Helena
The first thing the world does, when it finally lets me back into it, is breathe on the back of my neck.
Wind. I had forgotten that wind moves.
Ninety-six years inside stone teaches you nothing at all about weather. So I stand at the edge of the campus in the gray hour before dawn and let the air find the gap between my collar and my skin, and I do not move. Moving still feels like a thing I haven't earned.
I am out.
I test the word against my teeth the way you'd test a floorboard before you trust your weight to it.
Out. A body that hasn't walked under open sky since 1930 is walking now, slow, down a path it doesn't know.
The lamps along the green burn too white and too steady, a harder light than the one I left, and the cold comes up off the stone the way it always did.
The world has gone on without me. Ninety-six years of going on, and it has filled every inch I left empty.
None of it is the thing I want.
The thing I want has been gone for ninety-six years, and I have wanted her every hour of every one of them.
Cordelia.
I say her name out loud, here, where there's no one to hear it and no stone to throw it back at me. The saying of it opens the old place in my chest that never once, in a century, learned to close.
People imagine grief packs up and leaves, in time. Mine moved in. It took the year she died and it stayed, and after long enough I lost the seam between where it ended and I began.
I have reached for her in the dark so many thousands of nights that my hands still do it. Free now, out now, walking under open sky—and they still do it. They open at my sides in the cold, all on their own, feeling for the warmth of a woman 1930 took and never gave back.
That is what they put in a cell of stone and called containment. Not me. This. A woman who loved another woman past all sense, and would have, and will.
Under the prim gray buildings, under the soft descending names the wardens gave the dark—the Reliquary, the Sepulchre, the Hollows, the Deep—there is a wall.
Behind the wall, the Well. A century of stolen light, and folded somewhere down inside all of it, on the far side where I have never once been able to follow, is everything I have left of her.
Ninety-six years a wall's width from her. Close enough, on the worst nights, to feel her the way you feel a lit room through a shut door.
You become very simple, loving someone that long with that much stone in the way.
I am not cruel. I have never wanted to be cruel.
I only want the one thing, and I have wanted it so completely, for so long, that it has stopped being a wish and become the shape of me.
There is nothing I will not do to reach her.
There never was. She knew that about me, and she loved me anyway, and they took her and put her where I can feel her and not hold her.
So I will hold her. I have decided. I decided a long time ago.
The girl thinks she stopped me.
I want to be fair to her, because Everly Grey earned fairness tonight.
She went down into the place that swallows everyone, and she did not flinch, and she chose to leave the wall standing rather than let me have what's behind it.
It was the careful thing. The kind thing.
I might have made the same choice once, before so many years on the wrong side of a door taught me there are worse things than tearing something open.
I told her Cordelia was alive down there. It is the only lie I have told in a century that felt like a prayer, and I would tell it again tomorrow.
She stopped me. She did not understand what she was holding when she did it.
Because the wall does not come down to courage, and it does not come down to spellwork, and she is rich in both—rich enough that it moves me. There is one thing in this world strong enough to open it.
And the girl is carrying it in her chest.
Looped through her, four bright threads: one that drops the air cold, one that prickles the skin like storm weather, one with copper in it, one that flickers at the corner of the eye, and Everly the knot they all run through.
The bond. She pulled it back into herself at the Well's edge rather than spend a drop of it on me, and she thinks that means she put it somewhere safe.
She didn't put it away. She put it back in the lock and went home.
That is the thing she is too young and too in love to look at straight: the bond isn't finished.
It deepens. Every night she lies down inside that warmth and lets one of those men closer and calls the whole of it love, it grows—brighter, deeper, harder to break.
And she does it gladly. She does it for free.
I will never have to take it from her. I'd never get the chance; she would die before she let it go, and I find, to my own surprise, that I would rather she didn't.
I only have to wait.
She is so much better at loving than I ever was.
She will grow that bond past anything I could have forced out of her in a hundred years of trying.
And some quiet season from now it will finally be strong enough—and she will be standing on the wrong side of her own caution, holding the only key that has ever fit, and on the other side of that wall there will still be everything that is left of the woman I have not stopped reaching for since the night they took her from me.
The towers catch the first of the light. Gilt going green-gold, then plain gold, beautiful the way old things are beautiful right up until you remember what they're standing on. I don't turn to look. I admired that building from the underside of it for a century. I know exactly what it keeps.
I keep walking instead. Out, away, into a morning with no idea what just walked back into it. The cold is clean in my chest, and Cordelia is under all of it, the way she has been since 1930, the way she will be until I reach her or stop—and I am not going to stop.
She'll find another way, I think, the campus going small behind me. She has to.
So will I.
And one of us is going to be right.