"Everything is fine," Molly said, and somewhere she thought she could hear that other voice murmur softly before it faded away. She reached out and put her arms about Miriam's body and drew her down to the mat and stroked her back, her hip, her thigh. "Everything is fine," she whispered again.

Later, when the others slept, she stood shivering by the window and looked out at the valley. Autumn was very early. Each year it came a little earlier than the previous year. But it was warm in the large room; her chill was not caused by the season or the night air. She thought of the mat play and tears stood in her eyes. The sisters hadn't changed. The valley was unchanged. And yet everything was different. She knew something had died. Something else had come alive, and it frightened her and isolated her in a way that distance and the river had not been able to do.

She looked at the dim forms on the beds and wondered if Miriam suspected. Molly's body had responded; she had laughed and wept with the others, and if there had been one part of her not involved, one part alive and watchful, it had not interfered.

She could have done it, she thought. She could have destroyed that other part with Miriam's help, and the help of the sisters. She should have, she thought, and shivered again. Her thoughts were chaotic; there was something that had come to live within her, something that was vaguely threatening, and yet could give her peace as nothing else could. The beginnings of insanity, she thought wildly. She would become incoherent, scream at nothing, try to do violence to others or to herself. Or maybe she was going to die. Eternal peace. But what she had felt was not simply the absence of pain and fear, but the peace that comes after a great accomplishment, a fulfillment.

And she knew it was important that she let the visions come, that she find time to be alone in order to allow them to fill her. She thought of the sisters despairingly: they would never permit her to be alone again. Together they made a whole; the absence of one of them left the others incomplete. They would call and call her.

Chapter 14

Now the harvest had been gathered; apples hung red and heavy on the trees, and the maples blazed like torches against endless blue skies. Sycamores and birches burned gold, and the sumac's red deepened until it looked almost black. Every morning each blade of grass was edged in frost; it gleamed and glistened until it was melted by the rising sun. The passion of the autumn colors never had been so intense, Molly thought. How the light under the maples changed! And the pale glow that surrounded the sycamores!

"Molly?" Miriam's voice roused her from the window, and she turned reluctantly. "Molly, what are you doing?"

"Nothing. Thinking of the work for today."