“You should stay.”
“Stay and write obituaries?” She sighed. “I shouldn’t have published it.”
“The one for your mother? And then none of us would know you were hurting,” he replied. “What would you do if you could take back the words you gave her? Continue to pretend that your life was fine while you were with us by day, even as you grieved by night? Would you even know yourself after a week had passed, a month, a year?”
“You know nothing about me,” she hissed, and she hated how much she felt his words, as if she had breathed them in. How her eyes threatened tears again, if she dared to blink. “Now, please move, Kitt.”
“Don’t go, Iris,” he said.
She had never heard him say her given name. It seeped through her like sunlight, warming her skin and her blood, and she had to glance away from him before he saw how much it affected her.
“Best of luck to you, Kitt,” she said in a voice that was far colder and smoother than she felt.
He stepped aside.
She wondered if he would grow soft now, without her here to sharpen him. She wondered if he knew it too, and that was why he was so insistent she stay.
Iris opened the door and crossed the threshold.
She left the Oath Gazette and never looked back.
{14}
Farewell to Ghosts
I wanted to write and let you know that I’m leaving. I won’t be staying in my current home after tomorrow, and I suppose the magic portal will no longer be accessible for us to communicate.
Iris paused in her typing. She stared at her wardrobe door, wondering why she was even writing to inform her mysterious correspondent. She wasn’t obligated to, but she felt like she owed it to them—him, she had learned in his last letter, when he had shared the truth of his being an older brother.
She had left the Oath Gazette that morning and gone to the undertaker, to pay for her mother’s cremation. He had given her a small jar full of ashes, and Iris decided she should go home, uncertain what else to do with them.
But she had a plan now. She was eager to leave Oath. There were too many memories, too many ghosts in these walls.
Tomorrow, she would go to the Inkridden Tribune and see if they would hire her as a war correspondent. And if they wouldn’t, perhaps the war effort would, in whatever manner it needed her. She wasn’t a fighter, but she could wash linens and cook and clean. She had two hands and she was a quick learner. Either way, she hoped it would bring her to Forest.
She returned to her typing:
Thank you for writing me back that day. For telling me about Del. I know we haven’t been corresponding for very long (or, I have been to you, but you haven’t been to me), but regardless of that … time feels different in a letter.
I’ll carry the things you shared with me into my next adventure.
Farewell.
Iris sent it through the portal before she could change her mind. She chose her outfit for tomorrow—her best skirt and blouse—and prepared for bed, trying to distract herself from how empty the flat was and how deep the shadows felt.
She waited for him to write her back, even though she told herself he probably wouldn’t. She drifted to sleep with her candle still burning. Late in the night, a loud noise woke her. Iris sat forward, heart in her throat until she realized it was someone leaving the flat below; they were laughing and guffawing and quite drunk.
It was one in the morning, and Iris blearily noticed there was a letter on her floor.
She picked it up, and she didn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t a terse:
May I ask where you’re going?
It struck her as odd.
They had both chosen to withhold their identities, and while they had never discussed any further boundaries of their correspondence, Iris had surmised location fell under the also-keep-this-secret part of their relationship.
She decided she wouldn’t answer him, and she folded up his final letter and stuck it with the others she had kept, bound with a ribbon.
Her faithful candle extinguished at last, burning itself out.
Iris couldn’t fall asleep in the dark.
She stared into its vastness, listening to the sounds of the city beyond her window, the creaks of the walls. It was strange to her—how close she could be to people and yet how far away and lonely she felt. How the night made things feel more poignant and desperate.
I should have gone looking for her. I shouldn’t have just sat here at the flat, waiting. If I had found her, she would still be alive.
The guilt threatened to choke her. She had to sit forward and tell herself to breathe—breathe—because it felt like she was drowning.
She was up at first light, ready to wash the remorse from her eyes. She didn’t think curled hair and lipstick would matter for a war correspondent, but she prepared herself the best she could, thinking she didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
That was when another letter arrived over her threshold.
She stared at it a long moment, wondering if she should read it. She left it untouched as she packed her things in her mother’s battered valise. She chose to take her favorite set of trousers, a summer dress, stockings, a few blouses, and a handkerchief for her hair. She also included the letters from her mystery correspondent, her grandmother’s favorite volume of poetry, the jar with her mother’s ashes, carefully sealed, and Forest’s trench coat, since the days had finally become too warm for a jacket.
She was leaving far too many things behind, but Iris told herself that she should only carry that which had meaning to her. And even if she did achieve the impossible and was assigned to report on the war, would they let her carry so much?
She almost took the crinkled copy of the Inkridden Tribune, with the smeared eithral. But she decided to leave it on her desk, folded and face-down.
There was one more thing she wanted.
She walked into the living room, where she had left the box of her mother’s things, untouched since the night she had brought them home. Iris sifted through them now, until she found the flash of gold. The chain and the locket that her mother had worn every day since Forest left.
Iris clasped it around her neck, tucking it beneath the fabric of her blouse. It was cold against her skin, and she laid her palm over it. She knew what hid within the locket: a small portrait of her, and a small portrait of Forest. She could care less about her own face, but her brother’s … she prayed it would guide her to him, now. And Iris hadn’t prayed in a very long time.
The last thing she needed was her typewriter.
She found its box in her wardrobe, carefully stepping around the letter that still sat on the floor, and she packed the typewriter and the remaining paper and ink ribbons she had. The box was a hard case, with two brass locks and a wooden handle. She carried it in one hand, her valise in the other, surveying her bedroom for the final time.