Chapter 35
I know I’m dreaming, because I’m back on a familiar grassy hill.
It’s the place my mother always favored, where the wild elderberry shrubs grow as big as boulders. I’m sitting with her upon spindles of grass, the blades stiffer from lack of rain.
I remember this day.
Over her veillet, her head is adorned with the crown of berries that I made her, and she’s wearing her favorite white frock with the pink bodice over it. I too have on a crown that she wove together for me, and below us, we can see the field hands working to harvest the last of the wheat.
My mother lies back with a happy sigh, while I busy my fingers, braiding together a third crown for my aunt. My fingers are small. I think I’m only about eight years old. Aunt Lenna doesn’t wear the crowns, but she always keeps them, hanging them on the hook behind her bedroom door.
“Come listen, Esti,” my mother murmurs as she rolls onto her side, her light blond hair loose and glossy.
I set down the crown and curl up next to her until we’re facing each other. Her pink eyes watch me with a smile. “Listen to the earth,” she says, her voice light and lyrical. “Can you hear her breathing? Can you hear her murmur? She’s saying all sorts of things.”
I tuck my hand under my cheek and try to listen just as I always do. But I’ve never been able to hear a thing.
“Is the earth sad, M?m? Because she’s bleeding?”
She hums in thought and slips her hand under her cheek like me. “Blood isn’t always bad.”
“It looks bad. Up there,” I say, pointing at the churning sky.
She follows my gaze, but movement to our left pulls my attention. A rabbit jumps between two of the bushes near us, and I sit up, trying to coax it toward my pile of elderberries. The little thing is all tan fluff and twitching nose, but it lets me pet it after a few offered berries.
“Can we keep it?” I ask with a smile.
“Keep what?”
I snap my head over because the person who answers me is Aunt Lenna, not my mother. She’s standing a few feet away with a dowel in her hands, using it to stir a vat full of soaking fabric that I can instantly smell.
“Aunt Lenna?” I say with a frown. “What are you doing here? How’d you get the vat up here?” I glance around the hill, notice the elderberry bushes are no longer full of fruit. “Where’d M?m go?”
She scowls at me. “You’re distracted, Esti.”
In my arms, the rabbit suddenly wriggles and kicks, landing a bite on my arm. “Ouch!” I drop it and it dashes away, making my entire pile of berries spill down the hillside.
“Distracted,” she says again, with such disappointment in her tone that it scoops me out. I never, ever want to disappoint Aunt Lenna.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her as I get to my feet. The hillside has changed. It’s not green anymore. There are no harvest workers in the field below. Everything has browned and wilted.
But . . . this isn’t how that day went. Not at all. My mother smiled as I petted the bunny, and then reminded me that wild things prefer to stay wild. Then we walked home, and she bought me a piece of spiced honey cake on the way.
“Where’s M?m?” I ask nervously. “She was just here.”
“You left her.”
My stomach drops as I look over. “No, I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”
Aunt Lenna is stirring so fast now that water starts sloshing out of the vat. I walk over, and some of it splashes against my dress, soaking me down the chest.
“Aunt Lenna?”
But she keeps stirring. Harder and harder as she scowls.
I peer inside the murky water and see that it’s full of elderberry crowns.
The stems are all tangled up and the berries bursting open, bleeding black, sticky juices like an infected wound.
It’s staining the strips of soaking cloth within, a smell of sweet rot lifting from it.
“Aunt Lenna, the berries—they’re ruining it,” I warn.
With a violent halt, she stops stirring. Her eyes lift to me, but her purple irises have gone bruised. “No. You ruined it.”
My heart stumbles. “What?”
Her eyes drop, and I follow her gaze to my soaked dress. Instead of water, it looks like I’ve been drenched in blood. Fear pounds my pulse, and I try to wrench up my skirts and scrub the red away, but it doesn’t come out.
“You did this,” she accuses.
Tears fill my eyes and I shake my head desperately, still scrubbing. “N-no, it’s from the berries! It’s not blood . . .”
But it smells like it is. The metallic hint is now clogging my nose.
I jerk my head up at the sound of a splash. Aunt Lenna is gone, the vat now twice as large, the water dark and choppy. The dowel starts to stir on its own in a violent thrashing, and I leap up and grab hold of it.
“Aunt Lenna!” I scream as I search for her in the water, but it’s pitch-black, like Poison.
Clouds have gathered overhead. Dark, ominous, and ready to spew down a storm. I glance up at it, feeling a sizzling drop land on my cheek like a spark. When I look back down, I’m not holding the dowel anymore.
Instead, clutched in my hand is the Piper’s pipe.
“This is your fault.”
I whirl around, and there he is, just a few feet away.
“What are you doing?” I demand. “You shouldn’t be here.”
He stares at me, his expression so lethal that it makes fear pound in my ears.
His eyes flick down, and I stare in horror at the little bunny I’d just been petting, which now lies at my feet with foam gathered at its mouth, its eyes wide and unseeing.
My stomach roils.
“This is your fault,” he says again, gesturing to the red stain on my dress and covering my palms.
I shake my head at him, feeling the vat bite into my spine. “No, I didn’t mean to.”
He stalks toward me, his expression so horrible, so violent, that I flinch. Before I can block him, he slams his hands into my chest and shoves.
I fall back, landing into the vat with a terrible splash of dark water. Eyes wide, fear blaring in my ears, I look up at the storm clouds broiling overhead. But while I tread, trying to keep my head above the surface, a person steps up into my line of vision.
My mother stands over me.
Gone is her happy, healthy-looking self. Her skin is tinged gray, her hair thinned, lips cracking. She looks at me with a hollowness that matches the spot in my chest. With a betrayal that pierces me through.
“Why haven’t you come back to me? Why won’t you come home?” she asks in a broken whisper, and it’s a kick in my gut that disintegrates my air. “Why did you leave me?”
“I’m sorry,” I cry. With a shake of her head, she turns and starts to walk away, and tears rain down my face. “M?m!”
I start to swim up, to swim out, but the pipe in my hand turns weighted. It makes me sink down, dropping like a stone. I try to let it go, to shove it away, but I can’t.
It’s latched on to me.
The metallic, musty-tinged water feels suffocating. I look up through the murk as the pipe lets out an eerie song that sounds like death and blame. I scream, but water rushes in my mouth, and darkness surrounds me.
Just when I think I’m going to drown, I suddenly come awake, gasping for breath.
I heave over the side of the bed just as I spew out bile. My sweat has soaked through my clothes, my heart hammering so hard the pulse jolts my limbs. Sobs slice out of me, one cut after another.
As if the nightmare cleaved me open.
I collapse over on myself, head tucked to my lap, hands fisting my hair as I sob. The horrible words keep replaying. The sights haunting my mind.
It was too real. Too lifelike.
I ache for my mother so fiercely that it feels like someone has stabbed me through. As if I really will look down and see my chest soaked in blood.
But worst of all is the guilt.
The weight of it still drags me down, just as the pipe did. Because my nightmare was right. I’ve been so overwhelmed with everything else that I forgot the most important thing.
Getting home.