Echo Mountain: Chapters 41–56

I had already pried a lot out of him, and I didn’t want to push too hard, but there was a lot here that I still didn’t understand.

I thought about that—how Larkin had lost his father just weeks before he stood in the trees and watched us come to live on the mountain. Watched our pitiful start. Listened to Samuel bleating like a lamb in the cold, gray time before the wilderness greened again.

Esther, who followed behind her, took one look at the situation and stopped short, wavering in place, like a dress pinned to a line.

“She’s not a doctor. She’s just a girl. And she’s too wild and willful. You know she is. If she weren’t, she wouldn’t have been under that tree when it fell and none of this would have happened in the first place.”

“And that’s it?” I said. “We’re born to one thing and that’s it?” Of all the things she’d ever said to me, this was the most confounding.

I pictured the spider smashed into the root cellar floor like a spent star, dingy and dark.

I didn’t know what she intended, but then she came back wearing a pair of my father’s trousers, cinched with his belt at the waist and rolled into cuffs at the ankle.

But I stood still and waited for the two of them to sort themselves out. Captan did likewise, though his whole body yearned to be gone, uphill, to home.

The narrow bed, one hard chair, a table, the shelves with jars full of oddments and potions and worms. The nubs of spent candles squatting like toadstools all over the place.

“Why did you open the door if you’re trying to warm her up?” Esther said.
“To increase the draw, for the fire,” I replied. “The draft. The flow of air.”

She sounded cranky and subdued at the same time.

“We’re different.”
Cate scoffed at that. “So are ink and paper, but they get along very well indeed.”

And for a long moment, we stared at each other in the darkness, and I was glad that he was not a big, burly summer bear.

Ever since I’d imagined Esther being mauled by a bear, I had cared much less about other hurts, however real they might have been.

“I suppose you do,” she said, too much weariness in her voice. “But I won’t leave your father to go up that mountain with you.”

But I went to check on Cate first, to see how she and Esther had fared while I was gone, hoping she was enough improved that we could leave the honey to the bees.

The candle stubs burned out on her floor.

Cate lay propped up in her bed, in her clean nightdress, her blanket smooth and straight, her hair in a neat braid that wound its way over her shoulder to flaunt a bow fashioned from a strip of rag.

Her collarbone—the cleft in it just there, at the base of her neck—looked so fragile that I thought of songbirds and mice and rabbits, but old ones.

“What happens to a bedsheet left wet?”
She grew still. “It molders.”

“Things die. No reason to it.”
“Maybe too wet,” Larkin said. “Maybe mites. Maybe something robbed them and they starved.”

“The other side of what?” As if we lived on the moon and could not fathom the side we couldn’t see.

I hadn’t expected to pay for it, even in trade, and I had no time to bicker, so “My thanks,” I said.

I watched as she spooned perhaps a smidgen, no more than a dollop, from her own jar into mine.

“Smart of you to start out where so many of us are ending up,” Mr. Peterson said. Which apparently sat well with Larkin, who said, “Thank you for the honey.”

Just as she had given nothing in payment to my father when he had mended her feathered church hat, which was molting.

I almost said no, but I didn’t want to say that he was the grandson of the “witch” who had cursed her with a belly stone—though part of me wanted to put that notion to rest.

So he put his arms around me while I cried some more. As it turned out, a boy like Larkin was a fine antidote to bee venom.

But it also infused, in me, a good kind of sharpness. A keenness. As if the poison were medicine as well, brewed from the best the mountain had to offer: something ancient and pure and perfect.

But it also infused, in me, a good kind of sharpness. A keenness. As if the poison were medicine as well, brewed from the best the mountain had to offer: something ancient and pure and perfect.