Maeve Moore was no broken sparrow. Even if she had been upset about the window incident since mid-afternoon and it was now well past dinnertime.
“I jumped through that window,” Maeve whispered, her whole body shaking. “I wasright thereinside his head when hedid it. I was drinking and then the next moment, I was lying on the cobbles with glass shards sticking out of my eyelids. It was horrible. I can’t believe I did that to a person.”
“The guy didn’t die,” I shrugged. “He might need a little reconstructive surgery, but that could only be described as an improvement.”
Reconstructive surgery.I’d learned all about this human magic from a fascinating show calledGrey’s Anatomy. I’d learned all kinds of important things from watching the giant television in the Great Hall – namely that humans found crime scenes and home redecorating endlessly fascinating.
“But it’s compulsion. It’s messing with people’s heads. It’s wrong, and I can’t do that!”
“You can’t be this upset every time you do a little magic, Princess. You compelled someone before,” I reminded her. “What about all those fae you drove out with the power of your mind?”
“That was different,” she snapped. “Youdid that. Tell me, Blake. Tell me you didn’t force me to hurt that man.”
I shook my head. “As much as I’d love to claim the credit, this was all you, Princess.”
“But I can’t compel people! That’s a fae power, and I—” she snapped her mouth shut.
“You’re half-fae,” Corbin said, redundantly.
“Ohbollocks,” Maeve swore, the curse word like a delicious warm curry on her lips.
This didn’t seem like it was going to end up with Maeve accepting who she was and deciding to re-enact last night’s dream, so I stood up. “I’m going to sleep.”
Maeve looked at me with those big deep eyes of hers, but she didn’t ask me to stay.
I left them in the library and went up to my room, which was right next to Rowan’s. I pushed my door open with my footand dragged it shut again without passing through it, listening to the loud creak and click.There, that should satisfy Corbin the suspicious.
I crept back down the hall and opened the secret door leading to the narrow kitchen staircase. I swung the door shut behind me and muffled the click with my hand. The soft soles of my leather boots made my descent completely silent.
In the kitchen, I shoved aside the bottles and jars on Rowan’s potion shelves. Luckily, he labelled everything in neat, square lettering, and in no time at all I had exactly what I needed in my hand.
There was only enough sleeping draught left for one more dream. I had to make it count.
Tucking the bottle under my arm, I headed out the kitchen door and across the vast garden overlooking the Briarwood estate. How amazing it was that these witches lived in the midst of all these open fields and sprawling woods that were nearly as large as the entire fae realm?
I sprinted through the forest and came out near the low stone wall marking the boundary of Briarwood. In the field beyond, the three sidhe rose up out of the swaying grass, lit by the glowing green lights on Maeve’s monitoring equipment that we’d set up yesterday. I had no idea what any of it did, except that every few seconds one of the machines let out an annoyingBEEP.
I gripped the sleeping draught tight in my fist. At least with this, I’d be able to sleep right through that sound.
I lay down in one of the charred patches of earth where Arthur’s fireballs had burned the grass away. Staring up at the stars that fascinated Maeve so, the stars that were so different from the ones I watched for twenty-one years inTir Na Nog, I tapped my head back and poured the contents of the jar down my throat.
A few minutes later the stars blurred together and disappeared into inky blackness. I opened my eyes and found myself standing in a dark corner. My back pressed against a packed earth wall, and a faint square of light from an opening high above my head illuminated a crumpled body lying on the ground. Two golden braids peeked from the lump of limbs and tattered green clothing.
“Liah?” I whispered.
The shape moved. A head slowly rose out of the crumpled clothes. The flickering light above illuminated shallow cuts crosshatching her cheeks and multi-coloured bruises marring once-perfect skin. The eyes flew open. Anger twisted her face as she recognized me. She leapt forward with surprising speed and grabbed me, pinning me against the wall with her body and wrapping a hand around my throat.
“I’d choke the life out of you,” she growled. “Only you took my otherhand.”
“Stop,” I choked out. She was making a decent attempt with only one hand. “I’ve come to take you back with me. And I promise this time you won’t lose any body parts.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. I’d rather stay here and be tortured by Daigh. At least he hasn’t chopped off any of my limbs. He even repaired the arm he broke. You haven’t brought me a new hand, have you?”
“No, but I can help with that. Humans have this amazing thing called a television. It shows stories from all over the world in moving pictures. Some of them are myths – like this movie I saw about this man who got left behind on another planet that didn’t even have anytrees– but some of them are true. There was this girl who lost her hand in a machine – she worked in this thing called a factory that spits out poison into the air?—”
“Blake, get to the point.”
“Instead of healers, they have these nifty people called doctors who use human science tomakebody parts. And they made this girl a prosthetic hand. It wasn’t quite the same as a real one, but she could move her fingers and pick things up, and it was bright purple and she thought it was so cool. So I was thinking that if I took you with me to the human realm, we could get you fixed up with one of those.”
