I wanted to reach out for him, but he was a part of me, and I, him. We weren’t separate. And we weren’t alone.
The strid had gone eerily quiet, its own memories a background murmur, as though it had slipped into ours, watching the film of our lives through two separate cameras.
Then the strid started to speak. Not in words, but in images. It showed me a family fetching buckets of water from the spring. Bathing in the waters in the summer while an elderly woman took her shoes off and sat on the banks to dip her feet in. (She loved summer best because the smell of the apple orchards reminded her of her first love, who picked the perfect apple for her before every date.) It showed me a curious child picking up stones and washing them in the water to examine how they sparkled and what colors they revealed. (He had a friend he shared his collection with.) It showed me a man getting down on one knee to propose to the woman his parents didn’t want him to marry. (He’d loved her ever since witnessing her cheer and entertain a stranger’s crying child on the bus because she could tell the child’s mother needed a break.)
It was a flood of memories that weren’t mine or Kessian’s. They belonged to Shearwater, and these memories grew more and more sparse as time wore on, as people visited the spring less, or only came because they wanted something from it. It wasn’t that the photographs they took to show their friends were all vapid or meaningless. It wasn’t that the people of before didn’t have their share of misery. (The couple who’d gotten engaged had struggled to conceive, the woman who loved summer had lost the lover who gave her apples to a heart attack, and the little boy with his rock collection got bullied relentlessly in school.) It wasn’t that people didn’t laugh or play or fall in love anymore. It was just that they did so for a day, maybe a season, maybe a year, and then they left. And the strid never saw them again.
It had loved them all, however briefly, but it had never learned how to say goodbye.
I thought about kissing the stars on Kessian’s skin and wishing we had more time. How “goodbye” had been the universal conclusion to all myone-night stands and passing fancies, all his long-term love affairs. How one momentous goodbye from my only family had made me afraid of any more, afraid to let Kessian in, and he the same with me. We’d nearly driven each other away.
I didn’t know how to convey that to the strid. As usual, I fought for the right words. I despaired that I might fail for lack of eloquence when a soft voice touched my mind, soothing me and the strid both.
Kessian said,I understand. I miss Tal like you miss everyone. But nothing stays the same forever. Time doesn’t stop passing just because we found a moment so good we want to make it eternal. We have to make our own hearts a home if we have any hope of someone choosing to stay. I am in a constant state of renovation; the brick and mortar I thought I was made of was actually thatch and cob. There are rooms I’ve never explored, doors I’ve never opened, and I might find things in there that force me to knock down walls, or which aren’t fit for the people who once found shelter with me. And I’m no better at letting them go. I’m not. But nobody calls a pair of shackles their home.
So let them go. If we’re good and a little lucky, they might come back.
Let go, the strid repeated. Where its song always sounded like white water, now it had the quiet murmur of a brook. Contemplative and a little afraid.
I had to say something, too. If Kessian could teach it to let go, I could teach it how to stay, or at least how not to run.
I spent years moving from place to place, never putting down roots. Every person I’d meet, I had to wonder what might have been. I’d invent a whole life for myself with a boy I spotted reading my favorite book at a café. I’d watch groups at the pub who’d known each other since they were in nappies and ask myself who I’d be if I’d never left Shearwater. I resented every day you kept me from attending events where I might have met my new best friend. I had Lunaris, and I had myself. And then I had Kessian. There were a thousand and one different Tals I could have been before him, but I’m this one now. And I choose him.
Making a home isn’t about everything staying the same. You grow, and things change, and you get to know people for an hour or a lifetime, but the one constant is you. The real you.
And we know this isn’t you.
The strid weakly resisted the sentiment, but where before its own memories had chipped away at mine, I could now sense ours had turned the tide. In the spring, we were a creature of shadow and time, but the shadows were slowly filtering away. Wrung out of us like dirt from a rag.
The strid’s resistance faltered. It flowed through our memories—the ones Kessian and I had made together.
Let go, it repeated.Not running away.
As the last bit of oily poison was drawn out of us, I felt myself split, until I was singular instead of plural. For one petrifying moment, I thought I’d lost Kessian. I couldn’t sense his thoughts, couldn’t dive into his memories, but then I opened my eyes.
We were underwater. Really underwater. Kessian floated in front of me, eyes fluttering open, and unlike the unreality of the timestream, we were in our bodies. Ourrealbodies. And we couldn’t breathe.
I grabbed him by the hand and kicked. We broke the surface together, coughing and dragging in each breath. Morning light glistened off the ripples of the pool, no longer mirror black, but the phosphorescent blue of life and magic.
We swam for shore and collapsed on our backs, squinting into the sun.
I needed a way to tell if this was a dream, a memory, the Bloodstream, or neither.
“Say something to make this real,” I said. “Something to prove I’m not dreaming.”
He rolled over, brow scrunched in thought, but his expression quickly changed as he looked across the garden toward the house, to the sound of voices coming nearer. I sat up, too.
My family hurried up the cobbled path to the spring. They looked sleepless, red-nosed and puffy-eyed, all of them, except Marlowe, who was not in their number.
At the front of their band was Laurelie.
It should have made everything less real. I couldn’t bring myself to believe the strid had released so many of us, but I remembered crawling up onto the banks and watching her reunite with the family she hadn’t seen in nine years.
Kessian said, “It’s not a dream. We’re home.”
Epilogue
With the last of my cooking pans packed up, Lunaris’s kitchen looked unnervingly empty, nothing like the place I’d called home for the past nine years.
