by Annie Cosby
“You flirt with danger too much, Ruby,” Cath insisted.
I’d meant to ask Maisie about the strange conversation she’d had with Sarah, but I’d forgotten in my need to get a glimpse of my ghosts. I yearned for that more than I feared the stranger. I’d never seen the two girls in the daytime, but I also needed to find the clearing from my dream, and I had little hope of that in the pitch-black night.
I kept walking until the edge of the forest was out of sight. There, with none of the outside world peeking through the tree trunks, nothing but dappled light fell onto the forest floor. In the otherworldly peace, hummingbirds appeared in the soft, magical light like tiny, iridescent fairies.
“What do you want to do in here, anyway?” Cath whined, staying carefully behind a nearby tree, too terrified to go any farther into the forest. Her white-blond hair fell limply to her shoulders like a protective curtain, and I briefly considered walking on until I couldn’t see – or hear – her anymore. But that wasn’t very polite. And being polite was something Sarah always insisted on.
“I just want to wander, Cath.” And look for the clearing. For my mother. If I could just know something – anything – about who I really was …
“You’re a loon, Ruby Beg.”
Didn’t I know it. I had reminder enough that I wasn’t like the other girls without Cath babbling on about it. The memory of my failed first kiss warmed my cheeks.
“I’m leaving,” she announced. “A girl has better things to do than traipse around the forest. Like work. And flirting.”
I rolled my eyes. “Your priorities are laughable.”
“Mine?” she demanded. “It’s you that’s laughable! What are you doing with your life? Sitting in the forest as every other girl in town snaps up each eligible man?”
“That’s really what keeps you up at night?” I turned to my comrade, several yards away, just as an unfamiliar hummingbird came to a sleepy rest on my shoulder.
Her face seemed to fall, defeated. “We’re not five anymore, Ruby. There are more of us than there are men.” She wasn’t lecturing me anymore – she sounded despondent. “I’m plain and I like my peace and quiet. What would a man want with me? I’m liable to be the last one standing, and then what? I’m not made for traveling. I can’t go off and find me a husband. But I shan’t end like Maisie, either.”
The little bird on my shoulder tipped over, righting itself just in time to avoid falling to the ground, and I took him into my palm for safekeeping. His tiny eyes blinked once, then twice before falling closed again.
“I wouldn’t mind so much to end up like Maisie,” I said softly.
A disbelieving breath escaped Cath’s mouth. “Oh, wouldn’t you? I’ve seen the way you look at Wyn.”
My cheeks flushed indignantly. “Do you think of anything but marriage?” I bellowed. “What if I want more than marriage and a house in Killybeg?”
She looked genuinely confused. “What else is there?”
My mouth hung open, searching for the words.
I don’t know, I realized with a shock. And there it was, the root of my hesitation, laying out before me in crystal clear vision now. What if the rest of the world is awful? What if Wyn and I got lost – or died? What if Wyn died on The Great and Mighty Voyage and I was left alone?
“I don’t know what else there is, Cath,” I said softly. My thumb brushed against the sleepy hummingbird’s neck, desperate for a comforting, familiar feeling.
“Well, I know what there is,” she said sternly. “And it doesn’t include a whole lot of options. I’ll find a husband if it’s the last thing I do!”
“Eh! Stop the woman talk!”
I twisted around to find Pat Manor walking toward us from the depths of the Haunted Wood. He grasped a huge walking stick as gnarled as his hands, and wielded it in front of him as if to ward off the evil talk of women.
“Stop the girly drivel!” he yelped again. “There’s a man about! An old one, aye, but I still quake in the presence of lace and love and matches and florals and all else womanly!”
My cheeks flushed. Just how much had he heard?
“Sorry, we were chatting like old birds, so we were,” Cath said pleasantly. “And what are you doing lurking in the forest when there are strangers about? Were you trying to give us a scare?”
“Eh? Did you not hear?” Pat said. “The stranger left this morning.”
Cath’s mood immediately catapulted, and a bright grin stretched across her face. She’s not plain, I thought absently. If she thought she was plain, what did she think of me?
Cath continued to fire off questions about the stranger toward our old neighbor.
“Stop, child, stop!” he finally cried. He leaned against a tree near me, pulled off his plaid cap, and dragged a sleeve across his forehead. “I know nothing. He slept in my barn and left this morning. That’s all I know.”
“But what did he want?” Cath went on.
Pat’s faux shocked stare came to me. “Oh dear lord and savior!” he cried dramatically. “Has the child gone deaf? Has she not heard me say I don’t know?”
I smiled, but my heart was too heavy to trifle with the old joker. If Cath knew my deepest feelings about Wyn … who else did? Was it possible that Wyn did? And if so, why hadn’t he kissed me? Maybe he didn’t want to. It was a plausible option, I thought as I pressed the tip of my finger to the beastly ridge in my nose. Was I too plain?
I’d worried about many things before. Whether I was a good person … if my real parents were good people. If I’d live a long and happy life. Whether I was smart or funny. Whether my parents were mages. But I’d never worried about whether or not I was plain.
Every bit of me felt hot as I realized with humiliation that I’d just discovered the worries that plagued the other young women of Killybeg on a daily basis. If I opened that chest of pain and nerves, I’d surely become one of them, prattling on about kissing and dresses and other things I’d never cared about before.
“What are you doing out here?” Cath asked the old neighbor once again, determined for an answer.
This time, he answered simply, “Visiting my wife.”
Pat Manor’s wife had been dead these ten years.
Cath rolled her eyes, but my heart rate picked up and my eyes must have been the size of oranges.
“You see her during the day?” I asked breathlessly. The little hummingbird stirred in my hand, as if it could feel the pluck of my tightly strung nerves.
“Ruby!” Cath cried, appalled that I would exhibit even the slightest interest in such a topic. The topic of a lunatic.
“Aye, and the night, too,” he replied, as if seeing visions was the most natural thing in the world.
“Every time?” I asked. “Do you call for her? How do you find her? Or does she find you?”
His eyes narrowed. “Does the child see her own phantoms?”
The silence went on a beat too long, and I took in a deep breath of woody forest air to prepare my lie.
But I didn’t have to. That’s precisely when the familiar toll rang out.
It was the deep, booming bellow of an old bell, and it reverberated around the trees and roused the hummingbirds to the sky in a thick flash of dangerous color.
Chapter Seven
We left Pat Manor to hobble along behind as we dashed out of the woods. I paused at the edge to place the little hummingbird, still deep in torpor, on a low branch. He blinked gratefully at me and I dashed away after Cath.
My first worry was for Maisie. Her stiff, wrinkled hands and tired eyes came to mind. Surely they wouldn’t have sounded the alarm if Maisie went peacefully …
“What’s happened?” Cath demanded, huffing and puffing. We’d come upon George and Mary Finney on the lane.
“I don’t know, child!” Mary cried.
“Has the stranger come back for us all?” Cath cried, tears springing to her eyes.
My thankful breath came out in a sigh as our little blue house came into view.
Maisie herself stood in the doorway, alive as ever, her floury hands hanging limply by her sides. I paused to look at her but the old woman’s shoulders lifted slightly in silent affirmation that she didn’t know the reason for the alarm, so I ran on.
Instead of going to the mines, which were a good fifteen minutes’ run away, or running up and down the coast to find the trouble, I ran for the bakery. From Diamond’s Peak, I could look down upon Killybeg and see what was happening immediately.
I left Cath, whose plaintive cries at everyone we passed were grating on my nerves, and began the climb. As I took the stone stairs two at a time, I wondered if someone had died. If there was a new ghost in the Haunted Wood, and a soul floating to the sky that very moment. There were few enough souls in Killybeg as it was. My blood ran cold and it felt as though chunks of ice were piercing my veins. That’s precisely why I had to leave. There was nothing in Killybeg but a lifetime of waiting for the call to go up – the one that would some day send rescuers much too late to my own lifeless body.
My black, dusty boots stopped short of the last step. There was a frantic group in front of me. In front of the abandoned diamond mine. And a great pile of rubble and rocks where the gaping black entrance to the cavern used to be.
Dust muddied my sight, thick in the air like smoke. I edged nearer, but there were too many townspeople, too much shouting, and too many rocks.
“Get away, girl!” somebody yelled, moving in a flurry too fast for me to recognize the face or voice.
I stepped obediently backward, stopping just in time to keep from striding right off the edge of the hill and tumbling to my death. Shaken, I started up the path toward the bakery. Surely Sarah would know which miners were stupid or desperate enough to enter the old diamond mine. Once I was clear of the dust cloud, I took a deep, clean breath of ocean air and scrambled up the grassy bank to leave the winding path behind.
Sarah was already standing on the edge, looking down upon the scene.
“Careful, child,” Sarah said softly. The barely visible wrinkles in her forehead were deeper than usual, and a crevice of concern had been carved between her eyebrows.
She grabbed my hand and held on until I was back on flat ground, my boots even dirtier than before.
“Who is it?” I asked, breathless from the unorthodox climb. Sarah didn’t even spare two glances at my appalling blue dress. The frock had been dirty the day before. Now it was a downright mess.
“I’m not sure anyone knows,” she said. “There was an almighty crash down below and the bakery shook, and then everyone came running.”
I remembered what she had said about Oren the boat maker taking a tumble over the cliff’s edge, ending all Sarah’s troubles. Sarah would never … would she?
There were shouts from below, then, and we strained our necks to see over the familiar terrain.
“Careful, child,” she said again, putting an arm out in front of me. “It wouldn’t do to make the commotion double.”
The people shifting the rocks down below paused as two men pulled something long and seemingly heavy from the rubble. I couldn’t discern what it was. The dust was beginning to clear, but I could still only see the shiny bald spot on the top of one man’s head.
“They’ll need water,” Sarah breathed. Ever logical in her concern, she dashed away to the bakery.
I stayed put, my grimy boots planted on the edge. Whose family would be mourning tonight?
The two men carrying the heavy burden knelt amidst the group of townspeople. The shouts grew louder and several people pointed toward the stairs. A little figure, bowed and gray, was climbing up the stone steps with much difficulty. It had to be Jan, the only one for three towns who had ever studied the art of medicine.
I watched as the group waited, tense and nervous, while the little doctor lumbered upward. Sarah appeared behind me with a bucket and shuffled down the path, water sloshing over the edge, darkening the dirt behind her like blood. With her heavy burden, Jan beat her there, lugging his great big black bag behind him. The bag that had, on so many occasions in Killybeg, marked a failed attempt at resuscitation. Marked death.
As the group parted to let the doctor in, a prone figure was revealed, unmoving and covered head to toe in gray-brown dust. A man rolled the figure over, but the grime obscured the face. Just before Sarah reached the end of the path, a pair of men broke away and rushed to relieve her of the burden. As they did, one stopped and stared wonderingly at a pile of rocks. As I looked, I realized it was wobbling slightly.
“Hey!” the man yelled. “There’s someone else here!” He bent and pulled at the rock, but it didn’t budge. The man near Sarah rushed back and together they heaved until the rock tumbled over itself and away.
A shaggy black and white dog hopped up, limping slightly, and licked his savior all over the face. The dislodged rock seemed to have tumbled right into my stomach, cutting down my heart in one fell swoop.
“Felix!” I nearly screamed. Felix was never alone.
Chapter Eight
Wyn was laid out on Sarah’s bed, in the main room of the yellow cottage, where it was easier for the doctor to work. All the townspeople had been shooed out of the house, even the men who had carried him here. But not me.
“Let her stay!” Sarah had commanded through a torrent of fresh tears, and the little doctor had shrugged miserably and gone back to his task.
His tools were laid out on the kitchen table, gleaming, formidable, and frighteningly sharp. I hovered near the stove, pretending to mind the boiling water, for what felt like hours turned to days. Maisie, stalwart and stern, took up the daunting task of holding Sarah as she wailed. They were shut up in Wyn’s empty room, and the sound was muffled and unearthly, setting my nerves on edge. My own tears wouldn’t come.
After all, I couldn’t cry until I knew. Knew what I was crying for. Just a mangled leg or …
Finally Jan straightened to his full height, barely coming up to my nose, and wiped his hands on a once-white towel stained a bloody red and black.
“That’s all I can do for him,” he announced, before stepping back and dropping the gory towel on the table. He began to heap his things, the shine now stained with blood, back into his bag.
“That’s it?” I asked incredulously. I took my first step in hours, as unsteady and callow as a newborn lamb. The dust had been wiped away from Wyn’s face, but that only made the injuries more ghastly in comparison to his soft, creamy skin. Two great gashes had been ripped, one on top of the other, in the smoothness of his forehead, but they’d now been hastily sewn up with gruesome black stitches. His sweet freckles were dwarfed by a scattering of bright red lacerations. Colossal, russet-colored bruises littered his cheeks, neck, and arms, and the old burn scars on the backs of his hands seemed comfortable in comparison. Jan had built a mound of quilts to keep Wyn’s left leg, bent and badly bruised, elevated. And Wyn’s brown eyes – my favorite in all the world – were hidden from me behind purple-gray lids.
“If you pray, lass, he will be fine,” Jan said, patting me on the arm.
I hadn’t even noticed Jan approach me, and I felt a sudden flare of rage. “He doesn’t look fine!” I snapped.
Jan took a step back and studied my face for a moment. “I know you care about the boy. So for now, all you can do is care for him.”
“Is he even alive?” I choked out, something foreign and painful strangling the temper right out of me. As if a goblin had taken residence in my throat.
“His heart still beats, if that’s what you call alive,” Jan replied cruelly. “Whether he will wake up, that I do not know. That’s a question for diviners and prophets. I’m told there are doctors across the ocean that learn skills I can only dream of, but, alas, I was born on the Amethyst Coast.” He paused, and I used shaking fingers to wipe away the tears that had finally come. “Whether his spirit has left his body, I also don’t know,” he went on. “But I’m of the opinion that he will wake and live until his stupidity leads him down a pa
th from which I cannot help him.”
The opinion of a man who had studied medicine should have meant something to me, but tonight it didn’t. All I could think about was what Wyn’s ghost would look like.
“If he’s alive, when will he wake?” I asked.
Jan shrugged. “Soon, I should imagine.” And despite the wailing of the boy’s mother in the next room, the doctor’s eyes seemed to sparkle. “Though the body sleeps, the spirit has ways of knowing when there is something to wake up for. Give him something to live for.”
When my eyes dragged themselves open, I was laying bent over the bed, my arm, warm from sleep, entangled with Wyn’s lifeless one. My thumb rested on his old burn wound, long healed and utterly familiar.
Felix slept at our feet and the house was unnervingly silent. I wondered why I hadn’t been woken and taken back to my own bed. Injury, illness, or not, it was highly improper for me to sleep beside Wyn. Or so Sarah and Maisie had begun to say as we reached adolescence, and were no longer allowed to fall asleep together.
A piece inside me nudged sideways, knocking against my heart, yearning for those times when things had been simpler. When I wasn’t scared of The Great and Mighty Voyage. When I’d looked forward to it, cuddling up beside Wyn. Vill would come home and wake us from our nap to tell stories or run around outside on summer nights. Sarah had been less of a worrier then, Maisie happier and more apt to smile.
I crept over the creaky floor to Wyn’s bedroom door and peered in. Maisie and Sarah were sound asleep on top of the navy blue quilt of the skinny bed, the younger woman tucked protectively in the older woman’s arms.
I smiled sadly to myself. As long as they slept, I could be with Wyn. But once I went back to the chair, the sight of the stitches threaded through his skin made bile rise in my throat, a tidal wave threatening to spill over. And when I rested my head on the downy mattress, I couldn’t sleep.
