The house was empty.
Of course it was empty. Stupid girl. You fly two thousand miles because you learn your father’s dead, you walk for a night and a day and half a night again turning that news over in your mind, you talk with his hallucinated ghost, even, and still, when your mother leads you, silent, stately, through the village as doors gape and lanterns glitter and silent eyes watch you pass, when you follow her wordless down a road you could walk in your sleep to the peaked two-story house where you were born, after all that you still ask yourself why there are no lights waiting in the windows.
She took the front steps one by one with Connor’s help. Her foot slipped, and for an instant he bore Dawn’s whole weight. He looked guilty, as if he was the one who had tripped. She tried to smile to absolve him. Someone at least should be blameless in this mess.
Together they helped Dawn across the threshold into the house. The family room enfolded them: the empty fireplace, the book by the armchair with a ribbon halfway through. Her mother stood tall as a statue of a goddess near the kitchen, noble and furious and unable to speak. And still Tara’s eyes swept naturally to the stair, to the kitchen, to the workshop door, the root-cellar steps, as she wondered where her father was hiding, which passage he would enter through.
“Take her up to your room,” Ma said.
They had embraced before the wall, tight as drowning women, clinging to each other in place of air. But they’d traded few words, and Tara’s memory of those was choked with the same wet heat that would not let her breathe. “She needs help,” Tara said. “My kind of help. You might see things, hear things while I work.” This was as close as she’d come to talking about the Craft with her mother, and even though she was proud of her work and her life she felt ashamed, as if she’d been found rutting with a farmhand in the hay bales, rather than learning how to rule the world.
The world contained objects that were weak, and objects that were strong. (One more feature of the Craft, one more way of seeing: form precise divisions into kind, use definitions to split the world.) In the first category, place oak and iron and hurricanes. In the second, Tara’s mother.
“Don’t kill the cornfield.”
“That only happened once.” She heard her voice go plaintive in a way it hadn’t in years.
“Tara.”
“I was twelve, Ma. I won’t kill the cornfield this time.”
Her mother drew breath through her teeth. “Grafton will come once he settles his people down. I’ll see to him.”
Connor glanced from Tara, to the stairs, to Ma. “I’ll talk with him, ma’am. It’s the least I can do.” He had grown since she last saw him, in ways that weren’t obvious; there was a callus in his voice when he talked about his father now, where once there’d been a quaver.
“Help my daughter, Connor Cavanaugh. I’ll handle your father.”
Once Ma set her word to a thing, it was done.
Tara’s bedroom. Gods, her bedroom! With her own bed, still made, and the quilt her dad’s mom stitched for her, her books double-shelved in her small bookcase and stacked on top, her empty jewelry box on the dresser beside the carved and painted wooden figurines of monsters she’d bought from peddlers who came through town, with the profits from small jobs. She’d bought an engraving of a dragon at age eleven and tacked it to the pale yellow wall over the dresser and got in a small fight with her dad over the holes in the wood. Now that she’d seen dragons firsthand, she had to concede this wasn’t the greatest likeness, but she didn’t care. He’d left it up when she had gone.
With Connor’s aid she got Dawn to the bed. The girl stayed upright where she was placed—not a good sign. Sweat beaded her forehead, and her eyes showed black between the lids. Tara checked both eyes, and her pulse. Down to the midthirties.
Tara eased Dawn back. She twisted. “Don’t.” Her voice was ragged. “They’ll hear.”
If Blake’s Rest had not been ash, Tara would have burned it down herself.
She knelt beside her suitcase, unzipped the pocket where she kept her professional equipment, and removed her leather tool pouch and the black folder. She set the folder out of the way for now, and unrolled the tool pouch on the dresser, knocking over her old monsters. A small ghostflame burner would sterilize the instruments, and she decided on a number-six scalpel. Most of this operation she could, in theory, handle with her work knife, but the curse interacted oddly with Craft, and she couldn’t risk Dawn having another episode here. She lit the burner with a snap of her fingers. “Connor, get a tarp from the hall closet.” No answer, no sound of footsteps. She turned.
Connor’s dark and liquid eyes rested on the ghostflame, on the glyphs glowing beneath her skin. His mouth was half-open and his eyes unsure. His tongue flicked pink between his lips. “So this is what you do.”
They’d grown up together in Edgemont’s one-room schoolhouse, where her parents taught. His father wasn’t much for book learning, but he knew that running a farm needed someone with letters and numbers, and the Abernathy school was more than most towns had, and far be it from Grafton Cavanaugh not to take advantage. Connor had been an eager kid, antsy in class, his mouth quicker than his head and the rest of him lucky his feet were fast to match. He was wiry and lanky-strong and sort of sideways confident, and people listened to him, but he never put himself forward, never tried to lead any pickup ball teams after school, just did what people told him. When she learned more about his family, she’d understood.
The first time she came back to Edgemont, she’d found that he was quieter, and calm, and she liked talking to him. She hadn’t told him much about the Hidden Schools then. Tara and Ma and her father had decided she wouldn’t tell anyone. There were too many shades of ugly that conversation might turn. But Connor, who couldn’t talk about a lot of things, had a compass needle’s draw toward others who couldn’t talk either. It turned out there were a lot more things they could talk about than things they couldn’t. He showed her the sheep he tended when he had to and the goats he tended because he liked them, and they took long walks together, and he told her stories, though she was the one who’d been away. It wasn’t much, but it was there. One night she lay under the stars beside him and looked up and thought she might drink him in, instead.
But she hadn’t, and then she left. He had questions now, but he was no better at asking than she was at answering. “It’s a thing I do,” she said, as she sterilized the blade.
“I wanted to say that I’m sorry.” The words slipped out quick and painful as stitches drawn from a wound.
She tensed, and felt herself bleed inside. She couldn’t take this now. Her mother she’d grown a shell against, but Connor had never hurt her. She couldn’t break down in front of him, not with a patient on the bed, not ever. When she learned the Craft she’d learned, too, its useful inhuman ways. Why feel what you could not bear to feel? Set it aside. Crush it if you have to. “Get the tarp. Please. And, for this next part, just do what I tell you to, when I tell you.”
He got the tarp, and unfolded it at her direction, and rolled Dawn onto it. Tara gave the girl a fresh rag to hold between her teeth. Together, they began the work of saving her.
She told him to wash his hands while she prepared the site. He did not ask questions or argue. He went, and came back ready.
She held out her hand. “Scalpel.”
He passed it, and took it back when she returned it to him, bloody.
“Compass, and pencil.”
Dawn groaned. Her jaw muscles bulged as she bit the cloth.
“You’re doing great, Dawn. Hold still. Syringe.” And she looked at Connor when she took it from him. “You’ll see a shadow, and feel a heavy weight. Just keep passing me what I need.”
He looked ash-gray, but he nodded. That tongue tasted his lip again. “What if I can’t see the instruments?”
“You will. They’ll glow.” She felt guilty. He didn’t know much about her world, and here she was dragging him into it with no better reason than that he’d offered, he was useful, and she didn’t want to be alone. “You don’t have to stay,” she said, reluctantly.
“You look half-dead. Let me help.” And then, as if stepping onto ice: “If you need a soul, take mine.”
There was a grasping hunger in her head, and a horror in her heart. “You don’t know what that means.” He’d spent thaums to buy goods and earned them by selling, but he knew so little of the Craft that the last time she came through town he’d asked her if the Hidden Schools were actually invisible.
“I do. Some. I read up, after you left.”
She needed soulstuff more than she could say. She felt bone-slow and weary from the day’s work. Outside, downstairs, she heard raised voices. It wouldn’t help Ma turn back Cavanaugh’s goons, if Tara covered half the village in darkness to gather starlight for the operation. “Fine.” She took his hand. “You’ll feel a wind drawing you toward me. Don’t fight it.”
He’d never done this before, and the first time was always hard. She took as little as she could bear, and his soul rolled into her, delicate and smooth and thick with guilt. She crushed a sob in her throat. He did not know how to keep himself out of the transaction. His eyes rolled white in his head. He sagged against her, but she held him and made his soul her own. He did not fall. She used him and drew starlight through the window. Shadow pressed them down, held them close.
Tara plunged the syringe into Dawn’s back, and as Dawn screamed she drew the curse.
Connor recovered fast. He passed Tara tools, and when she sagged halfway through he offered her more soul, which she did not take. There was too much risk that she’d drain him to the dregs. She could not spare the words to explain; she hoped he would understand. Maybe he did. He did not offer again.
The operation lasted forever, and like all forevers it had an end. Dawn was safe. Her wound closed. Tara let her glyphs sleep. Cold and thirst and sorrow and exhaustion flowed in to replace the inhuman chill of work. Starlight slunk back through the window she’d climbed out years ago.
She sank to her knees.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and heard a voice, and as she fell she wondered who could there be in this empty house beside her.