leaving the only home they’ve ever known.” Denmark tosses the remainder of her tea into the fire, making it sizzle. “They didn’t flee their homes and I didn’t come here just so you could give up. And I certainly didn’t save your butt so you could walk away from your duty.”

  “My duty?” I say, indignant. “The only duty I had was to my family. And now they’re dead! All of them!”

  Denmark smiles, wounded. “Not all of them.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

  “It’s okay. I get it. But you should know you were lucky. I never even knew my parents. They died when I was a baby.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeat, sounding like a broken record. But the truth is I don’t know what to say. Having watched Prospero and Hamlet take
their own lives—their final, intimate moments together that I was privy to—keeps me from saying any more.

  “Macbeth and Lady M raised me as their own daughter. Taught me how to fight. How to be strong. But as much as I love them, for everything they have given me, I still feel like I was cheated. And that Fell was somehow responsible.” She pauses, cracking handfuls of kindling and throwing them into the fire.

  “Why did you leave Killem?”

  Denmark points a stick at me. “That is much more complicated.”

  “I’m sure I can grasp it.”

  She studies me for a moment as though deciding how much to tell me. “Let’s just say that Macbeth and Lady M understood what I meant when I told them that I had to find Fault’s End.”

  “The ninth Sovereign?”

  “It was my father’s,” Denmark says. “When I got there, I felt like I was near him. And I made a promise to myself that I would do whatever it took to avenge my parents’ deaths and dedicate my life to holding Fell responsible. I became ruled by revenge. It ate me up through and through.” Denmark looks at me long and hard. “We can’t control what happens to us. Only what we do about it.”

  When Denmark is asleep, her breathing merges with the chirp of crickets and the caw-caw of the night-flying things. The breeze of Mount Memoria tickles my spine, and I’m filled with a desire to remember, or maybe just to escape.

  Ledger comes to me by the fire. “Are you okay?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t think so.” I search him, wondering what it feels like to face an ending. “Would you still have come here? Knowing what you know now?”

  He turns to me, his face serious, his eyes intense. “Noelle, I would come to you over and over again, for all eternity, if it meant we could have this moment in time.”

  It’s the first time I realize it. Maybe I’d been so focused on everything else around me. But I see now: Ledger is suffering. He’s torn between what he must do and what he wants. But I know what I want. I want him to stay. Forever.

  “Ledger,” I whisper. “I don’t want anything to happen to us. I want everything to stay like this so we can be together.”

  “You heard Lady M. The reader needs the books as much as the books need the reader. And like all books, my pages are numbered.”

  “But what if they aren’t? What if there is another way? I don’t think I can handle losing you, too. Not after everything we’ve been through.”

  “I don’t know another way. I only know what I am here to do. I can’t deviate from that. It has to be this way. For your sake. You don’t understand now, but you will.”

  “I won’t,” I cry. “I’ll never understand why you came here if only to leave me when I need you most.”

  “Because I didn’t plan for this, Noelle.”

  “This?”

  “For loving you so utterly and completely! For not being able to contemplate existence without you. For being trapped inside this body, this body of someone you once loved long before me. For not being what you need me to be.”

  “What I need you to be is here!” I shout. “With me!”

  “No,” Ledger says through gritted teeth. “You need what I can’t give you. What I can never give you. Don’t you see?”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Noelle, I will always fail you, over and over again. We will always come to this. This is the only fate we have. Me, here, this body. You, asking me to stay, when you know I cannot. Your future depends on this final vision I must give you. This is the way it is. Our story. And it will keep playing out over and over again across all of time. It has always been and it will always be until this universe ends and another one begins. It’s our fate. It’s what has been written for us.”

  “I don’t believe that. I believe we can change our story. We can rewrite our fate.”

  He smiles weakly. “I wish that were true. Believe me, I do.”

  I look at Ledger’s eyes—the eyes of John, filling with real salty tears. I know what he wants. He wants to stay. To be here. But it’s more than that. What he wants most of all is to be human.

  And I know what I want. I want Ledger. In whatever form he comes to me.

  “Can we please just enjoy what we have, right here and now?”

  “Fine,” I huff. “You do the talking. Tell me about the earlier time.”

  Ledger reclines at the edge of the fire. He grabs a stick and swivels the end in the dirt near the embers. He looks so alive, it frightens me. “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about someone great.”

  “Okay,” he says, sitting up. “Man or woman?”

  “Man.”

  “All right. Let me see.” Ledger knits his brow in concentration before lighting up with recollection. “Okay. There was once a writer called Samuel Clemens. He lived during a time when this land beneath us was all one place, one country. It was united in some things, though the people in it were divided by many others.”

  “Sounds like our time,” I mumble.

  “In some ways,” Ledger says. “But these divisions concerned Samuel greatly. He liked to understand human beings, what made people tick, what made them laugh and cry. What made them angry. What made them hate each other. What made people what they were.”

  “Which story of his was your favorite?”

  “That’s easy,” Ledger says. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  Ledger sits up and takes me in with his eyes. They glaze over, like he’s reliving some vivid memory. “Because Tom has this thing for Becky. She’s this girl he goes to school with, but she doesn’t pay him any attention. Anyway, they get lost in this deep dark cave . . .”

  “What were they doing in a cave?”

  “They wanted adventure. They wanted to see something new, something no one had ever seen before.”

  I can’t help but smile. “So they got lost in this cave . . . ,” I prompt him.

  “Right. They get lost in this cave, and everyone is searching for them. But the deeper they go, the harder it is to find their way back. And soon enough they realize they’ve only got each other. No food, no light, no nothing!”

  Ledger is just inches from me. His closeness is intoxicating as though the cool night air is perfumed with the clean scent of his skin. “So, what do they do?”

  “They save each other.” He raises two fingers just above my face. I feel the brush of air as he traces me with the tips of his fingers, hovering above the edge of my jaw.

  My lips part, and I cannot help but sigh. “Then what happens?”

  Ledger works his fingers behind my ear and lifts my hair so carefully, brushing the nape of my neck with it, but never touching me himself. “You don’t want to know,” he says sadly.

  “Yes, I really do.”

  “It’s sad.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, Tom goes searching for a way out. Eventually he sees a speck of light in the pitch-black. He crawls toward it. Sure enough, it’s daylight.”

  “But Becky is still inside?”

  “Yes,” Ledger says. He’s whispering now, and his gaze is a deep inescapable stare. I’m fixed inside it. Inside him.

  “That isn’t so sad,” I manage to say.

  “No, you don’t understand. Tom goes back. Back inside that horrible pitch-black maze. Even though he’s tasted freedom, felt his escape, he turns and goes right back into the darkness. To save her.”

  “Because he loves her.”

  “That’s right. He does.”

  “What’s so sad about that?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Ledger says. “The story always made me sad. I think because somehow you know Tom loves her more.”

  “You don’t know that. Becky might have loved him just the same.”

  Ledger’s eyes widen a little, and he whips his hand back before it meets my skin. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, his face crumbling.

  “Ledger, let’s not pretend anymore that this isn’t the end.�
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  His eyes search me. “You’re such a mystery to me. What is it you want, Elle?”

  I think for just a moment, searching for the words. “I want what Rose and Hamlet had,” I say breathlessly. My heart starts beating when I think of the vision. “That moment. What they were together. What you showed me, Ledger. I want that. With you.”

  “Noelle, I—”

  Something takes hold inside me, and soon I’m pulling myself around, lowering my body into his lap. He looks shocked. Speechless. But he doesn’t resist. He doesn’t pull away. Not this time.

  “I can’t be the one,” he says quietly. “It has to be you, Elle.”

  “I know,” I say. And then: “It can be me.”

  My breath quickens. My heart races as I take his face in my hands, wrap my fingers in his hair and ease myself forward. I’m so close, I can practically feel our heartbeats dancing together in music of their own making. Even through our clothes, his skin radiates warmth, like a beacon reaching out, drawing me closer. His hands are braced against the ground behind him, his arms flexed as though it takes everything he has to hold himself steady.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” he asks. “You know what I am. I’m not John. I can never be—”

  “I know,” I say softly in his ear. “I don’t want John.”

  I feel his shoulders release. He exhales, enveloping me in a silent recognition of this moment. I sink deeper into him. His hands find my skin beneath my clothes—at last—as he pulls me in. I hover my lips above his for just a moment, knowing we are just atoms away from changing everything between us.

  “Please,” he begs me, his voice like air.

  I pause.

  I wait.

  I listen because I know the universe feels it, too. I know it is waiting for us to land fully together into this thing between us.

  There’s just one breath, a single word escaping his lips. The breeze takes it from him. The breeze of Mount Memoria that’s past, present, and future all at once. Suddenly, I know that this moment will always be. As long as his breath lives on through the breeze, we will always be.