Clouds End

  Finch married a bitter young man named Shallot, to Brook’s dismay, and Nanny married too, a fellow from the Harp. She had two babies in two years, which Shale thought indecent. Shallot’s friend Scrape drowned, caught out in a spring storm. Old Stick became the first person to spend a night on Shale’s island, a source of profound satisfaction to him until the day he died, shortly before the twins’ fifth birthday.

  Shale and Foam began trading regularly to the mainland, making at least one trip every season, and a second if spring came early or fall late. Foam had hoped that something would happen after he told Shale that he loved her, but nothing did. For a while she was wary and avoided him, but soon she needed someone to sail with her to the mainland, and he volunteered, and they became even closer friends. But Shale wanted neither marriage nor children, and Foam wanted no other woman. So there it stayed.

  It was a good time for Rope and Brook, though raising twins turned out to be much harder than walking to the Arbor.

  As for Jo, the haunt came and went. She would vanish from the island for months at a time. Then one day she would be back, knocking on Rope’s door to ask for shelter for a night or a month. As the years went by, she spent more and more time with them. Finally Shandy suggested they build her a house. Brook didn’t like the idea of the haunt making herself a home on Clouds End, but as the alternative was having Jo stay in her house for months at a time, she gave in.

  In time the villagers began to think of Jo as their particular haunt, another bit of flotsam the Mist had tossed out for them to salvage. When Foam and Shale went to the mainland they always brought her back tobacco, and she became one of the landmarks of Clouds End, a white-haired woman wreathed in smoke as if she smoldered inside.

  Brook’s children seemed to like her, though, especially little Feather. She and Jo would chatter for hours about the shapes of clouds or the doings of beetles. Brook had to admit that Jo was a great help. And yet, every time she saw the haunt with her daughter, a shadow came over her heart. She never left them alone together.

  Jo’s visits were difficult for Rope and Brook. Just when it seemed they had spent all their lives raising children on Clouds End, Jo would show up, and the narrow eyes now burning gold in her salt-white face would make them remember that once upon a time they had been part of something wondrous and strange. She reminded Brook too much of the magical story she had abandoned, and reminded Rope of how dull ordinary life could be.

  Though none of them ever said it, all three felt in their hearts that their story had not yet come to an end.

  * * *

  The twins were sail and rudder to the same boat, Shandy thought. Whenever the one was hurt (as happened sometimes to Boots) or upset (which happened frequently with Feather), the other knew at once. Yet you could hardly imagine two children more different. Boots was dark and chunky and patient, while little Feather was fairer than any islander the Witness had ever seen.

  Out by Sage Creek, making baskets on a chilly day in early spring, Shandy watched Brook with her children. Boots was working on one of the knot puzzles Rope made for him; little Feather was showing her mother a spider’s web.

  “Well?” Shandy asked. “Is the spider hungry?”

  “Feather says so.” Brook stroked her daughter’s neck. “What do you think, Boots?”

  Boots didn’t bother to look up. “Who cares how hungry a bug is?”

  “He is just as hungry as you!” Feather said hotly. “A spider’s hunger is as big as a whale’s, you know.”

  Boots paused to think this over. “That’s true.”

  “Feather might have a touch of the Mist,” Shandy said quietly as Brook left her children to come back to weaving baskets.

  “I know.”

  “Most likely she will grow up just fine, but there is a chance—just a chance—she might choose to be one of the people of the air. Are you prepared for that?”

  Feather was peering into the eddy, reaching out to prod a floating stick back into the stream. Please don’t take her, Brook prayed. Please, Jo. Please don’t take my child. “Many children talk to animals at this age,” she said.

  Shandy shrugged. “Where was I? Oh. I remember. Stories. We have talked much of medicine of late, and island history, but we seldom talk of stories. Never, now that I think of it.”

  Brook knotted her twigs together. “Tell me more about the whale. You were twelve, did you say?”

  “That’s history. Stories, real stories, are what I meant.”

  “What is the point?” Brook said. “Stories are not true. They are not real. They are about this wonderful place, the Mist. Everything is exciting there and everything has a reason and everything works out. So you get . . . discontented with the real world. You start thinking it’s boring, because it isn’t filled with magic like the Mist is. You start thinking heroic deeds are all that matter. You forget the value of the little things, family things. Making dinner. Looking at the stars. Talking with your children.” Brook felt a sudden, passionate love for Feather and Boots. They seemed so fragile.

  Boots, scowling, had managed to untangle one part of his puzzle knot. “Life is not made of toy puzzles,” Brook said. “Nothing ends so easily.”

  Shandy lashed an end-knot in her basket and looked up. “That was a shower from a clear sky.” The Witness scratched her grey hair. “What you say is true—but it is not the whole truth. Some stories are too simple. I agree. But some are good, and we need those ones.”

  “Why? Why not stick to what is real?”

  “Don’t fall in the water, honey,” Shandy called. Feather, who had been steering her twig-boat through the dangerous rapids, frowned, teetered, and stepped back with a sigh.

  “Think of a chart,” Shandy said. “A drawing on a flat piece of paper. It can’t really show you how big a mountain looks when you get close to it, or how it changes as you sail by. It can’t show you rocks at low tide and high tide both. It can’t show you the stars above at the same time as the sea below. But we have charts anyway, and they are very useful.

  “Stories—good stories—are like charts. They warn you of certain dangers. They teach you lessons you could otherwise learn only by making terrible mistakes.”

  “I suppose you are right,” Brook said at last. “But I still think most stories hurt more than they help.”

  “Then make better ones,” Shandy said. “How the young snivel! They always seem so outraged that life is not perfect. If you find a chart is wrong, you correct it. You don’t swear off all charts forever.” She gestured at the children. “Make stories you want them to hear. Make stories where talking and sunsets and rain and families are just as important as slaying monsters or tricking heroes.”

  Brook laughed. “Very well. I think I will.”

  Boots looked up, bored with his puzzle. Feather had wandered far up the length of the creek, until she was almost lost in the shadow of a copse of trees. “Hey!” he shouted. “Come play with me!

  The tiny blond figure stopped and turned, and then came pattering back.

  * * *

  Spring was late coming that year, and though the sun often shone, the days were still cool. Shandy’s back had persuaded her to let Brook take care of the herb garden. There was an ache along the witness’s spine that never went away, and a new brittleness in her joints. Her fingertips were losing some of their touch; she often had Brook do the more delicate parts of birthing. And while Shandy’s Sight was sharper than ever, her vision was beginning to cloud.

  “Young Twig’s apprenticing to Sharp,” Moss said one night as they settled into bed. “Now we know for certain Foam will not take his father’s place.”

  Shandy snorted. “You know Sharp. He needs someone he can boss around.”

  Moss chuckled, lying back with his hands behind his head. “I remember how you used to look up to Sage,” he said. “Back when we were first courting. You thought she was the most wonderful woman. I remember you said once you wanted to grow old just like her: wise and kind and seren
e.” He rolled over on his side, looking down at his wife’s dim face. “Well, you are old, anyway.”

  Shandy jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.

  “Oof! And wise, too. Arguably wise.”

  “You don’t think I am kind?”

  Moss checked his ribs. “Would you settle for spiny?”

  “Serene?”

  Moss kissed her cheek. “Wise, now. Wise enough to know yourself.”

  They lay in silence. At last Shandy sat up in bed. “I am old,” she said bitterly.

  “You are beautiful.”

  “I am old. I am old.”

  Moss held her as tenderly as he would his grandchildren, wrapping his arms around her thin shoulders. “I know what you’re doing,” she said at last. “After all these years I know what you are hinting.”

  “I figured you would.”

  The darkness pressed in on Shandy like the darkness of death. She didn’t fear it anymore, mostly. Only sometimes, late at night, when she felt her own heartbeat, or thunder rolled over her island, or the Mist coiled like a snake in her blood. She felt the tickle of her husband’s beard against her cheek. Her old cheek.

  (Under the bed, a white mouse scratched once and then held still. Listening.)

  Shandy was calmer now. “I think I would like to see the Harp again,” she said. “Or Trickfoot or Double-Eagle.”

  Moss gave her shoulder a squeeze.

  “You will come with me, won’t you?”

  Moss kissed the top of her head, nestled below his chin. “I will.”

  “But you’re right. I need an apprentice. And it will help ground Brook. For a long time Jo was trying to be one of us, you know. Trying to fit in. But she has been getting thinner lately. More desperate. If she sees Brook apprenticing . . .”

  “If Jo was going to kill Brook, she could have done it long ago.”

  Shandy grunted. “Jo is changing. Besides, she might not kill her. Might just cut her loose. Throw her into the Mist. Who would know? We would wake up one morning, notice that Jo had not been around for a while, but there would be Brook, just as always—”

  Moss said, “Like now, you mean. Jo has been gone since midwinter.”

  Shandy shivered, staring at the ceiling. “Who would ever know?”

  (The white mouse crept through a crack in the floorboards, out into the night. So little time left.

  So little time.)

  * * *

  Later that night Brook’s eyes flew open. A beam of silver from the full moon had come sliding through the shutters to ring her like a bell, blowing away her sleep as a fresh wind blows away fog.

  The night was alive with sounds. Not the muted, muffled noises of the forest but island notes, each one crisp, however faint. Rope lay with his back to her in the big bed, breathing gently. She heard the sheets slide on his chest with every breath. Heard the children turning in the next room. A breeze whispered outside and made the moored ships rock and creak and bump against the dock.

  From out of the darkness a voice of laughing silver said, Come with me!

  A second shock ran down into Brook’s heart, stronger than the first.

  She lifted her sheet and slipped out of bed, quietly quietly crossing the room to where her sandals stood beside the door. Silent as a spider. She was not afraid of waking Rope or the children, not exactly. A certain magic had enfolded her. The night had called to her and her alone; her family would not wake. No, she was quiet because it was right to be silent. This was a secret she did not want to share. A spell she did not want to break.

  Outside, the night was warm. To the west, tattered clouds split on blades of starshine. In the east, a bright moon paled the sky. A warm wind streamed over Clouds End, over the bare-branched aspens and elms, spilling down from the Ridge to wash through the village. The stone houses were unreal in the moonlight, giant toys strewn at the bottom of the meadow.

  Brook had not stopped to make her braid; for once her hair blew free, shifting and sliding around her shoulders, long tresses black in the dim light. The strangeness of it made her dizzy. What would it be like to wear it so always? Scandalous! Laughter streamed up within her, bubbles rising through dark water, but she made no sound. Wind and moonlight were in her like wine.

  The village slept as if enspelled. Quietly quietly she took the meadow path over the Ridge and down to Crabspit Beach, the fated place where she had first met Jo.

  The haunt stood waiting for her at the water line. With each wave, white foam frothed up around her feet; hissed; died. Seeing Brook, she cocked her head and bowed. Her mouth a thin-lipped desperate smile. “Sister.”

  Brook nodded back. Each wave broke at many places on the shore, many times, so that Brook heard first the nearby crash, then a patter of smaller crashes from left and right, like echoes. She stood next to Jo. Before them, a path of wavering silver light led into the Mist.

  And the moon, the singing moon!

  As a child, Brook had listened to Shandy’s stories, where marvel piled on marvel until she shook with wonder. But she was always looking forward, forward, looking to grow up, to be a woman. And the older she grew, the more stories she heard, and like autumn, they turned old, so slowly she never saw it happen, until by the time she was Named she had almost forgotten what the shock of wonder was like.

  For a time sex held a power almost as strong. The awareness of a man’s body! So intense it was like touching, though he sat across a table or on a different thwart. But sex was sharp and exciting, like danger; not the deep, round, wave-billow of wonder that took you from yourself.

  Tonight the moon poured wonder around her and into her until she felt it spilling from her eyes, until she lifted on its wave. Beholding the moon, its silver song, she knew she could be witness to its utter mystery, if only she let herself go. If only she let herself dissolve into the warm wind and the silver night. And she thought her heart would break with moonlight, and she knew she would give anything, anything to get there, to cross into that other place she had always secretly known, the secret continent of stories and marvels and dreams.

  “Please come with me,” Jo said. “There is a flame in my heart that casts a host of shadows. Do not let me burn.” And she held out her hand.

  Brook took it, and Jo stepped forward onto the silver path that led across the sea to the Mist. The haunt rocked gently as each wave went by beneath her feet. Fragments of light spun out from her dimpled footprints, glinting for an instant, then swallowed in shadows. Jo’s eyes were dancing points of gold. “The path is not hard to walk, as long as you don’t look down.”

  Brook followed, dark hair swirling and mingling with Jo’s white, letting herself be lifted by a wave of wonder. Melting on the warm flood of night.

  Don’t look down, Brook thought. Don’t look down. And there was so much else to look at, stars and twists of cloud, moonlight, and far ahead, tall crested waves ghosting through the night. A hundred things to watch, without thinking about the cold black sea beneath her feet.

  “Why don’t you want me to look down?”

  “Don’t leave me.” Jo gripped her wrist a little tighter. “This might be our last chance.”

  But Brook was not trying to stop, was not thinking of her husband, her children. Asleep at home, they were in another world. They did not matter, not here. Not now. And she would come back and see them again. Some time. She stared fixedly ahead, forcing her eyes to look only at the silver path.

  But the thing was, she was walking on water. And she knew she could not do that. Jo, maybe—Jo was a haunt. But Brook—her flesh was not of that kind.

  “It can be!” Jo cried.

  They were very far from shore now.

  It was the sea beneath Brook’s feet, the cold sea. Deeper than mountains, colder than stars, blacker than midnight. Their god, if Clouds End had a god.

  She saw Blossom’s face, bobbing in the seaweed.

  Jo’s fingers were like steel around Brook’s wrist, holding her up.

  Brook’s heart w
as pounding. She could not walk on water. She could not walk over the bodies of the dead. Walking over Blossom, seaweed tangled in her hair; walking over Scrape who vanished in a spring storm. Walking over her parents, their drifting drowned bodies rolling face down in the darkness. Looking away from her.

  Brook screamed and fell in, choking on black water. Desperately she struck out for the shore. She thrashed through the freezing surf and finally crawled out onto the rocks at the Talon. There she sat, head slumped between her knees, helplessly shivering and gasping for air. Seawater dripped from her long hair. Dread and wonder drained from her.

  Well.

  It was only her island. Her island at night.

  She turned at a gleam of light. Jo had built a fire on the rocks above the beach. Her twin looked cold, so terribly white and thin and cold sitting there in the moonlight. The fire was small. Brook could barely hear the flames.

  Jo looked at her. Then she hunched over the fire and rested her hands upon the orange embers. Rivulets of flame crawled up her arms, writhing around her as they had writhed around Ash so many years before. Then, as Brook watched, her whole body caught, hissing and crackling, until the haunt was only a paper-thin sheet of bending fire.

  “No!”

  Quickly Jo dimmed, pulling her hands from the fire. She walked slowly back toward the village, toward her little house.

  Brook watched her go.

  When the haunt had faded into the night, Brook reached for her shell bracelet and clenched her hand around it. She had been willing to go. She had been willing to leave her husband and her children and her island to walk into the Mist. Whether that was Jo’s spell or her own desire, the moon’s touch had woken something in her that would not easily go back to sleep.

  Her story was close now, swirling around her like the Mist rolling in around an island. The distance between her and Jo was very small.

  Slowly she stood and walked home. She hung her nightgown on a peg to dry and put her sandals by the door. Rope mumbled when she crawled into bed, but she curled up without answering and hugged him very tight. She was crying. It took her a long time to get warm, and only then did she fall asleep.