“Then the Northeast parishes withdraw their oath to the Union,” said Burgess, and it was said with a great heaviness. “We end our strikes, and you leave us at the mercy of the House, and the thin hope we’ll find them forgivin’.” This last came out slowly, as though the man could hardly believe he was uttering the words. “You’ll leave us no choice. We have our own parishes to pull through this winter.”
In Donny’s center, a rupture widened, all his hope spilling into it, and he thought of his father speaking in the pub, in the marketplace, standing on the podium he’d built himself, out of wood and nails and sheer thought, preaching to his widening congregation about the walls of community, and how tall they could stand, how quickly they could fall.One fissure… the smallest wavering, and the entire thing collapses. Like the walls of a mine, like mud sliding.
Donny felt it coming now, the ripples growing quicker than he knew how to stop them. Soon it would be a wave, a great tidal breaker seething overhead.
He sighed seismically and said, “I’m afraid we can’t have that.”
One by one, Gunner and Briggs took the guns of those six men and women, the bullets trapping in the barrels before they could fire.
One by one, the ambassadors from Dorser, Dunnitch, and Scurry went to their knees.
Donny turned over the silver bullet, loaded it.
One by one, the six shots discharged, and he felt them as though he pointed the revolver to his own chest. Felt them, because he couldn’t see them.
The sound thundered down the lanes and into the sky, loud enough to reach all of Kenton. High enough to reach the heavens, to make sure that even God, wherever he slumbered, looked down at Donny and saw the smoking barrel.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOURTHEO
The bluff helped him heal with remarkable speed, of course.
The day after they had arrived in Lavnonshire, the wound was no longer red and flaming at the edges. It did not weep. Each time Nina came to nervously lift the bandages, the flesh seemed less mottled. Still, every couple of hours she came with her warm cloth to clean it, to replace the bandaging. She did it without looking directly at him, answering his attempts at conversation in monosyllables. She touched his skin as though it burned her.
Part of him hoped it did. Surely that was better than indifference?
In the night, she woke to check on him, illuminating the room briefly with a candelabra, and her in its nimbus. The most beautiful haunting Theo could think of.
The quieter, crueler part of his brain knew that she was acting out of guilt. He’d thrown himself into the path of a bullet meant for her. He knew Nina well enough to understand she wouldn’t reconcile with it easily.
If he were honest, he was well enough now that he could change his own bandages. He could stand without too much pain, but he didn’t. He waited for Nina to come to him, and he lay still and quiet, like a carnivorous plant.
Daylight clung still, and Theo found himself wishing for dark. The afternoon wouldn’t bleed away.
The others were sauntering in lone corners after an early supper. It was difficult for each of them to tolerate one another’s presence in close quarters.Even Patrick and his own father seemed always on the precipice of coming to blows. John was downstairs, hunting through Mrs. Trunk’s inventory. Patrick and Polly, he presumed, were in their rooms.
Theo finally stood. His muscles unfolded, the blood rushing to the soles of his feet. The window overlooked the ocean as though he were looking at the world from a mountaintop. The waves, aquamarine and foamy, shuddered against the ramparts. The wind howled its agonized lament. The last light stuck to the horizon, refusing to vanish.
Down on the path overlooking the cliffs, her elbows propped on the railing, was Nina.
The cold had emptied this thin vein of a street, and the spray from the ocean made it uncomfortable for strolling. But Nina stayed where she was, hair tucked inside Patrick’s cap, a dusty oversize coat billowing out behind her.
Theo felt his heart hurtling toward an approaching end. He felt as though at any moment, a cliff would rear up before him, and he’d go hurtling off it before he could stop.
Without thinking on it too much, he left the window and took the stairs one slow step at a time, finally entering the shop. He smiled to Mrs. Trunk and skirted by John, who was at that moment upending an old cello with his back turned. Theo went out to the street quietly, carefully, his hand supporting his stomach as though he were keeping his intestines in place.
He limped across the lane to Nina, put his arms gingerly on the cold railings. He’d forgotten to don a coat, and the wind lashed at him.
He ignored all of it.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said to him eventually, distantly.
He nodded, though he did not look to the sea. “You used to enjoy painting it.”
“I found some canvas and brushes in the shop,” she said absentmindedly, frowning at the rolling clouds. “I hardly remember what it feels like to paint.”
Theo had rarely heard of a thing sadder than that—an artist who’d forgotten herself.
She finally looked over at him. “You seem improved.”
