A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 41

Rain

When I returned to Manor Dorn, Tanen was gone.

"He just...left, minda," Letta told me, a deep sadness in her eyes, where she was tending Victoria on a stool in the kitchen. The girl seemed to be suffering from an array of minor cuts and bruises.

The sadness in Letta's eyes was too deep to be merely about Tanen leaving, and so I concluded that she knew about Ombri. Victoria looked positively miserable as well – in a way that went far past the misery of a few cuts and bruises. She stared at the cabinets, unseeing, as Letta dabbed at a puckered scrape on her collarbone.

"I just wanted to see for myself..." she murmured, and in her voice I heard the same numb brokenness that I had felt myself.

"And no one can blame you for that," Letta assured her gently "You'd been smothered in this old house too long, hearing the rumors, your imagination encouraged to run wild. That will drive a person mad. There is nothing you could have done about the shift. The city will shift when and how it pleases, and there is nothing to be done by anyone. Avante can attest to that." She glanced at me as she said this, prompting my confirmation.

For Victoria's sake, I gave it; "She's right. No one can anticipate such things, or thwart them once in motion." No one except the girl who was dead and gone to us, who could ride a shift any day, when she wasn't diving into the midst of one to save another's life.

Feeling so very old and tired in the wake of my wracking grief, I turned away slowly, numb again, and went to lay down on my pallet. It was strange, lying on it in the daytime; I had never rested, except in the case of being sick, when light still shone outdoors. There was always too much to be done. We worked all day and slept at night. It was just the undying way of things.

But today – today was different. I lay there, feeling like everything had stopped. Like it didn't matter if we picked vegetables today or tomorrow. After all, they would still be there tomorrow. But some things...some things wouldn't. And because of that, I had little appetite anyway. I didn't imagine any of us would be all that eager to dine this day.

*

Tanen did not return that night, and no one spoke of him. We didn't speak of anything, really. We gathered at the end of the day on our pallets, everyone solemn and in his own separate world of coping. I lay awake, as I'm sure the others did too, and let my mind wander back and forth between numbness and relapses of silent grief.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm sure the thought occurred to me that all hope of saving Tanen was gone with him, but I no longer had the heart to fight for that cause anyway. It was just gone – all drive sapped out of me on that front. I could not think of him, when Ombri was dead.

Both of them were dead to me, now.

Sometime, in the wee hours of the morning, I drifted off into a head-achy sleep at last. And in my dreams: nothing. Pure oblivion, a product of soul-tired weariness.

And when I awoke – it was raining.

It hadn't rained in years.

*

I stood on the porch, sheltered by the second story eaves, as the sky cried around us – watching it all come down as if it had been pent-up all this time. My breath fogged into the cold, humid air, as the moisture of the heavens pelted the land. It fell in thick, straight sheets; all you could see, that morning, was rain.

Rain.

Rain.

Rain.

It whispered, and pattered, and applauded – a steady rush that didn't let up.

It was enrapturing, this novelty we had been deprived of for so long, suddenly letting loose, the floodgates opened. It would have been a disregard to my nature to stay on that porch for long, when I could be out in it.

I was soaked in an instant, one step away from the house. It hammered me with saturation, blankets of icy downpour that ran in rivulets down my body, sticking my clothes to my skin. I even felt it in my corset, seeping between brace and flesh.

Into the obscured field I wandered, closing my eyes to let the droplets race off my lashes, extending my arms palm-up, letting that rain pour through my fingers.

I felt more in that rain than I could ever put into mortal words.

It was gods shedding tears (in their own way). It was a current of cleansing. It was a quenching drink for a thirsty land. It was sadness, and newness, and pureness. Liquid miracle. New lifeblood to everything shriveled. Old sadness finally let go. It was spring, and winter, and another season – a new season – that didn't have a name. It was all the tears I had ever wanted to cry, even those I hadn't been aware of, shed by the gods so I didn't have to, poured out to wash me, to rinse the land of its bad taste. To make new things grow. To purge fresh the stale air. To soften the hardened, jaded ground.

It rained, and rained, and rained.

And I sat out beneath that cloudburst, and drank it up – half-drowned, and elated, and renewed. Sullied and muddied and cleansed.