“Maisie? What—Who are you?” he whispers.
The black-eyed girl strokes his cheek, harvesting a teardrop, pressing her finger to his forehead, gently traveling down the bridge of his nose to reach his lips. She takes Matthew’s mind, helps the wood empty his troubles. She welcomes him across the border. Says, “Hush.”
Part
VI
29
Forward only, never back. Do not, in your mind, keep a tally of past horrors. Do not question decisions that cannot be unmade, dwell on actions that cannot be undone. The power to equivocate is no power at all, and that you’ve ever thought it to be is your weakness.
RETURNING TO THE shadow forest proved more complicated than the woodland women led me to believe. I killed several trees, and brought them back when they did not make me an entrance. I knelt in supplication, asked for mercy at the top of my voice. I debated going back to the house and asking Lucy for instructions, looking for the old book she had mentioned, but the thought of Urizon unbridled—overcome by the wilderness I’d found upon my homecoming—was too much to fathom. Eventually I saw nothing else to do but follow Marlowe through the wood until he sat down, expectant, at the foot of a wide-spanning elder.
Marlowe had opened the forest before, after burying Mrs. Blott’s shinbone. Perhaps I needed a similar sacrifice, a gift for the wood. Marlowe had brought it a piece of a body. What had I to give? A bit of fingernail? An offering of blood?
I was prepared to unwrap my bandage and reopen my wound when a thought struck me, and I rifled through the pocket of my jacket. There, as I had suddenly been certain it would be, nestled up against the stitching, was the blade of grass I’d plucked my first time through the shadow forest. Even after all these months, it was still green.
I knelt and dug a shallow hole in the dirt at the base of the elder, careful not to brush against its roots. I kissed my blade of grass, set it on the ground, covered it with a layer of displaced soil. I closed my eyes, reached out to Marlowe, and took a deep breath. I opened them to find that nothing had happened.
Frustrated, I kicked at the dirt I’d displaced, which then blew up in a gust against the tree. A sneeze that I recognized came from somewhere deep within the elder’s twisted trunk. A voice grumbled, as if recently awakened.
“Peter?” I whispered, incredulous.
“Maisie.” It was his voice, wry, tinged with humor. “Forgive me, darling, I suppose I’d drifted off. It’s fine to see you, though I fear we’re in a spot.”
I wanted to laugh, so familiar was his diction, so expected his response. Could he see me? If I looked straight on ahead, I saw the elder. And yet . . . If I turned to just the right angle, I could find my father, trapped within the trunk.
“Peter? Is that really you?”
“Maisie, my girl,” said Peter, “I’m here.”
And then I laughed aloud, startling Marlowe, and had to restrain myself from clinging to a tree branch. The weight of what was waiting in the wood fell away. The pressure of the past few months, my overwhelming emptiness and fear, all seemed to fade in Peter’s presence.
“You don’t know how much I’ve missed you.” My words tumbled out, and in a rush I told him everything: the spiral paths, my double, falling into Rafe’s trap and fighting out of it, the resurrected horses, Matthew’s capture. Like a lapsed Catholic returning to confession, I named my sins—even the sparrow I’d let loose at age eleven—and knew my father could pardon them.
“I’m so sorry for all of it—the day I ran from Mrs. Blott’s house, the cat. All those years when I was angry. You were right, and now it’s my fault that you’re in here, that it all—”
“Maisie,” Peter stopped me, “don’t apologize, my darling. There was no way to know. None of us could have known.”
“Known what?” I frowned. “Known all this? That there really was a curse? That I came from it?”
“Any of it, darling. What had happened, what will happen.” I climbed up on a root to see my father’s eyes, strange and squinting without glasses, and was shocked to find that they were filled with tears.
“Well, I know what’s going to happen,” I said. I had found Peter quickly, and was confident the rest of my journey would fare equally well. Peter was here to protect me, and with his blessing, I knew I was invincible. “We’ll get you out of this tree, go rescue Matthew, stop the shadow girl, and go home.”
“No, my dear. We won’t,” said Peter, his voice softer than usual, tinged with regret.
“But we can! I know we can.”
“You can, Maisie. And you will. But you’ll do so without me.”
I’d spent sixteen years obeying Peter’s instructions, trusting his assertions. Even while I knew him flawed in myriad small ways, he had always stood heroic in his brilliance—both parent and deity at once as he plotted my life’s course and steered me straight. Now he spoke with the same certainty he might when insisting it was long past my bedtime, that I could not join the villagers in celebration, that the soup I was about to slurp was far too hot.
“Don’t be silly,” I said, my tone optimistic, but brittle. “I’m sure we can get you out of here. I’ll find an axe. Or touch the right spot on the tree trunk. It could be a matter of a pressure point, pulling the right branch. Certainly something in a book you’ve read can tell us what to do? I can run back to the library right now. I’ll be so quick you’ll hardly know I’ve gone. What should I bring you?”
“Maisie,” said Peter, “all of the books would bring us to the same conclusion: I will stay here, and you will go help Matthew. You’ll finish this, go back to live a full life at Urizon.”
“But there is no life without you!” I could hear myself nearly shouting in frustration. This made no sense at all. We’d only just found one another, and now Peter was asking me to leave him. When was he ever so defeatist? How could he be so sure? “If you’re staying here, I’ll stay with you. Me and Marlowe. We’ll stay, too.”
“Nothing could sadden me more than to see you waste your potential.”
“No.”
“It would be worse than any death to see you sacrifice your future, have you end your journey here.”
“No.”
“I like to think I’ve taught you well, my dear. I trust you. You’ll take up the Cothay mantle, and I know you’ll do it proud.”
“No.”
“And what of Matthew? You’re the only one who can save him.”
He had me there. Must I choose between Matthew and Peter? I remembered standing in Mrs. Blott’s kitchen all those months ago, looking from one to the other. I’d wanted neither, in that moment. Now I knew I needed both.
“I’ll come back for you,” I promised, “when it’s over. When Matthew is safe and I’ve found my shadow double or whatever she is and—”
“Maisie,” said Peter, “the wood requires a sacrifice to enter. Let that sacrifice be me.”
“I can’t. I can’t do it. It’s not fair. I need you.”
“Are you afraid?” Peter asked the question simply, as if back home in the nursery-turned-lab, asking me how a sip of orange juice tasted on my tongue. As if I were five years old, with my tangly hair and my large, solemn eyes, fidgeting at the edge of my seat while he flipped through his notebook. Tart, you say? And also sweet?
Afraid? Of course I was afraid. But of what? Did I fear what waited for me, there in the shadows? More fearsome was the thought of continuing, of living on with no one to guide me, of being alone with my destruction, day after lengthening day.
“Don’t be afraid, my girl,” said Peter. “I am not afraid at all. You are a marvelous young woman, the best of my life’s work.”