“Wait,” she said, the word a command. “Even if... even if you were right, some kind of answers are more than we’ve got.”
I’d known we all handle grief in our own ways. At first we’d searched for Mairi together, until all sign of her turned dusty and blew away and the space between us that had opened when her letters stopped coming grew from our hearts to physical. After, well, I’d come here to Last Hope, to the edge of living, waiting for the train to bring our baby’s soul to the next world. Morning and evening, for years I’d made my way to the platform to watch the ghosts of the newly dead shuffle past until my heart broke from waiting alone in silence and disappointment too many times.
I had known my wife would keep looking, but I’d thought that our endless argument of fault and recrimination wouldn’t be the end of everything, that she’d eventually realize some things had no answers. I’d thought she’d come back to me when she had accepted things how they were, and not how she wished they’d be.
But Raina... she’d kept going, straight to where the living should not go. She’d made a deal with Death and taken on the mantle of a Reaper, destined to hunt the earth retrieving wayward souls and escaped demons. Mairi’s name wasn’t on the scrolls, her soul unrecorded. So Raina searched, convinced our baby lived. Leaving me alone to bake away my grief and go on living. Go on waiting for all the empty parts of myself to scab over in time.
She stood on my porch, this woman I’d loved like my own heartbeat, two feet, a screen door, and ten years of pain between us, and repeated the words that would always break my heart even as I turned back to face her.
“I need you, Cassidy,” she said softly. “There’s places I can’t go, people don’t like to talk to me so much. Help me find her. Please.”
Distant thunder rolled, the storm’s far-off power licking along my skin with teasing promise. Wind rushed through the dry branches and rattled the screen like old bones.
“Give me a few minutes,” I said. “I’ll put some things together.”
“Pack light, we’re going on horseback and it’s far.”
I almost asked how far, but realized it didn’t matter. Raina had come back to me, and though I knew only grief lay down this hollow road, she was maybe a little right about one thing. This had to be finished, for both of us, one way or another.
I traded my skirt for jeans and my slippers for boots. A spare shirt and socks in my bag. Needle and thread, candles, salt, and a small box with shavings of oak, rowan, and ash followed. As a last-minute decision, I put the butterscotch blondies into a tin and packed that. I tied my braids up and put a kerchief over them. I checked the windows one last time and then I was out of delay.
“Almost thought you’d changed your mind,” Raina said as she leaned against the porch railing.
I locked the door behind me. “Where are the horses?” The gravel driveway was empty. In the distance the shapes of the town buildings grew indistinct as the herald wind kicked up summer dust. I took a deep breath and could almost taste the petrichor, though no rain had yet fallen.
Raina whistled and a cold tide of power washed over me. My ears popped as the biggest horse I’d ever seen melted into existence from the shadows beneath the spreading oak shading my little house. Its coat was black as ink, its eyes burning red like live coals, and its hooves struck sparks from the gravel as the horse danced up to Raina. It yanked her hat off her head and for a moment my heart stopped as her hair, waves of glorious rich black and silver curls, tumbled free of its twist.
I had no right, but I was secretly, selfishly glad she hadn’t cut it.
“What’s his name?” I asked, making myself walk toward them.
“She, and she’s got none,” Raina said, pulling her hair back into a knot before she jammed her retrieved hat back over it.
“Every horse should have a name,” I said, tentatively reaching a hand out to stroke the horse’s cold velvet nose.
“She’s a Nightmare,” Raina muttered. I raised my eyebrows and she added, “Hat Destroyer has a ring to it, I suppose. Be careful of your braids, she eats those, too.”
Power, cold and foreign to my own, played down my hand. Neither painful nor pleasant, but the mare snorted when I pulled my fingers away. I risked another gentle stroke.
“What’s in this? Rocks?” Raina asked as she stuffed my bag into her own saddlebags.
“Butterscotch blondies,” I said. “You wanted a hearth witch, you are getting a hearth witch,” I added when she shook her head at me.
Raina leapt effortlessly into the saddle and then extended her hand.
She still hadn’t told me where we were going, but I looked at her outstretched hand, the same hand that had rubbed my swollen feet when I was pregnant, that had lifted our daughter up whenever she fell, and had held me through all our darkest nights save the last. Her strong fingers that had intertwined with mine a thousand times, and I figured, what was one more. I crossed the distance between us and let her pull me up.
Raina warned me that “she goes fast, hang on,” and that was all I got before the Nightmare took off at a smooth but terrifying gallop. My arms went around Raina’s narrow waist before I could stop myself, but I let go and grabbed for loose ties on the saddle to steady myself before she could say a word. I kept my eyes fixed on her back after a stomach-dropping glance to the landscape rushing by in a blur.
We were going too quickly to talk; the wind created by our speed would have whipped the words away. I gritted my teeth in frustration but decided to focus on staying on the Nightmare and not losing my breakfast. The ride gave me far too much time to chew over the past as memories I’d thought well-buried churned to the surface.
Mairi had taken after me in her magic, her love of living creatures great and small, of gardening. Also in her eyes, the color if not the texture of her hair, and the shape of her nose. But in all else, height, loose curls, and bullheaded desire to get her own way, she’d taken after Raina.
Mairi had left home at seventeen. Raina had wanted to go after her, but I’d stopped her. Mairi was like one of Raina’s mustangs; I worried that if we tried too hard to tie her down, we’d lose her worse. I thought we could let her run and feel out the world a little, that then she’d come home when the money ran out and she realized that being alone wasn’t freedom.
The letters started coming a few months after she left and they had felt like vindication for me while soothing Raina’s anger. Mairi had joined a traveling carnival, working with the horses and learning acrobatics. She wrote detailed and funny accounts of her new friends, of the carnival life, and always at the end expressed that she loved us both and was glad we hadn’t done, in her words, anything too rash about her leaving.
The letters might have calmed Raina, but I could see now, with the gift of a decade of heartache and self-recrimination, that the rift between us had started when our daughter left. Tiny stress fractures in what we’d always thought was a solid foundation. Mairi was careful to never mention places or too many names; she used nicknames for everyone, even the horses. She wanted to assure us she was fine, but she was wary of us dragging her home.
