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B riony

Fresh earth hits the top of the plain wooden coffin, dissolving into the sheets of rain and forming a thick sludge that sticks to the surface.

To one side of me stands my father, silent, swaying slightly in his old winter coat. Beyond him is the priest. He’s wrapped up warm but his face is just as hard and worn as my father’s, and though he says the words he’s meant to, they’re said with no feeling and compassion.

What’s another girl dead after all? One from Slate? One without a mother? One less mouth to feed, one less soul to worry over. It’s not like anyone expected her to go off to the academy and return to anywhere but this wasteland of a Quarter.

No one believed that. No one but her and me.

I stare down at the rapidly disappearing coffin and try to imagine her laid out down there, in the cold, in the mud, all alone.

How could this have happened? It seems so unfair – so damned unfair – to lose a mother first and then a sister – a sister who had been more of a parent to me than my own father.

I have the urge to leap down into that hole with her, to scrape back the thick, sticky muck with my hands, and pry open the lid.

She’d blink up at me and grin, her nose crinkling.

“Only joking, Briony!”

I’d grab her by the hand, tug her right out of that ugly box and run with her, run with her far far away.

Like I should have done when she was alive.

But she isn’t. She’s gone. Taken from me. And when I can’t take it any longer, when the sight of my precious sister swamped by all that mud has acid sloshing in my stomach, burning in my throat, I turn and run away alone.

No Amelia by my side – even if I think I hear her voice in the wind rushing through the towering branches of the yew trees overhead.

That’s how it will be from now on. Just me.

Apart from the wind, no one calls after me. Nobody tells me to stop. I wonder if they even notice me gone.

I run away from the old stone church and its circle of graves, down the hill, away from the town and out to the woods, plunging into the darkness of the undergrowth, running and running, not caring at the way the branches scratch at my face or scrape against my legs, ripping the only pair of stockings I own.

I just keep running. There’s no point in stopping. There is nothing to stop for, and I don’t want to go back there. Without Amelia, there is no home .

Soon I know I’m lost deep in the forest, the sky gray with the incoming night, the wildlife out here stirring awake – a screech, a howl, a far off bark.

I stop.

Do I want to die? Is that why I came all this way? To fall down a ravine and break my neck or meet one of the old grizzlies and have my innards mauled?

“Do you want to join me, Briony?” she calls far above me as she rushes through the trees.

My face is wet with tears; they roll down my cheeks, run off my chin and drip onto my coat, lost among all the raindrops.

I shake my head.

I’m not ready to go yet, I call back, not until…

Not until I’ve made them pay for what they did to her. For taking her from me. She gave me everything. This is the least I can do for her.

It’s as I say these words to myself – or do I whisper them out loud? – that I first feel it. A force outside my body, pulling me along, as if I am a piece of old metal and it is a magnet.

At first, I pull back against it, peering down at my feet and wondering if I am losing my mind.

But then I think, what the heck? I’ve lost everything now. My sister to the academy, my father to the bottom of a liquor bottle. Neither is coming back.

I let the force pull me. At first, it’s weak, my feet moving slowly, but then the force grows stronger and stronger, pulling me along more quickly until I’m running through the forest again, this time leaping over scrubs, and ducking under branches.

I’m even more lost. This isn’t a part of the forest I know, one I’ve ever seen.

It’s wetter here and greener, vines spinning up the trees and moss covering the stones and sticks on the forest floor.

The dying light glows an emerald-green and when I lift my hand to my face, even my skin is tinged with it.

The air is heavy, too, with moisture, the chill less permeating in this carpet of lush greenery and sweat trickles down my spine.

Then I see it – a small pond beneath the trees. The light has almost gone now and the waters are black like tar. It’s impossible to see how deep it sits, but across its surface rest bright white lily pads – the kind of which I’ve not seen before.

The force beckons me onward.

“Uh uh,” I say out loud. “I’m not wading into that.”

My imagination is running wild. Perhaps I have gone mad? Chasing feelings through the forest with dusk falling. But I’m not mad enough to plunge into unknown waters. I’d freeze to death. Or perhaps I’d be pulled down to my grave, drowned without anyone ever knowing.

No, thank you.

The force doesn’t take no for an answer, it continues to pull. I dig my heels into the mud and cling to an overhead branch to stop myself from being dragged forward.

But then, just as quickly as it started, it stops.

I stumble backward into the undergrowth.

When I pick myself up, the pond glows a deep orange in front of me.

It lasts but for a fraction of a second before it plunges into darkness again.

However, it’s long enough for me to have seen what lies on its bottom.

A small black stone, the size of a large goose egg.

I don’t know how, but I know it is that egg that has pulled me here.

But why? What does it want me to do?

Rolling up my sleeves, I kneel down by the side of the pond, the wet and the mud penetrating through my stockings, and lean over the water.

The depths are too dark for me to make the egg out now, but I guess where it was and plunge my arms down into the water.

It’s icy and I gasp, the cold permeating right the way up into my chest.

I swim my hands through the water, searching for the egg beneath the surface. Finally, when I think I can no longer bear the cold water any longer, the back of my left fingers hit something hard and solid. I feel at it with my fingers and my palms.

The egg.

Gripping it carefully, I pull at it. The mud has sucked it tight, but with more effort, I yank it free and it comes bobbing up towards the surface, floating right in front of me. It is blacker than the water, so black it has no marking or coloring at all.

I cradle it carefully and bring it out onto dry land, admiring the smooth polish of its surface. It’s warm to touch, like freshly baked bread, and it smells like the forest and the pond.

It’s beautiful. A giant precious jewel.

I could take it to old Jeb in the market. They say he’ll buy just about anything hidden under the table. I’m sure this would fetch a fair few pennies – perhaps enough to feed us for weeks, even months.

But even as I think it, the stone warm and smooth between my palms, I know I won’t.

The stone asked me to find it and I will keep it safe.