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She shakes her head. “I done only this one,” she says, fingering a tall plant with thick, flat, red leaves. “I put my hands in the soil, and it was like I could feel the magic there, waitin’. I put m’mind to it, and up it grew. And then, it’s like it took hold, and the rest come up all on their own. It’s a start, innit?”

“Yes,” I say. The valley stretches out long and far, a mixture of color and ice. The injured land struggles to be reborn. It is a very good start.

A man approaches me timidly, his hat in his hand. His terror shows in his shaking limbs and searching eyes. “Beggin’ your pardon, miss, but I was told you be the one to help me cross on to the next world.”

“Who told you this?”

His eyes widen. “A fearsome creature with a head full o’ snakes!”

“You mustn’t fear her,” I say, taking the man’s hand and leading him toward the river. “She’s as tame as a pu**ycat. She’d probably lick your hand given the chance.”

“Didn’t seem harmless,” he whispers, shuddering.

“Yes, well, things are not always as they appear, sir, and we must learn to judge for ourselves.”

The ones who need my help come out here and there: This one wants to tell his wife he loved her, as he never could in life; that one is sorry for a falling out she had with her sister, a grudge she held till the end; still another, a girl of perhaps eighteen, is frightened—she cannot walk away from the past so easily.

She holds tightly to my arm. “Is it true what I hear, that I do not have to cross? That there is a place where I might live on?” Her eyes are wide with a desperate hope fanned by fear.

“It is true,” I answer. “But it is not without cost. Nothing is.”

“But what will become of me when I cross over the river?”

“I cannot say. No one can.”

“Oh, will you tell me which path to take, please?”

“I cannot make that choice for you. It is yours alone to make.”

Her eyes well with tears. “It is so very hard.”

“Yes, it is,” I say, and hold her hand because that is all the magic I can muster.

In the end, she makes the choice to go—if I will accompany her across the river on the barge steered by Gorgon. It is my first journey of this sort, and my heartbeat quickens. I want to know what lies beyond what I have already seen. The closer we get to the shore, the brighter it grows, until I have to turn my head away. I hear only the knowing sigh of the girl. I feel the barge lighten and I know she has gone.

My heart is heavy as we turn back. The gentle laps of the river’s current are but the whispered names of what has been lost: my mother, Amar, Carolina, Mother Elena, Miss Moore, Miss McCleethy, and some part of myself that I shan’t get back.

Kartik. I blink hard against the tears that threaten. “Why must things come to an end?” I say softly.

“Our days are all numbered in the book of days, Most High,” Gorgon murmurs as the garden comes once more into view. “That is what gives them sweetness and purpose.”

When I return to the garden, a gentle breeze blows through the olive grove. It smells of myrrh. Mother Elena approaches, her medallion shining against her white blouse.

“I would see my Carolina now,” she says.

“She’s been waiting for you across the river,” I say.

Mother Elena smiles at me. “You have done well.” She places a hand to my cheek and says something in Romani that I do not understand.

“Is that a blessing?”

“It is only a saying: To those who will see, the world waits.”

The barge drifts, ready to carry Mother Elena across the river. She sings some sort of lullaby. The light grows, bathing her in its glow till I can no longer tell where the light ends and she begins. And then she is gone.

To those who will see, the world waits. It feels like much more than a saying. And perhaps it is.

Perhaps it is a hope.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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