But as I stood there watching her, I realized that I wasn’t just afraid. I was . . . shocked. By how dark she was. How bitter. Like something scorched.

And I could feel that bitterness even across the clearing.

I waited for her to move. To say something. But she just stood there.

The way home was to my left, close by, and I wondered if I could just go quickly and be away and gone. But it was a long way down to home, and it was dark enough and the path strange enough that I couldn’t hurry without risking a fall.

So I turned, instead, and went back into Cate’s little cabin and shut the door behind me.

“Third time you didn’t knock,” Cate said from her bed. Larkin looked up from the big book. Captan, lying on the floor by Cate, raised his head, looked at me, and began to growl.

“What’s this, Cap?” Cate said. “She’s—”

“There’s a woman,” I said. “At the edge of the clearing.”

Captan stood up, stiff-legged, and growled some more, deep in his throat.

But Larkin surprised me by sighing. Closing the book. Rising from his chair and standing taller than he had before.

“You go on,” he said to me, coming to open the cabin door. He led me outside.

The woman was closer now, halfway across the clearing.

“Go on,” Larkin said again. “Go on home.”

There was something urgent in his voice.

I looked at the woman, who had come closer still. “Who is that?”

Larkin took my arm and pushed me a little, toward the path. “My mother.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

It’s one thing to climb a mountain in daylight, quite another to climb down it in darkness, and I had to go so slowly and carefully that I wasn’t far along when I heard shouting from above and stopped to listen.

Anger makes for loudness, but I still had trouble understanding much of what I heard as I stood among the trees. Something about Larkin coming home where he belonged.

Larkin yelling back. Something about him being old enough to make up his own mind.

After a while, the shouting stopped.

I imagined Larkin and his mother stomping down the other slope. All of us descending away from Star Peak. All of us except Cate and Captan, who stayed on that mountaintop alone together.

I had work to do, down-mountain. I had the chores I’d never done and my father to tend. But I decided I would come back soon to help Cate, too, whether she wanted me or not.

That was something I could do, so I would do it.

More than that, I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it like I wanted to be out in the spring air. To grow things. To grow up.