THE NEXT MORNING, EMELINE woke to find Joel beside her in bed, checking his phone.
“Morning, beautiful.” He reached to pull her closer, still staring at his screen. As his hand slid across her abdomen, the last bit of sleep clinging to Emeline evaporated.
Her whole body tensed up. I need to break this off.
Right now.
“Joel.”
“Yeah?”
“I can’t do this.”
Lowering the phone, he glanced up at her. “Do … what?”
She stared at the ceiling, diligently finding patterns in the white stucco. “Us.”
Joel went silent. The air prickled between them. “You’ve been through a lot, Em.”
True. But that wasn’t it.
Or maybe that was exactly it.
“Let’s talk about this when we get back to Montreal, okay? When you’re far away from this place and back to your normal self.”
Emeline wanted to laugh. Her normal self?
Who is that, I wonder?
“I’m not going to change my mind.”
He didn’t hear her. Or rather, he was ignoring her. He did that, sometimes, when he thought she was wrong about a thing. Like he wasn’t going to argue, he was just going to go ahead and do what he wanted anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, glancing over at him.
Predictably, he changed the subject. “Is this your mom?” He reached over to the bedside table, where a picture frame stood facing them.
Emeline wasn’t ready to let the subject drop. She wanted this done and over with. But as Joel lay back, holding the frame up between his hands, she fell silent beside him.
“I guess we know where you get your good looks from.” Joel grinned, then handed her the frame. He kissed her cheek and got out of the bed.
Emeline stared hard into the frame, no longer seeing or hearing Joel.
The photo was of her mother and a much younger Tom at the beach. They stood with their backs to the camera and their faces turned towards each other, giving Emeline a view of their profiles. The sky was pure blue in the distance. Glittering sand stuck to their skin, a gob of white lotion streaked the back of Tom’s neck, and a small crescent moon tattoo stood out against Rose’s pale shoulder blade.
But what held Emeline’s attention was the look on her mother’s face.
Inside the frame, Rose Lark was staring up at Tomás Pérez. Smiling like her heart would burst from happiness.
Emeline had seen a smile like that before: on Grace Abel’s face when she looked at Sable Thorne.
Her hands gripped the frame so hard, her fingers hurt.
She and Tom never spoke of it, but Emeline knew it all the same: Tom and her mother had history. Once, when Emeline was younger and baking pies with Maisie and Eshe, she overheard Maisie whisper to Eshe that Tom and Rose dated for years. Everyone thought they were solid—until Rose broke his heart, getting pregnant by another man. A man she refused to name.
Back then, Tom was constantly on the move, traveling from place to place, taking photos for National Geographic. When he heard the news, he took on a project halfway across the world and didn’t come back for a long time.
No one had seen or heard from Rose Lark in nineteen years. Not since the day she walked out on her newborn baby, leaving Emeline wailing in her crib.
It used to make Emeline sad, that story. Now she was numb to it.
What was this photo doing on her bedside table? It should be in the garage, with all the other personal items she’d boxed up before putting the house on the market.
Her gaze fixed on Tom, remembering how quiet and withdrawn he’d been last night. It was Tom who’d described the King’s City to her as a child, Tom who taught her how to tell a shiftling by their shadow.
If Tom had spent time in the Wood King’s court, he might know something about the Song Mage’s missing music. It was a long shot. But even if he didn’t, he would know other things. Things that might help her.
Red letters blared on her old alarm clock: 12:13. After noon.
She’d slept through the entire morning.
Surging from the bed, Emeline threw on a fresh pair of jeans and a floral button-up, then hooked Sable’s sheathed knife onto her belt. After creeping past the washroom where Joel was showering, she went to find Tomás Pérez.
THE DIRT PATH WAS warm beneath her bare feet as she followed it alongside Pa’s vineyards, carving across the back of Eshe and Abel’s farm. It was the path she’d trod as a child, running back and forth to her neighbors’ houses, and it faithfully delivered Emeline to her destination: a white clapboard house at the edge of the woods.
Tom’s garage door gaped open and the metallic, oily smells of his shop wafted out. Emeline started forward, pivoting when she saw a figure standing out behind the house and heading towards him.
At the sound of her footsteps, Tom turned. His chest rose from the breath he drew in, as if he were seeing a ghost.
“Emmie.” He shook his head. “For a second, I thought…” The wind had swept back his dark hair, and his cheeks were ruddy with cold. “You remind me so much of your mother these days.”
Emeline wrinkled her nose. She didn’t want to remind anyone of the woman who walked out on her baby without looking back. So she changed the subject.
“When you were in the king’s court, did you ever meet the Song Mage?”
Tom’s shoulders tensed. “Of course, kiddo.”
“What do you know about him?”
Tom rubbed a hand across his eyes. “That he’s invaluable to the Wood King. That he isn’t just a minstrel, but a kind of magus. If the king needs something done, the Song Mage does it using the magic in his voice.”
It was strange how Tom spoke as if the man weren’t dead.
He turned back towards the woods.
“But he sacrificed something precious in exchange for his power. He tithed his voice to the woods, and if he ever wants to return to this world, he’ll be mute. A shade of his once-famous self.
“The last I heard, he’d started to regret his decision and felt more like a prisoner. Like the role he’d been given—doing the king’s bidding—wasn’t a gift but a burden.”
“How do you know all this?”
Grimacing, he looked away. “Your mother told me.”
Emeline stared at Tom. “My mother? What do you mean? How would my mother know anything about it?” And because he was still talking as if the man were alive, she added, “The Song Mage is dead, Tom.”
He turned sharply to look at her. “Dead?”
“A witch called the Vile killed him.”
His brow creased. “Dead. It can’t be. Are you sure?”
Emeline nodded and pressed on. “You said my mother knew him. How is that possible?”
Tom breathed deep, running one hand through his windswept hair. “No good will come of this, sweetheart. Leave it be.”
Emeline stepped between Tom and the woods. No way was she leaving this be. Digging the folded photograph out of her pocket, she unfolded it and thrust it at him.
“The back is dated a year before I was born. How can she be looking at you like that—like you are everything she wants in the whole world—mere months before she gets pregnant with someone else?”
Tom’s fingers gripped the photo. As if he were drowning and it were a life raft.
“I wanted to impress her,” he whispered. “Or maybe I wanted to impress them.” He glanced to the woods. “I don’t know.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he gulped. As if getting the words out was a fight he was losing. “I took her to the King’s City. I wanted her to see it. To love it the way I loved it. And she did. But she also…”
Folding up the photograph, he handed it back to Emeline.
“You need to tell me all of it.” Emeline stared him down. “She was my mother.”
He nodded, eyes shining.
“She fell in love with someone else.”
“Who?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.” From the look that darkened his eyes, though, he had his suspicions. “She was utterly enchanted by him. She stopped showing up for her shifts at the diner. Like she didn’t care anymore. She’d forget to eat. Wouldn’t sleep. She was … unreachable. Living in a dream. So, when she came home pregnant after months of being at court, I couldn’t bear to see her. I … I left.”
“Because the baby was his,” Emeline murmured.
But that meant …
My father came from the woods.
She suddenly felt unbalanced.
Tom touched her arm—as if to steady her. The sorrow in him fled, replaced by a warm tenderness. “When I got back after those three years away, I didn’t want to look at you. I avoided Ewan’s house for months. I avoided everyone’s houses—in case you were there. And then one day, Ewan stormed over. ‘Enough is enough,’ he said. ‘This is Emeline Lark, my pride and joy.’ I took one look at you, and it all went up in smoke. One shy smile, and you melted my anger away.”
Emeline’s eyes burned as he pulled her to him, hugging her tight.
“Why did no one tell me any of this?” she whispered against his jacket, breathing in the familiar tobacco smell.
“She didn’t want anyone to know. So I promised to keep her secret.”
Emeline pulled away, glancing up at him.
He was staring into the woods again, eyes clouded. “Sometimes I wonder if I misinterpreted the signs. She looked so … hollow by the end. Like love was eating away at her. Making her forget all the things that were once important to her. Almost as if…”
Tom shook his head like he was trying to shake away a bad dream. “I’m sure I was imagining it. Just seeing what I wanted to see. And anyway, it’s over now. Rose made her choice.”
“Did she go back to him? After she left me?”
He raised his hands, palms upturned. “I assume so. I’ve always thought she was living happily with him in the King’s City.” Without Emeline. Without either of them.
They both stared into the trees.
Was it possible her mother was still there?
Grace had told her that humans weren’t allowed to reside in the King’s City, and few exceptions were given. Emeline was under the impression that she, Grace, and Pa were those exceptions. But maybe there were others. Maybe Rose Lark was living in the King’s City, too.
“If she’s there,” said Emeline, “I’ll find her.”