CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Letting Go
Maren held her hand flat over her own heart, over the figure in the water-lines, and she stopped fighting the leash and stopped fighting the water and stopped fighting any of it, and she went still inside, all the way down, to the place where the real grief lived under the rage, and she spoke to her wife.
"Lark," she said. "It's me. I know you're in there.
I've never been able to tell, this whole time, how much of what moves under my skin is you and how much is the hook they sank in you, and I think that was the cruelest part of the whole thing, that they made me doubt you even while I carried you.
So I'm going to stop guessing. I'm going to do the one thing that hook would never let me do if it could stop me, and we'll both find out together whether it's you. "
Her voice was barely a voice. The red light lay on the water, and the water reeked, iron and salt and the sweet rot of a thing too long dead, a smell she could taste at the back of her tongue and would never get out of the inside of her nose again, and the leash was a fury under her ribs and somewhere behind her the truth still hung in the air unswallowed, and she shut all of it out, the goddess and the Drowned and Calla and the whole drowned night, and she made the world as small as it had been on an ordinary morning in a Bywater studio, just the two of them, just Maren and the woman in her skin, the way it had been ten thousand times over coffee neither of them could make.
"I'm not going to ask the water," she said, "and I'm not going to ask Calla, and I'm not going to ask the thing that's been wearing you.
I'm going to ask you. The real you. The one who made terrible coffee.
And I'm going to give you the one thing nobody in this whole story ever gave you, or me, or anybody. A choice."
The leash hauled, frantic now, a drowning thrash against the inside of her ribs, because it knew, it knew what came next and it could not bear it, and that thrashing told Maren everything, told her that the part of the mark that wanted to keep her, that had wanted the kill, that had sung at the water's edge, was not Lark and had never been Lark, because Lark would not cling like this, Lark had never in her life held onto anything by its throat.
It thrashed and it clawed and it sent the old sick sweetness up through her, keep me, keep me, you will regret this, you will be alone, you will reach across that bed every morning for the rest of your life and find nothing there, keep me and you never have to.
And Maren felt the pull of every word of it, and held still under it, because she had finally learned the difference the whole trap was built to hide: that the part of her that wanted to keep Lark was not the part that loved her.
"You made me a promise once," Maren said, and the tears came now, freely, and she let them.
"An easy stupid Tuesday promise, the kind you made all the time and never thought about.
You said you'd never leave me. Do you remember.
And I held you to it like a child, I built my whole self around it, because I was a girl whose mother walked out and I needed one person on this earth who'd never go, and you said it, and you meant it, and then they drowned you for it, they used the very thing I loved most about you, that you came when the people you loved called, that you never left, they turned your staying into the leash on my heart.
" She pressed her palm gently to the mark.
"So I'm letting you off it. You hear me.
I am releasing you from the promise. You don't have to stay.
You were never supposed to stay like this, held down, hollowed out, a thing on my skin.
That's not staying, that's just not being allowed to go.
And I love you too much to be the one who won't allow it.
"I have been afraid my whole life of being left," she said, lower.
"You knew that. You were the only person I ever told the whole of it to, the mother and the car and the window and the way I learned at seven not to count on anybody staying, and you held it, and you never once used it against me, you just stayed, on purpose, every day, to prove to me a person could.
And then they took the one safe thing you ever gave me and bent it into a hook.
They made your love into a cage and put your face on the bars.
I won't have it. I would rather lose the whole true you than keep a cage that looks like you for the rest of my life. "
She felt the mark go still under her hand.
Not the frantic stillness of the leash and not the dead stillness of the drained scar on Lark's body in the morgue.
A waiting stillness. A listening one. And Maren understood that this was the door, that she was holding it open, and that the rest was not hers, the rest was the one thing in this whole drowned story that had to belong entirely to Lark, the choosing, and she could not make it for her and would not if she could.
"It's your choice," she whispered. "It was never going to be mine.
I'm not going to keep you and I'm not going to push you, I'm just going to open my hands and tell you you're allowed.
If you want to go, go. Be free of all of it, the water and the goddess and the debt and me, all of it.
And if some part of you is afraid to leave me alone, don't be.
I'm not alone." She did not look back, but she felt Rowan there, the living warmth of her at her shoulder, the woman who had stayed.
"I'm going to be all right. That's not your weight to carry anymore. Go on, my love. See you tonight."
And for one moment, one last impossible moment, the figure over her heart was wholly and only Lark.
Maren felt it the way you feel sun come out from behind cloud, the hook falling away, the leash and the goddess's long cruel hold sliding off all at once, and underneath it, freed, was her wife, the whole true her, present and warm and unmistakable against Maren's heart for the space of a single breath, and Maren felt her choose.
Felt the gladness of it, and the grief of it, and the love in it, felt Lark turn toward the open door like a woman turning her face up to the light after a long time in a cellar, felt her say, in no words, in the only language they had ever really needed, the thing she had always said, I love you, I'm not afraid, let me go.
And there was a last thing in it, under the love and the going, so purely Lark that Maren would hold it the rest of her life: not fear, not sorrow, but a fierce glad relief, the relief of someone held down a long time in the dark finally let up into the air, and threaded through it the old bright stubborn thing that had once walked into deep water to save a person she loved, turning now to walk through this last door for the very same reason, because Maren was the person, because going first was the only way left to save her.
She had spent her whole short life coming when the people she loved called.
This was the one time she got to be the one who left first, freely, on purpose, as a gift, so the woman she loved would not be dragged down after her.
There was even, at the very last, something close to her gap-toothed grin in it, see, I can do the hard thing too, watch me, and then Maren felt her, gently, with no violence at all, with that almost-laughter still in it, leave.
The mark lifted from Maren's skin.
It rose off her ribs like a held breath let out, the figure and the water-lines and the scatter of small dark birds all loosening at once and lifting away as red light, a drift of it, a single bright exhalation, and it did not fall toward the cup the goddess had opened for it, it went up and out over the still red water, free, and the small dark birds came apart from the figure and were, for one heartbeat, larks, a scatter of them rising, and then all of it broke apart over the water like the last of a wave and was gone, dissolved into the red, given back, and Lark Aldous was at peace, and the place over Maren's heart was bare.
For three years the ink had lain dormant on her ribs and she had forgotten the weight of it; for a month it had moved and burned and grieved and pulled, a second heartbeat, a held and drowning second life.
Now there was nothing. The skin over her heart was just skin.
The absence of it was the loudest thing Maren had ever felt, a silence where a person had been, and she stood on the trodden bank with her hand pressed flat to her own bare chest and understood that she had done it, that Lark was free, that she would never feel her move again, and that the freeing and the losing were, exactly as Odette had promised, the same single act, finished now, and irreversible, and hers.
The water screamed.
The thing in the still red shallows that had been denied its Vessel, its willing hand, its drowned and grieving cup, the old power of debts that had fed on this water for two hundred years on the iron certainty that what it took it kept, came up against a debt answered without it and a soul gone willing out of its reach, and it turned, vast and starving and robbed, on the nearest thing that was its own.
The red water rose. It rose in a slow towering slack-tide surge with no wind to drive it, and Calla Mourn, who had served it her whole life and trusted it the way you trust a mother, threw out her arms to it and called its name in joy even as it came for her, and it took her.
It took her down into the red and the still, the woman who had dressed taking up as love, pulled under by the one love that had only ever been taking, and her auburn head went beneath the surface and did not come up.
And Vesper went with her.
Maren saw it and could not stop it and understood, even in the moment, that it was not a thing to be stopped, that it was the whole point of the old woman's long ruined life.
Vesper Calder, who had refused this rite forty years ago and torn herself loose and run from it every day since, walked down into the red water after the woman she had brought into the order, and she took Calla in her two ringed arms the way you hold someone so they cannot thrash, and she held her under, held her to the goddess, gave the still water the priestess it was owed and went down into it herself, paying in one motion the debt of forty years of running, and her gray head and Calla's auburn one went under together into the red and the slack, and the water closed over both of them, and the screaming of the thing in the water guttered out, fed, finished, denied its Vessel but given its servants, and went still.
Maren would think, after, that she finally understood the old woman in that last moment, the whole shape of the forty years.
Vesper Calder had torn herself loose from this water once and saved her own life and never forgiven herself for the lover she could not save with her; she had run and hidden and outlawed the rite and helped in a hundred small careful ways, and none of it had ever been enough to fill the place where her own goodbye should have been.
And here at the end she did not refuse the water again.
She walked into it. She gave it the one thing she had kept back for forty years, which was herself, and she took the woman she had failed to stop down with her, and in the giving she was, for the first time since Maren had met her, not running from a single thing.
Her face above the red, in the last second before it closed, was almost at peace.
The Drowned were already scattering, their candles drowned, their song long broken, fifty ordinary women fleeing back across the marsh to their cars and their suburbs and their unremarkable lives, a congregation with no goddess and no priestess and nothing left to belong to, gone into the dark.
And Bryony Aldous stood alone in the red shallows where her sister had died and where she had helped to kill her, exposed now, unhidden, with no family and no Mother and no absolution and the whole unbearable truth of what she'd done laid bare in the open air where the water could no longer swallow it clean, alive, ruined, left to carry it, which was the only justice the night had to give her and was, perhaps, the heaviest there was.
And then the red water went slack.
It settled. The slow surge sank back, the surface flattened and stilled, the rust-red faded toward the ordinary black of marsh water under a bruised moon, slackwater, the held breath between the tides, and the marsh was quiet, and the night was just a night, and Maren Vale stood on the trodden bank with Rowan's hand in hers and her face wet and her chest bare, and for the first time since the hour of Lark's death, for the first time, she understood, in her whole grieving life, there was nothing moving under her skin at all.
No mark. No leash. No held and grieving weight over her heart.
No second heartbeat. Just her own. Just Maren, alone, at last and unbearably, in her own skin.