Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,41

thing or two about what ails a body. Come back if you want to, for help.”

“And you can come get me if you need to,” I told Larkin. I gave him a long look and told him what he already knew. “Straight down the deer path to a better path and then straight down some more to a cabin with a woodshed. But don’t go near that. It’s full of puppies, and their mother is nervous.”

“Puppies?” Cate said in a somewhat stronger voice. “You didn’t tell me that either.”

“No,” I said, confused by how changeable she was, sending me away one minute and then wanting to know me the next. “But you haven’t told me anything much either.” I turned to Larkin. “And I know nothing at all about you.” Though I did.

The thought of not knowing him better, not knowing them better, felt like hunger.

Which was when, without warning, I felt as if I might start to cry.

I tried to say something else, but all that came out was a croak. More bird than frog, but animal regardless. A puny animal. One that was used to feeling small.

The two of them stared at me in the yellow lantern light. Captan stood up and watched me closely.

I put my jacket on over my shirt with its missing sleeves. Picked up my pack. Cleared my throat. “I hope you get better now, Miss Cate.” I looked at Larkin. “I hope we never have to do any of this ever again.” Though that wasn’t entirely true.

And I took myself and my unspilled tears out the door.

* * *

—

I didn’t get far.

The stars stopped me for a minute in the clearing outside Cate’s cabin.

There aren’t many hurts that a sky-meadow full of clean white blossoms can’t make at least a little better.

But as I watched them, as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, as the trees at the edge of the clearing slowly took shape, one from the next, I saw someone standing among them.

I felt my shoulders rise around my neck. My whole body went terribly hot.

It was a woman. Standing so still she might have been a tree herself. Except she wasn’t. Everything about her said something else.

It was dark and she was some distance away, but something awful reached across that clearing and touched me.

And I felt what the fisher cat must have felt when faced with a hungry dog five times its size.

But as I stood there watching her, I realized that I wasn’t just afraid. I was . . . shocked. By how dark she was. How bitter. Like something scorched.

And I could feel that bitterness even across the clearing.

I waited for her to move. To say something. But she just stood there.

The way home was to my left, close by, and I wondered if I could just go quickly and be away and gone. But it was a long way down to home, and it was dark enough and the path strange enough that I couldn’t hurry without risking a fall.

So I turned, instead, and went back into Cate’s little cabin and shut the door behind me.

“Third time you didn’t knock,” Cate said from her bed. Larkin looked up from the big book. Captan, lying on the floor by Cate, raised his head, looked at me, and began to growl.

“What’s this, Cap?” Cate said. “She’s—”

“There’s a woman,” I said. “At the edge of the clearing.”

Captan stood up, stiff-legged, and growled some more, deep in his throat.

But Larkin surprised me by sighing. Closing the book. Rising from his chair and standing taller than he had before.

“You go on,” he said to me, coming to open the cabin door. He led me outside.

The woman was closer now, halfway across the clearing.

“Go on,” Larkin said again. “Go on home.”

There was something urgent in his voice.

I looked at the woman, who had come closer still. “Who is that?”

Larkin took my arm and pushed me a little, toward the path. “My mother.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

It’s one thing to climb a mountain in daylight, quite another to climb down it in darkness, and I had to go so slowly and carefully that I wasn’t far along when I heard shouting from above and stopped to listen.

Anger makes for loudness, but I still had trouble understanding much of what I heard as I stood among the trees. Something about Larkin coming home where he belonged.

Larkin yelling back. Something about him being old enough to make up his own mind.

After a while, the shouting stopped.

I imagined