The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by Schwab V. E

Author:Schwab, V. E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 29, 1764

XII

The cart rattles to a stop beside the river.

“I can take you further,” says the driver, gripping the reins. “We’re still a mile out.”

“That’s all right,” she says. “I know the way.”

An unknown cart and driver might draw attention, and Addie would rather return the way she left, the way she learned every inch of this place: on foot.

She pays the man and steps down, the edge of her gray cloak skimming the dirt. She hasn’t bothered with luggage, has learned to travel light; or rather, to let go of things as easily as she comes into them. It is simpler that way. Things are too hard to hold on to.

“You’re from here, then?” he asks, and Addie squints into the sun.

“I am,” she says. “But I’ve been gone a long time.”

The driver looks her up and down. “Not too long.”

“You’d be surprised,” she says, and then he cracks the whip, and the cart trundles off, and she is alone again in a land she knows, down to her bones. A place she has not been in fifty years.

Strange—twice as long away as she was here, and still it feels like home.

She doesn’t know when she made the decision to come back, or even how, only that it had been building in her like a storm, from the time spring began to feel like summer, the heaviness rolling in like the promise of rain, until she could see the dark clouds on the horizon, hear the thunder in her head, urging her to go.

Perhaps it is a ritual of sorts, this return. A way to cleanse herself, to set Villon firmly in the past. Perhaps she is trying to let go. Or perhaps she is trying to hold on.

She will not stay, that much she knows.

Sunlight glints on the surface of the Sarthe, and for an instant, she thinks of praying, sinking her hands into the shallow stream, but she has nothing to offer the river gods now, and nothing to say to them. They did not answer when it mattered.

Around the bend, and beyond a copse of trees, Villon rises amid the shallow hills, gray stone houses nestled in the basin of the valley. It has grown, a little, widened like a man in middle age, inching outward, but it is still Villon. There is the church, and the town square, and there, beyond the center of the town, the dark green line of the woods.

She does not go through town, instead bends around it to the south.

Toward home.

The old yew tree still stands sentinel at the end of the lane. Fifty years have added a few knotted angles to its limbs, a measure of width around its base, but otherwise, it is the same. And for an instant, when all she can see is the edge of the house, time stutters, and slips, and she is twenty-three again, walking home from the town, or the river, or Isabelle’s, washing on her hip, or the drawing

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