Chapter 2
I DON’T KNOW where I am. In these dreams the location is always different and never somewhere I know from real life.
There’s a lake, flat and black. The air is too misty for any reflection. I can barely see the trees stretching upward, black and leafless in the depths of winter. The caw of crows cuts through the thick silence, the sound passing overhead, but they’re shrouded in mist.
One thing that remains the same each time is here, though.
A dark figure lurks at the lake’s edge.
Every hair on my body strains to attention. I know who he is, though he’s never spoken, never mind told me his name.
It’s the kind of thing you just know in your bones, and his name is an aching voice in mine.
Death.
I’ve dreamt about him for years. He started off far, far away, but over time he’s come closer.
Normally he’s little more than a shadow, but now he seems solid and is perhaps twenty feet from where I stand.
The closest he’s ever been.
Cold closes around me. I want to turn and run.
But there’s something else in me, too. A warring want that draws me to him.
I never move in these dreams, but maybe one day I will run toward him.
Maybe now.
Just as I gather myself, there’s a whispered voice in my ear.
“The hour is near.”
Gasping, I wake to firelight and a warm touch on my brow.
“Oh dear,” Pa chuckles, pulling back from kissing my forehead. “Didn’t mean to wake you.” He crouches and tucks the blanket around my lap.
I rub my face, trying to clear the cold fog from my dream and the scattered lines of an old nursery rhyme from my head.
Death upon the water…
The fire helps, as does Pa’s familiar scent. He smells of the sea, salty and fresh, mixed with the soap he always uses before coming home so he doesn’t bring the stink of fish guts into the house. “You’re back. How long have I been asleep?”
“Not sure how long, but aye, I’m home, safe and sound,” he says with a reassuring smile.
That isn’t a given in his line of work. Annem had begun to tell me that once, before I was born, his boat had almost gone down in a storm, but Pa had arrived home, cutting her story short.
“Speaking of it tempts her back,” he’d said in the sternest voice I’ve ever heard him use, and I heard nothing more about the storm that had nearly taken him away.
He never admitted it, but I know he was afraid of her—not Annem, another storm. He even went to the trouble of moving us to the other side of the country, which I suspected was to escape the memories.
I shove down the worries and give him a bright smile. “Good catch?”
“Fish caught, gutted and sold. I’ll help your ma with a few jobs, then you can tell me about your day.”
“I can’t wait to tell you about the dragon I battled,” I call as he turns away.
He pauses there, back to me, the stillness strange in a man who is always busy, always working on the boat or around our home. Then he heads to Annem in their bedroom at the back of the house.
As the grogginess of sleep fades, my fingers close around a clothbound cover. Lowen had indeed brought me the book he’d promised, and I’d fallen asleep going over it and adding to my notes.
I smooth my hand over the cover of Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy and peer next to the armchair. I must’ve knocked my notebook to the floor as I slept. But there’s no sign of it. I feel down the side of the cushions—perhaps Pa tucked it down there with the blanket. Nothing.
Stiff, I heave to my feet, pull the cushions off the chair, and search all around it.
In case it’s been tidied away, I check Pa’s basket of nets that need repairing—the work we’ll do by the fire this evening.
Frowning, I spread my search further, circling the living space, glancing through the kitchen door, in case Annem picked it up and left it on the table.
Through the window, Lowen stands at the garden wall working on something.
I call toward the back room, asking if Annem has seen it.
As I wait for a reply, my stomach knots at the thought of her flicking through the pages.
I keep quiet about how much I long for the days before I was ill—I don’t want my parents to feel bad for my sake.
She worries about me, and he… sometimes I get the impression he feels guilty like it’s all his fault.
I don’t want them to know about the pain I’m in most days or quite how often I have the dizzy spells.
I don’t want them to think I suffer. And I really don’t want them to know it’s so bad that even after all these years, I still search for a cure.
Only Lowen understands.
No reply from Annem, but as I continue my search, footsteps approach from their room.
“I can’t find it anywhere,” I call, returning to the armchair. I must’ve missed it. Maybe it fell underneath and—
I stop in my tracks. I blink, swaying.
There’s something in the fireplace. Not a log. A flat oblong shape. Blackened. Flames leaping around it.
I lean on the mantelpiece, eyes burning as I stare and hope, hope, hope that I’m wrong. With the poker, I try to hook the object out of the fire, but the blackened shape flakes into ash. I drop to my knees, joints crying out.
One fragment comes out whole, landing on the sandstone hearth with its edges still glowing orange.
The spine of a book bound in green leather. An inch wide. No title or author name, just a single hellebore flower embossed and painted black.
My notebook.
A small sound escapes me. Not quite “No.”
All that work. All these years. All those books borrowed from locals, from market towns inland when I was well enough to travel, from folk passing through the village.
Observations from my own experiments with belladonna and foxgloves, willow and witch hazel.
Speculation about how my illness is like one aspect of this disease but shares symptoms with this other, unrelated one.
All of it.
Ashes.
I stare. I blink. I wish it into something else—anything else. I need this not to be real.
Brown leather boots edge into view. “Oh, sweetheart,” Pa sighs.
He isn’t surprised. He did it or he knew about it and did nothing.
I choke on the shock. The betrayal. The crushing pain at the thought he could do this to me. His own daughter.
“You know there’s no cure.” There’s this gruff edge to his voice that scrapes my skin, my insides, leaving me raw. “You’re only torturing yourself.”
My heart tightens like a fist. Isn’t it my business if I want to torture myself?
I’d take torture by hope over torture by despair any day. My hand shakes, fingers straining around the poker’s handle.
For a moment, it’s as though I’m the fire. And the heat of it terrifies me.
I want to explode. That dreadful potential quivers inside me, battling the stillness I try to cling on to.
I’m dimly aware of Annem’s soft footsteps approaching. “Your father’s right.”
They did this. Together. Planned it, perhaps.
They looked through the pages I’d written. Understood my hopes. Saw what I’d been working for all this time.
I can’t speak. There are too many things that are too big trying to get out through my throat.
All I can do is stare.
The fragmented pages twitch, settling and merging with the logs and kindling as the fire consumes them. It leaps as the back door opens, but my chest remains a clenched, hard thing, unable to unlock itself.
“What’s going—?” Lowen gasps as his steps get closer. “What happened?” I think he sees my frozen face, the tears gathering in my eyes and there’s a shuffle as he turns to our father. “Pa? Did you do this?” A harsh note of accusation cuts through his usually warm tone.
It cuts through me.
“Watch how you talk to your pa, lad,” our father says.
I kept the book’s contents secret to protect my family from my pain. I don’t want them arguing over it or me.
They’re my whole world, and I know my illness binds them all to this house—someone always has to be here to keep an eye on me. But I can’t be a raincloud making them miserable, too.
As the fire consumes the last of my notebook, I stamp down the fire licking through me.
I will not be a source of strife. Stamp.
I can’t be angry at them. Stamp.
I can’t bear to see them angry at each other. Not when I owe them everything. Stamp, stamp.
Soon all that’s left is the burning in my eyes as I drag in a breath.
“Or was it you?” Lowen goes on, turning to our mother. “Why would you—?”
“It’s fine.” I tear myself away from the fire and force a smile in place.
His eyes go round as he stares at me for a beat. “But don’t you want to know who—?”
“No. I don’t.”
Desperately, I do.
But I shrug, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. “It’s fine. Like Pa said, there is no cure. It was silly of me to waste paper writing all those notes.”
Pa’s brow lowers and his mouth flattens, like all the doors in him have shut. When I turn to Annem, she looks away, wringing her hands.
But it’s the stricken look on Lowen’s face that makes my eyes burn harder. He gapes as though I’ve slapped him.
I push myself to my feet, leaning on the poker like a walking stick. “I think I’m going to go to bed now.” The poker clangs as I return it to the stand, and I can’t help thinking of it like a bell tolling for the end of all my work.
So much destroyed in so little time. I try not to curl in on myself. I want to fling myself into the chair and scream that it isn’t fair. The notebook. My illness. Everything.
But it won’t achieve anything besides letting misery win.
Instead, I take a breath, smile and remind myself how lucky I am.
I have a family who love and protect me. With them, I’ll always be cared for. And with them, I have no reason to fear the figure of Death, because he will not find me alone.