Good. Good. She had time, she had a little time. She reached the harder sand and ran faster, throwing up a spatter of spray with every splashing step. If only she could make the boat.
Lacing up Boots’s heavy winter coat.
She felt the faintest puff of wind on the back of her neck, and her heart froze. An owl’s scream exploded behind her head; talons pierced her shoulder like nails.
She stumbled into the sea and turned to see Jo behind her.
The haunt’s hair sparked and shone. Veins of fire pulsed in her throat and dripped like burning tears from her eyes. The sea bubbled at her feet, sending a great cloud of steam up around them both, and her voice was like a hiss of wind rustling over burning paper. “The world has seen us apart,” she said. “Now it sees us one.”
Fixing Feather’s braid.
Brook gripped the little copper knife, feeling the Mist burning in her heart. “I’ll kill you,” she said.
* * *
This is a story of the real world, of Mist and stone and starshine, that is also the tale of two women.
Two women? the Witness asked.
And the wind, who tells all stories, even this one, even now, said, Brook.
* * *
It was the early evening of a clear winter day when Brook’s boat rounded the Talon and coasted home. A group of villagers were waiting on the dock: Sweetpea, Otter, Stone. Shale and Foam. Shandy.
Shale caught the painter with a grin and tied it to the docking ring with a round turn and two half-hitches. “Guess we’ll have to call you Witness from now on!”
“Never called me that,” Shandy grumbled, smiling.
Big Stone, beard now wholly white, held out an arm to help her from the boat. “I suppose we are equals now, foster-daughter. You may stay up as late as you like.”
Brook walked down the dock. The others remained behind, watching her. “She has been crying,” Shale said. “In Fathom’s name, what does she have to grieve for?”
Shandy watched Brook step off the dock and onto the island she would never leave now, until death, or a new Witness, or the end of the world released her. “Herself,” she said.
Brook walked alone. Here was the shore where she had seen Jo for the first time, and their lives had been knotted together. Climbing up the shingle, she came to the place where her twin had built a fire and thrust her arms into its red heart after Brook failed to follow her behind the moon. And here was the path through the meadow, where they had walked together so long ago, Jo treading on the wild flowers and making them squeak the day she first came to the village. Higher still, the Ridge with its stand of bare-branched poplars. There was a big elm up there that they had both sat upon, and below its hanging arm the cool green water of Teardrop Pond. She would swim there in summer, and in autumn the falling leaves would spin slowly to the south, caught up in the pull of Sage Creek.
The stream that had given Brook her name leapt boldly over the bluffs and bounded through the rocky channel below. Then it slowed, passing the herb garden and the meadow, Sweetpea’s house and Shandy’s. Then down to the docks, where their little boats creaked and rocked on the back of a sea vaster than mountains and colder than stars and deeper than the sky.
And there it passed, that one little stream, out of Clouds End forever, and was lost.
And she went on to her house, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and she was expected. And Rope drew her in, and set her in her chair, and put little Feather upon her lap.
Brook drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m back,” she said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A large book owes many debts. Thanks most of all to Christine, my love, and to Philip Freeman, to whom this book owes its theogeology and much else besides. Thanks to White Dwarf Books and to Sean Russell, chief among the many writers whose generosity and support has meant much to me. To this day I am amazed by my agent, Martha Millard, and my editor, Susan Allison, who cope so gracefully with my frustrating tendency to turn in books utterly unlike one another. Lastly, I want to acknowledge a debt that can never be paid to J. R. R. Tolkien. He might not have liked this book, but neither it nor my career would have happened without him.
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Sean Stewart, Clouds End
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