Page 51

She glanced down at herself. She was barefoot, wearing a comfortable linen shift dress. She went over to the vines that served as a closet and pulled down a linen cloak. It was a bleached oatmeal color, like the robes of the Silent Brothers. She put it on, arranged the hood so it covered her face, and slipped barefoot out of the room.

She followed the twisting, winding hallways, keeping to the wall, her head down. She’d tried to memorize the way back and forth before, but there were so many similar corridors: packed earth with vines running beneath the dirt, the blue-green light from the torches, the occasional staircase winding up or down. Eventually she reached a doorway that looked familiar. Taking a deep breath, she ducked through it.

Almost immediately, her heart sank. This wasn’t the training room. It was a circular room, with walls of impossibly smooth stone rising to a crystal set in the middle of the ceiling, like the eye of the Pantheon. On a plinth in the middle of the room sat a marble pedestal, and on the pedestal was set a large golden bowl.

The Queen’s scrying bowl.

She remembered Julian telling her how the Queen had taunted him, almost daring him to look into the water of the bowl, and how when he had used it he had watched in horror as their uncle offered himself as a sacrifice to the warlock Malcolm Fade in order to save their family.

What Jules had seen had been horrible, but it had been the truth. He’d watched Arthur’s death as it happened. The Queen might have done it to taunt him, but the visions were not lies.

Dru squared her shoulders and walked to the plinth. Two steps up, and she was standing beside the pedestal, looking down into the bowl.

She saw nothing at first but impossibly clear water, and, as she leaned forward, the reflection of her own face, pale and anxious. She wished she’d gotten more details from Julian about how the stupid scrying bowl worked.

She passed her hand over the water, not knowing why, just that it felt instinctually right. In a low voice, she said, “Show me my family. Where they are now. Show me Julian, Helen—”

The water moved. Dru almost jerked back as it rippled and turned dark as ink. She stared down at it in dismay. Nothing—just darkness. Her heartbeat spiked. Did this, could this mean that they were…

No, she told herself, firmly. Don’t even think it. She took one deep breath and then another, fighting off panic. Heart hammering, she asked the first question that came into her head.

“Why doesn’t Ash’s power work on me?” she whispered. “Why don’t I remember meeting him in Faerie before? What am I forgetting?”

Now the water surged, almost slopping over the edge of the bowl. She felt the Memory rune Ash had put on her burn against her skin, and then an image began to take shape in the bowl, misty at first but growing in clarity.

She saw herself, chubby and maybe two years old, with bows in her hair. She was toddling around Great-Aunt Marjorie’s overgrown garden, and it was summer, the air laden with the scent of flowers and the sound of buzzing bees. She saw herself giggle and clap her hands together as pixies appeared, scattering petals around her, tugging playfully at her sleeves.

Then her uncle Arthur appeared. He looked so much younger than Dru remembered him ever being, but he was still haggard, his face lined, his skinny shoulders like a coat hanger on which his shirt hung loosely.

He crossed the garden impossibly fast and swept Dru up in his arm, kicking at the pixies still dancing on the grass, sending them shrieking and tumbling into the hedgerow. “No,” he muttered. “No more tricks. Not with this one.”

Dru squirmed in protest, wailing her confusion, but Arthur, skinny as he was, kept her tucked firmly under his arm as he marched into the farmhouse. He carried Dru into the kitchen and set her on the counter, telling her that if she was good, she would see something amazing.

Baby Dru jammed a thumb into her mouth and watched Arthur mistrustfully as he gathered objects—a large copper pot, which he put in the sink and filled with water, and a few jars of odd-looking powder. He mixed the powders together and dumped the result into the pot, which made the water sparkle as if iridescent with stars.

Little Dru clapped delightedly, but her uncle didn’t seem to notice. He lifted her up with both hands and dropped her unceremoniously into the pot. Immersed up to her shoulders, Dru burst into tears.

Arthur laid a gentle hand on her head. “You are almost too old for this, but not quite,” he said, hoarsely. “This enchantment will keep you safe from the fey. Their wiles will not work upon you. Their magics will fail to harm you. The land of Faerie shall not keep you, nor shall nightmares of it linger in your mind.”

The vision in the bowl rippled and vanished. Dru gasped, as if the air in the scrying room had suddenly been emptied of its oxygen.

She could feel her memories coming back. Not just her dim childhood recollection of what Uncle Arthur had done to her, now that she had seen it, but her memories of Ash, though they were fuzzy and indistinct. She recalled a chaos of images—kneeling beside Ash on a bloodstained floor. Leaning against a wall covered by vines and flowers, looking up at him, the wheel of multicolored constellations so bright behind him. Ash in an underground tunnel, pressing a brooch into her hand. Ash when he was young, twelve perhaps, in a room full of weapons…

Dru pushed herself away from the scrying bowl, trying to catch her breath. She stumbled down the steps of the plinth, then out of the room and into the winding corridors, her cloak pulled tight around her.

So that was why Ash’s magic didn’t work on her. It wasn’t his magic, specifically. It was fey magic. Her uncle Arthur, who had been tormented by the fey to the point of madness, had seen her with pixies and been horrified. It had pushed him to try to create a spell that would protect her from the Fair Folk. And it had worked—in a sort of patchwork, wonky way. For Arthur, all his memories of Faerie had been nightmares, as he’d said. Awful and traumatic. So the spell had decided—as much as spells decided things—that it would be safer for her not to remember the parts of her life she’d spent in Faerie. This was why she had forgotten Ash every time she left.

Of course. You don’t remember me. A very strange habit of yours, he’d said. What was it like, having to introduce yourself to the same person over and over? Perhaps it didn’t bother him. He had saved her life when she’d encountered those goblins, and she thought now: Of course he did. He knew me. I might not have known him, but he knew me.

And apparently liked me enough to save me? It all seemed so unlikely. But she couldn’t think about that now. She’d just realized two more pressing things. First, that she was hopelessly lost among the morass of twisting corridors. And second, that she could hear the sharp tap of boots on stone.

Guards were approaching.

—

It wasn’t until they had returned to the room in the little canal house where they were staying that Kit noticed something wrong with Ty’s hands.

Ty had gone to sit on the edge of his bed and was methodically unbuckling the straps of his boots. He always started at the lowest buckle and worked his way up. Kit threw his jacket on a chair and, for a moment, let himself watch Ty—watch how he brought his whole focus to everything he did, even if it was just taking off his shoes. Ty reached up to unzip his jacket, and Kit saw him wince, then look down at his hands.