Unchained, Part 2

Laura stood in her chains with all three of her, as far up as they would let her, and every one of her eyes was on the fight.

She couldn’t look anywhere else. Sam was out there with blood on her chin, and Sumiku with one wing trailing, and Norah, favoring a hip, and Samson Drei, of all things, darting in low and out again, and Erin at the rim with both hands out and her whole body rigid with whatever it was costing her, and in the middle of them Nergal, held by one ankle in a twist of green that kept dying and kept coming back. The man who had stood over the Ring an hour ago was gone out of him. The left side of his face had swollen out of true, and what was left of the funeral robe hung in burned strips from his belt, and he stood upright, one arm held tight to his side, like something dropped from a height that had got up anyway. The air out there still had gold in it from Sumiku’s fire. Every time Thrustworthy rang off him Laura flinched in three places at once.

On either side of her, Myra and Riley were on their feet in their own chains, leaning toward it as far as the links would let them. Riley was shouting at Sam. Meatball sat against her shins with her ears flat. Myra wasn’t shouting at anyone. Her face was turned toward the fight with her lips parted, reading it, and every few seconds her hand opened and closed at the end of its chain, on nothing.

The pain had eased. It hadn’t gone. It sat in every one of her like the ache after a fever, but his hand was busy now, and his eyes were busy, and nothing was pulling at the middle of her anymore. She could breathe. She kept doing it, carefully, in case someone took it back.

Down the bond Andy was where Riley had found him. The bottom of the hill, the Garden, steady as a lamp in a window. She had been checking it every few seconds since Riley said it out loud, as she would have checked a pulse. He was there. He was there. He was—

Right behind her.

Hands closed on the chains of her middle body, one on each, and broke them.

The fog tore like old rope. She felt it go at her wrists, a jerk and then nothing, and the gray links around her throat came apart and hung loose and began to fray into the air. Laura turned.

Andy was standing there.

He was in his wedding clothes. The white mantle with Myra’s green showing at its edges, wet and dark along the hem as if he had walked through long grass, held closed by Emily's clasp. Dawn’s sash. Erin's cuff, and Claire’s locket. The circlet on his brow with her own blue rose set into it, cool and bright. A sword at his hip that she had never seen before in her life, in a plain dark scabbard on a belt she had never seen either. He had the broken ends of her chains in his fists, one in each, and he was looking at her.

He had been in the Hollow Garden. She had felt him there, not a minute ago. Nobody could get here in a minute.

She made a sound. She didn’t know what it was. She had never heard herself make it.

Her other two bodies were still chained. She could feel the links on them, at the wrists and the throat, and she didn’t think about it. She drew the two of her into the middle one, as she had folded herself down in the Garden with the Fourteen coming out of the dark, all at once and much too fast. It was like being packed into a case a size too small and then sat on. For a moment there was only one of her, standing in the ash in front of him, and the chains that had held the other two dropped empty to the ground behind her with a sound like wet cloth, and dissolved back into fog.

Then she let herself out again. Three. All three of her, all at once, and nothing on any of her wrists at all.

All three of her reached him at the same time.

She didn’t remember deciding to. She was simply holding him, every arm she had around him at once, her faces against his chest and his neck and his shoulder, her fingers catching in the mantle. His arms came around her, as much of her as he could get, and he was saying her name, and she was crying. She was crying into his mantle from three places, and kissing him, his jaw and his mouth and the side of his face, wherever she could reach, and she could feel his heart going hard under her cheek. “You came back,” she said, her voice catching, “You really did.”

He smelled of grass. Of grass and cold air and, under that, of him.

The pain went down. It went down the moment she had hold of him, receding fast, as it always had when they were close enough to touch. She could feel the bond against her like a hand. He was here, under her hands, solid, alive, wet to the knees from somewhere, and shaking.

He was crying too. She felt it before she saw it. He didn’t try to stop.

“I did. I couldn't let you go again.”

There was movement on either side of them. People going past, close: a skirt the color of an old rose, a pair of sneakers on the ash. Laura barely noticed any of it. It didn’t matter. Nothing that wasn’t him mattered at all, for as long as she could make that last.

“Where—” She pulled back far enough to see his face, with one of her, and kept hold of him with the other two. Her voice wouldn’t come out straight. “Where have you been? Andy. Where were you? What happened, what— I couldn’t find you. All night. I couldn’t—”

“I know.” His voice wasn’t steady either. He let it not be. “I know. I’m sorry.” He put his hand on the back of her nearest head, and she felt it in all three. “I found the First Gate.”

She stared at him.

She knew what those words meant. It was the thing she had told him no to, at that lunch, with Myra beside her saying no as well, and then the thing she had told him later he could do without her, if he ever found a way to do it that didn’t send the bill to someone she loved. She looked at his face for the price of it and couldn’t find one. She didn’t know whether that meant there wasn’t one.

“You—” She didn’t know which question to ask first. There were too many of them and they all came up at once and jammed. “The First Gate? Andy, that’s— what did you do? What did you—”

“I’ll tell you.” He held her face, the one he could reach, and looked at her like a man trying to see all of her at the same time, who couldn’t, and didn’t want to stop trying. “All of it. I promise. But before I tell you what it means—” He stopped. He swallowed. “Someone needs to tell you something first.”

He stepped aside.

There was a woman standing behind him.

She was small, as small as Laura, with long black hair that nobody had brushed, in a plain old dress that hung loose on her, and she had something pressed flat against her chest with both hands, a folded sheet of yellow paper, creased in a hundred places. She was looking at Laura.

That was what Laura saw first. Not the hair or the dress or the paper. The looking.

Her mother’s eyes were clear. They were very blue, and they were on her, and there was someone behind them. Laura had sat in front of those eyes every morning for weeks and watched them look at a window and nothing else. She had held her mother’s hands and talked to her and watched the eyes not move. She had not seen them look at her, really look, at her, since she was thirteen years old.

They were looking at her now. At all three of her, one after another and then all at once, counting, to be sure every one of her was there.

Laura’s mouths opened. “Mom?”

It came out of all three of her, one voice, small. Her mother’s face did something. It broke, and then it didn’t, as if she had made it hold on purpose so she could say the next thing.

“Hi, sweet girl,” Sarah said.

Laura had heard those words every morning since she came back. I’m sorry, sweet girl. I love you, sweet girl. Over and over, to a window. She had never once heard them said to her.

Then her mother was holding her.

She didn’t know who moved first. Her mother’s arms came up, paper and all, and Laura came down into them with every one of her at once, three bodies folding round one small woman until there was hardly any of her mother left to see. Sarah’s arms were thin, but they went round as much of Laura as they could hold and they held on hard, harder than Laura would have thought those arms could. Sarah’s face was in her hair. Sarah was saying her name into it, over and over, as if it were the only word she had kept.

She didn’t know how, or when, or what it had cost, or whether it would still be true when the sun came up. She didn’t ask. Not one of those questions was worth letting go of her mother to ask.

Laura held on.

Over her mother’s shoulder, with one of her, Laura could see Andy at Myra’s chains. He didn’t do anything clever. He took hold of the links at Myra’s wrists in both hands and pulled them apart, and the fog tore and frayed and let go, and then he did the one at her throat, carefully, with his fingers between the chain and her skin. Myra’s hands came free. They came up at once, both of them, and took his face between them.

“Andy.” Her voice was wrecked. “You’re so loud. And so bright. I can feel you from the other side of— you’re lit up like a—” She couldn’t finish it. She laughed instead, and it came out half a sob, and her tails came loose behind her for the first time in an hour.

“Sorry,” Andy said.

“Don’t you dare be sorry.” Myra held his face harder. “Don’t you dare.”

“I’m here,” Andy said. He put his hands over hers. “I’m right here.”

He bent and picked her cane up off the ash, where it had lain all night, and put it into her hand and closed her fingers on it. Then he let her go, because someone else was there.

Marie had come up beside them in her sneakers, out of breath, and Laura saw Myra’s face turn to her before Marie had said a word, as it would have turned toward a warm window. Myra must have known her mother’s colors from the far side of the Ring.

“Mom?”

“Myra. Oh, Myra.” Marie had her in her arms, cane and all. She held on as if she had come up a mountain to do it, and her hands were already going over Myra’s shoulders and down her arms to the raw places at her wrists where the chain had been, checking, while she talked. “My girl. My girl. I love you, Myra. I love you.”

“You’re supposed to be in the Hearth.” Myra’s face was in her shoulder. “Why are you— how did you— Mom, he came back. He came back.”

“I know. I know he did.” Marie laughed, wet, into her daughter’s hair. “And I don’t know how we got up here either. We were on the path, we’d hardly started up it, and then— never mind. Never mind. I don’t care. You’re here.”

Out on the ash, Thrustworthy rang off something that did not give, Nergal grunted in pain, and Andy was already at Riley.

He broke her chains as he had broken the others, wrists and hair and then throat, and the moment the last of the fog came off her Riley’s hair came up. All of it at once, the whole long russet-and-black weight of it that had been pinned down her back all night, rising and loosening and spilling out round her shoulders and down her arms. A lock of it went round Andy’s wrist before he had let go of the chain.

“You’re late, Cooper.” It came out of Riley cracked down the middle, and she looked up at him. “You came back.”

“I came back.”

Riley hit him once in the chest with her closed fist, not hard.

“I know,” Andy said. “I know, Riley.”

She hit him again, softer. Then she held on to the front of his mantle with that same fist and put her forehead against him, and her hair came around the both of them and held them there for a breath, two breaths, before she let him go.

When she lifted her head she was looking past him.

There was a woman standing a few feet off on the ash. She wore one of Laura’s mother’s dresses, a faded one the color of an old rose, too short in the sleeves and loose at the shoulders, and her feet were bare. She held her hands a little out from her sides, the fingers spread, as if she hadn’t yet worked out what to do with them. She had short russet hair, mussed and standing up at the crown.

She had Riley’s face.

Laura knew who it was by that face, and she knew by Riley’s that Riley was seeing it for the first time in the flesh. Riley had sat on the other side of a curtain from this woman. She had sat in a dark room with her and been held. Riley had seen her only once, in a dream, as she had been before her elimination. Now she stood three steps away with her own face looking back at her, wet, and trying very hard to hold still.

“Mom?” Riley said.

“Hi, baby.” Sandra’s voice cracked on it, once, and then she had it back. “Hi. It’s me. This is— this is what I look like.”

Riley didn’t move. Her hair did. One lock of it lifted off her shoulder and went out across the three steps between them, slowly, and touched her mother’s cheek, and Sandra shut her eyes.

“I didn’t know your face,” Riley said. “I only ever saw it once. In a dream.”

“I know, sweetheart.” Sandra opened her eyes. She lifted her hands, both of them, a little higher, and looked at them, and then at her daughter. “I’ve got hands again. Can I— I’d like to hold you. If that’s okay. Can I hold you?”

“Yes, Mom,” Riley said, her eyes glimmering.

Sandra crossed the three steps. She took Riley’s face in her new hands, very carefully, as if she wasn’t sure yet how hard hands were supposed to hold, and looked at it, and then she pulled her daughter in against her and held her, and Riley’s hair came around both of them and stayed.

After a while Riley said, into her mother’s shoulder, “You look like me.”

“Other way around, kid.” The Chicago was back in Sandra’s voice, and her eyes were streaming. “You look like me.”

She put one hand into the hair at the back of Riley’s head and left it there. It was, Laura thought, the first thing she had wanted to do with a hand in thirty-one years.

Laura watched them over her mother’s shoulder and couldn’t see for a moment. She blinked it clear.

Beyond them, beyond the fight and the gold light still hanging in the air from Sumiku’s fire, at the edge of the Ring, Arabella stood a little apart from everyone, with Erin a few yards along the rim from her, both hands still out toward the fight. Arabella’s hand was open at her side. It hung palm out, and the palm was dark with blood, and on the ash below it there was a single darker spot, the size of a coin. Laura had seen that hand shut over its scar all night. She didn’t know what it meant that it was open, or whether she was allowed to know.

Then her mother drew back, enough to see her, and Laura stopped looking at anything else.

Andy had come back. He stood a step away, close enough to touch, and didn’t touch her. He was letting her have this. She could feel him there anyway, down the bond and in the air, solid as a wall at her back.

Up close her mother’s face was thin, and lined at the eyes in a way Laura had looked at every morning since she came back without ever seeing it move. It was moving now. Everything in it was. Laura had knelt in front of that rocking chair and held those hands and talked to that window until she ran out of things to say, and then said them again. She had not known, until this second, how much of her had stopped expecting an answer.

Sarah looked at her. She put up one thin hand and touched the face nearest her, and then the next, and then the third, reaching for each in turn. She did it slowly—not checking for damage, but counting.

“I read your letter,” Sarah said.

Laura didn’t understand her for a second. Then she did, and the whole of her went still.

“My—” She looked down at the yellow paper crushed flat against her mother’s chest, the folds of it, the handwriting she could see through the back of the sheet. Her handwriting. Thirteen years old, five days before the river. “Mom, I never— I never gave you that. How did you—”

“Andy brought it.” Sarah’s voice was hoarse, and very plain. “I don’t know who gave it to him. I don’t care who did.” Her hand was still on Laura’s cheek. “You didn’t hate me.”

“Hate you?” It came out of all three of her at once, too loud. “Mom. No. Never. Not one day. I never—”

“I know.” Sarah nodded, a small, fast nod, a patient’s nod. “I know it now. It’s in your writing. I couldn’t hear it from your mouth. I thought you were being kind to me. I thought you came every morning because you were kind.” She stopped. Her chin shook and she made it stop. “And then I read it in your writing, and I couldn’t think it anymore.”

Laura couldn’t say anything. She held her mother’s wrist against her own face and couldn’t say a single thing.

Sarah took a breath. It went all the way down.

“There’s something else,” she said. “Andy says you think— about the Wish. He says you think it made him love you.” Her hand tightened on Laura’s face. “Sweet girl. I need to tell you about the Wish.”

Laura went cold, in all three places at once.

She knew about the Wish. She had read about it in her mother’s own handwriting, slanting hard to the right, a last letter written fast by a woman who knew she was running out of time. She had read it and felt the floor go out from under the only thing she had ever been sure of. Sam had told her afterward that a letter written in a panic didn’t have to say what had been said in the room. Andy had told her it didn’t matter where it came from, that he would keep choosing her. She had nodded at both of them. She had believed neither of them all the way down. She hadn’t been able to.

“Okay,” Laura said. It came out of her very small. “Okay.”

Sarah held on to her wrist.

“I was in Greg’s hands nearly a year by then,” her mother said. “You know about that. You know some of it.” Her voice was hoarse and plain and it didn’t shake. “I was tied to him by the thing the Hotel puts in you, so you can’t leave and you can’t stop going when you’re called. I didn’t choose it, not the way it ended up. I felt it every minute of every day. I felt it in the kitchen and I felt it in my sleep. I knew exactly what it was to be bound to somebody and have no say in it.”

Laura didn’t move. Close by, Myra had gone quiet in Marie’s arms. Riley had too. Laura could feel the two of them listening without turning her heads to look.

“So when Arabella came, and said I could have one Wish, I knew what I wasn’t going to ask for.” Sarah’s thumb moved on the inside of Laura’s wrist, back and forth. “I wasn’t going to do that to anybody. Not to you. Not to some little boy I’d never met, wherever he was, whoever he was going to grow up to be. I wasn’t going to have him made. I wasn’t going to have him built to fit you, like a key cut for a lock. And I wasn’t going to force him to love you. I asked for him to be found. That’s all. The real one. The one that could make you happy. Whoever he really was.”

“Mom—”

“Let me.” Sarah’s voice went harder. It was the first time Laura had ever heard it go hard. “Let me say it. I’ve had thirty years to not say it.”

Laura shut her mouths.

“I said if he wanted you, let it take. Only if he wanted you. Not because something was pulling him. Not because he couldn’t get away.” Her mother looked up at her, and her eyes were full and very steady. “And if he didn’t want you, then leave him be. Never make him. I said I’d rather you were lonely your whole life than have somebody love you who never had a choice in it, because I knew what that was. I was living in what that was. I meant it. I meant every word I said that night. I’d mean it again.”

Laura couldn’t breathe properly. She was breathing, she could hear herself doing it, and none of it was going all the way in. Her mother’s hand was warm on her face, as if it had been warm all along and Laura was only now being allowed to feel it.

“It never made him love you,” Sarah said. “It couldn’t. I made sure it couldn’t.” Her hand came up off Laura’s wrist and onto her face again. “He loved you before any of it took. He told me. You are soulmates, sweet girl. Arabella knew where he was, and arranged for Greg to move us next door. You were five weeks old. Greg called me back to the house, and I put you in Carol Cooper’s arms at her door and I ran, and I left you there with strangers.” Her face went tight, and she let it, and kept going. “And while I was gone, Carol put you down on a blanket next to her boy. And he looked at you, and you looked at him. And that was it. That was all it ever took. The bond came after that, Laura. It came after, because he let it. Because you both did.”

Laura looked past her mother at Andy.

He was standing a step away, where he had been all along, with his wedding mantle wet at the hem and her blue rose on his brow and the light from Sumiku’s fire still moving on one side of his face. He was looking at her as he had looked at her all her life. She had seen that look on him at thirteen, in a photograph on the hood of a car. She had seen it at the footbridge, and in the Sky Archive, and across a bonfire, and every morning in the Suite. She had seen it so many times she had stopped seeing it, and then she had read a letter and spent days afraid of it, afraid it had been put there.

Nobody had put it there. He had looked at her on a blanket in his mother’s house, five weeks old, before either of them had a word for anything, and chosen her, because he wanted to, with nothing pulling him at all.

He had chosen her every day, of his own free will.

He had chosen her from the very beginning.

The bond opened.

All the way.

It didn’t widen. It was simply open, from her end and his together, as it had been when they were small and she had never once had to think about it. Everything that had been narrowing for days, everything she had been reading through a crack, was there at once. She could feel all of him. Not where he was. Not how afraid. All of him, more than the bond had ever let through before. His love, which was so big she didn’t know where to put it, and his relief, which was shaking him, and under them both something hard and certain that she had never felt in him before and couldn’t name. She could feel his heart. She could feel him feeling hers.

And he could feel all of her. She knew it, because his face changed, and because she felt him find her: all of it, the love and the fear she had carried for days and the place where the fear had been and wasn’t anymore. He had all of it. She let him.

Andy’s eyes were wet. He didn’t look away.

She went looking for the fear, out of habit, as she had gone looking for it every hour since the bell. She found the place where it had been, swept clean, as if it had never once lived there.

Hi, he said.

Laura blinked at him.

His mouth hadn’t moved. She had been looking straight at it. It hadn’t moved, and she had heard him anyway, quite clearly, in his own voice, from somewhere just behind her own eyes, not through her ears but from the inside.

She stared at him. He stared back, and she felt his surprise come down the bond a breath after hers went up it.

Andy? She didn’t say it. She sent it, down the line between them, as she would have reached for him in the dark.

His eyebrows went up.

You heard that, he said, without saying it.

I heard that.

He laughed out loud, the kind of short, startled laugh a man lets out when he has nearly dropped something and caught it, with tears in it, and Sarah turned her head to look at him, and then back at Laura, and didn’t ask.

Okay, Laura sent. Okay. That’s new.

Yeah, he sent back. It is.

You smell like grass.

I walked through a lot of it. The corner of his mouth went up. Long story. You’ll get all of it.

Sarah was watching his face, and then Laura’s, and for a second her own mouth did something Laura had never seen it do, as if it had forgotten how to smile and was finding out.

Then he went still.

She felt it before she saw it. Something in him turned over and came to rest, like a thing that had been rolling a long time and had finally stopped. It settled into the hard, certain place she had felt under everything else, and fitted there. His eyes went past her for a moment, to nothing she could see, and came back to her.

She didn’t know what it was. She could feel the shape of it in him, solid and finished, a stone in a closed hand, and she couldn’t see inside it. He didn’t send it to her. She didn’t ask.

Her mother’s arm was still round her. Sarah hadn’t let go once, and Laura didn’t want her to. She leaned into it, all three of her, and with the one of her nearest him she reached out across the step between them, turning her hand so the claws of the gauntlet lay flat, and found Andy’s hand.

His fingers closed on hers at once, warm, and held on. The other two of her were leaning into her mother. Sarah’s arms were around both sets of Laura’s shoulders and hadn’t loosened once since they went there, thin and warm and much stronger than they looked, and Laura had no intention of asking them to.

She could feel him. All of him.

She kept noticing it, and every time she noticed it her breath caught. For days she had read him through a crack: where he was, how frightened, and nothing else, and she had held on to that crack with everything she had. Now there was no crack. There was only Andy, all the way through, his relief and his love and the ache in his legs from wherever he had walked tonight, and under all of it the hard, settled thing she had felt come to rest in him a minute ago and couldn’t see inside. It had never been like this. Not when they were small, lying on the rug in his parents’ living room with their heads together. Not ever, not even before the narrowing started. She didn’t know yet what to do with so much of him. She was half afraid to move, in case it spilled.

Beyond them the fight was still going. She had stopped hearing it. Now she heard it again: the bright crack of Norah’s sticks, Thrustworthy ringing off a man it couldn’t cut, the rush of Sumiku’s wings overhead. The air in the middle of the Ring still had gold in it from Sumiku’s fire. Erin stood at the rim with both arms out and her whole body shaking, and the green she sent up through the ash kept going gray in rings around his feet, and kept coming back.

He was still fighting them. He stood in the middle of it held by one ankle, and he turned and turned again, and every time one of them came in he met her. Norah’s stick caught his forearm with a clean crystal note and he flung her off it. Sam took the sweep of his right hand on the flat of her sword and skidded a yard through the ash and came straight back. Sumiku dropped out of the dark at him with the naginata, and he took that on the other arm. Samson Drei hung off his bad leg until a sweep of the hand sent him rolling, and was back on it before the hand had come round again. Nothing they did went into him, but they were hurting him, and it showed. The left side of his face had swollen shut around the eye. The funeral robe was burned off him down one side and hung in strips from his belt, and under the strips he was black and purple from the collarbone down. He stood straight anyway, favoring a leg, with one arm held tight against his ribs. Nothing he did kept them off for long, and they were paying for every return. Sam’s lip had split and the blood had dried down her chin. Norah held her shoulder low and put her weight on one hip. Sumiku ran with her left wing torn and trailing. Laura wondered which side would give out first. She clenched her hands, reaching out to summon her claws.

Then Andy’s attention went out past her. His hand stayed where it was. The rest of him left. She felt it go, over her shoulder and across the ash to the middle of the Ring, and settle there on the man in the funeral robes, and stay. And something came down the bond that she had never once felt in him.

It was cold. She knew his anger, the hot, quick kind that came up in him and burned itself out as fast. This was what was left when the heat had gone out of it, level and still and certain all the way down. She touched it, and it didn’t notice.

Andy? she sent.

Her mother noticed. Laura felt Sarah’s head lift beside her, and turn, and look up at Andy’s face from close by, and stay there.

He looked down at Laura. His face was quite calm. That frightened her more than the cold had.

“Wait for me,” he said gently. He said it out loud and quietly, to all three of her, his eyes going from one face to the next and back to the one whose hand he held. “Okay? Just wait for me. Stay with your mom.”

She could have argued. She could feel exactly how little good it would do.

“Go,” Laura said, from all three of her mouths at once. “I’ll be right here.”

He held on a moment longer. Then his fingers came out of hers slowly, one at a time, as if he were setting something down that he meant to come back for, and he turned away from her and drew the sword at his hip.