Page 59 of Tomb of Ancients
“You saved your folk, gave them a chance,” Dalton wheezed, a thick clot of blood dribbling down his chin. “That’s what I wanted. We never let them have that before. You will say goodbye to Fathom? The safe house,” he said at last, “I want it to be hers.”
A muddled groan came from behind us, and Dalton’s head turned toward the sound. “Father—”
But there was no more, the last word pulled everything out of him. There were no eyes to stare or close, but I felt him go, felt the last shuddering breath that rustled the grass. Gently, I let his head fall back into the green carpet of the courtyard, and then laid the bandage once more over his face, folding his arms one at a time across his chest.
Mother had not spoken until then, but her spirit whispered to me now.
One kiss to the moon, one bow to the sun
A gift of flowers to where the wild deer run
That is all that is asked, when our day is done
I repeated the prayer to Dalton, knowing it was what Mother had used to send restless souls to their repose. And then it seemed the wind took him, and all at once he was a riot of yellow butterflies and light.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Awren fell out of the nest once outside my dormitory window at Pitney. Jenny and I puzzled over what to make of it, neglecting our mandatory exercises. Neither of us cared much for taking turns about the lawn to keep the bloom in our cheeks, and so instead we hid behind a solid oak and debated what to do with the dazed bird.
“We could knock it on the head and put it in Francine’s bed,” Jenny suggested.
It was creative but nonetheless cruel. To the bird, obviously. Francine could go soak. “I’m not sure I can bring myself to kill it.”
“The nest is awfully high. We might fall and break a leg trying to put it back.”
Jenny was reasonableandcreative. It was part of why I liked her, and why we had become fast friends. Perhaps also we had become friends because we were the only two girls at Pitney who would spend time considering whether or not to shove dead birds into a rival’s bedclothes. Francine and the rest would never consider something so vulgar, but they had not grown up in the shit-stained slums. Their distant family still wanted them in some regard, and they simply awaited their return to place them as a governess or to offer them off to some random lad as marriage material.
“If we leave it, then a fox will come,” Jenny added.
“But isn’t that what would have happened if we had never found it?” I asked. I dropped the stick that might have been used as a tool of execution. The wren twitched, little feet kicking helplessly. “We never notice the bird. The fox comes. The fox eats the bird. If we cannot decide anything productive, then I believe we should let nature take its course.”
Jenny presented no compelling alternative, and so we left the bird behind the tree and returned to our vigorous walking. The next day, alone, I looked behind the oak. Nothing remained but a tuft of feathers. The fox had found its meal, or the bird had regained itself and hopped away. I think I always knew the answer, but I told myself the wren escaped unscathed.
The fallen wren lying before me today was not so lucky. The fox had found this bird, and I could only wonder if anything would remain of him after.
I knelt next to the shepherd, amazed at his smallness. He was not a large man, but in dying he seemed to shrink more; his arms were very short, and his oversize flannels made him look childlike. Pitiable. Dark blood ran from his lips as I knelt beside him. Khent stood a ways off, perhaps aware that he was not invited to the exchange. Or perhaps he did not trust that our battle was truly over.
“Are you the fox,” I murmured, watching as his milky eyes found me. “Or are you the wren?”
“I took you in once, girl, and this is my reward?” he sputtered.He coughed, hard, and I fished the handkerchief out of his pocket, holding it to his stained lips. “Courtesy? Now? I shall never understand it.”
“You murdered my folk,” I said. The words came easily, as if practiced. I blinked, gazing a little to the right of him. Something inside me felt warm and ready, perhaps what a mother experienced when she knew ’twas time the babe came. “You were the fox. We were but stunned birds. Now we are naught but a tuft of feathers.”
He shook his head slowly. “You aren’t making sense, girl. You’re mad. You’ve killed us, killed us because you are mad.”
The warmth in me spread, up and out, but it was not troubling—quite the opposite. I didn’t know what was happening, why I could feel so much at the sight of Dalton’s death and nothing at all as this weakened old man lay expiring on the ground. His worn gray cap had fallen off his balding head, and it lay in the mud. “I am the fox now, only when I make a meal of you and yours, there will be nothing left. Not a feather. Not a foot. Not a trace of you on the land or in the air.”
“There you go,” he sighed, hacking into the cloth I held to his mouth. “Sounding as damned crazed as your father. That’s your problem, you have so much of your father in you, lass. It’s put you down a path from which there’s no”—hack—“return.”
The smile I gave him was sad, but perhaps vacant, too. I took the handkerchief away and flattened it next to his head. The blood on it had made a pattern like a fallen leaf.
“My father is all gone now,” I told him. “Our book is rewritten. Our story starts anew. Father is nothing. I carry something else. Do you know?” I watched his brow furrow, terror in his eyes even as they were filmed with blindness. “Mother told me that what you and Henry did to us broke Father, watching so many of his children die. It scorched his heart to ash. But I walked through the fire with her in the Tomb of Ancients, and the fire did not break us, it did not char us to dust, no—we walked through the fire and it forged us anew.”
He let his head fall back against his cap, though his mouth never closed. “I should have asked forgiveness for what we did. I should have made amends. I never... never thought this would be the way it ended. God help me. God help Henry.”
“We’re well beyond that,” I said, watching his eyelids flutter and then close. I waited, thinking perhaps I should say the prayer Mother had gifted to me through her spirit. But then I thought better of it and stood. Finch, however, had tried to show me gentility once and might have become a friend had things been otherwise. I held no real animosity toward him in my heart, and he looked almost frail, crumpled on the ground. He had already left, probably before I had even emerged from the tomb.
I knelt and crossed his arms, closed his eyes with a soft touch of fingers, then spoke the words and watched him dissolve into wings and lift again high into the sky.
