Bailey Baz's Arc

Chapter 11 of 44

After Bram left, Bailey sat in his mud hut and stared at the old book. The altar could hold his hundred years. He believed that now. But he stopped when he tried to picture the boy he had been. He remembered his sister's laugh, it sounded a lot like Cora’s. He remembered playing in a castle. Nothing else. If the vines released him, he would lose even those scraps. He might break his curse and forget he ever had a sister to break it for. Cora knelt beside him. She turned the black totem piece on her necklace. "You look scared, brother," she said. "You never look scared." "I don't know who I was," Bailey said. "If I free myself and forget, then I saved a stranger. Not me." He closed the book. "I need my past first. All of it. I think I know where to finally start.” There was one who knew the dead. Bailey went to the rotting dock at the swamp's edge. Finn Brackley stood on it, soaked, gripping a pole he could barely hold. The ferryman's apprentice had told Bailey once that he knew the way to a debtor's answers, but never for free. "You came back," Finn said. His grin stretched too wide. "You want the dead to talk. They talk to me. But there's a price, warden." "Name it," Bailey said. Finn tapped the pole against the boards. "A memory. A real one. You give it to the water, and the water gives you a whole life back." His smile faded. "You get everything. But you lose the piece you trade. Your choice which." Bailey's throat tightened. He had only two clear memories left. His sister's laugh. The two of them playing back at home in the castle. Cora grabbed his sleeve. "Don't. That's us. That's the only us you have." Bailey looked at her. She was that girl now, grown. She had searched for him and died trying. The memory sat in his chest like a coal. But a whole past waited on the other side of the trade. "I'll keep the playing," Bailey said. "I trade the laugh." Finn held out a wet hand. Bailey pressed his palm to the water. Cold climbed his arm. He felt the laugh leave him, thin and bright, then gone. In its place a flood poured in. A stone house. A purple cloak with a golden crest. His mother clasping it around his throat. His name spoken by people who loved him. His uncle's face before the knife. He gasped and fell back on the boards. He knew himself now. Every year of the boy he was. He wept, and he could not say why the sound of Cora's old laugh was missing from the joy. "I remember," he told her. "I remember all of it." He stood, steady. The fear was gone. "Now I can break the curse without losing me." He touched his chest. "I have enough of myself to keep." Cora watched him, and she did not smile.