“Just wait a moment,” I said. I took a deep breath, trying to impress the taste of nonmagical air on my memory. I remembered the firelight, and the cold earth on my bare skin, and the tart, mineral smell of the ashes. Everything that I was leaving behind as I rejoined the world and rejoined the spell that had been lifted so briefly.
“All right,” I said finally. “We can go.”
We stepped out of the shadow of the trees, and I felt the spell settle on me again, like a bridle on a broken horse. It weighed down my butterfly-light spirit from the morning and turned it sickly, artificial, coated stickily with the false love and adoration that the heart magic created. I backed up in horror, colliding with a tree and setting its leaves to shivering.
“What is it?” asked Sylvester. Magical fabric swirled around him in ribbons of gleaming black, settling itself into a fine suit of clothes. A frothy cravat coiled itself round his neck, pinned with a single black stone at the hollow of his throat; and a pair of tall, gleaming boots flowed up his shapely legs like oil before hardening.
He was the sorcerer again, remote and worship-worthy. I grasped for the genuine love I had felt for him inside myself, as you grasp for the tail-end of a dream upon waking, but I felt it slithering away from me and disappearing, swallowed up by the heart magic.
Sylvester reached for me and pulled me toward him. I felt the terrible pull of the spell, the longing, and the real me was all mixed up in it somehow too, making a queasy hodgepodge of sensation that set both my stomach and my head to roiling.
I was drawn to him and repulsed at the same time. As his lips parted, I saw both the smile of a lover and the grimace of a monster.
“Don’t touch me!” I cried, hands raised, warding him off, and stepped out of his arms.
“Foss ...”
He took a step toward me. I backed away farther.
“What is it?” He stopped, one arm still outstretched.
“We can’t,” I said. I felt the spell swirling in me, thick and sweet as honey, turning my head and befuddling my senses.
“But why ...”
“The spell,” I said. “Now that we are no longer in the Weftwitch’s wood, I am under your spell again. Snagged. Hooked. And with only half a heart left, if that.”
He let his arm drop to his side as he thought about this. “But in the forest, when you were not ensorcelled by any magicks—you came to me then.”
“I did.”
“So that was not the spellbinding. That was just ... us.”
“I know.” I swallowed hard, as childish tears rose in my throat. I plopped myself down onto a handy stump and dropped my head into my hands. “You have no idea how much I want to,” I said, my voice muffled through my fingers. “But that’s the problem.”
“Why?” he said. Was he being intentionally dense? But when I peeked at him, he looked concerned and puzzled, that was all.
“Because now it’s all muddled up,” I explained. “What I feel, me, Foss, is tangled with the spell that’smakingme feel things, all over again, and I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. If we ... did anything now, it would be all snarled up, don’t you see? It would be tainted.”
“Tainted,” he repeated, turning the word over in his mouth. It sounded oddly clean and distinct, the way he said it.
“Do you see?”
“Yes, I see,” he said.
We looked at each other helplessly. How I wanted to leap at him, to let him kiss me, as he had the night before, and more! I felt weary, a hundred years old.
If I could not be free of this spell until one or the other of us died, Sylvester and I would never again be free to embrace as we had in the Weftwitch’s wood. Unless, that is, we decided to damn the world, damn Da and all the population of our kingdom, and live together in selfish bliss in the forest.
I could train under the Weftwitch, as she had said happened with people like me. Sylvester would be safe from his doom. The corruption could not touch me there.
I imagined it: a cottage in the woods. Sylvester waiting there, perhaps tending the garden or the chickens, while I went to the villages for the odds and ends we needed. Cornelius curled up by the fire. Yes, all right, it was hard to picture Sylvester tending chickens, but we could deal with that later.
Maybe there would even be a way to bring Da across the border to live with us. Maybe he could open a new butcher’s shop. And then all three of us would be free of the magic-workers and their terrible, voracious, insatiable appetites.
I wished it were possible. I wished it with all my heart. I didn’t evenlikethem, any of the other villagers with whom I’d grown up. I didn’t even like people in general, really.
But I couldn’t do it. I would never be happy, knowing that Da had been harvested and was dead, or worse. And knowing that we had doomed our kingdom to a slow death—half of it to heartsickness, the other half to the spreading corruption that would curse the crops, the livestock, and the water, and then finally dissolve the king’s walls and let in the war. Sylvester would never agree to it, either. At least, I hoped he would not.
