Light exploded from the sword.
Huck’s prayer rose sharply, Latin tumbling into the room, wrapping around the storm and the roar and Amelia’s cry. Thomas seized her about the waist and pulled her back against him, but the light did not release her. It poured up from the blade, spilled across the table, crawled over the walls like living fire.
The solar split open. Not the wall. Not the door. The very air itself.
It began as a seam. Thin, vertical, impossibly bright. Then it widened, pulling the world apart as easily as cloth. Wind roared into the room, though not from outside. From elsewhere.
Thomas smelled rain on stone. Not Ashcombe’s old wet stone, full of smoke and lichen and sheep and years. Something sharper. Cleaner. Odd. He smelled roses beaten flat by weather. Wet grass. A sweetness like wine but not wine. Something bitter and bright, like lightning burning iron.
The seam became a doorway and beyond it stood a ruin. For a moment, his mind rejected what his eyes saw. Ashcombe’stower was whole. But through the doorway stood Ashcombe’s tower now broken open to the sky.
The walls were jagged. The roof was gone. A black night showed overhead. Pale flowers sagged along the stones. Little lights, too many and too small to be candles, drooped like drowned stars. A brass tablet gleamed upon one wall. The ledge by the window was there, the same ledge, but old. Worn. Hollowed as if by the passage of time.
Hob made a rough sound.
Huck’s prayer faltered, then strengthened.
A woman’s voice came through the opening.
“Amelia!”
Amelia’s whole body went rigid. Through the portal, figures moved in the rain, blurred by light and storm. A woman stumbled through the arched doorway with one hand pressed to her mouth. She was smaller than Amelia and older, brown hair shot through with silver, raincoat flapping open, face pale and ravaged by grief. In one hand, she clutched a pale blue thing Thomas did not know, mud-streaked and ruined.
Amelia made a sound he had never heard from her.
“Mom.”
The woman on the other side looked about wildly, as if some part of her had heard. A man beside her, dressed in dark, strange clothing, tried to steer her back, but she shook him off with the fury of any mother whose child had vanished and whose world had offered no answer but dread.
Another woman appeared behind her, lovely even in ruin, her fair hair scraped back beneath a hood, dark tracks of tears beneath her eyes. A tall man held her upright with one arm.
Thomas looked from the impossible ruin to Amelia. “That woman.”
“My mother.”
The word hurt her. He heard it in her voice.
“And the other?”
“My cousin. Bree.”
Hob had gone pale beneath his beard. “Bloody hell.”
Huck whispered, “Mercy.”
The woman Amelia had named as her mother dropped to her knees near the ledge. Her mouth moved.
Thomas could not hear the words, but he knew the shape of a name.
Amelia.
Again and again.
She took one step forward.
Thomas caught her hand, and this time he did not release it.
She looked back at him, tears spilling down her cheeks.
