She puts on a long, fur-trimmed green coat with frog clasps. “Where is the girl?”
“In the stables,” I say. “I’ll take you—”
Vivi shakes her head. “Absolutely not. You have to get out of those clothes. Put on a dress and go down to dinner and make sure you act like everything’s normal. If someone comes to question you, tell them you’ve been in your room this whole time.”
“No one saw me!” I say.
Vivi gives me her best fish-eyed look. “No one? You’re sure.”
I think of Cardan, riding up as we made our escape, and of the guards, whom I’d lied to. “Probably no one,” I amend. “No one who noticed anything.” If Cardan had, he would never have let me get away. He would never have given up having that much power over me.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says, holding up a forbidding, long-fingered hand. “Jude, it isn’t safe.”
“I’m going,” I insist. “The girl’s name is Sophie, and she’s really freaked out—”
Vivi snorts. “I bet.”
“I don’t think she’ll go with you. You look like one of them.” Maybe I am more afraid of my nerve running out than anything else. I worryabout the adrenaline ebbing out of my body, leaving me to face the mad thing I have done. But given Sophie’s suspicion of me, I absolutely think that Vivi’s cat eyes would be enough to send her over the edge. “Because youareone of them.”
“Are you telling me in case I forgot?” Vivi asks.
“We’ve got to go,” I say. “And I am coming. We don’t have time to debate this.”
“Come, then,” she says. Together, we go down the stairs, but as we are about to go out the door, she grabs my shoulder. “You can’t save our mother, you know. She’s already dead.”
I feel as though she has slapped me.
“That’s not—”
“Isn’t it?” she demands. “Isn’t that what you’re doing? Tell me this girl isn’t some stand-in for Mom. Some surrogate.”
“I want to help Sophie,” I say, shrugging off her grip. “Just Sophie.”
Outside, the moon is high in the sky, turning the leaves silver. Vivi goes out to pick a bouquet of ragwort stalks. “Fine, then go get this Sophie.”
She is where I left her, hunched in the hay, rocking back and forth and talking softly to herself. I am relieved to see her, relieved she didn’t run off and we weren’t even now tracking her through the forest, relieved that someone from Balekin’s household hadn’t ferreted out her location and hauled her away.
“Okay,” I say with forced cheerfulness. “We’re ready.”
“Yes,” she says, standing up. Her face is tearstained, but she’s no longer crying. She looks like she’s in shock.
“It’s going to be okay,” I tell her again, but she doesn’t answer. Shefollows me mutely out behind the stables, where Vivi is waiting, along with two rawboned ponies with green eyes and lacy manes.
Sophie looks at them and then at Vivi. She begins to back away, shaking her head. When I come near her, she backs away from me, too.
“No, no, no,” she says. “Please, no. No more. No.”
“It’s only a very little bit of magic,” Vivi says reasonably, but it’s still coming from someone with lightly furred points on her ears and eyes that flash gold in the dark. “Just a smidgen, and then you won’t ever have to see another magical thing. You’ll be back in the mortal world, the daylight world, the normal world. But this is the only way to get you there. We’re going to fly.”
“No,” Sophie says, her voice coming out broken.
“Let’s walk to the cliffside near here,” I say. “You’ll be able to see the lights—maybe even a few boats. You’ll feel better when you can see a destination.”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Vivi reminds me with a significant look.
“It’s not far,” I argue. I don’t know what else to do. The only other choices I can think of are knocking her unconscious or asking Vivi to glamour her; both are terrible.
And so we walk through the woods, ragwort steeds following. Sophie doesn’t balk. The walk seems to calm her. She picks up rocks as we go, smooth stones that she dusts the dirt from and then puts in her pockets.
