The Sweet Far Thing

The roots trip me. I fall to the ground. Gasping, I crawl toward the dagger, but Amar is quicker.

“No!” Kartik shouts, and then I feel a sharp pain in my side. When I look down, the dagger is there and my blood spreads across my white blouse in a widening stain.

“Gemma!” Felicity screams. I see her running toward me with Ann just behind.

I stagger forward, and when I reach the tree, I pull the dagger from my side with an anguished cry.

“I…release…these souls,” I repeat in a whisper.

I plunge the dagger into the tree. It screams in pain, and the souls slip from its skin, pushing out of the branches like leaves of fire, and then they are gone.

My eyes flutter. The land goes wavy. My body trembles till I cannot stop it. I’m caught in the tree’s embrace. And the last thing I hear as I fall against the cradle of the branches is Kartik shouting my name.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

THE MIST IS THICK AND WELCOMING. IT KISSES MY FEVERISH skin with a coolness, like a mother’s caring lips. I cannot see what is ahead. It is just as in my dreams. But now a yellow glow is cutting the gray fog. Something is coming through. The glow comes from a lantern hanging from a long pole, and the pole is attached to a barge bedecked in lotus blossoms. The Three have come, and they’ve come for me. Behind me in the mist, I hear a familiar voice: Gemma, Gemma. It moves through me all whispery soft, and I long to return to it, but the women beckon with their hands and I move to meet them. Their movements are slow, as if they take great effort. I am slowing as well. My feet seem to sink into the mud with each step, but I’m getting closer.

I step onto the barge. They nod to me. The old one speaks.

“Your time has come. You have a choice to make.”

She opens her hand. There rests a cluster of deep purple berries, much darker in hue than the ones Pip ate. They sit cupped in her palm, as bright as jewels.

“Swallow the berries, and we will ferry you away to glory. Refuse them, and you must return to whatever awaits. Once you choose, there is no turning back.”

For a moment, I hear my friends calling me, but they seem far away, as if I could run and run and never catch them.

“Gemma.” I turn to see Circe behind me. She has lost the gray pallor she wore earlier. She looks just as she did the first day I saw her at Spence, when she was Miss Moore, the teacher I loved. “You did well,” she says.

“You knew Eugenia had become the tree, didn’t you?” I say.

“Yes,” she answers.

“And you meant to save me?” I ask hopefully.

She gives me a rueful smile. “Have no illusions about me, Gemma. I meant to save myself first. To have the power second. You were a distant third.”

“But I was third,” I say.

“Yes,” she says with a little laugh. “You were third.”

“Thank you,” I say. “You saved me.”

“No. You saved yourself. I only helped a bit.”

“What will become of you now?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer.

“She will roam here in this mist for all time,” the crone tells me.

The choice is before me in her palm. The cries of my friends grow faint in the fog. I take one plump berry and place it on my tongue, tasting it. It is not tart. Rather, there is only a pleasant sweetness and then nothing. It is the taste of forgetting. Of sleep and dreams with no waking. Never to long or yearn, to struggle or hurt or love or desire ever again. And I understand that this is what it truly means to lose your soul.

My mouth goes numb with sweetness. The berry sits on my tongue.

Felicity carrying goldenrod in her arms. Ann’s voice, strong and sure. Gorgon marching through the battlefield.

I have only to swallow the berry and it is done. That is all. Swallow the berry and with it all struggle, all care, all hope. How easy it would be to do.

Kartik. I left him at the tree. The tree. I was to do something there.

So very, very easy…

Kartik.

With a tremendous effort, I spit the berry from my mouth, gagging as I try to rid my tongue of the sugary numbness. My body aches as if I have pushed a heavy rock uphill forever, but now I am rid of it.

“I’m sorry. I cannot go with you. Not now. But I am to have a request, am I not?”

“If you wish it,” the crone says.

“I do. I should like to offer my place to another,” I say, looking toward Circe.

“You would give it to me?” she says.

“You saved my life. That must count for something,” I say.

“You know I abhor self-sacrifice,” she replies.