Chapter Text
Kate was going to keep her promise.
She’d woken, confused and cold, in a strange bed in a strange room, with Michael curled in the bed beside her, and Emma wrapped up in a crib.
There was a garland of holly strung around the crib and a stuffed animal on the end of Kate’s bed. She’d hardly noticed these, because she sat up, threw the quilt off and padded quickly over the chilly floorboards. She felt for the locket that was swinging around her small neck.
Kate, please promise me.
Where was her mother?
The corridor was dim. This room was the very last. Kate ran past the doors, each decorated with a garland, but all was quiet. No sign of her parents. She reached a big carpeted staircase.
A vision was stuck in her head. A tall shadow of a man in the doorway of her room. He’d said, it’s time.
She knew, then, that her parents were not here. There was no use looking for them. It had been time for something, and he hadn’t said it like it was time for dinner or a bath or an exciting movie to come on TV. It was time for leaving. Time to go somewhere.
They were gone.
But they couldn’t have! They couldn’t have just gone!
Kate sat on the top step of the staircase.
She rubbed the locket between her thumb and forefinger and thought back to what her mother had said, late at night, after they’d drunk all the hot cocoa and opened their presents (the locket for her mother, the book for her father). She'd gone to sleep but woken to her mother's concerned face.
I need you to keep your brother and sister safe. Do you understand?
She’d thought it was a dream, that she’d wake up any second.
She had woken up. But it was definitely real; the locket proved that. She opened the latch and saw herself smiling back, with Michael and Emma beside her.
Look after them.
She snapped it shut.
The dawn light played over the bannister. Kate traced her finger in a circle, around and around and around the cover of the locket. A distant anger had flamed in her stomach for a moment, but she'd dismissed it just as soon. She trusted her parents to return. Her mother had said they would.
We’ll all be together again. I promise.
Promises, Kate knew, were made to be kept. Whoever broke a promise was a bad, bad person - or maybe just a silly boy. She knew what was best: to remember her promise to take care of her siblings. And her mother would have to remember hers, that they would be together again.
Remembering was the easy part. How would she look after Michael and Emma by herself? And how long would she have to wait; a few days, or maybe until next Christmas?
Kate felt something that most four-year-olds do not feel, something that was bigger than anything she’d ever felt. It was huge, piercing her right in the centre of her heart, gaping like a hole, widening and riffing over her whole body.
She shivered. She drew her knees up to her chest. She found she didn’t care about Santa Claus.
She knew she was sad, terribly sad, more than pout-and-not-eat-your-dinner sad and somehow even more than cry-into-your-pillow sad. She was the kind of sad when you know you’re going to be sad for a long time, and you don’t cry, because you think there might be room for crying later.
And this was new to her.
Kate, the girl's mother said in her mind, in the memory that was now clearer to her than any other. Promise me you’ll look after them.
She may be scared. She may be terrified. She may wish her mother was here to tie up her dressing-gown properly and brush her hair back and tell her that it was, in fact, going to be alright, that Kate could go and play with her dolls and there was no need to wake up Emma and Michael all on her own. She may wish that her father would pick her up and spin her around and say once again,you’re my sweetest shortcake, and finish that story he’d been telling her and Michael, the one about the dwarf king. She may wish for all of that back, but for now...
Kate squeezed the locket tight in her small fist.
She had a job to do.
I can do it, she thought. Even if she couldn't, she had to try.
Because she was their sister.
Because she loved them.
“Because I promised,” Kate whispered. “I promised, I promised, I promised.”