But one of the exceptions tugged at him. He stood in the shop for a moment longer, trying to fight an urge he knew would only bring pain, and then he walked out, holding onto Beatrix’s hand, bringing her with him. She followed him without question down Main, past trees with lifeless brown leaves, into a building near the train tracks and up the rickety stairs to the second-floor apartment.
The door was locked. He reached into the shirt she’d unbuttoned, before this stopped being a game, and pulled out a key on a string, a memory twenty years old. His memory, not Beatrix’s, creating it out of thin air somehow. The key turned in the lock. The door opened.
He looked, just looked, at his grandmother as her image swirled into being in front of them. Another memory twenty years old. Nan’s eyes were tired, her body stooped, but her mouth turned up in a laugh frozen in time and her arms were held out. For him.My darling boy, come here.He reached out to touch her cheek with fingers that shook, but this vision of her was as cool and insubstantial as fog.
Beatrix’s arms went around him and he leaned into her instead.
“Why was there never a funeral here for her?” she asked after a while.
“She was shipped to Arlington. The Academy let me scatter her ashes on campus, and I was sent back to class.” He had to clear his throat, which was closing up. “I was two days shy of fourteen.”
“Did you have other family to go to?”
He shook his head. “Nan was all I had. The Academy was appointed as my guardian, but they’re already fairly well in charge of young wizards’ lives. The main difference for me was that I stayed there over holidays.”
“Oh, Peter,” she said, dismay in her voice.
“It’s not quite as bad as you’re imagining. Christmas was always dour, but summer break on a huge property with its own swimming pond and forest is no hardship.”
“How long did it take before you played in the pond and the forest?”
He hesitated before letting the admission out. “Two years. I wasn’t … ready.”
He couldn’t properly articulate how he’d felt—that he’d wanted to shut out the beauty and joy of a world that would take his only living relative from him.
“When it happened to me,” Beatrix murmured, “I was angry, too.”
He twined a hand into hers. This was the first real conversation they’d had in two weeks. That almost—almost—outweighed the subject matter.
He turned from Nan to look at Beatrix and realized that some of the sharp sadness he felt was actually hers. Her eyes were red. Her cheeks glistened, tracked with tears.
A thought struck him. “You lost your mother the same year I lost Nan. You were only thirteen, too.”
She nodded. “Then Dad …” Her voice gave out.
He tightened his grip on her. How had she managed after both her parents died within a few years of each other? How had she pulled herself and her family’s tattered finances together and raised her sister to boot?
How could she stand to be in this place?
He cast one more glance at the memory-Nan, there and not there, before turning away. “Let’s get out of here.”
The apartment shimmered. The dull, stained floor sprouted patches of moss that crept up the bottom few inches of the wall. The wooden lamp on the table by the door stretched both upward and down, growing over the table, thickening, sprouting bark.
But there the transformation stopped. Beatrix stood with her eyes squeezed shut, breathing hard, and around them, the room stubbornly remained a room. The almost-tree wasa trunk without limbs, lit up from the inside by a lamp that would not let go. Nothing else grew.
“I can’t get out.” She slumped against him, panting. He could feel her heart racing. “Peter, I can’t—can’t?—”
“It’s OK,” he said, chest constricting. He blinked to stave off the impression that the room was closing in. “Give it a moment. Why don’t you tell me?—”
She screamed, rearing back. The wallswereclosing in. The tree vanished, the door was gone—there was no way out except magic.
He wasted precious seconds trying to wish up another red leaf—damn it, why wouldn’t itcome—and lost more time frozen in horror, his mind two weeks in the past when he nearly asphyxiated in his cellar. The walls were eight feet away. Seven. Six. Five. They were going to die—perhaps for real?—
“No,” he shouted. “Beatrix, it’s a dream. You can stop this.”
He grasped her face, trying to force her to focus on him. Her pupils were so dilated he didn’t know if she could focus on anything.“Breathe.”
She blinked and gasped for air. One of the walls hit his backside, pressing him inexorably forward.
