“I didn’t hold my hurt back then. I put it on her. I didn’t know I was doing it, but all the awful crap Del put me through, I made it hers instead of mine.”

“That’s harsh,” Jack said.

Jilly nodded. “Tell me about it.”

“Who’s Mattie?” Joe asked.

“An Eadar. I made a whole world of Eadar somewhere in my head, but she’s the only one I hurt.”

“You’re right,” Jack said. “This sounds like a long weird story.”

Jilly gave Honey a last hug before she stood up and took Geordie’s hand.

“I don’t suppose you have some coffee to go with that campfire,” she said. “I’ve got the start of a wicked headache from caffeine withdrawal.”

Timony picked up the empty Styrofoam mug in which he’d brought Geordie a coffee earlier and handed it to her. By the time she took it from him, it was filled to the brim with hot, steaming coffee.

Jilly took a deep breath of its rich aroma before she had a careful sip.

“You are so going to have to teach me that trick,” she said.

Jilly

It’s weird being back on the mesa top. This is still the otherworld, but compared to that place where I left Mattie and the other Eadar, it seems . . . I don’t know. Weightier. Like there’s more gravity here, or presence, or something. It’s not so much that I noticed a lack when I was in that version of Tyson County that lies inside my head. I just notice a more here.

I take a sip of the coffee Timony made for me, then something occurs to me. I’m still in the otherworld, and I’ve still got the light inside me. What’s to stop me from working magic whenever I’m here? So I give it a try while we walk back to the fire and everybody’s talking.

Once upon a time . . .

I’m thinking of just a small thing, only to see if I can do it. So I imagine the coffee is cocoa and that the fire is green instead of yellow and orange.

But, of course it doesn’t work. It’s only going to ever work in that one little piece of the otherworld peopled by a shiver of my brother Del and the Eadar from Ellen Wentworth’s book.

I feel kind of relieved and disappointed, all at the same time.

“We should go back,” Geordie says.

He and Lizzie have been packing up their fiddles. There’s been conversation going on all around me, but I haven’t heard any of it until this moment, when Geordie touches my arm to get my attention. I’ve been in a world of my own, like a person standing still in the middle of a hurrying crowd of commuters as they’re getting on the subway.

“Jilly?” Geordie asks.