CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Heart Stone
“She’s dead,” said the Gunner as the Queen reined her horses in and brought the chariot to a sliding halt in front of the Artillery Memorial. The Queen dropped to her knees next to where the Gunner was pumping at Edie’s chest with the heel of his hand.
“Then why are you still doing that?” she asked as she moved around to Edie’s head.
“Because I don’t know what else to bloody do,” he said.
The Queen looked up and saw big tears rolling out of his eyes.
She bent over Edie’s open mouth, tilted her head back, and pinched her nose. She took a breath and blew it into the waterlogged lungs. She did it again. She listened. And when there was no answering breath, she did it again. For a while, the two of them tried to revive the small dead body, refusing to accept the truth that she had gone.
Eventually the Gunner looked at the Queen. His eyes had emptied and were now deserts of dry despair.
“Why are you doing this?”
She wiped her eyes, and the Gunner saw an echo of the dead girl in the way her jaw came stubbornly forward.
“Because I don’t know what else to do either. Except keep fighting.”
“Fair enough.” He pumped Edie’s chest. “Neither did Edie.”
He thumped his fist into Edie’s breastbone in frustration and grief, just as the Queen had blown in, and suddenly Edie threw up a great lungful of river water and then convulsed in a terrible coughing spasm.
Her eyes flickered open, then closed again as she passed out. The Gunner felt her heart. It was beating faintly. He stared at her in disbelief. He looked at the Queen. He’d never seen her smile before, but now her face shone back at him.
“Neither had she, I think you mean,” the Queen said.
He beamed back at her. “If you weren’t a bloody queen I’d kiss you.”
“If I weren’t a bloody queen I might well let you.”
Then her face snapped back its normal businesslike demeanor.
“She’s not out of the woods yet. She could still die of cold. We need a fire.”
“We haven’t got a fire.”
The Queen was unfastening her cloak. “Well, get a coat or something. We need to warm her up.”
The Gunner held Edie’s wrist. “Her pulse is hardly there at all.”
“Get a move on, then,” she snapped, and started stripping the cloak from Edie’s body.
The Gunner ran over to the monument, where he saw the Officer’s coat and hat sitting next to the wet bundle of heart stones he had brought from the underground tank. As he picked up the Officer’s coat, he noticed that the bundle was steaming.
“Hurry up,” shouted the Queen. “We’ve got to get her into something warm. She’s slipping away again.”
“Hold up,” he said as he threw the coat over his shoulder and untied the bundle. Light blazed at him. He quickly looked around to see if there was a taint or the Walker creeping up on them. But then he noticed something about the light. The glass stones had been of all different colors, but now they were glowing with the same warm hue, like the orange at the heart of a well-banked-up fire.
“Gunner!” shouted the Queen. “We’re losing her.”
The Gunner dumped the heart stones next to her.
“Heart stones. The bloody Walker kept them as trophies of all the glints he’d culled.”
Like him, the Queen looked around searching for danger.
“No,” he said, as he started placing the stones around Edie. “They’re not warning us. I think they feel her. I think it’s the spark of all them troubled girls kindling one last time. I think it’s them having a last laugh at the Walker.”
The Queen watched him carefully place a stone over Edie’s heart, and then she dug her hands into the blazing stone pile and helped him surround Edie with the warmth, and wrapped her with her own cloak and the Officer’s coat.
And in the end, it wasn’t just the fact that the Gunner and the Queen wouldn’t let her die that saved Edie. It was as the Gunner thought: it was all the lost girls and the lonely girls, all the odd women who thought they might be a bit mad because they didn’t quite fit in— because they didn’t understand that their glinting could be a gift and not a curse—it was all of them who surrounded this last lost lonely girl and gave her the final warm sparks that their lives had stored in their stones, so that she could go on and live for them.
Because the Queen knew this was so, she wept as she watched the color return to Edie’s face and her eyes flicker open again.
Edie’s small hand twitched where it lay in the Gunner’s big bronze palm. He closed his hand gently on it. Her eyes focused, and as she recognized him, she gripped his hand fiercely, and he again saw the rare small miracle of her smile break across her face like sunshine.
“It’s all right,” he said gruffly. “I’ve got you. You were too tough for the Walker to kill. And you were too bloody tough for the river to kill. You’re safe.”
Edie nodded and coughed harshly.
“Where’s George?”