Chapter Two. Rory
Rory
It was a blissful, endless sort of summer.
The flower girl—a Blodeuwedd, Wynne declared ceremoniously, though Rory called her Daye (since he couldn’t quite wrap his mouth around her full name, his tongue tripping halfway through Blo-daye-wedd) and his sister rarely called her anything at all—was the perfect playmate.
Her feet were quick and sure. She could run as fast as Rory—faster, though she never outpaced him.
She could climb any tree and reach every nest. She had a knack for finding mushrooms and hidden berry bushes.
And when she sat still on the grass by the heather, velvet-eared bunnies came to nestle at her knees, allowing her and Rory to hold them to their cheeks and feel their hearts thump-thump-thumping against their palms.
For the first time in his life, Rory got to be in charge.
It was strange at first, but Daye leaped to every idea with a spark in her eyes, lips quirked in anticipation, so almost without noticing, he fell into the habit of leading.
He invented games and dived into exploration as if he had been doing it all along.
Though, Rory pointed out to himself, he never lorded it over Daye the way his sister did to him.
He always checked whether she wanted to play the game he suggested (she always did) and always stopped to rest whenever her mouth started parting in strawberry-red yawns.
Daye wasn’t just a playmate, as Wynne promised. She was the perfect playmate. Not merely a placeholder for an absent sister, but a bosom friend, a confidant. Her footfalls in sync with Rory’s, her palm tucked in his.
She wasn’t as good as his sister—she was better.
“Why can’t Daye talk?” Rory asked his sister one July evening. A summer storm sent all three huddling into the living room while the housekeeper, Mrs. Matthews, banged about in the kitchen.
“She just can’t.” Wynne shrugged.
“But why can’t she?”
His sister’s mouth closed mulishly. “Because she can’t. That’s the way flower girls work.”
“But—”
“Rory,” Wynne said warningly, snapping her book shut. “Do you remember your promise to stop bothering me? You’re bothering me now. Stop asking why, or I’ll consider your promise broken and take the Blodeuwedd away.”
Rory beat a hasty retreat upstairs, Daye in tow. He didn’t think she would really take Daye, but it was never a good idea to underestimate his sister. A good dose of caution was always prudent, especially when her mouth arranged itself in that sort of line.
And anyway, though Wynne would never admit it, Rory was pretty sure that she didn’t know why Daye couldn’t speak, either.
He knew Daye understood everything he said, though—she would follow intricate instructions in whatever game they played or gasp at the exact right point in the story.
And Daye could express herself perfectly well to Rory, pointing or nodding or shaking her head; miming swimming when the day grew hot, or smiling in delight when they discovered a fox’s den.
Smiling in delight most of the time, really.
Even in her sleep her lips curved up, as if her dreams were filled with thrilling adventures.
And while they were strange at first, these one-way, half-silent conversations, soon the strangeness faded into normalcy, half invisible, half forgotten altogether.
“Wynne wasn’t always like this,” Rory whispered to Daye in his room. They were lying facing each other—Rory on his bed, Daye on the makeshift cot Rory had made for her, the gloom of a daytime storm between them.
Daye widened her eyes questioningly, her hands splaying in something that was both an inquiry and a reassurance.
“She used to be …” Rory searched for words and came up with fistfuls of silence. Lightning flashed, then thunder. Rory closed his eyes against the glare and kept them closed. It was easier that way. “It’s only that our parents … I think she misses them.”
He peeked, eyes still squinted. Daye’s mouth was round with sympathy, her hand pillowing her cheek.
“They used to be here more, when I was little,” Rory continued.
“Before they stopped being married. Not only for visits. They’d even take the two of us to the city with them, sometimes.
But they haven’t been here for”—he tried to count, but the months got confused in his head—“a long time. I don’t mind,” he insisted, seeing the concerned slope of Daye’s eyebrows.
“They send cards every birthday. And they were never around much to begin with. And I always had Wynne.” Or at least, he used to.
“And Ms. Lucy, our nanny. Though she’s gone now.
” His voice tapered down, something thickening in his throat.
He sniffed. “And I have Mrs. Matthews, the housekeeper. And Mr. Benson, our tutor. And you.” He smiled at her.
Daye smiled back, luminous.
“So you see? I don’t mind, but Wynne … I think she does.” Rory shrugged bravely, but a sniffle escaped—a small one, barely audible at all. He closed his eyes again, shutting off the gloom, the words, the restless pacing of his sister downstairs.
The bed beside him dipped, a small palm resting on his arm, soft and warm.
“I don’t care, really,” Rory said, still not opening his eyes. He didn’t.
Warm weight leaned against his back, and a slim arm encircled his waist as Daye curled around him, her cheek to his shoulder. Like this, with his face hidden from sight, Rory could finally let the tears brimming in his eyes spill.
“Everyone is always leaving,” he said, barely a whisper. “Ms. Lucy, my parents. Wynne, too. She’s never around anymore. But you wouldn’t, right? You’ll stay?”
From behind him, he could feel Daye nodding emphatically, her cheek bumping against his shoulder. Her arm around his waist tightened, and Rory leaned back, sinking deeper into the embrace.
They stayed like this, quiet and still, until the storm blew itself away.
And so the summer passed breathlessly, leaping from one adventure to another.
For three months, Rory and Daye crisscrossed the meadow and crawled between fallen trees in the forest, delighted in pocketfuls of mushrooms and waded through shallow rain pools, perfect for splashing, when the heat lay languid on the ground.
Each day seemed to stretch, toffee-like, into small eternities, perfect and drowsy with light.
It seemed like an infinite sort of arrangement, age-old and everlasting. The two of them—Rory and Daye—and their kingdom: meadow, forest, house, and everything in between.
There must have been earlier signs, but Rory missed them completely.
And if Daye noticed them, she made no mention of it, her smiles as quick and easy as they always had been.
It started small: the yellow of Daye’s hair growing faintly duller; her cheeks less vibrantly pink, less pansy-round.
Easily explained by a night of little sleep, a trick of the light.
So Rory couldn’t remember the exact point when he looked up and thought, Daye looks different. But he did remember the first time he thought, Something might be wrong.
It was a warm September afternoon, and they were thundering across the meadow solely for the pleasure of thundering, a shower of translucent bugs erupting from under their feet in continuous waves.
He looked right, and suddenly Daye wasn’t by his side.
She was in the grass behind him, braced on hands and knees.
A tremble moved up her arms—a leaf shiver, a horse twitching its coat, there and gone.
It lasted a moment, a heartbeat, the length of one bite into a hard apple, and then Daye was on her feet again, running toward him as if it wasn’t the first time Rory had seen her fall.
From then on, the changes grew bolder with each passing day.
By the third week of September—how could it have happened so fast, when only two weeks earlier they were flying through the forest in chase of fox kits?
—there was no denying that Daye seemed …
wrong. Drawn in a faded sort of way. Her ripe-red smile dimmer. Her steps less quick, less sure.
So Rory stopped racing. He invented new games: hiding, building a fortress of woven vines and branches to last them the winter.
And for a day or two, everything would be okay, and Rory would almost think that he imagined it, whatever it was.
That Daye’s hair was always that color, her skin always tinted gray that way.
That there was always a fine web of cracks stretching across her lips and up the backs of her hands.
And then something would happen—a stumble, a shiver, vines falling from Daye’s fingers mid-weave—and he’d realize, No, this isn’t right.
But it was okay, right? People, even flower girls, got sick sometimes, and you just had to wait it out.
It was a clear early autumn morning—the deceptive kind of fall day, all summer-blue skies and nipping chill.
They were walking through the meadow—ostensibly to the apple tree on its western side, but neither of them was in any hurry to get there.
Rory was telling Daye about his new idea for the fortress’s walls when a gaggle of geese passed overhead, drowning his words with their honks.
“They’re on the way to the lake,” he said when the last of the stragglers passed from view, but Daye wasn’t by his side.
Rory looked around wildly. For a moment he thought, Did Daye use the distraction to hide?
and a bubble of excitement flared in him, that everything was all right, that Daye was playing again.
But then he spotted her—a silhouette, crumpled beside the heather—and the breath whooshed out of his chest all at once.
He ran to her, dropping to his knees by her side.
“Are you okay?” he asked, as he did every time Daye stumbled, anxious and hovering.
And every time, Daye would smile and nod and heave herself up.
But today she seemed to have run out of smiles.
Her eyes were closed, and her chest rose and fell quickly, then slowly, then quickly again.
Rory grabbed for her hand. “Daye, Daye, are you all right?”
Daye’s eyes fluttered open, violet-dark. She looked up at Rory with a grimace. Lifted a shoulder. Gave a small, confused shake of her head. No, she wasn’t okay. No, she couldn’t get up right then.
“C’mon, I’ll help you up,” Rory said, bravely, forcing a smile to his face. He braced a hand on the grass and started pulling her up, but almost immediately she flinched, and her face scrunched with pain.
“Daye?” Rory asked.
And then he saw her ankle. It was at an odd kind of angle.
Brittle. Wrong. Like the only thing that was holding it in place was the sock over it.
Like it wasn’t in its place at all. Rory covered his mouth with his hand.
He looked down, searching for something else, some other explanation.
Instead, his eyes caught on long strands of Daye’s hair, connected to nothing and broken into straw-like fragments.
A bunch was sticking from under his knee, and with horror he realized, I broke Daye’s hair.
A gust of wind carried a small chunk away, and Rory swallowed back a sob.
Daye was breaking. Daye was flaking away.
Daye’s eyes drifted closed. Her chest rose slow and even, like she was taking deep, deep breaths.
The calming kind. Her palm spasmed in his, and when he looked down, he saw that her pinkie finger was hanging limply, and two more were bent at an odd angle.
The broken kind. Her skin was cracked, deep fissures spiderwebbing across it.
But instead of blood, they left a fine layer of leaf dust on Rory’s palm, gray-green against his skin.
Rory dropped her hand in alarm, backing away on his knees. The movement crushed the strands of hair beneath him, reducing them to little more than yellow-gray powder. Her hand remained, palm up, where he had dropped it.
Sobs shuddered in Rory’s chest. “Daye, Daye—please, please tell me what to do. Daye. Blo-daye-wedd. Please!”
But her eyes remained closed. Shivers racked her frame, beginning in her shoulders and moving downward.
Her pinkie fell off.
Rory got up and ran.