Day by day, Edgemont came to join them in the fields.
The kids were the first, as they were the most curious and had the least work to do at home. They watched in silence with large dark eyes. They were not judging, Tara tried to convince herself. Or, at any rate, they were not judgmental. Kids just watched like that: they took each new thing and held it to light and turned it against the other small pieces of the world that they had gathered, working the puzzle. Once in a while they asked questions. “Why silver?”
“It’s clean” was the easy answer, and almost true. The kids nodded to her and to each other and fell silent, and an hour later, one would ask what she meant by “clean.”
The sun climbed and the day grew hot and Tara sweated through her blouse. Even then she did not remove the loose jacket she wore, which covered her bandage and the curse in her arm. It was still growing. She checked each night. Once she thought she heard it whisper. Sometimes, even when the sun was high, she felt it wiggle.
When she called halt for lunch the kids ran back to the village with the full bolting speed that grown-up legs forgot. Tara unpacked the lunch Ma had made and spread it on a heavy blanket on the grass, only for the kids to come back, bearing a pitcher of tea and stoneware cups. A young boy with a scar beneath his eye gravely offered Tara tea. It tasted sweet and chill. “Thank you.” Cold tea wasn’t something you could just buy at the corner store in these parts—you needed ice, and ice did not come cheap in Edgemont. “Did you steal this?”
His answering grin was large and quiet.
So, the kids were all right.
She knew why they’d come. Anyone who scared their parents was worth a look. But she didn’t know why they stayed. Her work with Dawn and Connor was painstaking and slow, without any flash save for the dance of pen on paper. It was every bit as rote as planting. You just had to walk in a line and listen to the ground and do your best not to kill everything around you.
Okay, maybe in that respect it was not quite like planting.
There was one other difference: Tara liked this, and she’d never liked to work with growing things. John Abernathy had loved farming, even after his back soured on him. He’d tried to teach his daughter the joy of fields and fresh-turned soil, of pressing a tiny seed down into the dark and asking it to return to you a hundredfold. But for Tara, planting meant interminable hours sweating in the hot sun when she could be studying or reading adventure novels about griffins. The closest she ever came to sharing her father’s joy was an adolescent phase during which she found solace weeding: she was carrying a lot of anger, and that layered pop and give when she pulled up pokeweed by the root felt—like something, like anything at all.
As she worked she remembered Pa and wondered what he’d think to see her here.
Press a seed down into the dark and it will return a hundredfold. The dead thing goes in, the living comes out, remade. She traced the glyphs on her forearm and wondered what else Pa had passed down to her with an unintended slant.
She went to the cemetery every day. She took care to visit only when the sun was up, always stood with her hands at her sides, and brought flowers, and yet the village’s eyes still followed her to the graveyard gates. Esther Braxton had been publicly, effusively grateful after Tara healed her son, and Tomas showed off his scar to all the pretty girls and boys at every opportunity, though he hadn’t repeated his good-natured approaches to Tara since. (A certain sort of man never could quite get past the memory of your hand several fingers deep in his neck.) They were less scared of her now.
But they still watched her when she went to her father’s grave.
“What do they think I’ll do?” she asked the gravestone and the drying flowers and the inscription she still couldn’t bear to read. “Just pop you back up out of the ground? As if it was that easy.” At first she thought she was laughing. “It’s fine, Pa. I’m fine.”
He never spoke to her again. Not that he’d spoken to her that night on the road. That had been a hallucination. It must have been. But no matter how she tried to shake off that waking dream, she remembered his hand on her shoulder and missed it. Everything she’d learned at school insisted he was gone, as gone as anything ever was. Her father had been a temporary association of long-running causes and effects, just like everyone else. Those effects had not terminated with his life, but their intersection was over.
He hadn’t come to speak with her that night. He couldn’t hear her now.
But still she spoke to his grave. And listened.
Dawn learned fast and hungrily. Each morning before sunrise, Tara slumped downstairs, gray as the land outside her window, to find her student fresh as if from a feather bed rather than a night on Ma’s couch. Dawn had already eaten breakfast and cleaned her plate. Dawn had already swept the floors. And Dawn waited at the breakfast table with her scrounged-up tools: basin, knife, training slate, silver chalk, notebook, pen. Ready.
At the Hidden Schools most students learned skills and tricks and, ugh, sure, why not call them “spells,” the way casual cooks learned recipes, adding ingredients by rote, never asking why you salt here, why vinegar there, why this type of vinegar and not some other. You could ace exams that way. The girl everyone agreed was on track to come first in Tara’s class, a frizzy-haired and freckled kid with big round glasses, had an encyclopedia’s memory and a golem’s eidetic recall, but so far as Tara could tell she had never given the first thought to how her charms were made, why she held her hand one way and not the other, what was true about words and locks that let one open the other—no thought, that is, to the questions of true Craft.
Dawn got it. Observation, directed. Knowledge and pattern. The interconvertibility of soul and matter. Beings tended to see minds only in beings like themselves—rocks, naturally, think only rocks can talk, and they’re right, at timescales meaningful to rock. Structure and complexity beget responsiveness, adaptability, and at high levels, consciousness—you can bargain with just about anything if you are patient and understand the language.
So you learn the language. And you learn patience.
Dawn treated each lesson as if it might be her last—as if she expected a great hand to pluck her up someday soon and carry her two hundred miles into the Badlands, leaving her to reconstruct the Craft from the principles she’d mastered so far. Which made a certain amount of sense, given what little Tara knew of the girl’s history. Few details were forthcoming. Dawn seemed to treat the past like a dead bird on a sidewalk: there was nothing to be done, other than to weep if she had to and move on. She had grown up on the road, a season here, a season there, sometimes in day-laborers’ camps and caravans, sometimes just her and her dad. Dusty work. Blake’s Rest had felt like stability at first, and comfort. Maybe it would have stayed that way if her father hadn’t died. She could see that Dawn wanted to think so.
When the first glimmers of talent for or inclination toward the Craft rose within her, Dawn had sought what help there was. She learned what she could from the old women in the camps, absorbing their tangled and half-remembered hedge witchery, traditions ten thousand times older than the Craft but far less consistent, far less powerful. Most of the heirs to the old ways were gone now, their lineage confused and broken. In the God Wars, too many scared people had found comfort in painting the local old wise woman on the edge of town as an agent of the great and terrible Enemy. One mob could wipe out millennia of weird transmission from grandmother to granddaughter. True workers of the Craft could melt your fields to glass, wither your country, and impale you on spears of lightning, while the local hedge witch could at worst, in a fit of pique, lame a goat or curdle some milk. Humans were the same everywhere. The best fights to pick were the kind where the other guy couldn’t fight back.
“So when do we get to the good stuff?” Dawn asked one morning, after she’d made a mouse skull gnash its teeth on cue.
“The good stuff?”
“I saw you beat the Raiders. And I’ve seen what’s left of God Wars battlefields. Broken mountains and twisted land. Skeleton machines. How do I learn to do that?”
Tara examined the blackness of her coffee and pondered the many things she could say next. “You are.”
“I’m learning geometry and theory. Rule after rule.” And she was learning them. Tara had tutored many junior students back at the Hidden Schools, and she had never seen one improve so quickly. But Dawn was never satisfied with her own progress. That was one reason it came so fast. “But I want to help.”
“You are helping. I wouldn’t be able to work up the field wards so quickly on my own.”
“I mean, against them.”
And there it was: the cold edge to Dawn’s voice, which worried her. “Against the Raiders? Or against Edgemont?”
If Tara had been asked that question, at Dawn’s age, she would have played dumb. She’d have claimed she did not understand, because one of the ways she tried to protect herself from people was to pretend they would not really harm her. Their threats were jokes, that was all. Camouflage and deception were defenses she could deploy even against herself. But Dawn did not have the luxury of that illusion. “Either.”
“I am getting you ready to fight the Raiders. That’s what the wards are for. The Craft is particular when it comes to property. Once we can name Edgemont, we can call the Craft’s power to defend it. And when you stand on that wall beside me, you’ll know this place and its defenses well enough to help.”
“The Raiders aren’t the only threat.”
“Grafton Cavanaugh is a blowhard, but he’s not dangerous. The rest of this town is harmless enough.”
“You thought they might try to kill us on the village green, the night of the raid. And they still watch you when you go to talk to your father.”
“That doesn’t make them a threat.”
“Seems like a threat to me.”
She sighed. “They are afraid. And in a way they are right to be afraid: not of us, because we mean them no harm, but of our power, because if we did want to hurt them, they would fall. But we don’t want to walk that path. Once they’re afraid of us and we’re afraid of them, everyone starts looking for a bigger stick than the other guy, just in case. Wouldn’t it be better if nobody was afraid in the first place?”
Dawn looked skeptical. “I’d still want a stick.”
She finished her coffee and considered the girl: cold, and brilliant, and not wrong. She lifted a rake from the porch. “I suppose we should cover rudimentary self-defense. Follow me.”
The hill out back between the two trees was burnished red with the sunrise. Dawn stood, windswept and ready, more ready for this than she had been ready to be born. Tara hefted the rake, testing its balance. “All the ‘good stuff’ flows from boring fundamentals. Seeing, knowing, naming. It’s dangerous to get flashy before you’re ready. That way you end up all reflex and technique, no wisdom, no cleverness, no ability to improvise. You might as well be a priest at that point. Here.” She passed Dawn the rake.
“What do you want me to do with it?”
“What do you think?”
Dawn looked from Tara, to the rake. She seemed to be convincing herself of something. Then she gripped the handle in both hands, and, with extreme care, tried to poke Tara in the stomach.
Tara guided the rake handle away with the back of her hand. She couldn’t suppress a roll of her eyes. Students. “Do you want to learn, or not?”
Dawn’s eyes hardened. The rake handle flashed around, quicker than sight—and bounced off a curved wall of shadow two feet from Tara’s skin. Dawn was off-balance, and the unexpected rebound sent her tumbling. Tara reached to catch her—but at her touch Dawn recoiled, teeth bared, animal and angry. The rake swept around again, metal tines toward Tara’s face.
Tara caught it. Her glyphs burned silver. Her hand was a claw-tipped shadow. The rake handle rotted through in her grip. Its tines fell rusted to the grass. Then Tara realized what she’d done, what had happened, and stopped. That was not a teaching moment.
Dawn’s eyes widened and she slumped to the ground, like someone had cut her strings. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Tara reached for her—but stopped herself before she touched her. Dawn settled on the hillside in a heap, chest rising and falling fast, her gaze fixed on a point far away. “It’s okay, Dawn. I’m fine. So are you.”
Tara waited for the girl’s breath to settle. She didn’t want to ask what had happened. She suspected, and she did not want to make Dawn go through it again.
“I just,” Dawn said, at last. “I need to be. Ready.”
“Take your time.”
“You made a circle,” Dawn said, eventually. Tara was not inside her mind, but she thought she understood its course. Principles and logic were easier to process than the memories that had overtaken her in the moment she felt Tara’s unexpected touch. She had lived hard on the road and harder still at Blake’s Rest. “You made a boundary with your mind. Like with the wards. Circles.” She pointed. The grass at Tara’s feet looked like it had been dead a long time. Great. Ma would kill her. “You know the space.”
“It’s my space,” she said. “I can assert my right over it, against your intrusion. I told you, a circle is an easy shape. Geometry lets you work fast.”
“But that’s not what you did. The second time.”
As if Tara’s means of defense was the most significant difference between the two exchanges. Well, if that was the difference Dawn wanted to focus on, let her. “The second time I used these.” She lit the glyphs in her arm, let shadow flow from them. “It’s like referencing a point you’ve made before, rather than making the point again. Faster. More efficient. Once you’ve been glyphed, I mean. It hurts a lot, even before they work the silver in. Glyphwork relies on Craftwork precedent, so it obeys the same principles.”
“Why?”
“You’re asking, why does the Craft work?”
“Yes.”
They shouldn’t be talking about this. Tara should be taking her own inventory—and caring for her student. But Dawn leaned toward her, and in this moment her fear was gone, and she seemed to have a different history altogether than her own—the history of a clock, perhaps, a precision instrument assembled from gleaming metal. She was, after all, becoming a Craftswoman. Few people came to the Craft if the becoming was not, for them, easier than being human.
“There are different theories,” Tara said. “Some people think the principles of the Craft are part of natural law—that they’re inherent to any social environment, like mathematics is inherent to human cognition. And some people think that first group is full of shit.” Dawn looked blank. “Let’s start one layer up. Do you know where gods come from?”
“In the beginning,” she said, tentatively, “was the Cosmic Egg. And then it split, and the two halves were called, um, something and … Wait, no, that’s not how it goes. There was, wasn’t there a woman who fell from the sky? And she had … seeds?”
Okay. She breathed deep. Take it from first principles. “Gods grow from groups of people. Like a town, or a city, or a country. It’s like how a tree has one trunk, but many tiny roots. You’re made of cells, right? Just like a plant is. So, you think you’re you, but you’re also … a lot of tiny things moving together. Gods are like that, only the tiny things are people. Gods emerge from the interaction of soulstuff in a community, so long as there’s a kind of space for them, made by individuals’ imaginative surrender to something greater. That space is what we call faith.” The comparisons weren’t quite apt—gods were emergent network phenomena, and like any network they could be implemented on, or ported to, substrates of different complexity. Humans were just their native habitat. But it would serve.
“Sometimes gods are good. Sometimes they’re hungry. Vicious. Evil or just cruel. Sometimes one group in a community turns their gods against others. You get religious schisms, apocalyptic civil wars. Crimes were committed by gods, and the Craft was an experiment in justice. What if there were rules prior to gods, rules even gods had to follow? What if we tried to have faith in those rules, rather than in the local cloud spirit and her anointed king? Maestre Gerhardt and his fellow scholars went looking, and found those laws. Or perhaps they made them, wrote them so deeply into the world that even gods were bound. Every argument in every Court and Library, every claim of property by right rather than force, every piece of soulstuff exchanged on the planet, it all gives strength to the Craft. And that is why you can’t hit me with your stick.”
She watched the girl and tried not to look like she was watching. This was not a line of conversation to make anyone feel better—but it could make one stop feeling, for a while. A stillness spread through Dawn as she listened, a clerical calm Tara had seen when Abelard or the gargoyles knelt to pray. As if Tara was reciting a liturgy or promising an afterlife.
“Okay,” Dawn said. “I want to try.”
On their last day working on the Braxton property, Esther Braxton herself came out into the fields, prim and round in her gray dress, bearing a cloth-covered basket.
Tara didn’t notice at first. She was walking a stretch of field and listening to Connor, who told her how this particular field was kept fallow because of Vaughan Braxton’s grandfather’s superstition, like how a host might set out an extra cup at a feast. She worked that story into the world, and her eyes rested on his face, on his soft mouth, on the lines of muscle down his shoulders through his arms. His quiet rolling voice washed away curses, ghosts, and Raiders.
They finished the field, sweating, tired. Thank gods she was good at her job. Thank gods this ward-walking was routine work she’d have shucked off onto an associate at any decent firm. Otherwise the knife of her power might have cut the world deep while the rest of her was distracted by that voice, that jaw, that mouth.
She jumped when she saw Esther Braxton. (Why? Embarrassment? She’d been working. Listening to him. That was all. Right.) “Mrs. Braxton.” She adjusted her shirtfront. “How’s Tomas?”
“Well, thank you.” Formal, considered. “Is that what you’re doing out here? Gathering stories?”
She had stared down gods, but she still did not quite feel like a grown woman when faced with people who had minded her when she was young. “The stories help us name the land, and guard it. Connor’s been helping.”
“He’s a good boy. But would it hurt your work if his story’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” Connor looked confused. “Everyone knows that story.”
Esther Braxton looked satisfied by that. As they spoke, the kids had drawn close to her basket. But they scattered like dandelion seeds when Esther Braxton looked at them. Her reputation didn’t seem to have softened since Tara was a girl. She repeated, “Does it hurt your work if the story’s wrong?”
“It might,” Tara admitted.
Esther’s weighing expression conjured bad memories for Tara, but this time she wasn’t trying to explain away a fire she’d set while playing conjurer (lessons learned from that experiment: don’t use tippy candles for a summoning circle, and always tie up the sacrifice in case he gets cold feet). Esther Braxton handed off the basket without looking—one of the kids ran up to take it—and advanced on Tara. “Eat the first pie,” she told the children. “Leave the second for them that’s working. I need to speak with Ms. Abernathy alone.”
Tara had never been Ms. Abernathy in Edgemont before.
She followed Esther into the field, away from the kids and Connor and even Dawn—who moved to join them before Tara waved her back. When they were out of earshot, Esther turned her back to their audience. “Between us,” she said, “Shep Braxton’s ma was born in Regis, but her family was from the Shining Empire. They were in debt to criminals out there. Now, Shep’s pa met her while he was out in Regis mining, and she came back home with him when her parents died. The man they owed chased her down. They fought here, and she killed him and buried him in this field. I don’t know if this was her family’s tradition or if it’s Imperial magic, but it went like this: if you kill a man on your own soil, you leave that land fallow four generations to honor the death. So we did, and we still do. But we don’t speak of it.” The story came out crisp and in a rush. She’d never told it to an audience before.
Tara reeled. She ran over her work in her mind, adjusting its basis, shifting a glyph to the left, to the right, claiming the corpse belowground, the blood shed on the field. “Thank you. I’ll keep the secret.”
The other woman nodded once, and when she looked up she wore that bright smiling mask that every kid in Edgemont knew was the sign Mrs. Braxton had stood down from battle stations. “Now, let’s see if those children left us pie.” Dawn waved to them from the circle of kids, smiling, her lips and fingertips red.
Others came after that. The field’s owner, or her husband, or a cousin or daughter or son or grandfather, whoever in the family kept the secrets, wandered out as if they’d just so happened to be passing by. They brought gifts, pies or tarts, a loaf of bread, a bottle of cider, and stood apart, listening to Connor. And once in a while, when Connor was done, they took Tara aside and told her the real story.
Others came, too, folks with nothing better to do—or who could pass their work along to children or younger siblings. She expected them to leave soon. Her Craft wasn’t much to look at. But they stayed to watch, and in the end, like the kids, they asked questions.
Tara was halfway through walking a field on a particularly bright hot day when she heard Dawn say, “—anything can power the Craft, since there’s soulstuff everywhere. That’s why you have to be careful when you work. If you get distracted, or if you’re in trouble, you can draw more than you mean to.”
“So it is dangerous.” But not so dangerous as the edge to that voice, which belonged to a hard-faced young woman in slacks who stood in a tight cluster of spooked men. No one was passing tea now. The background conversation ebbed.
Dawn didn’t notice the hush, or else she decided the best way out was through. She no doubt told herself she would not be intimidated. Which looked, to them, like she was the one trying to intimidate. “Of course it’s dangerous. Everything is, if you’re bad at it.”
Even Connor stopped talking and turned to watch. Tara slid up beside Dawn and resisted the urge to set a hand on her student’s shoulder. She smiled to disarm the situation, or tried. Her smile had too many armaments of its own. “The Craft can be dangerous,” she said, emphasizing “can.” “But we’re not doing any new Craft here. Just surveying the ground so we can defend it later. The danger is,” she almost said “minuscule,” and substituted “tiny.” Then she realized that any audience that could understand the rest of the sentence wouldn’t be thrown by the word “minuscule.” She’d trained in necromancy, not marketing and communications. “Dawn, why don’t you help Connor? Are there any other questions?”
She expected silence from the crowd, a nonplussed shuffling of feet. But the kid with the scar under his eye raised his hand, as if they were in a schoolroom. Tara indicated him with her outstretched hand, palm up, and realized after the fact that this was how her mother called on kids she taught. “But if you’re not making anything new,” he asked, “where does the magic come from?”
So, with a glance back over her shoulder at Dawn, she drew a breath and tried to tell him.
Ma had not been part of the crowd, but Tara detected a slight self-satisfied edge to her quiet that night as they set the table for dinner. “What?”
“You told me once that you’d never be a teacher.”
That had been an argument and a half, not long before she ran away. “Dawn’s just an apprentice, Ma.”
“And you’re lecturing the village, now.”
“That’s not teaching. I’m just … explaining Craft. Half this stuff they could have picked up from any library that passes through. Hells, you and Pa taught them most of it.”
Ma’s eyes flicked up, and Tara realized she’d cursed. After a panicked moment, she decided that once one had been out of one’s parents’ house for the best part of a decade, and saved a few cities (one of them twice), one was entitled to a certain license with regard to vocabulary. She also decided not to curse in Ma’s presence again, there being no sense pushing one’s luck.
“Your father and I never practiced sorcery.” Ma was getting better talking about him. Was that something to be grateful for? They had not talked much since the funeral, beyond the small necessary words required between two people who shared a house, a kitchen, blood, and they rarely mentioned Pa. They stood on a bridge made of thin woven straw above a pit, and no matter how gently they placed their feet, with each step a new strand gave way. And then, as she set the bread board on the table: “He’d have liked to see this.”
The bridge broke. Tara fell, and Ma reached for her, falling, too. Hand found hand in the dark.
The rest of the week passed slowly, under a bright sky. There were more questions every day. At first they staggered her—didn’t these people have anything better to do? But then, they were her clients. Of course they wanted to learn how she meant to help. Even the priests of Kos Everburning in Alt Coulumb understood the basic elements of her work more than these people she’d grown up beside.
Dawn and Connor walked the fields while Tara taught. She missed the simple work (and not at all, thank you very much, the rather more complex sensations she felt while walking with Connor Cavanaugh), but the arrangement had its benefits. These days, when she worked her Craft, she felt the curse stir inside her. Growing.
That night she had to bite a leather strop as she peeled her shirt from her skin. She saw tendrils spreading down her arm, like the fingers of a splayed hand, the central bolus palm-sized now and seeping tacky gray fluid. It was large enough that she could see fine white threads writhing within the black. She cut new wards into her skin, as deep as she could bear, and laced those carvings with silver salt; the pain eased, but not the pressure. When she slept she heard a surf-wash of fishhook voices out of sight.
There was, to be perfectly honest, a part of her that panicked, that wanted to run. She talked herself down. You’re cursed. Deal with it for one more week. You’ll live.
She focused on Edgemont’s questions, and on their secrets. She heard tales of bodies buried, of dead children and scattered ashes. This was where my great-grandfather had his heart attack. This was where my grandmother hid a young man who fought for the Craftsmen in the Wars and turned up on her back steps one night bleeding, barely conscious. This is the field where my great-grandmother turned back into a bird and flew away.
“It feels wrong,” she told Pastor Merrott one late night on the church steps, sipping tea. “I shouldn’t know who killed who on the Braxtons’ back forty. Whose great-grandmother was a crane. Last week they almost killed Dawn and chased me out. And now they’re telling me things they can’t bear to tell each other.”
She’d paused in her work for the drink. Not all the Craft they needed could be done by daylight, for an audience. After dark, in the church undercroft, in privacy, they carved the inscriptions and glyphs that would let them invoke the Craft to defend against the Raiders.
Here they were alone. Only Pastor Merrott knew this work was being done. Tara guided Dawn through the grand curves, taught her the glyphwork alphabets and sacred geometry, which words she could speak out loud and which would draw the wrong sort of attention. Candle wax burned their fingers; in the circles’ light Dawn’s face had a strange luminous quality. The small creases that formed beside her eyes when she squinted seemed deeper than canyons. The girl drank it all in as if she were dying of thirst, and after each gulp she gasped, wiped her mouth, and asked for more. The analogy made Tara nervous: people near dead of thirst had to drink slowly, or else their guts would burst. But Dawn, learning, looked so happy that Tara could not bear to hold her back.
Pastor Merrott sat beside her, hands clasped in his lap. “There are goats—” He stopped himself, laughed into the hollow of his chest. “I don’t know how to talk to you, Tara.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just tend to tell stories. That’s much of what a sermon is, a story that binds people in one image, one thought. People come to me for guidance, so they expect to be, well, guided a little. But you’ve seen things, done things I can barely imagine. I worry you might think I’m condescending, or trying to teach you something you already know.”
“It’s fine, Pastor. We’re on the same team here.” Which featured on the great long list of sentences she never thought she’d say. But she liked him for that hesitation, then realized that she was meant to like him for it. His concern and vulnerability, however genuine, were also tactics he’d chosen to deploy—and she liked him more, realizing that, because she respected him.
“You’ve heard of sin goats, I suppose.”
She laughed at the bleakness of the image. “You think that’s what they’ll do to me after all this? Once they’ve told me their dirty laundry, they’ll drive me out into the wilderness? They tried that once already. It didn’t take.”
“I don’t mean it like that,” he said, too quickly. “It’s been a long time since you lived in a small town. When you want to be alone in Alt Coulumb, you walk out your front door and turn left. When Connor wants the same, he has to head two days into the Badlands. But not many people know the Badlands like Connor does. For them, the pressure builds. They hold their secrets, and with good reason. There’s a level of honesty few of us can bear. Some of these people have been carrying sins for generations. And you come along, with your promise to save this place and to leave. Of course they tell you what they can.”
“And who, I wonder, is encouraging them to confide in me, Pastor?”
He smiled for all the world like an innocent man, and eased himself to his feet like an old one. “Good night, Tara. Please do lock the undercroft when you’re done. I don’t think either of us wants to explain your work down there.”
She toasted his retreating back with her cup of tea. “Good night, Pastor.”
She crossed the fields off one by one on her map, and the days off on her calendar. Before bed she checked her curse and saluted the moon outside her window. She did not pray again. One night she tried to seek the nightmare telegraph, but its corridors were full of skeleton mouths and white, writhing threads.
Unable to get back to sleep, she untied the black folder and read. Its contents hovered around her like bad planets, the etchings and lithographs, the glossy pictures, and of course the memory crystal she had brought home from Alikand two years before.
The pictures, the legends, the descriptions of vanished artifacts, those might mean anything, taken alone. Every culture dreamed of the end of the world. It was only natural. Cultures were made of people, and people were self-centered, and people died. Gone one day, just like that. It didn’t take much. A few atoms changing position. A blood clot in the brain. A necromancer could bring your body back, but your body wasn’t you. Everything you saw, everything you loved, snuffed out in an instant. And it happened every day, to millions of people, good and bad, each a universe gone forever.
So of course human beings told stories, about how there had been worlds before this one, and those worlds were gone now, and how one day this world, too, would end. They told those stories again and again, carved them into stone and painted them on cave walls and passed them down generations, because people needed help to make sense of the strange and brutal planet they found themselves upon. No reason to take those stories literally.
But then there was the crystal, glowing with ghostlight in midair. When she touched it, she heard the sound, which had not been a sound when it was recorded. It had been captured out in the void beyond the sky, where there was no air. But things out there in the dark made waves of a sort, propagating through nightmares and light. When she touched the crystal, Craftwork translated those to sound, and she heard footsteps, massive, slow, and drawing nearer.
She had work to do back home. She was running out of time. She had a curse in her arm. She had grown up dreaming of the day she could leave Edgemont. And yet she stayed.
Why was she still here? She owed the town a debt, yes, but there were other ways to pay it. She could have left, found help, sent gargoyles back. Shale’s people would enjoy the fight. And she could have got back to work on the black folder. On the footsteps.
They were far away, she told herself. She didn’t even know who they were. She had seen shadows. Cave paintings. Half-melted reliefs in Quechal temples.
There were so many things happening at once. A week more or less would not hurt.
She’d get no more done tonight. Let it go, for now, she told herself. Sleep. She gathered breath, and let it out slowly, and with it she released her fears. There were more of those than she expected.
“Tara?”
She froze.
Dawn stood pale as a banshee in the doorway, her nightdress drifting around her ankles. “I couldn’t sleep. I saw Craftwork. What is this stuff?”
“Nothing.” She didn’t want to explain. “A long-term project.”
Dawn plucked one of the lithographs from midair: a cave painting, in ochre and crushed beetle shells, of a tiny marble with brown continents and blue oceans, in the grip of an immense clawed shape like a spider or a hand, vast as suns. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s fine.” She took the lithograph from her. She meant to be gentle. She meant to be reassuring. Dawn’s expression suggested that she had failed. “Get some rest. We have work in the morning.”
The next day Dawn was waiting, bright and composed as always, for their lesson and the practice afterward, her slow education in the principles of Craftwork self-defense. Their encounter the night before seemed to have fallen into her like a stone into a still pool, the ripples already settled. They walked in silence from the breakfast table to the hillside. Tara had quietly replaced Ma’s rake and borrowed a walking stick from Connor to use instead, in case of further accidents.
“Come at me as hard as you can,” Dawn said. “I’m ready.”
“Are you sure?”
She shook her head. “Do it anyway.”
Tara hefted the walking stick and locked eyes with Dawn. Tightened her grip. She chose her target—the upper arm. The worst she’d leave was a bruise.
The stick swept whip-fast through the cool air and bounced off a shell of darkness, inches from Dawn. “Faster.”
She tried again. This time the shell was closer to Dawn’s skin, but no more permeable. A third hit, a fourth. On the first strike, Dawn had flinched and given ground, but she handled each blow more easily than the last. Dawn was smiling. So, Tara realized, was she.
Her next swing was fast as she could manage, full force, full power—and she saw, too late to stop the swing, a flash of cleverness in Dawn’s eyes. She felt Dawn’s argument shift. This is my space, inviolate became force directed toward me is given to me, becomes mine, and I can guide it as I choose.
A cold fist punched Tara in the chest. She landed in the patch of dead grass, blinking away stars. “Good hit.” She gathered herself, brushed off her jacket, and without thinking, reached out. Dawn helped her up.
Tara saw the surprise on her student’s face as she rose, and felt a mirrored surprise in herself: Dawn shocked that she had taken Tara’s hand, and Tara shocked that, rather than rising under her own power, she had reached for someone else. For Dawn. Without feeling she was making some grand Decision, either. There had been no sense of forcing herself through an ice field. She had just reached out, without thinking, and the girl accepted.
Dawn stepped back. Tara thought she might have been about to ask a question, and if she had, Tara thought she might have answered it. But the sun was rising, and they had work, and Dawn remembered, then, what she had just done—her triumph obscured the rest.
They walked together, smiling, to the fields.
The crowds were there, larger than ever, and Connor. Even he had changed, she thought, in the last two weeks—he was tired, but he looked happier, less like a picture cut from a magazine illustration, less alone. The air was cool crystal and the sky’s dry blue its most perfect shade, and the sunlight rolled golden down.
She realized then that she was happy.
She tried to tell Connor how she felt. She’d taken to joining him as he tended his goats in the late afternoon. The critters gathered when he came, climbed walls and wells and rocks, and returned even the most sidelong glance with their own challenging glare. Ancient geometers had thought spirits hopped from body to body at the brink of death. They were wrong—souls were pretty fungible when you got down to it—but if they weren’t, Tara wouldn’t mind coming back as a goat. “It’s not that I like being the center of attention.”
“Though you do.” He shooed a goat off the well.
She laughed. “It’s a sort of control. When everyone’s watching you, you know they’re not sneaking up behind you.” A goat rammed her leg with his forehead. She bent to pick him up but he scrambled away. “The last time I lived here, after the Schools … people didn’t know what I was, or why I’d left. I couldn’t tell them. I was sure they wouldn’t understand. But also no one asked.”
The well chain rattled. She walked around to help him with the crank, set her hands between his on the shaft. As she let her muscles work she remembered another well in another city a continent and an ocean away, a fierce and quiet priestess watching her draw water. Connor reminded her of Kai—they had the same quiet consideration, all their knives directed inward.
Work sweat smelled so unlike the city sweat she was used to, the sweat of systems under strain. His smell was clean salt.
When she looked up his large eyes were looking down. “What?”
“I should have asked you for the whole story. I wanted to.”
She remembered that night on the hill after the dance the first time she’d come home, the stars bright and tempting overhead and this boy beside her. Not a boy anymore. She stopped the crank. “Why didn’t you?”
He looked down at her hands, then back. “Gods, Tara. Have you met yourself? It’s not just the Craft or the gods or the glyphs. It’s … listen, I go into the Badlands for weeks at a time, and I love the desert. But every time, I come back. You, you just kept going. You always knew who you were. When you were around, the world felt so big, like anything was possible. Back then … if I had asked you what was wrong, and you’d answered, and I’d seen cracks in you like I could see in me, there would be a crack in that feeling, too. I’d know you didn’t have it figured out. I know that’s not a fair weight to hang on you, but—”
She kissed him.
She hadn’t meant to. She hadn’t meant not to. She was leaning close and a current ran from her mouth through her chest down to her hips, and the same magnetism that had, these last few nights when the house was dark and still, drawn her hand down between her legs while she clenched her teeth to keep from crying out, drew her across those few inches, settled her lips on his. She stayed close. She breathed him.
It had been a long time since she kissed someone, and a long time was worse in some ways than forever. She tried to be calm, to wait for him, to hold herself teetering on that edge and give him room to decide.
His large eyes were dark and bright, and his lips found hers. There were so many reasons not to do this, and she was sure if she stopped to think she’d come up with one. Instead she kissed him again, tasted him this time as her hands found his ribs and back and his hands her sides. The crank handle, let go, struck her thighs as she pulled him to her, and that sharp sweet pain curled her fingers and she drew him closer. Her cursed arm ached and throbbed and even that didn’t break the mood. Her hands dug into his back beneath his shirt. Her chest pressed against him, and her shirt and bra felt tight as if a drawn breath would burst their seams. Nothing could contain her. She filled the world. She wanted to be inside him, to have him inside her. His heartbeat was firm, his body swelled into her when he breathed. He was ready, and from his eyes she could see he wanted her and feared what was happening between them, and she liked the wanting and the fear, and she showed him the white of her teeth.
It might have lasted a thousand years. She could do that—stop their hearts and hold them in that moment’s strain as their panicked brains came unmoored from time—they’d done it in the Hidden Schools once they learned the trick, deadly dangerous and sweet. There was no Craft here, though, just the moment thickening around her by her mind’s own magic, until the bucket hit the water.
They stood beside the well. There were goats all around. Beyond the goats, a fence, and beyond the fence, fields, and in the fields, folk coming home from work, houses silhouetted against twilight, and nothing between them and Edgemont.
He pulled away and she let him. Someone might have seen. They all might have seen.
She was not afraid. But this was hers, and his. Edgemont did not deserve it.
“Tonight,” she said, and before he could say anything else, she left. The goats did not offer her a path.
Dinner conversation was light and sharp. She laughed too loud and told jokes that landed askew. She felt feverish and famished and she wanted to swallow the world. Lying awake in bed later, she wondered whether Ma or Dawn had noticed. She lay, wondering at ceilings. The sheets were soft but her skin was so sensitive they rasped over her like sandpaper.
How slowly could seconds pass, how could stars linger in their courses, how deep was the night in which she waited, hungry, in a bed too small for her, as her thoughts spiraled out to fill the room and the village and the Badlands, too, only to gather the universe back in and fill her with space and time and doubt. Could he have misheard? Had she pressed him beyond his limits? Had she fucked this up, too?
A pebble bounced off the wall beside her window.
She dropped from the second floor, cushioned her fall and landed beside him without sound, took his hand and let him lead her, to make him think that he was safe. Sometimes she stopped him, to keep his foot from a root or a hole that might have turned his ankle, a twig that might break and make their passing known. They walked in silence. And in the hollow of a hill that faced the Badlands, she took him.
He was timid as he undid his clothes, as if afraid of the hunger they’d shared beside the well. His body was hard with work and wandering, and with need. They’d lost their names somewhere on the way. She left hers in that bed, and his never fit him completely. Her hands slipped on laces, hooks, the simplest movements so fumblingly complex. She didn’t have to get naked for this but the cold did not bother her and she wanted to lie empty and bare beneath the stars. She had never let herself want while she grew up here, not out where anyone could see, because the things she wanted set people running, made them light torches, grab pitchforks. But want was in her breath and blood and she was full of it as she caught his chin and guided him to her lips.
She drew him into her first, and when he propped himself on his hands she cuffed her fingers around his wrists and caught him with her thighs, wanting mastery and the strain, the certainty she was there and so was he; it built and built with aching slowness, a torture to them both. When she wanted more, she took more—she bucked him off, and, sensing what she needed and half smiling, he pushed against her arms as she pressed him beneath her to the blanket. The night was cold but so was she. Her hunger blighted grass, killed insects that flew near. She was a great pit like they said stars dug in the sky when they died and they both tumbled into her together. She held the whole world and him. Dimensions fell away, time first, then roundness, until they were shadows on a wall, then a long thin wire without end, and then just that single point, nowhere and everywhere at once, straining—he made a sound, she clapped her hand over his mouth, not because she was afraid of the noise but because she wanted to hold it, to hold him, this, rightnow/forever, but to grasp was to strangle, and though this one point was all that bound her to the world, she curled her fingers and toes and let
go.
The world cracked, unfolded, and was gone.
Pain brought her back—the dull coal-throb in her arm, in time with her heartbeat—and in that gentle aftermath she did not even mind.
After, while they recovered, she trailed her fingers over his chest, her glyph-rings glowing. His hairs rose toward her touch.
“That was…,” he said, and trailed off, wondering, unable to say what it was exactly.
“Yes,” she answered, unable to say either.
It was a start.
He eased her to the grass, sat up, and watched her, eyes wide. She felt a stab of terror, lying naked before a gaze that frank—an urge to collapse around the cursed arm and hide it from him—but his eyes tracked uncomprehending past the wound. Of course. Naked, she was an unfamiliar landscape, arms and legs and chest and belly inscribed with glyphlines glittering in moonlight, that quicksilver scar on her neck from Alikand. She was proud of her scars and glyphs, of the survival and work they represented—except, of course, for the curse. What did he think, as he puzzled over a body so different from the bodies of other girls he’d known?
To lie still and let him look felt like jumping off a ledge into the ocean, without checking to see how far down the water was or whether there were rocks.
He looked, half-awed, and then he bent to kiss her.
She did not ponder futures. She lacked agenda, plan, or scheme. If any were needed she’d make them up on the fly. She’d done as much before. Back in Alt Coulumb, and for that matter all her life, Tara never gave in to anything, even sleep, without a fight. But sleep for once found her unresisting, and even the voices of her curse kept their murmurs low.
Connor blushed a little when they met the next morning, and she might have blushed, too, even though she met his eyes and smiled, bright and easy with nothing to hide; regardless Dawn seemed to sense something had changed between them. She didn’t ask, though, only walked beside them to the last fields on their list.
The sky was perfect blue and the ground received her feet and the breeze was light and gentle from the east. Every day should be the first day after a long drought. She felt easy and open. On the walk they traded jokes; Dawn picked dandelions and blew their seeds out over the hills. She shouldn’t, they were weeds, but Tara was in no mood to tell her that.
No children joined them on the way. No idlers left their chores. She’d grown used to a gathering, but they walked on alone. She knew where they were bound, of course, and so did Connor—there were only so many farms and in the end they’d reach this one—but still she’d told herself it would be fine. She would hear Connor’s stories, do the work, and let that be all. No need for argument, confession, reconciliation.
When they reached the Cavanaugh land, Grafton was there, waiting.