CHAPTER FIFTEEN
What Rowan Saw
She did not change out of the river.
That was the first decision, and she made it standing dripping in the dark of the shop with the silt drying gray on her shins and her boots making a small flat sound of water every time she shifted her weight.
The shop had held the day's heat and it lay against her river-cold skin like a damp hand; beyond the shut door the August street had gone quiet, the cicadas long wound down.
If she peeled the wet clothes off and stood under the hot tap until the shaking stopped, she would get warm, and warm she would get clever, and clever she would find the argument that let her stay alone in this room one more night.
She knew herself. She had spent six days proving exactly how well the thing on her chest knew her too.
So she did not go to the tap. She crossed the shop in the dark, leaving wet prints on the boards, and she picked the phone up off the counter with a hand that did not want to obey her and she called the number she had told to never call her again.
Rowan answered before the first ring finished, which meant she had not been asleep, which meant she had been sitting somewhere these six nights with the phone where she could reach it, waiting to be allowed back into the disaster, and that landed in Maren somewhere under the cold and she could not afford it yet so she put it down.
"It walked me into the river," Maren said.
"Tonight. I came back into myself standing in the Mississippi with no idea how I got there.
I'd have gone in. If I hadn't surfaced when I did I'd have walked straight down into it and it would have looked like grief, and it would have been the thing on my chest, glad. "
A silence on the line with a held breath in it.
"Where are you," Rowan said. Not a question. The voice of a person already reaching for keys.
"The shop. Rowan." She made herself say the rest, because it was the true thing and she had promised the river she would stop telling herself comfortable lies.
"I'm not calling because I forgive you. I haven't got there.
I might not. I'm calling because I tried to do it alone and it nearly drowned me by Thursday, and you're the only person left who knows the whole shape of it.
That's all this is tonight. I need you not to make it more than that when you get here. "
"I won't," Rowan said. "Ten minutes."
It was eight minutes. Maren stood at the front window and watched the headlights swing in off the dark street and douse, and she watched Rowan come up the buckled path in the wet with her shoulders set the way a person sets them walking toward something they expect to hurt, and she unlocked the door and stood back to let her in and was careful, both of them careful, to leave a clear foot of air between their bodies in the doorway.
Rowan came in and stopped just inside and looked at the silt on Maren's legs and the river still dark in her clothes, and her weathered face did a thing Maren had seen it do exactly once before, at the death-site that first day, a kind of grief that was also recognition, and she understood that Rowan knew this particular horror from the inside. Of course she did.
"Sit down before you fall down," Rowan said. "I'll find you something dry. You can hate me in a sweater as easy as wet."
Which was nearly a joke, and it was the wrong moment for one, and it was exactly the thing that made Maren's throat close, because it was so plainly an attempt and so plainly costing her.
Maren sat on the stool by the empty chair, Lark's chair, the one nobody had sat in since, and let Rowan dig a flannel shirt out of the bag she'd brought without being asked, a person who came to a midnight summons with dry clothes in a bag because she'd thought ahead to what the river leaves on you, and that was Rowan entire, the awful competent kindness of her, and Maren took the shirt and did not say thank you.
When the worst of the shaking had gone out of her, she told Rowan about the floor, and the carry, and the batture, and the mark hot and forward, straining at her ribs toward the water.
Rowan listened without once looking away, and at the end of it she said, "It did the same to me.
After Nessa. Not the river. There's a place out past Shell Beach.
I'd find myself stood at the edge of it not knowing the drive.
It's not a thing it does to you because you're weak.
It's a thing it does because it's a leash, and a leash only works on a thing that's trying to get somewhere.
It walks you toward the water because the water is where it finishes. "
"Nessa," Maren said.
And so Rowan, who had hidden her whole self behind that one closed door for as long as Maren had known her, opened it.
She told it plainly, which was worse than if she had wept.
Nessa had been the girl she loved at nineteen, the two of them cult-born and cult-raised and certain they were going to get free together.
Rowan got out. Nessa was taken six months after, in a Severance Rowan only understood for what it was years later, when she had put herself through a degree and learned the chemistry of the blooms and gone looking, with a scientist's patience, for the pattern under the deaths her old people called accidents.
She had found it. She had spent the years since learning to read the water the way Les Noyées read it, the bloom building, the still backwaters going rust, the particular kind of quiet that came down over the Drowned when one of their rites was near.
She had taught herself to see a Severance coming.
And she had come back to New Orleans this season because every sign she had was screaming.
"I knew it was building," Rowan said. She had gone to the counter and put both hands flat on it behind her, bracing, the way she'd stood in Vesper's kitchen, a woman who needed the world to hold still under her palms to say the next part.
"I knew Calla was moving toward a high bloom.
I didn't know who. That's the truth, Maren, and you can believe it or not.
I didn't know it was Lark, I didn't know it was you, I didn't know your faces or your studio or your names.
I knew there was a pair somewhere with a bind pure enough to be worth the rite, and I knew the night was close, and I went looking the only way I had, which was to find Calla and follow her. "
"You followed her out there." Maren's voice had gone very flat. "The night."
"I followed her out the Chef road past the pass.
" Rowan's eyes did not leave her. "Out to the Vaudry water.
I left the truck back on the highway and I came in on foot through the grass because you can't drive up on them, they hear an engine a mile off in that quiet.
It's a long way in through the marsh in the dark.
I went as fast as I could go and not be heard.
" She stopped. Her jaw worked. "It wasn't fast enough.
By the time I came up through the last of the grass to where the water opens out, it had already started. I was minutes late. Minutes."
Maren did not say anything. She could not. The mark over her heart had gone still in a way it never did, listening.
"She was already in the water," Rowan said, and her voice did the thing then that it had not done through any of the rest of it, it shook.
"Your Lark. She was standing in the still red shallows up past her waist with the ring of them round the edge, and she wasn't fighting, that's the thing I couldn't, that's the thing I've carried, she wasn't fighting it.
She'd walked down into that black water on her own feet, calm, trusting, like somebody she loved had told her it was alright.
Lark who I know now was more afraid of deep water than of dying.
She'd gone down into it anyway because she trusted whoever brought her there more than she trusted her own fear.
" Rowan pressed the heel of one hand briefly against her mouth and took it away.
"I came out of the grass and I started toward her and there were eleven of them and one of me, and the water, and Calla had her hand on Lark's head already, gentle, like a baptism, and I, "
She stopped.
"I froze," she said. "For a second. One second.
I'd seen it before, you understand. I'd seen exactly this once already, at nineteen, and my body knew what came next and it locked.
And in that second Calla put her under, and the water took it, the whole bloom went, the red came up the way it does when she's fed, and it was done.
It was done before I got my legs back. I went in screaming and three of them held me out of it and the rest just watched me, kind, the way Calla's people are always kind, and then they let me go because there was nothing left to stop me reaching.
She was already gone. The bind had already routed.
I stood in that water and held what was left of her and it was just a body, Maren.
The soul wasn't in it anymore. The soul was already three miles back across the marsh, sinking into your skin in your sleep, and I didn't even know your name to come and tell you. "
The shop was very quiet. Out on the street a car went by with its radio up and the sound bent away and was gone.
"Who brought her there," Maren said.