The Poison Season(8)

Leelo knew then that the only thing worse than her brother leaving would be to find herself here, standing on the lakeshore, singing the drowning song for Tate.



Chapter Four


That night, Fiona gently brushed Leelo’s long hair while Ketty pulled Sage’s auburn strands into something resembling a plait. Tate was already asleep, and the living room was silent save for Sage’s muttered protests and the crackling of the fire.

All day, Leelo had been trying to make sense of what they had witnessed. She’d always believed there would be no contact with Tate once he was gone and that anyone who knew what the Forest was capable of would run as far from it as possible so they would never be tempted to return.

As a child, Leelo had doted on her little brother, before she understood that he would be leaving by his twelfth birthday—only weeks away now—if his magic didn’t come. It was generally assumed that if it hadn’t appeared by then, an Endlan was well and truly incantu, and while they may not immediately fall prey to Endla’s music, they would eventually. It was a far better fate to leave early than to stay until it was too late.

Around his tenth birthday, Tate gave up on singing his prayers to the Forest and began speaking them instead, knowing there was no magic in his voice. Leelo did her best to distance herself from him then, but it quickly became clear that the separation would be as painful as severing a limb, whether they did it now or when it came time for him to leave. He still tried to crawl into her side of the bed on cold nights, and sometimes she didn’t have the heart to kick him out. Sleeping next to him, his face still bearing the slightest traces of baby fat, she couldn’t imagine him alone in the world.

“Why do we send them away?” Leelo whispered, even though she knew the answer.

“Those without magic aren’t strong enough to resist it,” Fiona said, her voice so soft it made Leelo’s eyelids heavy. “That’s why we can’t allow them to stay on Endla.”

Leelo sighed. “But surely we could protect them somehow.”

“You know that’s impossible. They would run straight into our traps the moment we sang the hunting song,” Ketty answered, her voice as sharp as her gaze in the firelight.

Sage scrambled away from her mother’s rough hands and picked up a set of small antlers, still covered in soft velvet. The young buck she’d taken them from had died of natural causes; hunting wouldn’t resume on the island until after the festival. Sage had strung holly berries on a thread earlier and now proceeded to wind them around the antlers, fashioning her crown for the spring festival.

“So what if a few incantu are caught,” she said. “At least the Forest would be sated.”

Leelo frowned at her cousin. “How can you say that? Just because someone doesn’t have magic doesn’t mean they deserve to die.”

“Which is precisely why we send them away,” Ketty said. “It’s a kindness, not a punishment. Pieter knew the consequences of coming back.”

“What about the consequences of harboring an incantu?” Sage asked.

Ketty cleaned her daughter’s hair out of the comb and tossed it into the fire, where it was quickly reduced to ash. “Isola’s family will be shunned. For a time, anyhow. I’ll speak with the council on Rosalie and Gant’s behalf. They are too much a part of this community to be outcasts forever, and it doesn’t seem as if they knew about Pieter until today.”

“And Isola herself?” Sage pressed.

“That poor girl will be dealing with the consequences for the rest of her life,” Fiona said quietly.

Sage rolled her eyes, unsatisfied with this response. “No one will marry her now, I bet.”

“Isola is ruined,” Ketty agreed. “If her parents are smart, they’ll turn her out sooner rather than later. There’s no reason they have to be pulled down by her mistake.”

Leelo’s heart ached for Isola. She couldn’t imagine being turned out by her own family. “But Pieter was one of us, and he wasn’t harming anyone. We didn’t even know he was here until today.”

Ketty scowled. “Once an incantu leaves, they’re an outsider, and outsiders are forbidden on Endla. Why must we go over this a thousand times, Leelo?”

“Not all outsiders are evil, Ketty.”

Leelo turned to look at her mother. She rarely spoke, and when she did, it was usually to agree with her sister. But tonight, it seemed, she wasn’t in the mood to placate.

Ketty responded to her sister’s comment with a look that could cut flesh.

“I’m tired,” Fiona sighed, rising from her chair. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

Taking their cue from Fiona, Leelo and Sage headed upstairs to their shared room, leaving Ketty to smolder in the dark along with the embers.

Sage and Leelo prepared for bed in silence, but Fiona’s words played over and over in Leelo’s mind as she climbed into bed, toying with one of the balls of bright felted wool she had made and strung into garlands. They hung from the headboard, the windowsill, the little bookcase they shared. The only other decoration was a pink-and-red circular woven rug that took up most of the floor. Their grandmother had woven it, before she died. It told Endla’s story, if you knew how to read the colors and patterns.

When she was younger, Leelo had asked her mother about it. “I know we came here to protect the Forest and ourselves,” she’d said. “But what happened out there in the world that was so terrible we had to leave?”