Chapter Six. Daye
Daye
Daye could still taste fear in her mouth. It sat ashy and dry on her tongue, like the smell of a fireplace after the fire burned out. She shuddered.
“We’re almost home,” Rory said. His voice was frayed with exhaustion. “We just need to cross this field, and then we’ll be able to see the meadow.”
Though they could no longer see much of anything. The sun had set a few fields ago, turning the snow into an endless, shin-high puddle to wade through, stretching as far as the eye could see.
“Really.” Rory’s hand squeezed hers once, damp wool clammy-warm and scratchy against her skin. “Just a little bit more.”
‘It’s okay. I’m not tired,’ she signed haltingly, miming laying her head on a pillow, then shaking her head.
And she wasn’t, not really, though the shadow of exhaustion seemed to lurk just out of reach.
Autumn was all but over, and she could feel it in her branch-bones, the slow, inexorable climb of rot in her veins, a faint spider-like scrabbling.
Her skin was turning dry in patches—her left ankle, her inner thigh, the spot under her right shoulder blade.
Growing brittle and paper-thin, like the bark of a white birch.
Twinging with a strange kind of chill, one that seemed to lie under her skin rather than outside it.
They waded on. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hooted.
“I’m sorry.” Rory’s voice shattered the gloaming quiet, making Daye startle. “We won’t go there again, I promise.” He kept his eyes on the snow before him. “Really, the cake isn’t that good. And you can’t eat it anyway, so it’s not like you’ll be missing anything. We’ll just … stay home.”
Daye’s shoulders slumped, helpless relief turning into heavy, loss-tinged guilt, like teeth sinking into a soft plum, only to jar against the stone at its center.
She raised her hands to say … something, then dropped them again.
The world that only hours before had seemed to unfurl—growing houses that looked nothing like their house, and kids that looked nothing like Rory, and far-off places teeming with people and houses and trains—seemed to shrink around her.
She could almost hear it, a faint pop, like the sound of a faraway branch breaking.
The last of the light slipped away between the distant trees. Ahead of them, she could just glimpse the dip and roll of the meadow, its shape as instinctive as breathing. And beyond it, the faint lights of the house.
In the distance an owl hooted again, low and mournful.