THE LAST--the aftermath

4
A Wilted Rose
4



"She's waking up!"

"I don't want to wake up, thank you," she said softly. A head leaned down by her own, and whispered in her ear.

"You have to wake up, dear."

Sage smiled. It was her mother's voice. She had almost expected it. She stirred slightly in the bed, feeling the smooth soft covers that were laid over her. The warm blankets were pulled up to her chin, but they had slipped slightly and her shoulders were getting cold. But she was too tired to move her hand and pull them further up. It was far too much trouble. Her eyes stayed obstinately shut, and she didn't much care to open them. There was no point, after all because she was tired and she was probably just going to sleep again anyway.

"I don't want to," Sage whispered into the pillows. "I want to dream again, Mum. I want to see if I can dream again."

"Sage," said another voice, less softly in her ear. "Wake up, please."

It was not Elis, but it sounded very much like her. Sage kept her eyes closed. It was not necessary to open her eyes to know who stood over her.

"I don't want to, Avery."

"If you don't wake up now, you never will."

"Why would I want to wake up when the dream was so much better?"

"You have to live."

It was Pa. Sage smiled and turned her head slowly, but did not open her eyes.

"I suppose I can do that," she said. She opened her eyes. Pa was standing over her, mustering a faint smile for her. But Sage's eyes opened and stared away beyond him. Sage's eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

"Pa? Where are you?"

"I'm here," he said. "I'm right in front of you."

"Why can't I see you?"

Pa stood up straight and backed away. Elis glanced towards him and back towards Sage, then took his place at Sage's side. Avery stood behind her mother. Davin sat silently in the back, knowing that it was not his place to pry or to help.

Elis took Sage's hand and smiled.

"They were afraid of this, dear," Elis said. "The doctors, I mean. They kept saying that you might not wake up. They kept saying that you might not be the same when you awoke. They said that there was no way of telling." Elis laughed softly. "They said so many different things, I don't quite remember them all."

Sage leaned up towards her mother and wrapped an arm around her mother's neck to prop herself up. She was able to sit against the headboard of the bed. It smelled musty and a cloud of dust tickled at her nose. She sneezed, and it made her muscles ache.

"Mum, why can't I see you?"

Elis didn't answer. No on answered. Sage lowered her head and directed her eyes towards her hands. She wiggled her fingers in front other eyes, then waved them back and forth before her eyes. She touched her nose with one finger. Never once did she detect even the faintest sign of her finger.

"Look, Sage," said Avery softly. "There are some winter flowers on the table."

Sage reached towards the table and felt along the edge of it. She felt something tall and cool and smooth. As she touched them, a few wilted red petals drifted down to the table. Sage retracted her hand with guilt. Her lips pressed together to halt the tears.

"Mum, I'm blind!" she cried.

"It might go away," Elis said encouragingly. "The doctor's said that it might be temporary. Sage . . . I . . . "

"I want to sleep," Sage whispered.

"Please, we have to--"

"Let her sleep," Pa said.

Sage turned towards him to smile, but she looked at a dusty old painting hung a few feet to his left. He stepped forward to look into her big, dark eyes. How he had admired those lovely eyes. How he had always wanted to look into them, and how proud he had been that she was his creation. It had given him a thrill of joy to see what he had created. He had rough hands and hoary beard and tired eyes, but he had fathered that beautiful child. She came from him. Now she couldn't even see him.

Sage turned on her side and pretended to sleep. The dust kept tickling her nose and her heart muscles were aching. The room grew silent and she thought that everyone had left.

It had probably been in her genes from the beginning. She had always been a small child. Other girls teased her because the smallest school uniform was too large for her. She had stopped breathing three times as a baby. It had probably been a part of her all along. It must have been part of her, to become blind, to be distinguished even more completely from everyone else.

She reached towards the little table beside the bed. Her hand quested over the surface until she felt something cool and smooth. She found the flower in the vase and lifted it from its spot. A trickle of water fell in a line onto the dusty floor and onto the covers. It dripped on Sage's shoulder, but she ignored it. She held to her nose and let the faint aroma infiltrate her nose. She twirled the stem in her fingers and a few more petals fell off of the flower. It was a rose.

She laid it back down.

"Poor flower," she murmured, and she settled down in the bed.

"Sage, you're hair is a mess."

Sage started. She was too sore to sit up, but she blinked. She couldn't think of anything to say, so she sat there, waiting for something to happen.

Elis walked across the room and lifted her daughter to a sitting position. She smoothed back Sage's curls and ran her hand along Sage's shoulder.

"Oh, dear," said Elis. "You've got yourself into quite a jamb, haven't you? I wanted m children to be healthy and perfect and I wanted us to live like they do in books. I wanted us to all be happy, all of the time. It was silly. A dream. I wished it anyway."

Elis sighed. She got up from the bedside and reached into Pa's old ratty carpetbag for a hairbrush.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Mum, what happened?"

"Oh, the others left," said Elis as she returned to the bedside. She began to run the brush through Sage's knotted hair. She was silent a moment before she understood what Sage had really been asking. She ran her finger through a curl to try and break up the clump of hair, and thought. The brush went smoothly through that section of hair once, twice, three times, before Elis cleared her throat and answered. "You had a seizure, Sage. You were sitting by the fire, and you wouldn't answer us . . . your legs and arms were flying everywhere, I thought you were going to hurt yourself. I cam as soon as Roger brought the automobile home. I was glad that he made it all the way home, he's such a terrible driver. The doctors said you had had a seizure and that you had gone into spasms. Silly things, doctors are. They told us what we knew and couldn't do anything to help. They just told us to wait and see. Wait and see if our daughter would even be our daughter any more. Wait and see if you slipped away. Wait and see if you ever woke up again. Wait and see, wait and see. All we could do was wait and see."

"I had a strange dream."

"Yes, dreams are lovely, aren't they?" said Elis, with a bite of sarcasm in her inflection. "They woo you when you can't protest, they put you in a trance and make you think that they're real. Just when you are about to find out the important part, you wake up. The worst part if that you never quite know if you would have seen an angel or if you would have found bliss. You only know, all day, that you might have."

Elis fell silent as she brushed out her daughter's hair. Sage was silent, too. Her legs and arms hurt, because they had convulsed so violently. Her head ached because of the strain she had been through. And now her heart ached, too.

The brush was laid back in the carpetbag. Elis reached down beside Sage and lifted the flower from the pillow.

"I'll throw out this flower, dear," Elis said softly. Sage did not answer. Her head was cupped in her hands and her elbows were propped against her knees. She looked small in the mass of bed coverings and forlorn in the dusty old room. She sighed, but nothing more. Elis lifted the stem and what was left of the rose from the pillow. She collected the scattered petals. The rose was dumped unceremoniously into a wastebasket. One lonely petal had been forgotten; it was against Sage's cheek.

5
Sunrise
5


"Good morning, Mrs Tillfield."

Avery turned. The cool winter breeze twisted her dress about her ankles and it caught at the edges of her brimless hat. She held her hand over it to hold it atop her painfully straight hair. The voice had come from behind her, down the street but close enough to make her curious, for she had not noticed anyone standing in the street when she had walked out from the low old door of the hospital. The hospital had once been a grand old building; the mayor's residence, or some nobleman's riverside home. Now it was slightly derelict, run by severe doctors who came to the hospital in between medical school and grander jobs.

The hospital was set along the main avenue of town, which was currently resplendent with the decorations of winter. The main avenue was as straight as it could be expected to be in such a village, which is to say that you could see nearly from one end to the other. It stretched down a gradual slope from the hospital to the water below, and it stretched upwards to the darker lane which snaked through the forest and thence onto the moor and thence into the low rolling mountains. It was just beginning to brighten in the east, above the rise. The low, slightly crooked buildings at the top of the hill were starting to be washed with a fine rose color light, and the water had turned a vivid gold so that it looked like a snake of exquisite beauty lying in the nooks of the rolling, undulating grass of the hills.

The cobbled street was silent. The only thing in the street was a well-dressed woman standing beside a horse, which was done up quite as prettily as the woman herself. Avery had only rarely seen people travel by horse. Most people had simply given up on the quadruped. As most people walked wherever they went, only the forward had purchased automobiles (Avery was proud to say that her husband was forward and that he had purchased an automobile from the big city, some six hours drive from the village). The woman in the street did not seem to notice or to care that her horse seemed odd in the cobbled streets. The gas lamps guttered slightly over her head. They were beginning to blink out as the morning dawned. The town was not quite so forward as Avery's husband and had not, yet, converted their gas lanterns to the new electric lights. It was just as well, since everyone knew that electricity was still persnickety.

The woman was tall and lean, but not precisely thin. Her face had the toned feel of a woman who enjoyed the outdoors and riding but who had never felt the burn of a hard day's labor. Her limbs were proportioned well, her arms long and slender, and her legs similarly lithe. Her hair was a lovely blonde hue with hints of a berry red in it, highlighted very propitiously at that moment by the rising sun. The woman's hands were gloved in white kid, and her feet were shoed in a fine white leather. She wore a dress which looked expensive and which fit her disgustingly well. Avery knew well that familiar twinge which invariably arose at the sight of a person who looked so much better than herself. She herself was slightly plump, but in the right places so that she simply looked pleasant and strong-limbed. This woman had no plumpness about her at all, for which thing Avery was stubbornly disdainful.

The woman brushed at the long, stiff skirt of her dress, and glanced up at Avery with a smile. Her dress, like her gloves and shoes, was white. There was blue piping down the front in two long vertical lines. The piping was repeated in five rows around the elbows, from which point the sleeves puffed up slightly to meet with the shoulders of her dress. Below the piping, the sleeves went straight and fit close to the skin of her forearms. The neck, too, was lined in blue. The neck extended to just below the chin. The woman's golden hair was caught at the nape of her neck, so that the prim blue hat, with simple white piping around the edges, sat just above the bauble of hair.

"It's lovely this morning, isn't it?" asked the woman.

"It is, Lady Witson, ma'am," answered Avery curtly. She glanced up towards the sky. It didn't seem that the lovely day would last. Clouds were hovering over the horizon.

"Oh dear," laughed Lady Witson, "please, I am not very much older than you. You don't have to call me ‘ma'am.' I'm only six years older than you!"

Avery stiffened. She felt completely inferior at the moment and could no more have admitted their closeness in age than she could have jumped off a bridge to check the river's temperature.

"Yes, well, I'll be pleased to call a respectable woman by a respectable name."

"What's respectability got to do with anything?" Lady Witson asked. Avery was not certain whether this was meant to be rhetorical or not. She stood with her mouth open for a moment, trying to decide whether she ought to say something. Lady Witson saved her the trouble.

"How does your sister fare?" she asked.

"She's doing well enough, in the circumstances," Avery answered. She looked down upon the river. Fishermen in salty old garb were traipsing back and forth between rigging, rope, crates, and all manner of necessities. A few voices could be heard from the cramped houses on the cobbled street. Morning was coming slowly to the village, and it was just now giving a warning yawn.

"I hear that she's gone blind," Lady Witson said. Her eyes were staring out towards the river. But it was not the river she saw. It was not the fields beyond which she saw. It was not the sky which she saw, nor the mountains. Avery remembered with a little jump of fright that Lady Witson was blind.

"How did you know it was a fine morning? You couldn't even see the sunrise."

"You can do more than see a morning, my dear," answered Lady Witson. She turned her head towards Avery. Her eyes looked past her but mostly through her and inside her. "I can hear it and smell it and feel it. It's times like this when I miss being able to see it as well."

"How did you go blind?" Avery asked.

Lady Witson's eyebrows knitted. She turned to Avery with a faint smile upon her lips. "Are you so certain that you want to know?"

"Yes," Avery answered. Her cheeks were burning. The woman had protested that they were peers in age, but she always acted the noblewoman, always made it clear that she was the woman who lived in the manor house just on the edge of the forest. She stood so very erect and so very proud that none yet had dared doubt her standing.

"I warn you . . . "

"Your eyes were not put out," Avery said impatiently, "so it can't be so awful as all that."

"I'm simply not certain you would understand," said Lady Witson.

"I was raised in the fields, but I've been properly educated, ma'am," Avery answered curtly. She was appalled by how much she sounded like her mother.

"Yes, well, that's why I'm afraid that you won't understand," said Lady Witson. "You see, there are things that they don't teach in school, things which people choose to repress. They do not understand, and they do not want to understand. They fear it as much as they revere it. No one is quite certain what magic really is, except those who have immersed themselves in it."

"You mean witches? I met a woman who thought she was a witch." Avery realized she had sounded civil and hastily added, "That was in an asylum, mind you."

"Where do the images in a madman's mind come from, do you think, Avery?" snapped Lady Witson. In that one sentence she captured more venom than Avery had been able to scrounge up throughout their conversation. "I am blind because I chose to be. Magic is a visual thing. It can't be effective if it is not seen. It can be advantageous, sometimes, not to be able to see. I am blind because I made myself so. It's irreversible, of course, except through brief bits of magic. But it hardly matters, Avery Stillington Tillfield."

Avery gave a long laugh and smiled at Lady Witson. "Come now, you're having a jest!"

"Honestly, my dear, I am not," said Lady Witson, with a smile of her own. The pinkish light of morning was painting her red. "However, I did not expect you to believe me. That's the problem, I suppose . . . that's why she had to be so young . . . so that she would believe."

"What are you talking about?" Avery snapped.

"Nothing, Avery," she said. She turned and patted the horse on its nose. It was a lovely caramel colored mare, and she whinnied at her mistress's touch. Lady Witson took the reins and placed her foot in the saddle.

"I think I will see your sister Sage in time," Lady Witson said cryptically as she poised herself to mount. "Not now. She is weak yet. Not now."

"You'd do best not to try and speak with her at all," said Avery. "Mum wouldn't like it."

"If she's anything like you, she won't even realize the threat until it's upon her."

Lady Witson was up in the saddle and was readjusting her gloves.

"How are you going to get home?" asked Avery. "You're blind."

"I wonder, how do you find your way, Avery, when you see so damn much?" With this, Lady Witson slapped the horse's reins and gave it a firm kick in the side. Horseshoes clattered on the narrow cobbled streets, echoing off of the sleepy facades of the homes. The horse turned around a corner and disappeared.


6
A Fairy Story
6


Sage was taken home after a day in the hospital. The doctors shrugged when Elis asked them whether they could help her daughter in any additional ways. They didn't seem very interested in her case. There were a lot of people coming in with a particularly nasty flu epidemic, and they didn't care about a girl who was simply resting. They had said they couldn't repair a person's brain, and that the brain was where Sage had been damaged. But they had, kindly, assured her that this didn't mean the Sage was daft, only that she couldn't--and would never again--see. It had been then that Elis had stood up, stamped out towards the pretty, well- rouged nurse near the front to demand that she take her daughter home. Despite Elis's bellicose attitude, the nurse was quite unaffected and smiled as she wrote up a few papers, slipped one in a cubbyhole at her desk, and handed another to Elis.

"I hope your daughter fares better in the future," said the rouged nurse. She smiled brightly and returned to whatever work she had been at.

Elis had been flustered by the nurse's kindness, but her anger found something to butt against when the doctors told her blandly that they didn't think it was wise to remove the girl from the hospital. It was then that Elis tossed her handbag aside and began to storm in the middle of the hospital room. The doctors were hard put to calm the rapacious woman. She calmed herself very quickly when they threatened to bring in what little security they had. The doctors were glad to see her go. Pa watched in horror from a chair, but said nothing until the tempest had subsided. Then he stood, cleared his throat, and carried Sage out to the truck, which was parked along a narrow alleyway. The front doors lining the alley were shut and the street was spotless on that fine morning. It was too early for commotion or rubbish.

Sage was still asleep when the truck began to rumble out of town. She woke up briefly and stared at the ceiling of the truck, trying to remember where she was. Things were a bit hazy, but she knew what had happened and that the blackness around her wasn't night. She closed her eyes, for it did no good to have them open.

They arrived home not long after. When Pa came to lift her from the seat, she wrapped her arms about his neck and let out a long sigh of happiness.

"I'm glad to be home, Pa," she said softly.

"Aye," he grunted. "Aye."

She was settled in her bed and left to rest for most of the next day. Elis came in from time to time with a book which she read aloud or with broth which she set on the bedside table. But by the next afternoon, Sage was feeling quite well and got up and walked downstairs. Roger had leapt up in surprise at being roused from his nap by her soft footsteps. He looked thoroughly spooked, as though he had seen a ghost.

"Damn it!" he had said angrily. "I thought you were some bloody spirit!"

He muttered under his breath but asked her, grudgingly, if there was anything she wanted. She looked around the room vaguely, her eyes not taking anything in. Roger winced and tried not to remember the rosy-cheeked little child who had resided in Sage's body not so long ago.

"Water," she had said finally.

He had only been too happy to run to fetch it.

On the evening of the second day, she laid down on the sofa with a bit of an ache at the back of her head. She laid the cool fingers of one hand over her warm forehead and let her other hand flop at her side. The fire was crackling, but it was too warm. She wanted to escape out into the air, to go running through the snow . . . but she didn't think that she could run anywhere at the moment. She would trip, because she wouldn't see where she was going. Then she'd never be allowed out of doors, and she wouldn't like that much at all. She would very much like, she thought, to simply stand outside and feel the cold air.

There was a sharp rap at the doorframe. Sage tilted her head slightly.

"Who's there?" she asked.

"It's Lady Witson, dear."

There was the soft sound of Lady Witson's walking cane tapping out in front of her, finding any obstacles. Then a weight on the sofa made Sage roll slightly towards the edge. The sofa creaked slightly under Lady Witson's weight.

"Good evening, Sage," Lady Witson continued. "I wonder if you would be willing to listen to a story."

Sage glanced towards Lady Witson and thought she saw a faint glimmer of light there. A faint smile passed over her lips, but she knew that the illusion of sight was simply her childish mind playing tricks.

"What sort of story, Lady Witson?"

"A Fairy story," said Lady Witson.

"I've never been particularly fond of fairy stories," said Sage untruthfully. She had always found them fascinating, but she was far too tired to care.

"Oh? Your mother said you always enjoyed them when she told them to you. I have one to tell you." Lady Witson hand laid gently on Sage's shoulder. Sage stirred uncomfortably. "It's only a story."

Sage nodded slightly. "Tell it, then." It was easier to just let Lady Witson's words lull her to sleep.

"There was once a land where a great many magical creatures lived. Some lived in the sea. Some lived in the forest. Some lived upon the open moor. Some lived on the edge of the fields which they harvested. Some lived in the mountains. All of them lived without major calamity. Today, they are long forgotten. Today they are thought of as myth, but in their time they were as real as you and I. Then, one day, when it was thought that the magic would never again return to the land, there was a glimmer of hope. Someone with signs of magic! The few people who had retained the knowledge of the ancient magic had not been looking in the right places; now they knew where to find the remnants of the past. All over there were people who had the magic in their blood. A girl was born, one day, in no extraordinary circumstances, in an unextraordinary place, to unimportant parents, in an anonymous place. But this girl held more magic than the others . . . "

Lady Witson trailed off slightly at the sound of even breaths. She leaned over and patted Sage lightly on the head. She ran her hand over her cheek and sighed deeply. She laid a hand on Sage's wrist briefly. When it was removed, ink was left in a peculiar pattern on the small wrist. Lady Witson regarded it critically, then stood up and left. She walked past Elis without a word and soon her mare's feet were clattering down the lane.

When she awoke, Sage felt the urge to find Lady Witson and hear the rest of the story. But she thought, somehow, that the ending had not yet been decided. She got up from the sofa and walked to the window and leaned against the sill. She felt extraordinarily better that night. Even the blackness in her eyes didn't seem so acute, when compared with the darkness of the night beyond. She smiled at it from her spot at the windowsill. She would be fine.