“You weren’t afraid!” Jean said to her, astonished. The others told her they’d fallen down almost as quickly as they’d risen, but for Kate, for once, something had been easy. Susan and Nell looked at her with approval, and Kate felt for a moment as if she were still flying, as if she might keep rising forever, through the roof of the world, out into another universe, out toward home. Maybe, if the window didn’t open, that was the way.
Smiling, Laysia said that Kate had begun to sense the parts of things; like the ancients, she could pick out the single voice in the group at song. Kate felt full of giddy possibility. Everything was there before her, and she could touch it, move it, remake it if she pleased. She could sense the bits that made up the steamy wood, and the garden, and the clearing overlooking the sea. She laughed then, forgetting everything as joy popped inside her chest like fizz. The others laughed with her.
But in the end, when they were back at the cottage, the joy ran out, and they ceased to laugh at all. Again, Kate found herself watching Susan as her sister watched the woods, waiting, listening, impatience carved into her forehead and around her mouth.
Despite the dream of flight, each night as they returned to the cottage and Nell went to the wall with her basket of food, calling Wista’s name, and Max did not come, the world grew heavier, and Kate felt that it had been that way ever since she’d fallen through the window. Even Laysia seemed slower, weighed down by that sense of something needed, someone who wasn’t there and should be.
Missing had become such a familiar feeling that it almost didn’t surprise Kate when she woke to find Susan gone. It didn’t surprise her, but it frightened her so badly that she nearly couldn’t move.
She stood in the yard, trying to hear over the screams behind the wall, eyes scanning the empty woods. She tried to outshout Wista.
“Susan? Susan!”
But she knew Susan wouldn’t answer. She heard the door behind her and Nell’s voice.
“I can’t find her anywhere.”
Behind the wall, Wista wailed and then subsided into a whimper.
“She’s gone to the mist,” Nell said in the sudden quiet. “She’s gone to get Max.”
Laysia ran past her, toward the woods. Jean and Nell followed, and suddenly they were all sprinting toward the heavy place where the world seemed to tilt, where all the good feeling ran out like water down a drain.
Nell got there first, but they were all right behind her, breathless even though they were strong and the summer sun did not burn hot in the morning forest.
Susan lay on the mountainside, eyes open, tears tracing lines down the side of her face, her lips quivering.
Laysia dropped to her knees beside her, stared into her face, shook her, talked quickly. Kate saw Susan raise a hand, cover her eyes, and look away.
“She’s all right,” Laysia said when Kate crept closer. “She withstood it. But she couldn’t get in.”
Susan said nothing as they led her back through the woods. She walked like an old woman, hunched, slow. And when Kate tried to take her hand, it was limp. Kate squeezed, but Susan did not squeeze back.
Laysia understood now why she had never been given a child. She would have failed it, as she had failed these she had been given to watch over, so briefly. She could not even overcome the objections of one half-grown girl, and so she had caged the pitiful remains of another child, its wits all gone, behind stone, so it could torment the rest day and night.
Tur Nurayim had been wrong to have faith in her, wrong to teach her. She had done nothing with his gift but harm.
She thought these dark thoughts all morning after she’d led Susan back from the edge of the valley. Now the girl sat alone and wept, head resting on her arm, she whom the others said did not weep, this child she’d seen conquer the powers of the warrior — air and light and fire.
It was all nothing, for she whom they had trusted had no answer to give.
She tried to think what Tur Nurayim would say, but it was hard, now, to imagine. He had not known this world, this place that had become empty without him. The world had changed, with the loss of him, and though he had known strife, he had never known this aloneness, this place where children were devoured. What would he have made of it?
At last, undone, she could do only the simplest of things and soothe the child with quiet talk, with tea and cinnamon, as Lan had done when she was small.
“The mist is terrible,” she said. “We all know it.”
But the child did not raise her head, and from outside, the lost one wailed and wept and threw herself against the stones.
They set it against me,” Susan said that night when she had finished crying and become furious instead. “You know what that means, don’t you? They’re holding him! They know we’ll try to come for him, and they won’t let us. It wasn’t me who broke their stupid rules!”
Kate saw Nell’s shoulders go up. They had spent the afternoon baking bread in the small brick oven behind the house. It was the first time they’d used it since they’d come. Laysia said that like the garden, work done
