AllFreeNovel
Share Us
37
I WAS THEwoods and the stones and the stars. I was nowhere and everywhere and nothing and everything. I had never been free, never whole, and now I was—and I exulted in it, learning the shape of myself, tasting memories that had been buried with my bones all these long years.
Time, which had little meaning anymore, slipped around me as I turned to the task of my existence. My whole self burned with the need to create. I sank the dark tendrils of myself into the earth. Flowers made of frost and bone bloomed. The stones of Harrow melted and re-formed under my touch, making uncanny shapes. From leaf mold and brambles, I crafted strange and beautiful creatures. The shadows, no longer sustained by their endless search, folded themselves away. No one stepped foot on Harrow’s grounds, not anymore.
Until one night, she did.
I sensed her, the way I sensed every thrush and field mouse in my woods, but I paid her no mind until she began to sing.
“There was a maiden, golden-haired,
Came to the fold, came to the fold.
She walked among the shadows there.
Her bones are white, her blood is cold.”
All of my attention fixed on her, this stranger in my domain. She wore a gray dress and carried a lantern, glowing gold, and when she sang, an unsettled feeling rippled through me.
The shadows unfolded themselves and followed her, rushing in endless motion at the edges of her light. Not one flicker of fear darkened the light that blazed within her. She knew the names of Harrow’s shadows, and I knew hers.
Bryony.
She stood at the foot of the ruins that had once been Harrowstone Hall. It was overgrown with trees and vines, its brutal order cast into a kind of chaos both gentle and wild. The last note of her song faded. She set the lantern on the ground and tilted her face up toward the night sky.
“I know you’re here,” she said. “I can feel you. Please. Talk to me.”
I stood behind her, wearing a form of no particular identity, my face a mask of fractured light. “You’re Bryony Locke,” I said.“I remember you. You left.”
“My dad wasn’t keen on me living in a shack in the haunted woods alone,” Bryony said with a little laugh. I tilted my head, considering. I knew all the words she was saying, but the concepts seemed distant. “It was better for you, anyway. You needed time to heal yourself. But now you have to make a choice. You have to decide who you are.” She swallowed, and her eyes gleamed with tears. “You were always the dark soul, but you were Helen, too. You could be her again.”
“She wasn’t real,” my figment said.
“Yes, she was,” Bryony said fiercely. “She was Rachel Vaughan’s daughter. She collected bones and made them into art. She was awkward and clumsy and kind and funny. She was curious and clever and determined. She was real, and I loved her, and she loved me. And she wasyou, and you were her. And you can be again if you choose. Please, Rabbit. Please come back to me.”
“I’d be alone,” I said.“My mother hates me. Simon never existed.”I remembered these things. But they didn’t hurt me like they hurt Helen. Here, like this, I was safe.
“You’re not alone. You have Desmond and Celia. And your mother,” Bryony said.
“She despises me.”
Bryony shook her head. “She loves you.”
“Then why isn’t she here?” I demanded, and the anger was Helen’s, just for a moment.
“She thinks you’re dead. They all do,” Bryony said. “They can’t see you like I can.”
I fled from her, seething among the trees, finding refuge with the shadows. I hid myself in the wind and night sounds and waited for her to leave.
She didn’t.
“Hello, Rabbit,” she said when I emerged again. She sat on a toppled stone, her head tipped back to watch the shifting stars.
“I’m not that person anymore. I never was,” I told her.
“Of course you were,” she said, shaking her head. “And you still are. That and more.”
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
