With trembling fingers, I pulled my mother’s letter from my pocket and tossed it on the table. Wordlessly, Corbin’s dad picked it up and unfolded it. His eyes flicked across the words as he held the corners in the tips of his fingers, like it was a precious manuscript or a bomb. His expression changed – his mouth slackening, his eyes filling with moisture.
“I never knew what it said.” Andrew wiped the corner of his eye. A tear streaked down his cheek.
“Corbin kept it safe for me,” I said.
“That he did.” He wiped his eyes again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect to?—”
“It’s okay.”
Andrew sucked in a breath. “You probably want to know the rest of the story.”
Was he kidding? I wasdyingto hear. “Only if you’re ready to tell it.”
He folded the letter over again, running his finger over the broken seal. “Aline told me to keep this letter safe for you, and we did for all those years, and I guess Corbin kept it after we left. But you probably want to know about the rest of that night. The ground shook as the fae came for us. Witches screamed. Arrows whizzed past my head. I wanted to turn around and help, make sure Bree was okay, but Aline told me to keep going no matter what I heard. I raced into the woods with you under my arms, across Raynard’s land, and to the car that we’d parked on Holly Avenue earlier that day. We bought you a brand-new car seat in the morning, and I had some formula in a Thermos ready for you. I hit the pedal as soon as you were strapped in. Halfway down the M1 to London, I got a call from Bree. She was weeping. ‘Aline’s dead,’ she kept saying. ‘So many of us are dead.’ I asked her if she wanted me to come back, if they needed my magic. ‘The fae are gone,’ she sobbed.
“I kept driving. I broke so many road rules to get to the orphanage as quickly as I could. All the way, you barely made a peep. You waved your hands a little and gurgled when I took a corner a bit fast, but otherwise, you were a quiet little thing, just staring at me with those intelligent green eyes.”
“She still does that,” Corbin said. “It’s unnerving.”
Andrew laughed. The tension in Corbin’s shoulders relaxed a little. Andrew continued. “These days, people can’t just dump babies anonymously at an orphanage like a fairy tale, but Bree had found this old-fashioned place run by a cloister of nuns who didn’t have the strictest admin processes. You were so tiny, smaller than I remember Corbin being as a baby. When I handed you to the Mother Superior you looked up at me with this wide-eyed expression, like you knew exactly what was going on and you’d already decided to forgive me, and I nearly snatched you back and brought you to Briarwood.”
“Why didn’t you?” Corbin asked.
“We offered to adopt Maeve as soon as Aline told us what she was planning. But she wouldn’t have it. ‘If you’re suddenly looking after a newborn baby that’s not yours, people will guess, and all of this will be for nothing. No one can know, not the other High Priestesses, not our coven, andespeciallynot Robert.’ She wept as we made the plans for your adoption.” Andrew pointed to the corner of the letter, where small water stains marred the paper. “She cried those tears as she wrote this, but she said it was the only way to keep you safe.”
“What happened after you left the orphanage?”
“I returned to Briarwood. It was chaos. The remaining witches had sealed the gateway before more fae came through. Whatever Aline had done, she’d stripped them of much of their magic – they couldn’t raise the Slaugh. We’d won, but it was a hollow victory. There were bodies everywhere – the earth stained red with the blood of the greatest witches of our time. The other High Priestesses were packing up their covens, threatening to sever all ties with Briarwood. Isadora screamed that she would not be a party to dark magic. I had no idea what she was talking about until the others told me that they’d seen Aline kill you. I knew that wasn’t true, but I couldn’t tell anyone.
“The Briarwood coven disintegrated. The parents who remained couldn’t bear to continue on, knowing what Aline had done and how many had died. We didn’t blame them. They needed space to mourn their dead lovers and Aline’s betrayal. Bree almost told them so many times what Aline had done, but we wouldn’t dishonour her wishes.
“Bree and I wanted to leave the castle, too. Without the coven, the community we had built, Briarwood was big and empty and filled with shadows. But we had a duty to Aline, and to the world. We were the only ones left to guard the gateway. Aline made provisions for us – perhaps she had seen the coven’s disintegration, too – and she set up a trust to allow us to continue at Briarwood without worrying about money. We raised our family there, and we kept an eye on the gateway, and everything was fine, until—” his eyes swivelled to the ceiling.
“She knows, Dad,” Corbin said quietly. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“Right.” Andrew jerked his head forward, his voice shaking a little. “After that, we couldn’t stay. You may think us cowards for leaving the gateway unguarded and forgetting our promise to Aline. But we didn’t care if the fae destroyed the earth. It was dead to us already.”
“I don’t think you’re a coward,” I whispered, wanting to take his hand in mine but not sure if that was appropriate. “Just the opposite.”
Andrew swallowed. “So there you are. You’re all caught up. Tell me a little about yourself, Maeve. Did you have a good life?”
“So far, so good,” I told him about growing up in Arizona, about camping overnight in the desert and falling in love with the night sky, about bickering with Kelly, about Matthew and Louise Crawford and the love they showered on me as though I was their child. My voice choked when I came to their deaths, and how Corbin had protected me at the county fair and looked after me at Briarwood.
By the time I stopped for breath, Andrew’s eyes glistened. He removed his glasses and wiped them with a cloth, then dabbed the cloth into the corners of his eyes. “Aline would have been so proud of you, both of you.”
Corbin beamed. He reached for his dad’s hand, but Andrew drew away to pick up one of the papers. “We should get on with this task.”
We pored over the letters for hours. First, Corbin and his dad divided them into piles according to their type, taking all the ones between Smithers and other artists and galleries and leaving me a stack written in my mother’s scrawled hand. The coven must have believed the letters would someday become public, because they went to great lengths to avoid outright admitting to being witches. The envelopes were addressed to Herbert Missort, but in the letters themselves, she used Robert’s real name. The language only made veiled references to the coven and their work, and she talked a lot about a Historical Society, which I figured out was a code word for the fae.
Robert,
I hope things are going well in London. I miss you. Spring is always the loveliest time of year at Briarwood. The gardens burst with colour, and Mary and David are busy in the kitchens creating all manner of preserves and poultices from our bounty. Delicious smells waft everywhere.
I hung your portrait in the hall upstairs. It is very strange to pass by it and look up at myself. I feel as though I’m being watched through a mirror. It’s rather unnerving, but the others assure me that the image is quite fetching, so I’m sure I’ll learn to live with it.
We are having more trouble with the Historical Society. They were at the gates of Briarwood just the other day… I fear they will make a submission to the Council soon in an effort to seize the castle.
The baby is healthy. My ankles are like melons and my skin glows. I love being pregnant.
