The Sight by Melanie Golding

Author:Melanie Golding [Golding, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

21

BEFORE

WORSE THAN ANGER, much worse, was the disappointment.

“I’m sorry, Mum. I couldn’t help it. Those girls were being really mean.”

Iris was sitting by the wagon window, gazing out. It was as if she couldn’t hear her.

“Mum?”

No response. Faith sat opposite her mother and took her hands. “You forgive me, right? For getting kicked out of school?”

A tear fell from Iris’s chin and landed on the tabletop with a soft tap. After a while she said, “You can’t help what you see. What you are.”

Faith’s pulse increased. It wasn’t the answer she was looking for. Her mother’s mouth opened slightly and she shook her head, dislodging another tear. Faith was about to ask again, But you forgive me, don’t you?

Then Iris said, “I just wish you’d told me about the dream that day. I keep thinking that maybe I could have done something.”

She dropped her mother’s hands and slammed out of the wagon, rushed across the yard to Macha’s side, and buried her face in his mane. She bridled him and opened the stable doors, unable to stop crying as she did. Bareback, she used her heels to urge the horse out of the yard so that they were at a trot when they passed through the gates, and broke into a gallop as they reached the path through the woods to the lake.

As she rode through the trees, green with new growth, she saw flashes of that morning, the ice on the branches. It had been too cold for Macha, but if she’d been riding him it would have been different—she knows it—because whether Macha was there was something she could have changed from the dream, and therefore changed everything. She hadn’t needed to walk out, to meet Samuel, to stand there at the side of the frozen lake. She could have turned left instead of right, gone the other way. So many chances when she could have done something to change it.

They broke out of the woods onto the shore, and she pulled up on Macha’s reins to get him to slow. There was a branch nearby where Faith tethered him loosely, left the horse to graze on the lush grasses that grew at the land’s edges, and walked over the stony ground to the place where she’d last seen her brother alive. The ice was long gone; the water was calm and clear, a huge mirror reflecting the sky.

The hurtful words those mean girls used echoed in her head, their twisted faces looming near to hers.

Freak. Stinker. Loner. Dumbo.

All of these and worse. She ought to have felt bad about what she’d said to them—she knew it was bad—but she didn’t. They deserved it.

The headteacher deserved it too. She’d forced Faith to look in her eyes. No one should force anyone to do things they didn’t want to do. No one. Faith couldn’t be held responsible for what she’d done in response to that, partly because she’d blacked out. When she woke up in the medical bay, it became apparent that she’d said some terrible things to the headteacher in the time she’d lost.

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