Summer Sun's Arc

Chapter 12 of 15

Summer Sun woke up thinking about the laugh. She lay in bed and tried to name what had caused it. Not a joke. Not the mended stitch, exactly. Matilda had said, "I don't know why," and Summer Sun did not know either. That worried her. She had cheered up hundreds of grumpy people, and she had always known which crack let the light in. With Matilda, she was working blind. If she could not find the source, she could not go back to it. The scarves would sit in a drawer. The witch would sit alone in the brambles. Whatever had opened between them would close again by winter. She walked back to the bramble cottage that afternoon with no plan and no gift. Matilda answered the door in the same apron. Summer Sun said, "Come have tea with me. There's a place in the village. I want to try something." Matilda looked past her at the path. "Why." "Because I want to know if it happens again," Summer Sun said. "The laugh. I don't know what did it. I want to find out." Matilda's mouth pulled flat. She was quiet a long time. Then she took her shawl off the hook and stepped outside. "If people stare, I leave," she said. Summer Sun nodded. They walked to the tea cottage with the lantern-lit windows. Summer Sun ordered two cups and a plate of small cakes. Matilda sat with her back to the room and her hands in her lap. Summer Sun did not perform. She did not tell a story or make a face. She asked Matilda about the moonbloom root and the raven that kept slipping her snares. Matilda answered in short sentences. She said the root had been eaten three nights running. She said the raven was smarter than her. She said this last part flat, like a fact she had accepted. Summer Sun watched her face. Nothing moved. The tea went half cold. Summer Sun felt the afternoon slipping and her chest going tight, and she understood: she could not steer this. She had come to catch the laugh in a jar and there was no jar. She set her cup down and said, "I don't know how to do this with you. I always know. I don't with you." Matilda looked up. Her eyes went wet again, fast, and she made the same rough sound from the day before, half cough, half surrender. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth. "Stop trying to figure it out," she said. "That is what does it." Summer Sun sat very still. She had her answer and she did not like it. Her whole method was the thing in the way. She would have to come back without a plan, again and again, and hope. She walked Matilda home in the dusk and did not say a cheerful word the whole way.