Gallant(51)

It will not come to that, she tells herself as she flexes her fingers, the bandage tight over her palm. Her hands are empty, the sketchpad and the red journal left on her bed. She wishes she had something to hold. A hand. Or a knife. She sighs, fingers dropping to her side.

But as she takes in Hannah’s curls, threaded gray, Edgar’s stooping shoulders, Matthew, already winded—she bites back a silent laugh. Not the laugh you make when you’re amused, but the one that escapes when you know you’re in trouble.

Hannah pulls her into a tight hug, one that seems to wrap all the way around her like a coat. Olivia wishes they could stay like that forever.

“Just a child,” the woman murmurs, half to herself, and Olivia can feel a teardrop hitting her hair and knows Hannah is thinking of Thomas as much as her, and maybe even of her mother, and her uncle, of every Prior she’s met and known and lost beyond the wall.

Hannah cups Olivia’s cheek, tipping her chin so their eyes meet. “You come back,” she says. “Thomas or no, you come back.”

Olivia nods.

And then Matthew is leading her out into the garden. Away from one house and toward another. She looks back at Gallant, one last time—at Hannah and Edgar watching from the music room, little more than outlines in the failing light. At the ghouls that gather, the old one at the edge of the orchard, her uncle at the back door, a woman beneath a trellis, her mother sitting on a low stone bench. None of them tries to stop her as she and Matthew make their way to the wall.

But as they near it, she slows.

There is a new shadow on the ground. It fans out, the way lamplight does when it falls through an open door, though the one in the wall is closed.

Olivia kneels to study the mark.

It fed on every living thing, every blade of grass, every flower and tree and bird, leaving only dust and bones in its wake.

How do you fight something like that? she wonders and hopes she does not have to.

She runs her fingers over the grass. It’s dry and brittle and black.

The door was only open a second, maybe two, and in that time, the other side burned its way into this one. What would it have done in an hour? A day?

It would have eaten everything.

She looks down at her own hand where it rests on the barren earth.

The thing beyond the wall can strip life from this world, but in that world she can give it back. Is that a weapon, or a weakness? She doesn’t know.

Olivia straightens and finds Matthew staring at the door.

“Are you certain?” he asks. And she knows he must look at her and see a foolish, headstrong girl, a strange intruder on his stranger world, or worse, someone else to lose. He does not know what she can do. Then again, neither does she.

He looks at her and asks again, “Are you certain?” and she nods, not because she is, but because it is the only answer she can give. The only one that will keep Matthew alive, and bring his brother home.

Night is sweeping in now, and she turns to make her way to the edge of the wall, only to feel Matthew catch her wrist and pull her back. She tenses on instinct, unsure whether he means to quarrel or drag her into a hug.

He does neither. He simply rests his hands on her shoulders and looks her in the eyes.

“I will be right here,” he says. “When you come back.”

All her life, Olivia has wondered what it would feel like to have a family.

And now she knows.

It feels like this.

Olivia nods and squeezes her cousin’s hand.

And then she takes a deep breath and steps around the wall.

For a moment, nothing happens.

She is back in the empty field, the sea of tallgrass rippling in the breeze, a few weedy thistles jutting here and there between the stems. The mountains rise, craggy old stone peaks so far away they look painted on the sky, and she can feel the wall behind her, and the world beyond it, the warmth of the garden at her back.

There is still time to turn around.

Perhaps seconds, perhaps heartbeats, but there is still time. Olivia closes her eyes and holds her ground. Between one breath and the next, the world settles. She feels it the way you feel a cloud as it passes overhead, blotting out the sun. When she opens her eyes, the field is gone, and she is back in the wasted garden, staring up at the ruined old house.

No figure stands on the balcony. No milk-white eyes shine in the dark. Still, her hand drifts to the pocket of her dress, to the hunting knife hidden there, a short, heavy blade in a leather sheath. Edgar pressed it into her hands just before she left.

“Pointy end out,” he said, patting her shoulder, and she wanted to tell him she knew how to use a knife, even if the only thing she’s ever cut are carrots and potatoes.

She doesn’t draw the blade, isn’t sure what good it will do against the monster in the dark, but it is enough to know that it is there.

Go, hisses a voice in her head, and she forces her legs forward, up the slope into the garden, moving like a thief.

Once, back at Merilance, she nearly got caught.

She was in Matron Agatha’s room, kneeling in front of the bedside drawer, searching the contents more out of boredom than need, when the doorknob turned and the old woman came in, her shuffling steps and stale perfume filling the narrow space.

There was no room to hide beneath the bed, cluttered as it was, and if the matron had turned on the light, she would have seen Olivia there, but she didn’t. She stumbled, sighing, through the darkened room and sank onto the bed, eyes glassy with Matron Sarah’s sherry. She just sat there, staring at nothing, and Olivia knew she could either kneel there all night, waiting for the old woman to drift off, or make her escape, and in the end she decided she’d rather be caught fleeing than stay trapped, so she went.