26 #2
“Help,” Torsten grits, sunken to his shoulders. “Callalie, help me. Please. I don’t want to die in front of my mother.”
I debate whether I should. If the mud sucked him under, he would deserve it, but his mother is here. And he’s right. Some part of her would watch if I let him drown in the earth. She doesn’t deserve that. Muttering a curse, I hit my knees and extend the end of my golden spear to him.
He grabs it, panicked as he sinks to his neck.
“Do you know how to swim?” I ask.
“Yes!” he hisses, his eyes wild.
“Then lean backward and wiggle your toes and feet. Work them up to the surface. Act like you’re swimming on your back. Keep your movements small and don’t let go of the spear.”
He grips the gold and leans his head back, working his legs until they start to rise. “I’m doing it!” he gasps.
I give a short nod. “Good. When you can, crawl on your back to the ash. Stay on it from now on. The ash is safe.”
“Okay.”
When I look back at Cillian, he’s moved farther away, closer to the opposite shore. “No! Cillian, come back to me. Move this way! Toward me.”
No emotion graces his face as he takes the pole and shoves his boat a little farther away.
“Cill?”
“I don’t think,” Torsten grunts, finally freeing one foot, then the other from the mud, “I don’t think they know us. We must make them remember. This is meant to represent the river Lethe.”
Lethe is the river of forgetting that winds through the Greek Underworld.
My eyes narrow. “How do you know that’s what it is?”
Torsten unflinchingly holds my stare as he pushes toward the ash. His champion, Frejya must have told him what he’d have to do here. I shake my head. The moment he’s close to shore, I jerk the spear out of his hands and turn my attention back to my brother.
Make him remember. Remember me, our lives together, and who he is.
I start with something happy.
“I gave you a slingshot for your ninth birthday, Cillian. You ran outside, found all the stones your pockets could hold, and started pelting everything in sight. Abuela had a fit when you accidentally hit one of her birds. You were aiming at a blossom – which also made her furious – when the quetzal flew past. She heard its cry and came outside, livid.”
I shake my head at the memory. “She didn’t take the slingshot away from you, though.
She dragged me out to the yard and told us not to come back in until you had better aim and knew what not to aim at.
We stayed outside until the stars sparkled overhead and the air turned cool, with the insects singing all around us.
And we laughed. Do you remember? About everything and nothing.
Abuela grew tired of waiting and she was afraid a coyote would get us, so she waved us inside for a late dinner.
You never hit anything accidentally again.
But don’t worry, I didn’t tell her how much your aim had improved.
I let her think some of your later carnage was accidental. ”
His brow flinches, but he doesn’t move closer.
Torsten reaches the ash, twists onto his belly, and pushes himself up.
Someone else is stuck in the mud further down the bank, though not as bad as Torsten was.
Another contestant leaps over the mud and into the dark water and starts swimming across it.
“Fool,” Torsten says as he sloughs the muck from his arms and chest, watching their strokes slice the surface.
Then, he starts to talk to his mother. He describes making bread with her.
How they made the dough and rolled it out.
How she helped him form it and gave him milk while it baked in the fire.
How it steamed when they took it out, and he burnt his fingers tearing into it too soon.
He told her that the crust was her favorite part, and the soft middle was his.
I offer another memory to my brother.
“Cillian, do you remember when I tried to sew a dog for you for your birthday? I cut the shape out of Abuela’s best dress.
She was furious, but it was your favorite color and the little yellow flowers on it were pretty.
And you were desperate for a puppy. I wanted to give you a real one and Abuela said no, so I thought it would be the next best thing. Except I couldn’t sew.”
I chuckle softly. “I stabbed my finger and bled onto its ear, and the stain never washed out. I did my best with the stitches, but it looked monstrous when I was finished. Twisted, gnarled, and puckered. In one place, the stitching was too loose and stuffing leaked from its side. You loved it, though. For years, you held it when you slept. And when it needed mending, you wouldn’t let anyone touch it but me.
Even though I always made it worse somehow when I fixed it. ”
He raises his head, something sparking in his eyes. “I still have it,” he says. My brother uses the pole to move closer to me.
My heart skips a beat. “That’s good, Cillian. Come back to me.”
Torsten describes fishing with his mother. Of wading in the icy water together. Of her telling him stories at night. He repeats his favorite, one he asked her to recite a thousand times, about a wolf and a bear and how they became unlikely friends at the fjord.
She recognizes the tale, awakens a fraction, and starts moving closer to him.
“Cillian, do you remember dinners with Abuela and Carina? They would cook the meal, and you and I would set the table. I’d climb onto the counter and get the glasses and plates down from the cabinet, and you put them on the table with forks and spoons and Abuela’s sewn napkins.
Those napkins were your favorite. Each one had vibrant thread stitched around the edges that matched our chairs.
Yours was blue. Mine was red. Carina’s was yellow.
And Abuela’s was green – like the feathers of her favorite birds. Like her front door.”
“Quetzals,” he says distractedly.
“Yes! Quetzals. Resplendent Quetzals, if you ask her. We used to pick a flower for the little vase Abuela had before I knocked it over and broke it.”
“It was green, too,” he says, his voice stronger. Sounding more like him.
“That’s right. It was green. That’s why Abuela loved it. Carina made it for her out of clay. She baked it in the sun, then painted it green.”
“Where was Mamá?” he asks. “You didn’t mention Mamá.”
“Mamá left us with Abuela. Do you remember when she did?”
Though he seems confused, he pushes his boat closer. “I don’t – I don’t know.”
“I sewed that dog for your birthday, but Mamá left us with Abuela on mine,” I tell him, tears welling.
“That evening, Abuela told us to put our good clothes on for dinner. She’d made me my favorite cacao cake, which was cooling in the kitchen.
I couldn’t wait to have a slice. When she cut a piece, the middle would ooze like lava.
Mamá already had her dress on, and she’d laid mine and Carina’s out for us.
She went to help you get ready while we put our dresses on.
You wore the little suit she sewed for you, and Abuela wore her bright red dress. Do you remember it?”
Cillian nods, and a single, silver tear splashes onto his cheek. He drifts closer. He’s almost to the shore. “She didn’t have dinner with us that night,” he laments.
“No. She left right before, Cillian.” Not that any of us ate that night. My chin starts to wobble.
“She took her jewelry off.” His voice breaks and his shoulders start to tremble.
“That’s right. The jewelry Da gave her.”
He lifts his head and my heart soars. My brother has come back to me. “You look like her.”
I try to smile. “I know.”
“You look like Carina, but even more like Mamá.”
I nod, then speak around the stone lodged in my throat. “I do.”
“That’s why you hate mirrors. Because you see her, and Carina, in your reflection.”
I gesture to his boat. “Please don’t leave me, Cillian. You and Abuela are all I have left.”
The agony in my voice sharpens him and I know that whatever the gods did to make him forget is gone; he remembers wholly now. He digs the pole into the riverbed, faster and faster, until the little boat runs ashore.
I smile, relieved. “Jump onto the ash, not the mud,” I warn him.
Torsten is covered in it beside me as he paces, telling another of their stories. His mother is almost to the shore.
I think about August… Where is he?
Cillian jumps from the bow onto the ash, gazing with wide eyes at all the people still bobbing along in boats in the river. “Why are we here?”
“Because the gods want to punish us.” I push the mud-slick spear into his hands. “Just in case.” My brother takes it and follows me down the riverbank, trudging through the ashfall. “You don’t remember being taken here?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“We have to get back to the portal, but first, I need to find August.”
Cillian agrees.
August’s loved one was placed on the river farthest from Cillian. He’s beside Niall, whose older sister Fiona is in one of the boats. She appears as no more than a pale specter with rust-colored hair and their mother’s citrine eyes.
Niall finally coaxes her back, but August is struggling to persuade the little boy in his boat. He can’t be more than five or six, and he’s too close to the other shore.
“Is that your brother?” I ask when Cillian and I reach him.
August’s golden sword lays in the ash. He tugs one boot off, then the other. His socks are next to go. He grabs the back of his shirt and rips it over his head. “Nothing’s working. I’ve tried stories, jokes, and even threats. I’m going after him.”
I look down the line of mortals. “Who else jumped in?”
“Peng, I think.”
I scan the riverbank and don’t see Peng anywhere. “Has he made it back, yet?”
“I don’t know.” August starts toward the water.
I catch his arm. “Sing to him.”
“What?”
Something tells me if August gets in the water, I’ll never see him again. “He’ll know your voice. Your songs. Does he have a favorite?”
August rubs his forehead for a moment and then squares his shoulders. “Yeah. Yeah, he does.” He blows out a tense breath, focuses only on his baby brother, and begins to sing.