Free The Ghost's Child by Sonya Hartnett Page B

swirled. I dreamed of how its voice would sound, of what its first words would be. I wondered if it would like me, if it would like the cottage and the forest and field. I secretly worried that it would prefer the beach — that it, too, would spend its days tramping the shore like a poor creature in a cell. But I didn’t really believe that: I knew the fay was mine. I saw us sitting under trees, I saw it asleep in my arms. I felt the beating of its blood, the tenderness of its skin. I think I fell in love with it, that tiny, invisible thing.”
    The boy didn’t look up from stroking the dog; he asked, “Did you love it more than you loved Feather?”
    â€œFeather was beautiful,” Matilda said, “and I really did love him. But the fay would have been the most beloved thing in the world.”
    But then, one day, the little fay stopped spinning. Maddy was threading blue stalks of lavender into a vase when the ripples inside her broke on the riverbank, and faded into stillness. Limp stems of lavender fell from her hands, water spilled from the vase to the floor. Maddy dived frantically into herself as the fay sunk soundlessly down. In the blackness, she couldn’t see it. In the slick grief already pouring from her heart, she couldn’t catch the tiny gold body. “No,” she cried, “no, no —” but the little fay was dying, was already dead. Its flimsy winged body wafted over and over, and soon disappeared in the dark.
    Feather, of course, was nowhere to be found. Maddy stretched out on the cool floor, her face pressed to the polished wood. The tears that slipped down her cheeks made a puddle under her. With deadly silence, despair tore through the ground, ripping open a depthless crevasse. She looked into this ruined world and saw nothing but grit and shattered rubble. She could not speak, or draw breath. The walls, the table, the ceiling thinned. The flowers strewn about her wilted from purple to gray. Her agony was a rope tied around her neck. Maddy knew the pain would drown her.
    She climbed to her feet, straightened her dress, and walked out into the garden. It was a clear sunny day, and bees were bumbling on the air. Birds called each other from treetops, the cat was sleeping on the grass, and far away a young fox barked foolhardily. The sun kept shining, the breeze kept blowing, the earth kept turning round: only she had stopped.
    Maddy walked along the path in naked brown feet, to the end of the garden where reeds grew and dragonflies sailed. Then she picked up the biggest rock she could carry, and leapt into the pond.
    Down through the freezing water she went, the rock her greatest friend, plunging like a hound dashing after a scent, racing for the bottom. She closed her eyes and let the water streak past, raking back her long loosed hair, hauling at her sleeves. Its blackness and gaunt coldness made her think of the unseen side of the moon. Weeds swiped her face like ghostly hands wiping away laughter and tears. She felt the rock thud into the muddy bottom of the pond and knew all she had to do was hold on.
    She kept her eyes closed, cradling the rock, and let the water find her. She could follow the fay easily if she merely waited and was brave. If she stayed here, in the arms of the pond, she would never again have to find her way to the end of another lonely day.
    And then something warm and living touched her lips: startled, Maddy opened her eyes. Through the murk and knotty weeds she glimpsed a seal’s sleek skin, the arrowheads of a wing. Feather scooped her to him and kicked strongly for the sky. They broke the dark surface trailing cattails of clammy slime, gasping with the cold.
    He dragged her spluttering from the water, and lay her on the grass. Maddy would never forget the feeling of crisp lawn at her shoulders, the leaden weight of her waterlogged dress. She lay limply, blinking at the sky, understanding that its blueness was a threat and a