The Minor Fall

CHAPTER 49 The Foggy Dew

CHAPTER 49

The Foggy Dew

F erns scratched at Kazie’s bare legs, water squished in her low heels, and January numbed goose-pimpled arms. I shivered in sympathy. She’d threaded silk ribbons through her braids, a fairy walking to the Gate in the last chapter.

James offered her his coat, but she shook her head.

An hour earlier, James had burst into thick, blubbering sobs that fogged his glasses. Then Kazie had taken a walk with Bryn, the man who’d first shown her Ruhaven, and when she’d jumped into his arms, his quick, surprised laugh was a rare sound.

When she came to me, I hadn’t known what to do. It was like saying goodbye to a friend who was enacting their funeral in a school play. My words felt hollow, like I was no better than an audience member congratulating a performer. So I promised to water her plants, feed her budgies, and take care of James. And tactfully declined her offer of moving into her room—it really was only a matter of time until the hammock caved in the roof.

But even as her eyes sparkled with tears, I hadn’t been able to convince myself that she could leave us. The Inquitate I could explain as a hallucination, a brain defect we were born with, while the memories were a quirk in the oddity of space, and Bryn’s ability to walk was a miracle.

But to drift up into the sky to be reborn?

It didn’t have the aspect of truth to it. Where were the bright stage lights, the music from the hills, the recognition by the world that something impossible, something monstrous was about to happen? Shouldn’t the woods be screaming with the magic of it? Instead, my feet crunched in congealed pine needles and thorns.

Maybe they had it wrong.

Bryn limped at my side. The waterlogged bridge, as soft as Naruka’s carpets, made barely a sound as we crossed. In the river’s reflection loomed the rock where I’d imagined Bryn’s easel the day the Inquitate had come.

When I reached for him, he tucked my hand in his. Any lingering arousal from the gate lodge was packed tightly away, miles from woods that breathed in quiet awareness of what was about to happen.

We entered the Gate together. Kazie rolled out the blanket and kneeled on its worn threads, fluffing her dress around frozen legs. Didn’t she want to skydive, eat at a fancy restaurant, or buy something before being sucked into the universe?

What would I do if this were my last day? Finish the gate lodge? God, that was sad.

No, no. I looked at Bryn. Yes, I knew exactly what I would do.

He lifted the lantern from our bag, hung it on the tattered clothesline, and lit the candle inside as James wiped at his eyes. How was that string still intact? One day, the lantern would fall on our heads and I’d be right that something besides a human could wake us from Ruhaven.

Though there might not have been a momentous trumpeting to mark the passing, there was a calm hush, a quick pause of life that reminded me of the nights Willow had spent cross-legged with burning incense.

In tenth grade, she’d gone through a witch phase—short, luckily—and filled our shared room with piles of rocks, sand, and herbs. Dried flowers were strewn over our bunk bed. Plants were harvested and prepared. Our windowsill was transformed into a garden of crystals and rare stones. She prayed to the moon, mixed potions, and tried her hand at tarot readings.

One day, I’d turned to her and asked, “But Willow, is it real?”

“What do you mean?” she replied, genuinely perplexed.

I held up the book describing a potion to hex a relative. “I mean, do you really think this is going to curse Uncle Phil?”

She scratched at her knee-high striped purple stockings, and asked, “Does it matter?”

I turned to Bryn. Dew curled his hair behind a tall, slightly pointed ear as he blinked under long eyelashes.

“Rowan, James and I believe you should witness the Fall, as we have both seen it previously. If you were to decide to make this decision for yourself…” He trailed off. “James believes that if you were to decide as Kazie has, that it is important you understand the experience.”

I searched his porcelain face that gave away nothing. What do you want, Bryn? Instead, I asked, “What will happen?”

He dropped the backpack as he’d done a hundred times before. “The Gate will claim Kazie when Kazmira dies in the memories.”

I chanced a look at James, teary-eyed and gaunt, coal-black hair wilting under his flat cap. Could he handle losing Kazie so close to Essie?

“I’ll anchor,” I agreed after a moment. If anything were to happen to Kaz, I’d need to scorch my eyeballs with the truth of it.

I waited while James hugged her to his chest and spoke in her ear. He wouldn’t make the Fall, which meant he would never meet Kazie again, not in this life or Ruhaven. How many times had James watched a Ruhaven make a choice he felt he never had?

Kazie undid her dream catcher necklace and clenched it in her fist over her heart. Her token.

Why was everyone acting so normal? Shouldn’t there have been some ritual beyond a token in Kazie’s palm? A funeral, a gift, a card?

Yet they laid next to her, James with tears in his eyes and Bryn with the soft delicacy of stone as he grasped her hand. He’d live the last memories with her, with Kazmira.

What happened if the Gate wanted him too? Could it scoop him up? What if they were wrong and the Fall could happen at any time?

I sank beside Bryn, clutched his arm. “Are you sure you’re not going anywhere? There’s no chance…?”

He propped himself on an elbow. “No, the Gate will not take me now.”

But the Gate could claim someone at the end of the memories. What if Bryn slipped away, unaware he’d even made the Fall?

I tightened my grip. “Bryn, are you absolutely sure ?”

His eyes softened. “Yes, my Rowan.” But just in case…

He cupped my neck, slanted his mouth to mine. The kiss was light and gentle before his tongue slid in a soft question over my lips.

Too soon, he released me. His lips quirked, a tiny, lopsided smile that outed him as mortal after all. “I would hardly risk leaving after waiting so long to find you,” he reminded me.

“C’mon, guys,” Kazie called, looping her arm through Bryn’s.

Reluctantly, I let him go.

They created a colorful chain under the barren branches of winter. Their eyes closed together, like a mother drawing a blanket across her children.

There was no fear in Kazie’s dark face, no tension in the glossy set of her mouth.

“Kaz, are you going to be okay if nothing happens?”

Her lips crept up into that banana grin, a perfect half-circle. “Of course something will happen. I can’t wait to see you in Ruhaven.” She yawned. “Look after the budgies. Fred likes carrots. Bye, Roe. See you in…?”

“Kazie?” I said softly. “Kazie—” But her eyelashes fluttered once before the Gate claimed her.

I held my breath.

And waited like an idiot, like she’d poof into the air before my eyes.

Bryn’s hand loosened in mine as he joined her. His toes rolled out, his lips—still damp from our kiss—parted. James’s bony shoulders relaxed into the quilt. He no longer uttered embarrassing noises or other indications of his time in Ruhaven. Not with Essie gone.

But Kazie did not wither and disappear. Her braids sprawled in a medusa halo, her skin puckering from the cold as she replayed her last memories.

The woods quieted, listening as the Gate made its decision.

How could she know Ruhaven would take her back? What if it was like Bryn thought and it judged you, like a St. Peter’s Gate to Tallah?

People didn’t just float away.

But people also didn’t see memories from another planet, meet their brothers from hundreds of years ago, or find their mates who gladly broke off engagements for them.

As a breeze ruffled Bryn’s hair, I brushed aside the scattered locks. His forehead was cool and unstrained, asleep in a world he loved, watching the last moments in Drachaut for Kazie.

What could have happened that would have brought Bryn, Tye, and me through the Gate together?

I shivered as fog squeezed between the bare oaks and birch trees like pudding pushed through a strainer. But with the sudden lack of wind, I unwound my scarf from my sweaty neck and twisted it into a ball.

I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes.

What would I tell Kazie if she woke and her soul was not in Ruhaven, but this world she’d never loved?

Even in the Gate, she kept her fingers tightly fisted on the dream catcher resting on the folds of her dress. Folds that pooled and dripped over her body.

I rubbed my eyes, tired from the last few days. Between the bomb Tye had detonated on me and Bryn’s memories, I could barely keep my thoughts straight. And now Kazie was—

I squinted at her dress again.

But it was dripping. It pooled on her stomach and spread into the weave of the quilt.

I scrubbed at my face. It wasn’t supposed to melt. She wasn’t supposed to melt. James would have told me if the Fall caused her clothes to bleed off her body .

Or was it an illusion? Inquitate?

I shot to my feet.

Bare patches of dark skin rippled under material that was no more than thick water so that she looked like a woman plucked from the river, like the sea-sprayed statue at the head of a boat.

I jumped away from the floral dress running in rivers over the blanket. Her belly button piercing—a ceramic lemon—poked through the thinning material that dripped off her breasts. Another tattoo, this one of a blindfolded woman, smiled at me on the side of her thigh. But unlike the clothes, Kazie remained untouched. Her dark, naked skin perfectly matched the evening folding itself into the skies.

Dropping to my knees, I splashed in the pool of her dress. “Kazie, wake up! Wake up!” I grabbed at her and ended up planting my hand through her knee.

I held up my shaking fingers, now coated in the fondue of her dress.

Jesus Christ.

Kazie’s naked body wavered.

Right in front of me, in the middle of the Irish oaks and yellow moss, her entire existence faltered like a cut umbilical cord.

My breath stuck in my throat. The drumbeat at my temples whipped into a frenzy.

Then, with each blink, she dematerialized further.

Blink. Her feet whispered away. Her kneecaps dissolved. Her beautiful beaded braids scattered like fleeing ants. Her hips and torso wavered, a mirage in the desert, before they, too, were gone.

And when her face slipped away, the only thing left were the fingers grasping a dream catcher.

Then they evaporated too.

Only the deerskin-wrapped necklace, with its beaded threads, lay still upon the quilt.

I stared, unblinking, at the space between James and Bryn—a street with an empty lot, whose overgrown yard was the only indication of the house that was once there.

She’d…she’d…

I pressed shaking hands to the rough blanket. Dry . There was nothing left of her. No color, no liquid, no dress. No Kazie. Nothing but a flimsy piece of jewelry.

I scratched at the blanket, tore at it, my breath burning. There had to be something left. I yanked so hard that James and Bryn spilled off the edge. Yet all evidence of her—of everything that had been Kazie—was gone.

Kneeling in her empty lot, I bundled my knees to my chest.

Despite everything I’d seen, it felt like the first time Tye had taken me up here and forced me to witness what I’d thought had been a dream. When the world had shifted under me and brought with it that mind-numbing terror to know you weren’t alone in the world. That there was more, so much more, and your existence meant nothing.

Then my head snapped up at a distant voice.

“ Istilick mi liom, shakila. ”

The hairs on the inside of my ears pricked with awareness. Everything became a dull roar inside my head.

“ Istilick mi liom, shakila, ” it repeated.

Willow ?

Her voice. My sister’s. One I’d never forget, no matter how many years separated us.

“Istilick mi liom, shakila! Istilick mi liom, shakila! ” she yelled, urgent now.

I ran trembling fingers down my cheeks. My breath came out in rapid pants.

“Willow!” I called hoarsely, voice lost in the rustling leaves.

“ Istilick mi liom, shakila. ”

Something flickered between the trees.

Heart pounding, I jumped to my feet, lunged toward the path—

“Rowan.” Bryn snagged me around the waist, his warm breath at my neck as he squeezed me to him.

“Bryn, I—she’s—was there and then—”

He smoothed back my hair, folded me against his warm heartbeat. “I know. She has returned to Ruhaven. It is a shock to see it for the first time,” he said, mistaking my stuttering.

Was it her? Was it Willow? Or an Inquitate? Should I tell Bryn? I reached out a hand—to call her back, to beckon, I didn’t know. Then I remembered—he’d spoken of this before, the illusions of the Fall. That he believed it was Ruhaven speaking to us.

Through Willow?

James let out a low wail as he woke.

Istilick mi liom, shakila, Willow had said, and hadn’t I heard those words before?

No. Not heard. Seen . Engraved in the plaques around the Gate, the ones that even now glittered invisibly.

James and Bryn spoke quickly under their breaths, words I couldn’t process, couldn’t hear, just a low rumble against my chest as I replayed Willow’s voice again and again, as I pictured Kazie melting into the earth, as I fought to understand what that meant for me now.

As I shook, Bryn murmured in my ear, soft words that soothed the wrong shock. “She is in Ruhaven now,” he repeated, rocking us like boats listing in a port. “She has gone home.”

Yes, Kazie was in Ruhaven.

And somehow, somehow, it made perfect sense. She was exactly where she was supposed to be. Where she was meant to be. Where she deserved to be. A puzzle piece slid into the empty slot I hadn’t seen.

James ran spindly fingers over the bumps in the quilt where Kazie had lain, picked up the dream catcher. “I didn’t see the end in the Gate,” he said heavily. “Did ye?”

Bryn’s hair tickled my ears when he shook his head. “No. No, I was with Nereida, with Rowan.”

I clutched his wool jacket. “She—her clothes,” I stuttered, voice raspy in my throat. “They melted.” Before I heard Willow.

Bryn grasped my hand. “Yes, it is Ruhaven taking only her soul.” His throat worked, bobbing under the collar of his jacket as James knelt on one knee and skewered the ground with a shovel I hadn’t noticed. “James will bury her token now.”

Her token. Nothing more than a metal plate buried in soil and worms, waiting for the next Ruhaven to vomit in a shrub and discover them.

When the hole was deep enough, James gently lowered the necklace and set it between the glittering plaques. After scooping soil, he withdrew a metal rectangle from his coat pocket and nestled the gilded plate on the makeshift grave.

I glanced at Bryn. He knelt solemnly in the dirt, eyes dry and a little vacant, but not shocked, not surprised, not a drop of remorse that I could see on his pale, pale face.

Did he, even now, want our plaques to be buried amongst this graveyard?

James drew a deep inhale before a song left his lips. Not in Ruhaven, but in Irish.

I pulled away from Bryn to lean over James’s shoulder. Kazie’s bronze bar glittered green under the leaves, the grooves of the name catching flickering lights.

“Istilick mi liom, shakila, ” I read aloud. The first time I had, it’d been Bryn with me here at the Gate. When he’d told me of the Fall. “What does it mean?”

James wiped at his eyes. “ And in the end, the beginning .”

“What?”

“It is a Ruhaven blessing,” Bryn explained quietly. “For those who have made the Fall. A chance to begin again.”

I swallowed against the sudden harsh constriction in my throat. “You’re sure?”

“Yes, of course.” The corners of his lips dipped. “What is it?”

Sick and anxious, I rubbed at my throat, willing my voice to stay even. “Nothing. Nothing, I’m fine.”

“ R owan!” Bryn’s voice trailed me through the forest. “Please wait for me. I cannot keep up with you.”

Not with one leg, and for once, I was eternally grateful for it.

Willow had called to me from the Gate. From Ruhaven. From that dark, naked room. Why?

There could only be one reason, even if I didn’t want to accept it, even if everything in me was screaming in denial at what must have been so obvious from the beginning. And now I was dangling on a precipice of numbing possibility.

I ducked branches automatically, having memorized their crooked curves from all the hikes to this Gate. I stepped over logs and onto moss that squished half a foot before my boots met solid ground.

And in the end, the beginning.

It was all so horribly clear now.

The end for me. The beginning for her.

Because after everything, after the months of living as Nereida, I’d never really escaped the truth. And now that the Gate had given me this gift, had allowed me to witness what was never mine, it was asking for its sacrifice.

It wanted Nereida back. It wanted Willow.

This was what it had come to—and of course it had. The reason for it all, the meaning of my name in that Ledger . Because I had always been on borrowed time, a borrowed life, one that the Gate needed me to return now. Because watching the memories hadn’t come without a cost, and the cost was to return Willow to Ruhaven. That was why I’d been allowed to witness her past life. If there was enough of Willow’s soul in me to watch the dream, then there was enough to bring her back too.

I blinked away the burn behind my eyes. James had nearly convinced me that it’d been my birth in the Ledger , and then Bryn had seemed so certain, but it’d all been a delusion. Mine. And delusions came with a price.

Had I really thought I could pretend that I was someone else? That the Gate wouldn’t come and extract something from me? And who was I to deny it now? No one. I’d never been anyone.

I never had dreams like Willow, never finished college, never wanted anything in my whole life. I was something that materialized between the gaps in Willow’s life, springing up like flowers in the cracks on a grave.

And now I expected the Gate to—to accept me? As a replacement? No. I hadn’t done anything worth accepting.

A cobweb hanging between two glistening birch trees broke across my face before I could bat it away.

I was the only Ruhaven ever born a twin, a twin whose soul was as intricately bound to my own as Nereida’s Tether. And souls were what Ruhaven accepted—that’s what Kazie had said before it’d taken her own.

If Willow’s soul was bound to mine, then some piece of her—and I didn’t know which piece—but some piece of her had to come back with me.

When Naruka loomed into view, light guttered in her windows as if she were looking down at our numbers and wondering why one was missing. Smoke puffed from her chimney, staining the royal sky with pewter soot.

How long did I have before Naruka was mourning me too? Years? Months?

I stumbled through the tack room and barreled into the kitchen.

But pulled up short when I caught sight of Tye leaning against the stove, a bandaged hand gripping the counter.

“She’s gone then,” he said without emotion.

Was she? Or was Kazie right now running through Ruhaven as Willow might be? And how long did I have before the Gate asked me to sacrifice myself like Kazie? “What?”

Tye’s eyes hardened to cool, emerald stones, his lips moving in some indistinguishable pattern. My thighs felt numb, my mind empty, my fingers fought to undo the suddenly unfamiliar shape and form of buttons.

Two steps brought him toe to toe with me. He grasped my trembling hands. “What is it?” he asked firmly.

I couldn’t breathe. My shoulders tightened on a wave as I fought air into lungs that had shriveled to raisins. “How long do we have?” I managed at last. “I mean,” I said, struggling for another noseful of air. “How long do I have? Before the call? Like Kazie?”

Tye’s eyes went to wide discs of green. “What the hell are ya talkin’ about?”

What was I talking about? Making the Fall? Was I prepared to cast myself away like that? For Willow? When I had—when I had—

Tye’s hands tightened on my wrists, and he gave me one good shake, hard enough that the words tumbled out. “The Fall,” I managed, collecting myself. “When will I hear the call? Is it years? Months?” My voice strained into a whisper. “ Weeks ?”

Tye shook his head in disgust and released me. “You ain’t got long,” he said abruptly.

Not long . Not long to live at Naruka, not long to be me , whatever that was, and not long to be with Bryn.

“How do you know?” Did Kazie? Did everyone? Had I missed some crucial piece about when the Fall would happen?

The clock tick-tocked on the wall.

Tye didn’t look at me. “I know in the same way that Stornoway knows. We ain’t got a lot of time, and your time’s comin’ up.”

Bryn knew? How? But when I asked, Tye only shook his head. “I always knew he’d manipulate ya into it.” But his voice wasn’t angry, it was weary, resigned. Defeated. Something I’d never heard from Tye, not once, not even when Bryn broke his finger. “You’re gonna make the Fall.”

Was I? Was I really saying that? Committing it? Promising it? What did it mean to turn away from something Ruhaven asked from you? No—not Ruhaven, Willow. Could I ignore my sister’s own request for me to save her, to sacrifice myself at the Gate? One soul for another.

“Listen,” Tye said quietly. “I don’t know how long we got—you got, before the call comes, but when it does, ya only got weeks to make it on up to that Gate. Before ya do, ya better make sure there ain’t nothin’ here ya wanna hold on to. Nothin’ here ya wanna do before ya leave. Ya know what I’m sayin’?”

No, because I couldn’t begin to comprehend what my own death would mean, when it seemed as unrealistic as Kazie disappearing into the earth.

“—I bought you that plane ticket.” Tye’s words leaked into my ears again. “I said I would, and it’s leavin’ tomorrow. If I mean anythin’ to ya, you’ll come back with me. Have a think about all of this away from Naruka. Away from Stornoway.”

Go back to L’Ardoise? A last goodbye? Would my parents want to see me? Or would they be glad to never have the reminder again of what they’d lost?

“I’ve seen people just like you,” Tye continued. “They get all caught up in it. They see someone make the Fall, they lose their mind for a bit, think it’s callin’ ‘em or somethin’. Roe, please, I’m damn near beggin’ ya. If you could just take a week, remember where you’re from. Don’t rush into this.”

Because everything that was me would be buried under a plaque in the Gate. I didn’t even know what my token would be—maybe drywall, after all.

I nodded without thinking, and Tye said, “That’s good now. You go on upstairs and pack. I’ll come get ya in the mornin’ and we’ll sort this out. You’re gonna be okay, Roe. It’s all gonna be okay.”