And they were men and boys whose hearts were stained with blood and rust.
They were all woven from secrets they took with them into the ground.
But Estrella was drawing him back. This girl who had kept the carved wooden horses like they were her pets, and then buried one so deep it had called him to the surface.
Estrella. This girl who, in her blue dress against the green hills and the brick of the Briars’ house, had looked like a small sky. A girl catching light in the folds of her skirt.
The girl whose hands had found him in the garden valley that had once been a quarry.
She had brought him back to life.
Now her blood, searing through the ground, reached him. Her voice burrowed down to where he drifted in the dark. Her hands found his, their fingers meeting in the sand. His brushed hers, and hers felt like cords of daylight.
Her heart felt strong and desperate enough to pull him back. Her mourning for everything her family had lost went down as deep as he had fallen.
The other voices whispered to him to follow her. Theirs was a story that needed to be told, and the land wanted it spoken as much as they did. They were the immigrants, the underaged, the ones left off role sheets. And they had been caught here, in the ages they had been when they died, freed neither by being found and given burials, nor by their families hearing what had become of them, nor by the truth ever being told.
None of those things had happened, so they had all carried it for more than a hundred years.
The ground shifted. Not a storm this time. The slow crawl of a wave, like blue petals spreading.
He did not realize he still had fingers, or a body. But he was rising up from that deep place. He had been drifting down toward his brother and all those other voices the ground had taken. But now he stopped, and gave into the feeling of his body floating toward the surface. He’d been a river stone, and now he was turning to foam on a sea.
The feeling of his own lungs came sudden and hard. It felt not like coming up from underwater, but like taking back the breath he’d had before. Earth fell from his lips. It drew back from his neck. It streamed away from his body like water. It ran off him as though he was a like magnet, and the dirt was filaments skittering away. Those currents of ground knew they did not belong on him anymore.
Her hands touched his forehead, and he realized he was skin and muscle again. She was brushing earth off his eyes as he coughed it out of his throat. She was sliding a palm under his neck and saying his name.
“Breathe,” she said, and her own breath at the end of the word sounded like a whisper. “Breathe,” she said again, and this time he felt the outline of the word on his temple, her mouth on his skin.
She slid her hand under his back. At her touch, his body sparked to life, first his skin and muscle, then the worn-down places around his heart. His chest trembled with trying to get his breath back.
The moon needled his eyes. A drop of rain, hot and sudden, struck his cheek, and he blinked.
Under that sudden light, he understood. He took with him what he’d learned in the dark, both things known and questions to ask. He brought it all to the surface.
THIRTY-THREE
The ground shifted and swirled. At first, she thought the ocean of blue petals was turning to water. Then she thought it was answering her wish to become part of it. It would break her into flowers, and make her part of the earth.
The blue and violet buckled, the flashes of forget-me-not petals and borraja rippling like a pond.
She thought she was imagining him, a boy from the earth. Petals and leaves and dirt still half covered him when she made out his shape. Black hair. Skin the soft brown of bare tree branches in winter. His eyelashes like dark stars.
He seemed like a thing she had imagined. She’d spun the black of his hair out of the night sky. She’d made up the brown of his skin from the brown of her own, and her cousins’. He’d been an illusion of La Pradera, a boy crafted out of her understanding that this was a place nightmares bloomed as easily as flowers.
The ground lied to her, the way the Briars had lied about the ground with the help of her hands and so many others.
Then petals and dirt blew aside, like the wind was drawing back sheer layers of a skirt. It pulled away from this boy as fast as if it had its own current. With the thinning of the blue and brown, the colors of him were close and true, his hair and skin and the pale violet of his mouth.
The breath came back into him, each inhale a gasp, each breath out sounding like coughing. She held him, put her mouth against his skin and told him to breathe.
“I’m sorry,” she said, holding him close enough that she was speaking the words against his skin. “I’m sorry.” Her own guilt, her wish for him to believe her, put cracks in the words. “I didn’t know.”
He hadn’t opened his eyes. But his fingers caught in her hair, and with his whispered “I know,” she understood that he recognized her by her touch and her voice.
Even with his skin damp from the ground, flecked with petals she’d made, he still smelled like blue mushrooms and wild grass, like the pond with its scent that made her dream of both stone and light.
Heat prickled her eyes. The life in him was water and warmth to everything dying in her. The hope in her, a deadheaded rosebush, woke and put out new green. It pushed out buds and shuddered into full color.
Estrella blinked, and a tear’s heat and salt fell from her eyelashes. It struck the earth, and in its place a starflower broke through. It unfurled five soft-pointed pink petals. Its center held filaments of white pollen as fine as still-flaked snow.
The single flower spread into a vine, and then branched into a dozen more. Buds and leaves grew so fast the ground looked like it was bursting into blue and pink flames.
In the middle of that spreading ocean of petals, new color broke the blue and violet. Green rose up through the ground, growing into a tiny sapling. Its thin trunk wore few leaves. But it snaked into boughs and branches, and opened into flashes of color. It grew tall, and took on a willow’s wide spread.
Tiny flowers fluttered over the branches, like wings landing. But instead of cream or soft pink, they were turquoise and teal. They were gold and green and lilac.
The colors of beads she had given to the pond, along with her wish that this boy would find everything he had lost.
THIRTY-FOUR
Fel opened his eyes, still bracing against the moon and the prickling light of stars. He moved his hands, and the feeling came back to each of his fingers.
The world resolved into forms.
A tree grew from Estrella’s ocean of blue petals. The branches had the shape of cherry and almond trees in flower.