At first there was only blue, pale, firm and empty.
Tara floated beneath on growling waves. She had her name back, and colors, light that felt like light and not the impact of photons on retina. Memory lurked out of view.
She let the waves bear her east.
The blue faded into stars and she nursed on them. She arched and ached and drew in light. She became aware of her hand through pressure on her palm. The black ebbed to blue and the blue to black again, as stars breathed in dark and exhaled sky.
Concepts slunk back into her awareness, boundaries, tensions. Sleep and waking. Day and night. Alive and dead. She thought she was alive. There was a hand in her hand. She did not want to rise and see whose.
Sound was a mess of different sorts of liquid shaken in a jar, chaos bubbly and swirled at first, everything all through everything else. It settled and separated. She became aware of voices, though she did not understand them and could not tell one from another. The growl beneath her was not the sea but an engine. Time, too, assembled. Dark and day acquired gradations. The moon slimmed. Clouds came, clouds left. Sunset, dusk, twilight, midnight.
Dawn.
Tara was not anyone in particular, anything in particular, just flotsam, foam. No one needed her. She did not decide to be. She suckled on the night, as the stars wheeled.
The flute brought her back.
Connor was telling a story on the flute, an old Quechal trickster-rabbit tale half fable and half tone poem, each scrambling escape accented with a bright rising trill, each tiger half stepping through underbrush in a minor key.
She followed the notes and found herself on the flatbed of the golem cart, around nine o’clock at night to judge from the moon, two days’ hard ride from Edgemont. The others sat around a fire larger than any they’d dared build on the ride out: Dawn, poking the embers with a stick; Pastor Merrott, cross-legged and hunched and thin but there; and, flute half-raised to open lips, Connor.
“You don’t have to look so surprised,” she managed, weakly, before he reached her and circled her in his arms.
Tara spent the last days of their trip cotton-wadded, talking slow and seldom as the others helped her piece the story together. It was all a bit confused. Dawn got Pastor Merrott down and free, then came back for Tara, and they made it to the cart somehow. Dawn unraveled Tara’s wards, and the Pastor gave Connor what soul he could spare.
“I was far gone,” Connor said, “but not so far as you, I think. Dawn told me what you did.”
“I did what I had to do” was all the answer she could offer then, and hoped he understood.
“Thank you.”
“I’m glad you weren’t there. It was a bad fight.”
“You don’t have to hide anything from me.”
She was not sure that this was true, but she did not press the issue. She needed that slow pace, as the golem cart ate distance by the steady hour, needed silence even now that she had found her voice again. The curse was gone, leaving no trace but a scar on her arm and a spreading bruise, but there were still too many moving pieces in her mind, and it was hard to think.
Tomas Braxton was watching from the wall when they came home, and his cry raised the crowd.
Edgemonters streamed over the wall and through the gates and out around the golem cart to cheer them home. The cart slowed from the weight of bodies. Tomas Braxton’s arm still hung in a sling and he walked with a limp. Jon Darien had lost the leg. Tara saw the holes first, absences, probed them like a tongue probed missing teeth. But the people remained. The children rushed out and around the edges and pressed toward her, and she hugged them in a big messy group.
Pastor Merrott stood, still weak, still drawn, but he waved, and the cheers rose. By the fire he had told her he did not suffer much, that he could not remember most of his captivity. She did not point out that these two statements did not quite go together, nor did she mention the sounds he made at night. But he stood straight with Connor’s and Tara’s help. He knew how to act out a triumphant return.
Grafton Cavanaugh surfaced through the crowd, shouldering folks aside with his good shoulder. He moved more slowly with his crutch and his face was careworn and lean with healing, but as Merrott stepped down he circled him with a hug, and kissed him, and what they said to each other was soft and lost in applause. They broke their clutch painfully, and when Grafton looked up, there was Connor, stepping down to meet him.
Tara only turned away by reflex, and might have turned back had she not seen, nearing through the crowd, drying her hands on her apron—Ma.
She had been underwater; she found air. She had been silent; she found a voice. She was down, and running, and they met each other in the crowd.
And Dawn watched.
There would be a feast. Grafton and Mrs. Braxton and the Learys were planning it already, with Pastor Merrott’s weak approval—there would be a feast and celebration and commemorative plaques, they’d kill a pig and roast it in a pit, but that would take time to arrange and for now each family brought what food and drink they could spare to the green. There was music, and Dawn danced with the Learys’ middle boy. Tara told what little of the story she could bear to, and tired early; Ma guided her away as the music played, and she, half-drunk on general exuberance, tried at first to resist, then apologized, then sagged against her when they were out of sight.
The house felt light and kind. Known places have a different, fuller silence than the desert, heavy with memories. Ma gave her a glass of chrysanthemum tea with a cube of sugar in it and sat her on the couch, and when Tara turned down her offer of a blanket, she draped one over her shoulders anyway, just so Tara could shove it off and glare, half smiling, in that shared moment of normalcy.
“You brought them back.”
“They brought me back.”
“That, too.” She cupped Tara’s cheek in her hand, and Tara looked up at her through wild curls of hair. “I wish,” she began, and stopped herself. “I don’t wish. I know. He’s here with us, isn’t he? He never left.”
Their hands found one another. Orbits touched.
That night she woke to a knock on her door.
She flailed in the dark, punched the wall and knocked a book off her nightstand before she remembered where she was. Who she was. Before she remembered she was no longer in that cavern, with the many eyes. “What do you want?”
Connor said, “It’s me.”
She opened the door with a flick of Craft from across the room. He stood there, hand raised to knock again, tired, wearing fresh clothes, his skin new-scrubbed from the trail. “What are you doing here?”
“Your ma let me in.”
“That is nine types of embarrassing.”
“I could go?”
“Don’t.” She gathered her legs up to make room for him at the foot of the bed. He sat. “It’s weird, isn’t it.”
“I always feel like this, coming home. You’re out there and you can keep walking forever, push yourself to the edge and no one will ever know how far you’ve gone or what you found until you come stumbling back, and even then you never tell the story right. You step back into town and in moments it’s like you never left, only more than that, because you did leave and still it didn’t change. That’s why I never could quit leaving.”
“I know how that feels.”
“I suppose you do,” he said. “Doesn’t it scare you? What could happen if you fail?”
“Why do you think I work so hard?”
He let that one unfurl in the night, in her childhood room. “I know I can’t ask you to stay.”
“I can ask you.” She settled her hand over his on the bed, lifted it, and guided it to her leg. “Stay. Tonight.”
“That’s asking?”
“That’s an offer.”
He was too gentle with her at first—not too gentle judged against some abstract standard, but against her need for something to fight against, to remind her that she existed. She dug her fingers into him and he found his way. This might be the last time for them, but it was real and they were here, however broken. She lost herself in the waves of it, and came home to shore and rested with his head on her shoulder.
It could be like this. If they were different people. If either of them could bear to be other than they were.
But this was what they had, and for now, for here, it had to be enough.
They lay together in her childhood bed, soft now and sliding into and out of sleep, until he settled at last.
Tara watched the ceiling, waiting for screams. When she heard none, she unwound herself from his body and him from her own and left him there, happy in the night.