He remembered right, though.Thatmemory was crystal clear, and the Spade girl was beyond anything he could imagine on his own—but still. It was unreasonable to be thinking about her for so long, so often. It was unreasonable tospend nights trying to guess what her favorite color was, what all her smiles looked like, what the shape of her tears and the heat of her skin and particular rhythm of her heartbeat was.
Unreasonable, yet he had been doing it for almost a whole month now. Every night.
Maybe it was to be expected. Maybe it came with having your mind wiped and your memories taken away. Nobody had dared to say a single word to him about what had happened, and people avoided him for that reason alone now, which suited him.
But he couldn’t even be mad about it because of something his mother had said the very first day he came back and demanded she tell him the truth:
“Tell me, if it were Vera…if it wereme.Would you risk it?”
The answer was simple—no,he would not.
So, he’d never asked again.
Talking to his father would be futile, and he didn’t have any friends. It was easier than to drag people into his family issues. His father tended not to take the Heart boy’s word for anything when he was younger, and when he came home from work, would go ask all his friends about where he had been and what he’d done. So, he’d learned early on thatalonewas his best survival strategy.
Now it was easy—everyone had been staying away for so long even his classmates no longer considered it an option to try their luck and talk to him.
Because they wanted to.Nowthey did—he was a former Hand of the Turning Trials. A big deal. Famous and rich—and so perfectly empty the whole world wasn’t enough to make him feel full again.
He’d just grabbed his rod but decided to put it down again, to go out for some air, look at the night sky, at the moon, hope it would tell him something. Knowingit wouldn’t.
The world had gone…mad.
One second he’d signed up for the Turning Trials, eager to leave home, knowing that if he didn’t, he would do something stupid to his father, something that would inevitably ruin the lives of his mother and sister—not to mentionhis,as he’d be in prison forever—and the next…nothing.
There was just nothing there.
Excepther.
Except the whispers.
Except the screams.
Outside, the moon hid, the clouds so dark he couldn’t even tell in which part of the sky she was. Their front yard was only a few feet wide, but the main street was deserted, most of the houses of the neighborhood completely dark. People slept. Why wouldn’t they—they hadn’t lost their memories like the Heart boy had.
He sat on the grass for a moment and breathed, tried to clear his head, tried tothink.Tried to remember. They were bound to come back eventually, his memories. They were bound to come back at some point.
Or—he could get on a carriage and travel to Neverwhen, request a talk with the queens and get to the bottom of this once and for all.
A lot of lies had been spread. The queens had claimed that they’d be taking care of the former Hands while theyrecovered.They hadn’t. Nobody had even spoken to the Heart boy about it. Nobody had asked him a single question.
Better yet—while he was on that carriage, maybe he could skip Neverwhen and go straight for the Court of Spades. He had no interest in the place, of course—only a girl with sky eyes and sunshine hair, an aura about her that calmed him down like nothing else. Just the thought of her standing there, smiling half a smile, as confused as he was cooled his head, released all the anger he accumulated during the day.
“Ora.”
He said the name out loud like maybe he hoped the night would understand.
Then he saw the light.
It slithered down the middle of the cobbled street in front of his house far on the right, like it was the most natural thing to do.
Teal light, not liquid, but not quite gas, either.
Magic.
Something inside him squeezed, malfunctioned, groaned—an empty space that used to be full. He saw that same green-blue light in his mind, exploding on all sides at once,leakingout of hands that belonged to no one.
That same light that was now slithering its way up the cobbles like a snake, perfectly soundless.
