Unthinkable (21 page)

She heard Walker yell her name. She felt his hand grab
hers on the gearshift. But she was already in second gear,
heading toward where the dog would be.

Simultaneously, however, Fenella’s other hand moved, on
the wheel of the truck. It moved independently of both her
brain and her will.

It was too late. She knew it within a second. The impact
of the collision was unmistakable.
Fenella slammed on the brakes. The truck rocked to a
halt. She tasted salt in her mouth.
She could hear screaming. It was a woman’s voice.
Maybe she would never open her eyes again.

The salt in her mouth was from blood; she had bitten into
her lower lip.
She could hear Walker’s urgent voice but she couldn’t
comprehend what he was saying. He forced her numb right
hand away from the stick shift. His foot kicked hers away
from the floor controls. He did something else and the
truck engine died.
A single fact penetrated slowly into Fenella’s mind. The
dog was alive. Pierre was barking, a frenzied healthy barking that was edging into a full-throated howl. The barking
was intermingled with the screaming.
The dog was alive and well, yet the truck had hit something. Something heavy. Heavier than Pierre?
Fenella could understand the voices now, hear what they
were saying.
“Oh my God, oh my God!”
“Call 9-1-1!”
Who did I hit? Fenella thought. Who?
She was frozen with dread.
Then came a keening even worse than the dog’s, a human keening. It was a special kind of noise—Fenella knew
it well. She had made it herself, once.
It was the sound that a woman makes over the dead body
of her lover.
Please, Fenella prayed. Not Zach. I know death must
come for him and Lucy someday. But please not while
they’re so young.
Let me not have done this.
Let him live.
In that moment she knew: It would have been better if
she had seduced Zach. At least, then, there would have been
the possibility of healing, of forgiveness, of renewal.
Death ended those possibilities. Death ended all possibility.
How could this have happened? This was the one thing
she had sworn she would not do.
Shakily, Fenella reached into her pocket for the oak leaf,
desperate for its comforting pulse. She curled her fingers
around the leaf.
It did not pulse.
It had abandoned her, she thought. She straightened her
fingers and let the leaf fall from them. She buried her face
in her hands.
Beside her, the truck door was wrenched open from the
outside. Walker grabbed her arm and pulled her down, out.
Whatever he was saying still did not penetrate, though his
urgency did.
Fenella’s legs were weak. She fell onto her hands and
knees beside the truck. Walker did not catch her. He was no
longer there at all; she felt his absence.
Of course he had gone. Walker would hate her now too.
They all would.
What had she done, what had she done, what had she
done?
Screaming tore through Fenella’s head like a hundred
steel blades. It was inside and outside her head. Sirens were
shrilling, coming closer. There was hard pavement beneath
her hands and knees. She pushed herself into a sitting position. She grabbed her knees and pressed her body against her
thighs, curling small. She rocked back and forth, eyes shut.
Then came the brush of soft fur against her side.
Fenella.
It was Ryland. Fenella managed to move her lips. “What’s
going on? Who—” She swallowed. “Who did I hit?”
You didn’t do it on purpose?
“No. No! It was—I changed my mind—it was an accident.”
Silence.
“I’m begging you,” she whispered. “Tell me. I can’t bear to
look. It’s Zach, isn’t it? I’ve killed Lucy’s husband.”
Finally, Ryland spoke again in her head, his tone quite
dispassionate.
It’s not Zach. It’s Leo. He ran into the road. I suppose he
was hoping to grab the dog in time. But then you swerved and
hit him instead.
Fenella felt at first a shameful rush of relief. Not Zach.
But then—
“Leo’s dead?” she said numbly.
She could envision Leo Markowitz’s face, intent, leaning
over a guitar. She could almost hear his voice, lifted in song.
And now she recognized that the woman’s voice she heard,
the voice whose keening had turned into a low whimper,
was Soledad’s.
She did not need to open her eyes to know that Soledad
was beside Leo’s body. Cradling her husband in her arms.
Begging him to wake up.
She had done the same for Robert.
Ryland said: Your veterinarian friend is doing what he
can. But it doesn’t look good.
“I didn’t mean it,” whispered Fenella. “I was trying to hit
the dog.”
You’re not making sense. You swerved away from the dog.
“I know.”
After all my work too. I did what you told me to. You’re
sure you didn’t see Leo coming, and improvise? You didn’t
simply realize that hitting him was a better solution?
“No. No! Leo shouldn’t have been there. It was a mistake.
Also, I—I had my eyes closed.”
A pause. Then: You are an extremely frustrating young
woman.
Fenella did not reply. She listened to Soledad’s keening.
The good news, said the cat, finally, is that you have succeeded at the second task. You have destroyed love.
At this, Fenella opened her eyes. She looked straight on at
the destruction she had wrought. She looked at her family.
Lucy and Zach and Soledad and Miranda. And yes, Walker.
They all had their backs to her.
As they should.
It had only been a few minutes since the accident. The
sirens sounded closer. Help would be here soon. Eventually
they would remember her. Then Walker would tell them
that it had been Fenella in the driver’s seat.
She thought of her dead leaf, fallen in the cab of Walker’s
truck.
“Ryland?” she whispered.
What?
“Can you please, please, please get me out of here?”
Yes, said the cat. Let’s go see my sister and find out about
the third task.

_{A fire truck,}
an ambulance, and two police cars roared
down the street. The vehicles pulled between Fenella and
Ryland and the accident.

Fenella managed to push to her feet and totter after the
cat. Ryland paused by a leafy rhododendron bush. He gestured with his head for Fenella to slip behind the bush. He
twined himself around Fenella’s ankles and then they were
in mist.

Three steps forward, then two to the left.
The mist drifted off on a gentle breeze.
They stood on a winding, worn stone path that lay inside

the archway of a private little walled garden. Beyond the
garden’s low walls, covered with delicate new ivy, Fenella
could see a green forest and, farther away, the purple outlines of mountains.

The garden itself seemed designed to please a domestically minded human woman. It was both pretty and cozy,
with riotous flowerbeds. On the garden wall, a magpie
preened its long tail. Above, the sun shone down benevolently from a lovely blue sky.

Fenella looked toward the forest. Were any of the tree fey
present? Her hand crept into her pocket to touch the leaf
that was no longer there.

This place again,
Ryland complained. I hate this garden.
My sister should stay away, but she likes to torture herself.
Look, there she is. At least she’s not pretending to be Mallory
Tolliver.

In the small stone clearing at the center of the garden,
under a tall oak, stood a chair formed from flowering vines
and the roots of the living tree. Queen Kethalia sat in it.

Seeing Fenella and Ryland, the queen rose. Her strong
hawk’s wings flared out behind her and she lifted a clawed
hand in an ambiguous gesture that could have been either
waving or beckoning.

With Ryland slinking beside her, Fenella moved to the
queen. The queen reached out her clawed hands, as if she
wanted Fenella to take them. Fenella barely touched the
hands. She stood awkwardly.

“Yes. The second task is complete. I can feel the difference in your body. You are nearly free.” The queen’s tone was
neutral. “But you don’t look happy.”

“He was a nice man, the man I killed. Leo Markowitz.”
Fenella paused, and then words came out in a rush. “You
would have liked his music. They—my family—will miss
him terribly. He was Lucy’s father, the only one she ever
knew. And his wife—they were married many years—her
name is Soledad. She—they—everybody was so kind to
me.”

She felt pressure behind her eyes and in her throat. But
murderers had no right to tears.
“You have indeed destroyed love,” said the queen, almost
gently.
“There is no going back.” Fenella’s voice was strangely
high.
The spotted lizard crawled out from the mass of the
queen’s hair. She stroked him gently with one finger. “Have
your feelings changed?”
“Which feelings do you mean?”
The queen scratched her lizard’s back with a careful claw.
“Do you still want to die?”
Fenella exploded, incredulous. “More than ever! Especially now, I deserve—” She stopped speaking. Her eyes
flickered.
“What?”
“I deserve death,” Fenella said. “Not as reward. As punishment. No. Death is too good for me.”
The queen made a gesture, inviting Fenella to sit on the
living chair that was formed of tree roots and vines. The
branches of the seat accommodated themselves to Fenella’s
shape, cradling her.
Fenella put her head in her hands. “I thought I was trapped
before. I was willing to do anything to free myself. But now
I have killed, and—it was an accident. Killing Leo, completing the second task. I have done two terrible things. To my
own family! There will be a third task ahead. And I must do
it—for their sake now, not mine. To save Lucy and the child.”
“Yes.” The queen restored the lizard to her shoulder. “You
must go forward.”
Fenella took in the multitude of shades of green and
brown and orange that composed the flowing mix of hair
and fur and feather cascading from the queen’s head and
the nape of her neck, noted the way the cascade melted
into the feathers of the queen’s wings. So beautiful; so
alien. Yet the queen looked kind, even sad.
“You warned me at the start. I should never have accepted the tasks.”
“I understand,” the queen said. “I too have walked the
path of destruction, and seen no way out.”
Fenella asked sharply, “You didn’t choose to pursue
destruction, though, did you?”
“No. But destruction was where I found myself. I played
my role.”
“It wasn’t the same,” said Fenella. “I know about this. You
went into your mission with the goal of saving others. Your
intentions were honorable.”
“Do you think, then, that good intention excuses bad
action?” asked the queen. “Do you think it is allowable to
destroy one person in order to save many?”
Fenella slipped from the tree chair onto her knees. She
looked all the way up into the queen’s face. “I can’t do anything else to them! I can’t complete the third task.”
“You are declaring defeat, then? You will belong to
Padraig, and you will condemn Lucy and her child to this
as well?”
Fenella thought of Walker, and of how he had looked
at her. “Someday,” he’d said. Walker would not want that
someday anymore. At this moment he would be denouncing her to her family.
“I wish I had never agreed to this,” Fenella said hopelessly.
“No matter the outcome, I have done too much harm.”
“There can be healing, though. On the other side of pain
and suffering.”
Fenella shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”
The queen persisted. “People can recover from even the
worst blows. They mend and go on with their lives.”
Fenella thought of how her family had rallied after the
loss of their home. She thought of how Lucy and Zach had
fought through great terror together. But—
“These are tasks of destruction! By definition, they do
terrible, irrecoverable harm. Even when people mend,
they’ve changed. They’re damaged.”
“Doesn’t the regular process of life, and all its normal
tragedies, change people anyway? Didn’t you say so at the
beginning of all this?”
“This is different,” said Fenella.
“How?”
“Because I’m the one doing the damage.”
“That matters to you now?”
Fenella glanced down at Ryland, who was sitting sphinxlike on the ground, small head alert. The queen did not look
at her brother at all.
Fenella’s voice was sharper. “I’ve become an arsonist and
a murderer. Do you think I like that?”
The queen snapped back, “So it’s all about you, not your
family? You don’t like giving up your vision of yourself as a
poor little tortured martyr? You’d rather return to having no
agency at all?”
Fenella gasped.
“It is not bad,” said the queen, more calmly, “that you
decided to be active. That you wanted to take control of
your life, to pursue what you desired.”
“But I chose destruction.”
“You also chose change.”
Fenella was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand. Is
change always destructive?”
“How else is room made in the world for the new?”
“But . . . but . . . do you approve of what I’m doing? Is that
what you’re saying? I killed a man! A good man! All because
I would not stay quiet and accept my lot.”
“I did not say I approved. Or that I disapproved. Neither
of which matters, by the way. This is your own path.”
“I’m confused,” said Fenella tightly.
“And angry,” said the queen.
Fenella tilted her chin. “And angry.”
The queen looked beyond Fenella, finally, at Ryland. He
got up and stretched. He trotted over to the edge of the
clearing, turned a disdainful back to them, and sat down—
still well within earshot. The queen laughed then, low.
Fenella said, “At the beginning, you told me Ryland was
good only at destruction.”
“I did,” said the queen neutrally.
“And now you say destruction has its place.”
“I do.”
“You also told me you wouldn’t speak in riddles!” said
Fenella with frustration. “But you do. First destruction is
bad. Then destruction is change, and it’s maybe good, or
at least inevitable. And the tasks themselves—they have
turned out to be riddles too.”
There was a silence.
“I am new at my job,” said the queen. “Choices in life are
indeed riddles. And creation is all mixed up with destruction. You cannot have one without the other. I don’t think
I fully understood that before either.” She paused. “What I
also now see is that riddles are sometimes the only way to
express truth.”
Nonsense, Ryland said. He had moved when she was not
looking and was now at Fenella’s feet. Ask her about the
third task already.
Fenella nodded grimly. She would do the third task. She
would do it as quickly and as mercifully as she could, but
she would do it. She would see Lucy and her daughter safe
from Padraig before she died. She had to.
She turned to the queen again.
The queen said, “The last task is the destruction of hope.”