A Long Day in Lychford (Lychford #3)(23)

How could she get past the fear? What was her experience telling her to do?

Bloody bite it. Chew it. Rip it up.

She snatched at the material with her teeth, grabbed it and held on, wrenched it from side to side. Was this achieving anything? Only satisfaction, but . . . there was a taste here . . . what was that? Taste, like every other sense she had, had been changed by exposure to the water from the well in the woods, but it wasn’t often she got to make use of it. There was a kind of . . . meaningfulness under the emptiness she had in her mouth, a sense that . . . yeah, put her tongue on it, get more of it . . . a sense that something real was here underneath.

Okay, what had she got to lose? She grabbed a handful of what was turning into a void of meaninglessness around her and started to gulp it down. Started to take it like it was a drug. Come on, let her body and brain process this stuff, let it poison her, let her actually start to see what was . . .

She realised she’d started to see the real fibres again. That now they were leading right into her body, that she’d actually managed to randomly pull some of them into her. What if she went beyond being able to pull on them, actually got . . . ? She grabbed a great handful of them and shoved them into her mouth, and into her brain, and it pulled her open, and she pulled them open in turn, and she forced her way inside. She abandoned the idea of her brain making sense of what she was visualising, and went with the impossibility. She reached a hand out of the impossible knot that was impossible to get out of and grabbed Marcin and the white being and hauled them in after her.

Suddenly all three of them were in a sort of kaleidoscopic rollercoaster, colours rushing past at an impossible speed. Marcin was yelling, his hands trying to find purchase on something, but at least now he was reacting to the same thing she was. The being had just curled in a ball. But she herself . . . she was surfing this now. She had no control, but she could stand, and face forward, and see what was coming, ready to deal . . .

There was ahead a jumble of infinite threads, all colours, which she couldn’t make sense of. The point where all the boundaries met, where all the borders were pulled tight. This was what someone had made, centuries ago, around Lychford. It connected the worlds as well as holding them apart. It wasn’t a great work of art, it was an organic mess of compromises and solutions and traps.

Autumn fell into it yelling.

*

“What the bloody hell,” said Judith, “are you doing in my head?”

Judith hadn’t actually expected to be alive. She was annoyed to find that she’d grabbed hold of Rory Holt as if to shield him from the collapse, just as he’d grabbed hold of whatever he could see of the sprites. They were all curled together in a tiny preserved bubble of a world, light flickering around them.

“Holding the roof up,” said Autumn, from where Judith normally had an internal voice telling her to remember she’d put the kettle on or that Gardeners’ Question Time would be on soon, “and hey, you’re welcome.”

“Just . . . don’t look around, now you’re in there!”

“I can’t help it. I can . . . see . . . no, I’m feeling, I’m experiencing, like they’re my memories too . . . oh . . . oh no, oh Judith, I’m so—”

Judith wouldn’t have been able to stand her pity if they’d been in the same room, never mind when it was coming from between her own ears. “Get out!” she whispered.

“If I do that, there goes the roof. I didn’t choose to be in here, I just landed in the centre of . . . I think it’s where all the boundaries are attached . . . and I saw you here and I threw my . . . my sort of hand . . . out to save you and here’s where I ended up.”

“How the hell . . . ? No, never mind that. Can you get us out of here?”

Judith felt Autumn’s presence sort of . . . shifting in her head, like she was now looking at summat else apart from every intimacy of Judith’s life. The other thing Judith didn’t like was . . . oh, yes, she could feel Autumn’s existence too. There was an outsiderness that Judith recognised, but that with Autumn was both of long standing and recently, sharply, deepened. Judith found they were suddenly thinking a thought in both their inner voices at once. It was that if she wanted to, Judith could move to another town and fit in, while Autumn would always have a certain number of people who stood between her and that release.

To share a thought . . . when she was younger, that would have been so good. But now it hurt so much. That outsider feeling was something Judith so did not want for Autumn, and she saw with great guilt how she had contributed to it. That guilt was reflected back by Autumn’s thoughts about how she’d treated Judith, given how Judith . . . was now.

Oh. Oh no. What could be worse than this shared pity?

What could be better?

Judith bellowed internally. “Can you stop being so bloody soft and just find what you need to—?!”

“You don’t get to order me around while we’re the same person.”

“I order myself around all the bloody time, you stupid woman!”

“We are going to have a talk about this, when . . . if I can get us home.”

“What are you going to do about this one?” Judith mentally pointed to Rory, still curled up, holding on to the sprites like they were soft toys. “He’s in your power now.”

“So I can’t just save you and the . . . sprites?” She’d found what they were called inside Judith’s knowledge. She hadn’t wanted to think that harsh a thought, but there were no barriers between the two women now.