Unmade

  “No,” snapped Jared, and took a furious step forward. Ash said nothing, but Kami felt the flare of determination behind the walls in her mind. He stepped up too, standing at Jared’s shoulder, having his back.

  Rob’s eyes traveled contemptuously past Jared, over his shoulder, and fixed on his wife’s face.

  “Lillian,” he said. “Will you come?”

  “If I do, you will let every one of them go?” asked Lillian, staring ferociously at Rob. Kami knew Lillian well enough by now to know that she was deliberately not looking at anyone, unwilling to betray that she had weaknesses.

  “Lillian,” said Kami’s dad. “You don’t have to.”

  Kami saw the look on Rob’s face when he heard that. She had a single terrible moment when she thought she would have to act, would have to choose whether to save Angela or her father.

  “Shut your mouth.” Lillian’s voice was more cutting than Kami had ever heard it, like a whip handled in expert hands. It was either a Lynburn’s scornful outrage or a desperate plea for him to be quiet. “I am so tired of hearing you babble to your betters on subjects you know nothing about.”

  Rob’s tensed muscles visibly eased, and a smug smile spread across his face.

  Lillian turned her salt-white face to her husband. “I assume I do have to, if I want them to live?”

  “I would prefer to think of it as you seeing the cleverest and most reasonable course of action to take. You are my lady. You should be second in this town only to me, and all should bow their insolent heads to you.”

  “All should bow their insolent heads to me,” said Lillian. “That’s true.”

  Rob wasn’t stupid. He saw what Lillian was implying. But he laughed, gently. It seemed bizarre and grotesque, seeing the two Lynburns bicker over a body. But Kami saw Lillian’s hand clenching into a fist at her side, knuckles whiter than her face. She had to trust that Lillian was playing for all of their lives.

  “I always admire your spirit, Lillian,” Rob said. “Even though I find the display of your spirit often so stupid. Are you going to be smarter now?”

  “Are you going to let them all go?”

  “Go, go,” said Rob, and waved a benevolent hand. “All of you can go about your business now. All of you can rest easy in your beds. Order has been restored to Sorry-in-the-Vale. You may depart, safe in the certainty of a true sorcerer’s peace.”

  He waved a hand negligently at Angela, who sagged, gasping, as if she was a fish held on an invisible hook. Jon Glass stepped up to Angela and took her hand, caressed it and would not let it go. He held her back and drew her away, not letting her lunge again or stumble as she went.

  Rob did not deign to notice what any of his defeated foes were doing. He held out a hand to Lillian, a gesture less of affection than command.

  Lillian reached out and took it.

  They walked, the golden pair, the lord and lady followed by their retinue, into Aurimere.

  Enough of Rob’s people stayed behind so that Kami knew they had to go, and go quickly. Any one of them could be a victim of Rob’s malice, even if he had already taken his sacrifice.

  She could not go, though, not quite yet.

  She stepped up to the stone dais. She refused to look at the ruin that was Rusty’s body. She looked only at him.

  Kami used the edge of her sleeve to clean the blood from his dear face, until it was untouched, until she could tell herself he looked as if he was only sleeping, as if he might wake soon. She smoothed back his hair with a tender hand, light as though she could wake him, and bent down and kissed his cold brow.

  “Sleep well, sweetheart,” she whispered.

  She hated to abandon him there on that cold stone, but she did it. She turned and walked the long road down.

  All the words that I utter,

  And all the words that I write,

  Must spread out their wings untiring,

  And never rest in their flight.…

  —William Butler Yeats

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Boundless Deep

  They went back to the Prescotts’ farmhouse. Kami had thought Angela might not go, but she came back with them, walking silently. It made sense. How could she return to the place where she and Rusty had lived? Angela had never gone away to be alone before, not really. She had always had someone to go home to.

  Angela did not speak to any of them, all the long walk home. She did not even let Kami walk near her, outstripping Kami effortlessly when Kami tried. She had let Kami’s dad keep her hand, for a little while, but then tore it from his grasp as if his sympathy burned her.

  Once they were at the house, Angela headed for the bedroom farthest away from the others, as far away from everyone as she could get. But she had still chosen to go home with them. Kami hesitated and then followed after her in a rush, shutting the door behind her hastily.

  “I understand if you want to be alone,” Kami said quickly. “I just want you to know that you don’t have to be, that you never have to be. I want you to know how much I want to be here for you and oh, God, how sorry I am.”

  Angela stood across the room, by the bed. Her eyes were like holes burned in a sheet.

  “I’m sure you are sorry,” Angela said slowly. “You should be sorry. Would any of this ever have happened if you hadn’t had the burning urge to know every damn thing that wasn’t your business, if you hadn’t decided that you were on some kind of stupid crusade? Everyone told you to stop, but you wouldn’t listen. You were so sure you knew best.”

  “Was I wrong?” Kami whispered.

  “I don’t care if you were wrong or right. I don’t care about good and evil. You’re the one who made all this some kind of story, and it never has to be real for you. Your Lynburns will protect you. But they didn’t protect him. You wanted to have your stupid adventure, and you got him killed. All I care about is that my brother is dead and it’s your fault!”

  Angela stopped speaking, panting. She looked despairing and exhilarated at once, looked as if she’d needed to punch someone in the face and done this instead.

  Kami felt lashed by the words. She opened her mouth to shout that she had suffered too, that her mother was gone, beyond all real chance of recovery. But there was that faint hope, the thread that Kami was clinging to. She didn’t know what would happen, what she would do, if that thread broke and she fell. She didn’t know how Angela felt, and she could not stop fearing that she would.

  She didn’t shout. She didn’t want to hurt Angela any more than she was already hurt.

  “We could stop, if that’s how you feel about it,” she said in a low voice. “Rob Lynburn can do what he wants. He doesn’t need us anymore. He’s not going after my … he might leave us alone. He doesn’t have any of our tokens. He could rule or destroy the whole town, and we could—let him. We could run away. He might not try to stop us. He might just let us go. We could go far away from here, and never know what happens next to anyone in Sorry-in-the-Vale. We could stop fighting and forget it all.”

  She looked up at the end of the speech to see Angela arrested, somehow, caught in a startled moment with her mouth open and her tear-wet eyes wide. She looked at a loss with her anger taken from her, even briefly. She looked young and terrified of feeling anything else.

  “You’re lying,” she said in a hard, sullen voice. “You won’t stop. You never do.”

  “That’s right. That’s who I am. I won’t stop for anybody … but I will for you,” said Kami. She wasn’t sure if it was right, or okay to say, but nothing was right anymore. She told the truth. “You’re my sister.”

  “I’m nobody’s sister anymore!”

  Angela screamed the words. It made Kami think of the way the wind had howled, the sound of a world being torn to pieces.

  Kami could do nothing but throw clumsy words at all of Angela’s pain, move forward with her hands held out, knowing that words and arms were so little comfort it was almost laughable.

  “You don’t have to be my
sister, and I know it doesn’t make up for anything, but I’m yours, I’m yours. I love you and I won’t stop loving you even if you hate me, I won’t leave you, I won’t want to, nothing you ever do or say will ever make me turn away from you. And that’s family, it is, it has to be.”

  Angela could not back away any further. Kami had always been the one who took the extra steps, acted and dragged Angela in her wake, from the time that they were both twelve, when Angela was the new girl who hated everyone and Kami had refused to be hated and insisted on friendship.

  Kami hesitated now. She didn’t know if she would be welcome. If what Angela wanted was for her to be different, to give up, then Kami did not know what a different person would do for Angela. She tried to imagine being a better person, who could be better for her friend.

  She was here, and she loved Angela. She did not know how to be any better than that, be the person who loved Angela, as hard as she could.

  Kami took a step toward Angela, and then another. Angela sat on the bed, in the corner, with her head bowed. She did not make a move in Kami’s direction or away from her. When Kami took Angela’s hands in hers, they were cold.

  Angela’s hands were limp in Kami’s for a moment, and then they clutched far too tight. Her grip was icy and strong, like the grip of a hand in a nightmare, breaking through a grave. Kami tried to chafe some warmth into her fingers, and Angela slipped free and clutched at her sleeves, at her shirt, got a handful of her hair. She grabbed at her like someone drowning, and as she did, she began to sob.

  “I’m sorry,” Kami whispered. “I’m sorry, it’s so bad, there’s nothing I can do to make it right. But I love you and I’m here.”

  “And we give up if I say?” Angela’s voice was choked with tears, like a river choked with leaves.

  “We give up.”

  “And if I say we go after them, we kill them all, we wipe them out? If I tell you that we have to make them pay for what they did?”

  “Then we will do that together,” Kami said, into Angela’s tumbled hair. “I swear.”

  Angela let out a wail, a terrible sound torn out of her throat, one that made Kami’s own throat ache in sympathy. It was true what she had said, there was no action she could take, no way to make this right. The only thing she could do, in all the world, was be there.

  Angela’s arms went slowly around her waist, and they sat locked together, until Angela’s wild sobbing was muffled, finally, against Kami’s shoulder.

  Angela collapsed with exhaustion at last, after the storm of tears. Kami staggered out of the room feeling as if she had been in a fight, her body aching as though she had been beaten, but not feeling as if she could ever collapse. She hated the thought of even closing her eyes. She had to do something. She found a little room where she thought Hugh Prescott had done his accounts, with a kitchen chair and a workbench that he seemed to have used as a table, with paper and pens on it. Some of the paper had sums scratched on it, some of them crossed out, as if Holly’s dad had not been able to make the numbers work the way he wanted them to.

  Kami sat on the kitchen chair: parts of the yellow wood were blistered, and patches of it were worn white. She stared at the blank page in front of her until it seemed like a doorway into oblivion, until her eyes were so strained they burned, and she could not think of a thing to write or anything else she could do. She could not think of anything but Rusty, and how she had not valued him enough.

  Rusty. She had known he was sweet, known he was loyal, known he was loving. But he had been so familiar to her, for so many years. She had not thought of her lazy, goofy Rusty, her best friend’s big brother, as a hero.

  She had not told him she loved him too. She had not told him that she was grateful to know him as well. She had always prided herself on her way with words, but she had not told him how much he meant to her when she had the chance. He was gone and she would never have the chance again. He would never hear another word she said, would never say another word to her. He was lost to profound silence that no words could ever break. No words of hers could ever matter to him now.

  She had almost wanted to give up, when she had told Angela she would. She did not know how to keep hoping and keep acting, how to say that she would not surrender at any cost, when now she knew what real cost was.

  She had seen death before his. She had seen her old friend Nicola die at Rob Lynburn’s hand. She had seen the sorcerers on Lillian Lynburn’s side, people she had known all her life, dead because they had followed Lillian’s command, dead for nothing. But she had loved Rusty. And they had murdered him.

  There was a light knock on the door. Kami flinched and looked up.

  “What do you want?”

  Jared stood in the doorway, one hand still raised and curled against the door as if he was going to knock again. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “I’m fine,” said Kami. She felt short of breath, but flattered herself that her voice sounded normal. “I’m fine.”

  Her love had not been able to save Rusty. She’d thought she knew that those she loved were in danger before, but she realized now that she had been a child, thinking everything would work out, thinking that love was magic and it would form a protective spell.

  She had been so blithely arrogant, so happily stupid. Beloved people died every day. Her love was not special, and her wishes would not order the universe.

  “You’re not fine,” Jared said.

  “I’m not—I’m not happy,” said Kami, and pressed her hand against her mouth to stop the sob, as if she was stifling a hiccup. She did not even know how to react, when everything seemed like a ghastly, obscene version of itself. “I thought I had to always be in control, and then I thought maybe it wouldn’t be that bad if I wasn’t—but it’s so bad, and I’m so miserable. He’s gone and I have to … I have to do what he would have wanted, but I don’t know what I can do. He’s gone and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  She scrubbed at her face with the back of her hand. She wished Jared would go away, that she could go back to looking at the blank page and trying to think of something to do. Feeling numb and hopeless was better than this. She did not know how to deal with this.

  “He’s not gone,” said Jared.

  “Oh, and how do you figure that?” Kami demanded. “He seems pretty gone to me.”

  “When my dad died …,” said Jared. Kami stared at the blank page and the workbench instead of watching him come toward her. “Not Rob, but my real dad, the one I grew up with,” Jared continued. “When he died, he wasn’t gone. My mom and I could never be what we might have been without him. He stayed like a shadow in every corner of our home, stayed a stain on our hearts. I felt it. I can’t believe that good will leave us when evil remains. I will not. I do not.”

  Jared knelt down, crouched at her feet so that she could not help looking at him, at his eyes filled with the light of the battered old lamp. He looked like he believed every word he was saying. He took hold of her wrists, his grip light but warm, touching her as if he always did it, as if he found it easy to do. She watched her tears fall on his hands like drops of rain.

  “The way he made you feel, the way he felt about you—they can’t wipe it away. They can’t take away all he was to you. It was too much. They don’t have the power. Nothing can take that from you.”

  His hands on her wrists were the only thing she could really feel, the only anchor when the rest of her body was so numb she almost felt like she was floating, about to come apart. She was held together, was able to remain whole and herself, because of his grasp on her.

  “Whenever I thought about dying, I always thought that you would remember me,” said Jared. “I thought about living on in your mind. I knew I would be safe there, that I would be good there, remembered as better than I had been. I know all you have lost, I know everything is changed, but when I thought of death I didn’t think of going away. I always thought of it as still being with you.”

  Kami knew she wa
s crying, but had not realized how hard she was crying until she tried to talk and could hardly speak. “That’s because you’re kind of crazy,” she said, sobbing and tender, and it seemed strange and miraculous that tenderness could survive when she was in such pain, that she loved him through even this.

  “Be crazy with me, then,” said Jared. “You’re always good at that. Believe me when no one else would believe me. You have faith in him, and I have faith in you. He didn’t want to leave you and Angela, and I don’t believe anyone could make him. They could change him, but they couldn’t change what was between you. They can’t make him leave you. He will not fade from the world. You would never let that happen.”

  Jared’s voice sank as he spoke to her and looked up at her, as if he was murmuring in the hush of a church. Kami trembled looking at him and could not look away. She thought that she knew now why the words “scared” and “sacred” had the same letters, almost made up the same word. And she realized that she still wanted Jared when all thoughts of passion were dead, when other consolation seemed like a cruel joke—that she wanted to be with him when the thought of being with anyone else was unbearable, when the thought of someone else touching her made her want to scream.

  “Do you think you could believe me?”

  “I think I could,” Kami whispered, her throat clogged with tears and aching. “Since it’s you.”

  Kami moved closer, rested her weight against the solid warmth of his body. She closed her eyes and laid a hand on his chest, felt his heartbeat until her own heartbeat gradually fell into rhythm with his, so her heart felt like his heart, so they were as close as they could be.

  She had not realized before that she had thought that there must be another way, that she would find some alternate route to victory. She knew now that there was no other way, that she was going to have to do the ceremony, go down into the lakes and down into the darkness of death afterward.

  Rusty had known what a willing sacrifice meant. He had guessed that if he went to Aurimere, if he offered himself up—not one of the Lynburns, not a sorcerer or a source, but one of the group of rebels that Rob hated—Rob would think it was close enough to the equinox, and that a willing and certain sacrifice would make his triumph certain as well. Rusty had done it to save Kami’s brothers. He had done it to make sure that nobody else died defending them, so that Kami, Ash, and Jared would be alive to do the ceremony and save the town.