The hour-long bus ride is spent writing out her hazily remembered descriptions of the spell; both Seffon’s initial casting, and his later adapted one. But that’s not enough. I also need the Bitter Dream component…white wine, bleach, dandelion. White wine, bleach, dandelion.

The sinew stinks a little bit, and the butcher’s paper is already greasy, but she doesn’t worry overly much. Eww, it’s probably going to leak all over the clothes I packed for tomorrow. Oh well. Doesn’t matter. If this works, that won’t be my problem.

The city turns to the suburbs, and the suburbs turn to the countryside. The low hills of the north shore, the baby foothills of the Laurentians, start to poke up between rivers and towns, blanketed with dark evergreen and pale maples. The bus follows more built-up routes, through small towns clustered along the highway, long stretches of field and brush between them. Bright orange daylilies and purple loosestrife line the ditches along the road, mixed with tall, waving phragmites. Occasionally, cattails.

She calls her father when she’s halfway there. “Guess who’s coming to dinner?”

“Sidney Poitier?”

She blinks a few times, staring blankly out the window. “What?”

“God, I’ve failed you as a parent.”

“Wow, I just realised where I get my sense of humour from.”

“Took you this long?”

“But for real, I’ll be there in about half an hour. I know, I know, short warning, and I didn’t really explicitly say I was coming when I last called, but – ”

Her father is howling with laughter. “So I told your mother about our earlier call, right?”

“Uh-huh?”

“She’s been asking me every ten minutes for the past two hours when she has to go pick you up.”

Leah smiles, leaning her head back against the padded headrest, feeling her hair catch in the coarse fabric. “You guys are great, you know that?”

She hears her father repeat it at a shout to her mother, and can vaguely hear something shouted back. “She’s asking if you need anything from the grocery store?”

“Um, not really. I’ll be fine. I might get us a white wine, for supper.”

“Already have one picked out.”

“Then I guess see you soon?”

“You betcha.” The line goes dead.

Leah looks at her phone for a few seconds, after the call has ended. The contact list – never very long, but full of the very best people she’d met – seems to taunt her.

Should I contact them? They deserve to hear from me, but would I be setting the unfair expectation that they would continue to hear from me? There’s no guarantee. If this works, they almost certainly won’t hear from me again.

She swipes up and down, not for any real reason, just to watch the screen roll. She taps back to the home screen, opens the notes app, and start a new note. Version 2.0, here we go. It takes her a moment to figure out where to begin, but then she starts writing.

Beeswax

The Five

Kimry

Jeno

Areiu

Seffon

Sewheil

Adan, whatever the fuck is going on with her.

Wellen

John

That goat milk dessert drink

Reading in the orchid garden

Pheasants (the live ones, not the meat)

That quasi-ramen broth dish

She looks it over. This feels shorter than the other one. To be fair, I spent a much shorter time there than I’ve spent here. Also, the entries on the other list tended to be more objects, and less people – but to be fair about that too, I think I just put friends and family under one heading, then, and here I’ve broken them down into individuals. If I named every person on the old list, it would have been fifty entries long.

She goes back to the top, ready to do the second part, but she can’t quite bring her fingers to type the symbol in. Her thumb hovers over the X, then goes back up to the body of the note and starts scrolling. Without putting it down on metaphorical paper, it becomes a little easier to assign each entry a ‘replaceability-factor.’ To no-one’s surprise, least of all hers, each entry gets a bold ‘X.’

Can’t own pheasants in the city, and I’m sure at least some of those species either don’t exist in this world or are too endangered to find outside of a zoo or wildlife preserve. Never asked for the recipe for the soup thingy, or the drink. You have to pay to get in the botanical gardens, and I don’t think they’d let me sit around and read in the greenhouse. And the people…none of the people are replaceable. Not a single person.

Least of all the horse. Definitely can’t own a horse in the city. She forces out a quiet chuckle, imagining her landlady’s face at the sight of a horse tethered to the bike rack beside the apartment building. Unless I become a caleche driver, but even then that’d be one of those big buggers, not something reasonably-sized like Beeswax. Actually, the horse would end up being quite a lot like Blither, Meredith’s horse. Huh, I never made the connection. Meredith rides a caleche horse.

Damn. Next time I go to the old port, if this doesn’t work, I’m going to be at perpetual risk of breaking down into tears.

She takes a deep breath. It’ll work. Gods above, it has to work. Please let it work.

*

Her mother picks her up at the stop beside the Anglican church – one of four churches in the town, each of a different denomination of Christianity. They hug quickly before pulling out and driving towards home, and Leah’s gut churns. I’m so dumb. I’m an idiot. I can’t do this. This is a mistake.

Then she remembers seeing Seffon’s face in the reflection of the window, his arms over hers, her cheek against his back – his face, neutral yet cracking, pain showing through, carefully hidden. She remembers Areiu, drawing numbers into the tablecloth, one tiny child-hand braced against Leah’s knee, palm too long to grip the utensil steadily. She remembers how Iris had lifted her off the ground in the Baron’s office, squeezing her so tight it hurt, and how much love had been in that hug.

The woman sitting next to her is undeniably a stronger source of love. Leah feels it in every memory – in childhood soccer games, in high school track and field meets, in summer camping trips, in homemade birthday cakes, in movie nights during thunderstorms, in brunches, in St-Jean fireworks, in getting a lift home from the bus stop. But the Gulf…but the last few weeks…

She remembers the weight of Seffon’s hand against her forehead, and everything unsaid between them.

I know. I know.

Within the span of about eight seconds, every single one of these memories courses through Leah’s mind. Certainty is replaced by doubt, then is replaced by certainty again. She feels the bulk of her spell components in her bag, and her anxiety settles.

Leah watches the spire shrink behind her in the rear view mirror, the tall metal roof shining in the late afternoon sunlight. She catches a glimpse of her own face, framed in too-long hair, and looks away quickly.

“Anything exciting happen?”

“Hm?”

Her mother gestures vaguely with one hand, the other on the wheel. “You know, since we last saw you.”

Leah shrugs, hands fidgeting in her lap. Oh, you know. This and that. “Not really. Just wanted to visit for a bit, get some country air.” She watches the power-lines rise and fall in waves as they drive along the road. “Also, still making up for lost time.” Lost time. Time that someone else picked up and ran away with.

“You don’t need to feel guilty,” her mother says reassuringly. “And I hope that guilt isn’t the only reason you’re out here.”

Not the only reason. I heard mention of piri-piri. “Not the only reason. I wanted to spend some time back home.”

Her mother nods, giving a hum of approval.

Leah is not so easily appeased. Is it just guilt? Did I feel guilty for abandoning them, so I came back here to reassure them? Did I actually want to come back?

I was afraid of how they felt. I was afraid they’d be sad, or frightened, or worried.

Yeah, but did I want to come back for me? If I’d never found a way here, I’d never have had to face up to the potential negative emotions, the potential wounds. It would never have been my problem or my responsibility.

But it still would have happened. Just because I wasn’t there to observe it doesn’t mean…

So did I come back for them, or for me?

“You doing okay honey?”

Leah nods, head leaning against the window, skull rattling with each pothole and poorly-done patch. “Just lost in my thoughts.”

Her mother doesn’t interrupt again, but Leah can’t quite get her thoughts to move on from the rut they are stuck in.

*

An hour before sunset the burgers hit the table. The potatoes, condiments, toppings, and drinks have already been set out, and each person fills up their plate to their own tastes. Leah surprises herself with how much she finds she has missed North American food. Someone’s really got to introduce the Gulf to white bread – and it might as well be me. Hey, I wonder if you could do piri-piri with sweet potatoes? Definitely worth trying…

The dog sits by the corner of the patio table, looking up through the glass at the plates full of food, bug-eyes staring to the side. Leah only has vague memories of him, and can’t quite remember his name. Under the pretence of scratching his neck she checks the tag and sees that it’s Sammy. That’s right, I knew that. Sammy the French bulldog mix. Good boy. She tousles his head, and the dog tries to lick her hand; she lets him, then goes inside to wash her hands before eating, marvelling at the luxury of crystal-clear water on-demand. The soap is vanilla and shea scented, almost dessert-y in its sweetness.

Back outside on the warm rear porch, Leah sits down to supper with her family, in full awareness of the fact that it might be the last time she does so. She talks with them, smiling and reminiscing and laughing and boiling on the inside, swallowing guilt at every moment. Mum and dad. Mum and dad. I’m never going to have another family like this, but I also don’t really…Gods, it feels horrible to say, but I never used to visit them. I grew up and I grew apart. And hell, they’d forgotten enough about their only offspring that they didn’t even realise I’d been replaced, so it’s not like the negligence is one-sided.

I want a sibling. I want someone who sees me as me, not as who I was when I was ten. I want someone I can argue with without it being written off as ‘disrespect’ or ‘rebelliousness.’ I want family I can drink with without them saying how weird it feels that I’m old enough to drink. I want…

Yeah, yeah. That’s why I’m here. Because I’m a damn idiot.

Conversation continues long after everyone’s finished their meal – weather, local gossip, work stories. Low-stakes, casual, friendly. Leah listens interestedly, engaging where she can, letting her parents take over when the topic moves to people she doesn’t know.

“Want to do a movie?” her mother asks her, once the meal has been declared over and everyone is bringing the dishes inside. “Board game? Cards?”

“Not just yet; I’m still digesting.” Leah rolls her shoulders and cricks her neck. “Might actually go for a walk for a bit, first. Fresh air, you know,” she says with a shrug, spreading her arms out in the setting sun.

“Need bug-spray?” her father asks, scraping clean the grill.

“I remember where it is,” she says, going inside, still carrying her wine glass with its final bit of white wine sloshing inside. In the bathroom, she tops it off with a touch of bleach, then casually walks back outside, picking dandelions as she goes and squeezing a bit of their milk into the mix. She fetches a piece of charcoal from the bag beside the barbecue and tucks it in her pocket with all the other hidden ingredients.

Please be enough, she prays, walking out into the hay fields, walking until she can barely see the power lines. Please be enough, please.

The crickets are out in force this evening, and the frogs add their song as well, creating a dense, inescapable web of noise. Once far enough into the field to be out of sight of the house, Leah sits in the grass and pulls everything out of hiding; the tea light, the matches, the stones, the powdered pearl, the rat skull – made into a pendant on a chain, but close enough – the wine-mix, the charcoal.

Meditatively, humming the tune that captain Nedies had helped her remember – learn? Re-discover? What’s the right word? ­– she begins drawing on the runes, sprinkling the powdered pearls over them as she goes. She sets out the stones in the familiar shape of the Bitter Dream spell, pours the wine-mix into the skull, and then sets it down in preparation for the last part.

Taking the sinew from its bag – smelly and fresh, not optimal but the only source she could think of – she begins to braid it into a little ring, just as she had watched Seffon doing. She can hear his distracted muttering even as she does it, and her breath catches for a moment.

“Focus now,” she scolds herself, putting the ring on the index of her dominant hand. “You’re mixing a whole bunch of different magics here. You might blow something up if you get distracted.” She laughs half-heartedly at her own joke, shifting the gemstones to make sure they are in the precise, perfect configuration.

In short order, all her preparations are finished. Leah breathes deeply, and starts tracing the final runes out, carefully; desiccation and moon, invoking them as she goes.

And now the test. The theory that I have no evidence for. The thing that will tell whether this is even worth trying.

Her eyes are focused on the little tea light, every ounce of willpower directed towards making the wick catch – not a big flame, as she is very much in the middle of an arid grass field, but still. She takes a steadying breath, and recites: “Do hai iebar, Do aieha, lo maitassi, lotai eha.”

The candle sputters and lights. For a moment, Leah feels tears welling up.

It’s not something about their world that makes magic possible. It’s something else. Oh Gods. What is it? How does any of this work?

I can’t fucking wait to spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out. Please work, please, please work.

No time to think about this now! Focus on the spell. This part was possible, maybe the rest will be too. Even though the sinew is too fresh. Even though I don’t have a system restore, mind sample, vial-thingy. Even though I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Maybe it’ll work anyway.

Maybe.

She breathes in the fumes from the skull, and then sets it next to the flame of the candle; it burns slowly, but it does burn. Her vision wavers, doubled slightly.

“Na ievessoi Dohair,” she says, feeling only slightly silly as she says it. “If ever there was a time for godly intervention, this would be it. Here I am, on the threshold, at sunset, making the biggest decision of my life, trying to find the path home.”

Crickets.

“Um.”

Crickets.

“Hello?”

Leah listens to the wind in the grasses. A whippoorwill calls from somewhere near the forest line.

She begins humming the tune of the prayer again, wishing she had the words. The tune seems to be picked up by the rustling grasses, increasing in volume, coming from all around her, echoing and low. The frogs fade to the background, and then the crickets, and then her own breathing.

The candle in front of her goes out.

Leah passes out.