Eight

THE FEVER SAVED ME, I guess. The poison heat I'd drawn out of Relly's body kept me alive while I lay there in the rising drift.

Snow was falling again. Not snow called by battling gods. But regular, real, normal snow.

I went in and out of feverish dreams. I'm dead, I thought. This is what it means to be dead. Perfect silence. Cold and hot at the same time. Lost, alone, nowhere.

Did I escape from that snowy grave like a ghost? I don't know. But I did rise and walk. I'm sure I left that place at the foot of the hill. Maybe my spirit came out from my body. Maybe some part of me split away. Or maybe the fever and the fight had made me completely crazy.

Whatever it was, however you explain it, I started moving in the snowstorm after my body came to rest.

A grave lay open. The coffin was empty.

I looked at myself and saw a long dress from the olden days. Gray tatters. My hands were thin as bone. I took a deep breath and heard an empty rattle.

Before me was a stone that read SILENCE LOUD. Before me was her grave, a gaping hole.

Now deep in earth, this bed of sighs
I wait till I, like fire, shall rise.

The poem was true. She'd risen, and I'd risen, like fire. Not leaping flames, but a slow, powerful glow.

I was alive and I was her. I was me, Zee, the girl who never talked. And I was Silence too, awakened from her long sleep.

The air, swirling with snow, seemed to glow. All was peace and stillness. A beautiful silence had fallen on Mount Hope.

I was both dead and alive. Me, Zee, and she.

For a minute, or maybe an hour, I stood in the falling snow. Or maybe it was forever. Or only a second. I don't know now. It's all a brilliant blur, my memory cooked with fever and frozen by the winter air.

I stood there, we stood there. Surprised to rise. Me and she. The girl dead over a hundred years and the girl dead for five minutes.

There in the swirling snow was a black carriage and two black horses. People with black streamers on their hats and sleeves stood in a little circle. Mourners, I thought. They've come to see their Silence buried.

Mother and father, brothers and one sister. A preacher. Friends and distant relations. All there to see Silence Loud lowered into the grave.

"Wait," I said, but no one heard me. "Wait for me. I will be back someday."

Then something shifted. A deeper glow was burning in the blizzard. The people and the hearse flickered out of sight and I knew these were just Silence's last memories. Her spirit had hovered there in Mount Hope and seen her people lay her to rest.

The glow grew stronger, like a searchlight burning through heavy fog.

This brilliant fire was no memory. It was real. And it found me out.

"You," came Knacke's knife-edge whisper. He paused between every word. "You ... will ... pay ... with ... your ... life."

That almost made me laugh. What was he going to do? Kill somebody who was already dead?

I went toward him. Silence and me, together, we went bravely to meet Knacke's last eruption of fire.

Straight at him. A rickety body that had been in the ground for almost two hundred years. We swayed and tottered. But we did not fear him anymore.

He was yelling now, I suppose. Curses and threats that had no power. He had gathered his flame for one final, awful blast. It came and it hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt. But it didn't stop us, me and Silence.

We grabbed him around the neck while the flames poured out. And we closed our bony feverish hands on his windpipe. Without oxygen there is no fire. We squeezed while he burned. And then the fire was gone. Gone for good.