Thinking of living here, abandoning the kingdom to its fate, gave me the same skin-crawling sense of wrongness that I’d had when I had first seen Sylvester’s magic in person.
The king’s magic-workers weren’t right. They were a creeping sickness on the world, like the mold that blighted their store of hearts, and I could not leave my kingdom, unnaturally warped and bespelled as it was, to suffer any longer under their rule.
“There you are,” said Cornelius, pouring himself down from a tree like black ink and reassembling himself at the bottom. “I was beginning to think you’d never come out.”
“We have learned a great deal,” said Sylvester, and I knew he meant more than just what the Weftwitch had told us.
I held out my arms, desperate for comfort, and, to my surprise, Cornelius jumped into them. He touched my nose with his, feather-light.
“Did she fix your heart?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “She doesn’t know how. I don’t think anyone does. She sent the message to the Snagged so they would help her spread the corruption. That’s all.”
“Then what was the point of all this?” said Cornelius. Reasonably.
Well, I couldn’t tell him that she’d armed me with enough magic to fell all the sorceresses and the king—and Sylvester—at once.
“We just need to go back,” I said. “Even if we can’t repair the hearts, we can try to stop the king from taking more.”
Sylvester nodded. I had been a little afraid he would argue with me, but Cornelius was the one who objected.
“Why can’t we stay here?” he said. “It sounds like we’re going to our doom.”
Well, yes. It was hard to deny.
“You can stay here, Cornelius,” I said. “I am sure you could find a home with a warm fire and plenty of bacon. I wouldn’t blame you for it.”
“Well, of course I’m coming with you,” said Cornelius, giving his whiskers a quick wash. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s a terrible idea.”
“I agree that we cannot abandon the kingdom,” said the sorcerer, “but I do not know how we are supposed to return to it. Did the Weftwitch give you any ideas?”
“She said there are weaker points in the mist, but that was it.”
I had pinned so many of my hopes on the Weftwitch, thinking that she would mend my heart and send me back with the recipe for repairing all the rest, and she had been so very different from what I had imagined.
She had provided me with a way to defeat the magic-workers,
it was true, but not with a way of getting back to the kingdom and using it.
They could sneak messages or objects through, she had said, but travelers lost their lives, or their senses, even if they did successfully make it through.
There were weak points through which her self-sacrificing messengers had forced themselves, but she had said they didn’t survive long on the other side.
“The Weftwitch said they have their own manner of magicks here,” I added out loud. “Magicks that don’t use hearts. We’ve seen it.”
“It won’t work,” said Sylvester with finality.
“Why?” I was annoyed that he wouldn’t even entertain the thought.
“The barrier was created with heart magic. The Weftwitch is right—it is an evil magic, but it is powerful. The most powerful. A spell cast with heart magic can only be undone with the same, as you can only unlock a door with the key made for it.”
“Then how are we to get back?” I cried. “If you cannot use heart magic?”
“I do not know,” he said.
“We didn’t even have enough to get us through the first time without using mine,” I said, folding my arms tightly over my chest.
“We are not using yours.”
