“How curious,” Pondwader said.
“Hmm?” she asked, as though awakening. “What?”
“This is the first time I have ever heard anyone speak of Cottonmouth with fondness. Did you love him?”
For a time the silence stretched, unbroken except for the surge of waves and whimpering of wind. She set her cup on the ground, and gripped her darts tightly again.
“Did I love Cottonmouth?” she repeated in a faint, curious voice. “No one has ever asked me that. Not once in my whole life. From the time I turned ten-and-three summers, people just assumed we were in love. It was so obvious. Painfully so. Whenever we were close to each other, we were always touching gently. I was so drawn to him, Pondwader, that whenever we were apart, I was frantic. Desperate for him, ready to kill to see him again. There was nothing I would not have done for him, or given him—except my souls. And for a time, I would even have given them up, if he’d asked me to.”
The fingers around her darts knotted to fists as she closed her eyes, blocking out the firelight and flickering stars, sealing herself from Pondwader’s gaze. Her eyelids fluttered, as if memories danced across her souls, and from the hard set of her jaw, she must not have liked what she saw.
Softly, Pondwader asked, “Is that what made you stop loving him? His dark side?”
She turned her head to regard him seriously. “I never stopped loving him.”
“B-but you ran away from him!”
She leaned her head back, and wavering shadows cloaked her beautiful face, above a square of light that lit her throat. She seemed to be peering intently at the Shining People. “Yes,” she answered softly. “I ran away.”
“If you still loved him, how could you?”
A ghostly smile touched her lips, but her eyes were not amused; they brimmed with bitterness. “Is the world so simple for you, Pondwader?”
He suddenly felt very small inside himself. He lowered his gaze. “Could you answer me? I really need to know. Why did you run away if you loved him?”
“Because I had to.”
“Why?”
“I do not wish to speak of these things, Pondwader!” she snapped. “Can’t you understand that I—”
“I understand that these things bring you pain,” he answered gently. “And I don’t want to hurt you, but this is very important, Musselwhite. Please. Help me. I must—”
She shouted, “Cottonmouth told me if I did not let him take Glade with him on his next war walk, he was going to attack Windy Cove’s village site on Pelican Isle, and kill everyone that I loved! … Just as … as I would be killing Glade.”
“You? Killing Glade? What did he mean?”
She bowed her head. “Glade had been in a coma for two-tens-and-two days. He’d had such a high fever … I had been giving him spoons of water, dribbling them down his throat, and he would swallow the water, but I couldn’t get him to eat anything. He kept losing weight, until only a tiny bundle of bones remained. He was so little. He felt like a feather in my arms when I roeked him.”
As if those haunted words had painted pictures across Pondwader’s souls, he glimpsed that little boy lying limply in his mother’s arms while she rocked him, and wept, and tore herself apart. Like a cactus thorn hidden in a sandal, he felt the unexpected stab of her grief.
“I think … I think it was even harder on Cottonmouth than me,” she continued sadly. “He could not let Glade go. He tried force-feeding him, and when the food just lodged in Glade’s throat, Cottonmouth would shriek and slam our son on the back to dislodge it. Then he would sink to the floor of our shelter and sob.”
“But if Glade was so ill, why would Cottonmouth have wished to take him on a war walk?”
Musselwhite ran her fingers up and down her dart shafts, as if concentrating on the texture of the wood, feeling every place a knot had been shaved off. Her beautiful firelit face contrasted sharply with the silver frosted trees at her back, which swayed and moaned in the night wind.
Tightly, she answered, “He … Cottonmouth believed that if he could wound a man, then lay Glade on his chest, so that Glade’s eyes were looking directly into the wounded man’s when Cottonmouth killed the man … He thought the man’s souls would seep into Glade’s body and bring him to life again.”
Wind flicked Pondwader’s white hair and it brushed coldly across his cheeks. White light flashed inside him, followed by a rumble that shook his ribs. Pondwader shivered and whispered, “I have heard of such things, though people do not speak of them often. Did Cottonmouth possess such great Power? Was he a witch?”