“She’ll keep there,” Laysia said. “But she won’t like it. Let her go, Nell. She’ll only hurt herself against the stones.”
“Then make it softer” was all Nell said.
Nell would not leave the wall, and so Kate stayed with her, even after Laysia went to see Susan and Jean. For an hour or more, the slasher screamed behind the stones. Nell peered through the chinks, talking to her.
“You’re not a beast, Wista. You’re a person. Your mother gave you that necklace, remember? You were going to learn to read. Remember? Wista? Wista!”
The thing growled and wailed and at last fell to whimpering as the dark came on. All the time, Kate tried to hear the girl’s voice in it, nice Wista, happy Wista, who had come to their room asking for Nell. She couldn’t.
Now even in the wood at twilight, there was no peace, nothing but fear everywhere, fear blaring from the raving thing behind the wall, fear unsettling all the small creatures Kate had learned to listen for in the underbrush. Even the bear stopped its placid lumbering and knocked jaggedly against the trees out of sight in the woods.
Kate wanted to shut it out, all that noise of fear, but she didn’t know how. It invaded her head like a bad dream, clung to her like humid air, like fine rain.
At dawn, Nell was back at the wall, but the sound of her voice only infuriated the thing behind it, and at last, after lowering a basket of food into the small fortress Laysia had made, she agreed to come away for a while, to the clearing.
Laysia said they needed air, but Kate thought there would never be enough air anymore, ever. Susan had barely spoken since the slasher’s arrival. Jean, too, was silent. Now, as they walked together through the trees, Jean said, “Max wouldn’t change like that, would he? He couldn’t, right? Like you didn’t, Nell, right?”
Kate saw a muscle jump in Nell’s jaw. “It’s all in your head,” she said. “It’s not even real.”
“We’re different,” Susan said firmly. “She said so, didn’t she?”
But they didn’t seem so different anymore. Not so different from Wista.
Susan must have seen the look on her face then, because she at least took her hand as they went on, and the firm grip of it eased the walk a little.
In the end, though, none of it was enough. Not that day, and not in the days that followed, as Nell stayed most of the time by the wall, talking to the wailing beast behind it, and Susan grew as distracted as she had been in the valley.
There were moments, though.
One day that week, Laysia told them that of all the tools of the warrior, one was not learned, but remembered.
“We all dream of flying,” she said when they stood away from the trees, facing the ocean. The glass cliff blinked like a beacon over their shoulders. “We are born knowing that we should rise. Only Loam holds us to her with her iron grip. We need simply convince her to loosen it a little.”
As she spoke, she grew suddenly taller, and Kate saw that her feet were not on the ground.
“Try to remember,” she said. “You’ve flown in dreams.”
Finally, Kate thought, something that makes sense. In dreams, she had floated out of her own house and swooped in great dips, like the blackbirds. But here she was awake. Could a person dream standing up?
She didn’t know how, so she did what she always did, and listened hard. She understood now that there was more to listen to than just voices. Beneath Laysia’s talk, she found the wind hurrying the waves to shore, the ecstatic birds leaping up to meet the tide of air, the pop and crash as it tossed them toward the sun.
The birds are dreaming, she thought. I can hear them doing it. She reached for their shrill voices, those delirious, wheeling sounds, and for a dizzying second, they filled her up until nothing existed but wind and sun and the distant, unimportant lines of land and sea. Then a giddy lightness took her, the kind of loosening that came with floating in water. She could feel the wind breathe through her. The faint pressure of the ground against her feet disappeared.
Somebody called her name, but it was far away, and she barely heard. The sound of the wind was in her ears and the sky was all around and Kate was part of it, like the clouds, like the sun. The ground had nothing to do with her; she had forgotten it. Weightless, she felt the soft breeze ripple through her skin, sharp, like the splash of cold water. And again there was that sensation of rising, floating upward like a tuft of dandelion seed, so much fluff, riding the current.
She bobbed along and looked to the sea, and suddenly she was there — drawn to the pulsing, moving mass. She drifted down and settled on the sand. She had never seen such an untouched beach. It went on in both directions. She turned and looked. The cliff was far behind her, the people on it only specks. The sand she could feel was as soft, almost, as the sky.
“Sky child,” Laysia said from behind her. She had followed and was standing a little way away on the sand. “Loam barely has a hold on you.”
“It does feel like a dream,” Kate said. This close, the sea was loud as hands clapping; it foamed at the hard sand along the edge of land. “Why didn’t the others come?”
Laysia laughed. “Perhaps you live more in dreams than the rest of them,” she said.
Kate didn’t want
