Ebony Hill (17 page)

Ronan takes a breath. “I’d like that.”

We walk on, eyes front, feet in time, our silence companionable. “Ronan,” I say at last, “could you—” I pause, chewing on my lip. I don’t know how to ask without sounding foolish.

He looks around. “What?”

“It’s just … I’d like to think there was something to mark where we – where Esha was – when…”

“I’ll make sure.”

Something eases inside me.

At the crest of the first hill I turn to look back. Ebony Hill stretches clear of the surrounding slopes, fog rising like smoke from the gullies that score the ridge’s flanks. So much has happened here; so much more than I expected, than any of us could have expected.

“I’d better head back,” Ronan says.

I nod, stripped of words. He shifts from foot to foot.

Dev strolls into our silence. “Good luck then, Ronan,” he says. “I hope it works out for you at Summertops. And you know there’ll always be a place for you in Vidya.” He smiles his wide smile.

Ronan nods. “Thanks, Devdan.”

The scouts are already shepherding the group on. “Come on now, people,” one calls. “We’ve a long walk ahead of us.”

Dev turns his smile on me. “We’d better get going, Ness.”

Farra’s hand comes from behind to rest on Dev’s shoulder. “Let’s just give them a moment there, Devdan.” He winks and I colour. It’s hard to tell how much pressure he exerts as he propels Dev away.

Ronan tilts his head to one side. “You’ll make a good medic,” he says.

“I hope so.”

He leans forward suddenly and kisses my cheek, only I move at the wrong moment and his lips meet my ear. I put an arm around his neck and hug him, for a moment burying my face against his shoulder. He returns my embrace, arms tight around my back.

“I’ll see you, then,” I say, as I let him go.

The corner of his mouth is already quirked in a smile. He walks backwards two steps, raises a hand, then he’s gone, striding quickly down the hill. “What makes anyone belong anywhere?” he had asked me once – and suddenly I know.

For all that the sea might run in my blood, and
Dunnett Island hold a piece of me it won’t ever give up, it’s people that let you belong. Those you care for and who care for you. Part of me wants to run after Ronan and tell him so, but I don’t.

When Farra returns to fetch me he pats me kindly on the shoulder. “You can always come back,” he says.

I wipe at the speck of dust that’s blown into my eye.

“Good ends come out of the least likely things,” he adds. He grins and rests his palm flat against his side. “And I should know, eh lass?”

With his broad hand on my shoulder I turn to follow the group strung like beads along the jigger line. Two of the younger boys are balancing, arms outstretched, on the rails. As I watch one wobbles and falls. The other boy laughs. Mothers are interlaced between children. A toddler rides on her father’s back, head tucked sleepily into the curve of his neck.

Past the walkers, the rail line snakes along the spine of the hill, up a rise and over into the valley beyond, sunlight glinting on the metal before it disappears from view. I picture the road ahead of us, straight as an arrow past the lake, curving along the ridge above the ruined valley, hurrying down to the coast and the tiny settlement that clings between the line and the sea.

Farra plans to call on our way past to check that they’re all right – they’re too small to offer much defence against marauders.

The ribbon of shining line runs on in my mind: through the tunnels, above the sea, shuttered and shadowed by the wall of hills, clanking up and into and
through the burnt-out remnants of the city – a lost city from a lost world – till it leads us finally back to a world that’s not lost, to my future, to Vidya.

Anna Mackenzie lives with her husband and children on a farm in Hawke’s Bay where she avoids farmwork, grows an excess of vegetables, and fills her time with words.
Ebony
Hill
is her fifth novel and sequel to
The Sea-wreck Stranger
.

High Tide
, 2003

Out on the Edge
, 2005

The Sea-wreck Stranger,
2007

Shadow of the Mountain
, 2008