Galatea broke South’s dreaming spell. As soon as she did, he shot up from the bed, screaming.
“They’re coming!” His jaw stiffened and his shoulders tensed. “Queen Magrit and her soldiers. She’s so angry. And she’s coming for us, Farrow,” he said with urgency, as if he expected them to breach the Veil at any moment.
Galatea spoke up beside him. “Like I said. It’s time to go home.”
The word sounded strange to me. This place, the Reverie, was the only place that truly felt like home.
Everyone rushed out to the circle in the courtyard, and one by one, my sisters disappeared from where they’d come into the morning haze until only Bari, Amantha, Galatea, South, and I remained.
We—even South, though it pained him—joined hands, and Galatea and Amantha chanted under their breaths. Suddenly we were elsewhere.
“This is where you live?” I asked as I took in the outline of the large manor house before us.
It was rustically beautiful. It wasn’t as formal as the Reverie. The main house itself was the size of the Couterie, but its face was comprised of gray stones puzzled together with peach grout. The house was large with a long, sloping roof covered in red-clay tiles. Tall, rectangular windows were spaced a few feet apart along the house’s face, except for around an unfinished oaken door that was a couple of stories high with a large, iron family-crest knocker.
I had told my story, but I had not even begun to hear those of my sisters. They had dispersed throughout the Queendoms. Most of them stayed as far apart as possible to avoid discovery, but Bari and Amantha had stayed with Galatea. I asked why.
“Yes, the three of us came here right after the Burning. Amantha and I were wounded from the explosion, and Galatea needed someplace that no one would look to use her powers to heal us,” Bari said.
“Wounded how?” I asked, thinking of Freya.
Our wounds used to be wiped away with a single wave of a wand.
Bari shrugged off the question. “Galatea fixed us, but without the power of the three sisters it took longer than normal. Still, I think our wounds served us . . . When we arrived, Mr. Gray, a nobleman, and his wife could not deny us. They took one look at us and they welcomed us into their home. Even with all the rumors about what really happened in the square. Then the wife fell ill, and we had to take care of their daughter, Cinder, um, Ella—”
“Cin-der-ella . . . ,” Amantha chimed in a singsong. For a split second I was transported back to our childhood room, and I remembered how Amantha, Bari, and I teased South. Perhaps they were not so grown-up after all.
“Ella. The girls gave her a nickname that I refuse to use,” Galatea corrected.
“Because she is forever getting dirty,” Amantha explained. But I was left with more questions than answers. Judging by the finery of the house, Ella should be very much refined. But Amantha and now Bari seemed to be on the verge of a fit of giggles at the mere mention of the nickname they had given her.
“Anyway, it was all terribly tragic. After the wife died, Galatea married Mr. Gray—” Bari straightened her face and resumed her story.
“You’re married?” I asked, spinning around to look at Galatea.
“Was married. Heathcliff . . . Mr. Gray died of the same illness,” she said somberly.
“Did you love him?”
Galatea laughed. “Mr. Gray was very good for a human. He and his wife took us in not knowing what we were.”
The Entente were not supposed to indulge in romantic love. But they weren’t supposed to get married either.
“But did you love him?” I asked plainly. Entente did not marry. Entente did not love. That was the way we were brought up. But Iolanta’s story about loving a Rook and having South had changed my perception of what an Entente was capable of. Of course, Iolanta, bless her to the Fates, was different from any other Entente . . . But the intervening years had left us all so changed—what if this had changed too?
As a surprised Galatea considered my question, I wondered what I wanted her answer to be. Did I want Galatea to have loved? And I wondered why the answer mattered to me.
“I loved him for what he gave us. Safety and opportunity,” she said noncommittally.
Love and gratitude aren’t the same things, I thought. But I did not say the words out loud. What did I know of love anyway, being not quite Couterie and not quite Entente?
“There were also servants living with us, but they’ve . . . they’ve all gone. Ella’s still here, though, so we need to keep South from prying eyes,” Galatea explained, leading us inside the adjacent barn.
We climbed a rickety set of wooden stairs to the uppermost portion of the barn. I could still smell the horse below.
“You want to keep him here?” I asked, incredulous.
The Fate waved her wand and turned a blanket and a bale of hay into a proper bedroom with a wrought-iron bed and a nightstand.
“There are no traces of humans here except for Ella. This is the best place for South right now,” Galatea said matter-of-factly.
“Can’t you fix him? I thought you were going to do a spell to help him deal with all the Presents?”
South looked up at her, expectant.
“There is no spell to help South. I would have explained it earlier, but you were in so much pain.”
“Just like there was no spell for Iolanta,” South said. He dropped his head, resolute.
“I can’t cure him, but I can shield him. We will make a spell to make sure that no one outside this household will even dare look up when they enter the barn. And if they do, they will see only bales of hay.”
Galatea led us in the chant, which we repeated over and over.
Protect our brother from the light;
Make it so those outside the grounds can never see his might,
Until the time is right.
After a couple of seconds, it began to rain in the center of the barn. The rain seemed to fall in slow motion. Every drop clung to South. And after he was completely covered, the rain seemed to meld into his skin.
Protect our brother from the light;
Make it so those outside the grounds can never see his might,
Until the time is right.
And then the rain stopped falling.
“South, you are not healed, but you are shielded,” Galatea announced. “No one can see you or your magic unless you want them to.”
South looked at me, his eyes still filled with excitement about the magic he had just experienced.
“Do you feel any different?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Everything’s different. We got our family back,” he said simply.
I smiled and a warm rush of feeling washed over me. South was right—we had our family back.
Our next chapter was beginning.