EPILOGUE

To see another is the birth of Compassion.

FROM “RENALDO THE WISE,” A SCIM LEGEND

At night, Yenil liked to play in the garden.

Tonight there was a full moon, and the blue light washed over the flowers. It reminded Madeline of the Wasted Lands. Not what it was, but what it could be. She sat wrapped in a blanket, in a wheelchair on the crushed-seashell path. She held the book Darius had given her, the first edition of The Gryphon under the Stairs, in her lap. She didn’t like to be apart from it —it reminded her of him.

Shula sat beside her. Without the magic of the Sunlit Lands, they spoke to one another in French or, increasingly often, in Shula’s hesitant English. It had been two months. Yenil’s English came quickly, and Shula was not far behind her.

Madeline’s parents had been astonished, grateful, and disbelieving when they saw her that first night. She had been gone ten months, they said, and they had begun to believe the worst. They had taken Shula and Yenil in with surprising good grace, though Madeline could see the strain on them. She wasn’t able to answer their questions in a way they could grasp. She couldn’t explain her absence, or her sudden reappearance, or her silver scars, the ones that precisely matched the ones on the little girl who showed up with her.

Yenil —unless someone looked very closely —appeared human when not in her war skin. Honestly, Shula —a Middle Eastern girl who didn’t speak English —had been a harder sell than Yenil for her parents. “Does she have a green card?” her mother kept asking in a hushed whisper. When Madeline explained about the Sunlit Lands, a confused look would cross her parents’ faces, and they would stop pushing. She heard them whispering sometimes, sharing their strange theories of where she had been. But eventually the gravity of “putting on their happy faces” took over. Her mom went back to managing appearances, and her dad went back to work, and things were, more or less, normal again. Soon they stopped asking questions, whether because they didn’t want to or couldn’t understand the answers, Madeline didn’t know.

Yenil was amazed by the house. She kept saying she lived in an Elenil mansion now. Madeline had tried to correct her at first but had given up. She wasn’t wrong, Madeline had realized.

She couldn’t breathe freely anymore. But she saw now that her family, her upbringing . . . She was more like the Elenil than the Scim. Which wasn’t bad. It wasn’t wrong. But she was looking at her life now, her privileges and power and wealth, in a new way. She was looking for those places where she could breathe only because others were holding their breath. And she planned to take a sword to each and every place she discovered.

Yenil bounded up through the moonlight, delighted at some treasure she had found. She placed it in Madeline’s hand. “What is it called?”

“A bottle cap,” Madeline said.

“Bottle cap,” Yenil repeated and giggled. “Bottle cap!” she shouted. “Bottle cap, bottle cap!”

She danced into the garden, laughing and shouting. “Chase, Shula, chase!”

Shula jumped up, running after her into the garden. “Here I come!”

Madeline loved to see Yenil playing. Some nights Yenil woke from nightmares. Some nights she couldn’t sleep for weeping. Shula slept with her and sang to her. Madeline’s own mother went in to comfort Yenil some nights, a strange motherly action Madeline couldn’t remember her mom ever doing for her.

“She’s a dear girl and knows the value of a good bottle cap.” The Garden Lady stood beside Madeline, her broom-like hair bursting out from her floral fringed hat.

Madeline smiled and moved her fingers in a tiny wave. She didn’t use the energy to speak. She heard Shula and Yenil on the other side of the flowers, singing a Scim lullaby, which Yenil often hummed to herself. She had taught it to Madeline and Shula. Do not cry in the darkness, but follow the small bright star.

The old woman grunted and rearranged her hat. “I owe you a favor yet, dear. I’m not the kind who leaves a favor unfulfilled. What would you like? Silver and gold? Your breath back again? Anything in my power, child. Ask and I’ll give it.”

Madeline shook her head. She knew the cost now. She couldn’t ask for magic that came at another’s expense. “Sit . . . beside me,” Madeline said. “Tell me . . . about . . . the Sunlit Lands. Tell me . . . about my . . . friends. Tell me . . . a story . . . about them.”

“That I can do, my dear, that I can do.”

The Garden Lady tucked Madeline’s blanket in around her shoulders and sat in Shula’s chair. She sat there long into the night, while Yenil played in the garden, and told her everything her friends had been doing in the Sunlit Lands.

And Madeline closed her eyes and was happy.

THE END