“Alone, maybe not. It’s a fair thought about your weans. But I was thinking, bound to be safer with two. Maggie and Bess made it through together all right coming here. It was going back alone that Maggie disappeared.”
“You made it safely here alone.”
Elspeth grinned.
“I’m just that good. Anyway, you’re forgetting this.” She pulled her collar down to reveal the scar again. Charlotteflushed. “Point is, both of us together, maybe we’d have a chance.”
They’d reached the edge of the village.
“Need help getting home the rest of the way?” Elspeth asked.
The fog clinging to the edges of Charlotte’s mind, always ready to rush in after an emotional upset or with pain or a change in the weather, thickened and threatened to spread. Nonetheless, she shook her head, thinking of the old gossip in the square saying,Shecould handle that and more if she’d try harder.
“I’m leaving first thing Saturday,” Elspeth said, “if you want to go. If you want to talk it through some more, I have a room at the pub.”
Charlotte wrinkled her nose. “The convent might’ve given you shelter, if you wanted someplace less rough.”
“I like rough.” Elspeth’s eyes glinted. “Besides, I don’t hold no truck with nuns, and they don’t hold none with me, neither.”
“Why not?”
As she had on the stoop the other day, Elspeth considered Charlotte, searching for Charlotte knew not what. Then she said, in a low voice that made Charlotte shiver, “Ran away with one once. They don’t take kindly to it when you do that.”
xvi. In which Arthur fixes a watch
Between helping Ira with chores, Arthur explored the vale for another way out, despite Ira’s insistence there wasn’t one. To his astonishment, there was hardly more to the vale than what he’d seen. The funny little tree-house with the clearing curving around three sides of it, the firepit, stone oven, well, clothesline, table, crates, stools, headstone, and flowers. The pines and brambles surrounding them, so thick and dark.
This afternoon, as Ira darned shirts with Calyx at his feet, Arthur said, “I’ll get more kindling,” and scurried outside before Ira could tell him they didn’t need more. Arthur examined the brambles for an opening through which he could slip. His cheek throbbed where they had scratched him yesterday morning.
“Mrowr?”
Freya picked her way toward him, her nose wrinkled in distaste for the snow. Arthur scooped her up and buried his face in her fur.
“We’ll get home, won’t we?”
She leaped down and wound into the thorns.
Arthur’s heart skipped a beat. “Careful!”
Only her golden eyes were visible. She chirped at him.They’re only brambles,she seemed to say, but he was so much bigger than she, and already with that scratch throbbing unnaturally on his cheek.
There. A gap in the canes. Arthur stepped into it, but the brambles tightened, grasping at him with thorny fingers. He hastily backed away, rubbing his arms with a shudder. His imagination conjured canes wrapping around him, thorns puncturing his skin.
“I can’t,” he said shrilly. “They won’t let me through.”
Freya emerged and twisted around his ankles. He scooped her up again. She settled against his shoulder, purring.
“All right. All right. There must be another way.”
He followed the brambles around until he reached his father’s grave. He touched the top of the headstone, as he’d taken to doing whenever he tramped around the clearing. Already the vale’s size wearied him; he couldn’t believe he’d ever thought the village small, with the open sea stretching to the west. Here, the only openness was the sky above. Even that felt constricting, framed in bare, black branches, eternally overcast.
Guilt plucked at him. Ira had been stuck here far longer than he had.
Still. Arthur had his family to get back to. And if he found his way out of the vale, surely Ira could leave, too.
Behind George’s grave were trees rather than brambles. Arthur stepped into their midst. He held his breath, anxious despite their lack of black ooze.
He picked his way through with the cat clutched to his chest. If they went far enough, these trees had to give way to those of the surrounding forest. Yes, those trees would drip black with strange, unsettling sap. Yes, skeletal birds would inhabit them. But they’d mean he’d escaped the vale—the first step to going home.
