Sitting cross-legged next to him, I spread my skirt over my knees. I slid the fabric under Matthew’s head, taking care not to touch him, and eventually shimmied it up into my lap.
“There,” I whispered, my lips so close that had he been in his right mind I’m sure he would have felt my breath. “That’s more comfortable, isn’t it?”
Confined by my folded legs, the head thrashing slowed, then ceased altogether. Some hair had jostled out over Matthew’s forehead, prickling up against his eye, and I regretted not having had the presence of mind to grab gloves from my bag before going to him.
“Rafe?” I let out a hoarse whisper, the loudest I could manage without using my full voice. Unsure of how long I had slept, I didn’t know how long we’d been out here, how long Rafe had been gone. I heard no response. I called again, and louder. Still nothing.
Matthew’s breath was slowing, the moaning stopped.
“We told you to let the mechanic take care of it,” I whispered. That wayward lock of hair was sopping, more brown than it was gold.
Dread settled as a weight in my chest, making my limbs heavy, pulling me down. I felt that we were sinking, that the sky was widening and growing ever farther away.
“Rafe!” I called out, almost screaming. “Rafe!”
Then Matthew was no longer breathing at all. A reddish liquid dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes rolled back, showing just their moony whites. His forehead shone with sweat. His jaw was clenched, his shoulders shuddering, each seizure striking my body as I tried to hold him still.
And so I did the only thing I could. Steeling myself, feeling an aching in my chest, I swept my fingertips across Matthew’s forehead, combing the hair back from his face. At my touch I felt his body cool, grow stiff. I took a breath.
There had been very few times in my life that I had touched another person. In recent memory, there was nothing: Matthew was the first since I’d been made to understand my father’s rules. I waited several long seconds before reaching back down, savoring the sweet anticipation, knowing I might never touch bare skin again. Finally I pressed two of my fingers to a lymph node in his neck, holding them there until I felt his pulse.
Matthew’s eyes fluttered closed. His chest rose with breath.
My body was numb; I felt as if the blood had all drained out of me. “Thank goodness,” I whispered. I tucked the jacket around Matthew, whose color had softened, who mumbled in his sleep. Strange, I thought, that I could see him so clearly. Had a cloud unleashed the moon?
It had not. I turned and found myself in the beam of a truck’s headlights, saw Rafe climbing down from the passenger’s-side door. A woman sat in the driver’s seat, her face in shadow.
“Maisie!” Rafe ran to me. “What happened? When we pulled up, I could have sworn Matthew had . . . it looked like he was . . .”
I could have kissed him, and squeezed my fingers to fists to keep from reaching for his hand.
“The engine sparked,” I said slowly. “There was a small electrocution. It was frightening, but I think he’ll be all right.”
The woman came to join us, surveying Matthew and his car.
“Not much to do out here, tonight,” she said. “In the morning we can call and get you towed, find out what we’ll have to do to fix you. I can bring you three back with me, give you a place to pass the night, but if you need a hospital, that’s different. Have to push on toward the city, several hours.”
“We don’t,” Matthew croaked, sitting up blearily.
I considered protesting, insisting we get Matthew to a doctor, but I knew that I had cured him, and to press the issue further would raise questions that I did not want unearthed. Unless he already suspected, there was no way for Rafe to know what he had seen, to understand what had happened with Matthew. Still, I felt suddenly exposed.
Matthew was stretching, yawning, circling his right wrist. I caught a flash of his confusion, saw the moment that he brushed it away. When he stood, he lacked balance, and Rafe offered his arm. I stayed put.
“Can we keep the car here, overnight?” Matthew asked, accepting Rafe’s arm without acknowledging its source. “No harm will come to it?”
“Not with the hood still smoking. Not if you lock it up tight.”
Matthew nodded. His eyes shot again to his wrist as he flexed it, then to the woman.
“I’ll have an estimate tomorrow,” she said. “Find out how much repairs will cost you, how long repairs will be.”
The Ceremonials
This is what we’ll do,” says Lucy. The other women gather around her, looking every so often in the direction of the black-eyed girl’s clearing, some hundred yards away. Equally nervous and excited. “There is a ritual,” says Lucy. “A drowning. I learned of it in a sacred book—an old tradition from the east, a way to end the winter, welcome summer and spring. Perhaps a way to let the wood know that we’re ready to end our long season here. A way to strengthen our daughter.”
Mary, focused, nodding. Emma curious. Imogen frightened. Kathryn sucking on an index finger. Helen, perpetually dazed.
“The drowning of death,” says Alys. All turn to her, surprised to hear her speak. Lucy’s eyes widen. She cannot know her sacred book was authored by Alys’s cousin Madenn, that the ritual she speaks of was carried thousands of miles across mountains and sea by great-grandmothers, brought south with settlers, north with Alys’s mother’s marriage.
“The drowning of death,” Lucy repeats. “We make an effigy, immerse it, and in doing so we bid farewell to old seasons, we welcome in the new.”
“A poppet?” asks Imogen, shuddering at the word, the mere mention of which, in her former life, led women to the pyre. “Of the girl?”
“A poppet of death.” Lucy frowns at her. “Not of the child.”
But Imogen knows that death and the black-eyed girl are one and the same.
“What about the other girl?” asks Kathryn. “The living one. Will we be drowning her too?”
“We aren’t drowning anyone,” says Lucy. “It’s symbolic.”
“Well, if it’s just symbolic, then what will it do?” Helen asks.
Helen is the last of the women from whom Lucy expects argument. She squeezes her eyes shut, exasperated, and speaks very slowly, as if addressing a child.
“It’s a sign, like a prayer, to the gods or to nature. We banish death, we banish winter, we banish whatever force has kept our woodland daughter silent and still for so long.”
“But just the other day Mary saw her take that—” Emma begins.
“Enough,” says Lucy. “Will you join me?”
Helen looks to Alys, who is silent. Mary will, of course; the steady spaniel always loyal to her mistress. Kathryn loves change, any excitement. Emma likes the idea of crafting a doll. Imogen likes the idea of destroying a doll, the possibility that this could be the black-eyed girl’s destruction. Helen waits to see what Alys will say before deciding.
It stirs a strange melancholy for Alys to hear her family’s rituals distilled thus by Lucy. The spring before the soldiers took the river—that spring which, centuries ago, preceded this eternal summer—Alys and the women of her clan had brought their own effigy to the water, welcoming the changing season, celebrating the turn from death to rebirth. What that ritual actually did now seems irrelevant—whether it was Alys impacting the river and the season, or the season indelibly marking Alys, does not matter. That she took action, that she noticed and honored each differing sensation, that she loved the land, her body—that was the resurrection. That was what the land desired, what it deserved.
Alys nods. She’ll follow Lucy. She’ll make communion with her family one last time.
15