Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,67

her. “You can come closer, child. I won’t bite.”

After a long moment, Esther came to stand next to me by the bed, though she looked like she wanted to be somewhere else altogether.

“Ellie, fetch the lantern,” Cate said, frowning. Which I did, hoisting it so the light fell on Esther’s face.

“Oh my,” Cate said, her eyes growing wide. She reached for my sister’s hand, though Esther clearly did not want to give it. “You look nearly the same,” she said. “Older, but the same.”

And I smiled at what was coming.

Then she looked harder at me. At my face. My hair.

“You, though, have changed quite a lot. You’re thinner than you were. Taller. And your hair used to be so long.” She reached up with her other hand, and I bent lower so she could touch the soft shortness of it. “I used to call you Rapunzel.”

And I felt, in that touch, the big, jolly nurse we’d once known. The one who had called me Rapunzel and tended to Esther’s earaches.

Cate was not big. Nor was she jolly. But as I looked into her blue eyes, I knew both what she was and what she had once been, which were really the same thing, though they weren’t.

Here, beside me, was another soul both split in two and doubled.

She looked at Esther again. “Do you not know me?”

Esther shook her head. But then she bent closer. And her own eyes grew big. “Nobody called Ellie Rapunzel except Mrs. Cleary,” she said slowly.

And it wasn’t the lantern that lit my sister’s eyes as she sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “But Mrs. Cleary was a big woman. She was a big, round woman with rosy cheeks and hair in a braid down her back and blue eyes”—she leaned closer—“like yours, but . . . you can’t be her. You can’t be.”

And then Esther was crying, wrapped in the arms of a woman who had wanted nothing at all but to make Esther well when she was sick. To make her stop hurting so much.

I felt like a bystander, which made me sad. But I felt joyful, too.

The Esther I’d once known was right there, close enough to touch. And so was the hag who had once been Mrs. Cleary. And still was.

Chapter Fifty

After that it was different.

My sister wanted to stay, to look after Cate while I went home again.

It was clear that Esther didn’t want to go back out into the dark. But it was also clear that she wanted to be with Mrs. Cleary.

“All right,” I said. “You stay. I’ll go back.” Though I felt sad, even a little annoyed, to be leaving Cate in Esther’s hands . . . and to see that they were content to stay there together without me. First Larkin, which I had found easy to understand, and now Esther, which I found . . . unfair.

But I had been the one to wish for Esther to wake up a little. To open her eyes. So I could not very well blame her for doing just that.

“Mother will be in a state, wondering what’s become of us,” I said, as matter of fact as I could be. “So I’ll go home now and then to Larkin in the morning, and we’ll fetch you some more honey in case that leg festers again.”

Cate nodded. “I could use some more.” She pushed the deer hide away. Saw that the blanket was bloody where it covered her wound.

“Where are the bandages we wrapped it in before?” I said.

“I washed them in the bath. I had them with me. But I remember feeling dizzy on my way back here.” She frowned. “Nothing after that.”

“I’m surprised you let your leg get wet,” I said, and I could hear the disapproval in my voice.

She sighed. “I didn’t mean to. I was clumsy. And all for something that might have waited till you got back.” She gave me a rueful smile. “I’m used to doing things for myself.”

“The bandages are somewhere on the ground near where we found her,” I told Esther. “Go find them. And if they’re dirty, wash them out again.”

She stayed right where she was for a long moment of no and then went out into the night.

When she returned, I pointed at the fire and watched as she draped the wet bandages over the back of Cate’s one hard chair and dragged it close to the flames.

Cate looked from me to Esther and back again.

“What’s