It takes several days to get back. When we arrive, we skirt around the village, stopping at Ms. Adelaide’s so she can send word to my father before heading to Madda’s the long way so no one else will know we’ve returned. Before we left the clearing where the monolith no longer stands, we decided that after all we’ve been through, we deserve a little time to ourselves. Time to heal the wounds we both bear.
Healing is more than medicine. Madda always said that healing starts with the heart, and though we aren’t healed yet, we’re on our way. Some of our hearing has returned, but not all, and I don’t think it ever will. A small sacrifice, I suppose, for freeing the creatures of the spirit world. Maybe one day they’ll return to give thanks, and I’ll be able to ask for my hearing back. But maybe not. We talk about these things, Bran and I, between the moments when we stare at the fire, sleep, look at the stars when the sky is clear. We talk about what it means that the boundary is no longer there. We talk about the guilt we feel, and what will happen when we tell the Elders what we’ve done. We talk about if there had been another way, if we could have tried something else, if we were somehow mistaken about what the dzoonokwa wanted us to do. We talk about Plague, and the men it infected, and wonder, Have we just been lucky, or is there more yet to come?
We talk and we talk, but in the end, talk doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. We can’t change that. No one can.
The only thing we manage to decide in all our talking is that we must find Paul. How, we don’t know, but we will. Together, we will.
But for now, we exist in our little spell, for soon it will end.
And, as fate would have it, it is Avalon who ends it for us.
We are in bed, beginning the slow process of finding each other. We touch each other’s scars, the half-healed wounds, the bruises that mark our histories. Bran kisses the sisiutl’s bite, slowly, one dot at a time, as if his mouth can take away the pain that still lingers there. He’s about to slide lower when someone opens the cottage door, and before either of us has time to react, Avalon wanders into the bedroom as if she owns the place. We look at her; she looks at us. If she’s surprised to see us, she doesn’t show it.
“Get out” is all I say.
Bran laughs as she slams the door shut. It’s the first time he’s laughed since I found him, and if it weren’t Avalon he was laughing at, I might laugh too. But I don’t. I reach out and pull him toward me, and then we pick up where we left off.
Word spreads from there, and it isn’t long before we have to explain ourselves and what happened.
The Elders are arguing over the Band’s next step at this very moment. They can argue all they like, but there are two things I know. The first? We can’t stay here anymore. The boundary has fallen, and this place is no longer safe. The sea wolf knows where we are, and the creature that follows him does too.
The second? I’m going north, and Bran’s coming with me.
There’s a story among people-not my people, for I am, and will always be, one apart. But there’s a story of how people came to be, how Raven dropped from the sky to pry open a clam shell, and found humankind inside. They say that this story took place a long, long time ago when the earth was still young, when Raven still spoke words that were lies and truth at the same time.
So I say: This is the story of the way things once were, and now are, and how they will be, for if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we are not bound by the myths created for us. It’s time for my own myths, and those myths will take place in the land of ravens, the land left behind by time-the land of the Bix’iula.
These are my truths, my myths, my lies. This is my story.