Dreams had woken and emerged into the dawn. Children through the mist, children now! Devoured, hunted, exiled. Surely the sky should crumble and the mountain fall before this, but they didn’t. They never changed, despite horror, despite heartbreak.
And yet the child lived, unchanged, and here was another, walking through the wood, the cloud of her hair catching the light. It was this she had seen in dreams. Laysia stumbled at the thought, nearly losing her grip on the other one, and the young girl took her arm.
“You okay? I know she’s heavy. Susan helped me before.”
Her words were unfamiliar, some of them, and the name Laysia did not know, but the sense of it came through. She found her voice.
“No, I’m all right. Forgive me. We’re close now, and then I’ll lay her down.”
She had not asked the child’s name. She could barely ask it now, lest the two evaporate with the audacity of the question. It was such a sweet dream, such a vivid one! If this was madness, how much better it was than she had imagined. And yet there was no help in pretending, now she’d thought of it.
“Child,” she said, trying to keep the catch from her voice, “what do they call you?”
“Kate,” she said in her pretty way. She walked along, solid as ever, a real flesh-and-blood child who had emerged from a dream. “And this is Nell.”
They walked through the forest together, Kate trying to keep track of the way. She memorized the direction of the rising sun over her shoulder, the tangled path, the place, somewhere below and to her left, where the sanctuary lay.
The woman cradled Nell like a baby. Kate could feel how careful she was, as if Nell were made of china and might break with a wrong step. She looked at Kate, too, strangely, and Kate worried that she had misunderstood something, done something wrong. She didn’t hear people right sometimes. She didn’t like to be with this stranger alone on the mountain, without Susan or Max or anyone to tell her what it all meant.
But Nell needed help. And Susan must have turned back, once she’d gotten them up the hill, to get Max and Jean, maybe. So she hurried beside the woman as the trees thickened and they moved away from the valley. The sun unfurled yellow ribbons through the branches and gathered in the leaves like white pearls.
After a time, the woman said quietly, “Who is she, to you, that you came for her?”
She had a smooth, narrow face, and her expression was hidden in the shadows and sudden glare of the morning forest.
“My sister,” Kate whispered.
“Your sister.”
She said it differently from the way the Master Watcher had. Not as if she disbelieved it, but as if it made her sad. Kate worried that maybe Nell wouldn’t get better.
“What should I call you?” she asked the woman, trying to banish the thought.
“Laysia” came the answer. Then the woman shook her head and laughed a little.
“What?”
Laysia moved right, striking deeper into the wood.
“It’s been a long time since I said that name. It feels strange to say it.”
Everything she said was hard to understand. Did she have another name, then? If Susan would only come, she’d explain it. As it was, Kate said, “Do they call you something else?”
Again, that laugh that sounded too much like crying.
“Oh, yes, but that’s not what I meant.”
Kate sighed. Too often life felt this way, people full of puzzles. They talked too fast or in riddles, and by the time Kate had unwound all the knots of their speech, they’d gone on to something else and she’d missed the point. It was why she kept quiet in school most of the time. It was why she liked to stand next to Susan, or her mother, in crowds, because they would know to look at her and whisper what it meant.
Neither of them was here. Kate cleared her throat. “I don’t think I understand.”
The woman lifted her head and turned at that, and Kate saw that there was no meanness in her face. The laugh hadn’t been at her expense.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I’ve been a long time alone. I’m unused to conversation. I’ve lost the art of it.”
“Oh.”
“It’s what happens in exile. But you gave this one a great gift, following her. You didn’t let her be alone.”
Exile. Now, that was a word Kate knew.
It was as if she had stumbled into the wood where the first had emerged from the pool of life, from the waters of beginning, and seen the full expanse of it, that wood of dreams and legends, that place from which all the stories had come. It would be strange, yes, but familiar, as this child was familiar, as they both were. And yet strange — so strange! Not in look or manner, but in the very essence of them. Laysia studied the child as they walked along together through the brightening wood. She clasped the older one, the mist-hounded girl, to her chest and tried to puzzle out the meaning of such a mix of difference and sameness. What was it?
And then a memory came to her, of another day on the mountain, years past. Midmorning in a brilliant autumn it had been, and she, still new alone and hopeful, had heard the sound of the rising mist and followed it all the way back to the ridge overlooking the valley, so close she could feel the weight of the cloud in the air, so close she must cringe at the scream of the man it drove to the ground. So close she could see it as she’d not seen it when it came for her. Soft, it appeared, like the cotton that flew from the trees in spring. Soft even as the color dampened,
