Foxlowe. Eleanor Wasserberg
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out there. That’s where the Bad is coming from. The salt keeps it out, she said.
It was buried under the dark, but I knew the moor rolled out, cut through with stone wall and the dots of sheep. In daylight the hill called the Cloud would sit stark against the sky, its rocks jutting. The Standing Stones lay just behind the house, hidden by the drop and roll of the moor, and I began to feel the itch of being away too long: we’d stayed off the moor for most of the winter.
White dropped on white and showed it grey: the early frost had lost its glitter under our boots. My bag brought us to the edge of the lawns where Egg took over, wiggling his hips and casting his salt from side to side in a wave. Pet took us up to the house. We carried on like that until Freya’s salt met Richard’s in a pile outside the front door. She’d passed Blue to me and as the salt piled up I whispered into my arms, We’re safe now. The Bad is strongest today but it doesn’t like salt.
We made Foxlowe full of light and music. Some stories say this is to help keep the Bad away, others to celebrate the new Scattering and it is only the salt that matters. I loved the house full of fire and sound, played chase games with Toby in the usually dark places: the back corridors with the old bells and cobwebs, the cellars full of paint and sacks of flour, our shadows ballooning with the rarely lit torches hanging from every doorway. The grown ups chased each other too, squealing and slamming doors, or danced or lay with their heads on each other’s stomachs, drinking and smoking far into the night, their lips and chins red.
It was easy to take Blue.
Someone had tucked her into her drawer on the middle landing, where she lay swaddled and open-eyed. The Family had been carrying her and swinging her over shoulders, rocking her while they danced, but she got heavy, and the Family could get bored of the ungrown on Solstice days when the moonshine flowed, and so here she was, alone. Toby was with Valentina; she’d grabbed him as we ran through the front hall, swept him up and kissed him, and they had gone to the yellow room, where I knew she’d be tearfully clinging to him and telling him stories about their old life that he’d try to retell to me later, but wouldn’t quite remember the details. He just liked the way she held him close those nights, and let her words wash over him.
Blue’s mouth blew kisses at the air as she gazed at the beams. When I leaned over her, her eyes refocused, the little black dots blooming, and I thought how I might be a strange moon to her, so big. I knelt and pulled my hair around her drawer, in Freya’s way, so my face made the world. She started to cry.
I thought about Freya’s face turned away from me and how I couldn’t get into her arms any more, then scooped Blue out of the drawer. Above me, the grown’s footsteps and slamming doors echoed, and the ballroom rang with music.
The night sounds: a sniffing, the air rustling. They smothered the feet on flagstones and voices as I closed the kitchen door behind me, and stepped out. I glanced back to the house where glowing balls of candles and torches bobbed up and down as the grown carried them about. Blue thrashed in the freezing air. My throat was tight. Any moment the Family would catch me outside on Winter Solstice night and I’d be Edged, sent to the yellow room, put on a starve day, or worse.
The lawns were frosty and quiet, the steps and the fountain white against the black sky. The oaks swayed in the distance. The moor rolled out behind them, the Stones waiting for us and for summer. I held Blue to me, suddenly excited. Everyone was inside but us. I could race across the deserted gardens, under the stars, in the strange midnight green laced with ice, as long as I stayed inside the salt line.
Something shifted in the gloom. I held Blue’s warmth to my chest, and wobbled towards the salt line. The Bad hung there in the quiet, and a kind of pause, a deeper black in the air behind the line, like spilled ink. Freya had told me how the smallest gap in the salt would let it through. It could flow and squeeze and drip like the tiniest raindrop, then swell into a flood and wash us all away.
Blue began to mewl. Behind me I heard the goats bleating softly. I thought how I would do anything in the world to keep Freya for mine. But perhaps it wasn’t that so much. Perhaps I just wanted Blue to be one of us, the ungrown. She would take the Spike Walks with us and we could soothe her afterwards and teach her how we imagined the pain leaving. We’d show her how to hide the Bad if you thought it was bubbling up. And I thought about how now she’d be more like me than like Toby. Freya just didn’t like him all that much. But she knew the Bad was in me for sure because of the Crisis. This would put Blue in the same place. Make us more Family.
Whatever the reason, here’s the truth: I took that baby and I laid her out in the cold outside the salt line for the Bad to take.
Inside, Toby and Valentina were at the kitchen table. My heart quickened, but Valentina’s head was in her arms, and she barely looked up. Toby was sucking on the cloth that had been wrapped around the boiling sugar. He let it drop from his mouth when he saw me.
—You never, he said.
—It was only for a second.
—Not like you weren’t safe inside the salt, he said, and shrugged, but I could tell he was impressed.
—Come and look, I said.
I pulled him to the window in the studios, half-finished canvases and sculptures all around us. We cupped our hands to the glass.
Somewhere, Blue’s wails carried.
It took Toby a while to see her. I waited, breathing white against the glass.
—Is that new little … is that Blue?
—Yes, I said.
—She’s outside the salt line!
—Yes.
I thought he wouldn’t want to go outside but he wriggled right out of the studio window, the torch swinging wildly as he kicked it on the way out. I thought he might yell for the grown, but he only glared at me through the glass, and beckoned. I followed him, running to the edge of the safe places. The air had lost its crisp chill from before. I felt dizzy with a heat that roared in my head.
Toby stopped just where he should and I stood silent beside him. I gripped his hand and he didn’t shake me off. Blue was screaming now and we watched her, counted in names, clutching hands, not bothering to pretend we weren’t afraid. Then Blue’s cries moved to a higher pitch and my panic lunged me forward. The Bad let me pass right through it, swirled around in the air and kissed at our skin as I brought her back over. I stood with her in my arms, staring at Toby. A rush of violence came from the Bad and I imagined throwing Blue to the ground, drawing blood, until it ebbed away.
—Sorry, I whispered in a rush of horror. —Sorry Blue, sorry Blue, sorry.
—Maybe it didn’t get her, Toby whispered.
—It got her, I saw it.
—Me too, Toby said. —You’ll have to … Green, this is so, I think you’ll have to be a Leaver.
I started to cry then and held Blue to me and kissed her and begged Toby and said sorry so many times that he fetched dried long grass from the sheds and bound our hands together. We swore we would never tell the Family what I’d done.
See, Blue would understand what I did, because like all of us, once she was old enough she’d learn about the Time of the Crisis. The Time of the Crisis isn’t Blue’s story, but mine. Freya would tell it to me after a Spike Walk. She’d be lying next to me, stroking my hair, kissing the broken skin. Freya’s breath in my ear was just soothing sounds like the wind over the roof tiles, but slowly she formed words that wrapped themselves around me like a familiar blanket. I could tell it off by heart even before I knew what the words meant. It’s Freya’s voice, not mine, but I can’t help that: the Time of the Crisis was her story first.
The Time of the Crisis must always be remembered, so we are vigilant, and learn from our mistakes. This was the time before the rituals became solid and clear, and we were trying to decide