Widdershins (76 page)

Because some things—the deep, meaningful things that sit at the heart of our souls—can’t be touched by magic. They can only be touched by the hurt or the love that we offer to each other.

That’s the real measure of our worth: How we touch each other in a way that really matters.

Which, I realize, is what the Grace is all about.

I lay the book down on the step and stand up.

“I have to go to her,” I tell Tom.

“I know,” he says.

I walk down the steps and onto the grass. The Eadar open their crowded ranks to make a path for me, but they reach out and touch me as I pass by them. On my arms, on my shoulders, on my back. It’s a curiously empowering experience. I don’t have words for them, they don’t have words for me. But we communicate our joy for each other’s existence without them. That joy flows over us like a wave of light. Like the light that’s supposed to be inside me that I can never see.

I can almost see it now.

I can certainly feel it.

The sensation holds all the way across the yard and follows me through the fields to where the forest begins. But once I’m under the dark boughs of the spruce, my footsteps swallowed by the carpet of needles under my shoes, I’m on my own. I may continue to hold their good will, but the deeper I go into the woods, the less tangible it becomes.

I don’t worry about how I’m going to find Mattie, one small girl in all these acres of dark woods. We’re in a story now—Mattie and I—and the story will lead me to her.

When I find her, she’s sitting among the roots of a huge pine, holding the torn remains of her teddy bear. The pine’s roots twine around a snarl of granite pushed out of the ground by frost.

“What did you do to him?” she asks. “I can’t feel him anymore. Not really. It’s just like there’s a sliver of a memory left, but that’s all.”

“I wrote him out of the story.”

She studies me for a long moment before she asks, “Is that what you’re going to do to me?”

I shake my head.

I hadn’t even thought of that. But even if I had, it’s not something I could ever do. Mattie’s not my enemy, for all that I’m hers.

“You can’t make it better,” she says.

“Iknow.”

“Nothing can make it better.”

“Believe me, I know.”

“So, why are you here?” she asks.

That stops me. I want to see her through to the other side of these dark woods. But is that really what I’m doing here? Am I here for her need, or my own? But if I’m expecting forgiveness, shouldn’t I be willing to offer it to Del first?

Except I’m genuinely sorry for what I did to Mattie. Del doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

She holds up the teddy.

“And look at Grath. Look at what you did to him.”

I didn’t do anything. That was Lizzie. But considering how everything that’s happened here is because of me, she’s not wrong.

But this, at least, I can fix. I only have to wake up the charm. Which, I know now, is calling up the light. The hidden mystery of the Grace that put the tiniest quiver of itself in my unworthy body when I was a child. But while I know I don’t deserve it, that doesn’t mean I can’t use it.

Once upon a time . . .

And the torn teddy bear is mended like it was never hurt in the first place.

I guess I’m expecting her to at least be pleased with this. But her eyes are still cold when they lift from the mended bear to my face. She sets the teddy bear down on the grass.

“Kill her, Grath,” she says. “Kill her forever.”

And hard on the heels of those words, the teddy bear swells and grows and changes, from sweet toy to that giant grizzly I encountered when I first entered this world.

Tom Foolery said I was the Conjurer now, but it looks like I’m not alone. Mattie has enough magic in her to create a protector for herself.

What happens if I die here? What happens to Mattie and the other Eadar? Does the world end, or can it go on without me?

I think maybe it does. Go on, I mean. I’m not so egocentric as to think that it has to die with me. Maybe that can be my last conjuring, that the world goes on, no matter what happens to me.

Once upon a time . . .

The grizzly rears above, one enormous paw drawn back to strike me down.

Part of me doesn’t want to struggle. Part of me believes that I should just let the damned bear tear me apart. That I deserve whatever happens.

And maybe I do. Or, at least, maybe I deserve
something.
I should have to pay something for what I did to her.

But I didn’t give in to Del, and I’m not going to give in to this impulse either.

For all I know, it’s a piece of Del that’s making me think this. Maybe a small unending tremble of confusion and uncertainty is going to be his legacy to me, the bit I have to carry forever.

So I call up another piece of the story.

Once upon a time . . .

Once upon a time, there was a girl who went into a dark wood, but she wasn’t scared of what she might find in there, she wasn’t afraid of ghosts or ghouls or hungry beasts, because she was a ghost herself.

Just a Ghost Girl.

I flinch when the grizzly’s paw strikes me.

Except it doesn’t. It goes right through me instead, as though I’m made of air. As though I’m just a . . .

Ghost Girl.

The bear roars with frustration and attacks me with renewed fury. Branches and pine needles and bits of rock go flying in all directions because it can’t touch me. It can only tear apart the ground I’m standing on.

Finally it stops and looks back at its mistress.

Mattie jumps up and runs to where I’m standing. She tries to beat me with her little fists, but they’re no more effective than the grizzly’s big paws and just go through me.

Mattie lets her arms fall to her sides. Her shoulders bow with defeat. But her eyes don’t give up. They burn.

“What do you
want
from me?” she cries.

“Nothing,” I tell her. “I just want to say I’m sorry.”

“I know, I know, I know, I know. You’re sorry. You were just a little girl yourself, and you didn’t know better. But now you do. Now you want to make it all up to me. Now you promise everything’s going to be better.”

I shake my head. “No. I don’t know that. I’m just sorry for what I’ve done to you. If I could take it back, I would. But I can’t undo the nightmare. I can only tell you how sorry I am.”

“Sorry doesn’t do
anything.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“You’re just saying it to make yourself feel better.”

“I can’t imagine anything making me feel better about what I did.”

She turns away from me and reaches for the grizzly. When she touches his fur, he shrinks back down into a teddy bear again. Clutching him against her chest, she looks at me again.

“So, now you’re back to pretending you’re nice,” she says.

“I don’t think what I did was particularly nice. It was horrible.”

“Oh, but you’re nice now, aren’t you? With that big light inside you, and anything you want you can just make happen, because now you’re the Conjurer and I’m still nothing.”

“If that’s true,” I tell her, “then it’s not working.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just want you to know that I’m sorry. That I’m here for no other reason than to tell you that.”

“So what? Am I supposed to forgive you?”

I shake my head. “I’m not here for that.”

“Then why
are
you here? And stop saying you’re sorry.”

I decide to come at it from another direction.

“What do
you
want, Mattie?” I ask her.

“If I could have anything?”

“If you could have anything.”

“For you to be dead,” she says.

“That’s not an option,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t die for Del, and I’m not going to die for you.”

“Then let me forget.”

I study her for a long moment.

“Are you sure of that?” I ask. “I thought that was what I wanted, but all I did was make a nightmare for you. And the memories never really go away—not forever. Not for real. They end up festering away inside you and spoiling everything.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Pretty much. But until I got here, I didn’t know how badly.”

She doesn’t say anything, and I stop myself from talking. Instead, I change the story about the Ghost Girl and become who I was when I walked into the woods. I offer her my hand.

“What do you want now?” she asks.

“I just want to show you something.”

“Maybe I don’t want to see it.”

“That’s your choice,” I tell her. “I won’t make you do anything.”

“But you could.”

I look her right in the eye.

“I could,” I say.

I’m still holding my hand out to her.

“And what if I do come with you?” she asks.

“Then you’ll see the thing I want to show you.”

“Why don’t you just tell me instead?”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

She hesitates a moment longer, then holds the bear against her chest with one hand and reaches for my hand.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she tells me.

“I know,” I say.

Except it does. How, that’s still to be seen.

I lead her back to the house. She stares curiously at the Eadar gathered in the yard and almost smiles when she spots Tom Foolery, but she catches herself in time.

“Here, sit beside me,” I say.

We sit on the steps, and I pick up the book and my pencil again.

“Can you read?” I ask her.

She gives me a withering look, so I turn to the end of the book where I’ve been writing. She reads what I’ve put down so far.

“And then what?” she asks.

With her looking over my shoulder, I write about the coming of Tom Foolery and the other Eader, of my going into the woods, and what happened between us in there. I draw a picture of her holding the bear, sitting in among the pine tree roots. When I get to the end, to us sitting here on the steps and my writing in the book, I turn to her.

“Are you going to finish it?” she says.

“No, you are,” I tell her.

She looks out at the Eadar, then at Tom who gives her a wink.

“They’re all innocent, aren’t they?” she says. “They don’t know what we know.”

“They know,” I tell her. “But they didn’t have to experience it the way you and I did.”

“Why did
we?”

I hold her gaze. “I don’t know why I did. But you experienced it because I was a stupid and selfish little girl. I wasn’t brave enough to keep it to myself so I made you carry it for me.”

“That’s not true,” she says.

I raise my eyebrows.

“You didn’t know what you were doing.”

“But that didn’t make it right,” I say.

She’s quick to see how we’re having the same argument we did before, except we’re arguing each other’s side of it this time.

“ I . . . I just wanted to be loved,” she says after a long moment. “By someone who didn’t want to hurt me.”

“Me, too.”

“Did you ever find that?”

I think of all my friends, from Lou and Angel, to Sophie and Wendy, Isabelle and Mona. Joe and Cassie and Christy and Saskia and the Professor. But most of all I think of Geordie, waiting for me on a mesa somewhere else in the otherworld.

“I did,” I tell her. “But it took me a long time, and it took me even longer to believe it could be true. And . . . and even now, I find it easier to believe that it’s all just a dream. That it couldn’t be real.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” she said. “If I had people who said they loved me, I’d believe it. Especially if they didn’t hit me.”

I give her a slow nod. “I guess you’re braver than I am.”

She touches a finger to the blank half page that’s still left at the end of what I’ve written.

“How does it end?” she asks.

“I really don’t know. Like I said, you have to finish it.”

She looks away then, her gaze going inward. She strokes her teddy’s head.

I don’t know how long we sit like that. Nothing changes. The Eadar don’t move or talk. The light doesn’t change—the sun just stays where it is in the sky.

“I want to grow up,” Mattie finally says when she turns back to me.

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t,” I tell her. “It’d be up to you.”

“Up tome . . . “ Then she gets it. “Are you saying I could be the Conjurer now?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“But I don’t want to hurt people.”

“You don’t have to be that kind of Conjurer.”

“So, you’ll just let that happen?” she asks. “You’ll write it in the book and that’s the way it’ll be?”

I nod.

“What if once I’m the Conjurer I put you in the deepest darkest dungeon, and you have to stay there forever and a day?”

“I don’t think you’re the kind of person who would do that, but it’s the chance I have to take. I just hope you’ll look out for the others.” I nod toward the yard. “They need someone to protect them and keep them safe.”

“You mean me?”

“Well, I would think that’s what a good Conjurer would do.”

Mattie turns to look at the scarecrow.

“How would you feel about that?” she asks him.

“We just want you to be happy again,” he says. “To be one of us.”

“And . . . and the old Conjurer?” Mattie asks. “What happens to him?”

I tap the book. “This doesn’t change.”

She actually smiles now. “Because you’re the Conjurer, too. You have to be, because all of this is inside you.”

“So we’ll both be Conjurers,” I say, “though you’ll probably make a better one than me.”

“You’re just saying that,” she says, but I can tell that she’s pleased, nevertheless.

“We already know you’re braver.”

She shakes her head. “I never could have done what you did.” She smoothes a palm over the open pages of the book.

I take a chance, then.

“But you never made somebody else’s life a nightmare,” I say.

Her gaze clouds for a moment and I hold my breath. But then she shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “I just tried to kill you whenever I could.”

“So, shall I finish the story?” I ask her.

She nods, reading over my shoulder as I write the ending into the book. The last thing I do is draw a picture of her, but she’s older in it. A young woman.