Mada Zola smiled slowly. “Very well, but not the fire trick. That one’s finicky.”
She went to a bouquet of red roses and plucked off the fattest blossom. The firelight cast shadows over half her face, and Anouk felt herself drawn to the witch all the more. Mada Zola held the rose out in open palms.
“Take it, dearie. We aren’t allowed powder in this house, but not all spells require such complexity. Sometimes a simple rose can do the job.”
Anouk hesitated, but she’d gotten them into this and she couldn’t change her mind now. She popped the rose in her mouth. The petals felt wrong against her tongue, like she was eating perfumed silk. She forced it down.
Mada Zola nodded. “A rose alone isn’t enough to perform most enchantments, but it can create a light breeze. Make someone forget what he was about to say.” She looked at Beau. “Put someone to sleep, like your handsome friend.”
Beau grunted. “Why do I have to be the victim?”
Mada Zola ignored him and rested her hands on Anouk’s shoulders. “Feel the life of the flower spreading through you. From your stomach to your throat to your tongue to your fingertips. And whisper after me: Dorma, dorma, sonora precimo.”
Anouk paused. “Are you okay with this, Beau?”
He muttered, “Go ahead.” For all the resignation in his voice, there was a trace of curiosity too.
Anouk’s throat felt scratched raw from the rose, and yet the pain had woken her body in some way. She closed her eyes, raised her fingertips, and whispered, “Dorma, dorma, sonora precimo.”
“I don’t feel anything. You—” Beau collapsed to the oriental rug. It happened in less than half a breath. His head hit the edge of a chair as he fell but he didn’t cry out, didn’t move. It was so fast that Anouk had barely finished speaking.
“Beau!” She dropped to her knees. She held her breath until he suddenly shuddered and let out a raking snore, and she sighed with relief.
“You did it!” Cricket whirled on Petra. “Give me one of those roses.”
Petra held her back from the vase. “Who are you going to enchant? We can’t have all of you passed out and useless.” But Cricket was fast enough to grab a rose anyway; she stuffed it in her mouth and coughed out something vaguely resembling the spell. Nothing happened.
Petra smirked. “They call it the Silent Tongue for a reason. Not the Yawping Squawk.”
Cricket narrowed her eyes as she spat out chewed-up petals.
Anouk stroked Beau’s hair, worried, and looked up at the witch. “How long will he be out?”
“Until morning, I’d imagine,” said Mada Zola. “It was a large rose.”
Despite herself, a part of Anouk felt relieved. No more of Beau trying to drag her back to the car, and the thought made her feel guilty. She brushed a clump of dust out of his hair.
“We’ll put him to bed in the west bedroom,” Mada Zola said. “He’ll be safe there until he wakes.” She rested one hand on Anouk’s shoulder and the other on Cricket’s. “You should rest, too, dearies, though I know it won’t be easy. You look dead on your feet.”
“I want to try that spell again,” Cricket said.
“Patience, dearie. Patience.” The witch made a small tsk noise. “You can’t do magic properly if you don’t have a rested mind.”
“But I could help you look through spell books—” Cricket insisted.
“No.” Mada Zola’s voice was firm, but then she softened it with a gentle pat on first Cricket’s and then Anouk’s cheek. She turned to Petra. “Show them to the bedroom.”
Petra was already picking up Beau’s feet. Anouk and Cricket had little choice but to help her hoist him up, and groaning under his weight, the three girls carried him down the hallway and up a flight of stairs to a bedroom. They placed him on the bed.
Petra handed Anouk a gas lamp. “Good night. Try to sleep. Did you know you have a streak of dust on your face?”
Anouk sighed. “Always.” She swiped her sleeve over her cheek and then fluffed the pillow under Beau’s head. He felt warm. She went to open a window. The clouds were heavy, casting a murky glow over the fields. She sucked in a breath as she caught sight of a tremor of movement in the fields. “Petra, there’s something out there!”
Petra, unconcerned, lit another gas lamp for them. “Those are just the gardeners. They tend to the flowers at night.”
“I thought you said you two were alone here.”
“We are,” Petra answered.
A creeping feeling spidered up Anouk’s spine as she peered closer at the gardens. A flash of leaves caught in the faint light.
The topiaries.
Their enchanted shapes loomed as they weeded and watered and pruned with their slow, lumbering branches. A gleam in the driveway caught her eye and she jerked to attention, thinking at first it was a gunmetal-gray motorcycle, but it was only a watering can.
“You’re certain no one can get through the hedges?” she asked, turning from the window.
But Petra was gone.
A key turned in the lock.
“Hey!” Anouk and Cricket both ran to the door. “Petra, you can’t lock us in here!” Anouk twisted the knob, uselessly. Cricket kicked at the door.
“It’s for your own safety.” Petra’s muffled voice came from the keyhole. “I promise, it’s better this way. Nights around here can get . . . unpredictable. I’ll unlock it at first light.”
Anouk and Cricket pounded on the door, calling for Petra, but there was no response. Frustrated, Anouk sank onto the bed. “Our own safety? That’s rubbish.”
“I’d guess that Zola doesn’t want us snooping through her things,” Cricket said, sitting cross-legged on the other side of Beau. “Witches, you know. Secretive to the bone. I’m surprised that we’re not wrapped in chains in some dungeon.”
“Do you think Zola is telling the truth about the spell library at Castle Ides?”
Cricket took out a knife, tapped the hilt anxiously in her palm. “I don’t know what to believe.”
Anouk lowered her voice. “There’s a room here with herbs hanging in the rafters, tied up in the same clove-hitch knot Luc uses.”
Cricket considered this. “You think he was here?”
“Yes, or—I know this sounds crazy—is here now.”
“And, what, Mada Zola has him bound and gagged in a closet? That’s what she doesn’t want us to snoop around and find?”
“Maybe.” Anouk eyed Beau, who was muttering in his sleep. “I think Beau knows more than he’s letting on. He promises that he didn’t kill Mada Vittora, but I think that he knows who did.”
Cricket’s expression turned grim. “I still think Viggo did it. He isn’t capable of love, not even for his mother. You know what I’d most like to do with what little time I have left? Find him and smother him with that stupid slouchy hat of his.”
At the mention of Viggo, Anouk looked back at the window where she’d thought she’d seen the motorcycle. She cocked her head. “Cricket, does Viggo have an invitation to Castle Ides?”
“Why? What are you plotting and why didn’t I think of it first?”
Anouk lay back on the pillows, drumming her fingers on her ribs, thinking. “Maybe something. Maybe nothing.”
“Well, he does.”
It wasn’t a large bed and she was pressed against all six feet of Beau. At home, sometimes she and Beau had fallen asleep in bed together, Luc usually snoring in her armchair. But that was before Beau’s confession in the foyer. Only a fool . . . and I’m a fool. She wasn’t sure what to do with those words, which were mixing around in her stomach like champagne bubbles, but she knew that sometime in the past few days, he’d ceased to be like a brother to her. He was something else. Something more. But how much more?
Cricket lay down on Beau’s other side, toying with her charm earring distractedly, her foot anxiously jiggling enough to make the whole bed shake. Anouk reached across Beau and took Cricket’s hand. Cricket stopped tapping her foot. They interlaced their fingers and held tight. A mouse, a dog, a wolf, a cat, an owl, Anouk thought. All predators and prey. If the worst happened, would they turn on one another? She found herself scratching her arm as though fur were already pushing its way out.
“I want to cast magic,” Cricket said quietly, a private admission. “I want to show the Royals that they aren’t the only ones who matter.”
Anouk thought of those dark spells Cricket had found on the Internet and scrawled down. Cricket wanted revenge and that made Anouk uneasy. And yet, didn’t Cricket deserve it? Didn’t they all?
“You’ll learn. I know it. It’s easier for me because I already speak a bit of the Silent Tongue.”
“Yeah, that and your whispers actually sound like proper whispers, not like someone coughing up a hairball.”
She squeezed Anouk’s hand. Anouk squeezed back.
The clock was ticking on the table, that black cat’s tail always moving in a constant circle. Tick-tick-tick. Beau snored softly. She envied him his enchantment. Tonight, she knew, he was the only one who would get any sleep.