CHAPTER 38
The wraith still moved a tiny fraction at a time. Laurelie shut the door on it and turned to face us.
I pulled her farther into the sanctuary Lunaris had made for us, grasping her by the shoulders. It was so strange to see her this way, an aged weariness in her eyes, but she still looked sixteen.
“Are you all right? I mean— Of course you’re not. I can’t believe I just asked that.”
“I’m better than I’ve been in nine years,” she said. “You’ve given me my mind back, at least temporarily.”
“Is there any way to get you away from it permanently?”
“Probably not.”
My heart staggered.
“I don’t want to give you false hope. I am neither alive nor dead.
I am neither myself nor the strid, but something in between.
” Her voice and the way she spoke changed subtly.
Like the Keepers, she spoke with the threads of more than one voice.
Her own, and something reedy, watery. “Both of us have changed in this unhappy union.”
I felt lost, a mix of disbelief and soul-sucking sadness that she was here, but not herself, and probably not for long.
“I have so many questions.”
“Ask and I will answer as much as I know, but be quick.”
I scrambled, caught between reuniting with her, hardly recognizing her, and needing answers to cure the strid and escape.
“How did this happen? When you made a wish on this coin, how did you become … what you are now?”
“Marlowe gave me the coin. He told me it was a true wishing coin, that the spring’s magic had returned, and it might grant my wish if I asked with all my heart.
” The sweetness of her voice rasped with barely restrained anger.
“He lied. The coin had no magic. He’d lured me there so he could use the bone flute.
He had not meant to kill the first time. But he did with me.”
“Why? What could he possibly gain from killing a teenager?” Kessian asked.
“At the time of my drowning, I did not know, but since merging with the strid, the history of Shearwater is a pool of memories I can drink from. I could tell you how Edwi—Grandad smashed a favorite toy Marlowe played with often because he saw it as a waste of time and a sign his son was too lazy to amount to anything, and perhaps you would sympathize with the boy Marlowe was, but over time he grew spiteful. And greedy. He wanted to be rich. He wanted to be the heir to Shearwater Spa who returned magic to the spring. He wanted to prove his father wrong.”
“And he was willing to kill his own family for that?” Kessian said, disgusted.
The dark veins spidered up Laurelie’s throat, creeping over her jaw.
“He was willing to make a bargain with Warwick. The coin he gave me had no more power to grant wishes than a pebble picked off the road, but the bone flute … It grants wishes at a terrible cost. Warwick knew what Marlowe wanted, and that he could be used to serve Warwick’s interests. ”
“What did Marlowe wish for?”
“For magic to return to the spring, so he could prove once and for all that he was worthy. And so the wish was granted, but magic was returned by—”
“Tithing the lives of two dozen people,” I finished hollowly.
“Once Marlowe realized the bone flute had twisted his wish, he could do nothing about it. The contract he’d signed magically ensured his silence insofar as Warwick’s part in the tragedy.
He could never speak of the bone flute to anyone.
He had gotten his wish but could claim no credit for the magic’s return without admitting responsibility for the deaths.
Rather than guilt, he felt only bitterness and self-pity.
“So to ensure he would still inherit the spring, he hatched another plan. He would make a second wish, and a third, but these would be straightforward, without room for ambiguity.
“While I wished for my dad back, Marlowe wished for my death by drowning.”
Laurelie’s voice was barely recognizable. I put a tentative hand on her arm and she blinked, looking down at it as if observing a strange, out-of-body experience. Some of her own voice overpowered the wraith’s. “I’m … sorry. To speak of it now, I would not think nine years had passed.”
In the timestream, past, present, and future overlapped each other. Time healed all wounds, they said, but only if time marched in sequence.
“I don’t understand,” Kessian said. “You weren’t the first in line to inherit. Why kill you?”
“Grandad would never pass the torch to him. He preferred Tal and me, Fae and Amelia. Like so many parents, he did his best to raise his children, love them, but he made mistakes. Played favorites. Lost his patience, lost his temper. His grandchildren were easier to love; he didn’t have to fear letting them down because they were not his sole responsibility. ”
“So Marlowe would have come after the rest of us? Even Amelia?”
Laurelie’s mouth twisted. “He might have spared her under the assumption he’d have more control over her, but in that he does not know her well.
He would have been the ruin of us all, except the bone flute still twisted his wish, twisted me.
I became the wraith to haunt him. I would have dredged him from his bed and drowned him in whatever body of water was deep enough.
But he fished that coin out of the spring, hooked it in your ear, and bound me to you instead. ”
I went cold. “But the coin was meant to banish you. I thought he was protecting me.”
“The power you had to banish me was not in any talisman; it was in our bond.” Her expression crumpled, some of her leashed fury turned inward.
“I never wanted to harm you, but over the years, it became harder and harder to tell where I ended and the strid began, and it was so angry. Both of us so angry. It fumed that its magic had been corrupted through those sacrifices, and I—I raged over my stolen life.”
I tried to absorb it all, but like an over-sodden sponge, I couldn’t hold everything. It leaked out of me. “He murdered you just so he could inherit the spring when it had already been sold to Warwick. He made Warwick richer, and us—”
Poorer wasn’t the right word. Broken, more like. Words for once failed Kessian, too, who could only squeeze my shoulder.
Laurelie bowed her head. “Now you know the whole story of how he poisoned Shearwater.”
I scrubbed the dampness from my eyes, set aside my feelings and all the things I could not change in favor of the one thing I could.
“How is a poison like this cured? What’s the antidote?”
Slowly, Laurelie’s expression wilted, melancholy dampening her anger. She cast a furtive glance to the door, where the tap of the wraith’s claws finally making contact set the hairs on my arms on end.
“Laurelie? What’s the antidote?” I said again.
“I poisoned the wild magic with my hatred for my uncle, my desire to go home when I could not, with how much I missed you and Fae and the Shearwater of my childhood. That home, the family I once knew, is gone. Changed. Or perhaps it was always this way, and now I can’t unknow the things I was blind to as a child. Either way, I can never go back.”
The dark veins crawling up her face spidered into the whites of her eyes as she looked into the ceiling lights. She did not want to answer.
“Unless …?” I prompted.
“Unless you bring my home to me.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“No,” Kessian said.
“It does not have to be him,” Laurelie said to Kessian. “It could be you.”
“What are you talking about?” I looked between them, my intuition quaking at the implication while my mind blocked it out.
The scrape of the wraith’s claws, slow and quiet, made Laurelie speak faster.
“Wild magic is a tricky thing, not made from tithes or anything we can touch. Its power depends on the spirit of the feeling or gesture it comes from. For Shearwater, its magic is fueled by … by a sense of belonging. When you walk a long road, and your feet are sore, but you come home to a dog wagging its tail and a lover kissing your cheek and saying, “Welcome home,” that’s where Shearwater gets its magic.
To return it to the way it once was, you need to show Shearwater the meaning of home again. ”
“By dying,” Kessian finished. His voice shook. “The strid absorbs one of us, who’ve finally found our home, and through us the wild magic returns, is that it?”
“No.” I shook my head in adamant denial. “No, that can’t be how it works. More sacrifice?”
“Kessian chose Shearwater to be his home. He has put down roots in the place, loved it so well he hasn’t left even when stripped of the four walls that sheltered him,” Laurelie said. “You are the Keeper because the strid chose you, too.”
“So it should be me,” Kessian said.
“No.” I’d lost all eloquence and could only repeat it more firmly. “No!”
“It need not be Kessian. You’ve fought this past week too, Tal.
Not for Shearwater, but for your family, who was once your home as well.
You have tried to repair the fractured relationships inflicted by Marlowe’s poisonous influence.
And …” Laurelie got very quiet. “You are my brother. By joining me, I could go home as well.”
“A twisted kind of love if it kills him,” Kessian said bitterly.
“I didn’t want to trap either of you. Anytime I missed Tal, I’d find myself in the Bloodstream, dipping in and out of memories. Reaching for you, I suppose, in the only way I knew how.” Her face fell. “I wish it had not come to this.”
“Tell me there’s another way,” Kessian said. “We can bloody time travel in this place, so we can find a way to leave without one of us dying.”
“You are out of time to travel with,” Laurelie said.
Kessian consulted the pocket watch. The seconds ticked by slowly thanks to Lunaris, but there were still only fifteen minutes left. Not enough to make another leap through time and do anything of substance. And if we failed, we both drowned.
At least one of us ought to survive.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“No you won’t,” Kessian said.
“This problem followed me around the country for nine years, and because I only now stopped to fix it, you’ve been dragged in.”
“You heard Laurelie. I chose this. I’ve had my time in Shearwater, had my chance to put down roots. You deserve the time, after nine years of isolation.”
“Of those nine years, the past week was the best of them.”
Color rose to Kessian’s cheeks, his steely gaze gone a little too shiny. “There will be more.”
“Stop talking about yourself like you’re already dead! The Ashbornes created this problem, an Ashborne should be the one to fix it.” He started to protest, but I said, “No. Not you. Please. My life has been a tragic series of goodbyes, but letting you die is one too many. I can’t bear it.”
Kessian gazed into my eyes with his shoulders set and his jaw clenched, but as he took in my resolve, he slowly unwound.
Shadow had started to creep beneath the door and into the lock. There came the minuscule click of it turning.
“We do not have much time left to argue,” said Laurelie.
“You’re sure?” said Kessian.
“I’m sure.”
Neither way was fair, but after all, I was very used to saying goodbye, and he was very used to being left behind.
Finally, he relented. “How can I argue? I can’t stop you. If I fought you, you’d win.”
Relief was not the word for what I felt, but I did feel a little release. I turned back to Laurelie. “What will happen to you?”
“In truth, I do not know. Perhaps I emerge from the spring, as you once did, but I fear I am too changed. I will probably die.”
“I don’t want to kill you.”
“Marlowe killed me. You are setting me free.” The shadows under the door reached for her, and her voice shifted once more, dripping with the hollow reediness of the wraith.
“Your task is set. In a moment, I will open the door and merge with the wraith again. In the same moment, the Kessian of twelve hours past will be coming here from the wedding. He intends to meet Tal, but will encounter me. I will take him to the strid. You must go to the spring and swim its waters one last time. I—some version of me—will wait for you there.”
I nodded in understanding. “Then I suppose this isn’t goodbye.”
Laurelie smiled sadly. “Let us say it anyway.”
I wrapped her up in a hug. She felt insubstantial, like trying to hold a cloud, cold and watery. We released each other, and she reached for the door.
“Wait,” Kessian said.
She turned to him.
“Why did you choose me as Keeper? That was you, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
“You didn’t know me.”
Her expression softened so much she almost looked like the real Laurelie again.
“In the waters of the Bloodstream, you were as known to me as Taliesin. I knew you through him. Your connection shone to both of us—the strid and me—like a North Star. Even while cursed to wander and to be left behind, you found home in each other. Making you Keeper was one thing the strid and I agreed upon. Beyond that, I felt it was right to break the rules of inheritance. Edwin chose to give it to me instead of Marlowe. A great irony, when it was this exact eventuality Marlowe hoped to subvert. It happens often. Someone, in their efforts to avert disaster, instead plays into that design.”
Kessian’s stony expression hadn’t shifted. He nodded, and Laurelie turned back toward the door, where shadows wreathed the cracks.
She opened it and stepped out into the embrace of the wraith, whose smoke slowly engulfed her once more.
It was too much like watching her die again, so I closed the door.
In a moment, she would take off after the Kessian of twelve hours ago.
Once the coast was clear, I would make my way to the spring.
In the warmth of Lunaris’s kitchen, things were quiet, a reminder of a once comfortably uncomfortable life. I ran my hand along the counter. She’d always come to my rescue, but it had all caught up to us in the end.
Kessian leaned against the counter. “The two of you have come to my rescue more times than I can count.”
“You stood up to my mum, which was far braver,” I said. “Consider this returning the favor.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry either. If this is how things have to be, I have one request.”
“What’s that?”
He leaned his cane against the counter and stepped into my space. His fingers knotted in the collar of my sodden shirt. “Kiss me like you would have if we’d made it to our rendezvous.”
My pulse hammered. “I don’t think there’s time for the kind of kiss I was going to give you.”
“We have thirteen long minutes. I counted the length of a second. Ten minutes in here is more like an hour. Time enough to properly say goodbye.”
I spun him until his back was to the counter, lifted him up onto the edge of it, and with both hands on the hinge of his knee to encourage him to wrap his legs around me, leaned in to kiss him like the world was going to end.
Because mine was.