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People say there’s a witch in Vermilion County.
–
Tzila is thirteen years old. She’s running into the Black Candle Cabaret, slamming open the door, and Sherman drops the glass he’s cleaning at the look on her face. By the time the glass hits the floor and shatters, he’s already halfway across the room, sinking to his knees to catch her in his arms. She’s sobbing, furious and frustrated, and throws her arms around his neck.
She’s been growing like a weed recently, but for now, she’s still small enough to be enveloped in Sherman’s hug. “Whoa, whoa,” he says, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“She’s not dead, Dad!” Tzila cries. The cabaret isn’t open yet, it’s only late afternoon, so it’s still quiet and dark inside. Tzila’s shaking, and Sherman’s reminded of when she was littler, back in the Highest Light, coming back from school after getting in a fight with some teacher who refused to explain a rule to her. But why, Dad? It’s so stupid! It doesn’t make any sense!
“No one will listen to me– they keep saying–” she heaves a shaking breath, and bursts into sobs again.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he says, soft. It’s been a hard six months, for all of them. Rebuilding is never easy. But for Tzila…
She looks at him, eyes red and jaw clenched. “You’re thinking it too,” she accuses. “Oh, look at the baby who doesn’t understand people dying. I’m not a kid, I know what dying is. Saskia–” she breaks off to gasp another breath. “But Lark isn’t dead. Dad, she isn’t.”
He misses Lark, too. He glances at Emmet behind the bar, who’s produced a dustpan and brush for the glass. He nods at Sherman, and says “Go. I’ve got this.”
“Do you want to come up to the roof?” he asks Tzila, who nods reluctantly, dashing tears off her face with her hands.
They wend their way up the many stairs, and come out onto the smooth roof of the cabaret. Up here, it’s just them and the wind.
Tzila sits with her back to a chimney stack, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, squeezing tight. Sherman sits down next to her, getting down with more difficulty than she had. They can see right out over Stationary Hill from here, out to the desert on the horizon.
“She isn’t dead,” Tzila repeats quietly.
“I believe you, you know.”
“Do you? No one else does.” She stares morosely at the sky. Sherman is so glad that no matter what else is happening in his life, he’ll never have to be thirteen again.
“I know you understand death,” he says. It isn’t easy to say. She’s seen so much, and she shouldn’t have had to, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. “You’ve… most people your age haven’t had to deal with… well. Any of it, really. I know you understand what you’re saying.” He shrugs, and puts his arm around her shoulders, squeezing her to his side gently. “If you know Lark isn’t dead, then I believe you.”
“Okay,” she whispers. He can’t tell if she believes him, but as long as she knows. The rest will come with time. She leans her head against his side. “Okay.”
–
Tzila is fifteen when Robbie McLean goes missing from Stationary Hill. He’s seven years old, missing his front tooth and obsessed with rocks, pockets always weighed down with stones that he’ll tell you all about if you give him half a chance. He just doesn’t come home from school one day, and his mother frantically checks the houses on the street until she gets to Tzila and Sherman’s.
“We haven’t seen him,” Tzila says, as Ms McLean twists her hands together anxiously on the doorstep. “I’m so sorry. But he’s… he’s a very distractible kid! He’s probably found a cool pebble and stopped to look at it. I’m sure he’s okay, Ms McLean.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” she says, glancing off down the street. “He’s not the most observant when he’s really interested in something, and you know, he doesn’t really talk much, not our Robbie…”
She looks at Tzila, who nods her understanding. When he’s under pressure, Robbie McLean just stares and can’t manage to get words out. He signs, some, but not everyone in Stationary Hill knows enough to understand him. And with the merchant ships coming and going, and the bustle of main street, and…
She has a sudden, horrible thought. It isn’t Stationary Hill that has the best places on Midst for a geology obsessed kid. It’s out in the desert, where erosion has carved red rocks into unearthly shapes, where quartz glitters in the sand. “Ms McLean,” she says, trying to work out the best way to phrase this. “Does… has Robbie ever been into Vermilion County?”
“Only with me, on collection trips,” she says, distractedly. “Not for a few months, either, I’ve been so busy with experiments at home–” She looks up suddenly. “Oh, no. Oh, Tzila, you don’t think–”
“No,” Tzila says, taking Ms McLean’s arm and leading her inside the house. “No, of course not, he never could have got that far. Come on, let’s go find Dad and get you something to drink, we can get people searching–”
When the rest of the street is roused, Tzila slips out the side door into the alley that runs along their house, and tugs off the cover over the monocycle– Lark’s monocycle, now hers. She fastens her jacket, and checks the fold-safe lights are working. Fold is approaching fast now, and she doesn’t want to get caught out. Landlord lopes out of the house after her, and she settles him into the sidecar. She’s about to get on and head out when she hears her name. “Tzila.”
She turns. Sherman’s standing at the door, her bike helmet in his hands. “Oh, hi, Dad,” she says. “Uhm, just checking on the ol’ bike… seeing how it is…”
“I’m not going to say you can’t go,” he says, a little wryly. He holds out her helmet. “You don’t need to pretend. That kid needs help.”
She takes the helmet, buckling it underneath her chin. “I was going to leave a note,” she says, looking up at him. “I promise.”
“Warn me in person next time?” he says. “I’m not here to stop you. Just let me wish you luck?” His voice is steady, but she suddenly remembers that he knows exactly what it is like to have lost a child on Midst. She tackles him into a hug.
“I’ll be back soon,” she says, stepping back.
“Be safe, Tzila,” he says, hands on her shoulders. There’s more grey in his hair than she remembers there being, when she last looked. “Bring him home.”
Robbie McLean is sitting on the ground when the monocycle lights illuminate him, and Tzila swerves to a stop. He doesn’t look hurt, just sitting, not even all of the way out to Lark’s old cabin. Tzila hasn’t been back to the cabin, since. She’s glad he isn’t there, now.
“Robbie,” she says. He just looks at her, eyes wide. “Are you okay?”
He squeezes something in his hand. “I got lost,” he whispers. “Didn’t mean to.”
“I know, it’s okay,” she says, “Are you hurt? What have you got there?”
He opens his hand and shows her the perfectly round pebble. Smooth, black obsidian. “Fold gave it to me,” he says, “When I was lost,” and he can’t or won’t elaborate when Tzila asks him what he means, heart leaping.
She takes him home, sees him into the arms of his mother, then goes back to her own house, parking the bike back in the alley. Everything seems so quiet now, without the engine running, the rustle of the wind over the desert.
Standing on the doorstep, she pauses, and rests her hand on Landlord’s head. “Thank you,” she whispers to the darkness. Then she opens the door, and goes inside.
–
Tzila is eighteen years old when Sherman first catches her doing a reading. She has a piece of brown parcel paper spread across their kitchen table, taped down at the corners, and she’s scribbling on one side of it. He’d never seen Lark read, but he knows what this is. The little bag– contents now emptied across the table– had sat in pride of place on Tzila’s bookshelf for years. Untouched, as far as he’d known. But Tzila is growing up. Has been for a while, now.
He steps closer, leaning over the sheet of paper. The items– stones, sticks, buttons, beads– are scattered at random, and Tzila is drawing round each of them, looping swirls of black hitting multicoloured clouds, shaded like sunshine hitting a prism. It looks like oil and water, mixed on paper.
“Is that the Fold?” he asks.
She looks up and grins lopsidedly. “Yeah, kind of. And the Un.”
“It’s beautiful,” he says, and it is. He’s sure Lark didn’t read like this. Tzila’s coloured pencils scratch away at the rough paper. “Can you… Do you understand it?”
She just looks at him, warm, a little teasing. “It says we’re going to live happily ever after.”
“Hey,” he says, resting his hands on the table, in their kitchen, together. “That sounds great to me.”
–
She’s twenty when she takes the bike out into the desert, and drives the winding route to Lark’s old cabin. The sidecar is full of lumber and tools, and she’s not alone, either, Bets and Walter following in a wagon behind. This gully has probably never echoed with laughter before, but it does today, as they build something new out of the burnt out ruins. They put beer bottles in the shade of an outcropping, and as Fold creeps in once again, they sit in the wagon decked with lanterns and tell stories. It’s nice. It feels, in fact, suspiciously like home.
Tzila pushes the wagon flap back, late, in the depths of Fold. She stands with her bare feet on the cool sand, and stares up at the sky as it swirls softly. She feels the presence of someone standing next to her, hears the familiar breathing.
If she looks, there’ll be no one there. So she doesn’t. Tzila and Lark watch Unrise approaching.
–
People say there’s a witch in Vermilion County, and Tzila Guthrie just smiles to herself. She knows they’re wrong.
There isn’t one witch. There’s two.