Now I’d confirmed I could go back in time, I knew the event I needed to circumvent would come in only a few minutes, and as if sensing my resolve, the Keepers appeared before me.
“You understand what you must do?”
“I think so.”
“Then come with us.”
They led me away from Lunaris, to the spring where it all began, ended, began again in an endless loop. I stood at the edge with just my toes in the water.
“A word of caution: Resentment is contagious, and the wraith has many years of it.”
“So do I.”
“Yes. And you must let go of it and convince it to do the same.”
“I will.” I had to. I wasn’t losing anyone else.
“Time has a tricky way of making the foulest memories far stickier than the ones that make us smile. If we can impart any wisdom, it is to be most at home in yourself, so you do not give in to that sick tide.”
“I will be.” But my heart beat a little faster. Did I know how?
“Then go,” said the Keepers.
While we’d spoken, the glassy surface of the spring rippled. The tines of each antler emerged first, the wraith’s head just above water, elongated like a horse’s skull. It stared at me. It waited.
I took a step closer, though my instincts railed against it. It had attacked me so many times, it was more unnerving to see it still. As I got closer, it twitched its head like an animal chafing against its chains, water softly splashing, but it didn’t lunge or give chase, so I pushed forward until I floated before it, treading water and summoning words, though I didn’t know if it understood me.
“I’m here to cleanse the poison.”
The water rippled with a vibration. It beat against me like it was blood throbbing through vessels. A heartbeat. Its song was still filled with all the fury from before, but I was more attuned to its pain. Perhaps because I hurt, too, fearing for Kessian and what would become of us if I failed.
The wraith circled me, its shadows leaving ink trails in the water. I tried not to flinch as it swept behind me.
In my ears, the strid sang,Come home, come home, please come home.
My home wasn’t just a place, but Shearwater had indelibly carved its initials into me, and I tried to let it in. Tried to sympathize with the wildmagic that fed off of ephemeral, ever-changing things likebelongingandfamilyandacceptance.
The wraith sensed my willingness to help like a wasp seeking out a crevice in the wall in which to make a hive. I tried not to flinch as its claws wound around my throat, tilting my head back.
It blotted out the stars in the sky before it split apart. The shadows swarmed over me, into my nose and mouth, blotting out my vision. I felt myself sucked underwater, engulfed inside the wraith, my consciousness melting with its own.
In that cavernous nothing, there was only the rabbiting of my heart and the strange, breathless expanse of the water around me.
Then came a torrent of memory. Not my own, but the strid’s. Countless people dipping their toes in its waters, hoping to steal a glimpse of the future. Staying for an hour or a weekend, departing, the strid never knowing if that future came to pass. The endless cycle of faces, so few of which it ever saw again. So few who were familiar. So few who cared enough to wonder if the magic spring wasn’t exhausted, lonely, and lost.
It hated them. It hated how they squatted in homes that were otherwise empty through fall and winter. It hated how they treated its magic like a novelty, a trick. Where were the ones who said a prayer to the wild? Where had the family gone, who’d lived here six generations? Seven? And of the ones who stayed, how many had happy stories to tell? So many splintered because all the flats were for bed-and-breakfasts. Families hung drawn and quartered until Shearwater was less a home than a hotel. Everyone it loved had left or no longer loved it back. All those people it could no longer see. People like me. They’d gone far from here, where the strid’s waters couldn’t reach, couldn’t see.
It had gone blind. The power of time and memories was only so marvelous when you got to see how the stories ended.
The viciousness of its resentment sucked me under, tumbling me in the undertow. I recognized these feelings, this desire to keep someone in a cage for fear they’ll fly away. I’d hesitated to bare my heart to Kessian for fear he’d break it. Kessian had pushed me away for fear I’d leave.
I tried to call out to the strid, press back with my own memories.
People change, people leave, but sometimes they come back. I came back. If you cling too tightly, you’ll choke the life out of them, and their loved oneswill grow to hate you, and the ones who depend upon you for their livelihoods no longer can. Some of what’s happened isn’t because the world is ever-changing and unfair, it’s because you frightened people too much for them to find a home in you.
I didn’t know if it was my blood pounding in my ears or the strid’s. I waited in that vast nothing for some answer, some indication the strid understood what I meant. A part of me hoped I’d gotten through to it, but I was in the past, and I knew what the future held.
Without warning, the strid lashed out at me with its own rebuttal of memories. Dad’s skull opened against the rock wall of the strid. He’d worked so hard most days, there weren’t enough memories of us together to overshadow that one. Laurelie wishing him back to life and drowning in Marlowe’s greed. Traveling from one town to another with an open road and an empty heart. Kessian kissing me one last time and not knowing it was goodbye. That moment he turned his back on me to walk into the spring carved my heart open.
