CHAPTER 31
I didn’t know what to expect—the horrific variation where wraiths crawled out of grandfather clocks or the warm memories of times long past.
It was neither. The clocks populating the living room and hall were not so numerous as they’d been in the present day, nor was anything quite so dusty, but it looked … normal. I had to remind myself we were still in the strid.
“It would have been nice if the Keepers had given us detailed instructions,” Kessian whispered.
I didn’t think the Keepers had much more information than we did.
Muffled, agitated voices drifted to us through the ceiling.
Exchanging a glance, we both made for the stairs.
On the landing, the door to Grandad’s study was ajar.
Grandad himself sat behind a cluttered desk heaped with notes and books, observed by countless clocks on the wall.
Including the three on a shelf Amelia had told us about, labeled with mine, Dad’s, and Laurelie’s names.
In front of the desk, Mum chewed her nails while Marlowe paced.
“I only need to borrow five thousand this time.”
Grandad had his head bowed in his hands, elbows propped on his desk. “I told you, I don’t have it.”
“You’ve always got a little something squirrelled away, and I can pay it back in a few months. After the growing season, I’ll make it back from the cider farm.”
“Come on, Dad,” Mum said. “It’ll be his in less than a year if you don’t slow down, anyway. You’re killing yourself.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t bail you out this time,” Edwin said. “I don’t have the money.”
“But the summer brought in more tourists this year than we’ve seen in a decade. Surely you haven’t spent it all on these damned antique clocks,” said Mum.
“They’re not valuable. And … we won’t be able to depend on the spa’s income anymore.”
“Why not?” asked Marlowe.
“Because I sold it.”
A stunned silence filled the room.
Marlowe said, “You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“Why?”
“Because it was losing money, and I had more important things to worry about.”
“Like what?” Mum said.
I tensed. Eavesdropping on my grandad as if he were still alive set me ill at ease, but so did the direction of the conversation. He sacrificed all that trying to find a way I could come back.
“I don’t want to burden you with an old man’s worries,” Edwin said.
“No, fuck that, Dad!” Mum said. “Keeping secrets in the name of some noble martyrdom isn’t helping any of us, so what’s really going on here? From where I’m standing, you sold off the one asset that could pick us up by our bootstraps. Who did you sell it to, anyway?”
Edwin winced and avoided their eyes.
Marlowe’s exasperation turned to true anger. “Not Warwick.”
“It was worthless at the time. Losing us money.”
“So Warwick buys it up for a few copper coins under the guise of doing you a favor, it miraculously regains its magic, tourists flood back in, and none of that strikes you as suspicious?”
I’d never heard Marlowe raise his voice, but we could have heard him downstairs.
“Of course it does,” Edwin hissed. “But what’s done is done.
Hindsight being what it is, and foresight being outside my control, this is where we’ve landed.
And I hate to disappoint you, I really do, but I honestly did what I thought was best at the time.
” He gestured around him to the state of his study, a horologist’s hoard, gray with dust. “Bail yourself out. You can’t expect a clap on the back for failure.
I’ve done the same thing my whole life, and it failed.
You tried something different with the cider farm, and it still failed.
Unfortunately, the world didn’t guarantee our success. ”
Marlowe’s mouth worked around a retort, but voiced none. Hurt stained his features. It didn’t matter how old you got, your parents’ words still cut deepest, and Marlowe didn’t take well to his father calling him a failure, even if he’d included himself in the statement.
He looked like he wanted to make some grand declaration, lips moving, but in the end he turned on his heel to go. Mum marched out with him, but paused to deliver one last rebuke. “Sometimes feels like you care more about the people we lost than the ones still here.”
“Have you got any right to say so after sending your surviving son away?”
“We’d all be reunited at the bottom of the strid if I hadn’t.”
She and Marlowe stormed out. Kessian and I hurried to clear enough room for them, but the landing was small, and I experienced the uncanny sensation of my mum and uncle passing straight through my shoulder.
But not Kessian’s.
As Grandad said, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” Marlowe’s shoulder clipped Kessian’s. He reeled back, glaring at Grandad with true contempt. “Very mature, Dad.”
He’d thought Grandad had cast some spell to literally hit him with the door on his way out. Kessian rubbed his shoulder, mouthing an apology, but how was he to know that would happen? We seemed like ghosts in this memory, unseen and unheard, but not un-felt.
Confusion pinched Grandad’s eyebrows together as he watched his son and daughter leave. He rose from his chair, went to the doorway, and searched the landing. For a moment, it felt as though he stared straight at me.
“Hello?” he called.
Kessian whispered, “Can he hear me?”
Grandad didn’t react.
“He cannot,” said another voice.
The Keepers appeared between us in a curl of blue flame. “Edwin Ashborne never tapped the true potential of his abilities as Keeper. Unlike you, he never swam the strid.”
That struck a chord with me. “So you’re saying, in order to fully use these abilities to help, he would have had to risk his life by diving into the strid like we’ve just done?”
“Correct. Dreams bring you closer to the Bloodstream’s truths, but in these dreams you are a spectator. In order to become their architect, you must let the blood of the strid flow through you.”
“That seems an unfair risk to take,” Kessian muttered. “Why did it choose me?”
“Because you chose to make Shearwater your home. Edwin Ashborne’s family were no longer fit for the task, fractured and sending their own away as they have.
The people of Shearwater benefit from the spring’s magic, the Ashbornes most of all, yet a balance between give and take was not struck. They exploited it.”
“So it took our lives instead?” I asked.
“No. Those are the actions of the poisoner. Lives are a poor substitute for what the strid truly wants.”
“Which is?”
“I’ve told you. To go home. So poisoned, it cannot. You must heal it.”
“How?”
The Keepers gestured into the study, where Grandad had turned back to his wall of clocks. “Some things are easier when demonstrated. Watch, and we will guide you.”
They vanished once more, and we turned our attention to the study. Edwin stared at the shelf of clocks. He pinched his mouth between his fingers while he thought. After a moment’s hesitation, he spun the hands of the clock labelled with my name.
As he did, the world washed out as if it were a rained-on watercolor. The noise of the strid’s current roared in my ears. Briefly, I couldn’t breathe, lungs straining.
Then the river released me, and I washed up in the warm, welcoming place I used to call home.
It was my childhood bedroom. I looked around at the posters ordered neatly on the wall, the shelf of my earliest ceramics, wobbly and charming in only the way a child’s work could be. My teenage self slept with one leg stuck out from the duvet to keep cool on a summer’s night.
Seeing myself in a memory might have been strange, but not as much as seeing the calico cat curled up on my pillow next to me. If Lunaris hadn’t transformed yet, that might mean—
My side of the room had mathematical order to it while the opposite overflowed with clothes, books, crafts, a plastic bug tank with something crawling inside. And in the bed was a face I hadn’t seen in nine years.
Laurelie was curled up tight, cuddling a crochet egg with a duckling hatching out of it.
“Is that Lunaris?” Kessian whispered.
“Yeah. Always slept by my head so my feet wouldn’t get too hot.”
“So that’s …?”
“My sister.”
We looked alike. There’d been other fraternal twins at my high school who looked nothing alike, but Laurelie and I had looked more or less identical until puberty hit.
I missed her so powerfully, the nine years seemed to shrink, leaving me freshly stung by the grief of her passing. She slept right in front of me, but I couldn’t escape the knowledge this was just a memory.
A noise pierced the quiet night. Something eerie and unnatural that silenced the song of summer insects, replacing it with a different sort of music. I shuddered at its familiarity.
A few hollow notes whispered through the window, cracked open to let in the night air and dispel the heat, and in response, my younger self blinked awake.
He sat up wearily, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and stood.
A frisson of fear made him scrabble a hand over the bedside cabinet for something to hold on to.
It clenched around the silver pocket watch, the gift Grandad had given me.
Whatever directed him pulled too powerfully.
His eyes glazed. The floorboards creaked quietly underfoot as he rose and walked past us into the hallway.
Laurelie shifted in her sleep but did not wake to stop him.
Kessian and I followed.
On the landing, another figure from photographs and memories appeared.
My father wore only his sleep shorts and walked barefoot down the stairs.
The sight of him added to the weight of grief burgeoning within me, as he opened the front door, then waited for his son to sleepwalk over and take his hand.
They walked out into the night, leaving the door ajar.